The English Civil War: A People’s History

Historians have disagreed violently about whether the rioters were motivated solely by religion, or whether class hatred played a part too. For many in the swirling, angry crowds, the war was, precisely, a war on the papists, and the goal was to prevent them from carrying out the hideous designs they were believed to be nurturing. In its paranoia this enabling narrative of recruitment does strongly resemble Nazi anti-Semitism, and like Nazi anti-Semitism it could easily tip over into corruption, profiteering and simple looting. Unlike anti-Semitism, however, it was elastic, able to embrace people (ultimately including Charles himself) who were clearly not Catholic nor even particularly sympathetic to Catholicism, but who were not godly enough, who did not share the culture and aspirations formed among the godly and the indefatigable tellers of their story, the London press. People who said ‘damme me!’ or ‘sinke me!’, people who fought alongside the Royalists or supplied them willingly, could come to be seen as near-papist because they were assumed to be part of a vast and secret conspiracy or else the dupes of that conspiracy. As well, England was swayed by rumours of prominent conversions; Laud was said to have been present when ‘Doctor Prince’ received extreme unction; an Essex man thought most of the bishops were secret Catholics; Suffolk parishioners began to suspect their ministers of Catholicism. Fears centred on the queen; at Bures a local gentleman said that ‘the king hath a wife, and he loves her well, and she is a papist and we must all be of her religion, and that’s the thing the bishops aim at’.

But many of those accused of popery were merely Arminian or not sufficiently godly to abhor Laud’s reforms. No one even knew how many Catholics there were in the Eastern Association, and as some of the stories above make clear, locals were not always sure about who counted as Catholic; there were probably only 30,000 Catholics in the whole country, in a population of around four million. But prejudice was deaf to statistics. The queen’s activism and the Laudian reforms made it seem that Catholics were gaining in strength. So did the rising number of Catholic peers: in 1603, there were nine, and in 1625 eighteen; the number of active, visible priests rose too, and Jesuits went from nine in 1593 to around 180 by 1641. The people of Essex and Suffolk had no direct knowledge of these alarming statistics, but they may have picked up a general and accurate sense that Rome was on the rise.

Dreadful as it seemed for Countess Rivers, worse fates awaited others. In Dorchester, in August 1642, two Catholic priests disobeyed a royal proclamation of 8 March 1641 which had tried to placate the public by insisting that all priests leave the country. They were arrested; one recanted, and the other refused to do so. His name was Hugh Green, and he was fifty-seven years old. He had been making for the ports to try to leave the country when he was arrested by a customs officer. He spent five months in gaol, was tried and convicted.

Green was to be executed on a Friday, by his own desire. They brought the furze for the fires to Gallows Hill, outside Dorchester, on Thursday. Green himself was taken to Gallows Hill on 18 August 1642. A crowd was waiting for him. It was eager and hopeful; after the terror of the Irish, after all Pym had said, it seemed obvious to the spectators that traitors like this one were behind it all. Three women were being hanged, too, for various crimes, and two had sent him word the night before that they would die in his faith. He absolved them with a sign, because he wasn’t allowed close to them. ‘God be with you, sir!’ they cried.

Green gave away his things – his beads, his crucifix, his Agnus Dei, his handkerchief, his book of litanies. However, he would not apologize for what everyone knew to be his treachery. He made a long speech, denouncing heresy. Sir Thomas Trencher’s chaplain, who had once been a weaver, was angry, shouting ‘He blasphemes. Stop his mouth!’ So the sheriff told Green to stop. Then he prayed instead for unity, for peace, and for the king, and forgave everyone. He called a Catholic woman, Elizabeth Willoughby, to him and she came, and he asked her to say goodbye to his fellow-prisoners, and he blessed her and five others.

He prayed for half an hour. No one could be persuaded to turn the ladder and make him fall. Finally, the hangman, sitting astride the gallows, persuaded a country clown to turn the ladder, and Green dropped. He made the sign of the cross three times. And they cut him down with a knife at the end of a long stick, handed up to the hangman by a constable, ‘although’, said Elizabeth, ‘I and others did our uttermost to have hindered him’. Their courage was wasted. ‘The man that was to quarter him was a timorous, unskilful man, by trade a barber, and his name was Barefoot. He was so long dismembering him that he came to his perfect senses and sat upright.’ Elizabeth Willoughby managed to write down her horror:

Then did this butcher cut his belly on both sides, and turn the flap upon his breast, which the holy man feeling put his left hand upon his bowels, and looking on his bloody hand laid it down by his side, and lifting up his right hand he crossed himself, saying three times, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu Mercy! The which, although unworthy, I am a witness of, for my hand was on his forehead … all the Catholics were pressed away from him by the unruly multitude except myself … Whilst he was thus calling upon Jesus, the butcher did pull a piece of his liver out instead of his heart, and tumbling his guts out every way to see if his heart were not among them; then with his knife he raked in the body … Methought my heart was pulled out of my body to see him in such cruel pains, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and not yet dead. Then I could no longer hold, but cried, Out upon them that did so torment him. His forehead was bathed in sweat, and blood and water flowed from his eyes and nose. And when on account of the gushing streams of blood his tongue could no longer pronounce the saving name of Jesus, his lips moved, and the frequent groans which he uttered from his inmost heart were proof of the most bitter pain and torture which he suffered.

Hugh Green lingered in the hands of the local barber for half an hour or more. When another Catholic woman pleaded with the sheriff, he was finally put out of his agony. After he had died at last, his heart was cut out and held up on a spear point, then flung into the fire where a minute before, his genitals had been burned. Some Catholic bystanders, including Elizabeth, tried to take the torn body away for burial, but the crowd stopped them, angrily, and it was all Elizabeth could do to get home without being torn to pieces herself.

Then Green’s head was cut off, too, and the crowd kicked it about like a football. As a football, in fact; they went on playing till four o’clock – which proved that the man had no power – but since they believed Catholics were in league with the powers of darkness, they put sticks in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and buried the head near the scaffold. They had thought of putting it on one of Dorchester’s gates as a trophy and a warning, but they had been put off, Elizabeth said, because a previous priest had been so displayed and God had punished the town with the onset of plague.

Others suffered the same fate. In July 1641, a Douai priest named William Ward who had spent twenty years in prison was suddenly dragged off to be hanged at Tyburn. In December, Parliament wanted to hang another seven priests. Charles refused the petition – courageously, if rashly, given that half the nation was by now wondering if he was not a papist himself – but two more priests were nonetheless executed in January 1642, and another seven in 1642 alone. Parliament, when ruling alone, went on to put to death twenty-four priests between 1641 and the end of the First Civil War, simply because they were priests. Eager claims for Parliamentarian tolerance and enthusiasm for liberty were liable to skate over the horrible deaths of these men, victims of a holy crusade and a paranoid terror that had little to do with liberal values. Rather, the English Civil War would not have occurred without the hysterical dread of popery which provoked the kind of violence Lady Rivers and Hugh Green experienced. Liberty was what had to be defended from papists like them, by truly godly people. In this way, a nation came to define itself against some of its own citizens. Civil war was bound to follow.

VII The Valley of Decision

The king had set up his standard before London had begun to gather troops. It was 22 August 1642, as a newsbook reported:

His Majesty came weary out of Warwickshire to Nottingham, and after half an hour’s repose, commanded the Standard to be brought forth, which was carried by a Lord, His Majesty the Prince, the Duke of York, and diverse Lords and Gentlemen accompanying the same, as soon as it was set up, his Majesty called for the printed Proclamation, mended with pen and ink some words misprinted, or not approved of, and caused the Herald to read the Proclamation three times, and so departed.

The same newsbook went on to say, ‘They plunder all men’s houses whom they please to call roundheads, and bring in cartloads of household stuff and sell them before the court-gate.’

