It was again besieged from April 1645. Royalist commander Richard Grenville, Bevil Grenville’s younger brother, began pouring musket and cannon fire into the town from new siegeworks on 10 April. Grenville’s efforts were hampered by Goring. Ordered to send his foot and guns to Grenville, he did send the foot, but himself went sulkily off to Bath, thinking he should have been given command. After Grenville was wounded, he took care to ensure his officers would dislike the new interim commander, Sir John Berkeley. Once again, the Royalist commanders were thinking about personal honour rather than about the conduct of the war. At times it was hard to be sure who was in overall command; all three men behaved as if they were, though only Hopton had royal authority. Meanwhile, in Taunton the streets were blockaded and the town entrances blocked by earthworks, so that it could only be taken in pieces. It was a little Stalingrad.
The New Model Army under Fairfax had been told that its first task was to relieve Taunton. Goring and his cavalry were ordered back to Oxford to join the king and Rupert for a new northern campaign, and without his cavalry to act as scouts Hopton was surprised by the speed of the New Model’s advance, hearing nothing until Fairfax was at Salisbury. Then Fairfax was himself recalled to respond to Charles’s movements, leaving a force of around 6000 men under Colonel Ralph Weldon to relieve Taunton. Before he left, however, Fairfax bluffed Hopton with a clever feint; on 8 May he swung west, which made Hopton think that he was about to face the whole of the New Model. Then Fairfax turned east again while Weldon continued towards Taunton. By now the town was suffering terribly from Hopton’s artillery; two days before, the Royalists had captured an outwork to the east but then next day were driven back by musket fire, and also stones and boiling water. Baffled, Hopton staged a sham fight between two parts of his force firing blanks, hoping that Blake would think the fighting caused by the relief and send out a sortie. It was then that he heard that Fairfax was moving west, and he reacted by making one last all-out effort to storm and burn the stubborn town.
The successive sieges caused great hardship in the town. Sieges almost always began with a cannon bombardment designed to terrify the people and also to tire them into surrender. In Taunton, it felt as if they were being besieged by a wall of fire. The civilian population could only hide as the assailants swarmed through every street in bitter house-to-house fighting. At seven in the evening a general assault began; in the east, it succeeded in breaching the defences, and the soldiers immediately tried to light fires that would burn the entire town. Thwarted by a change of wind, the Royalists were nevertheless cheered to hear that Fairfax had turned east, and that Goring was on his way back from Oxford; they attacked again on Friday 9 May, and now they fought their way through barricaded streets and against frantic house-to-house resistance. By evening, half the town was burning. The defenders held only the castle, St Mary Magdalen’s church, Maiden’s Fort, and an entrenchment in the marketplace. Ironically, for a war at least in part about religion, churches were key points in armed conflict because they could be fortified as strongholds. Weldon’s relief force advanced slowly, seeing the flames of Taunton against the night sky; Weldon sent word to Blake that he would signal his coming with ten cannon shots.
On Saturday morning, the Royalists made a last attempt to fire the small part of the town that still held out. Three were caught and lynched; one, a woman, was hanged by the women of Taunton. Hopton sent in a final demand for surrender; Blake replied that he would eat three of his last four pairs of boots first, an engaging mixture of determination and common sense. Weldon’s advance guard arrived that afternoon, and Blake, who had always felt God was with him, was triumphantly vindicated. By four o’clock, the Royalists were retreating, felling trees as they went to hamper pursuit.
So on Sunday 11 May, Weldon entered what were almost the ruins of Taunton. The townspeople were starving. Two-thirds of the houses had been destroyed, while the rest had been stripped of their thatch to feed the horses, and their bedcords to make match for muskets. More than a hundred defenders were killed, and twice that many lay wounded. But the men began to creep out of hiding, and the slow work of clearing up began. Next day, the people from the surrounding countryside crept in too, and stood around, with ‘broad eyes of wonder’. On the first anniversary of the relief, the godly minister preached a sermon which recalled the day. ‘You may read it in the ruins of this place’, he said, meaning the story of other towns that had actually fallen to the enemy. ‘Look about her and tell her heaps of rubbish, her consumed houses, a multitude of which are raked in their own ashes. Here a poor forsaken chimney, and there a little fragment of a wall that have escaped to tell what barbarous and monstrous wretches there have been.’
