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

by Diane Purkiss

  It was from this culture of radical religion that the agitators appeared in the spring of 1647, and their activities in turn reinforced the radical religious sects’ sense that the world was indeed ripe to be turned upside down. The agitators were representatives of the New Model regiments elected by the men to discuss political issues with the officers. From them came the General Council of the Army in July, the debates, and ultimately radicals like the Levellers, who sought rights for men without substantial property.

  Though the radical Independent sects and the agitators appeared to be riding the Zeitgeist, most people feared them, and that included moderate opinion on the Parliamentarian side. Nobody hated them all more than New Model Army chaplain Richard Baxter, who had seen his men charge the Royalists at Naseby. He hated them all even more after the war than he had before; he felt that they were to blame for the plight of godly people like himself. To defend his party from charges of revolution, he tried to open up a visible gap between the godly and the revolutionaries. But along the way, he did try to describe the ferment in the army, and while his panic may have exaggerated, he did not lie:

  A great part of the mischief they did among the soldiers was by pamphlets, which they abundantly dispersed, such as R Overton’s Martin Mar-Priest, and more of his; and some of J Lilburn’s, who was one of them … And soldiers being usually dispersed in their quarters, they had such books to read when they had none to contradict them. And all their disputing was with as much fierceness, as if they had been ready to draw their swords upon those against whom they disputed … I thought they were principled by the Jesuits, and acted for their interest and in their way.

  This seems an odd idea, but shows how Catholics could still be seen in everything disliked, because of course these men were not Catholics. They were the Levellers. For Baxter, the Levellers were like the Jesuits because they had abandoned belief in predestination for faith in free will. He connects this ungluing of religion with their social beliefs, and perhaps he was not altogether wrong. Discontent like his soon found an active outlet. Those not enthusiastic about the radical sects or the Army radicals were beginning to be active; there were signs of a Royalist rising in the capital. This opposition only cemented determination to reform the state thoroughly. The New Model declared its intention of marching on and occupying London to put down what increasingly looked like Royalist insurgents, and was only restrained by Fairfax’s efforts. On 23 July 1647, the committee had its first meeting at the Guildhall, and its members were assaulted by some young men with Royalist sympathies, who said ‘that if they came here again they would hang their guts about their ears. And never left them till they had compelled them to rise, and, as they went, followed them with ill language.’ On 26 July a violent mob assaulted Parliament itself; it included some Cavaliers, and disrupted voting. Besieged on all sides, Parliament prepared to defend London against the New Model, and even though ten thousand men in arms were produced, the New Model occupied the capital on 6 August, handily assuming a role as protector of Parliament. The lord mayor was replaced by a radical Independent, John Warner, and the Royalists among the aldermen found themselves in the Tower.

  The Cavalier and Royalist agents among the rioters had presented the New Model as a ravening horde of plunderers and rapists, but in fact London couldn’t help but notice how disciplined and orderly the New Model was in comparison with its supposed defenders, the reformadoes; Thomas Juxon noted that ‘there was not so much as an apple took … by any of them’. It was so obviously an agent of law and order that it sold itself to people otherwise doubtful, and the city began to simmer down. But the radical sects were heartened by its presence, which allowed vital cross-communication between radical Independent leaders and the Army agitators. The result was to reinforce the radical tendencies of both groups. What went on in the churches and meeting houses was the engine that was to drive the astonishing political demands made by the Army’s more militant agitators.

  Part of what inspired these demands was the heady personal experience of meeting houses, of seeing the power to speak in public vested not in those appointed by still higher powers, but in those customarily silenced. There could be no apter symbol of the lowly and the silenced than women, and in some congregations women began to speak with greater and greater frequency. They took as their text the Magnificat, in which the Lord, said Mary, ‘has put down the mighty from his throne/And exalted the lowly’. The speech Mary makes is overtly about the very myth England’s godly loved best, the myth of themselves as a great exiled people surrounded by ungodly enemies, fighting for God against the unholy armies of darkness. In this way, the speech of women like the prophets Sarah Wight and Anna Trapnel was not incidental to the Army reformers’ quest, but part and parcel of the same activist movement.

  Yet women who spoke did face opposition, just as the Army radicals did. In his first epistle to Timothy, St Paul had declared roundly that women should not be suffered to teach, but to be in silence; if they were baffled by anything they might ask their husbands for elucidation at home. And yet the Civil War and Independency made it possible for some women to ignore this injunction. Anna Trapnel was famous for her fasts and prophecies, but she was not the only woman speaking out in London churches and meeting halls. Even before the war, Mrs Attaway had denied that ‘any in the world this day living had any commission to preach’, by which she meant that ministers had no special rights. It was this idea which could be read as a licence for women to speak. Katherine Chidley, for example, had been involved in political and religious struggles on behalf of the Independent sects from as early as the late 1620s, and she also had links with radical Levellers in the New Model Army. It may have been the liberty allowed them that attracted many women to the radical and Independent sects.

