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

by Diane Purkiss

  JOHN HAMPDEN

  E. S. Cope and W. H. Coates eds, Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden Society, 4th ser., 19, 1977; The Short Parliament (1640) diary of Sir Thomas Aston, ed. J. D. Maltby, Camden Society, 4th ser., 35, 1988; JHL, 3–4 (1620–42); The journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of King Charles from London, ed. W. H. Coates, 1942; W. H. Coates, A. Steele Young and V. F. Snow (eds), The private journals of the Long Parliament, 3 vols, 1982–92; De jure majestatis, or, Political treatise of government (1628–30), and the letter-book of Sir John Eliot (1625–1632), ed. A. B. Grosart, 1882; C. Russell, ‘The ship-money judgments of Bramston and Davenport’, English Historical Review, 77, 1962, 312–18; State trials; R. P. Cust, The forced loan and English politics, 1626–1628, 1987; J. T. Cliffe, The puritan gentry: the great puritan families of early Stuart England, 1984.

  JOHN PYM

  A key early source for Pym’s parliamentary and administrative career is Wallace Notestein, Frances Helen Relf and Hartley Simpson, eds, Commons Debates, 1621, 4: A diary by John Pym; 7 vols, New Haven, CT and London, 1935. Many of Pym’s speeches survive in the form in which they were originally printed between 1641 and 1643, including his vital speeches on the Grand Remonstrance and the Remonstrance itself. On Pym’s career see The reign of King Pym, by J. H. Hexter, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, challenged by Morrill, John, ‘The unweariableness of Mr Pym: influence and eloquence in the Long Parliament’, in Susan Dwyer Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds, Political culture and cultural politics in early modern England: essays presented to David Underdown, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995, 19–54. Important discussions can also be found in Perez Zagorin, ‘The political beliefs of John Pym to 1629’, English Historical Review, 109, 1994, 867–90. Conrad Russell, ‘The Scottish party in English parliaments, 1640–1642’, Historical Research, 66, 1993, 35–52. W. H. Coates, V. F. Snow and A. S. Young, eds, Private journals of the Long Parliament, [1]: 3 January to 5 March 1642; [2]: 7 March to 1 June 1642; [3]: 2 June to 17 September 1642, 3+ vols, New Haven, CT and London, 1982–. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, 1981. Conrad Russell ‘The parliamentary career of John Pym, 1621–9’, in Peter Clark, Alan Gordon Rae Smith and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, The English Commonwealth 1547–1640: essays in politics and society presented to Joel Hurstfield, Leicester, 1979, 147–65, 248–53, and in the books listed in the section on the outbreak of hostilities. Keen to emphasize the role of the aristocracy rather than the Commons is J. S. A. Adamson, ‘Parliamentary management, men-of-business and the House of Lords, 1640–1649’, in A pillar of the constitution; the House of Lords in British politics, 1640–1784, ed. C. Jones, 1989, 21–50. Reactions to Pym’s death can be found in A narrative of the disease and death of the noble gentleman John Pym esquire, 1643; Threnodia: The churches lamentation for the good man his losse: delivered in a sermon to the Right Honourable the two Houses of Parliament, and the Reverend Assembly of Divines, at the funerall of that excellent man John Pym, Esquire, late a member of the Honourable House of Commons. Preached in the Abbey-Church of Westminster, by Stephen Marshall, B. D. Minister of Gods word at Finching-field in Essex.; Published by order of the House of Commons, 1644, and in Ian Gentles, ‘Political funerals during the English Revolution’, in Stephen Porter ed., London and the Civil War, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996, 205–24.

  ANTI-POPERY

  See also Iconoclasm, below

  Cornelius Burgess, The First Sermon, 40, 67, 68–9. Trust a Papist and Trust the Devil. For the Catholic side of the story, see R. Challoner, Memoirs of the Missionary Priests, ed. J. H. Poller, London, 1924, 378–491. The source for Hugh Green’s death is a letter by Elizabeth Willoughby, in Challoner, op. cit. 421–8. See also Edwin H. Burton and Thomas L. Williams, The Douay College Diaries 1598–1654, II, 437, 477, and Joseph Gillow, Literary and Biographical History of the English Catholics, III, 18–23.

  On anti-Catholic panics Fran Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, gender, and seventeenth-century print culture, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, and Peter Lake, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and players in post-Reformation England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002; R. Clifton, ‘The popular fear of Catholicism during the English Civil War’, Past & Present, 52, p. 29; Morrill, in Public duty and private conscience, ed. D. Woolf, 1993. Iconoclasm vs Art and drama, ed. A E. Nicholas and C. Davidson, 1989. The Month, 175, 1941, 348–57; M. J. Havran, The Catholics in Caroline England, 1962. Andrew J. Hopper, ‘“The popish army of the north”: Anti-Catholicism and Parliamentarian allegiance in civil war Yorkshire, 1642–46’, Recusant History, 25:1, 2000, 12–28. Marotti, Arthur F., ‘Southwell’s remains: Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in early modern England’, in Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti, eds, Texts and cultural change in early modern England, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, 37–65; Alexandra Walsham, ‘“The fatall vesper”: providentialism and anti-Popery in late Jacobean London’, Past & Present, 144, 1994, 36–87; Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Chapel Hill, NC, 1983; Hibbard, in Princes, Patronage and Nobility, 1991. The description of Henrietta’s pilgrimage to Tyburn is from John Pory’s letter to Joseph Mead on 1 July 1626, in Thomas Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, 1, 119–23; the description of her chapel is from the memoirs of Cyprien de Ganache, 432–3.

  ANNA TRAPNEL

  On Poplar see among others Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs: the parish of All Saints, ed. Stephen Porter, Athlone, 1994. On Stepney see Memorials of Stepney parish, the vestry minutes from 1579 to 1662, with an intr. and notes, ed. by G. W. Hill and W. H. Frere. I am grateful to Richard Channon, of the Shipwrights Company, for a helpful e-mail on shipbuilding and shipwrights. The probate inventory is Guildhall MS 9174/4 Probate inventory for Daniel Jeames, Chaundler, Middlesex, 1663. Primary sources on Trapnel include A. Trapnel, The cry of a stone, or, A relation of something spoken in Whitehall, 1654; A. Trapnel, A legacy for saints, 1654; Anna Trapnel’s ‘Report and plea, or, A narrative of her journey from London into Cornwall,’ 1654; A. Trapnel, A voice for the king of saints and nations, 1658; A. Trapnel, ‘Poetical addresses and discourses’, Bodleian, Oxford, MS Rawl. A. 21, 325. While there has been a flurry of work on Trapnel’s writings, there have been few biographical discoveries. The best accounts are James Holstun, Ehud’s dagger: class struggle and the English Revolution, London: Verso, 2000 and Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: women prophets in late medieval and early modern England, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. On the rise of the radical sects, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. On women’s role in the radical sects see Rachel Trubowitz, ‘Female preachers and male wives: gender and authority in civil war England’, in James Holstun, ed., Pamphlet wars: prose in the English revolution, 1992, 112–33; M. Claire Cross, ‘“He-goats before the flocks”: a note on the part played by women in the founding of some Civil War churches’, in Popular belief and practice (Studies in Church History, 8), eds G. J. Cuming and D. Baker, Cambridge, 1972, 195–202; and Patricia Crawford, ‘Historians, women and the civil war sects 1640–1660’, Parergon, ns, 6, 1988, 19–32. On anorexia Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, London: HarperCollins, 1998 and on eating and fasting as protest Maud Ellman, The hunger artists: starving, writing & imprisonment, London: Virago, 1993.

  THE BISHOPS’ WARS, THE THREE KINGDOMS, AND MONTROSE

  The outbreak of the conflict in Scotland has become perhaps the hottest topic in Civil War studies. Indispensable are The Scottish National Covenant in its British context, ed. John Morrill, Edinburgh, 1990, 134–54, and David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44: the triumph of the Covenanters, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973. A recent survey is David A. Scott, Politics and war in the three Stuart kingdoms, 1637–49 (British History in Perspective), Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
, 2004.

  On Montrose there has been a large, patriotic and sometimes romantic literature. Sources include Mark Napier, Memoirs of the marquis Montrose and his times, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 1856; Robert de Salmonet Menteth, The History of the Troubles of Great Britain, containing a particular account of the most remarkable passages in Scotland from 1633 to 1650, with an exact relation of the wars carried on … by the Marquis of Montrose. Written in French by R. Mentet. To which is added, the true causes … which contributed to the Restoration of King Charles II. Written in French by D. Riordan de Musery. Translated into English by Capt. J. Ogilvie, L.P., 1735; George Wishart, Later Bishop of Edinburgh, The memoirs of James, marquis of Montrose, 1639–50, Amsterdam, 1647. Biographies include Wedgwood, Cicely Veronica, Montrose, new edn, Stroud: Sutton, 1995; E. J. Cowan, Montrose. For Covenant and King, 1977; McNeill, W. A., Montrose before 1700: from original documents (Abertay Historical Society publications, 8), Dundee, 1961, and for fans of the legend, John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, ‘Montrose and leadership’, in Men and deeds, 1935. For the poetry, Civil warrior: the extraordinary life and complete poetical works of James Graham, First Marquis of Montrose, warrior and poet, 1612–1650; edited with a commentary by Robin Bell, Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2002; helpful military histories include Stuart Reid, The campaigns of Montrose: a military history of the civil war in Scotland, 1639–1646, Edinburgh, 1990, and Auldearn, 1645: the Marquis of Montrose’s Scottish campaign, Oxford: Osprey, 2003.

  THE ULSTER RISING AND IRELAND, AND ANTI-PAPIST PANICS IN ENGLAND

  There is an enormous pamphlet and diary literature on the rising. HMC Seventh report Pt 1 appendix, London, 1879, Verney MSS, 435–7; Richard Love, The Watchmans watchword, 1642; The Earl of Straffords Ghost, 1644; Baxter, Reliquae Baxterianae, p. 46; The autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, 1875. Durham; Marie Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, 1884, I, p. 152; deposition dated 25 May 1653; K. M. Noonan, ‘“The cruell pressure of an enraged barbarous people”: Irish and English identity in seventeenth-century policy and propaganda’, Historical Journal, XLI, 1998; Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion, 36:2, 2004, 223–55; K. J. Lindley, ‘The impact of the 1641 rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, XVIII, 1972, 143–76; N. Canny, ‘Ireland in the first British empire’, in Strangers within the realm: cultural margins of the first British empire, ed. B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan, Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1991, 58–9; on the pamphlets the key text is E. H. Shagan, ‘Constructing discord: ideology, propaganda and English responses to the Irish rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies, XXXVI, 1997, 4–34; N. Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660, 1987.

  On the anti-papist panics in England: A True Relation of the putting to death one Master Boys, a citizen of London, at Redding, by … Colonell Aston … Of the great danger the Protestant Religion is in, if this Army of Papists grow to a great body, etc, 1642; Henry Sawyer on the Catholic menace, CSPD 1633–4, p. 2; ‘Kneeling to the cross on the shilling’, Coke MS 58, 9 July 1638, Sharpe, p. 844; A damnable treason, by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore: wrapt up in a letter, and sent to Mr. Pym: wherein is discovered a divellish, and unchristian plot against the High Court of Parliament, October 25, 1641. 1641. Many others could be cited; see Anti-popery above.

  THE OUTBREAK OF WAR IN ENGLAND

  This is perhaps the most bloodstained historiographical arena because the answer to the question ‘what caused the war?’ is taken to bear directly on the politically charged question of what the war was about. This book’s goal is to separate those questions; the war’s cause was not always visible to the majority of those who fought and suffered in it. Ann Hughes, The causes of the English Civil War, Basing-stoke: Macmillan, 1991, tries to reconcile the competing claims of leftist treatments such as Society and Puritanism in pre-Revolutionary England, by Christopher Hill, London: Secker & Warburg, 1964, and revisionist accounts such as The revolt of the provinces: conservatives and radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650, by J. S. Morrill, London: Longman, 1980. Most detailed and still most satisfying is The Outbreak of the English Civil War, by Anthony Fletcher, New York: New York University Press, 1981. Also on the outbreak is The English people and the English revolution, by Brian Manning, with a new introduction, 2nd edn, London: Bookmarks, 1991, whose ideas have been challenged by revisionists. Regional studies of the war and the choosing of sides include John Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–60: County Government and Society during the English Revolution, Oxford, 1974; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660, Cambridge, 1987; John Morrill, The nature of the English revolution, London: Longman, 1993,1–29; Ronald Hutton, The royalist war effort, 1642–1646, 1981; Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English civil war, Cambridge, 1974; B. G. Blackwood, The Lancashire gentry and the great rebellion, Manchester, 1978; Roy Sherwood, Civil strife in the Midlands, 1642–51, 1974.

  THE FIGHTING

  Civil War battles are recorded by many participants: I have used especially the memoirs of Richard Atkyns and John Gwynne, printed as The Civil War: Richard Atkyns, edited by Peter Young, and John Gwyn edited by Norman Tucker, Hamden, CT.: Archon Books, 1968; the memoirs of James Duke of York, The memoirs of James II: his campaigns as Duke of York, 1652–1660, ed. A. Lytton Sells, Bloomington, Indiana; 1962; Jacob Astley in R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Three generations: based on letters of the Astley family during the civil war, 1992; Henry Foster, A true and exact relation of the marching of the trained bands of the city of London, 1643, repr. in James Washbourne, Bibliotheca Gloucesterinsis, Gloucester, 1828, I 253–71; Richard Symonds’s diary of the marches of the royal army, BL MS Harleian 991 edited by Ian Roy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Henry Slingsby, The diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, of Scriven, Bart: Now first published entire from the ms. A reprint of Sir Henry Slingsby’s trial, his rare tract, ‘A father’s legacy’ written in the Tower immediately before his death, and extracts from family correspondence and papers, with notices, and a genealogical memoir. By the Rev. Daniel Parsons … London: Longman; 1836. Nehemiah Wharton, ‘Letters of a subaltern officer’; ed. Sir H. Ellis, Archaeologia, 35, 1853, 310–34. A relation of the rare exploits of the London Souldiers, 1642. Peachey, Stuart ed., The Edgehill campaign and the letters of Nehemiah Wharton, Leigh-on-Sea, 1989; not all such accounts can be attributed to a named soldier: a newsbook telling of Marston Moor does not identify its source: W. H. A relation of the good successe of the Parliaments forces under … Generall Lesly, the Earl of Manchester, and the Lord Fairfax, against the forces commanded by Prince Rupert and the Earl of Newcastle, on Hesham-Moore … July 2. 1644. Sent by way of letter from a captain there present, to a friend in London, [Cambridge] 1644; Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Esq; Lieutenant General of the Horse, Commander in Chief of the forces in Ireland, one of the Council of State, and a member of the Parliament which began on November 3, 1640.: In two volumes Switzerland, printed at Vivay in the canton of Bern, [s.n.], 1699. I have also read memoirs on which I have chosen not to draw in detail: J. Lister, A Genuine Account of the Taking of Bradford, A Description of the Memorable Sieges and Battles in the North of England … during the Civil War, ed. J. Drake (Bolton, 1785), 87–108; S. Porter, ‘The Biography of a Parliamentarian Soldier’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, CVIII, 1990, 131–4; and J. Priestly, ‘Some Memoirs Concerning the Family of the Priestlys’, Surtees Society, LXXVII, 1883, 18–19, 23, 26–7. Contemporary military textbooks are useful too: Richard Elton’s The compleat body of the art military … for the foot, London, 1650, is especially useful for the ordinary soldier. For accounts of Lostwithiel, see Devon and Cornwall.

  The first historian to make memoirs and experience the focus is Charles Carlton, Going to the wars: the experience of the British civil wars, 1638–1651, London: Routledge, 1992; more straightforward military history
is provided clearly and vividly by Peter Young and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War: a military history of the three civil wars, 1642–1651, London: Eyre Methuen, 1974, and Trevor Royle, Civil War: the wars of the three kingdoms 1638–1660, London: Little, Brown, 2004.

  On Edgehill, Peter Young, Edgehill 1642: the campaign and the battle, Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1967, reprints most of the key sources. On Marston Moor see Peter Young, Marston Moor, 1644: the campaign and the battle, Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1998, and Austin Woolrych, Battles of the English Civil War: Marston Moor, Naseby, Preston, London: B. T. Batsford, 1961. The battlefield ghosts of Edgehill are described in ‘The Diary of John Greene 1635–59’, ed. E. M. Symonds, English Historical Review, 43, 1928, p. 391, and in The New Yeares Wonder, p. 5. Soldiers suffering in the aftermath of battle are described in many surviving petitions, such as those of the Kentishman from Newbury fight in Kent County Record Office Q/Sb2/66.