Goring’s forces remained, in part because Goring himself could not seem to decide what to do instead. By now, however, he faced real, organized resistance. In Herefordshire, there had been a great Club outbreak, a throng demanding compensation for their losses. But the Clubmen centred on Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, a poor area with a long history of riots against enclosure. Like modern Countryside Alliance protesters, many Clubmen were people who had managed to claw something together, but not a lot, and who had seen it taken away. There was a huge assembly at Gussage Corner, near Wimborne St Giles, on 25 May, and a ‘peacekeeping’ force was formed, its principal aim being to preserve its members from violence and plunder. A Clubmen banner proclaimed: ‘If you offer to plunder or take our cattle/ Be assured we will bid you battle.’ It intended to petition both king and Parliament for peace. Bands of farmers wearing white ribbons in their hats were soon demonstrating against both sides; church bells were rung to warn villages farther afield if marauding soldiers were sighted. Armed with pikes and clubs, men interposed between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces and made them stop fighting and drink together instead. On 2 June a group of 5000 men gathered near Castle Cary and the Prince of Wales received a delegation denouncing Goring’s activities. There were various attempts to convert them to Royalism, to which the Somerset men turned a deaf ear.
They were deaf because the war had cost so much, more than they could afford; not only sons, brothers, fathers, but livelihoods and food and above all housing, especially in the towns. All over England, buildings that had once stood stalwart against rain and wind lay in crumpled heaps or were reduced to ash and rubble. Faringdon, close to the Berkshire–Wiltshire border, saw ‘the whole town almost pulled down, demolished and wilfully consumed by fire’ as the last desperate battles for Oxford were fought in and through its narrow streets. Here 236 families were made homeless. Bridgewater lost all its suburbs, including an entire parish, Eastover; the loss was estimated at 120 houses, around a third of the entire housing stock. In the north, too, there were losses; the garrison towns often lost almost everything that stood outside the city walls. In York, ‘all the houses in some streets … burnt and broken down to the ground’ testified mutely to the homelessness of their former residents. About one-sixth of York’s houses lay outside the walls. Carlisle, which suffered similar destruction, was ‘a model of misery and desolation’. England was to see nothing on this scale again until 1940; for the purposes of comparison, the German raid on Coventry was to destroy about half the houses in that city.
There were bitter human costs, too. After the war, the widows of Somerset petitioned the local authorities for pensions. The petitions reveal the extent of the suffering the war caused. Only those who had fought for Parliament were eligible. Joan Burt, of Durlenge, wrote that she was of a ‘great age’, and hence could not support the children of her son Jeffrey, who had been cruelly hanged at Taunton after imprisonment; nor could she care for the two children of her daughter, or her son-in-law John Abbott, killed at Bridgewater. Alice Drummond of Horningsham had lost her husband Colonel Edmund Ludlow at the siege of Wardour Castle, leaving her with three small children and nothing to keep them; she was subsequently the victim of Goring’s plundering Royalists. The whole family then succumbed to leprosy, so that they were lik
ely to die ‘for want of food and to be turned out of door naked for want of house room’. Her case, too, was referred to the parish overseers of the poor for relief. The exhausted countryside embarked on a long, cold voyage to recovery.
XXVI The Birds in the Greenwoods are Mated Together: Anne Halkett and the Escape of James II
After Naseby in June 1645, the Royalist armies crumpled, Charles rode away, first to the Scots, eventually to captivity. His fate would be decided later. His pasteboard capital, Oxford, finally surrendered to the new and hard reality on 24 June 1646. Among the loot gathered in was a little prince, the future James II, now Duke of York. Like the royal art collection, the royal family were now in the hands of their enemies.
