Thomas Fairfax retired to build his garden and collect books, which he left to the Bodleian Library in his will. He later emerged to invite Charles II to return. He had chosen the winning side, but its actions in displaying the bodies of his old comrades Cromwell and Ireton disgusted him, and he turned back to his books and garden.
Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, was interrogated about her part in Presbyterian elements of the 1648 risings; she was taken to the Tower, the place where she had lived as a girl, and shown the rack and other instruments of torture, to encourage her to tell all. For her involvement in the Second Civil War, she spent eighteen months in the Tower and under house arrest, but she was active again on the Presbyterian side in 1659-60. She remained strongly Presbyterian all her life, and arguably pursued a consistent set of political goals, in her own stylish manner.
Anne Halkett survived, and saw her son with Sir James Halkett grow to maturity; he was given fifty pounds by the Duke of York, but the new king denied her many petitions. She opened a school to make ends meet, dying in 1699. Her son Robert was to serve in Ireland under the prince she had rescued, and to go to gaol for his pains.
Charles, Prince of Wales, invaded Scotland in an effort to regain the throne in 1650; his forces were defeated and he was obliged to flee. After that, the first of many Stuart re-invasions, he tried to raise foreign aid, but was only successful when recalled by Parliament itself. He rode in triumph into London in 1660. His brother James succeeded him, though his reign was marked by a continuation of the bitter religious strife of the wars. Bevil Grenville’s sons both became close friends of Charles II, and the elder became Earl of Bath.
Ann Fanshawe eventually made her way back to England and to her estates in Yorkshire and Huntingdon. After the Restoration, Richard became a knight and an MP, and then ambassador to Spain in 1664; Ann went with him to Madrid. He died in 1666, and she in 1680; they were buried side by side.
Artemisia Gentileschi returned to Italy and settled in Naples, where her new works suggested the influence of English classicists. She died in 1652. That same year, Eleanor Davies died – or, as her epitaph put it, entered immortality – in July, mourned by her daughter Lucy.
Hannah Wolley became the cookbook and household-science guru of Restoration England, an early Isabella Beeton. After the Restoration, she married again, and did more cooking and less writing.
John Milton also married again after his recalcitrant Mary died, and then again when his Katherine too proved mortal. He wrote his epic, or rather composed it in his head since he was entirely blind by 1652. It was sombre and ringing, it was Paradise Lost, and with it Milton really had entered earthly immortality. Put on a government blacklist at the Restoration, he was talked off it by his friend Marvell, who sensibly argued that the regime would not cover itself with glory by persecuting an old, blind poet. He died in 1674, of that Royalist-sounding malady, gout.
Humphrey Mildmay survived the republican regime almost intact, despite his mounting debts, sympathy with Royalism, and enthusiastic Christmas merrymaking. By 1650 he was his old self: ‘I put on a new suit and am easy in it’, he said. Somehow this seems a metaphor for his adaptability. His collection of newsbooks reminded him of the stirring times, but his own life went on much as before the war. He died shortly after the Restoration brought England into line with what he had always thought.
Sir Kenelm Digby invented a salve that was supposed to prevent wounds from becoming infected; unfortunately, his idea was that the salve be rubbed on the blade that had caused the wound. He died in 1665. Poignantly, his tomb was destroyed the following year in the Great Fire.
Gerrard Winstanley became a gentleman, and he married the daughter of another gentleman when his first wife died. He could not beat them, but he did at least manage to join them. He also became a corn-chandler and a Quaker, a chief constable and a churchwarden – respectability incarnate. When his countrymen failed to respond to his calls, he settled back into the old order, and began searching for that light only in himself.
John and Elizabeth Lilburne kept on fighting, and were frequently sent to gaol for their pains. John died in 1657 while on parole.
We do not know what became of Sergeant Henry Foster.
After the war ended, Richard Symonds pursued his artistic quest by embarking on the Grand Tour. He met Poussin in Paris, and was the source for the allegation that Caravaggio slept with his models; his acquaintance with the Caravaggists might explain how he knew about Nicholas Lanier and Artemisia Gentileschi. He was the origin of the famous anecdote that Cromwell visited the corpse of the dead Charles I. He died in June 1660 at the age of forty-three.
Richard Atkyns’s marriage did not survive the war. After a complicated dispute with the Stationers’ Company, Atkyns was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, where he died in 1677.
John Gwynne remained a soldier, ending his career in Monmouth’s army in 1679–80.
Philip Skippon refused to have anything to do with the regicides. He became an MP, and later tried to persuade Cromwell to take the crown; in his simple way, he saw it as a simple solution. He died just before the Restoration, still in command of his beloved London militia.
Brilliana’s dearly loved son Ned Harley never wielded the politcal influence of his father. He refused to recognize the republic, and the whole family were barred from local office until 1654, when Robert and Ned were engaged in removing ‘scandalous ministers’. Ned managed to get back onto the Herefordshire bench, and became an MP in 1656, though he was excluded from the chamber. He died in 1700.
Ralph and Mary Verney resettled in Buckinghamshire. Their family still holds the estates they held during the wars.
Nehemiah Wallington went on thinking and going to sermons and praying. He also carried on turning wood. He wrote down everything that happened to him in his spiritual journals, because he knew that he had lived through the beginning of the end. He reread them all in the weeks before his death, hoping to understand himself and the part his prayers and thoughts had played in events. But he stopped, defeated, because ‘I am very ill in body’. He died in 1658.
Richard Wiseman escaped to the Scilly Isles at the same time as Ann Fanshawe, as part of the Prince of Wales’s entourage. During Charles’s exile, he became one of his closest and most trusted confidants, and was rewarded with royal appointments.
The English republic was finding its shape through all this blood, this iron. It had already broken up the Crown Jewels. Those one sees today were carefully reassembled – or faked, really, since most of the original stones were not recovered – after the Restoration, all but the spoon for the holy oil used to anoint the king during the coronation service. All the other clotted metal magnificence was melted into common coin, the jewels sold. Henry Marten, who had helped John Clotworthy tear up Henrietta’s Rubens masterpiece, had uncovered the Crown Jewels in a cupboard at Westminster:
and having forced open a great iron chest, he took out the Crowns, the robes, the Swords, and Scepter, belonging anciently to K Edward the Confessor, and used by all our kings at their inaugurations with a scorn greater than his Lusts and all the rest of his vices, he openly declares, That there would be no further use of these toys and trifles. And in the jollity of that humour, invests George Wither [an old Puritan satirist] in the Royal habiliments Who being thus Crowned and arrayed (as right well became him) first marched about the room with a stately garb, and afterwards with a thousand apish and ridiculous actions exposed those sacred ornaments to contempt and laughter.
After that they were locked up for six years. The plate in the Tower had already gone to fund Essex’s ill-fated attempt to conquer the West. And by January 1650, the Crown Jewels and other regalia were sold, but not intact; they were to be ‘totally broken and defaced’. One buyer got the sapphires from the State Crown, another the pearls, and another the emeralds. Only the spoon, dating from the twelfth century, was bought by a member of the royal household, who returned it so it could be used in Charles II’s
coronation ceremony. A new St Edward’s Crown had already been made, albeit with hired stones.
As well as beheading Charles, the republic also beheaded his statue at the Old Exchange. The place where the statue had once stood bore an inscription, ‘Exit tyrannus, Regum Ultimus Anno Libertatis Angliae Restitutae Primo’ (Exit the tyrant, last of the kings, in the first year of England’s restored freedom). Inns quietly took down loyal signs. ‘Here was the King’s Head’, said one tactful pub. Parliament had captured the Great Seal of the kings of England with Oxford. It was broken to pieces by a blacksmith, to the sound of cheering, as was the old Parliament-seal, which had the king’s picture on it. The new seal bore a motto, ‘In the first year of freedom by God’s Blessing Restored’. Other people fought against this rebranding of the nation. A ballad wrote: ‘Oh Charles, that exit which they put, up o’er thy statue’s head, was but/ An entrance to our woe;/ That fatal Axe which thee divorced from us, our happiness hath forc’d/ Into the grave to go.’ ‘From fools and knaves in our parliament free/ Libera nos, Domine’ (Lord, deliver us), ran another, cheekily using church Latin.
Another magical act of restitution and inauguration performed by the republic and protectorate was the readmission of the Jews to England. Jews had been forbidden to enter the country since the reign of Edward I, but the godly had become accustomed to identifying with them as God’s chosen elect, and had also come to have great respect for Hebrew Old Testament scholarship. The idea behind their readmission was also to convert them and thus bring about the Second Coming, but in reality it was they who converted England to more civilized ways. With them came the very spirit of cosmopolitan urbanity – things would never again be quite so crude, so raw. The very first coffee house in England opened in that most Royalist of cities, Oxford; its proprietor was one Jacob, a Jew. They became intelligent alternatives to the alehouse, replacing shouted ballads with intellectual discussion.
But the ambivalence of what the republic made and broke can be glimpsed best in the fate of Charles’s cherished art collection. The finest art collection ever assembled by an English monarch was also a casualty of war. The king had left a legacy of debts, and his servants begged Parliament to pay them. Accordingly, the king’s creditors and the amounts he owed them were listed. But the works of art found few buyers. Some of the finest paintings in Europe were sold off cheaply, or offered to servants and claimants in lieu of money.
So a London goldsmith called John Bolton bought Van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles for £40, probably the one that now hangs in the National Gallery. The future artist Sir Peter Lely snapped up pictures. Colonel John Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s husband, bought two Titians, one for £600, the other for £165. One, Venus of Pardoe, now hangs in the Louvre. Giorgione’s Holy Family went to John Linchbeck, merchant, for £114. Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents was bought by Captain Robert Mallory, a serving officer who might have found its subject-matter sadly consonant with the times. A tavern-keeper named William Proctor bought Correggio’s Holy Family for £58. Colonel William Webb bought a number of Van Dycks, including his portrait of The King’s Three Eldest Children, and also acquired Titian’s The Entombment. The king’s own plumber, John Emery, got a Titian, St Margaret Triumphing over the Devil. Jerome Lanier, Keeper of the Queen’s Music, acquired a Raphael and a Tintoretto, while Nicholas Lanier bought back his own portrait by Van Dyck for £40, along with a Bellini. The king’s glazier got a Correggio. Edmund Morrison, embroiderer, received Rubens’s Peace and War, Mantegna’s Dead Christ (now in Milan), two Titians, and Van Dyck’s portrait of Prince Henry. Edward Bass was rewarded with some Raphaels for telling Parliament where some of the king’s plate had been hidden.
In one sense, this was a tragedy for the nation, for the collection was dispersed, and many of its finest pieces ended up in France, in Russia, in Spain. In another sense, it was a great and astonishing democratization of art. For one brief moment, the walls of relatively ordinary tradespeople were hung with masterpieces. They had managed, suddenly, and a little uneasily, to lay hands on what had never been meant for them.
And they would never forget how it felt. Never again. ‘Remember’, said Charles, as the axe swung down.
FURTHER READING
GENERAL
Many of the chapter titles are taken from ballads of the day, many found in Cavalier and puritan: ballads and broadsides illustrating the period of the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660, edited with an introduction and notes by Hyder E. Rollins, New York: New York University Press, 1923. A few are from contemporary poems, particularly Milton’s. The Diggers’ Song (‘Stand Up Now, Stand Up Now’) is from The Penguin book of Renaissance Verse: 1509–1659, selected and with an introduction by David Norbrook; edited by H. R. Woudhuysen, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1992.
The industrious production of books and articles on the English Civil War began during the war itself, as I hope to have shown here, and has continued apace ever since. The result is a large, bewilderingly rich and hence unwieldy body of literature, much of it deeply and sometimes overtly political, much of it also deliberately and polemically in disagreement with what has just been said by another expert. This fractiousness has characterized the field since Clarendon’s time, but taken together with the sheer number of materials makes it impossible for the amateur to approach the topic with confidence. The Civil War – or perhaps the English Revolution, the Great Rebellion, and latterly the Wars of Three Kingdoms, each title politically correct to some and anathema to others – cannot even be named with certainty. That is natural, for it is also the first major historical turning-point for which really substantial numbers of disputing sources survive for many though not all events. Rival newspapers and polemical pamphlets contend for who shall authoritatively describe particular battles with the memoirs of soldiers and generals. All this sounds daunting, and it is; my principal motive for writing this book was to try to tell the stories of the war to people who didn’t already know most of the main events well, and so make it less daunting. Those who now feel well prepared can launch themselves into the additional reading below.
The plethora of previous work is by no means all bad news, however. It also indicates that any work of scholarship on the English Civil War must reveal that it is a mere mouse, standing on the shoulders of an elephant, for this book would not have been possible or even conceivable were it not supported by generations of patient and intelligent historians, and companioned by others who offer different and even adversarial accounts.
This means, however, that it would not be practical to list here all the sources I have consulted. What I offer instead is some suggestions for what primary and secondary sources may be most central to the matter I discuss and to my own text. My focus has been on the impact of the war on people – key players, but also those who were less central to determining its course: the human face of the war. This bibliography is similarly focused.
The historiography and its battles is canvassed in The debate on the English revolution revisited by R. C. Richardson, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1998. See also Ronald Hutton’s recent vivid summation, ‘Revisionism in Britain’, in Bentley, Michael (ed.), Companion to historiography, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 377–91. The history of some at least of those papery and inky battles has been eloquently and wittily described in Blair Worden, Roundhead reputations: the English Civil War and the passions of posterity, London: Allen Lane, 2001.
Anyone keen to read a single traditional top-down history of the Civil War can find magisterial and readable single-authored accounts by Samuel R. Gardiner, and by C. V. Wedgwood, neither of whom has yet been surpassed for style and scholarship, though many of their interpretations have been challenged.
ISABELLA TWYSDEN
Isabella Twysden’s diary comes from BL Add MS 34169-72, and is printed in Archaeologia Cantiana, 51, 1939. For women’s diaries in the Stuart era, see Sara Mendelson, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, London: Methuen, 1987.
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CHARLES I
Our principal sources for Charles’s childhood include the surviving letters of the physicians who examined him and the memoirs of his foster-father Robert Carey, ed. G H. Powell, 1905. Fyvie’s reports: Letters and State Papers of James VI, ed. Adam Anderson, 1838, 46–7. The Fyvie/Seton household: George Seton, Memoirs of Alexander Seton, 1882. Atkins’s letters: 13/5/04 Hertfordshire Record office MS 65447, and SP 14/14/8. On James’s upbringing and tutoring, Alan Stewart, ‘Boys’ buttocks revisited: James VI and the myth of the sovereign schoolmaster’, in Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in early modern Europe, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002,131–47. Charles’s boyhood: Letter to King James from Dunfermline, County Record Office Hertford MS 65447; CSP Venetian 1623–3, 592, and Robert Carey, Memoirs, 1975, 25–6 and 66–9. On rickets, Audrey Eccles, ‘The dissemination of medical thought in the 17th century – a case of rickets in Westmorland’, Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, ns, 83, 1983, 101–5, and De Morbo Puerili Anglorum, 1645; Charles as not erect but repandous is from the hostile and anonymous Reign of King Charles, 1655, but it seems unlikely that even a hostile source would insist that a man seen by thousands was deformed if it were untrue; ‘A Declaration of the Diet and particular fare of King Charles the first, when duke of York’, Archaeologia, 1806, vol. 15, 1–12. Valerie Fildes; ‘“The English disease”: infantile rickets and scurvy in pre-industrial England’, in J. Cule and T. Turner, eds, Child care through the centuries, Cardiff, 1986, 121–34; The Childrens Disease of the English, by Daniel Whistler, 1620; Arnold Boate’s chapter on what he called Tabes pectora, and Gerard Boot, physician in ordinary to Charles I and brother of Boate (or Boot), Ireland’s Natural History, 1645; The Secret History of the Court of James 1, 1811; F. Osborne, Historical Memoirs of the Reigns of Elizabeth and of James, vol. 2; Anon, Reign of King Charles, 1655; Henry Cornwall is, A Briefe Life of Henry Prince of Wales, 1641; Anderson, Letters and State Papers James Sixth, 1838; Alex Macdonald, Letters to King James VI, Edinburgh, 183, xxxviii; BL MS Harl. 6986, 151; Simonds D’Ewes Autobiog; William Lilly; Philip Warwick; Carlton; Sherborn to DC, 31 May 1616; CSPD 1611–1618, 370; PRO SP 14/86/95, and 14/87/40, cit. Lockyer, Buckingham, 33–4; James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, ed. Joseph Jacobs, 1892,1,164; cf. Chamberlain, letter, II 32, Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1619–23, p. 4, Relations with Henry: among others CSPV (the Venetian ambassador) 1603–7, 739; BL MS Harl. 6986, 174. Buckingham: Roger Lockyer, Buckingham, the life and political career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628, 1981; Charles on the Isle of Wight: A royalist’s notebook: the commonplace book of Sir John Oglander, Kt., of Nunwell, transcribed and edited by Francis Bamford with an introduction by C. F. Aspinall-Oglander, London: Constable, 1936; The letters, speeches and proclamations of King Charles I, edited by Sir Charles Petrie, London: Cassell, 1935.
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