The contrast between the king’s standard-raising and the murky behaviour of his troops is clear. What the newsbook writer didn’t know was that even the standard-raising was something of a public relations disaster. For one thing, it was pouring. For another, the standard had to be planted in a hole scraped out of the mud with knives and bare hands. Finally, not many had as yet rallied to the king, and the standard was unfurled before a meagre assortment of three cavalry troops and one infantry battalion. Worst of all, the wind blew the standard down into the mud during the night. For a people saturated in Biblical portents, it was a sign of doom. For a man like Charles, to whom ceremony was the vessel bearing the precious liquor of authority, it was ominous. But he was committed, now, to war. Charles longed for military settlement, for a simple battle where he could beat his foes and show them to be traitors, treat them as the rebels they were. ‘I am going to fight’, he said, ‘for my crown and dignity.’

And blood had already been shed. When William Brereton tried to raise troops for Parliament in Chester, he and his men were set upon by an angry mob. The Earl of Bath got a similar reception in Exeter. When Ralph Hopton rode into the small town of Shepton Mallet, he was hoping to recruit more men for the king. It was 1 August. But a thousand or so men turned out to stop any recruitment. Both Hopton and his foes withdrew to gather their forces. Three days later, the two troops met at Marshall’s Elm. It was a Royalist victory, and twenty-seven Parliament-men lay dead. Only a skirmish, it was nevertheless the first real fighting of the war.

‘Are you for the king, or Parliament?’ schoolboys used to cry. In the war years, soldiers stopped all comers and asked them, ‘King or Parliament?’ But when conflict first began, it did not begin with the choice of sides, but with their formation from much more inchoate and various positions.

Before Charles raised his standard at Nottingham in August, it only became obvious as the months of late summer slid by that there were any sides to take, and even then it was not at once apparent that there were only two; at first there was room for many sides. Caught up in the unfolding events and in the hot tide of feelings running through the three kingdoms, the people did not know that they were about to fight an ‘English Civil War’. Some thought that they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought that they were fighting against a vast conspiracy of Catholics who were plotting to subvert Church and state, others that they were fighting to protect Church and state against a vast rebellion against just and legitimate authority. Still others thought the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour, which required that obligations to those higher in the hierarchy be observed at the price of blood. Still others thought they were witnessing a kind of rebalancing, where Parliament was about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king and his counsellors of late. Others thought that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the processes of government to make their voices heard. Some people thought it an ideal chance to make war on neighbours that they had always disliked. Others thought it a chance to get rich quickly, with plenty of plunder available. A few – not many – thought that England would do better as a republic like Rome or Venice. A very few thought the end of the world was coming.

Because men and women thought in these diverse ways, the ‘English Civil War’ was not one war, but many; within each ‘side’, there were ancillary struggles to define that ‘side’s’ purpose. Labels like ‘Royalist’ and ‘Parliamentarian’ describe coalitions of difference, coalitions that sometimes broke under pressure. These same pressures would break many men and women, and because choices were often so finely balanced, families broke too.

Two hundred and fifty years or so before the king abandoned London, Geoffrey Chaucer had described a group of pilgrims gathering there, all sorts and conditions of men and women, their various statuses, professions and trades. His diverse men and women were to share a journey to redemption, and exchange stories. In 1642, the social hierarchy and many of the conditions of men he described still existed, though some of the clerical orders had been swept away by the Reformation. But all three kingdoms were still societies of sorts and conditions, societies in which people’s choices and tales were shaped by the place they occupied. In 1642, these sorts and conditions of men and women were to share a different and more painful journey, not towards redemption, but to the perdition of war. And they all had stories to tell on the way. Every kind of person in 1642 had to make their own sense of what was happening. Powerful nobles like Lucy Hay, gentlemen like Ralph Verney, tradesmen like Nehemiah Wallington, serving-women like Anna Trapnel – all were united and divided by the terrible choice before them. Like Chaucer, we can ride swiftly past a representative few of those estates and persons, and hear fragments of their stories. But unlike Chaucer, we do not have equal access to every estate. Most – though not all – of those who wrote down their decision-making and its origins were the better-off, with leisure, literacy and ambitions. We do not have anything like as many stories from the lower orders as we would wish, though we have some, and as we shall see, one good effect of the war was to enable ordinary soldiers to find a voice that would be heard. But for now, before the war has begun, we will be hearing mainly from what Chaucer would have called the gentil, the nicely born and bred.

We may begin with The Gentlewoman’s Tale, the story of the choices made by Brilliana Harley. The Harley family of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, were an especially united family due to their shared beliefs. Brilliana’s father was Sir Edward Conway, Governor of Holland and Zeeland during their revolt against Spanish rule in the 1570s, so uncannily predictive of the Civil War in its anti-monarchic violence, iconoclasm, and cries of ‘liberty!’ Born in 1598, she was in early middle age when the conflicts began, forty-four or so. Anne Fairfax, the wife of Parliament’s most important general, was her cousin.

Until the war, Brilliana’s life was dominated by family life and religion. Early modern women dreaded infertility because they were usually held responsible for it, and once pregnant they feared miscarriage and stillbirth because they were considered the fault of women too. It was widely believed that the mother’s imagination could act upon the child during conception or pregnancy, causing deformities. Looking at a picture of John the Baptist at the moment of conception could create a child covered in hair, while gazing at a hare might cause a hare lip. Birth, too, was dangerous for mother and child. Women feared the death of the child: Alice Thornton dreamt of lying in childbed with a white sheet spread, but drops of blood sprinkled on it. ‘I kept the dream in mind till my child died’, she wrote. Lady Eleanor Davies was haunted by the image of a dead child which she saw in her dreams. Women also feared that they might die themselves. Elizabeth Joscelin was not the only pregnant woman to compose a loving letter of advice to her unborn child in case she was not available to guide the child in person. In her case her fears proved well grounded, and she died soon after giving birth. Lucy Hutchinson’s grandmother lost her wits after a difficult birth.

The ceremony of childbirth was a women’s affair. Birth took place in a room from which all light was excluded; most air too. Only women could be present, and the labouring woman’s mother was usually with them. All the women, including the one giving birth, drank caudles, often a kind of eggnog with milk, wine and spices. But there was no anaesthesia available, and births did go catastrophically wrong from time to time.

After the birth, the woman remained in the birthing room for ten days, lying on the same linens on which she had delivered. After this time had elapsed, her ‘upsitting’ occurred; the linen was changed and she sat up and could show off the baby to its father and to other male visitors. But she and in particular the baby traditionally did not leave the home until a month had passed, during which time she would if reasonably off be cared for by a lying-in maid. At the end of the month, she and the baby would go to church for the churching ceremony, though a godly woman like Brilliana Harley might well find the ceremony offensive. Women from lower social strata would then feed their babies themselves. Some better-off women expressed the wish to do so but were sometimes forbidden by their husbands. The frequent remedies for sore and dry breasts in early modern commonplace books suggest that the process was not trouble-free, certainly not pain-free.

Historians used to think – rather arrogantly – that parents in earlier periods minded less about the deaths of children because such tragedies were much more frequent. Recent research strongly suggests that this was not the case. If anything, children were even more valued then than they are today because they represented prosperity and hope for a better future economically. And Brilliana, who certainly didn’t need her children’s labour, nonetheless adored her eldest son Edward, whom she called Ned. It was Ned who was the centre of her emotional life, not his father Robert. Brilliana sometimes asked Ned to tell Robert things or to ask him for things, but she also relied on him directly for love and comfort.

Brilliana’s other emotional centre was her religion. She was a very godly woman, alert and curious within a framework of strong, severe Calvinism. For Brilliana faith, good works and respect for God are not the means to salvation, but outward signs of election. From the beginning of time, God knows exactly who will ultimately join him in heaven, and who will be damned. This cannot be changed. Free will does not exist. So Brilliana wrote in her commonplace book that ‘man can not move it [his will] once to goodness, for moving is the beginning of turning to God … It is God that first turns our will to that which is good and we are converted by the power of God only, it is God that works in all of us.’ This could make life very difficult, for godly people were prone to terrifying bouts of introspection, examining themselves for signs that their faith was adequate enough for election. This was made all the more troubling because even those who were not truly elected could show some signs of faith; Brilliana, quoting directly from Calvin, wrote that ‘those that are not elect have some signs of calling, as the elect have, but they never cleave to Christ with that assurance of heart with which the assurance of our election is established, they depart from the church because they are not of the church’.

One of Brilliana’s servants, Blechly, decided that she was not saved in May 1640: ‘[and] has these 2 days been in grievous distress, and is in grievous agony of conscience and despair; she says she shall be damned’. Brilliana urges Ned to ask his tutor to pray for Blechly. Doubt and despair could themselves be outward signs that one was not a member of the elect, which made them even more terrifying. At the same time, complacency was a bad sign as well, so those cast temporarily into despair could revive themselves and experience a new birth of faith. Brilliana reminded Ned of the need for self-examination.

The Harleys made sure the vicar of their local church at Brampton was of their kind. At the end of the 1630s a man called Stanley Gower was the incumbent; on arrival in 1634 he had set about overlooking those regulations of the Laudian Church offensive to the godly. He wouldn’t let his parishioners stand during the gospel, nor bow at the name of Jesus; he left the absolution out of the prayer book’s service, he refused to rail the altar, still treating it as a movable communion table, and he told his congregation not to kneel in prayer, and not to remove their hats.

Robert Harley was part of the godly power network that was eventually to ensnare the king. He was accused of allowing Gower’s offences, harbouring Richard Symonds, a radical separatist who was also his son’s tutor, and creating special fasts for his own household, usually a sign of radical Puritanism. Harley was also in touch with that godly powerhouse and eminence grise Lord Saye and Sele, a distant cousin, and with his son Nathaniel Fiennes, with whom he exchanged godly books. He was also in contact with Prynne and Burton, visiting Prynne during his imprisonment, and sometimes meeting Burton bound on the same errand. It was Harley who moved at the start of the Long Parliament that all three should be invited to put their case to Parliament, which found in their favour and offered them compensation. During the Short Parliament, Robert Harley urged that bowing to the altar was idolatrous, and, with Pym, wanted it named a crime. At the same time, Brilliana disliked independents like the Brownists; she would not have seen eye to eye with Anna Trapnel. What she and Robert wanted was not innovation, but the retention and modest extension of what she saw as the normal practices of the Calvinist Elizabethan Church.

The Harleys saw the events of the 1620s and ’30s as a sign that the final struggle between the people of God and the Antichrist had begun. Brilliana wrote to Ned that ‘this year 1639 is the year in which many are of the opinion that the antichrist must begin to fall. The Lord say amen to it.’ The Harleys firmly believed in a sophisticated conspiracy of Catholics who manipulated Charles and would eventually convert him. It was against this background that news of the Ulster Uprising broke in November 1641. The belief that the same things could happen at any moment in England was fuelled when a tailor named Beale claimed on 15 November that he had overheard a design to kill 108 MPs, followed by a general Catholic rising. Robert Harley promptly wrote to John Aston: ‘look well to your town, for the Papists are discovered to have a bloody design, in general, as well as against the kingdom, as elsewhere’. At Brampton they were all in arms in the castle, ‘and took up provisions with them there in great fear’, wrote Brilliana.

To keep abreast of the ‘real’ news, suppressed by the government, the Harleys tried to get hold of printed news-sheets called corantoes and of manuscript news-sheets, called separates, which reported such events as speeches in Parliament and state trials. Sixteen-year-old Ned kept Brilliana supplied with separates during the Short Parliament. But personal letters were still the main source of news. The risk that they might be intercepted encouraged writers to be circumspect, however. Brilliana warned Ned about this risk: ‘when you write by the carrier, write nothing but what any may see, for many times the letters miscarry’. Some letter-writers used codes (Charles was especially fond of them). But the practice increased both paranoia and a sense that one was surrounded by spies and foes, plotting. Brilliana was delighted to hear of the abolition of the Court of High Commission, which had been the instrument of silencing many godly ministers, but not everyone in Herefordshire or the Marches was equally delighted to see godliness return. Brampton’s own vicar, Gower, reported glumly that ‘the vulgar comfort themselves with assured confidence that the bishops will get up again. I tell you but the language of Babel’s bricklayers’, while Thomas Harley, in Brampton, reported to his brother Ned in London that ‘some men jeer and cast forth reproachful words against the Parliament, and others that might forward the work of the Parliament are very backward’.