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

by Diane Purkiss

  He left me behind him, I then lying in of my first son Harrison Fanshawe … as for that it was the first time we had parted a day since we were married, he was extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature. But the sense of leaving me with a dying child, which did die two days after, in a garrison town, extreme weak and very poor, were such circumstances as he could not bear with, only the argument of necessity.

  As Ann explains in the family notes attached to her memoir, Harrison Fanshawe was born at Oxford in Trinity College on Sunday 23 February 1644 ‘at 9 a clock at Night’. He was christened the next day, by Doctor Potter (Master of the College), so his health may have been a problem from birth. He lived ‘but fifteen days & lies buried in the parish church of St John’s College Oxford’. It may have been partly grief that dampened Ann’s spirits and impaired her health:

  And for mine own part, it cost me so dear that it was 10 weeks before I could go alone, but he by all opportunities writ to me to fortify myself and to comfort me in the company of my father and sister, who were both with me, and that so soon as the Lords of the council had their wives come to them, I should come to him, and that I should receive the first money he got and hoped it would be suddenly. By the help of God, with these cordials, I recovered my former strength by little and little. Nor did I in my distressed condition lack the conversation of many of my relatives then in Oxford and kindnesses of very many of the nobility and gentry.

  Despite her optimistic tone, Ann was really desperate for money. When she finally managed to struggle out to church, in May 1645, a messenger reached her from Richard, bringing fifty gold pieces and a letter saying she could come to him the following week. He sent word that he would find two of his men and that Lady Capel and Lady Brandford would meet her on the way. ‘But that gold your father sent me when I was ready to perish did not so much revive me as his summons’, wrote Ann loftily. Meanwhile, gold was not lying safe in Oxford, as the town was becoming more and more difficult to manage. One citizen was confronted by a party of Royalists who under threat of blowing up the house, took away plate and rings to the value of £300. The following week, Ann Fanshawe set out for Bristol. Perhaps it would be safer, she thought. In this she was doomed to disappointment. Ann’s loving description of her husband was her gift to her son; for her daughters she had another book prepared, one which contained a different kind of knowledge acquired in the Civil War. This was her household receipt book.

  Every woman who could read had a book of this kind; it contained everything from alchemical remedies for the Black Death to the secret of how to make a perfect cheesecake. Through its pages, one gets a strong glimpse of the way even a ‘hoyting’ girl who cared more for running than for housewifery might lead a life busy among the complexities of herbs, their gathering, growth and preparation, of cooking in a kitchen with servants, but without a reliable solid-fuel range; of sickrooms, with no medicines but with many, many remedies and much nursing and care; of nurseries, without inoculation but with great love and devotion. Each receipt is an act of maternal and housewifely earnestness. Ann’s include recipes for curing ‘melancholy and heaviness of spirits’, something she must have seen often in the war; it sounds cheeringly warming: ‘For Melancholy and Heaviness of spirits: Take Siena of Alexandria 4 ounces, of Salsaparilla 3 ounces, of Raisins of the Sun the stones being taken out one pound, of epthamum, of double camomile flowers … 1/2 an ounce of liquorice, 2 ounces and 2 drams of annyseeds.’

  Ann did have plenty to make her sad. Like other women caught up in other wars, the men in her life began to die. Ann’s brother William died at Oxford with a bruise on his side caused by the fall of his horse, shot out from under him against a party of the Earl of Essex in 1643. ‘He was a very good and gallant young man, and those are the very words the King said when told of his death’, she wrote.

  Some of her other remedies suggest war experience too, a drink for a bruise, a way of staunching bleeding, a wound remedy that required over twenty plants, including avens, bugle, comfrey, dandelion, agrimony, honeysuckle, mugwort, five-leaved grass, violet leaves and wood betony. And above all her plague remedy refers to her time in Oxford:

  Dr Burger his directions in time of Plague: Take three pints of malmsey, boil in it a handful of sage, and handful of Rue, till a pinte be wasted, then straine it and set it over the fire again, and put thereto a penny worth of long Pepper, half an ounce of Ginger, quarter of an ounce of Nutmeg, all beaten together; then let it boil a little, and take it off the fire, and put to it a pennyworth of mithridate, a pennyworth of treacle, & a quarter of a pint of the best Angelica-water. Keep this as your life above all worldly treasure. Take it always warm both morning and Evening a spoonful or two if you be infected, and sweat thereupon, but if you be not infected then one spoonful a day is sufficient, half a spoonful in the morning and half at night. In all your Plague time under God trust to this. For there was never none died of the Plague that took it. This is not only good for the common plague, But for the meals, Small Pox, Surfeits, and divers other kinds of diseases.

