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

by Diane Purkiss

  Winstanley and Eleanor had a good deal in common. Both wanted to recreate earth in the image of heaven through their writings. But perhaps rivalry developed, for in December 1650 she sacked him. There was a dispute. He had approached her, asking for pay for his men, who had helped with the harvest. It may not have appeased him that she confronted him angrily in the barn and told him, in response, that she was the prophetess Melchisedecke, the Queen of Peace, using the Bible in her customary creative way.

  She accused him of faking the invoice. Winstanley was unmoved, and wrote to her bluntly: ‘What’s the reason’, he asked, ‘that divers men call upon you for money, which you truly owe them, and you either put them off, by long delays, or else make them spend 10 times more to it in suits of law, whereas you have estate sufficient that you might pay all?’ She wrote across it: ‘He is mistaken.’ She cited Matthew 25:19: ‘After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh and reckoneth with them.’ How long, O Lord, how long? Winstanley might have retorted. He claimed not only reaping, but also arranging to have the sequestration taken from her estate, leaving her with plenty of funds. She still claimed to be ‘destitute’. His letter was also a jibe at her sex: ‘you have lost the Breeches which is indeed true reason, the strength of a man. And you must wear the long coat’s tail [a fool’s coat] till you know yourself.’ This astringent misogyny was his last hurrah.

  Winstanley went back to Cobham. He stopped Digging, either with his spade or with his pen, refusing to sanction violence or to denounce all authority. He bent to the regime, dedicating The Law of Freedom to Cromwell. It is less polished than his earlier writings, as if he himself were giving up. His wife Susan died, without children, and he married again to a woman called Elizabeth Stanley who bore him two sons. They died in their teens. He became a corn chandler, re-entering the world of trade which he had fought to destroy. The great experiment was over, the light had gone out. Only the passionately dreamed writings survived.

  XXX The Second Civil War

  Extremists now held the floor; some of them had been moderate once, but had become convinced that they were seeing the last days of Antichrist. Nehemiah Wallington had once hoped that the Lord would change the heart of the king, but it was his own heart that had been changed by endless reading of atrocity stories, and by the ongoing dread of popery. He had heard of papists ordering massacres of the godly, and of Prince Robber, as he called Rupert, and his deeds in the Midlands; but he was also worried by the very kind of sectarians whom Trapnel saw as the true children of God. He was fiercely loyal to the emerging republic, and eager to see the Scots beaten by Cromwell, yet he also feared that the falling out among the godly was a sign that the judgement was not far off. God, he felt, had stopped listening. Like John Milton, he might have thought that ‘license they mean when they cry liberty’, for he believed passionately in parish discipline; if men did not whip each other, then God would send judgements, fires, swords, plagues, and wars. Were these the Last Days, now?

  Anna Trapnel was not the only one stimulated to produce a flood of prophecies. There were many others. London often seemed to be drowning in a sea of prophets. Among them was Eleanor Davies, who had been predicting Charles’s downfall since well before the war began, the woman who had briefly and querulously employed Winstanley.

  While the Army debated and the Diggers sought to change the world, the captive Charles had decided to try to reconquer his kingdom. The conflict that resulted was far worse than the First Civil War had been, and there was no more talk of ‘war without an enemy’. Both sides had been brutalized by the first war, and now found themselves capable of doing things more dreadful than they had imagined. There was now a cadre of very experienced soldiers, who saw themselves as separate from civilians. And the War of Three Kingdoms became the divisive, bitter War Between Three Kingdoms, so xenophobia could heighten cruelty further.

  The Second Civil War was begun in confusion, in the last week of March 1648. The Parliamentarian commander of Pembroke Castle refused to hand over authority to his rival. He declared for the king, and South Wales did the same. Then Berwick and Carlisle were surprised in late April by Royalist insurrectionaries. Most of Kent and much of Essex had risen for the king in the second half of May. Montrose’s enemy Argyll had managed to prevent the Scots from setting out in support of southern Royalists. They finally crossed the border in July.

  There was plenty of plotting, but little order. Among the plotters was Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, the woman who had helped to trigger the First Civil War by betraying the king’s plan to arrest the Five Members to Pym. She had, of course, remained with Parliament on the outbreak of war, but she exemplified those who were increasingly alarmed by the Army radicals, and by the rise of commanders like Fairfax and Cromwell rather than the more reliable gentry of the House of Commons. She had always wanted to reform rather than abolish the court. Her contacts there were used in 1646–7 by the Parliamentarians seeking a compromise peace with the king. During the Second Civil War she conspired with the Scots, London Presbyterians, and her old ally the Earl of Holland, one of the Royalist commanders, to raise men and money for Charles I. It was typical of Lucy to detect the nation’s mood, but she seriously overestimated the efficiency and intelligence of her confederates. Like other women, she had to confine herself to intrigue rather than command, when she might have done a better job than her male allies. She could hardly have done worse. Just as energetic Prince Rupert had begun almost every battle waiting for his Royalist colleagues to get themselves onto the field, so now Royalist insurrectionists stood about waiting for each other.

  This hopelessly sporadic timetable meant that Fairfax and Cromwell could attack each rising as if it were a little local difficulty. Cromwell went off to Wales, and Fairfax sent John Lambert to the north to intercept the Scots, while he himself headed for Kent, where things seemed most menacing. Kent had not forgotten the riots over Christmas. ‘Their rage is all against godly men’, wrote a terrified news-sheet journalist. Fairfax’s soldiers marched for three days without rest, and reached Maidstone on 2 June; by midnight Fairfax was master of the town, after some sharp fighting.

  The commander of the Royalists in Kent was George Goring’s aged father, the Earl of Norwich, who had little except longevity to recommend him for the job. He decided to march to London, hoping the city would rise for Charles. His supporters, who had been soundly beaten in Maidstone, thought they could smell defeat; they began to creep home, so that Norwich had only three thousand men left when they emerged onto the hill of Blackheath on 3 June 1648, after an all-night march.

  Despite Norwich’s shrunken army, the situation in London looked promising for Royalists, as Fairfax had left only a small garrison in the capital, commanded by the ever-reliable Philip Skippon. Cromwell was still tied down outside Pembroke Castle, where a group of former Parliamentarians had dug in, and were resisting the siege Cromwell had started on 24 May. The rebellion in Essex had begun on time. The ever-loyal Cornish, like the rest of the Celtic nations, were up in arms for the king, believing the Scots were coming from the north.

  But then it fell apart. In London it did so thanks to the indefatigable, sturdy Philip Skippon. As always, Skippon kept his head when all about were losing theirs. He shut the city gates and manned its defences. Norwich’s hoped-for rebellion within the City of London never materialized, so he left Blackheath for Chelmsford, crossing the river. Few of his Kentishmen followed him (most went home). Five hundred or so swam their horses across the Thames, using the Isle of Dogs as a base, and landing near Poplar docks. They were glimpsed by Anna Trapnel as harbingers of a storm of apocalyptic proportions.

  But Trapnel’s fears were well in excess of reality; Fairfax had already mopped up the remnants of the Kentish rising, and in Cornwall, too, the insurrection had collapsed. The only remaining area of revolt left unsubdued was Essex. The Royalists occupied Colchester on 12 June, and there was a ferocious encounter, in which the Parliamentarians attacked Sir Charles Luca
s’s infantry, who resisted stoutly. They were ‘like mad men killing and slaying them [the Royalists] even in the cannon mouths’, thought one observer. A cavalry sally by Lucas’s men enabled their infantry fellows to escape the Parliament-men and take refuge within Colchester’s walls. The town’s only hope lay with the king’s old commander among the Scots, James Duke of Hamilton, and his promised Scottish invasion in support of the king. Fairfax was tied down in the south, and Lambert alone could not have held the north. But Hamilton delayed, wanting the war as good as won before he would move. This gave Fairfax time to move his forces into Essex from Kent.

  So in June 1648, the siege of Colchester began, one of the bitterest of all the conflicts of the Civil War years. Each side accused the other of terrible deeds. The Royalists inside the town were said to use soft-tip and poisoned bullets. Fairfax cut off the town’s water supply, and also melted down its lead pipes for bullets of his own. The defenders did the same, but their roughly made bullets were interpreted as a deliberate attempt to inflict serious wounds, and the Parliament-men shot twenty prisoners found carrying them. When the Parliamentarians captured the house of Sir Charles Lucas, just south of Colchester, they broke open the family vault and tore apart the bodies of Lucas’s mother and sister, cutting off their hair to wear in their hats as scalps. This was no longer iconoclasm, but a kind of tribal magic.

  It was another hideously wet summer, even worse than 1644. The fields were awash; there were storms, floods, and the weather was appallingly cold. Inside the town, the food supply ran out quickly. The defenders said at first that they would hold on until they had gnawed their own fingers to the bone. Soon everyone was eating horsemeat and then dogmeat, at twelve shillings a carcass, and by the end of the siege, every cat in Colchester had been eaten. Prices mushroomed; soon cheese was five shillings – half a week’s wages – a pound. The ration dropped to seven ounces of bread, made from oats, malt and salt water; it may have been a kind of improvised salt-leaven bread, and like the bean bread being eaten by Lambert’s men it was a triumph of ingenuity, but the officers didn’t think much of it. ‘Let them eat horsemeat and maggots’, suggested Parliamentarians, gloatingly. The townspeople, though, who were loyal Parliamentarians and had been so throughout the last war, were starving too. Desperate women petitioned to leave town with their families – no wonder, when a Royalist soldier was heard to comment that one crying, hungry baby ‘would make a good deal of meat, well boiled’.

  The garrison’s commander Lucas, ‘more intolerable than the siege’, thought Clarendon, was unbearably determined to hang on, hoping for the Scots to arrive under Hamilton, for Holland’s forces in Surrey, for the young Duke of Buckingham to march on London and thus draw Fairfax off, for the Prince of Wales and the fleet, now anchored off Holland. London newsbooks reported the Royalist forces as barbarians, some all but incoherent with horror:

  Much filthiness might be named of women, attempted some, forced others, shrieking, crying, flying and sometime scaping; sending their husbands out forcibly, and fall on their wives in their absence … The most memorable is the answer of a gentlewoman, who if she did not yield had a pistol set to her breast, yes, says she, I shall cheerfully embrace your pistol and my death, but not you … Women, some presently upon their delivery, some ready to be delivered, Infants in their mothers’ laps, and some hanging on their mothers’ breasts, all turned out of harbour, and left helpless to lie upon cold ground.

  A group of women tried to escape. Startled, Fairfax ordered the men to fire blanks at them. When this failed to deter them, the besiegers used more drastic measures. The Parliamentarians stripped four of them naked and sent them back. Lucas’s men refused to admit them and they had to sit disconsolately outside the walls.

  And meanwhile, Lucas’s hopes began, one by one, to fail. On 11 July 1648, Pembroke fell to Cromwell, so Lucas knew he would be arriving soon. Holland managed to raise only five hundred men for the king. There was no hope now of surprising London and drawing Fairfax away from Colchester. All Holland could do was wander about England until overhauled. He tried to take Reigate Castle, but was prevented, and his men routed; on his retreat through Surrey, he was surprised by a Parliamentarian force, and in the encounter, Francis Villiers, the younger brother of the Duke of Buckingham, was killed, a man who had possessed, it seemed, much of the beauty and charm of his notorious father, the first Duke, and an equal measure of military incompetence. His death was due to Cupid rather than Mars: he sent his company on ahead in order to make a night of it with Mary Kirk, daughter of the poet Aurelian Townshend. The Parliamentarians cut and mangled his body after his death. Andrew Marvell was asked to write an elegy, and did, revealing an enthusiasm for the king’s cause surprising in a friend of John Milton. After Villiers’s death, the Royalist soldiers began to melt away, and soon there were only two hundred, effortlessly rounded up by the Parliamentarians sent in pursuit of them. Holland was soon on his way to London to be tried.

  Although the Second Civil War was largely fought over the territories that had escaped the first, Devon and Cornwall were unlucky enough to be central to both. In May 1648 a group of Cornishmen who had rebelled against Parliament in the name of Charles I met with comprehensive defeat at a place called ‘the Gear’, near Helford, and were pursued back across the Lizard peninsula to the seacoast beyond; surrender seemed inevitable, but some of them refused it. They joined hand to hand and hurled themselves bodily into the water, a desperate expedient on that rocky coast, as one later writer noted. Cornwall had been occupied by Parliamentarian troops, mostly from London and the south-east, who had attacked the Cornish churches, demolishing the chapels and ornamental stones which formed part of the landscape, and trying to close down Cornish sports and games. The locals reacted angrily, and the rebellions of the Second Civil War were especially fierce in Cornish-speaking areas. On the Land’s End peninsula, still almost entirely Cornish-speaking, a force of three to five hundred men occupied Penzance in the name of the king. They called to other Cornishmen for assistance, and in St Ives and Helston they found some support.

  The Cornish county committee were warned of the imminent Penzance rising by a merchant called Anthony Gubbs, but they took no notice, and Gubbs was sent home profitless. To his horror, his house was already surrounded by the rebels when he reached it. That very night a force began gathering, and by dawn it was ready, marching on St Michael’s Mount. The rebels had hoped for surprise, but the garrison had been warned. The Cornish insurgents hurried back to Penzance, and Gubbs immediately galloped to St Ives, where he sent his son Joseph straight to the military commander of the West, Sir Hardress Waller, for help. Returning to Penzance, Gubbs was seized by his angry countrymen; his goods were confiscated, and he was ordered to pay £300 to supply them further. He refused, and they imprisoned him under sentence of death.

  The insurgents dug in, establishing a gunpowder magazine. They hoped for support from Helston, but a rising there was pre-empted when a force of thirty Parliamentarian soldiers arrived the afternoon before, on their way to the Mount. Nevertheless, the Penzance rebels’ ranks were swollen by men from the western parishes, and they had also sent a message to the Lizard. They put up fortifications and lined the hedges with musketeers against the Parliament forces. The Parliamentarian leader Bennett called on them to surrender, but those in Penzance refused to listen. So Bennett attacked, and after two hours of fighting at the barricades, the Royalists were scattered, losing ‘about 60 or 70 slain, some drowned, and sixty taken’. The survivors ran for it along the narrow maze of ancient field-boundaries that surrounded Penzance. When one local Parliamentarian tried to ride into Penzance to congratulate Bennett, he was confronted by ‘a bloody soldier, who held up his musket to knock me on the head’.

  The chief hope of the rebels lay in the Lizard peninsula, the traditional home of Cornish rebellion, and the only other part of Cornwall with a majority of Cornish-speakers; an emissary was sent there and managed to raise 120 men at once; they immediat
ely made for St Keverne, hoping to draw on a tradition of riot in order to gain support for their cause; and it worked, since their number increased to 350, setting off to join the Penzance rebels. Did they dream of 1497, when they had tried to throw off the English? But before they even reached Penzance, the rebels there had been crushed, and no one else had joined them, so Parliament could spare all its troops to attack the men from the Lizard. The result was the rout at ‘the Gear’.

  Meanwhile, brilliant young John Lambert, a major-general at only twenty-eight, had not been idle. Managing to rally and unite the once-discontented Northern Association troops, he had enough men to keep Royalists like Sir Marmaduke Langdale contained while he waited for Fairfax and Cromwell to intercept any Scottish invasion. And worst of all, the Scots were defeated when they finally crept across the border. There were nothing like as many of them as Hamilton had hoped to raise. Denounced as wickedness from many a pulpit, on the grounds that the terms of The Engagement (the deal the Scots offered to Charles) offered far too little to the Kirk, the enterprise had little chance, and good commanders like David Leslie bowed to Kirk pressure and withheld their services. What chance the Scottish invasion had was lost when a Covenanting protest against the war was broken up violently; the two sides actually skirmished, Scot against Scot, and it was the Royalists who were forced to flee, making their cause seem both feeble and immoral. Recruits from Ulster were slow to arrive; landing in fishing boats, the Ulstermen were set upon by the Scots, so that only about fifteen hundred ever reached Hamilton. Eventually, he had a force of around nine thousand, many so raw that they didn’t know how to use the pikes they carried.