Wolley’s books did not confine themselves to cookery. As Isabella Beeton was to do later, Wolley tried to advise women on every aspect of running a household, including the training of servants. In doing so, she gives us valuable insights into the lives of a group of women from whom we rarely hear. Washing plate, for example, involved a first rinse in warm water and soapsuds, rubbing any spots with salt and vinegar, then scouring the plate with vinegar and chalk, then drying it in the sun or before a fire, and a final polishing with warm linen cloths, an enormous amount of arm-aching work, all told. When Ralph Verney’s aunt lamented the dire possibility of being forced to dine off pewter, she probably gave little thought to what plate meant to her household staff.
Wolley herself was keen to explain that as a servant she was not idle. ‘I sit here sad while you are merry,’ she wrote, ‘Eating dainties, drinking perry;/ But I’m content you should so feed,/ So I may have to serve my need.’ This servant’s critique of the rich women she waited on shows that an awareness of injustice survived the war, along with cooking styles.
In The Gentlewoman’s Companion, the Preface launches a swingeing critique of educational priorities: ‘The right Education of the Female Sex as it is in a manner everywhere neglected, so it ought to be generally lamented. Most of this depraved late age think a woman learned and wise enough, if she can distinguish her husband’s bed from another’s. I cannot but complain of, and must condemn the great negligence of parents, in letting the fertile ground of their daughters lie fallow, yet send the barren noodles of their sons to the university.’ This astringent remark shows that the critiques of the rich that were voiced by Civil War radicals could echo the feelings of ostensibly much more conservative members of the lower orders.
Wolley was also eager to explore new kinds of hobbies and crafts for women. The traditional pastime of embroidery, so enjoyed by Brilliana Harley, was supplemented by ‘all kinds of bugle-works upon wires, all manner of pretty toys for closets, rocks made with shells, frames for looking glasses, pictures or the like, feathers of crewel for the corners of beds’. A skilled servant might contribute to the gentrification of a household through ornamentation. The ‘moss work’ and other skills Wolley claimed to teach offered a chance for a family to rise in status.
That styles of housekeeping were indicators of class is clear in another and much more scurrilous household manual, The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth Cromwell. This rude satirical pamphlet portrayed Oliver Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth as entertaining her court on a meagre diet of gruel and leftovers. Some modern cookery writers have missed the polemical intent, and diligently reprinted Elizabeth’s ‘recipes’. The satire shows that, then as now, you are what you eat.
It wasn’t even that cookbooks began innocently and became political. They were always political. Even Gervase Markham, author of one of the oldest bestsellers, The English Housewife of 1615, couldn’t quite maintain the self-sufficiency he preached without fairly frequent supplementations via cookbook writing, but he argued nevertheless for a traditional England of independent smallholders. This is not as far as all that from some of the ideas that would make Gerrard Winstanley and his followers significant political innovators in the late 1640s, in particular the notion that the poor could escape the power of the rich through self-sufficiency.
Somehow, receipts seemed a way of sustaining a vanishing past. Catholics had formed a habit of squirrelling the past away, for later use; perhaps that is why three out of the four bestselling cookbooks of the age were written by them. The most fascinating of all the cookbook writers was Sir Kenelm Digby, oddball and Catholic, that ‘man of very extraordinary person and presence’, as Clarendon called him. He loved to talk, in six languages. He was a bold, sexy pirate, a wide reader and an even wider knower, an experimenter and scientist who struggled to stop surgeons packing wounds with infection-bearing leaves and cloths, and one of the most handsome and seductive men of his time. Far more glamorous than today’s celebrity chefs, his friends included the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. He did not only preserve receipts; he amassed a collection of 238 medieval manuscripts which he gave to the Bodleian Library in 1634, which included important texts by Chaucer, Langland and Lydgate. He also collected Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts, and presented a large library of these to the fledgling Harvard College in 1655.
And yet Digby was always an outsider. His father had been hanged, drawn and quartered in 1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Because of his father’s treason, Kenelm spent most of his early life overseas, in Spain, France and Italy. He claimed that Henrietta Maria’s mother Marie de Medici pursued him amorously, but he was by then passionately in love with Venetia, illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Dorset. She was beautiful, ‘a most lovely and sweet-turned face, with delicate dark brown hair’, but a blot on any family’s escutcheon. Kenelm Digby did not care; instead of making her his mistress, the normal course of action in such circumstances, he married her. He liked to tell everyone that ‘a handsome lusty man might make a virtuous wife out of a brothel-house’, which must have been tiresome for Venetia, as must the portrait painted by Van Dyck, which shows her trampling lust and deceit under her feet.
Digby was having breakfast one morning in May 1633 when Venetia suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. He was heartbroken; his beautiful, beloved wife was dead. He collected a few relics of her – hair, casts of her feet – and then summoned Van Dyck to paint her. It was an odd but entirely Catholic and courtly response. ‘Sir Kenelm erected to her memory a sumptuous and stately monument at Friars near Newgate-Street, in the east end of the south aisle, where her body lies in a vault of brickwork, over which are three steps of black marble, on which was a stately altar of black marble … upon this altar her bust of copper-gilt, all of which is utterly destroyed by the great conflagration [the Great Fire].’ He never remarried, but he remained curious and vital; he tried to resurrect a phoenix from ashes, and he visited the possessed nuns of Loudon in 1636, concluding that their malady was psychological; he did not believe in demonic possession. In 1640 he met and debated with Descartes. In 1641 he fought a duel to defend Charles I from an accusation of cowardice from a French nobleman. He was, however, imprisoned in November 1642 as a probable malevolent, and when released in June 1643, he left for France, where he went on to serve Henrietta Maria in her court in exile, and he remained in her household until his death in 1665.
And yet this romantic, spectacular figure was also the author of a cookbook, The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened. It is no ordinary cookbook, admittedly, but something of a compromise between alchemical and scientific experimentation and cosmopolitan cuisine of Italian origin. A number of recipes are attributed to Henrietta Maria herself, by the Restoration era the fountain of all food goodness, and Digby’s patron: ‘the queen used to baste such meat with yolks of fresh eggs beaten thin’, he says, apparently meaning that Henrietta did this personally. This seems unlikely, even for a queen in exile.
Digby’s recipes cross the faultlines of the war, lacing together such stern political foes as Parliamentarians Lady Saye and Sele and Lady Robartes with Marie de Medici. Moreover, Digby’s Closet isn’t just a recipe book; it’s a glimpse of high living. It unites everyone, as cookbooks do, because everyone has to eat, everyone has to manage a household.
Digby’s is the first English cookbook to recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast. He uses bread, and flour, but otherwise he offers meat dishes, rich, soft, delicately and formally spiced; they are often flavoured by reductions of stock, and by sauces that use cream, marrow, musk, ambergris, caraway and sugar. He was trying to introduce something like mortadella sausage. Queens like broth, Digby says, meat consommé, but Digby warns not to overdo herbs that will rob it of vitality. Chicken broth is also recommended as healthy, especially with orange juice added, but not too much lest it become too hot and dry. Creams are rich and soft, in cloudlike curds. Tough, gritty food was for the hungry poor, who still ate rough grain porridg
es and hard brown bread. The Digby recipes are the kind of protein-rich food eaten on feast days by those starving for enough fat and protein, but for the rich every day was a carnival. His venison is cooked until it can be cut with a spoon.
However, venison was not just any old meat – it was political. Even before the war, gifts of venison had been used to cement social networks, much as an entrepreneur might use extravagant presents or dinner parties today. The Earl of Middlesex liked to give venison to people whose social status was too low to allow them to hunt themselves, rather like giving a poorly paid secretary a nice bottle of duty-free scent. Just as Digby’s cookbook reeks of shared and enjoyed privilege, so did game announce status. But sometimes such announcements were unwelcome to those suffering the terrible pangs of hunger.
In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn Valley north-west of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, was transfigured by the spectacle of six hundred dead and dying deer. ‘A rising of neighbours’ had killed them, wantonly, as some kind of protest against the Earl of Middlesex, who owned them. Oddly, Digby’s cook-book can help us understand this curious affair through its sensuous evocation of the luxury of meat.