Yet culture did not stand still. John Suckling’s poems, Fragmento Aurea, appeared; the title summed up the tattered but still surviving Caroline ideals. John Donne’s witty justification of suicide saw print for the first time; perhaps it seemed topical, for it argued that Jesus Christ was a suicide, too. Thomas Browne tried to correct numerous vulgar errors in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. The Catholic poet Crashaw produced his devotional Steps To The Temple. And the poems of an unknown Welshman called Vaughan appeared. Edward Hyde, his royal master defeated, began writing his own history of how it had all happened.
There was a sense of ending. Some were certain that they were living through the Last Days. In Leicestershire, a great pond of water turned to blood under the shocked eyes of locals. It signified that all men were of one blood, and that the wars should stop, so its chronicler thought. In Shoe Lane, in London, a woman gave birth to a child without head or feet, and out of its neck was born another, smaller baby. Above Newmarket, there were strange apparitions: ‘three men in the air struggling, and tugging together, one of them having a drawn sword in his hand, from which judgement God in mercy preserve those three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland from further conflicts and effusion of blood’. It may have been the Northern Lights, not usually seen so far south; they were to haunt the American Civil War battlefields in the cold hard winter of 1863, as far south as Fredericksburg in Virginia, so perhaps the heavens were really eager to deliver a message to humanity about kin-strife and fratricide.
Under their glare, one woman would find a way to help the stricken royal family look towards the future. Anne Halkett had the same kind of education as her contemporaries Ann Harrison Fanshawe and Lucy Hutchinson. She learnt to write, speak French, play an instrument and dance, and she also learnt needlework, ‘which shows I was brought up in an idle life’. She got up every morning for divine service, at five in summer and six in winter. She also loved plays, and to walk in the Spring Gardens (‘before it grew something scandalous by the abuse of some’, she adds hastily), and declared proudly that when she went to the theatre she paid for her own ticket.
But then Anne fell in love, and in doing so disobeyed her parents, committing exactly the crime later thought to have been a cause of the war itself. Her private love life was inextricably intertwined with affairs of state, and it proved impossible for Anne to live and love outside the political concerns that swept the nation into war. This was in part because her love crossed the bounds of class. Her suitor, Thomas Howard, was related to a patron to her father. In the 1640s and 1650s, Edward, first Lord Howard of Escrick, was a prominent Parliamentarian. He joined the Commons when the Lords were abolished. Thomas’s younger brother William was an even more controversial figure. Involved in a Leveller plot to overthrow the Protectorate in the 1650s, he accepted Charles II, but then when sent on a spying mission to the Netherlands swapped sides, and served William of Orange; later his enthusiasm for William led him to Whig politics and ardent support for James’s exclusion from the succession. This might explain Anne’s eagerness to tell what at first glance seems a private story, unrelated to the war.
Thomas Howard, it seems, was a seducer. He used a hard-to-resist romantic approach, assuring Anne that ‘he had endeavoured all this time to smother his passion which he said had begun the first time that ever he saw me, and … if I did not give him some hopes of favour he was resolved to go back again into France … and turn Capucin’. He was menacing Anne with popery. Anne ‘did yield so far to comply with his desire to give him liberty one day when I was walking in the gallery to come there and speak to me … his hand trembled when he took mine to lead me, and with a great sigh said, “If I loved you less, I could say more.”’ Anne replied under the constraint of propriety: ‘I told him I could not but think myself much obliged to him for his good opinion of me, but it would be a higher obligation to confirm his esteem of me by following my advice.’ He was undeterred. ‘Madam’, said he. ‘What I love in you may well increase, but I am sure it can never decay.’ He proposed a private marriage. Anne refused. She wanted her mother’s consent, and his father’s. They got neither, and so had to part; it was an emotional encounter. Thomas ‘fell down in a chair that was behind him, but as one without all sense, which I must confess did so much move me that laying aside all former distance I had kept him at, I sat down upon his knee, and laying my head near his I suffered him to kiss me, which was a liberty I never gave before’. Later Anne’s faithful maid Miriam managed to reach her with the urgent message that Thomas was at the back gate hoping for a few final words with her. Anne steadfastly refused to see him, but then Miriam came up with an alarming report. ‘I believe you are the most unfortunate person living,’ she said, ‘for I think Mr H is killed.’ Miriam had been speaking to him, when ‘there came a fellow with a great club behind him and struck him down dead’.
