Verney, Lady Margaret, 164–5
Verney, Mary, Lady (Sir Ralph’s wife), 12, 301, 390–2, 394, 567
Verney, Peg (Mary’s daughter), 391–2
Verney, Pen, 302
Verney, Sir Ralph: and son’s rickets, 12—13; and war with Scots, 84; Parliamentarian commitment, 164–6; and father’s death, 180–1; and death of John Denton, 304; aunt’s lament at eating off pewter, 350; children, 390, 392; marriage to Mary, 394; resettles in Buckinghamshire, 567
Verney, Ralph (Mary’s son), 391
Verney, Susan, 304
Verney, Thomas, 304
Villiers, Lord Francis, 536–7
Virginia (North America), 300
Voyle, William, 150
Vyvian, Richard, 158
Wakeham, John, Abbot of Tewkesbury, 355
Waldegrave, Edward, 363
Wales: divisions in, 161, 164; English view of, 163; Royalist support in, 164
Walker, Sir Edward, 369
Waller, Edmund, 66, 124, 271
Waller, Sir William: Ned Harley joins, 151, 219; Bevil Grenville writes to, 157; defeats Herbert at Gloucester, 216; friendship with Bevis Grenville, 231; Cromwell serves under, 325; Hopton defeats in west, 326; on Cromwell’s way with words, 339; Sir Richard Grenville serves under, 358; fails to reinforce Essex in west, 359, 363; at second battle of Newbury, 370; army disperses, 416—17; describes Cromwell, 423; in Isabella Twysden’s diary, 432
Wallington, Nehemiah: interests, 9; listens to preachers, 9, 283–4; brother killed, no; on rebellion in Ireland, 112; on London’s godliness, 128; on dispute at Tower of London, 130; motives in war, 142, 161, 284; religious beliefs, 162, 532; on Prynne, 200; iconoclasm, 203, 205; collects souvenirs, 204; influenced by propaganda, 284–5; as working man, 284; on outrages on women, 291; rejoices over Marston Moor victory, 337; on Anabaptist iconoclasm, 361; on execution of Laud, 374; on drunkards, 375; on woman spy in Oxford, 410; extremism, 532; subsequent career and death, 568
Walton, Isaak, 519
Walton, Valentine, 325, 338–9
Walwyn, William, 477, 504–5, 516–17; The English Souldiers Standard (attrib.), 505
Wanderford, Sir Christopher, 109
Warberton, Anne, 379
Warburton, William, Bishop of Gloucester, 124
Ward, James, 339
Ward, Father William, 139
Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, 389, 441
Ware, Hertfordshire see Corkbush Field
Warner, John, 467
Warner, Walter, 51
Warren, Colonel William: at Drogheda, 563
Warwick, Sir Philip, 14, 16–17, 123, 334, 547
Warwick, Robert Rich, 1st Earl of, 131–4
Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of, 82, 104, 191–2
Washington, George, 2
Washnage, Cornet, 232
Waterton, John, 173
Watson, Leonard, 332
weapons, 418–19
Webb, John, 286
Webb, Colonel William, 570
Weedon, Thomas, 188
Weldon, Colonel Ralph, 438–9
Wellingborough, 503–4
Welsh, Sir Robert, 159, 229
Western Risings (1549), 159–60
Westminster Assembly, 279
Wexford, Ireland, 564
Whalley, Edward: at Edgehill, 176; leads Ironsides, 325; quality of soldiers, 417–18; at Naseby, 427, 429; guards Charles in custody, 459; and army mutiny, 499
Wharton, Sergeant Nehemiah, 185–90, 196, 256, 283, 346
Whately, William, 148
Wheeler, Mrs (Charles’s laundress), 544
Whitaker, William: Answer to the Ten Reasons of Edmund Campion the Jesuit, 307
White, Major Francis, 502
White, William, 267
Whitecoats, 333–5
Whitehall Palace: as royal residence, 57; Charles leaves for Hampton Court, 126–7; abandoned and plundered, 278–9; see also Banqueting House