Hunting was fraught with significance. It was an expression of upper-class masculine values – courage, moral superiority over the animal and vegetable, knowledge of nature and endurance of nature’s worst extremes, ownership of land, and generosity when the carcasses were divided. Hunting was, among other things, about rule. It was part of civilizing the countryside, striking a kind of unspoken bargain with it whereby its carnal largesse was at once consumed and contained by the hunters. And performing the role of hunter correctly created great honour for the performer. Hunting involved a body of knowledge hallowed by antiquity; Alexander the Great had hunted, and so had King Arthur. Hunting told king and nobles that they were part of an eternal order which would never be revoked or challenged. It trained body and mind for warfare: dens and setts suggested fortifications, and the twists and turns of a hare could remind hunters of the cunning of political enemies. The round of the year was marked by the chase rather than by arable activities for anyone in the greater gentry or above: Christmas was boar-hunting time, hare-hunting was midsummer. A seasonality marked by what beasts were on the table offered a savage pagan alternative to the Church calendar. Just as the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, themselves great hunters, knew every hill and tussock on their hunting territory and recognized individual beasts of venery, so early modern hunters came to an intimate and passionate knowledge of every tree, every holt, every stag; hunting knitted the countryside to its owners and masters. The nobility of the deer, the courage of the boar: these were supposed to be matched, almost imbibed, by the hunters. Above all, the royal hunt was a microcosm of the state itself, a careful hierarchy of manners and classes, ordered as beads in a necklace, from king to huntsmen and hounds. Spending too much time in this challenging but richly arrayed and stratified world could easily lead a king to imagine that it was the entire world. But it was not, and the slaughter on Corse Lawn almost seemed designed to demonstrate the fact. Hunted deer were gralloched with care, according to a precise series of rules. These deer had simply been gutted, gracelessly, and left to bleed and rot.
It wasn’t the first time the Middlesex deer herd had been illicitly attacked. Local men were not always willing to wait for Middlesex to send them a present of venison; sometimes – like the young Will Shakespeare, it is said – they liked to scrump a few deer and boast of their exploits. Some sold the venison to other local gentlemen. Woodcutters also came to the chase often, searching for kindling and scarce, precious, forbidden firewood. Usually, such poor men were left alone, but Middlesex made the mistake of lumping their trespass together with the much more serious offence of deer poaching in a single Star Chamber action.
He had actively supported the removal of royal forests in Worcestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire in the 1620s; they were cleared for enclosure and the dwellers on their margins, the very poorest of the poor, were cleared away too, turned off to starve. The forests were to belong solely to the Crown, and to work only as symbols for royal or noble power and control. But they were already enmeshed in politics. It was, as usual, a matter of religion. In the Forest of Dean, the Catholic magnates were said to be plotting to destroy the woodland, thus preventing England from defending itself at sea against the Spanish. The forest men saw themselves as defenders of the nation, as well as the trees. A man called Thomas Carpenter was hauled before the Star Chamber for cutting firewood. What’s more, Forthampton Court, the residence of the earl, was coming under increased scrutiny. It had been owned by Tewkesbury Abbey once, and it had contained a chapel, built for the abbot. In 1540, the house had been granted to John Wakeham, the last abbot, and he had brought a few fragments of his ancient holy house with him: a crusader’s tomb, and a few pieces of what had once been the Lady Chapel. When Parliament passed the ordinance against superstitious relics and images, it included objects not found in churches. It may be that in the tense atmosphere of late summer 1642 Middlesex’s failure to remove all traces of popish relics from his property, together with his tyrannical behaviour, added up in the minds of local gentlemen and tenants to a suspicion of papistical leanings. Deer slaughter was a form of iconoclasm, like the covert attacks on suspected Catholics elsewhere.
The dead deer on Corse Lawn were as much an assault on the regime as any smashed statue of the king. They too had been icons. They too lay broken. It seems a long way from their bloody carcasses to Hannah Wolley, but both are expressions of the feelings of servants, slighted, ignored, silently judging their masters. The conflict allowed those grievances and their cries of hunger to be heard.
