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

by Diane Purkiss

  Yet it is not that Britain cannot ‘do’ battlefields. Travel down the road to Leicestershire and you will find a very elaborate recreation dating from 1974 of the last battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth, in which King Richard III died shouting for a horse. Hastings is equally well commemorated. Both are diligently billed as ‘The Most Important Battles in English History’. Yet the far more important Civil War battlefields lie hushed, their stories hidden under roads and crops. The other displays dispose of the idea that the Civil War battles are not commemorated because they are too long ago, or because they were a civil war. Something deeper is at work, a reluctance to acknowledge a difficult past, a dread of re igniting religious hatred.

  But above all, it was nobody’s business. To commemorate a war, someone has to want to keep its memory alive. In the English Civil War, people’s sense of what the war was about changed radically during the war itself. For the king’s opponents, what had once been a defence of Protestantism and Parliament as its surest safeguard became a critique of the king who had failed to protect true religion – but only for some. For the king’s defenders, an attempt to mop up a rebellion by the usual suspects became a defence of traditional rural life, parties, ceremonial. The idea that the war was about Parliament was immeasurably compromised by Pride’s Purge. After that, the king’s opponents were no longer sure of what they were about. The king’s supporters, on the other hand, had no real reason to run about erecting monuments to battles lost to rebels. So England has turned its back on its most influential war, which is barely even taught in schools.

  It was thus not untypical that at nineteen I came to the English Civil War from a position of blank ignorance. My interest arose through John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. In those days at the University of Queensland, everyone had to spend a semester studying it, and what fascinated me was that it isn’t solely about Adam and Eve; there’s also a whole book about war in heaven, in which angels and archangels are seen fighting – very oddly – with cannon. I had no idea what the context might be, but set out to discover it, which led me to Christopher Hill’s extraordinarily readable and exciting books on the Civil War. Of course I now think they contain errors, but I also think this is less important than their overall message. Hill made me want to know more, and I began searching for soldiers’ own accounts of the battles. I’d been reading Australian soldiers’ letters from Gallipoli, and it struck me that there might be eyewitness accounts of the conflicts of the seventeenth century. I was delighted to find that I was right, and dozens of soldiers’ memoirs and diaries and letters of the Civil War passed through my hands. Among many, one stood out: a man called Sergeant Henry Foster, who told of the horror of the Battle of Newbury, bombarded by blood and brains as the cannon fired on the men ahead of him, and I realised that this was a war as terrible as the Somme, a war with patient footsoldiers as well as dashing commanders. I began wondering, too, about the people who received letters like Foster’s: what was it like for wives and mothers? Again, I found a wealth of material, known to scholars but not to the general public. Seventeenth-century newspapers, pamphlets and court records added further depth to what I was reading. I began to wonder about why the stories of how people lived and suffered in this war were so little known. I began to long for the chance to tell them. I bored people at parties with my discoveries, and learned that my own ignorance was not a unique plight. Even professional historians often seemed to know little of what I was finding out.

  There was another factor. I came to learn about this war not only as an ignoramus, but as an immigrant to England. People from the Commonwealth aren’t encouraged to think of themselves as immigrants, but some of us share the classic immigrant experience of wondering why those born here devalue the very things that made us émigrés choose to spend our lives here. I hugely value the richness of the past in England; the first house I owned here was older than white settlement of my country of origin. Everything in Australia is either an unimaginably old part of the Dreaming, or very recent, and despite their curiosity, whites are still not usually part of the former. Here in England, the storied past is still part of the bones of the living, contiguous with them. It’s straightforward and linear, without the corkscrewing turns of the colonial experience. But in an odd way, the colonial experience is what made me side strongly with the silenced people of this terrible, forgotten war; I know all about what it is not to be heard in your own country.