  Perhaps Ann felt this had kept her and her family safe during the terrible Oxford plague that struck the city like a great wave when it was already reeling from the war. The struggling city first had to grapple with a deadly disease in the army camps themselves in 1643, called gaol fever; it may have been an outbreak of typhus. From this and other causes, the death rate in the city climbed staggeringly, until by the end of 1643 an eighth of the city had died. A fifth of the council lay in their graves. And then the plague broke out afresh in the summer of 1644. The city tried all the usual, ineffective measures – killing the cats and dogs (thus ensuring skyrocketing numbers of rats), burials at night, closing the churchyards, opening the pesthouses. Some plague huts for victims were hastily set up in Holywell Street, just outside the city walls; infected people were forcibly removed to them, dying at what their neighbours hoped was a safe distance, but of course city walls did nothing to stop the movements of rats or fleas. The dead were buried in the wastes surrounding the old castle. A bill of mortality for a week in October 1644 shows nineteen deaths. Smallpox broke out, too, and typhus continued to rage. In neighbouring Berkshire, disease including the plague was a particular problem. In 1643 alone, two parishes in Reading had a total of 529 deaths, compared with an average of 152. The close proximity of the worst-affected areas to military camps suggests that the armies brought disease with them.

  Law and order began to break down under all the pressure, and some reports sound as if there were some atrocities: ‘a woman shot – lay dead three days’, ‘a soldiers grave that was murdered’. And Oxford also had to face the scourge that follows plague. On the afternoon of Sunday 6 October 1644, a fire began somewhere beyond the Northgate; it raged through the city to the west, destroying some two to three hundred badly-needed houses as it went, mostly in the poor parish of St Ebbe’s, melting the roof of St Peter’s church, and wrecking many of Oxford’s key food industries.

  Miserable as things were, some Oxonians managed a normal life for themselves. Anthony Wood – or Anthony à Wood, as he styled himself – was an Oxford type, a kind of person still to be found in the city’s narrow streets. He liked to spend his afternoons picking up old ballads, broadsides, and pamphlets; he especially loved to acquire books that were not in the Bodleian Library. After the war he worked on the Bodleian catalogue. He catalogued his own collection, too, piling up pamphlets and listing them in categories. He had, for instance, 35 items on America, 21 on Astronomy, 413 on Catholic and Anti-Catholic, 105 on Conduct, and 660 on Armies, including battles, sieges and civil war. He also collected accounts of treason trials, crimes and murders (357), marvel tales (417), works on entertainment (including fishing, drinking, smoking, cards, feasting, progresses and sideshows) (56), and works on the radical sects – among whom he included Presbyterians (179) – and on witchcraft (42) and women (139). He was especially careful about cataloguing the last group, indexing them under ‘Women�
��s advocate; women’s vindications, women virtuous; women hist of; Women’s rhetoric; women history; Wom Parl. Of; Women modish and vanity; women excellent’.

  ‘Wom Parl. Of’: this cryptic entry refers to Parliaments of Women. There were of course no women MPs or voters, but there was a flourishing satirical genre which depicted women sitting in Parliament. It’s fascinating that Wood should give this nonexistent body its own index entry. It’s true that the Civil War produced a number of spoofs reporting on women’s activities in a fantasy parliament; one of them, written by the satirist Henry Neville, attacked Ann’s friend Isabella Thynne, and even more so Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle: ‘[The House] ordered that an English garrison be put into Carlisle, to prevent a foreign enemy from getting into possession thereof; as is to be feared by reason of some secret intelligence had by the French Ambassador in that place.’

  In these satires, the women’s powers are exercised in ensuring a supply of ‘French commodities’ without ‘excise’, and in retaining fashionable obstetricians ‘to help them with their most pressing affairs’. It may not have seemed especially funny to Ann, after her sufferings in labour. But Wood might have found its cruelty ribtickling. He was a grump of heroic proportions, so irritable that not even Merton College’s hospitable Senior Common Room could accommodate his quarrelsome nature. Describing his erstwhile friend and collaborator, the biographer John Aubrey, as ‘a shiftless person, roving and maggotyheaded, and sometimes little better than crazed’ was typical. Bodley’s librarian Thomas Hearne responded gallantly that Wood himself was ‘always looked upon in Oxford as a most egregious, illiterate, dull blockhead, a conceited impudent coxcomb’. The atmosphere in Oxford was becoming so tense that even the university was growing irritable.

  If the king and his retinue had engulfed Oxford, they had left other places forlorn. Londoners could scarcely forbear to believe in change when they glanced at Whitehall Palace: ‘A palace without a presence! A White-hall clad in sable vestments! A Court without a Court! Here are miseries, and miseries, and miseries which the silken ages of this peaceful island have not been acquainted with’, mourned a London pamphleteer. But the lachrymose tone belies the pamphlet’s subtle criticism of the vanished courtiers:

  To begin at the entrance into the Court, where there had wont to be a continual throng, either of gallants standing to ravish themselves with the sight of Ladies handsome Legs and insteps as they took coach, or of the tribe of guarded by whom you could scarce pass without a jeer or a fancy answer to your question; now if you would ask a question there is no body to make answer … You may walk into the Presence Chamber with your Hat, Spurs and Sword on.

  Away from all the protocol, what was a palace but echoing rooms?

  London was, as ever, curious. For months Whitehall Palace, once a Forbidden City, had stood unused and silent. No guards were posted, so there was nothing to prevent all London from drifting in, to look at the pictures, to prowl the state apartments like their modern tourist successors, to try out Charles’s throne for size. Grass grew between the paving-stones, men said. A ballad mourned that ‘we see Whitehall, with cobwebs hanging on the wall,/ Instead of silk and silver brave, which formerly it used to have,/ With rich perfume in every room, delightful to that princely train’. But not everyone was sad. London was, as always, opportunistic; people carted away the royal coal and the royal kindling, even the royal beer, for their own use. Londoners did not do these things because they supported Parliament and not the king; but when they had done them they could not feel the same way about the king, or the court. It was no longer a sacred mystery, but a place to play, to trade, to get some free winter fuel, not a sacred space any more. The connection between Laud’s concern to rail off the altar and the king’s tendency to rail himself off from his subjects now became obvious.

  As London lost its sense that any space was forbidden, its idea of itself expanded. Now it was becoming the New Jerusalem. And in 1643, Londoners could feel that they had crossed a Rubicon. The year had begun frowningly, with rumours that Charles was planning to use his western armies eventually to encircle London in the hope that loyal Londoners would rise up from within the city and overthrow Parliamentarian rule. But by autumn Gloucester had held out stoutly, preventing the king’s onward march, and soon a powerful new ally would help still more.

  And yet not all change was welcome. By now some in London had had enough. They wanted peace.

  One reason might have been Parliament’s new demands for money. The search for revenue led to new powers which might well have made some recall the personal rule fondly. In January, County Committees were empowered to raise money by taxes from those who had not contributed voluntarily to Parliament’s cause. A Weekly Assessment was established in February 1643. In May, Parliament passed an ordinance to sanction compulsory loans; it also created new duties on a wide range of goods, duties extended even to food by January 1644. There was, too, a peace party in Parliament, and due to its activities negotiations began with Charles at Oxford in February 1643. It was all over by April, agreement being impossible, but the talks had encouraged some to long for what they had proved incapable of providing. Another factor was Parliament’s noticeable reluctance to forward the cause of godly revolution with sufficient rapidity. True, the promisingly Scotssounding and entirely Calvinist Westminster Assembly was established in June to work out a religious settlement. Its one hundred and twenty divines had been hand-picked, but convening such a body meant that splits that were beginning to emerge between Presbyterians and Independents became more visible.

  The same splits were echoed in Parliament. Convinced the war was unwinnable, and eager to save their skins from traitors’ deaths, the earls of Holland, Bedford and Clare decided that Oxford looked healthier than Westminster. Denzil Holles began a long campaign of miserable inactivity. Other MPs were unenthusiastic about inviting a Scottish army onto English soil. But Pym did manage to coax the Solemn League and Covenant through the House in September 1643, in part because he won over the moderates by sending firebrand Henry Marten to gaol. And the taxes that were so little loved guaranteed that Parliament’s finances were sounder than the king’s could ever be. If the war went on long enough, Parliament would win it.

  The peace protesters, like the defecting peers, failed to see this long view of Parliament’s prospects. Some of them wanted the old world back. It was all many Parliamentarians had ever wanted; the king on his throne, Parliament acting as some kind of check or balance or remedy – never mind what kind – the social order firm, the Church properly good and godly, but not overrun by fanatical lecturers croaking about the onrush of Doomsday. Negotiations between king and Parliament stumbled, largely on bricks put in their path by Pym, with his keen eye for self-preservation, and the armies stumbled too.

  Perhaps most importantly, London was running out of coal. The king controlled the coalfields of Newcastle and Durham, from which the city coal came by sea. He was willing to send supplies to London, but would also have collected enough tax revenue from it to hire foreign mercenaries – papists, as likely as not. So London shivered self-sacrificingly. The acrid aroma of coal-smoke had been the subject of complaint; people felt sure it was unhealthy. But now those who had complained the most cried out for the brightness and warmth of their fires. It was hard to feel hopeful when cooking, washing, and heating were all problematic.

  The peace protests accordingly began with a women’s peace petition outside the House of Commons on 8 August 1643. The protesters wore white ribbons in their hats. When a committee went out to try to appease them, they beat on the door of the committee-room to force it open, and threatened to cast Pym, Strode and others into the Thames. They threw brickbats, too. ‘Some say they were Irish, servants and Queens [whores]; most of them came out of Southwark Westminster and other places without the city’, said a news report. Other newsbooks called them ‘the civil sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons’. Others called them ‘army whores’, ‘of the poorest sort’. These were
routine insults, but the women, like those protesting in Edinburgh five years earlier, were probably city traders’ wives, fed up with the war. There had been an earlier demonstration, in January 1642, which had addressed loss of trade.

  MPs thought it was impossible that women could have organized all that by themselves. The Parliamentary leaders of the peace party were suspected; men like Denzil Holles. ‘They are put on and backed by some men of wealth and quality’, thought MP Walter Yonge. On Wednesday, things deteriorated still further, and the demonstration was more violent: ‘from words they fell to blows – troopers were called in, many were injured, and a woman was killed’. Newsbooks reported that the women ‘are all of the poorer sort … oyster wives and dirty tattered sluts’. The Commons spent some time trying to find the ringleaders, but all of those proceeded against were men.

  In fact, the faltering peace negotiations collapsed because no one – not Charles, not the Commons – wanted peace enough. Everyone was still hoping to win the war. And as the year wore on, Royalist hopes began to look more and more well-founded; battlefield successes combined with those Charles saw as the source of the trouble falling like birds from the sky. On 17 June 1643, John Hampden lay dead on Chalgrove field, after a short, sharp cavalry engagement in which Prince Rupert had personally led a charge by leaping a hedge that separated him from his enemy’s cavalry forces. Hampden was a grievous loss, a possible commander-in-chief. Worse still, John Pym was ailing, racked by painful stomach cancer that left him too nauseated to eat. He died on 8 December 1643. His many enemies said he was eaten alive by lice, a traditional end for a usurping tyrant; his memorial pamphlet was obliged to deny the report strenuously. ‘The man’, wrote an elegist, ‘was public good, and still his zeal/ Observed the king, and loved the commonweal.’ Ambiguous words. In his gaping absence, fiery young Arthur Haselrig stepped to the fore, leading the bereft war party. No wonder Denzil Holles was now one of those most eager for a settlement.