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

by Diane Purkiss

  Ann’s cheerfulness emerges clearly, as ever. ‘My husband had provided very good lodgings for us, and as soon as he could come home from the council … he with all expressions of joy received me in his arms and gave me a hundred pieces of gold, saying “I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.” And now I thought myself a queen, and, my husband so glorious a crown that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess, for I knew him very wise and very good, and his soul doted on me.’

  And yet it was in Bristol that Ann and Richard had a kind of quarrel. Ann’s friend Lady Rivers (‘a brave woman and one that had suffered very many thousand pounds lost for the king’, Ann said, thinking of the riots inspired by the Rivers family) commended the ‘knowledge of state affairs’ that some women had, including Ann’s friend Isabella Thynne and Lady Aubigny. She added that she knew that the queen had recently sent a post from Paris to the king, and that she longed to know what was in it. Ann was young, and ‘to that day had ever in my mouth, “What news”’ She thought perhaps it would be fashionable, and that perhaps it would please Richard, if she found out more. So when Richard came home she greeted him as usual; then he disappeared into his study. She followed him, and she asked him what the queen had said.

  Richard reacted like a parent. ‘My love,’ he said, ‘I will immediately come to thee.’ Then he went on with his work, then came out of his closet, kissed her, and spoke of other things. Ann failed to take the hint. She asked him again. He talked still more of other things. Ann was put out; at supper she ate nothing. Richard was firm, like a parent with a nagging child. ‘He as usually sat by me and drunk often to me, which was his custom’, and he talked to the others at the table, guests. At bedtime, Ann asked him again. And now she applied some pressure, saying she could not believe he loved her if he would not tell her. Richard knew his Shakespeare: ‘he stopped my mouth with kisses, so we went to bed’. ‘I cried,’ Ann remembered, ‘and he went to sleep.’ The next morning, Ann still wasn’t speaking to him. He kissed her, and went to court. Then he came home for dinner, and Ann burst out, angrily, ‘Thou dost not care to see me troubled.’ Now Richard took her in his arms and spoke to her gently, saying, ‘My dearest soul, nothing upon earth can afflict me like that, and when you asked of me my business, it was wholly out of my power to satisfy thee. For my life and fortune shall be thine, and every thought of my heart, in which the trust I am in may not be revealed, but my honour is my own, which I can not preserve if I communicate the Prince’s affairs, and pray thee with this answer rest satisfied.’ Ann was instantly repentant. Richard’s courtesy and reason made her think twice, in a way an order might not have done. So ‘from that day until the day of his death, I never thought fit to ask him any business, but that he communicated freely to me, in order to his estate or family’.

  Events were now moving swiftly, and they were about to carry away Richard’s master the Prince of Wales, and the Royalist cause too. Ann, Richard and the prince were forced to flee Bristol by that great general King Plague, whose mighty armies raged in its streets. Prince Charles and his retinue went to Barnstaple, where Ann, ever the cook and housewife, noticed a curious new kind of cherry, a massard, ‘and makes the best pies, with their sort of cream, I ever eat’. Her comment shows that for her Devon was almost as exotic as Istanbul might be today. Once Rupert had surrendered, Prince Charles had no choice but to flee. Charles wanted his heir safely in France, and so did Henrietta, but the council sensibly pointed out that Charles would then be seen as a foreign, French papistical foe. For now, he moved slowly into Cornwall. He, Ann, and Richard reached Truro.

  By then the war in Devon was all but over. Cromwell had beaten Hopton in a fierce engagement in deep snow in January 1646. Hopton hardly had a man left to fight him. Fairfax, who was active in Devon too, wrote to his father that he had reached Totnes, a lonely outpost of godliness that was especially glad to see him. Ann was anxious to leave Truro anyway. She had been attacked by robbers because she had in her keeping a small trunk of jewels. She and her servants put up a typically stout defence until help came. Next day the prince sent her a guard. She met the Grenvilles – John, son of Bevil, of whom Ann wrote that ‘his father was a very honest gentleman who lost his life in the king’s service, and his uncle, Sir Richard, was a good commander, but a little too severe’.