  In my immigrant way, my studies of the English Civil War have led me to think the British devalue what they have done for the world. Sometimes people write and speak as if the only Britons to fight for freedom were the soldiers of the Second World War. But those gallant soldiers were the lineal descendants of the people’s disciplined, brave, meritocratic New Model Army; just as merchant sailors debated politics eagerly before the momentous 1945 election, so the men of the New Model sat around campfires singing psalms and finding that any human being has the right to justice and to a say in government. If those ideas had not been developed then, they could not have been bequeathed to the American revolutionaries, or in turn to the French revolutionaries and to democrats throughout Europe. Britons today spend a lot of history lessons hanging their heads in shame over the crimes of the empire, and that is not erroneous, but an occasional break for rejoicing at Britain’s role in laying the intellectual foundations of modern democracy might be in order, even if they were not what the war was ‘about’ for those who initiated it or for all of those who fought in it. But if it had not been for that war, perhaps no one would have said or thought that the poorest he had a life to live, as much as the greatest he.

  It was when writing up the fruits of all these years of reading that I came to see how the English Civil War also has some grim and stark lessons to teach us about the way ideals of freedom can be oddly entangled with religious fanaticism. We look at what the press calls ‘Islamic extremists’ with horrified fascination. We look in exactly the same way at America’s ‘red-staters’ who believe in the coming Endtimes, the second Coming of Christ, the end of the world – and the Roman Catholic Church as the Beast of Revelations. (How that would rejoice godly Commons MP John Pym’s heart!) Our kindly liberal hearts shrink from all that sectarianism with delicate shudders. So perhaps now is a good moment to remember that the kindly liberalism on which we pride ourselves is an accidental byproduct of the religious fanaticism of the none-too-distant past.

  Men like John Pym would have been less astonished, sharing as they did the fund-amentalist idea that God has a very narrow set of requirements for the goals of human history. The fierce light of eternity, we learn, can silence normal human compassion and urge that restraint be hurled aside as an impediment. The New Model Army began as, and also remained, God’s foot soldiers; it was their experience of removing bishops and bells and seizing ecclesiastical power that made them aware that they could have a voice in how the state too was run. Oddly, this discovery led to the abandonment of religious hatred. The coming of democratic thinking (not democracy itself) seemed to encourage talk of rights rather than Right.

  As I write, it seems more and more urgent to communicate to the British public the deeds and sufferings of their forebears, great and ordinary. There is a risk that history is shrinking again to the lives of a very few members of the royal household. We have a hundred books on Elizabeth I, but none about her dressmaker, or about those who baked her bread. We need to know about the Elizabeths, the Charleses, but also about those who lived under their rule. Otherwise the rulers can hardly matter. If we listen to the siren songs of those revisionists who want to reduce the deaths of over half a million people to a senseless squabble between nobles, we will miss the richness and complexity of this war. Doubtless it could seem that way to some of the nobles themselves. The Earl of Essex may have seen himself as a traditional champion of noble rights, but his opinions didn’t affect his shivering army trapped among furious Cornishmen, and abandoned by the general himself. Essex’s
view was alien to Brilliana Harley, for whom it was a war of religious principle that became a fight to keep her home and her household safe. Brilliana’s view was similarly alien to Anna Trapnel, for whom it was the rising of the saints. Her view was not shared by Richard Symonds, for whom the war was a matter of loyalty that afforded an opportunity to visit churches and note their architecture, a kind of British Grand Tour. Symonds’s preoccupations were not only odd but dangerous for a man like Nehemiah Wharton, for whom the enemy was church statues, pictures, and altars and not the Royalists, and for whom war offered the chance to break, burn – and steal – cultural treasures to which he had had little access as a humble apprentice. Wharton probably found that the war meant death. As it did for so many. But death should not mean silence. It has been my aim to break that silence.

  Read on

  If You Loved This, You Might Like …

  Paradise Lost

  John Milton

  The finest artistic fruit of the war. Like a Bach fugue – waves of angelic, sombre sound.

  History of England

  Thomas Babington Macaulay

  Great storytelling history.

  Introduction to Cromwell’s letters and speeches

  Thomas Carlyle

  Magnificent, compelling characterization.

  The World Turned UpsideDown: Radical ideas during the English Revolution

  Christopher Hill

  Possibly mistaken, but genuinely interested in the frustrations of the ordinary man and woman.

  Going to the wars: The experience of the British Civil Wars

  Charles Carlton

  The first historian to make memoirs and people’s experiences the focus.

  Find Out More

  www.englUhheritage.com

  Find out more about visiting Civil War sites including Pendennis Castle.

  www.nationaltrust.org.uk

  Information on many Civil War sites including Corfe Castle, and also details of various re-enactments of Civil War events.

  www.english-civil-war-society.org

  A members’ society website with details of re-enactments and a discussion forum.

  www.thesealedknot.co.uk

  A society set up in 1968 to commemorate and bring alive the history of the English Civil War.

  The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. WC2N 5DN

  www. nationalgallery.org

  Here you can see the equestrian portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck, and paintings by Rubens presented to Charles I that have survived. Also, interpretations of Civil War events by later artists.

  National Maritime Museum, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF

  http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.160

  Find out more about the beautiful Queen’s House in Greenwich which is now part of the National Maritime Museum.

  The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ER

  http://www.hrp.org.uk/webcode/banquet_home.asp

  A potted history and advice on planning a visit to this historic palace where Charles I commissioned Rubens’s ceiling paintings. He was later beheaded outside.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all those who have helped me with this project: above all Catherine Clarke and Arabella Pike, for their faith in it, and also Richard Betts, Kate Hyde, Annabel Wright, Helen Ellis, Douglas Matthews, my wonderful Civil War colleagues at Oxford David Norbrook and Sharon Achinstein, without whom I might have lost courage altogether, innumerable other academics, especially Nigel Smith, Elizabeth Clarke, Kevin Sharpe, Lloyd Bowen, Garthine Walker, Ian Archer, and Jayne Archer; equally innumerable archivists and librarians, especially at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and above all my family, who never seemed to tire of being dragged to Civil War battle sites in the rain. My parents have bravely supported all my own unconventionalities and rebellions. Finally, I acknowledge the support of everyone who wrote on this great event in the past, from participants to modern historians. It is invidious to single out a few names from so great a roll call of historians, but I would particularly like to mention Samuel Gardiner, master of us all, Christopher Hill, wild and inspiring enthusiast, and the great postrevisionists Ann Hughes, Laura Gowing, Garthine Walker, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake.

  I wrote this book to do justice to the gallant human beings who lived through these terrible years. G. K. Chesterton once said that the people of England have never spoken yet. In fact, from king to beggar they have done so many times, and never more loudly or more clearly than in these broken years of civil war, division and grief. This book is for them.

  About the Author

  Diane Purkiss is fellow and tutor at Keble College, Oxford. She was formerly Professor of English at Exeter University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed The Witch in History and Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. She is currently working on a history of British food to be published in 2009.

  Praise

  Praise for The English Civil War:

  ‘This is narrative history at its best: gripping, heartfelt, complex, and as full of contradictions as life itself

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Superbly researched and including a particularly interesting chapter on the food and cookery writers of the era, this book vigorously brings the horror and humanity of the conflict to life’

  FT

  ‘A moving, lyrical and principled piece of writing’

  Independent

  ‘Purkiss uses news-sheets, cookery books, diaries and autobiographies, particularly those of women. The result is a book that is as enjoyable as the histories of this episode often promise to be but somehow seldom are’

  Economist

  ‘Light in touch, though grounded in an enormous wealth of documentary material, this “people’s history” shows how England’s men and women coped with quite extraordinary times’

  Scotsman

  ‘Purkiss is at her best when describing the sheer brutality of war. Her vivid descriptions of the key battles at Marston Moor and Naseby are shocking and terrifying in their graphic detail of the suffering inflicted by cannon, musket and pike’

  Literary Review

  By the Same Author

  The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations

  Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories

  Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War

  Copyright

  Harper Perennial

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  Hammersmith

  London w6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This edition published by Harper Perennial 2010

  THIRD EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by Harper Press in 2006

  Copyright © Diane Purkiss 2006

  PS Section copyright © Siobhan Machin 2006, except ‘Breaking the silence: the people of England speak’ by Diane Purkiss © Diane Purkiss 2006

  PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  Diane Purkiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the
time of publication.

  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007369119

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand