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

by Diane Purkiss

  Parliament voted Essex fresh supplies and troops, to be sent by sea via Plymouth. Waller was supposed to reinforce him, but only got as far as Farnham, while the supply fleet was halted by contrary winds. Essex established himself in the ruined shell of Restormel Castle, but he failed to fortify the high ground above Lostwithiel.

  What followed was perhaps the Royalists’ greatest success, and it is to one of the victors that we owe our most detailed accounts of it. His name was Richard Symonds. Some of his family had declared for Parliament, including a first cousin, also named Richard, who died at Naseby in the New Model Army in 1645. But the diarist was a devout member of the Church who had welcomed the Laudian reforms eagerly. In 1641 he was aged just twenty-four. Introverted, solitary, he loved and admired the antiquity and orthodoxy of the Church, and as he travelled around Britain with the army he seized the chance to record what he saw in the village churches he passed. Imprisoned by Miles Corbett in March 1643, and with his assets sequestered, he escaped in October, and probably went to Oxford, where his younger brother died in October 1644. Symonds noticed everything. His war was also Brilliana Harley’s war. On campaign, he was at Wigmore church, two miles from Brampton Bryan, and remarked the east window, ‘very old and large’, and a portrait of a man in armour, noting that ‘Sir Gilly Merrick lived here in the castle. Sir Robert Harley was born here, and his father lived in it before Sir Gilly.’ He reported eagerly on architecture, on duels, on a man who tried to hang himself. Everything was interesting. Richard’s troop was called the ‘show troop’, the gilded, aristocratic Life Guards. He made sketches of Oxford colleges, and noted the remains of Osney Abbey.

  Richard Symonds found time to make note of a sermon that had interested him, one against popery which had urged ‘that one of the greatest arguments against them is the denial of reading the scriptures: for how can that be an honest guardian that will not let the heir look into his father’s will?’

  As a lover of old churches, Symonds was especially dismayed by Parliamentarian disregard for them: ‘One of their actions while they were in Lostwithiel must not be forgotten. In contempt of Christianity, religion and the church, they brought a horse to the font in the church, and there with their kind of ceremonies did as they called it Christian the horse, and called him by the name of Charles, in contempt of his sacred majesty.’

  Symonds’s source was probably a news-sheet – then as now, one of the ironies of war is that the frontline troops often find out what their foes or their army has been doing from journalists. Since Symonds was a Royalist, the news-sheet in question is likely to have been Mercurius Aulicus: ‘When the earl of Essex was at Lostwithiel in Cornwall, one of the rebels brought a horse into that church, led him up to the font, and made another hold him while himself took water and sprinkled it on the horse’s head and said “I sign thee with the sign of the cross, in token thou shalt not be ashamed to fight against the roundheads at London”, with a deal more such norrid blasphemy.’

  Mercurius, in turn, had heard the story from an East Anglian clergyman, returned from the wars, who had used it in a sermon. Such anecdotes fed a stereotyped view of the godly Parliamentarian: rough, blunt, harsh, and somehow a little vulgar. They may have been true, however. In summer 1644, another group of Civil War troops quartered at Yaxley in Huntingdonshire ‘there being a child to be baptised, some of the soldiers would not suffer the child to be carried to church to be baptised, and the lieutenant of the troop drew out a part of the troop to hinder it, guarding the church that they should not bring out the child to be baptised; and instead of the child being baptised, in contempt of baptism, some of the soldiers got into the church, pissed in the font, and went to a gentleman’s stable in the town, and took out a horse and brought it to the church and there baptised it’.

  Thomas Edwardes, ever the chronicler of the madder kinds of godliness, cites several other examples: ‘his soldiers fetched a bald horse out of Mr Finmore’s stable . . . and in the church at the font, having pissed on it, did sprinkle it on the horse, and call him Bald Esau (because he was hairy) and crossed him in the forehead. They had soldiers [as] godfathers, and one widow Shropshire, a soldier so nicknamed, was the godmother.’

  Apparently the same soldiers had baptized a pig on another occasion. This is a story about exceedingly transgressive bodily behaviour (pissing in the font). The extreme degradation is apparently required by the extreme situation; only really brazen impiety will demystify the mumbo-jumbo. But there is also an element of lads-on-the-razzle, shocking not just religious but social decorums. Once you have decided that there is nothing especially holy about a church, then its claims to sanctity appear comical. It is just another stone building stuffed with treasure to be looted.

  Nehemiah Wallington, in far-off London, reported that he had seen an Anabaptist ‘that did deride and mock of the ordinance of baptism in the baptising of a cat’ and who subsequently suffered the judgement of God. A London woman was questioned in 1644; she had accused someone else of baptizing a cat; while William Dugdale mentioned Parliamentarian soldiers at Lichfield, who had brought a calf into the cathedral and sprinkled it with holy water from the font. There had been similar cases before the war: a man had ridden into a church in Devon demanding to have his horse christened, and there was another incident in Buckinghamshire, where dogs, a cockerel and horses also received the blessings of baptism, while in Eyam a cow underwent churching, though there, according to Wallington, the perpetrators were punished with all the plagues of Egypt. The war released these violent energies from the confinement of law. After the Restoration, cat baptisms continued at Henley; and at Ratcliffe in London, a hotbed of godliness during the war years, a horse was introduced to God in baptism, and also given communion.

  Though lacking the careful arguments of the iconoclasts, these riotous souls were imbued with their energy, and Thomas Edwardes may have been right to imagine that they were influenced by the language of religious radicals. Or they may just have been groups of lads, having a bit of fun at the expense of more serious neighbours. And yet these ceremonies contain an odd recollection of the carnivals of the very medieval Church which they sought to destroy, in which dogs could be saints and boys were crowned with the mitre and robed in the cope, for one day of rule.

  But the baptism was a sideshow to the real fight. The Battle of Lostwithiel was the end of a crushing war of attrition, and high jinks like those with the horse may have been a response to its asphyxiating pressure.

  The Royalist forces began to close like a net around Essex’s army, the tactics masterminded by Charles himself, leading general in the field, and in this campaign surprisingly competent. On 11 August Grenville secured Respryn Bridge, so that the Royalists now held both sides of Fowey. On 12 August Grenville occupied Lanhydrock, and the next day the ford at St Veep and the fort at Polruan were seized. The fort commanded the entrance to Fowey harbour. Essex was bottled up – and out of luck. Charles himself was viewing the Parliamentarian lines when he suddenly came under fire from across the river; a fisherman standing next to the king was killed.

  Both armies had withstood an August so wet that crops rotted in the fields and the roads were rivulets. With no tents, and only limited food supplies, the weather made life very difficult. It helped – literally – to bog the army down. On 21 August, a misty morning, the Royalist guns on Becon Hill damaged the church in Lostwithiel. Essex had only small demi-culverins, little cannons with a short range, and could not return the fire. The bombardment stilled the town, and the Royalists even wondered if the king intended moving back to Fowey; when they realized he wasn’t, they simply settled down to wait. Convoys reached them with food and powder, while Essex’s powder ran short and food even shorter. The tight Royalist lines stopped his soldiers from foraging. Still, Essex had 10,000 men, and the king had 17,000 deployed along a fifteen-mile front.

  On 30 August 1644, two deserters were brought to the king’s headquarters at Boconnoc. They revealed that Essex intended to retire
to the coast with his infantry and artillery, while Sir William Balfour was to break out with the cavalry. The king reacted promptly, sending warnings to St Blazey and St Veep, and a carrier to order Edward Waldegrave to break the Tamar bridges. The army stood to all night. And yet Balfour’s cavalry did creep away, helped by the fog. At 3 a.m., Balfour passed the musketeers stationed on the Lostwithiel-Liskeard road, without a shot fired. Lord Cleveland scraped up 250 horse, but it wasn’t enough to stop Balfour, and only at dawn did he muster a large enough force to offer a real pursuit. Balfour shrugged off the attack, crossed the Tamar, and made Plymouth with the loss of only a hundred men. This was a humiliation for the Royalists, and a testimony to the difficulty of holding a long line. ‘They escaped only by our sloth and improvidence’, thought Joseph Jane disgustedly. The army was actually roaming around looking for food in the ravaged countryside, having exhausted local supplies. But Symonds was undismayed: ‘Sir Edward Walgrave took above 100 of the rebels’ horse in the pursuit on Saturday, and told the King that if the country had brought in intelligence but an hour or two sooner, where and which way they went, he believed they might have cut off and taken all their horse, they were such cowards and so fearful that eight (said he) would make twenty cry for quarter.’