  Now the prince decided to head for the Scilly Isles. Not France, but far enough away. So on 4 March 1646, in the first real darkness of the night, Charles and his entourage crept onto the frigate Phoenix, moored at Land’s End. He was only just in time. Hopton signed the surrender ten days later at Exeter. Ann and Richard packed up their entire estate in two trunks and boarded another ship, where Richard was forced to pay the sailors extra to get them to sail at all, and once on board the crew rifled their trunk and made off with some gold lace, all Ann’s combs, gloves and ribbons, and all their best clothes. Now she had none of the stuff from which a woman of her time fashioned an image. To add to her misery, Ann was violently seasick; no wonder, since she was also heavily pregnant.

  Now the prince was king of just these islands. The legendary lost lands of Lyonesse were said to lie beneath the Scillies like a haunting remembrance of that other kingdom Charles had lost, drowned under the flood of war.

  ‘I was set ashore almost dead in the Isles of Scilly’, Ann reported, and ‘when we had got to our quarters near the castle where the Prince lay, I went immediately to bed, which was so vile that my footmen ever lay in a better, and we had but three in the whole house, which consisted of four rooms, or rather partitions, 2 low rooms, and 2 little lofts, with a ladder to go up. In one of these they kept dry fish, which was his trade, and in this my husband’s two clerks lay; one there was for my sister, and one for myself, and one among the rest of our servants. But when I awoke in the morning, I was so cold I knew not what to do, but the daylight discovered that our bed was near swimming with the sea, which, the owner told us afterwards, it never did so but at spring tides. With this we were destitute of clothes, and meat or fuel for half the court, to serve them a month, was not to be had in the whole island. And truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every meal our last. The council sent for provisions into France, which served us, but they were bad, and little of them.’

  Then ‘after three weeks and odd days’, the prince and his dwindling court set out again, this time for Jersey. The pilot did not know the safe channel into the harbour and simply sailed over the rocks, but somehow they survived. Ann found Jersey much more to her taste; there were avenues of trees leading to castles, grassy pastureland. And her daughter was born, and christened Anne.

  But where should Prince Charles go next? The queen still wanted him in France; she was lonely and she hoped his presence would help her raise support. At last he went, reaching Paris in July 1646. Richard followed, but he sent Ann back to England to try to recover his revenues. Ann left the baby with a nurse on Jersey, and took a boat to Caen and then another to Southampton. She was pleased to be entrusted with a mission, and managed to extract some money from the Commons. When Richard too reached England, however, he had to hide. Ann is almost silent about these years of eclipse. But she had one more part to play, before their bitter end.

  XXIII New Professions: Parliament Joan and Richard Wiseman

  The year 1645 began in bitter cold, and the future was bone-cold, too, for the Royalists. In this year, the astrologer William Lilly’s prophecy The Starry Messenger predicted stunning and sweeping victory for Parliament, and it was printed on the very day of the war’s most astounding and resounding victory, the Battle of Naseby. In the north, Montrose was to offer the Royalists the cruel hope of success before he too was engulfed by the tidal wave of failure that was sweeping the king’s cause away. Even the remaining Royalist sandcastles – Hereford, Basing House – were soon swallowed up.

  This year, too, the poems tha
t John Milton had allowed to appear slowly and obscurely were brought together in a single volume, and republished with notes pointing out their prophetic relevance. In using his poems, especially ‘Lycidas’, as a kind of pamphlet, Milton was responding eagerly to the spirit of a time that had no leisure for the lyric. But he was also withdrawing, disappointed, from affairs of state. He was having trouble with his sight, too:

  I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim, and that the same time my spleen and all my viscera burdened and shaken with flatulence. And even in the morning, if I began as usual to read, I noticed that my eyes felt immediate pain deep within and turned from reading, though later refreshed after moderate bodily exercise; as often as I looked at a lamp, a sort of rainbow seemed to obscure it. Soon a mist appearing in the left part of the left eye (for that eye became clouded some years before the other) removed from my sight everything on that side.

  He dreaded blindness. He dosed himself with medicines. He hoped. But the darkness closed in, slow and unstoppable, cutting him off from the books he needed and loved. No one is sure what caused his blindness, but whatever it was, it made him less certain as a pamphleteer, keen not to waste the dying light on controversies that didn’t matter. From now on he would stick to poetry, and to the really important political causes. And after all, Homer had been blind.

  At Oxford, the days of the court were numbered. While Paris had its first taste of Italian opera, the English court was collapsing. Soon there would be no court at all to entertain the languors of pastoral; only brisk hard-headed satire and bitter songs. The masque house at Whitehall was pulled down; now theatre had no place in London life. Yet the violent, macho Cavalier spirit refused to die. The Church of England was stripped to its essentials, plain and simple. By now there were no organs, no prayer book, none but ordained clergy preaching in the English churches. People who had committed crimes were not to be allowed to receive the sacraments. But in that bleakness, many strange things were to flower, and perhaps the most important was a group of men who began to meet at Gresham College to think about the physical world and how it worked. After the war, they were to become the founders of the Royal Society.

  Parliament might be winning the war, but the battle for hearts and minds was still in the balance. One factor that was helping to decide it even then was the newly freed press. The London print trade, liberated by the absence of the Licensing Act, was mushrooming, fuelling hectic political discussion and religious innovation, deflating the pompous and setting up new pomposities of its own. As well, there was an overlap between the print trade and the world of politics: print traders were ideal informers. Hawkers and chapmen sold broadsides and pamphlets in the streets of London. They brought in news while they also spread it about. They tramped all day from the Exchange to Westminster, from Westminster to the Old Bailey, from the Old Bailey to St Paul’s Churchyard, then back to Westminster again. In so doing, they also passed the booksellers’ stalls, and they stopped at inns and ordinaries, hostelries and lodgings to pick up gossip, listening especially to any carriers who transported goods to and from the country along a fixed route. As they handed out their pamphlets, people expressed their views on the latest news, even though the hawkers might remember, and might tell the authorities.

  Some of what they found to say would have been sedition even hundreds of years later. Early modern London had a salty tongue. When she saw two sheep’s heads together for sale, Alice Jackson said ‘she wished the King and Prince Rupert’s heads were there instead of them, and then the Kingdom would be settled, and the Queen had not a foot of land in England and the King was an evil and an unlawfull King, and better to be without a King than to have him King.’

  In 1646 Ansell Powlten said ‘that the King was run away from his Parliament, and that he was no king, neither had he foot of land but what he must win by the sword, and being asked of one why the state did not impress in the king and parliament name, for answering that they did that to cozen the subject’. But the king was not the only one to be attacked. Verbal assaults on Parliament were common too. Men and women who might quarrel over the ownership of a pair of shears and exchange lavish insults would use the same language for the government. One man thought ‘The Parliament nothing but a Company of Robin Hoods and Little Jacks’, while in Somerset the Parliamentarian candidate was known as Robin Hood. People also knew about the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, Jack Cade and Wat Tyler; in 1642 a pamphlet was published about them, which in turn was based on an old Tudor drama. The penitent ghost of Jack Straw appeared to proclaim the need to obey the king.

  Bookshops and printing houses were also places where books and pamphlets could be discussed; a Jesuit debated with a godly minister in Thomas Bates’s shop in Bishop’s Court near the Old Bailey in 1641. Religious lecturers might perform outside or nearby, and on days when they did the canny booksellers would crowd their window displays with religious satires criticizing bishops. Bates, however, was eclectic, and sold anti-Puritan satires alongside godly books, Royalist squibs alongside anti-episcopalian theology. Other booksellers specialized in particular kinds of books. Francis Grove’s shop sold the latest ballads and jestbooks; he sold scandalously satirical ballads celebrating Marie de Medici’s departure in 1641. You could buy pamphlets about whale-sightings, a pool in Lancashire that had turned to blood, children born with horns, with two heads, about Oliver Cromwell’s adultery with Mrs Lambert, and Anne Fairfax’s wish to be queen.