  The role of prophet, in particular, allowed women to wriggle around the Pauline prohibition. A prophet was chosen by God, not by men; he or she was proof that the Holy Spirit ‘bloweth where it listeth’, as people said. And she could argue that she was not, herself, speaking, only allowing God to speak through her. The idea that God might choose someone unimportant, weak, ‘low’, reinforced the idea of the last being first and the first last that was dear to the Independents’ mille nariaism. Finally, there were women prophets in both the Old and New Testaments who could be cited as examples of God choosing to speak through the vessel of a woman.

  But women prophets and preachers could find themselves open to severe criticism and even savage punishment unless they were careful. A woman named Mary Gadbury, for example, emerged in the late 1640s from the radical sectarian groups of St Stephen’s Coleman Street in London. She had been deserted by her husband, and she was unilaterally blamed for this by her critics. She was assumed to be sexually entangled with her fellow-missionary William Franklin, a charge she denied; for a woman to open her mouth in public was to court charges of sexual immorality and even whoredom, and thus the condign punishments that accompanied them. She was whipped at Winchester, and then sent to Bridewell. Admittedly, her belief that Franklin was the Messiah cast especial doubt on her claims to have seen him transfigured by a bright light, but she was punished more severely than he was.

  In this fraught context, London responded with various kinds of passion to women like Anna Trapnel. By the late 1640s there were, at least, many of them. Anne Hempstall is said to have spoken for two hours to women who came from far away, but the author says they stayed only because they had been promised ‘a good fat pig’ after the sermon. This suggests the women can’t rise above their bodily appetites, but also implies that those concerned are poor, perhaps hungry. One critic wrote with feigned amusement that ‘Thus I have declared some of the female Academies, but where their University is I cannot tell, but I suppose that Bedlam or Bridwell would be two convenient places for them’. The misogyny evident here is not the point. It is assumed to be widely shared, but uses that prejudice to discredit the Independent sects, whose ministers lacked Oxford and Cambridge training.
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br />   Others claimed that women used religion to cover up their sexual longings: ‘of all WHORES there is no WHORE to a holy WHORE, which when she turns up the white of her eye, and the black of her tail when she falls flat on her back, according as the spirit moves her, the fire of her Zeal, kindles such a Flame, that the Devil cannot withstand her, Besides she can fit a man with such a cloak for her knavery that she can cover her lust with Religion, O! these lasses that can rise and get them ready by Six a Clock in the morning to go to Christ church, And then in the Afternoon to go to Saint Amholing O! how they listen for that Tinkle Tinkle bell that raises them in a morning to a stirring exercise’.

  This is anxious about women, but also bothered by the radical sects in general, and it uses the oldest image of trouble in the book to discredit them, the image of the sexually voracious woman. But Trapnel and dozens of other women were not deterred by abuse. Rather they were powerfully motivated by seeing themselves as part of a larger political cause that extended to heaven itself, a cause so holy that it was bound to attract the attention of diabolical foes. And for Trapnel it was especially significant that her career as a prophet derived from her mother, who was one of those to die in the war (Trapnel doesn’t tell us how she died). Nine years later, as the Independent sects of which she was a part became dominant in London, Anna remembered her death: ‘The last words she uttered upon her deathbed were these to the Lord for her daughter: “Lord! Double thy spirit upon my child.” These words she uttered with as much eagerness three times, and spoke no more.’

  These words suggest that Trapnel’s mother was not only godly, but actively Independent. Trapnel quotes them because they help to prove the authenticity of the prophecies she was to utter. But they also point to the bereavements of the war years, bereavements that might cause those prophecies to seem worthwhile, even urgently necessary. Because of her mother’s death, Trapnel was an orphan in the roughest, most lawless of London suburbs. An aunt took her in, but often such care meant a life of fairly robust servitude, being a kind of unpaid servant. However, Trapnel’s training in her aunt’s household included the vital literacy skills that would allow her to absorb the political pamphlets of the day, along with the Bible; she notes ‘I was trained up to my book and writing’. Basic literacy was often seen as a necessity for godly children. Reading allowed her to discover in the psalms and in the prophecies of her namesakes Hannah and Anna intimations of a new age when poor women like herself would be advanced by God ahead of rich and powerful men. She believed that God would himself select those to whom power would be extended, and she strove to be in their number.

  Like others, she found the 1640s a time of material struggle. Starting in 1645, she ‘kept house with the means my mother left me’. After selling her plate and rings to support the army further (she had already paid taxes for them) she ‘wrought many nights hard to get money’, though she does not say at what. There were trades open to women in Poplar and its environs, usually connected with the shipbuilding industry: sailmaking, for example, and laundry work. There were also all the usual businesses, from turners to bakers. Any of these would have brought her into further contact with the world of Poplar, a world outside the staid laws of the City and passionately pro-Parliament and inclined to Independency. She moved in with a minister’s widow, then with one of her daughters. This makes it sound as if she sold her house as well, also for the army; some did do this, but also because there was little point in home ownership if the Second Coming was imminent.

  It was after the military victories of the New Model that she began speaking out in assemblies: in May 1646 her first discourse appeared, published later as A Legacy for Saints. In June 1646 she suffered her first ‘distemper of body’, the rigours of some illness intimately connected with her spiritual growth.

  In 1647, Anna visited Sarah Wight, a girl who had fasted for fifty-three days, between 6 April and 11 June with short respites: ‘her drink being only fair water for about twenty days: and since that, some small beer: and both these only at once in two, three or four days’, wrote her spiritual adviser Henry Jessey. A few weeks later, Anna Trapnel began her own fast, on 1 July. Just as eating disorders spread now in girls’ boarding schools, so fasting became a competition for holiness in Anna’s circles. The new calendar of the Church year was about fasting rather than feasting. Parliament used fast days as if they were magical, holding them to help Essex’s stricken Western army in 1644. The army was itself hungry, so it was partly a matter of solidarity. But food had private as well as public significance. In the modern world, anorexics are often stereotyped as those who want to regress to childhood, avoid maturity. Of course, fasts like Wight’s and Trapnel’s were not about the body in the mirror; they were about the body as felt, roaring with hunger and need. Refusing the powerful call of that screaming body made the faster feel powerful: the fiercer the hunger, the greater the power. To fast is to be entirely autonomous, to need nothing and no one. Modern anorexic Marya Hornbacher writes that ‘the anorectic is attempting to demonstrate – badly, ineffectively, narcissistically – a total independence from the helpless state of childhood, from the infinite needs that she recognises in herself, and will annihilate in any way she can’. Fasting may have stood for independency in more ways than one. A girl who had spent her childhood uncomfortably part of households not properly her own might have felt an especial longing to renounce need, and with it mastery. She could do this best by choosing Jesus as her master. She sang:

  I could not eat of anything

  Nothing will now go down,

  For I have tasted other meat

  In viewing of the crown.

  Her hunger allowed her to critcize the greed of others. Addressing the army, she rebukes it for plundering, and asserts that God will:

  … welcome all of you

  And say, oh here is that,

  Which is more costly food for thee,

  And far more delicate

  Then all thou hast of that thou stolst

  From the Commonweal poor,

  For to feast thy carcass withall,

  Which is to be no more.

  This is itself a kind of declaration of independence. Fasting also allowed Trapnel to pull away from those trying to manage her:

  I was judged by diverse friends … to be under a temptation for not eating; I took that Scripture, Neglect not the body, and went to the Lord and enquired whether I had been so, or had any self-end in it to be singular beyond what was meet; it was answered me, No, for thou shalt every way be supplied in body and spirit, and I found a continual fullness in my stomach, and the taste of diverse sweetmeats and delicious foods therein, which satisfied me.

  It also shows how much attention her fasting won for her, even as she denied any needs. And yet like all girls who refuse to eat, she said she was not hungry. To be hungry is to admit a need, and there can be none. The fullness of which she speaks is probably the euphoria of fasting. After several days, the body compensates for hunger by producing chemicals which make for a rush of joyful and liberating energy. To someone like Trapnel, always waiting for the Holy Spirit, this euphoria might have seemed like encouraging proof that he had come to her at last.

  Her fasts were also the last extreme of iconoclasm, and just as violent. First the new Laudian reservations in churches had been broken down, so that no space was more sacred than any other. Then statues and stained glass had been destroyed. Then had come the Independent sects, which revolted against the idea of the very building of the church, and liked to hold their meetings here, there and everywhere. The last remaining icon was the body of the believer, the body as temple of the Holy Ghost, and it too must be destroyed to allow the Spirit to blow freely. But her fasts were controversial, as her defence of herself shows. Some people thought the body at least should be kept intact, and those who sensed the power of her rebellion were understandably a little afraid.