The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  At once several horses were killed by musket shots from the hedgerows:

  Their muskets playing very hard upon us, made us retreat so disorderly, that they fell foul upon our foot; and indeed there was not room enough for us to retreat in order, unless we had gone upon the very mouths of their muskets.

  So Atkyns urges a charge:

  The enemy, to encourage us to persecute this success, gave all the symptoms of a flying army: as blowing up of powder, horse and foot running distractedly on the edge of the hill, for we could see no further: these signs made Sir Robert Welsh importunately desire the Prince to have a party to follow the chase, which he gave him the command of, and me of the reserve; but when he came up the hill, and saw in what order they lay, he soon quit his employment there, and desired he might have my command and I his, which was ordered accordingly. As I went up the hill, which was very steep and hollow, I met several dead and wounded officers brought off; besides several running away; that I had much ado to get up by them. When I came to the top of the hill, I saw Sir Bevil Grenville’s stand of pikes, which certainly preserved our army from a total rout, with the loss of his most precious life: they stood as upon the eaves of an house for steepness, but as unmovable as a rock; on which side of this stand of pikes our horse were, I could not discover; for the air was so darkened by the smoke of the powder, that for a quarter of an hour together (I dare say) there was no light seen, but what the fire of the volleys of shot gave, and ‘twas the greatest storm that ever I saw, in which though I knew not whither to go, nor what to do, my Horse had two or three musket bullets in him presently, which made him tremble under me at the rate, that I could hardly with spurs keep him from lying down; but he did me the service to carry me off to a lead horse, and then died.

  Atkyns’s narrative collapses into incoherence as the battle explodes around him into the hours of darkness: Walter Slingsby remarked, the same night, that ‘legs and arms were flying apace’. Once darkness fell, ‘there was a great silence’, and then, as Atkyns records:

  By that time I came up to the hill again, the heat of the battle was over, and the sun set, but still pelting at one another half musket shot off: the enemy had a huge advantage of ground upon our men, for their foot were in a large sheepcot, which had a stone wall about it as good defence against any thing but cannon as could be, and ours upon the edge of the hill, so steep that they could hardly draw up, this true there were shelves near the place like Romish works, where we quartered that night, but so shallow that my horse had a bullet in his neck: we pelted at one another till half an hour before day, and then we heard not any noise, but saw light matches upon the wall, which our commanders observing, sent one to discover whether they had quit the field or not, who brought news that they were gone.

  It was a miserable day.

  Before the war, Bevil Grenville and Parliament’s general in the West, William Waller, had been friends. Waller had once taken Grenville’s son out to dinner in Oxford, like a kindly uncle. Giving Waller a horse before the war, Grenville called him ‘my noblest friend’. Now his friend’s army had shot him dead.

  The odd thing was that the war violated such feelings and also allowed them their truest expression. As all soldiers know, on the battlefield wars are less about strategic objectives and master plans, and more about fighting for each other, fighting for the men who stood beside you last time your horse was shot under you. You don’t want those men to see you run. Those simple feelings, well expressed by Atkyns, were complicated by the fact that you might, in this case, have similar loyalties to the men at whom you were firing. For many men, the war was no longer about the king or Parliament, personal rule or authority, even religion; it was about surviving today and saving one’s friends. Atkyns came to live from action to action.

  Of course, once Bevil Grenville was dead, his legend could begin and assume significance for the Cornish. The fact that he had frequently criticized the court before the war was not often mentioned. His suicidal charges, his personal charm, and his early death led to a collection of elegies, and later hagiographers were inspired by Bevil’s son, one of Charles II’s most trusted courtiers, created Earl of Bath and Viscount Lansdowne, a title specifically intended to evoke Bevil’s heroic death. His loyalty became a symbol for Cornwall’s own loyalty to the king. Bevil was an appealing figure for those inclined to see the Royalists as a bunch of godless tearaways, too, because he was and was known to be very religious, as diligent as the young Cromwell in making his men pray before battle, so he could be an apt figurehead of the piety and holiness of the Cornish army. By contrast, the darker and more ambivalent figure of his younger brother Richard Grenville received rather less attention, though he was to bring himself to everyone’s notice later in the war.

  Things did not improve next day for the Royalists, as Atkyns describes:

  The next morning was very clear, and about half an hour after sun rising, we rendezvoued our horse and foot upon Tog-Hill, between the hill where we quartered all night, and Marshfield; Major Sheldon and myself, went towards the Lord Hopton, who was then viewing the prisoners taken, some of which, were carried upon a cart wherein was our ammunition; and (as I heard) had match to light their tobacco; the Major desired me to go back to the regiment, whilst he received orders of his lordship; I had no sooner turned my horse, and was gone three horses lengths from him, but the ammunition was blown up, and the prisoners in the cart with it, together with the Lord Hopton, Major Sheldon, and Cornet Washnage, who was near the cart on horseback, and several others; it made a very great noise, and darkened the air for a time, and the hurt men made lamentable screeches. As soon as the air was clear, I went to see what the matter was, and there I found his lordship miserably burnt, his horse singed like parched leather, and Thomas Sheldon, that was a horse length further from the blast, complaning that the fire was got within his breeches, which I tore off as soon as I could, and from as long a head of flaxen hair as ever I saw, in the twinkling of an eye his head was like a blackamoor; his horse was hurt, and run away like mad, so that I put him upon my horse, and got two troopers to hold him up on both sides, and bring him to the headquarters, whilst I marched after with the regiment.

  Washnage died of his injuries. Sheldon was left behind as the enemy advanced, trying to take advantage of the confusion. Atkyns heard later that he too had died, ‘by whose death I had lost my martial mistress, but had not time to bewail it’. His odd term should not necessarily be read as homoerotic; he means that his commanding officer ruled him, through love. For Atkyns, war was about this kind of love. And it was also about having to watch as the one he loved disintegrated before his eyes.

  XI The War over Christmas

  One of the things everyone knows about the English Civil War is that Cromwell cancelled Christmas. In (very sober) fact, Christmas was cancelled, but not by Cromwell; it was cancelled by that transhistorical killjoy, a Parliamentary subcommittee exceeding its remit. All Cromwell did was enforce a policy agreed some years before his became an important voice in government.

  When Parliament signed its treaty with Scotland, the Solemn League and Covenant, in September 1643, one of the promises it made was to reform the Church of England. No one had much idea what this meant – some kind of push in a more godly direction was expected, and a group of clergy and MPs was set up to draw up a report. The removal of saints’ days from the calendar was expected, but the committee went much further. Led by Robert Harley, Brilliana’s serious spouse, they reformed the Church calendar just as he had reformed Church décor. For Harley, paintings and stained glass were clutter that could obscure the simple truth of God, and the more beautiful they were, the more tempting and alluring they became, and therefore the more of an obstacle to true worship. The same stern aesthetic applied to the colourful festivals like Christmas, Easter, and saints’ days; their very human appeal meant that they distracted believers from the motions of the spirit. As such, for Robert Harley the Church calendar too was to take less account of
human needs for ritual, striving instead for an order which would allow the elect to approach the God of the Gospels without distraction. The committee therefore agreed that only the Lord’s own day, Sunday, was a special day requiring special treatment.

  All other festivals were to cease. The calendar would be marked only by fast days, and by days of national remembrance such as 5 November. The godly wanted to change for ever the way people thought about how they moved through time.

  The old Church calendar that he wanted to erase mirrored the agricultural year, marking an annual cycle of birth, growth, death and resurrection. Christmas was an especially important feast for the idea of carnival. The incarnation and birth of Christ were reversals of the natural order of the universe; the king of the world born an outcast in a dirty stable. This encouraged symbols of paradox, transformation and the overturning of order to grow up around the feast. There was an implicit agreement: the labouring poor would share the life of the lords for whom they worked for the twelve days of Christmas, in exchange for quiescence for the rest of the year. Plum pottage was a kind of opiate of the masses. For this to work, symbolically, a number of things had to happen with clockwork regularity: the lord had to be present, sharing the feast; the feast had to be superabundant, symbolic of largesse; ideally, there must be games – ranging from mumming to cards and dice – in which extreme reversals of fortune featured. The most concrete expression of this was the Christmas Lord of Misrule, who presided over the feast; also linked were boy bishops, choirboys elevated to the mitre and crozier for Christmas from the feast of St Nicholas, 6 December. Battles between Christmas and Lent were sometimes staged on Shrove Tuesday; Christmas at Norwich in 1443 rode a horse decked in tinfoil while Lent was clad in herring skins, white and red, and his horse covered in oyster shells. The last night of Christmas, Twelfth Night, was especially associated with disorder and misrule through the lottery of the Twelfth Night cake. Whoever got the slice of cake with a bean hidden in it was king of the feast. The cake itself contained expensive spices: a 1620 Geneva tract gives the recipe as containing flour, honey, ginger and pepper. Hospitality was the goal of the season, and especially so tenants and poor neighbours could gain temporary access to the lord’s hospitality, in return for the enforced gifts that marked their dependence: licensed openness with a careful structure. The poor may have got to eat in the hall, not by the gate. In exchange an acceptance of the hierarchical relationship was implied – and required.

  The centrepiece was always food and drink, however; ‘at Christmas we banquet, the rich with the poor/ who then (but the miser) but openeth his door?’ asked Thomas Tusser. One of the main treats was a boar’s head, and Tusser also lists brawn as an important element. He describes, too, a carnivorous feast of mutton, pork, veal, souse, and finally cheese and apples. He also mentions turkey, but stresses good bread, good drink, and above all a blazing fire in the hall; Christmas feasting might have represented the only real chance to be warm all winter for the very poorest guests. The other way to get warm – or not to mind about the cold – was of course huge quantities of alcohol, also central to Christmas. Wassailing – with a regional drink, sometimes cider, or the spiced beer called lambswool – involved a shared drinking and kissing ritual, sometimes involving a demand for money and food with menaces. (It was a struggle to get new wine for Christmas, as most of the previous year’s wine was undrinkable by then.) People were menaced for money by mummers, too, and those who didn’t give it, whether because they were godly or because they were mean, could be punished with a riding; on a staff to Chichester High Cross, for instance, in 1586. This was part of the general holiday fun of violence. Similarly, while gathered around the fire, more-or-less traditional and subversive songs could be sung, and stories could be told, the deeds of Hereward the Wake or Robin Hood, or of Tom Thumb. Christmas carols were promoted by the early Stuart Church; court preacher Lancelot Andrewes was an especial advocate.

  That jovial man Humphrey Mildmay was always in search of a good Christmas, but his idea of what made Christmas good didn’t altogether fit the model exhorted by the defenders of Yule. Mildmay was not enormously fond of the tradition of open-house hospitality. He noted, Ebenezer-like, that at New Year ‘to dinner came rascal upon rascal without sending for’. Still, he did love food and drink; he made sure he ordered in hogsheads of wine, and like many a modern family he enjoyed walking off his excesses. ‘I have been walking in the fields and woods so wide’, he writes, ‘on Danbury Hill.’ Despite his reservations, he revelled in the sociability of the festival, and the contrast between indoor jollity and raging winter. In 1639/40, he noted that the weather at Christmas was especially nasty; it was clear and cold on 20 December, but it was also ‘high winds, and dirty beyond measure, the floods mountain high’. Despite this, at Christmas everyone went to church, and the next day ‘all night was a mighty storm’. On New Year’s Day he wrote, ‘to dinner; many here and the hall full of idle company’. During the Twelve Days, Humphrey Mildmay also enjoyed bull-baiting, and the indoor pleasures of cards, especially gleek and pink, also known as post and pair, and dice, and of course tables, and ‘gammon’, or backgammon. They all played for money, significant sums by the standards of the day, and women played as well as men. Dancing was also part of the festivities, to the music of fiddles and trumpeters.

  Church was important too. In the old Roman Sarum rite, the devout were to attend three Christmas Masses; the most important was dawn vigil, after which the congregation could break their fast with the roasts, pies and puddings that had been forbidden in Advent. Churches were decorated with greenery – rosemary, bay, holly and ivy. Other customs included gifts exchanged at New Year: Christmas boxes for servants, tradesmen and the poor, and pastimes, which included singing, dancing, card games, stage plays, and the creation of a Lord of Misrule. Yet as with modern festivals, one person’s cheer was another’s noisy nuisance. The Elizabethan moralist Philip Stubbes complained that ‘more mischief is at this time [Christmas] committed than in all the year besides’, and he claimed that it incited robbery, whoredom and murder, dicing and carding, banqueting and feasting, ‘to the great dishonour of God and the impoverishing of the realm’.

  Complaints like this are the reason that Christmas was always under threat. It is true that the Edwardian and Elizabethan Church allowed it, along with St Stephen’s Day and Holy Innocents’ Day, because all could be found in the New Testament. Those eager to defend ‘traditional’ Christmas were also inclined to give it a much longer history than it actually possessed; Christmas didn’t become a major Church festival until the high Middle Ages, though it was a minor one from early in Church history. No sooner was it established than it was criticized. From Henry VIII to Dickens, Christmas has always needed work to improve it, to endow it with the magic it possessed in the past. The Tudor Christmas among aristocrats was characterized by banquets, balls, plays, masques and mummings, coordinated by the Lord of Misrule; this replaced simpler, older open-house feasts for tenants. By the time the Civil War began, Christmas had again become controversial; as early as James’s reign, the godly had objected to the king’s masques and Christmas games as pagan survivals. Ben Jonson, author of Christmas His Masque in 1617, made his work an evocation of a traditional Christmas already seen as under threat, ‘a right Christmas, as of old it was’. Like Dickens, Jonson castigates Londoners for their failure to bless the poor and keep Christmas. The poet Robert Herrick, too, insists that unless Christmas customs are kept up, the crops themselves will fail; ‘Wassail the trees, that they may bear/ you many a plum and many a pear’, he urges, referring to the custom of pouring wassail around fruit trees to make them bear, but using this as a metaphor for the relations between tenants and lords. Give hospitality, Herrick insists, or lose the loyalty of the poor. The connection was more obvious because, traditionally, the first Monday after the Twelve Days of Christmas was Plough Monday, when the ploughing began.

  So Christmas was supposed to be a kind of dream-world, in
which the rich could see themselves reflected as generous and hospitable, the poor as welcome and loved. But it was an illusion, and Parliament had no time nor place for illusions.

  What helped to doom Christmas for the godly was the way Catholic Counter-Reformation clerics emphasized the cult of the Virgin and the Holy Family. Thus Christmas became more important to Catholics, and hence, dangerously, more associated with them: Dorothy Lawson, a staunch Catholic, celebrated Christmas ‘in both kinds … corporally and spiritually’, enjoying Christmas pies, dancing and gambling. In 1594, the imprisoned Catholic priests at Wisbech kept Christmas with a hobby horse and morris dances; at Douai, at the Benedictine school, they elected a Christmas King every year. The priest John Gerard reports that vigorous celebrations of Christmas made recusants conspicuous. And on the eve of the Civil War, Richard Carpenter, recently converted to Protestantism, reported that the recusant gentry were noted for their ‘great Christmasses’. The result was that more and more Protestants viewed Christmas as one of the trappings of popery. The Protestant notion that ‘all days are alike God’s creatures’, direct and simple, made Christmas seem a nonsense of noise and fuss. In December 1642, Thomas Fuller was delivering a fast sermon on Holy Innocents’ Day, a sad note in the Twelve Days: he remarked that ‘on this day a fast and feast do both jostle together, and the question is which should take place in our affections … [the young] may be so addicted to their toys and Christmas sports that they will not be weaned from them’ and he advised the older generation not to be transported with their follies, but to ‘mourn while they are in mirth’.

  What encouraged the godly to try to shut down the entire festive calendar was the Solemn League and Covenant. Previously, even the most zealous godly had spoken only of abolishing saints’ days, but now every feast was denounced by someone as superstition. So the Christmas Wars began, a reflection of the wars fought by the contending armies. Accordingly, in 1643, some shops opened on Christmas Day in London, and some churches, by contrast, were closed. Amazingly by modern standards, some MPs turned up for work. And some newsbooks attacked Christmas, pointing out that it contained the word ‘mass’, an ‘idol’, and tacitly urging Parliament to press forward with legislation. Eagerly Sir Robert Harley had been reforming the Sunday trading laws. All commerce, travel, labour, wakes, ales, dances and all pastimes whatever were to be banned on the Lord’s Day, and maypoles were to be taken down.