  Early modern people often greeted each other by asking, “What’s the news?’ At work, in alehouses, at ordinaries, men and women discussed the whole range of contemporary issues: Charles I’s religious policy, the influence of Henrietta Maria, the designs of the king’s evil councillors, Laud’s secret allegiance to Rome, Catholic plots in London. They were often overheard and reported on, which is how their views have been recorded and preserved. In the crowded streets, privacy could be hard to find. This could be either an advantage or a drawback for radicals, depending on how you chose to look at it. Katherine Hadley, a spinster and servant to John Lilburne, was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment on suspicion of ‘having thrown abroad in Moor Fields copies of Lilburne’s pamphlet A Cry for Justice in the Whitsun holidays in 1640’. She was arrested, yes, but she managed to get the pamphlet out too.

  Other agents were working among the crowds. Elizabeth Alkin, or Parliament Joan, was born about the turn of the seventeenth century, and died in 1654. As befits a spy, she remains a shadowy figure. The Committee for the Advancement of Money gave her two pounds in March 1645 ‘for several discoveries’, and forty shillings later, for discovering the delinquency of George Mynne. Mynne, an ironmaster of Surrey, was supplying the king with the raw materials for warfare, storing iron and wire in caches around the country. Parliament Joan discovered one such cache. Her husband was a spy, too; he was caught by the Royalists early in the war, and hanged at Oxford.

  Both capitals were haunted by spies. Sir Samuel Luke had an intelligence network in Oxford which supplied Parliament with information. In July 1643, Nehemiah Wallington recorded that ‘there was a she-spy who was in Oxford on the Lord’s day last. She relates that on the Monday morning, about five of the clock, there were three executed there for spies.’ Joan petitioned the Committee for Compositions, trying to claim a sequestered house whose owner had fought against Parliament and had also worked for the very man who had hanged Joan’s husband. She had also searched for unlicensed or seditious presses for the authorities. A printer warned his friends to ‘have care of a fat woman, aged about fifty, her name I know not, she is called by many Parliament Joan’. She had discovered four presses in the custody of a man called Dugard, in the Merchant Taylor’s School. Joan herself said that she’d been employed as a spy by Essex, Waller and Fairfax, but found spying didn’t pay well enough, and eventually became a printer of newsbooks herself. After a hectic career as a printer, she became a naval nurse, continuing to petition Parliament for the money she felt they owed her for
‘my continual watchings day and night’.

  Joan’s story shows how the apparent liberalization of politics through print was countered by government agents. She was a printer, exposing news to the eager eyes of a nation hungry for it. But when her neighbours expressed their views or acted on their opinions, they did so knowing that someone like Joan might be listening.

  The new times created opportunities for other professions, too. An army surgeon was paid only four shillings a day, and most relied on private practice to eke out a decent living. As a result, there was a chronic shortage of surgeons, and those left to the army were often frighteningly incompetent. Surgical techniques were also at an early stage; one self-deprecating practitioner, Edward Coke, admitted that ‘one Death, who doth and will prevail’ had carried off most of his patients to ‘the great God of heaven’. There were facilities for the sick and wounded; at the Savoy, for instance, for the Parliamentarian casualties, and in 1648 Ely House became a hospital. These took 350 patients between them. Nurses were employed – chiefly the widows of soldiers, one for every twelve patients.

  There were also attempts to support wounded soldiers. Old clothes, linen and wool were gathered, and a tax was levied. After the Restoration, 1840 disabled veterans and 1500 widows were given twelve weeks’ pay each, but after that they had only the uncertain mercy of their parishes to rely on. Sometimes instead of transporting patients to a town, officers would commandeer a large building as a hospital. On 18 September 1645, George Blagrave recorded: