In Bolton, for example, the wife of the captain of the garrison was allegedly raped in part because she would not reveal the location of her plate. The story appears in one of a number of pamphlets accusing Rupert’s men of ‘filthiness’. The title makes it clear that it is not exactly neutral in tone: An Exact Relation of the bloody and barbarous massacre at Bolton in the Moors in Lancashire … by Prince Rupert. Another news pamphlet told of how Rupert’s men ‘beastly assaulted many women’s chastity, and impudently made their brags of it afterwards, how many they had ravished, glorying in their shame’. Assessing reports like this is impossible, because both sides tended to portray women and children as hapless victims because of their obvious propaganda value. Richard Baxter describes one particularly horrific and bizarre case, involving a miracle: ‘When Prince Rupert put the inhabitants of Bolton in Lancashire to the sword (men, women and children) an infant escaped alive, and was found lying by her father and mother, who were slain in the streets: an old woman took up the child, and carried it home, and put it to her breast for warmth, (having not had a child her self for about 30 years) the child drew milk, and so much, that the woman nursed it up with her breast milk a good while.’
Most people are dimly familiar with the nineteenth-century painting of a boy being interrogated by sinister Puritans, and entitled And when did you last see your father? It was painted by W. F. Yeames, and is a nosegay of fresh errors, especially notable for its insistence that Royalists wore pale blue satin and lace while the Parliament-men wore dull black. Nonetheless, there may have been more than a grain of truth in the idea that children were sometimes interrogated about their families, and could certainly be victimized:
On Monday 29 May 1643, a boy of five or six years of age attended by a youth, was coming to Oxford to his father an officer in the king’s army, passing through Buckinghamshire, he fell into the hands of some troopers of Colonel Goodwin’s regiment, who not only pillaged him of the clothes which he brought with him, but took his doublet off his back, and would have taken away his hat and boots … that night they came to the place where the child lay, and the poor soul being in bed fast asleep, his innocent rest not disturbed with the injuries of the day: they dived into his, and his attendant’s pockets, robbed them of all their monies, and left them either to borrow more, or to beg for sustenance in their journey to Oxford.
This heartrending tale is told by Bruno Ryves, a man who specialized in compiling such stories and enfolding them in one gigantic anthology called Mercurius Rusticus, news from the country. Historians have tended to disbelieve Ryves. He was a passionate Royalist, and all the stories he recites have immense propaganda value. However, from accounts like the one above we can learn not about events, but about values. Ryves would not tell the story if the plunder of the innocent were not already what people feared. And we learn, too, that the pathetic figure of the sleeping child robbed was just as moving to the seventeenth century as it would be to the sentimentalists who gave us And when did you last see your father? We do learn, too, about events. The story would not be credible if it seemed impossible for a child to be journeying across England with only a servant for company.
Even if not all of Ryves’s stories were true, they expressed and invoked, but also described the fears that people truly felt when their town was besieged and then occupied, when their family members were forced to travel the always-dangerous roads. Across England, stories of loss and death began to multiply. The idea was increasingly of the soldier as a brutal and indiscriminate eater, a waster: ‘They have killed Ewes great with lamb, and one Ewe that was great with two lambs … whatsoever they cannot eat at any time, be their diet never so good, they throw away’, mourned A True Relation of Two Merchants of London, who were taken prisoners by the Cavaliers in 1642. ‘The soldiers having almost starved the people where they quarter and are half starved themselves, & for want of pay are become very desperate, ranging in about the county & breaking and robbing houses and passengers and driving away sheep and other cattle before the owners’ faces.’
The figure of the Plundering Soldier was in any case almost all belly; woodcuts showed him with a great greedy Falstaffian girth. ‘The Plunderer’ fed on the entrails of the kingdom: the ‘English-Irish soldier’ ‘had rather eat than fight’, and was composed of all the goods he had plundered, a figure of someone without an identity who had deprived others of theirs in order to manufacture a specious one of his own. It was not only food that was taken or destroyed, but houses too. ‘Miserable it is to see the multitude of inhabitants and their children flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a house to put their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling.’ After years of fighting, Joshua Sprigge described Banbury: ‘scarce the one half standing gazing on the ruins of the other’. Towns were laid waste. This is Cirencester, taken by Rupert’s men in 1643:
Our greater firemen, ’twere injustice to forget, for the terror and fury of the cannon much eased the victory. On one side the grenadoes were terrible, especially after they had fired one house … the dying men in the very fight cried out, that Sir Robert Cook, Mr Stevens, Mr George, and their preachers, had undone them. Whereby you see that when God by affliction gives understanding, the justness of that cause cannot satisfy the conscience of the dying … Some of the prisoners confessed, and others made it good, that the gentlemen and clothiers threatened them they should have no work. Others that they should be plundered. Others were violently fetched from their houses by dragooners, and made to get up behind them. Others were dragged from their ploughs, and others coming into the town about business were there detained, and threatened to be shot, if they offered to get out.
Thus spake the Royalist conquerers. But the Parliamentarian defenders told a different tale:
The enemy had fired some barns and ricks of corn and hay that lay quite beyond these hundred musketeers, so that the enemy being at the wall, and breaking of it down, and the fire so behind him, that it took away all possibility of retreating if they stayed any longer, and they being so few … our men were forced out of that works after two hours’ valiant resistance of that furious charge of the enemy … the enemy killed without quarter those they met without or overtook … they stripped many of the prisoners, most of them of their utmost garments. They were all turned that night into the church, and though many of them were wounded, and weary, yet their friends were not suffered to bring them a cup of water into the church that night, but what they thrust in at the backside of the church.
One can feel the heat of indignation coming off both these newsbooks. One other casualty of war was becoming visible: truth, and faith in other men’s tales. Ironically, just as men and women too became freer to print their view of affairs, to discuss politics in London taverns with less fear of repercussions, the stuff of such discussions, the news, was corrupted.
The destruction of property, especially household property, continued to be painfully felt: ‘Nay such was their barbarous carriage, that many of the featherbeds which they could not bear away, they did cut the ticks of them in pieces, and scattered the feathers abroad in the fields and streets’, reported A True and Perfect Relation of the Barbarous and Cruell Passages of the Kings Army, at Old Brainceford. This pamphlet also claimed that ‘they left not unplundered the four alms-women in the Spittle there, and took from them their wheel or rocks, by which they got something towards a livelihood’.
This is a portrayal of men who have gone beyond law and order into a realm of unmitigated violence. The siege and sack of Bolton in Lancashire in 1643 introduced the inhabitants to such a world. It is a recognizable world to us. It is the world of war:
[the soldiers] spoiling all they could meet with, nothing regarding the doleful cries of women or children, but some they slashed as they were calling for quarter, others when they had given quarter, many hailed out of their houses to have their brains dashed out in the street, those that were not dead in the streets already, pistoled, slashed, bra
ined, or trodden under their horses’ feet, with many insolent blasphemous oaths, curses and challenges to heaven itself (no doubt) hastening the filling up of their cup, and bringing that swift destruction upon them, which they shortly after tasted of … I forbear many sad things, which might be inserted, the usage of children crying for their fathers, of women crying out for their husbands, some of them brought on purpose to be slain before their wives faces, the rending, tearing and turning of people naked, the robbing and spoiling of all the people of all things that they could carry … the massacring, dismembering, cutting of dying or dead bodies, and boasting, with all new coined oaths, swearing how many Roundheads this sword, or they, had killed that day, some eight, some six, some more or less; arms, legs, yea, the brains themselves lying distant from their heads, bodies and other parts. Their treading under horse feet and prancing over half-dying poor Christians, who were so besmeared and tumbled in dust and blood that scarce any thing of men remained.
William Bolton was fetched out of his chamber with scorn, saying they had found a praying saint, and fetched him to kill him before his wife’s face, who being great with child and ready to be delivered, fell on him to have saved him, but they pulled her off, without compassion, and had him call on his god to save him whilst they cut him in pieces … Elizabeth Horrocks [the wife of one of the commanders], a woman of good quality, after that they had killed her husband, took her in a rope, and dragged her up and down, after that they had robbed and spoiled her of all she had, and threatened to hang her unless she would tell them of her plate and money, who was yet wonderfully preserved, their inhumane using of her, and barbarous usages of other maids and wives of the town in private places, in fields, and in woods; the trees, the timbers, and the stones we hope will one day be a witness against them.
At their entrance, before, behind, to the right, and left, nothing heard, but kill dead, kill dead, was the word, in the town killing all before them without any respect, without the Town … pursuing the poor amazed people, killing, stripping and spoiling all they could meet with.
‘To wreak ones fury upon a dead Carcass, is a most barbarous, cowardly, and impious thing’, said Edward Symmonds sternly to the army of Prince Rupert, in A military Sermon. Apparently he thought this needed saying. For its part, in 1644 Parliament passed a law prohibiting quarter for Irish soldiers and allowed their killing after capture: the Irish were outsiders, barbarians and Catholics. This could hardly help but encourage soldiers not to show mercy.
Atrocities did not only occur in sacks; because there was no ‘front’, soldiers could be encountered anywhere. It had always been dangerous to wander the roads alone; there were thieves, footpads, highwaymen. But now there were also the soldiers, some of whom might act in an unruly manner. So Richard Atkyns’s wife discovered, to her cost:
She adventur’d without a pass, which proved very unhappy, for at Nettlebed, a party of Sir Jacob Astley’s Soldiers … took her prisoner, and carried her on to Reading, where the waters [of the Thames] being then overhigh, she took a great fright … When she came to London, she found her house full of soldiers, and could not be admitted there, but [found other lodging with a tenant next door]. Where seeing her goods carried away before her face … she fell ill and miscarried (as I understood) of three children, and was very near her death.