Whitelocke, Bulstrode: on Charles’s attempted arrest of Parliamentary enemies, 123; on London trained bands, 193; on Lord Falkland’s death, 254; on Skippon’s surrender at Lostwithiel, 367; on Fairfax’s independence of thought, 423; on Ireton, 489
Whorwood, Brome, 455
Whorwood, Lady Jane (‘Helen’), 10, 382, 384, 455, 458–60, 544–5, 549
Wight, Isle of: Charles flees to, 460–1, 498
Wight, Sarah, 467, 471
Wigmore church, Herefordshire, 359
Wigmore, Mr (of Herefordshire), 217
Wild, George, 267–8
Wildman, John, 491–2, 496
Wilkinson, John, 148
William, Prince of Orange, 55, 248
Williams, Jane, 519
Williams, John, Bishop of Lincoln (later Archbishop of York), 21
Willingham, George, 185–6
Willoughby, Elizabeth, 137–8
Wilsnack, 204
Wilson, Arthur, 133
Wiltshire: conditions in, 379; Clubmen, 437; army mutineers, 501
Wimbledon House, 58
Winceby, Norfolk, 208, 326
Winchester, Hampshire, 205–6
Winchester, John Paulet, 5th Marquess of, 84
Windebank, Sir Francis, 95, 106, 273
Windsor, Marchioness of, 311
Winstanley, Gerrard: account of war, 3; advocates self-sufficiency, 351; beliefs as Digger leader, 511–12, 517–19, 521–7; champions the poor, 517–18; background and career, 519; religious conversion, 520; fined, 523; works for Lady Eleanor Davies at Pirton, 528–9, 531; later life, 531, 567; The Law of Freedom, 531
Winstanley, Susan (née King; Gerrard’s first wife), 519–20, 531
Wiseman, Sir Richard, 127, 414–15, 568; Of Wounds, 412
witches and witchcraft: belief in, 375–9; identification and persecution for, 379–82, 384–8
Wither, George, 249, 308, 368
Wolcott, Hugh, 517
Wolley, Benjamin, 349
Wolley, Hannah, 347–50, 355–6, 566; The Cook’s Guide, 349; The Gentlewoman’s Companion, 350; The Ladies Directory, 349
women: and childbirth, 143–4; Anthony à Wood lists pamphlets on, 277; peace petition (1643), 280–1, 283; carry messages to and from London, 282–3; violated, 290–1, 507, 536; cookbooks and household management, 347–51; accused of witchcraft, 380–2; accompany Royalist army, 430; petition for pensions after war, 441, 507; preaching and prophesying, 467–9; Levellers’ view of, 506, 509; claim equal rights, 507–8; political activism, 507; wartime activities, 507–8; Royalist view of rights, 509; in Essex riots, 512–13; and Diggers, 524; in siege of Colchester, 536
Wood, Anthony à 277–8, 455, 504
Wood, Sir Henry, 268
Woodcroft House, 546
Woodforde, Robert, 102
Woodhouse, Sir Michael, 298
woodland commons: exploited by poor, 514
Woodward, Ezekiel: Christmas Day the Old Heathen’s Feasting Day, 241
Worcester, 188–9
Worcestershire, 153
wounds, 411–14
Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Ely, 46
Wroth, Lady Ann, 348–9
Wroth, Sir Henry, 349
Wynn, Cadwaladr, 163
Wynn, John, 163
Wynne, Sir Richard, 192
Yaxley, Huntingdonshire, 360
Yearaes, W.F.: And when did you last see your father? (painting), 291–2
Yonge, Walter, 281
York: Doomsday pageant, 32; Rupert ordered to relieve, 328–9; Royalists flee to after battle, 336; surrenders to Parliamentarians, 336; houses demolished, 441; see also Marston Moor
Yorkshire, 296–7
Young, Thomas, 310
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …
Interview
Q & A with Diane Purkiss
Do you find that being from another country gives you a helpful critical distance when studying English history?