Anne was frantic. For her, the Civil War had in that moment become a sudden, criminal, violent disruption of normality. Her lover had been mugged. ‘The reason for this was from what there was too many sad examples of at that time, when the division was between the King and Parliament, for to betray a master or friend was looked upon as doing God good service.’ The attack was not, however, a piece of random violence. There was a story behind it, though Anne didn’t work it out fully until later. Anne’s brother-in-law’s estates had been sequestered, that ‘with much difficulty my sister got leave to live in her own house and had the fifth part to live upon’. After that the family was spied on by one of her brother’s tenants, a man named Musgrove, ‘who was a very great rogue’, and who saw Thomas and mistook him for Anne’s brother-in-law Thomas Newton. Perhaps the stalker heard the name Thomas. Anne wasn’t interested in Musgrove’s story, and we don’t know enough to reconstruct it, but it was an example of the ripple effect of war, how one event might overwhelm many caught in its consequences.
Thomas survived, and Anne managed a final meeting, blindfolding herself so that she could keep her promise never to see Thomas again. It was the night of 10 October 1644. Anne waited. Then one day she heard the news. A letter came from a female friend. He was married. Married. To an earl’s daughter. Anne flung herself down on the bed. She thought, ‘Is this the man for whom I have suffered so much? Since he has made himself unworthy my love, he is unworthy my anger or concern.’ And rising, she immediately went out and ate her supper as if nothing had happened. Her loyal maid Miriam shared her rage, and voiced it in sturdy terms that Anne couldn’t use. ‘Give her, O Lord, dry breasts and a miscarrying womb’, she cried. Anne reproached her decorously, but noted that the Lord had apparently accepted her request, for ‘that lady miscarried of several children before she brought one to the full time, and that one died presently after it was born’. She added, with poorly restrained glee, that ‘not only was this couple unfortunate in the children, but in one another, for it was too well-known how short a time continued the satisfaction they had in one another’. The stubbornness that had made her a trial to her mother now helped her. But Anne’s story goes on, and it takes a darker turn.
Anne’s mother died in 1647, and Anne went to live with her brother and his wife. It was at their house that she met a much darker and more dubious man than Thomas Howard, the Irish adventurer and Royalist spy, Colonel Joseph Bampf
ield. Anne was attracted to him almost at once. ‘His discourse was serious, handsome, and tending to impress the advantages of piety, loyalty, and virtue; and these subjects were so agreeable to my own inclination that I could not but give them a good reception.’ This sounds demure enough – but Bampfield was married, though he explained that it was the king’s service that had led him to London while his wife remained in the country.
Bampfield was born in 1622 or 3, so he was only in his twenties when Anne met him. He had joined the king’s army at the age of seventeen, and had risen through the ranks to become a colonel. Indeed, he had been charged with helping the thirteen-year-old Duke of York to escape from St James’s Palace. Charles was especially eager that his son should get away. ‘I look upon James’s escape as Charles’s preservation’, he told Bampfield, meaning that he could live on through hope and through his son.
Bampfield needed Anne’s help, because his plan involved dressing James as a girl. Thirteen-year-old boys were regarded as girlish in this period, and James at this age was fair-haired, blue-eyed, pale, small and slight. Anne sensibly pointed out that the imposture would be more convincing if James’s female clothes fitted him perfectly. At Anne’s urging, Bampfield arranged to see James alone. Anne told him to take a ribbon and to bring back measurements for the prince’s waist and height. Her tailor thought the measurements odd:
When I gave the measure to my tailor to inquire how much mohair would serve to make a petticoat and waistcoat to a young gentlewoman of that bigness and stature, he considered it a long time and said he had made many gowns and suits, but had never made any to such a person in his life … he had never seen any woman of so low a stature have so big a waist.
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