Nor were the outrages confined to the south-east. The north, too, was suffering. The war had been grim in Yorkshire, if not quite as deadly as in the south and west. In west Yorkshire, the woollen towns were for Parliament, but the whole area was dominated by Newcastle’s huge Royalist army, and it was only when he left to escort the queen south in March 1643 that the Parliamentarians, led by a talented and dynamic father and son duo by the name of Fairfax, were able to retake a few strongholds, efforts that ended abruptly in the return of Newcastle and the crushing Royalist victory at Adwalton Moor on 30 June 1643. In north Yorkshire, York itself was a major Royalist stronghold, a kind of unofficial northern capital, and most of the surrounding area was also securely Royalist. Yorkshire exemplified a county where allegiance was divided by lifestyle and resulting religious conviction.
Large armies billeted in an area made for loss of law and order. Sometimes the gap between soldiers and highwaymen was very narrow. Soldiers and ex-soldiers ambushed trains of merchants and their pack animals, and were richly rewarded by the wealth from Yorkshire’s thriving wool trade. Bands of such soldier-highwaymen ranged over the countryside in the 1640s and 1650s, and ex-soldiers were also horsestealers. In some cases this began as requisitioning, but it did not stop at it, and deserters were especially inclined to it, or those recently disbanded. Some soldiers also stole horses to get revenge; one man explained that he had taken his neighbour’s horse because the latter had caused him to be put forward as a soldier. What this often meant was Royalist deserters and even army officers preying on those with Parliamentarian sympathies, exacerbating divisions. Henry Morton, a member of the Royalist garrison at Pontefract, became a well-known leader of a gang of highwaymen in south Yorkshire; he was caught in 1650 and hanged. His fellow-soldier at Pontefract, Captain Edward Holt, also turned highwayman; he was captured and hanged in 1648, having preyed on travellers between Lancashire and the West Riding.
The Yorkshire records for the war years show how the soldiers were beginning to be resented. At Holmefirth in an alehouse in 1648, John Oldfield extended a sarcastic greeting to a trooper: ‘we must help winter you … You are always oppressing us.’ The trooper did not take it kindly, and Oldfield paid with his life. At Owram a pair of soldiers gatecrashed a wedding and helped themselves to drink, then killed the groom’s father. One jealous husband was moved to kill his wife after ‘she had drunk with a soldier all the day until the night’, accompanied the soldier to a deserted house, and then returned home, drunk. A quarrel followed, and the man beat his wife to death. Soldiers often attacked villagers who tried to get their property back, and after one robbery the soldiers firmly told their pursuers that ‘they would let their guts around their heels’ rather than yield.
Ill-disciplined armies could turn the anger and aggression generated by battle onto the helpless: civilians, and also prisoners. An early pamphlet told Parliamentarians what to expect. Two London merchants were taken by the Cavaliers in 1642 in Thistlesworth, after getting lost in a sudden mist: ‘It was a lamentable condition that these two gentlemen were in: they were not well acquainted with the way, the smoke had almost blinded their eyes, the night was as dark as cold, which were both then in extremes, they saw their lives at the mercy of the merciless men and to make their condition yet worse, there did arise a thick and swollen mist, which took from them the little knowledge of the way they had before.’
Asked about their allegiance, one of them tried the diplomatic answer ‘the king and parliament’, but the soldiers cut off their ears, repeating what had been done by the state to Prynne. The English countryside became a kind of underworld of black unfamiliarity and cruel torture to the poor lost Londoners; it was an experience which was repeated many times during the war. In Cirencester, ‘they stripped many of the prisoners, most of them of their utmost garments. They were all turned that night into the church.’ Similarly, after Hopton House in Herefordshire surrendered to the Royalist troops of Sir Michael Woodhouse, an official order handed the naked, wounded prisoners over to the common soldiers, who attacked them savagely, driving them into a cellar full of water where they were massacred.
But of course most of those slain were killed in battle. The battlefields were unforgettable. Some employed apocalyptic language to describe what they saw:
On both sides men were slain, whose carcasses bestrewed their mother’s bosom, the earth wept in blood to see her native children foster cruelty, each trod the wine-press of rebellious wrath, Death triumphed in his colours, this bloody conflict made the earth appear a Marian Golgotha, the earth had changed its verdant livery, and put on scarlet, it was robed in blood, the sun did hide its glorious rays, the heaven
s were mantled in a dusky cloud mixed with some streaks of red, which seemed to express the blushing of the sky, to see men use such inhumanity. Death and destruction revelled in the fight, for each man there did strive, who first should die, thinking it base to live subject to fortune’s scorn.
But the simplest words were often better at conveying the horror than flowery rhetoric. Henry Foster, who gave the account of the Battle of Newbury, described seeing his first corpse, a French mercenary who fought for the king called the Marquis de la Veil: ‘I viewed his wounds, he received three shot in the body from us, one in the right pap, another in the face’, he noted, struggling for a kind of clinical objectivity. ‘The sight of so many, brought to Oxford, some dead, some wounded, since the battle [Newbury], would make any true English heart bleed.’
‘That night we kept the field, where the bodies of the dead were stripped. In the morning these were a mortifying object to behold, when the naked bodies of thousands lay upon the ground and not altogether dead’, wrote Simeon Ash, Parliamentarian chaplain, in horror. War itself was the worst atrocity.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 36