The English Civil War: A People’s History

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On 4 January 1642, the king set off at about three o’clock for Westminster. He had decided to arrest his five worst enemies, those wretched fellows, Pym and his junto. He had identified the men he thought most dangerous – Pym; John Hampden, his old foe, who had spoken so stoutly for the Remonstrance; Denzil Holles, another Ship Money refuser; young Arthur Haselrig, who had suggested the plan to attaint Strafford, and (unexpectedly) William Strode. They were all men with a history of opposing him, but his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords. Even if his expedition had been successful it would not have silenced all his critics.

Charles knew he could find his quarries in the Commons. Accounts differ as to whether the king advanced on Parliament with his guards, or on his own, but it seems unlikely that even Charles would have set out to face a defiant House with only Prince Rupert for company. Bulstrode Whitelocke says ‘the King came, guarded with his pensioners, and followed by about two hundred of his courtiers and soldiers of fortune, most of them armed with swords and pistols’. Whoever he took with him, he was too late. The birds had flown, as he himself later quipped. The phrase shows that he saw himself as a hunter, a role in which he felt at home.

For a moment he could not believe his failure. Charles looked desperately around the chamber for the men he wanted. He called their names, unable to give up hope that they were there. Then he asked the Speaker for his chair, with careful courtesy. It was like Charles to say ‘By your leave, Mr Speaker, I must borrow your chair’; the politeness and deference of his words emphasized rather than concealed the gross disregard of the Commons’ independence implied in his entry with armed guards. He knew how they might feel: ‘I must declare’, he said carefully, ‘that no king that ever was in England shall be more careful of your privileges’, but he went on, ‘yet you must know that in cases of Treason no person has a privilege’.

The House was not impressed. As Charles left, in defeat, the Commons roared ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ The cry was echoed by the London crowds next day.

Historians do not quite like the idea that it was Lucy Hay who warned the Five Members, but this is no mere fantasy invented by romantic lady novelists. There are contemporary voices who believed it to be true. Philip Warwick saw Charles’s plans frustrated by the countess personally: ‘Yet his coming to the Lower House, being betrayed by that busy stateswoman, the Countess of Carlisle, who has now changed her gallant from Strafford to Mr Pym, and was become such a she-saint, that she frequented their sermons, and took notes, he lost the opportunity of seizing their persons.’ Thomas Burton, for example, in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig himself as the source for Lucy’s intervention:

The King demanded five members, by his Attorney-General. He then came personally to the House, with five hundred men at his heels, and sat in your [the Speaker’s] chair. It pleased God to hide those members. I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice. Yet some of them were in the house, after the notice came. It was questioned if, for the safety of the house, they should be gone; but the debate was shortened, and it was thought fit for them, in discretion, to withdraw. Mr Hampden and myself being then in the House, withdrew. Away we went. The King immediately came in, and was in the house before we got to the water. The queen, on the King’s return, raged and gave him an unhandsome name, ‘poltroon’, for that he did not take others out, and certainly if he had, they would have been killed at the door.

Similarly, the poet John Dryden remarks that ‘Mr Waller used to say that he would raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to virtue, but he was unhappy in the choice of subject of his admirable vein in poetry. The Countess of C. was the Helen of her country’ – as if the war had been fought over Lucy herself. Bishop Warburton called her ‘the Erinnys of that time’, and claimed that she was the source of information and intelligence ‘on his majesty’s intentions’.

It was not only Restoration writers who saw Lucy as the chief instrument of knowledge. Henry Neville, republican intellectual, portrayed her as Pym’s lover in 1647: ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master [Denzil] Hollis, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord of Holland under hatches’. Astrologer William Lilly, though he names another party as the direct source of Pym’s warning, provides information about leakages from the king’s secret councils via the queen’s circle: ‘All this Christmas, 1641, there was nothing but private whispering at court, and secret councils held by the Queen and her party, with whom the King sat in council very late many nights.’

Lucy was certainly still a visible member of the queen’s party, but events show that her heart by now lay elsewhere. Lucy liked and embraced change. While her sister, equally ambitious, married a staid aristocrat of whom her father thoroughly approved, Lucy had married a young man of fashion. Tiring of him, she fell in love with an authoritative statesman of pronounced political philosophy. Neither choice was remotely snobbish; if anything, Lucy seemed particularly attracted by men with more than a touch of the people in their makeup. When her statesman fell, Lucy seems to have fallen in turn for his intelligent foe, John Pym, another change for her. Here was a man who was like her previous lovers in intelligence and power, but who was capable of showing her quite another world, a world to which she was attracted by its very difference.

It is also quite possible that Lucy – just like the rest of Pym’s followers, and a strong minority of the nation – was outraged by Charles’s behaviour. No Catholic, she disliked the influence exerted by Laud on the Church. Her personal attraction to Strafford may have been strong, but she may not necessarily have sided with him on questions of absolutism, and his fall and the king’s willingness to sign his death warrant may have done something to put her off the absolute power of monarchy, as well as forcing her to realize that it was not in fact absolute. This may not have been a matter of direct personal vengeance either. Lucy had just seen a great self-made man struck down by the king. To a woman who had spent years trying to advance herself and her family in the eyes of a monarch, this cannot have been very reassuring. It might have reminded her of her father’s fate, or even of the entire history of the Percys, a family struggling to maintain a powerful aristocratic position without monarchic interference, which had seen several members executed for treason. Strafford’s death confirmed in Lucy Hay an ideology of monarchy limited by strong Protestantism and aristocratic counsel, an ideology she was to adhere to throughout the Civil War years. And odd as it may have seemed, Pym and the saints offered a more rational path to that goal than did any of those remaining about the king.

Self-preservation, too, was always a central plank in Lucy’s motivation. If Lucy knew anything of Pym’s plans to impeach the queen, she may have become anxious that she would herself be implicated.

Strafford’s death was a warning that no one could escape by virtue of position or rank. It may have seemed sensible to have a foot in both camps. And since she was almost certainly not the only one who disclosed the king’s plans, it was sensible. Strafford’s fall from power was a warning. It might have looked like the beginning of the end for everyone in the king’s and queen’s immediate circle.

Ironically, too, if Lucy did send a message to Pym, it may suggest that he was more circumspect with her than others had been, for some historians think that Pym lured Charles into the rash invasion of the House, that the whole attempted arrest was a trap. If so, Pym may have been making use of Lucy, knowing only too well that she had a foot in both camps and an eye on the winning side. If Lucy was lurking in Pym’s camp to gather information, then he may have used her to leak unreliable information to the queen’s circle, even to bait the trap he was setting for the king. Is it significant that it was Henrietta’s urgings which sent the king to the House, her interests which prompted him to act so rashly? Perhaps Lucy Hay betrayed her friend the queen not by giving away her plans, but by unwittingly giving her false information. Who was using whom?

Somewhere, Pym and the other members hid while Charles and his men burst into the Commons. Rumour said that they took refuge in the Puritan stronghold of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, very near the Guildhall. It was ominous that the new state wrapped itself protectively in the folds of the church, ominous and predictive of what would become a Parliamentarian theocracy of sorts. They were able to enter the Guildhall the next day, to cheers.

These events left Charles and Henrietta thoroughly scared, and after a failed bid to persuade the London aldermen to give up the errant members, on 10 January 1642 they packed their bags and abandoned Whitehall for Hampton Court. It was Charles’s second disastrous mistake in under a week. The king and queen knew that when the House reconvened it might go on to impeach the queen as the one who had invited the ‘Jesuited papists’ who threatened the nation into the country in the first place. They had sensed the mood of London when Charles rode to the Tower the day after his disastrous invasion of the Commons. ‘Sir, let us have our liberties,’ cried someone in the crowd, ‘we desire no more.’ The Christmas holidays meant that London’s apprentices, always volatile, were available to demonstrate. On 6 January there was a panic in the City as vast crowds thronged public spaces; a fight broke out between the king’s supporters and demonstrators at Westminster Abbey, and Sir Richard Wiseman was killed. The demonstrators took up a collection to pay for Wiseman’s funeral, though, and the French ambassador commented on how calm the crowds were in comparison with crowds in Paris.

In the Guildhall it was the same. ‘Parliament, Privileges of Parliament’, shouted some. Others shouted back ‘God bless the king’. But there were not enough of them, and – with no military effort at all, without even a show of real opposition – Charles’s opponents achieved the tremendous victory of persuading him to vacate London.

In doing so, Charles lost prestige. He lost credibility as the inevitable, the unconsidered government. And he lost the Tower, with its mint and its armoury, and the London militia. Perhaps the capital had become peripheral to him. He had had dreams of a new London that would reflect the order and ceremonial he loved, but it had failed to materialize from the mongrel old city, crowded with unregulated houses of worryingly diverse and muddled shapes. Early in his reign, Charles had grandiose schemes for London; he issued proclamations to regulate new building, enforce the use of better materials, and impose some semblance of town planning. He wanted to rebuild and beautify Whitehall itself, but also the great cathedral of St Paul’s, so tumbledown and so given up to profane activities that Charles felt it was unworthy of his capital. He wanted to demolish the existing jerry-built medieval housing to forward these schemes. He wanted London to reflect his own ordered family, his well-regulated court. He disliked the continued residence in London of those who, he felt, should be in the provinces looking after their tenants; the gentry were strictly prohibited from neglecting their estates in the country and the duties they should be performing there by residing in London all year round.

The problem with all this was that the London corporation was unenthusiastic. And as often, when Charles couldn’t realize his fantasies, he turned his back. During the period of his personal rule, Whitehall had become just another palace, like Hampton and Oakley and Greenwich. He knew nothing first-hand of the vast activity that surrounded his court – the trade, law, business, finance, the sheer human pressure of what was in a few short years to become the greatest city in Europe. He had always avoided it. He hated the London crowds that reached out to him, hoping his touch would heal their sores. He had not visited the great shipyards at Poplar that had loomed over Anna Trapnel’s childhood, nor seen the first ships of the East India Company dropping anchor in Poplar docks laden with luxuries. He had seen only the luxuries. Now this city, invisible to Charles, was to be his downfall. He had refused to see it, and London, not the city to take a slight lightly, never forgave him.

Like all wars, the Civil War was expensive, and the money to pay Parliament’s army came from the public. London alone provided between a quarter and a third of all the money spent by Parliament. And yet at the same time business was down; with the court gone the trade in luxuries, which had been booming, collapsed. And with the king away, Parliament at once acted to alter the social fabric of the city. The theatres were closed, the traditional holidays abolished: this threw still more people out of work.

Not everyone was miserable as the conflict deepened. Woodturner Nehemiah Wallington was happy, because his London was a godly city once more. For him, all events were a rich source of moral lessons. This was a man who, when his house was burgled in August 1641, tried to see in it the correcting hand of God’s providence: ‘because the Lord doth see the world is ready to steal away my heart, therefore, he doth it in love to wean me from the world’. But Wallington, like other godly folk in London, lived in terror that his bounty of spiritual surroundings might be taken from him. He was also a workaholic who adjured himself to wake at 1 a.m. to write, and who decided to miss a spring expedition across the fields to Peckham with his wife and daughter in order to stay at home and worry about ‘the sadness of the times’.

Even before the war, London had outgrown law and order – the king’s palace at Whitehall, like some manor surrounded by new estates, was now at the heart of a troublespot. The Middlesex suburbs contained a high proportion of the disorderly poor – to the north and west, as well as to the east. The large number of apprentices and other migrants – young, poor, male and single – meant that turbulence within the city was endemic; the rallying cry ‘prentices and clubs’ symbolizes that threat. London was huge. It was constantly growing. And it was noisy: its streets resounded with pealing bells, the cries of street traders, the songs of buskers, the news cries of ballad-singers. Some traders made sure they were noticed with bells, horns and clappers. Every time you sat down in a tavern a fiddler and a flautist or two would appear, and expect to be given a fee for cacophonous playing. Alehouses were noisy. But almost all houses in London except the very grandest were right on the street. The clatter of carts, and of water-carriers on cobbles was almost constant. Dogs barked and howled. There were more and noisier birds: rooks and jackdaws were once common in the city. And London talked; from the upper storeys Londoners could eavesdrop on neighbours or shout abuse at them.