  Meanwhile a group of Royalist prisoners managed to barricade themselves inside the belfry of St Bartholomew’s church in Lostwithiel; they pulled up the ladder and refused to come down. Their captors tried to dislodge them with musket fire and smoke; when this failed they exploded a barrel of gunpowder, which lifted the roof.

  The Parliamentarians began to move towards Fowey, as one of them recalled: ‘The ways were so extreme, foul with excessive rain, and the harness for the draught horses so rotten, that in the marching off we lost three demiculverins and a brass piece, and yet the Major-general fought in the rear all day, he being loth to lose those pieces, thirty horses were put to each of them, but could not move them, the night was so foul and the soldiers so tired that they were hardly to be kept to their colours.’ The confusion was so great that Royalist troops sometimes leapt eagerly into the midst of Parliamentarians, taking them for their own men.

  ‘Daily skirmishes … kept them to continuall duty’, said one Parliamentarian, tiredly. Essex was being slowly and inexorably confined to a narrow river valley, commanded by hills 400 feet high on either side, and terminating in an arm of the sea. Once Essex lost control of the hills around Lostwithiel or of Fowey harbour, he would be at the mercy of the enemy. There was little hope of relief arriving by sea because Waller had no troops to send. He had managed to push two thousand men as far as Farnham, but there he halted, complaining that his men were starving, ‘the pictures of famine and poverty’. Parliament helpfully held a public fast on 9 August to support Essex’s army. But not even a miracle could save Essex’s men now. On that very day the Royalists had seized the ford at St Veep and a day later a relief column was defeated. The Royalists crept on, taking the hills to the north-east, the ruined castle of Restormil, confining Essex and his army to a strip only five miles long and two miles wide.

  They had no supplies and no prospects. There were only the caves of Polkerris and Menabilly to serve as bases for communicating with the fleet. Essex wrote, not very surprisingly, of ‘the fatigue of the soldiers, many of them not being relieved for eight days’. Parliament’s munitions wagon was almost blown up with a lighted match, and the flame had crept to within only two inches of the powder when it was discovered. One Parliamentarian described the incident, and his letter was printed in London:

  We have been in skirmish a week tomorrow morning … many of our great pieces and theirs are within musket shot of each other, the enemy … The first morning they fell on us, I was sent out with a party of men to encounter them; we had very hot service all day.

  We were so near, that sometimes the kingmen would leap over the hedge into the midst of us, taking us for their own men … [the enemy] had procured one whom we have not found out, to blow up our train, and had so far affected it, that the wildfire and lighted matches were put into some wagons, one match (by the providence of God) went out of itself … Now stand still, and see the goodness of God: The first match burned clean out to the Powder, and there dies, doing no execution at all; the second match was burned within two inches of the powder. The Lord is good to us in providing for us in so barren a place. We were above a fortnight without beer, but now we have some sometimes from the Lord of Warwick, as also Biscuit, Butter and cheese, so that, blessed be god, we are in no great want.

  The army was cut off from the outside world by an invisible wall of hostility from the locals: ‘Intelligence have we none,’ wrote Essex on 16 August, ‘the country people being violent against us; if any of the scouts and soldiers fall into their hands they are more bloody than the enemy.’

  On 31 August a more intense skirmish was fought, as Symonds told it: ‘then about 11 of the clock Captain Brett led up the Queen’s troop, and most gallantly in view of the King charged their foot and beat them from their hedge, killing many of them, notwithstanding their muskets made abundance of shot at his men … Shooting continued much on both sides, more on theirs, we still gaining ground.’ Then Parliament charged ‘very bold’ to try to take the high ground, but were beaten off. The Royalists beat the tired foot from hedge to hedge. The Parliament-men made a last stand inside the shell of the old castle; they hung on, exhausted, till dusk fell, but as night drew on they broke at last. Symonds again: ‘That night the King lay under the hedge with his servants in one field … I saw 8 or 9 of the enemy’s men dead under the hedges that day. Some shooting continued all night … That Sunday (1 September) the rebels being surrounded by we on three parts and our army on the land Skippon [who was in command] sent propositions of treaty.’

  The next morning, very early, their general decided to leave them. Essex slid away in a fishing boat, with Lord Robartes. He neglected to inform his second-in-command, Philip Skippon, of his plans. ‘I thought it fit’, he said, afterwards, ‘to look to myself, it being a greater terror to me to be a slave of their contempt than a thousand deaths’, and he told Colonel Butler that ‘I would rather fall into the hands of God than men, for if the enemy should take him, they would use him reproachfully’. In reply the Royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus asked, ‘we desire to know the reason why the rebels voted to live and die with the Earl of Essex since the Earl of Essex hath declared he will not live and die with them’.

  Sensible Philip Skippon was not flustered by Essex’s sudden departure. He called his officers together, and told them the news without ado: ‘That which I propound to you is this; that we having the same courage as our Horse, and the same God to assist us, may make the same trial of our fortunes and endeavours to make our way through our enemy as they have done and account it better to die with faithfulness than to live dishonourably.’

  An ugly rumour ran through the desperate army; that ‘by a counsel of war they had resolved, to put every man to the sword, and give quarter to none … In the first assault having taken about 30 they put them to the sword, who asking quarter they answered God damme, not a man of you shall have quarter.’ Of course this ‘increased resolution and courage in our men … who resolved to set their lives at a high rate, beyond what the enemy durst bid … After Major-General Skippon had made a short speech to the army, they threw up their Hats and gave a great shout, resolving unanimously to fight it out to the last man, and to ask no quarter, and upon the enemy’s approach, they gave them many fiery salutations, which much amazed the enemy, for by their great and small shot, sent with resolved courage, there fell of the enemy at least six for one.’

  Alas, this was propaganda. The officers were not enthusiastic about a last stand. They knew the temper of the men: exhausted, miserable, shocked by Essex’s departure. So they decided to surrender. The terms were good, because the Royalists too were short of supplies.

  The defeated army was worth more than one glance for the ever-observant Symonds:


  They all except here and there an officer (and seriously I saw not above three or four that looked like a gentleman) were strucken with such a dismal fear, that as soon as their colour of the regiment was passed, (for every ensign had a horse and rode him and was so suffered) the rest of soldiers in that regiment pressed all of a heap like sheep, though not so innocent. So dirty and so dejected as was rare to see. None of them, except some few of the officers, that did look any of us in the face. Our foot would flout at them and bid them remember Reading, Greenland House (where others that did not condition with them took away all prisoners) and many other places, and then would pull their swords … This was a happy day for his Majesty and his whole army, that without loss of much blood this great army of rascals that so triumphed and vaunted over the poor inhabitants of Cornwall, as if they had been invincible, and as if the King had not been able to follow them, that ’tis conceived very few will get safe to London, for the country people when they have in all the march so much plundered and robbed, that they will have their pennyworths out of them.

  Later Bulstrode Whitelocke thought that Skippon ‘carried his loss with a very good grace’. After the surrender, Charles pressed Skippon to join him. Skippon replied ‘that he was fully resolved of those principles to which he stood to be for God and his glory, in which by God’s assistance he would live and die’.

  A Parliamentarian newsbook told the Lostwithiel surrender story very differently: the Royalists had cheated, hindering provisions. The pamphlet also cites a further letter from a participant:

  Then came our misery. For when we had laid down our arms, and came to march through the enemy’s army, we were inhumanely dealt with: abused, reviled, scorned, torn, kicked, pillaged, and many stripped of all they had, quite contrary to the articles; for presently, even in the presence of the king, and of their general, they took away our cloaks, coats, and hats, calumniating us by reproachful words, and threats, if we would not desert the Parliament and turn to the King; And after a day or two march, they stripped many of our officers to their shirts, taking away their boots, shoes, hose, &c.