One Kentish man remembered Newbury with horror. His name was George Robinson, a cobbler, a heelmaker. Later, in 1651, he petitioned for a pension because of his injuries:
Your worships’ poor petitioner going in the Parliament’s service, under the command of Colonel Springet and in the company whereof Mr William Jones was captain, at the first fight at Newbury was shot in one of his legs by means whereof he lay in the hospital of Bartholomew near Smithfield in London by the space of half a year lame and sore diseased in his body. And another half year after his departure thence in a chirurgeon’s hand before he was able to work, having had above threescore splinters of the bone of his leg at several times taken out, to his great pains, and his own and his friends’ great charge, whereby he is not alone disabled to follow his vocation, but is almost continually in intolerable pain thereof, of which he cannot hope of remedy during his life.
George’s story shows that for those who were wounded, a battle never ended. The Battle of Newbury lived on, vivid, ever-painful, in George’s shattered leg, his broken life. More hearteningly, the story also lets us glimpse the beginnings of something resembling a system for caring for the wounded.
If George’s story seemed endless, the civilians around Newbury might have said the same: ‘that which exceedingly afflicts us’, grumbled the man sent to find out why the area was not keeping up its military commitments, ‘is the continual clamour of the soldiers of Newbury and country people thereabouts, the soldiers having almost starved the people where they quarter and are half-starved themselves, and for want of pay are become very desperate, ranging about the county and breaking and robbing houses, and passengers and driving away sheep and other cattle before the owners faces.’ For many, the Battle of Newbury was to remain a tormenting reality for years to come.
XIV Two Capitals: Oxford and London
For Royalists, Oxford had become the nation’s capital, because the capital was where the court did its business. The arrival of court and army meant that it was transformed from a comfortable, autonomous university city with run-down medieval walls to a crowded, bustling garrison town with stout defences, at the centre of a network of other fieldworks which reached as far as Faringdon in the west, twenty miles away, and to Islip in the north. Not everyone in Oxford welcomed the incoming Royalists and hangerson. Not all the newcomers were glad to be there.
One of the displaced persons was Ann Harrison (later Fanshawe). Ann had always had trouble doing what was expected of her. She loved ‘skipping and activity’ and riding, and running, and ‘was that which graver people call a hoyting [hoyden] girl’. She simmered down a bit when her mother instructed her. Ann remembered that her mother was ‘kind to the poor’ she ‘drest many wounds of miserable people’. Ann’s father was a rich merchant, and they lived ‘with great plenty and hospitality, but no lavishness in the least, nor prodigality’. Her father invested heavily in the royal cause. Knowing his sympathies, the king’s enemies arrested him at his house in Bishopgate Street, but he managed to escape his gaolers by pretending he had to go to fetch some writings they demanded. They sequestered his estate, and plundered the house. He fled to Oxford in 1643, and after that life became very difficult for the Harrison family, as Ann recorded:
We finding ourselves like fishes out of the water and the scene so changed that we knew not at all how to act any part but obedience: for from as good houses as any gentleman of England had we came to a baker’s house in an obscure street, and from roomes well furnished to lye in a very bad bed in a garret, to one dish of meat and that not the best ordered; no money, for we were as poor as Job, nor clothes more than a man or two brought in their cloakbags. We had the perpetual discourse of losing and gaining of towns and men; at the windows the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes sickness of other kinds, by reason of so many people being packed together, as I believe there never was before of that quality; always want, yet I must needs say that most bore it with a martyrlike cheerfulness. For my own part I begun to think we should all like Abraham live in tents all the days of our lives.
Ann’s family were not the only sufferers. The whole of Oxford was similarly crowded to the walls with a court that had overburdened the ampler palaces of London. The occupying forces needed billets. They swarmed into the half-empty colleges, taking rooms vacated by students who had ‘fled home to their mothers’. But the colleges soon overflowed, and citizens’ houses were requisitioned for the use of the king’s men. It wasn’t only the army that had to be accommodated. As well as refugee families like the Harrisons, the king and the princes brought their entire households with them. Many of the king’s servants could hardly afford to stay behind. In January 1644, a listing of the inhabitants of houses showed five ‘strangers’ in each of seventy-four houses in St Aldate’s. They included the king’s seamstress, Mrs Julian Elliot, her barber Thomas Davies, his German apothecary John Wolfgang Rumler; there too was William White, poulterer to the king, the king’s bakers Lawrence Ball and George Wild, William Langley, maker of wax lights, and Samuel Nurse, who was the royal coal-carrier. Just names, perhaps, but they hint at stories not unlike Ann’s; these servants were unpaid or only partly paid for some or most of the war.
Townspeople suffered too; though some made money from the increased population, there were other kinds of difficulties. The godly Parliamentarian Unton Croke had some of the king’s troops and servants billeted upon him; conversation at the dinner-table must have been lively. He absented himself, though we don’t know exactly when, and was in high favour with the Lord Protector by the 1650s. By contrast, Abel Parne was a staunch Royalist, with what by St Aldate’s standards was a large house. He was a whitebaker, a baker of bread for the rich, and his house was also his workshop. His rooms do not all sound inviting, especially the dark room and the little room over the parlour, but every one was tenanted, with boarders who ranged from Mr Andrew Morrison, a ‘very wanting man’ who had been unable to pay the charge levied for the city defences, and the king’s bakers Lawrence Ball and George Wild; perhaps they and Abel found they had much in common. But Abel was also host to Sir Henry Wood, the treasurer of the queen’s household, and to a total of eleven other men and women, including the daughter of a local gentry family who had refugeed to Oxford to be away from the fighting. Unton Croke and Abel Parne had been neighbours for years in the crowded parish, with its hugger-mugger houses. There were no class divisions in Oxford town, no troubled estates glaring at leafy suburbs; rich and poor lived next door, used the same merchants.
Another source of housing was the residences of those who had fled to the cosy embraces of godly Abingdon; their houses were soon stripped and crammed with lodgers. The city’s asylum, almshouses and prisons were bursting with visitors too. In the almshouses opposite Christ Church, thirty-one men brought in wounded from Edgehill died over the following weeks. Parliamentarian prisoners-of-war, locked in Oxford’s churches, took the opportunity to perform a little godly iconoclasm.
What Oxford experienced was a combination of becoming a garrison town and taking in evacuees; the results were predictable. Like all overcrowded cities, Oxford saw many quarrels break out over lodging rights. Wealthy lodgers could expect to find the best rooms, with luxuries provided by the citizens; other households had to provide bed – and board – in time of war for guests in exchange only for paper ‘tickets’, redeemable at some future date, which were not even accepted as part-payment for the contributions laid on the citizens for the soldiers’ upkeep.
The intense population pressure put a strain on the city, too. Its narrow streets became choked with rubbish and traffic, its simple drainage exploded into overflow under the strain. The king was far from happy with all this disorder. A royal edict complained of horror abominalis and cited pigsties and pigs crowding the highways, and dirt blocking the Northgate. Slaying Lane, now Brewer Street, where Abel Parne had his house, remained a mess. The water protecting the ditches was fouled with excrement and runoff from the teeming town. Ani
mal carcasses rotted in the ditches, disturbed only when brewers went down to draw water to make beer.
Above all, the king needed money. Parliament had the advantage of drawing on London’s much greater resources. The king, leaning on tiny Oxford and its hinterland, was more-or-less forced to extort money at a rate that almost all the citizenry found exceedingly heavy. Essentially, the occupying soldiers had to be paid to prevent them from burning the town. The size of the forced loans demanded was crushing. In spring 1643, £2390 had to be raised to pay for the fortifications and their weaponry; a large loan of £2000 went with this demand. Food stores had to be provided for every inhabitant in case of siege. All householders except the poorest and ‘mere scholars’ had to pay; the college servants who were usually exempt were included. The city also had to maintain a garrison, at £450 a month, a tax that had to be enforced by the military. Arrears were common despite this effort, though they could be worked off by ditch-digging, or by raising a regiment for home defence. The city borrowed desperately using its plate as collateral. The king ordered all adult males, even academics, to work one day a week or pay a shilling. The service was unpopular, and despite the efforts at enforcement, numbers declined to a point where only a small fraction of those who were expected appeared for duty. Despite the non-appearance of more than half the workforce, the fortifications proceeded, and decayed medieval walls became modern earthworks. The line of works enclosed the city, while its wet ditches and flooded fields helped to protect the fortifications, impressively surmounted by cannon.
The citizens had been deprived of money and time, and they had also had their arms taken; now they were asked to raise more regiments, and somehow six hundred new recruits were found, forming six companies; each came from a particular neighbourhood. There was a new gibbet at Carfax, where the farmers gathered to sell their wares, for military executions.
It was worse still for prisoners in Oxford Castle. One hundred men were taken by the Royalists at Marlborough in December 1642. Dragged through mud and ice to Oxford Castle, they were confronted by its brutal commander, William Smith, already known as a monster. One of the prisoners recalled that even the officers among the men of Marlborough were stripped to the skin and forced to don filthy rags, assigned small rooms which contained forty people, who at times were ankle-deep in their own excrement. But it was still worse for the men: ‘On these poor souls did the viper Smith exercise his more than savage cruelties. He allowed them but five farthings a day, so that many of them grew very sick, all very weak … Now there began to be a great cry among them for bread and water, but Smith and his officers denied them both, though a river ran below the castle walls.’
Relatives tried to send food to them, but it was taken and eaten by the guards. Recalcitrant prisoners might be beaten, hogtied, or burnt with lit match. Smith was hoping that this reign of terror would induce the men to enlist in the Royalist army. The men could obtain their freedom by taking the protestation and then paying. But most of the men still sought other ways of escape. A group managed to creep through a hole in the wall and then to swim the river to safety. When they reported on conditions, the king himself dismissed Smith, and had him pilloried in the streets of Oxford.
But while some struggled and suffered, others found business was booming. Beer, bread, clothing, and even luxury goods were in demand as never before. The harvests continued to be good, and when the mayor bought in a supply of wheat for the public food store, he was able to do so at a good price. Another reason prices fell was that the king broke up some local monopolies, including the brewers’ monopoly, with the result that it became impossible to regulate the supply of ale.
Amidst the mud and the smells, Ann Harrison contrived a life for herself. She liked to go to Trinity College with her friend Lady Isabella Thynne, daughter of the Earl of Holland (Lucy Hay’s devotee), and tease its solemn head of house. Precisely because the world outside the colleges was smelly and crowded, the court liked to make theatrical and pretty pastorals, little islands of civility and prettiness under siege in a world stirred to unquietness. ‘Our grove’, Aubrey remarked, ‘was the Daphne for the ladies and their gallants to walk in, and many times Lady Isabella Thynne, (who lay at Balliol College), would make her entry with a Theorbo or a lute played before her. I have heard her play upon it in the grove myself, which she did rarely; for which Mr Edmund Waller hath in his poems ever made her famous.’ But Ann and her friends were young, and they also took refuge in fun. ‘I remember one time this Lady and fine Mrs Fanshawe (her great and intimate friend, who lay at our college) would have a frolick to make a visit to the president. The old Dr Quickly perceived that they came to abuse him; he addressed his discourse to Mrs Fanshawe, saying, madam, your husband and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather. I know you to be a gentlewoman. I will not say you are a whore, but get you gone for a very woman.’ Ann loved to shock him; she was still the hoyden, the one who loved to tease. She and Isabella Thynne liked to scandalize the elderly dons by coming to the chapel ‘half-dressed, like angels [whores]’. The stress is said to have shortened the life of Ralph Kettell, one don more comfortable with books than with ladies.
Doubtless Ann also enjoyed the recreations that the queen brought with her. There was plenty of scandalous romping:
Toward the evening of that day, Prince Rupert accompanied with some lords and other cavaliers danced through the streets openly with music before them, to one of the colleges where, after they had stayed about half an hour, they returned back again dancing, with the same music before them, and immediately there followed them a pack of women, or courtesans it may be supposed, for they were hooded and could not be known.
But Ann’s life came very quickly to centre on Richard Fanshawe, the man with whom she had fallen happily and deeply in love. When she writes of Richard, she describes him so closely that it is clear she knew every inch of his face:
He was of the highest size of men, strong, and of the best proportion, his complexion sanguine, his skin exceeding fair, his hair dark brown and very curling, but not very long, his eyes grey, and penetrating, his nose high, his countenance gracious, and wise, his motion good, his speech clear, and distinct, he never used exercise but walking, and that generally with some book in his hand, which oftentimes was Poetry, in which he spent his idle hours. Sometimes he would ride out to take the air, but his most delight was to go only with me in a coach some miles, and there discourse of these things which then most pleased him of what nature soever. He was very obliging to all, and forward to serve his Mr, his country and friend . . . He was the tenderest father imaginable, the carefullest and most generous Master I ever knew. He loved hospitality, and would often say it was wholly necessary for the constitution of England.
Writing for her children, Ann tried to find words which would help them understand the love she had found:
Now you will expect I should say something that may remain of us jointly, which I will do, though it makes my eyes gush out with tears, and cuts me to the soul, to remember and in part express our joys. I was blessed with, in him. Glory be to God we never had but one mind through out our lives. Our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aim and designs one, our loves one, and our resentments one. We so studied each other, that we knew each other’s mind by our looks, what ever was real happiness God gave it me in him.
It was as if the mother Ann had lost as a young girl was found again, for Ann felt as safe and happy with Richard as a baby in its mother’s arms. But as Royalists their lives would not be easy. They were married in Wolvercote Church, two miles from Oxford, on 18 May 1644. The choice of this obscure parish may point to Richard’s relatively godly religious beliefs; the university was mostly Laudian. It was a war-wedding. Ann’s father was present, and gave Ann her mother’s wedding ring, with which she was married, and her sister Margaret and brother and sister Butler were also there. The other guest of note was Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon and supreme historian of the Royalist cause. ‘We m
ight’, said Ann, optimistic as ever, ‘be truly called merchant adventurers.’ With the twenty pounds they had between them, they bought pen, ink and paper, so that Fanshawe could ply his trade as a government secretary. At first he had trouble, Ann said, with Charles’s Secretary of State Windebank, who ‘being a papist’, said Ann, tartly, saw Richard Fanshawe as a Puritan enemy.
Richard missed a job as the Prince of Wales’s secretary as a result. In 1645, he left for Bristol, leaving Ann in some difficulty, to say the least. All over England, couples were parting; those who had been together a week, and those who had been together for twenty years. Their grief was given voice by Richard Lovelace, in his famous lyric that captures both human plangency and very Royalist playfulness:
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
Lovelace and his own Lucy Sacheverell were parted for good; Lovelace was reported dead of wounds, and Lucy married someone else as a result. His lyric captures the anguished sense that a husband is deserting a wife, however good the reason. And this was what Ann felt, as Richard rode off to Bristol. She had particular reason for feeling bereft, and one can hear a wail in her first words:
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