It wasn’t just the noise of London that a countryman might have found surprising. London was also smelly. If we could travel back in time and sniff the London air, we would be suffocated not by the smell of sewage, but the pervasive acrid reek of coal fires. As the seventeenth century progressed, industry moved into the East End and Southwark, and the smells it produced lessened. When slaughterhouses were moved out in the 1620s and 1630s, the city lost the noise and mess of pigs, cows and sheep driven through the centre. There was also less noise from smithies, tanneries and the like, but the shouts of those advertising bear-baiting and prize-fights went on. So did town-criers, shouting the time, the news, the dead, the ‘For Sale’ notices. The noise did have a term: there was a curfew, and the nights were much quieter.

In the period of personal rule, Charles had relied on the London money market as well as on his subjects for forced loans, and in the crisis of 1640, when the royal forces’ defeat in war coincided with a widespread refusal to pay outstanding taxation, the City’s financiers declined to continue to support the regime. Some rich men were ruined in Charles’s fall, which may have made the others less keen to bail him out. Once the Scots were seen successfully to resist the king, some of the discontent that had been bubbling beneath the surface in London, repressed by Laud, became visible. After all, in 1637 John Lilburne had been whipped at the cart’s tail for publishing an attack on the bishops, and in the ‘liberties’ outside the jurisdiction of the City, there were separated congregations, church groups that had declared their independence of bishops and priests. Cheaper, open-air theatres staged plays openly critical of the court.

The intermittent swirls of London’s rage finally eddied into a new whirlwind of riot over the appointment of a Lieutenant of the Tower. On Monday 27 December 1641, Londoners marched to Westminster, demanding to know what had happened about their Commons petition. Were they to be landed with Charles’s unpopular and corrupt appointee Colonel Lunsford as Lieutenant of the Tower? When they heard that he had been removed, they did not go away, but hung about asking what had happened to their petitions on ecclesiastical matters. They made a lane in both Palace yards, ‘and no man could pass but when the rabble gave him leave to . . . Soon they set up the cry of “No Bishops! No Bishops!”’ There was an undignified tussle between the Archbishop of York and a boy whom he unwisely tried to arrest. A near-riot began when Lunsford himself appeared in Westminster Hall, and he and other citizens tried to drive away the angry protesters with swords: ‘then David Hyde began to bustle, and said he would cut the throats of those roundheaded dogs’. With that, Hyde, Lunsford and some others attacked the protesters, ‘and cut many of them very sore’. They were driven back by a hail of hurled stones. Then came the indefatigable John Lilburne, with ‘about a hundred citizens, some with cudgels, some sailors with truncheons, and the rest with stones’. Under the assault, half the gentlemen fled. The rest fought on, but were finally routed by citizens who fought ‘like enraged lions’.

On 28 January 1642 Captain Philip Skippon ‘marched very privately when it was dark to the backside of the Tower, and stayed at the iron gate with his men … he sent one into the Tower to the serjeant, who commanded the Hamleters, that he should march out of the Tower with his men and come to him. But the serjeant desired to be excused.’ Skippon, snubbingly described by Clarendon as a ‘common soldier’, was actually the son of a minor Norfolk gentleman, who had fought as an officer for the Elector Palatine and then in Holland against the Spanish – two Good Old Protestant wars, giving him plenty of practice for a third. His toughness as a trainer of troops was vital in moulding the London trained bands into the crucial fighting force they became, and he was to become one of Parliament’s most stalwart and sensible soldiers, a major-general of infantry in the New Model Army.

When Nehemiah Wallington described the serjeant’s refusal to obey Skippon’s order as a plot by ‘malignants’ to take over the Tower and the City, he saw such incidents as standing in the way of the political and spiritual rebirth of the nation: ‘you see many an excellent blessing and mercy in this very birth’, he wrote, ‘for this honourable parliament (as the Mother) to bring forth, and cannot’. This defined all the conflicts so far as an effort to turn England into a godly nation.

The king’s departure left Parliament free to begin to gather troops from Anna Trapnel’s East End. A militia committee was established in Tower Hamlets – authorized to assemble and train men and to suppress riot and trouble, and to collect a rate to finance the troops. The Tower Hamlets militia were strongly Parliamentarian, refusing to unite with city regiments whose loyalty to Parliament they suspected. (In 1662 Charles II refused to attend a muster on Tuttle Fields because of a rumour that the Hamleters would shoot at him.) So it came to seem appropriate that at any rate by February 1642, the Tower had come into the hands of the city authorities, its ramparts guarded not by royal troops but by the trained bands of the East End that Charles so hated, the Tower Hamlet bands. Anna Trapnel’s world had triumphed, in London, at least.

London was not the only place with unruly crowds. Many other areas saw violence erupt. In the early months of 1642, some rebellious energies were contained by traditional means. The majority of locales drew up and presented petitions to Parliament, opening with fulsome praise of the institution. Many expressed concern about the king’s evil councillors, by whom they largely meant Laudians and papists. Still others blamed the universities as nests of papistical and Arminian thought. Most expressed dread of a popish invasion; nineteen counties demanded that all papists be disarmed, while others expressed doubts about strict measures already taken. Oxfordshire begged Parliament to administer oaths to those searching recusant houses for arms to prevent them from concealing what they found. But fear of popery also provoked extreme violence. On 13 May 1642, a year after the London crowd had been gratified by Strafford’s death, an Essex village saw a crowd of over a hundred gathered at the blowing of a horn, before marching out to the heath of Rovers Tye, where they tore down a series of enclosures that had been built by the Lucas family. All through Essex, Parliamentarians had rushed to fill the army of Robert Rich, first Earl of Warwick, known as a political activist and as a patron of sermons fervently denouncing popery, just as they had stayed away from the king’s army gathered to fight the Scots two years before. Local Roman Catholics were disarmed, and fortifications built around Colchester. Laudian ministers were quickly silenced. But local magnate Sir John Lucas was determined to bring aid to the king. He gathered horse, arms and men at his residence just outside Colchester’s walls. But his plans were known to his enemies. A night-watch set by the mayor spotted him as he left his house by the back gate. A musket was fired, the local beacon was lit to alert the villages. The trained bands and the Parliamentary volunteers besieged his estate, even bringing two pieces of ordnance. Men, women and children gathered, forming a crowd of around two thousand all told. The attack on Sir John Lucas’s house included an assault on the ladies’ chamber. There, tireless collector (and inventor) of atrocity stories Bruno Ryves tells us, a naked sword was set to Sir John’s wife’s breast. To Clarendon’s later horror at the disregard of rank implied, Lucas ended up in the town gaol, and he was glad enough to be there.

Observers thought this outbreak of rage looked exactly like the ‘inundation of the vulgar’, the rising of the belly against the brain, which had been predicted by the Cassandra-like MP Simonds D’Ewes as the inevitable outcome of civil war. Though the rioters themselves sought to justify their actions by claiming support for Parliament, even Parliamentarians among them spoke of the violence of ‘the rude people’: ‘we know not how to quiet them’, muttered the mayor of Colchester, ‘we could not repress them if we had five trained bands’. In parts of Suffolk, where there were further disturbances, the rioters were said to have denied any religious motivation, saying they were for the king, and would not be governed by a few Puritans.

The Essex-Stour valley mob initially confined itself to attacking the local Catholic community, but soon everyone got a taste for the fun, and the violence became less discriminating. ‘As well Protestants as Papists’ were plundered; similar unpolitical incidents involving the ‘lewd and disorderly people’ were reported in the area in the last three months of the year. ‘Forasmuch as at this present there are disorders and distempers … and evil affected persons who hunger after rapines and spoilings and plunder of men’s houses.’ It was an excuse for a spot of vandalism, but it might be premature to assume there was no class distinction behind the plunder of the houses of the rich. There is some shaky evidence from the inexhaustible Ryves that locals picked out as targets families who were already disliked. Ryves shapes his account around the attack on Countess Rivers because it violates codes of honourable conduct in war: ‘And you may guess what spiritual men they were, and likewise what danger this honourable person was in, they express themselves in rude unchristian language, that if they found her they would try what flesh she had?’

The Rivers family felt menaced from the beginning. Lady Rivers’s sister Lady Penelope Gage wrote anxiously from Hengrave Hall, north of Bury St Edmunds, at the very beginning of 1642, that ‘we are daily threatened by the common sort of people’. Living in St Osyth, the Rivers’s Catholicism had long made them the object of local suspicion and dislike. Ryves claimed the Colchester attackers began a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the countess. They pursued her as if she were a comic-book villain. The crowd reached St Osyth only a few hours after she had made her escape; they were joined by sailors and what one local Catholic called ‘the whole army rout’. At once, wrote a contemporary, they ‘enter the house, and being entered, they pull down, cut in pieces, and carry away her costly hangings, beds, couches, chairs, and the whole furniture of her house, rob her of plates and monies’. Her servants were attacked. She made it to her house at Long Melford in Suffolk, but the crowds followed her there, gathering support en route, especially from seamen, a group especially noted for their strong anti-popery. Countess Rivers was understandably afraid. She sent for help to the Earl of Warwick, but he was at sea, Lord Rich was at Oxford, and Charles Rich was out hunting. So Arthur Wilson, steward of the Earl of Warwick, travelled through the Stour valley on his master’s instructions during the riots, hoping to rescue the recusant Lady Rivers from the fury of the mob. Wilson was a Puritan and a Parliamentarian, but he thought very little of the crowd:

With difficulty I passed through the little villages of Essex, where their black bills and coarse examinations put us to diverse demurs. And, but that they had some knowledge both of me and the coach, I had not passed with safety … When I came to Sudbury in Suffolk, within three miles of Long Melford, not a man appeared till we were within the chain. And then they began to run to their weapons, and, before we could get to the market-place, the streets swarmed with people. I came out of the coach, as soon as they took the horses by the heads, and desired, that I might speak with the mayor, or some of the magistrates, to know the cause of this tumult, for we had offended nobody. The Mouth cried out, This coach belongs to the Lady Rivers; and they are going to her, for he had recognised her steward in the coach: and some, who pretended to be more wise and knowing than the rest, said, that I was the lord Rivers. And they swarmed about me, and were so kind as to lay hold on me. But I calmly entreated those many hundreds which encircled me, to hear me speak, which before they had not patience to do, the confusion and noise was so great. I told them, I was steward to the Earl of Warwick, a lover of his country, and now in the parliament’s employment. That I was going to Bury [St Edmunds], about business of his. And that I had letters in my pockets (if they would let any of the magistrates see them) which would make me appear to be a friend and an honest man. That said, the Mouth cried out, Letters, letters! The tops of the trees, and all the windows, were thronged with people, who cried the same. At last the mayor came crowding in with his officers: and I showed him my letters … The mayor’s wisdom said, he knew not my lord’s hand; it might be, and it might not. And away he went, not knowing what to do with me, nor I to say to them.

But the town-clerk, whose father was a servant to the Earl of Warwick, ‘told them I was the Earl of Warwick’s steward: and his assurance got some credit with them. And so the great cloud vanished. But I could go no further to succour the Lady Rivers. For I heard, from all hands, that there was so great confusion at Melford, that no man appeared like a gentleman, but was made a prey to that ravenous crew.’ So he left the coach at Salisbury, ‘and went a bye-way to Sir Robert Crane’s, a little nearer Melford, to listen after the countess’. He thought he was witnessing the actions of an ‘unruly multitude … the rabble’, not those of ‘honest inhabitants’. He thought that they only pretended to religious fervour, while in fact ‘spoil and plunder were their aim’ and that they acted as if ‘there had been a dissolution of all government’; he concluded that ‘so monstrous is the beast when it holds the bridle in its teeth’.

Countess Rivers’s ordeal was not yet over. On Wednesday 24 August, a multitude of like disposed persons, threatening her death’ nearly caught her; they entered the house ‘before she had fully escaped their sight’ (perhaps she had been loath to use the ‘back gate for beggars and the meaner sort of swains to come in at’, noted by James Howell when he visited the house). So the crowds ransacked the house. John Rous reported that ‘the Lady Rivers house was defaced, all glass broken, all iron spoiled, all likely places digged where money might be hidden. The gardens defaced. Beer and wine consumed and let out (to knee deep in the cellar) The deer killed and chased out.’ She may have been helped to escape by Sir Robert Crane; she sought sanctuary at Bury St Edmunds, thirteen miles away. It shut its gates against her. Eventually she was allowed in, but was forced to flee to London the next day.

The crowds, unsatisfied, moved on to other targets: the Audleys, a Catholic family within the liberties of Colchester, who had already been the subject of a panic in 1640 when it had been said that Catholics were assembling for an insurrection. The family’s house and cattle were plundered. On his funeral monument, Sir Henry had written Non aedes (belli civilis furore diructas) (He did not rebuild his house, destroyed by the fury of the civil war); the doggy, compressed Latin suggests some haste. A clergyman called Gabriel Honeyfold was set upon by ‘a multitude of boys and rude people’ who ‘throng about him … throwing stones and dirt at him’. Another minister, Erasmus Laud, lost his cattle too, and the attackers also took all his wife’s spare clothes. He was attacked solely because his name was the same as that of William Laud, the hated Archbishop of Canterbury. All across the east, local Catholic gentry were assailed; the landed Martins whose chapel was itself a provocation; the house of Carey, a steward to the Rivers family. The riots spread to neighbouring locales, including Maldon, where a Catholic landowner named Edmund Church came under attack; ‘the poor people of the neighbourhood pulled down and carried away a barn and an oxhouse, declaring that Edmond Church was a papist’, and that they would pull down his house if any opposed them. As in other civil wars, people who had been warily tolerant neighbours for years suddenly turned on the minority in their midst. Wherever there was a Catholic family, the crowds gathered: the Petres, the Southcotts. The trouble only stopped when Parliament implemented a vigorous programme of Catholic-watching and sequestration.

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 (#ulink_2fb7c000-6d12-5138-9b98-a6c8d4c0c6b7)

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’.

When Parliament went into brief recess in September 1641 Robert returned to Brampton and tried to enforce the Commons’ resolution to remove all crucifixes and images from churches, not only purifying his own church at Brampton, but all those in surrounding villages. At Leintwardine he broke the windows and smashed the glass with a hammer, throwing it into the Terne ‘in imitation of King Asa 2 Chron 15:16 who threw the images into the brook Kidron’, but at Aymestrey the minister and the parishioners withstood him. Harley wrote angrily to churchwardens in Leominster asking why they had failed to take down the crosses he had seen passing the church.

For most of 1642 to 1644, Robert was away from home, serving as an MP at Westminster. In his absence his wife Brilliana took charge of the Harley estates. She disliked it when he was away because she felt miserably isolated: writing to Ned, she complained that ‘now your father is away, you know I have nobody that I can speak to’. But she knew it was her duty. Robert Harley often criticized her management: ‘what is done in your father’s estate pleases him not, so that I wish myself with all my heart in London, and then your father might be a witness of what is spent: but if your father think it best for me to be in the country, I am well pleased with what he shall think best’. This sounds submissive, but the note of anger is unmistakable.

For Brilliana her connectedness with her son became a way to imagine herself escaping from the dangers that enclosed her more and more tightly. In theory, Oxford was a world that Robert knew and she didn’t, a man’s world. Robert had been to Oxford, to Oriel College in 1597, graduating with a BA in 1599; his tutor Cadwallader Owen was a powerful godly influence on the young man. Robert was also in charge of the boys’ education, searching for a tutor for them in 1631, but they were eventually sent away to school, to Shrewsbury. Ned went up to Oxford in 1638, just before his fourteenth birthday. He went to Magdalen Hall, where the principal John Wilkinson was a solid Calvinist, and where he would be taught by another staunch Puritan, Edward Perkins. Brilliana, however, took a strong interest in Ned’s godly tutors. She was worried when William Whately died and his living became vacant; she feared they might lose the services of Mr Perkins, too, since ‘as soon as any man come to ripeness of judgement and holiness he is taken away, and so they still glean the garden of the ripe grapes and leave the sour ones behind’. She also worried, like any other mother seeing a child off to university, that he would be exposed to moral danger. She wrote in a letter, ‘now I fear you will both see and hear men of nobility and excellent parts of nature abandon themselves to swearing and that odious sin of drunkenness’. Robert also wrote that ‘the universities do too much abound with such pigs’. The larger world beyond the family was menacing. But it was also enticing. Brilliana’s letters betray twin yearnings; to enclose Ned in the safety of family holiness, and to catch a glimpse of his larger world through him. She sent him reams of advice and torrents of home-made medicines:

13 November 1638. I beseech the Lord to bless you with those choice blessings of his spirit, which none but his dear elect are partakers of. I have sent you some juice of liquorice, which you may keep to make use of, if you should have a cold.

17 November 1638. I am glad you find a want of that ministry you did enjoy: Labour to keep a fresh desire after the sincere milk of the word, and then in good time you shall enjoy that blessing again.

She worried all the time about Ned’s health and well-being: ‘Pray send me one of your socks, to make you new ones by’, she wrote; and ‘You did well to take some balsam; it is a most sovereign thing, and I purpose, if it please God, to write you the virtues of it’. Sometimes she was tentative: ‘Dear Ned, if you would have anything, send me word; or if I thought it a cold pie, or such a thing, would be any pleasure to you, I would send it to you. But your father says you care not for it, and Mrs Pierson tells me when her son was at Oxford, and she sent him such things, he prayed her that she would not’ (14 December 1638). But at heart she was a generous provider. She also kept her husband supplied, writing that ‘I have sent your father a snipe pie and a teal pie, and a collar of brawn, or else I had sent you something this week’ (December 1640).

She also liked to supply spiritual food. She urged holy books on Ned, as part of their literary discussions: ‘I believe, before this, you have read some part of Mr Calvin; send me word how you like him.’ With almost every letter a present or a small piece of advice arrives: ‘I have sent you a little purse with some small money in it, all the pence I had, that you may have a penny to give a poor body and a pair of gloves; not that I think you have not better in Oxford, but that you may sometimes remember her, that seldom has you out of my thoughts.’

Ned also sent her things, including books. She wrote to thank him: ‘I thank you for The Man in the Moon. I had heard of the book, but not seen it; by as much as I have looked upon, I find it is some kind of Don Quixote. I would willingly have the French book you write me word of; but if it can be had, I desire it in French’ (30 November 1638).

The Man in the Moon was an imaginative choice. It was actually an early work of science fiction: the hero, Gonzales, is on his way home from Spain when he falls ill, and is put ashore on a desert island. Here he soon trains a pair of swans to be his servants, and eventually through the use of complex machinery they fly him to the moon, where he finds an ideal society in which there is no war, no hunger, a cure for all illnesses. This society does not lack hierarchy, however; there is a system based on height, and the king is the tallest man. There’s an element of Swiftian satire of learning, but also a critique of contemporary politics; if Ned sent his mother this book, it shows that she was herself an adventurous and curious reader, interested in unfeminine topics like political theory. It is also suggestive that Brilliana knew about Don Quixote, that great debunking of the chivalrous romances to which Charles and Henrietta and their court were so addicted.

But Brilliana was no bluestocking; she was keen on the emerging commodity culture of the late 1630s, and wanted to furnish Brampton in style. She often asked Ned to shop for her: ‘If there be any good looking glasses in Oxford choose me one about the bigness of that I use to dress me in, if you remember it … All my fruit dishes are broken; therefore good Ned, if there be any such blue and white dishes as I used to have for fruit, buy me some; they are not porcelain, nor are they of the ordinary metal of blue and white dishes’ (19 November 1639).

Another fashionable commodity was news: ‘I should be glad to hear from you how the King went to Parliament’ (23 April 1640). Brilliana didn’t only ask for news: she passed it on eagerly, showing that her choices were based on a careful attempt to keep abreast of things. She wrote to Ned about the army gathering for the war against the Scots (3 July 1640). She liked to pass on news from others to Ned; ‘The last night I heard from your father. He saw Mr Prynne and Mr Burton come into London; they were met with 2000 horse and 150 Scotch, and the men wore rosemary that met them.’ Rosemary for remembrance.