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

by Diane Purkiss

  Childhood deaths from diseases were common before – and after – the war, but it made them more frequent. Sir John Gibson lamented the loss of an entire family:

  Twelve sons my wife Penelope

  And three fair daughters had.

  Which then a comfort was to me

  And made my heart full glad.

  Death took away my children dear

  And at the last my joy,

  And left me full of care and fear,

  My only hope a boy.

  Alice Thornton, who had suffered in the Ulster Rising, thought that her sister, Lady Danby, had died in childbed because of the war:

  The troubles and distractions of those sad times did much afflict and grieve her, who was of a tender and sweet disposition, wanting the company of her husband Sir Thomas, to manage his estate and other concerns. But he, being engaged in his king’s service, was not permitted to leave it, nor come to Thorpe but seldom, till she fell sick. These things, added to the horrid rudeness of the soldiers and Scots quartered then among them which, vexing and troubling her much with frights, caused her to fall into travail sooner than she expected, nor could she get her old midwife, being then in Richmond, which was shut up, for the plague was exceeding great there.

  Some believed the war had encouraged children to be unruly. A godly minister who fled to New England thought so: children were much more disrespectful to their parents than in days of yore. They ‘carry it proudly, disdainfully and scornfully towards parents, and it’s well if their very parents escape their flouts’. In Clarendon’s opinion youthful manners were in decline as well: ‘young women conversed without any circumspection or modesty … Parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any Obedience.’ The wargames children played in Plymouth were typical, for children imitated the behaviour of adults. Surrounded by soldiers who plundered, ravished and destroyed, they were hardly likely to grow up bursting with respect for adult authority. Yet parents themselves often drew the opposite conclusions, finding it more than ever necessary to insist on authority. Henry Slingsby, himself destined to become a victim of authority when he was executed in the late 1650s, wrote an advice book for his son, in which he gave detailed instructions about how to behave after his death. ‘Subjection to superiors’ was an important duty. And yet Henry Slingsby’s very insistence suggests that this duty was felt to be neglected.

  Certainly Mary Verney thought so. When she reached Claydon, she found that not only was her son’s health in danger, but also her two sisters-in-law had enjoyed rather a lot of freedom in the absence of their father, slain at Edgehill, and Ralph, exiled in France. The place was a mess. ‘The house is most lamentably furnished,’ she wrote, ‘all the linen is quite worn out, the feather beds that were walled up are much eaten with rats … The spits and other odd things are so extremely eaten with rust that they cannot be ever of any use again … And the dining room chairs in rags.’ All the new, fashionable upholstery had suffered during the war years, because soldiers had been quartered in the houses. She could hardly find a horse to ride. And yet the roads were dangerous for a woman on foot, and Mary dreaded the unruly soldiery. ‘I left them a fighting at 4 a clock this morning,’ she wrote, ‘but I trust in God they are appeased by this time.’ Just as she got things straight, a new detachment arrived. ‘I fear they will make us very poor as beggars’, she wrote despairingly. Mary was a brave and unhappy woman. Perhaps she felt the terrible losses of the war more than most because her own childhood had been lonely. She was an orphan with a large fortune. She had been forcibly married at the age of ten to a cousin by relatives hoping to secure her fortune for themselves. Luckily, one of Mary’s uncles objected to these not unusual proceedings, and managed to win custody of her. Instead, she was married to Ralph Verney on 31 May 1629, at the age of thirteen.

  Hester Pulter, a passionate Royalist, inveterate reader of romances, and talented poet, was cut off from her children by the war, too. She tried to express her anger and frustration in a poem which borrows from the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin:

  Now see how breach of promise is accurst

  The fellow piping went away again

  A hundred and thirty children in his train

  Into a hill he led those pretty boys.

  And thus their parents lost their hopes and joys

  Which with sad hearts they now too late deplore

  For they neer be were never heard of more.

  By these their grievous sufferings you may see,

  That breech of promise punished sure will be.

  For women like Hester, the war itself was interpreted as an event that affected the family. Anne Temple wrote to her daughter in the tense winter of 1641, and her thoughts, too, were fixed on the nation as a place to bring up children: ‘Dear Daughter, I am in reasonable health I praise God, and so I hope are all the rest at Hanwell and little Sara, only I am troubled with a cold and so are some of them, for it is a general disease I think, yet Sara is free for aught I know, God is exceeding good to us every way, both for Bodies and souls; and hath done wonderful things among us already’, she wrote pellmell. For her, thinking of her children’s safety prompted a longing to reform the Church: ‘we shall see idolatry and superstition rooted out, and God’s ordinances set up in the purity and power of them; altars begin to go down apace and rails in many places, and yours must follow if it be not down already’. But she also longed for a visit from the grandchildren: ‘if we live till spring I hope we may see my son and you here, and that he will give you leave once more to come and see me, and bring pretty Nan and Moll with you, I should be very glad to have them both here that they might go to church, which they cannot do with you especially in winter, they shall be most welcome to us, but if I may not have both, I pray you to let Nan come’. She commented lovingly on her granddaughter Sarah, already living with her: ‘Sara goes daily and will remember her doctrines, one is that God is the giver of all grace, and she will set me of it, and her other also, she is a pretty child and I hope you will have much comfort of her, she is so loving to me and enquires after me and sends to me to come home’. The letter was dated ‘Broughton this day 16 January 1641’.

  Love tried to bridge the gaps the war made. As a world was smashed, a grandmother tried to gather in her grandchildren. For all parents, to experience the war was also to experience love and fear. Children were the future for which the war was fought.

  XXII God with Us! Montrose’s Campaign

  After months of hanging miserably around Oxford in 1644, Montrose had been granted his wish; he was to raise the Highlands for Charles. He managed to reach his own lands in August 1644 after a dangerous journey through the Covenanting Lowlands. Word of the king’s defeat at Marston Moor made his task more difficult. But he did find willing recruits among the traditional enemies of the Campbells – MacDonalds and Camerons. Crucially, he found the Roman Catholic battleaxe of a tribesman, Alasdair MacColla, a man who knew how to use a Highland charge and had done so in Ireland. The Civil War was Highland rivalry by other means, and that was how Montrose managed to raise an army. It was a bit short of weapons; some of its men carried bows and arrows and axes. But they were tough Highlanders and Irish MacDonnells.

  At Tippermuir, in August 1644, he effortlessly defeated an army twice the size of his, and entered Perth. At Aberdeen in September he fought and won again. His old foe Argyll was sent in pursuit. Montrose led him on a wild goose chase through the snow-covered mountains. At the beginning of December, his army set out for Inverary through Breadalbane to Loch Awe. Within a fortnight they were in Campbell heartland. Houses were burned and livestock eaten. Any man named Campbell died. The MacDonalds under Montrose pillaged the Campbell countryside while Argyll hid in his castle at Inverary. By the end of January they were in the Great Glen, bound by a new Covenant, to ‘stand to the maintenance of the power of our sacred and native sovereign, contrary to this present perverse and infamous faction of desperate rebels now in fury against him�
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  On 31 January 1645, Montrose led his 1500 men in a flank movement through bitter weather, over the trackless mountains of Monadliath, covering thirty miles in just a day and a half. His followers were outnumbered, but they were willing to fight Campbells anywhere, anytime. So on 1 February they charged ferociously, over frozen ground, and another 1500 Campbells fell in battle at Inverlochy. Again, it was tribal, savage, but immensely impressive, and in Edinburgh the Covenanters began wondering if Montrose had been sent by a wrathful God to chastise them. Montrose also raided Dundee, and crushed three armies at Auldearn in May. This battle involved an especially effective and impressive tactic: Montrose’s force was actually perilously small, but he drew it up so that it appeared to be massed well forward, while actually the bulk of the troops were stationed in the rear. The plan almost went wrong when the MacDonalds noticed that among the advancing troops were some Campbells, but although they attacked too early enough of the Covenanters had been lured into the trap, and the hidden army fell on them. Even Sir John Hurry, the Covenanters’ commander, threw in his lot with Montrose, though admittedly he had changed sides before. He was not alone: Montrose at last had an army of respectable size. At Alford in June, he lured his pursuers onto boggy ground and attacked. As ever, the clansmen’s charge was decisive and terrifying. They pursued and destroyed their enemies. More Covenanters came; Montrose fought them, too, and in the heart of Covenanting country, at Kilsyth on 14 August. The Highlanders won again, cutting down the Covenanters as they fled. Over 6000 men died, and the Highlanders were relentless because the Covenanters had massacred their women camp-followers a few weeks earlier, at Methven. (As at Naseby, this massacre seems to have been sparked by some sense of the women’s foreignness; they were probably all Gaelic-speaking.) But this was tribal warfare, clan fighting on a grand and bloody scale: now the Highlands and the Irish, the gaeltacht, would have revenge. Along the line of the Antonine wall they heaped the bodies high. Bones were still being discovered in the area in the late eighteenth century, including a pitiful heap of the small bones of drummers and fifeplayers, boys. As a Gaelic poem had it: ‘Like the short-lived web of the spider when facing tempest, not more enduring is that host laid low on knoEis; thousands are slain./ Bodies like clothes a-bleaching are stretched on hillsides, ignoble of aspect.’

  Standing atop this heap of dead, Montrose was master of Scotland.

  But I must rule and govern still,

  And always give the law,

  And have each subject at my will,

  And all to stand in awe.

  But ‘gainst my battery, if I find

  Thou shunnest the prize so sore

  As that thou settst me up a blind,

  I’ll never love thee more.

  Montrose was received eagerly, fulsomely in Glasgow, and Edinburgh set free its Royalist prisoners. Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson’s friend, wrote eagerly to Montrose: ‘the golden Age is returned, his Majesty’s crown established, the many-headed monster is near quelled’. Here was the Gaelic culture of the Highlands in triumph.

  But if thou wilt be constant then,

  And faithful by thy word,

  I’ll make thee glorious by my pen

  And famous by my sword.

  But by now events further south had freed David Leslie to move north with his experienced army. Now Charles had only Oxford and the Celts. And they could not stand long. Nonetheless, the king decided to march north, to join Montrose. Leslie managed to keep him away, however, and Montrose was soon himself pursued. Leslie, who was a clever, careful, well-trained soldier, may not have seemed a threat precisely because of these professional attributes. He lacked authority to a Highland noble. And Montrose was at heart a fatalist, a gambler:

  Some friends as shadows are

  And fortune as the sun;

  They never proffer any help

  Till fortune hath begun;

  But if in any case

  Fortune shall first decay

  Then they, as shadows of the sun

  With fortune run away.

  In writing this, Montrose was defying Calvin, who had said emphatically that since everything – good and bad – came from God, none of it could be seen as ‘chance’. Like his fondness for gambling, Montrose’s passion for Fortune was a weakness, and yet he also felt God might have had a hand in it all: ‘it may be sensibly seen to be the Lord’s doing’, he wrote, ‘in making a handful to overthrow multitudes’. This was part of his ongoing adherence to the Kirk and to the Covenant; he felt sure the Lowlands would eventually go over to the king. They must.

  The trouble was that Lowland Scotland remained unconvinced. How could Montrose be a proper Covenanter when his army was full of Irish, the people who had unleashed what Lowland Scotland saw as a bloody reign of terror?

  As Montrose moved south, his Highlanders began to go home, laden with loot. Their leaders defected; they fell out among themselves. Montrose, despite his charm and ability as a commander, was powerless to prevent the desertions. There was a lesson here for Bonnie Prince Charlie, had he possessed enough sense to see it. By this time Montrose seems to have parted company with reality, speaking as if he were pursuing Leslie, not the other way about. He even hoped to supplement his forces in the Lowlands. But there is a Highland legend that when Montrose stopped at Selkirk a local woman was boiling a sheep’s head, vowing that if it had been Montrose’s head she would have held the lid down. So by the time he met Leslie at Philiphaugh, Montrose had only 600 men. They were taken by surprise; the result was a massacre, not a battle – Montrose’s men were mostly still trying to catch their horses as Leslie advanced. The Irish infantry fought frantically, fiercely, but were overwhelmed and persuaded to surrender. The Covenanting ministers who accompanied Leslie convinced him that he had granted quarter only to the actual officers who had met him to agree the truce. The Irish were butchered, and so were their wives and families: ‘the boys, cooks, and a rabble of rascals and women with their children in their arms … were cut in pieces with such savage and inhuman cruelty as neither Turk nor Scythian was ever heard to have done the like’. There was a rash of trials and executions.

  Now let us a’ for Leslie pray

  And his brave company

  For they have vanquished great Montrose

  Our cruel enemy.

  Montrose wanted to die fighting, but his followers convinced him that he could serve the king best by escaping. He cut his way out of the press with a small remnant of his men. Those who tried to follow on foot were cut down as they fled. He took to the heather and the hills once more, managed to raise another force in the Highlands, and conducted a guerrilla war for some months. He was still a terror to the Lowlanders, who dreaded what he might do in summer, with another Highland army.

  But finally he had no choice but to flee when Charles surrendered to the Scots. Charles urged him to accept the peace, but this was made difficult for Montrose by his own explicit exclusion from it; he was not to be pardoned except for safe-conduct to a ship waiting to take him overseas. So he disbanded his small remaining force, as ordered: ‘His soldiers fell at his knees, and besought him with tears, if the king’s safety required him to quit the kingdom altogether to take them with him where he would. They were ready to live, to fight, and if it pleased God, to die under his command.’

  Sensible, as usual, he left for the Continent. But he almost missed the boat; it didn’t arrive until 31 August, and the shipmaster, a Covenanter, refused to sail on the grounds that the ship needed caulking and rigging. Montrose smelt a rat; his agents found another ship, a small Norwegian vessel, whose master agreed to take on passengers.

  And so that night, a small cock-boat brought the Reverend James Wood (Montrose in disguise) aboard. With him was his shabby, poorlyclad manservant. Montrose had not given up, after all; his love of tricks was as active as ever.

  I’ll serve thee in such noble ways;

  Was never heard before,

  I’ll crown and deck thee all
with bays

  And love thee evermore.

  Despite his disappointments, Montrose was still full of burning zeal, and the execution of Charles only made him more determined. He escaped to Sweden and began trying to raise Scandinavian levies. He racketed around Europe – Paris, Geneva – being offered high military office by an admiring Mazarin, corresponding in ebullient Cavalier style with Rupert. He received Charles II’s commission to raise Scotland in April 1650, and landed with a handful of Danes and seven hundred men from the Orkneys. But within three weeks the Covenanters annihilated him at Carbisdale. He was betrayed into his enemies’ hands, and also by Charles II, who signed an agreement with Argyll without bothering to secure Montrose’s fate. He was executed at the Mercat Cross, and his head was placed on a spike at the Tolbooth.

  He was, said Clarendon, the man of ‘clearest spirit and honour’ among all the royal advisers. He was no politician, but a fine soldier, and a magnificent leader of men, fighting in primitive country, with wild followers. Exactly one hundred years later, a Highland army would again leap the border and then melt away, this time under Bonnie Prince Charlie. Ironically, the fate of the House of Stuart was foreshadowed by the fate of the man they abandoned. But to the Lowland Scots, he was a brigand, a pirate who had let loose wild Catholic Irish on their farms and homes, a man who had sacked and destroyed estates and towns, and had set the Scottish nation itself at naught in pursuit of personal pride.

  Ann Fanshawe, too, was discovering new worlds. While some marriages broke, hers held firm:

  And next week [May 1645] we were all on our journey for Bristol, very merry and thought that now all things would mend and the worst of my misfortunes past, but little thought I to leap into that sea that would toss me until it racked me, but we were to ride all night by agreement for fear of the enemy’s surprising us as we passed, they quartering in the way. About nightfall, having travelled about twenty miles, we discovered a troop of horse coming towards us, which proved Sir Marmaduke Roydon, a worthy commander and my countryman. He told me that hearing I was to pass by his garrison, he was come out to conduct me, he hoped, as far as there was danger, which was about 12 miles. With many thanks we parted, and having refreshed ourselves and horses we set forth for Bristol, where we arrived the 20th of May.