XIX Twenty Thousand Cornish Boys: The Battle of Lostwithiel
Sometimes we argued together, sometimes we scolded together like Fishwomen of Cheapside, and sometimes we fought very hot’, wrote a member of Essex’s Parliamentarian guard of the war in the West. Verbal abuse was a key part of Civil War tactics. ‘The enemy calling ours “papist dogs”, “Washington’s bastards”, “Russell’s apes”, “Where is the king of you rogues”, “Where is your tettered king?”, and ours replying and calling them “traitors”, “villains”, “rogues to your king and country”, “the sons of a Puritan bitch”, “bid you go preach in a crab-tree”.’
This soldier plainly knew more about Cheapside than about Cornwall, and felt more at home there. To the Parliamentarian army invading it in 1644, Cornwall was a weird and hostile place, full of unfriendly locals who didn’t even speak English, ‘We are’, thought one, ‘among a people as far from humanity as they are from sanctities, for they will neither serve God nor man, but after the old fashion of their grandfathers.’ Their Royalist soldier-opponents were by contrast more familiar. In the final campaign of the war in the West, the two armies were very close, for very long.
On 6 March 1644, Bevil Grenville’s difficult brother Richard turned up in Oxford, with thirty-six of his troop, £600, and news of a Parliamentarian scheme to surprise Basing House. Colonel of Horse and Foot, Lieutenant-General to Ralph Hopton, Richard Grenville was born in 1600, a second son; he was knighted in 1627 and rose under Buckingham to be a baronet in 1630, ‘a man who used to speak very bitterly of those he did not love’. As a result of a feud with the Earl of Suffolk, he fled to Ireland, where he held a command against the rebels from 1641 to 1643. Parliament liked the ‘signal acts of cruelty which he did every day commit upon the Irish’, and in 1643 he went to London and was expected to take up a command against the Royalists; he was appointed to be general under William Waller, but he underwent a change of heart, since, he said, he found ‘religion concealing rebellion’ and so declared that he would henceforward obey the king and that ‘no fortune, no terror, nor cruelty’ would make him change his mind again. He was sent to assist John Digby before Plymouth, and when Digby was wounded he assumed command.
Hopton was ordered to clear Dorset,
Wiltshire and Hampshire, in October, and took Arundel Castle on 9 December. Waller destroyed a detachment in Alton on 13 December and on 6 January 1644 recaptured Arundel. Both armies reinforced and clashed in a pitched battle at Cheriton on 21 March. The battle was notable for the fact that both sides chose the same rallying cry, ‘God with us’. It exemplified the war; both sides believed it. The Parliamentarians changed theirs to ‘Jesus with us’. Perhaps he was, because the result was a Parliamentarian victory which opened the West to London. The king could see that something needed to be done. Why not combine the interests of heart and head? Henrietta Maria was already at Exeter, and Charles set out to join her on 12 July 1644. He just missed a reunion with his wife, but did manage to see his newborn baby daughter. Meanwhile, Essex had decided to march west as well, encouraged by Lord Robartes, who kept telling him how very godly and helpful the Cornish would be. Essex was personally brave, very popular, and the trump card in Parliament’s pack because of his very high rank; his men adored him. But he was about to lead his admirers to disaster.
He raised the siege of Lyme on 15 June, however, and went on through Somerset into Devon. Grenville immediately fell back to hold a line along the banks of the Tamar. Lord Robartes urged Essex on, pointing to his own influence in the county. And Essex heeded him; he brushed the Royalists aside, reaching Bodmin on 28 July. But new forces began to gather against him. Maurice drew together around 12,000 men at Exeter, and was joined by the king with his 7000.
Meanwhile Essex was harried by the Cornish peasants, who starved his troops of food and information, while Grenville also harassed him, often preventing him from foraging. By contrast, the king was kept supplied and informed. A small boy told him on 4 August that ‘there were many gay men in Lord Mohun’s house at Boconnoc’. In the ensuing surprise many officers were captured, and Essex’s quartermaster only escaped by disguising himself as a servant.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 43