Yes, because I didn’t do English history at school, so I don’t have the same assumptions as ever
yone else. And yet it’s also true that because I’ve learnt a lot of it as an adult through recognizing horrible gaps in my knowledge, I’ve approached it more intensely than most fourteen-year-olds, which means I’m actually less distant and more passionate.
Your approach to the period focuses on the people, those that might otherwise be overlooked, rather than the figureheads. If you were to pick a favourite character that has come out of your research, who would that be and why?
I can’t pick one. I love them all – Charles and Cromwell both, for example. But since I must choose a few, I shall nominate Sergeant Henry Foster, who stoically and calmly reports on the terror of battle; he has all the virtues of good sense and lack of false pride I admire in British soldiers to this day. Then I choose Richard Wiseman, army surgeon, doing the best he can with an impossible lack of knowledge, but with endless curiosity and interest, and Brilliana Harley, who faces her worst nightmare with nothing but love and goodness.
You say Milton’s Paradise Lost is arguably among the war’s most enduring consequences. Does its significance become greater because it was written during a time that will be remembered for the destruction of so much – architecture, religious art and writing by the iconoclasts?
I wouldn’t swap it for the Rubens crucifixion that was destroyed, much as I love Rubens. Sometimes destruction is the price we pay for artistic breakthroughs. Milton’s poetry is unimaginable without the vehement outburst of new ideas that the Civil War brought with it, and all new ideas involve discarding old ones, either violently, or by gentle loss of interest (which is how most things get destroyed).
In the Prologue you state that you’re keen to create a formal, respectful relationship between reader and author. When and why do you think this has been lost?
In his book The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett argues that we have all lost the formal manners that make urban life possible, codes that let us know what to expect from strangers, and help us to inhabit public spaces without bothering other people. I think this has extended to authorship, which is often disfigured by mannerless harangues like Jonathan Franzen’s when he found himself on Oprah’s to-read list. I think as authors have become salespeople, they have been tempted to see the public as salespeople do, as dupes and fools. But as an author I’ve found the public to be intelligent, curious, and well-informed. I think it a compliment if anyone picks up my book and looks through it; I’ve occupied five minutes of that person’s life. If a reader is willing to spend time with my book, take it into his or her house, then that requires a reciprocal courtesy on my part, a thank you, a willingness to remove my hat.
Is there a particular place that brings alive the history of the English Civil War for you?
I deplore the neglect of Civil War battlefields. I’d really like to see Naseby commemorated as Bosworth is; it’s incomparably more significant. Bosworth was just a change of dynasty. Naseby changed the world men and women lived in. That said, my favourite Civil War place is the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Its frozen beauty and formality exemplifies everything that was wrong and right about Charles and Henrietta. You can see the Isle of Dogs from there, and the former East India dockyards, but the palace is cut off from them, as if it were on the moon.
The Royalists’ failure to win over London was a key factor in their eventual defeat, and you attribute part of that failure to losing control of their image in London. Does the English Civil War offer an example of the importance of propaganda and control of the media as a weapon for any army?
Absolutely. The Civil War is the very first war in which propaganda is a huge factor; atrocity stories about babies spitted on pikes in Ulster in 1641 are one of its primary causes. The Royalists do eventually learn how to exploit the press, which is a key cause of the Restoration, but Parliament learns it first. But all this begins before the war; the whole powder trail of antipopery which ignites and explodes in 1642 is laid many years before in anti-papist pamphlets; a steady drip-drip of stories which forms opinions.
You have made a point of seeking out primary materials – letters, diaries and contemporary newsbooks – which flourished in this era. Do you think historians of the future will use blogs in the same way?
I hope and bet they will. Blogs about 7/7, for instance, are in circulation in recapitulations of that event. Emails and text messages too are histories of the future, and so are mobile phone snapshots and webcams, and interactive TV responses. The mobile phone messages left by the passengers on United 93 are already the stuff of history. But there are also still letters.
Do you write with your students or your peers foremost in your mind?
Neither. My imagined reader is neither a student nor a historian in the academy, but someone who has always wanted to know more about a subject and suddenly feels curious, or someone outside the academy whose passion is Civil War history. The general reader, in fact. I know from my postbag that general readers still exist.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a book on food in British history; it tries to restore food history to the landscape but also to take it into the mainstream and show how what we eat as a people affects everything else we do. I’m also working on a book about the dissolution of the monasteries.
LIFE at a Glance
BORN
* * *
Sydney, Australia
EDUCATED
* * *
University of Queensland (BA Hons) and Merton College, Oxford (DPhil)
LIVES
* * *
Oxford
CAREER TO DATE
* * *
Was Professor of English at Exeter University until 2000 and is currently Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford
FAMILY
* * *
Married to a historian who fled to business analysis. Has two children, Michael, 12, and Hermione, 7
A Writing Life
When do you write?
Mornings. Most of the ECW was written between 5 am and 9, before my family drags itself out of bed.
Where do you write?
I write history in my study at home. I write fiction just about anywhere; in the car on the school run’s longueurs, for example.
Why do you write?
I have stories I badly want to tell, stories about the past.
Pen or computer?
History by computer. I couldn’t do it any other way; I’m a complete cyborg. And I loathe laptops. I had one and hated its dinky keys. Fiction in a notebook, with a fountain pen.
Silence or music?
I use music to change between projects. The ECW was triggered by a little jig called ‘The Running Set’, and a piece for fiction I’m working on by Vaughan Williams’ ‘Norfolk Rhapsody’. But they have to be pieces I know so well that I’m almost deaf to them, and when they end I don’t replay them.
How do you start a book?
In the middle. The writing process on the EC W started with the probate inventory that appears in the chapter on Anna Trapnel.
And finish?
With reluctance. Like most people I find it hard to stop tinkering. It’s a bereavement when you stop writing something that has occupied four hours of waking life every single day for three years.
Who reads your work before your publishe rlagent?
My husband, who is a marvellous, supportive, and intelligent critic.
Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?
I hate talking about what I’m writing before I get it down in draft. It always spoils the freshness of it.
Which living writer do you most admire?
In literature, Geoffrey Hill and Tobias Wolff. In history, no single person; I admire the unsung academics who ferret out new and magnificent stories from mouldy manuscripts while staying in flea-bitten hotels on salaries lower than the head waiter’s.
What or who inspires you?
The brave, wise people of England’s past and present. They don’t know their own strength.
> Which book do you wish you had written?
Ferdinand Braudel’s The Mediterranean.
If you weren’t a writer what would you do?
I’d be a village baker. Baking is not unlike writing; it’s all about patience and honesty.
What’s your guilty reading pleasure?
Cookbooks of every kind.
Top Ten Historical Novels
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Toilers in the Sea
Victor Hugo
Notre Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
A Dead Man in Deptford
Anthony Burgess
Vanity Fair
William Thackeray
Middlemarch
George Eliot
The Persian Boy
Mary Renault
Beloved
Toni Morrison
About the book
Breaking the silence: the people of England speak
by Diane Purkiss
ONE FINE SEPTEMBER a few years ago, my family and I spent a weekend fruitlessly hunting for the Civil War battlefields at Edgehill and Naseby. At the site of Naseby fight, where thousands died, a busy road tears by, indifferent lorries filling the air with brusque modernity. At Edgehill, a nearby pub-garden houses a modest panel sketchily explaining what happened. Only Marston Moor has a nineteenth-century monumental pillar and a few plastic signs. Around the pillar, the inscrutable fields stretch blandly away on every side. There are re-enactments, but they do not always command an audience.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 78