Remembering the English Civil Wars

Lloyd Bowen, Mark Stoyle, Lloyd Bowen, Mark Stoyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000462449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Remembering the English Civil Wars is the first collection of essays to explore how the bloody struggle which took place between the supporters of king and parliament during the 1640s was viewed in retrospect.

The English Civil Wars were perhaps the most calamitous series of conflicts in the country's recorded history. Over the past twenty years there has been a surge of interest in the way that the Civil Wars were remembered by the men, women and children who were unfortunate enough to live through them. The essays brought together in this book not only provide a clear and accessible introduction to this fast-developing field of study but also bring together the voices of a diverse group of scholars who are working at its cutting edge. Through the investigation of a broad, but closely interrelated, range of topics – including elite, popular, urban and local memories of the wars, as well as the relationships between civil war memory and ceremony, material culture and concepts of space and place – the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, with exceptional vividness and clarity, how the people of England and Wales continued to be haunted by the ghosts of the mid-century conflict throughout the decades which followed.

The book will be essential reading for all students of the English Civil Wars, Stuart Britain and the history of memory.

1
CIVILIAN MEMORIES OF THE BRITISH CIVIL WARS, 1642–1660

Imogen Peck

DOI: 10.4324/9781003030546-2

In 1646, Robert Gregorie, a resident of the village of Brinsley in Nottingham-shire, recalled his fears of what he might find when, after several weeks, he was finally able to quit a nearby garrison and return home. His trepidation was not unfounded. On returning to Brinsley, Gregorie discovered that his once well-furnished house had been emptied. The windows, cupboards and bedstead had all been broken to pieces. The intruders’ ‘malice’ had even ‘reached soe farre [as] to breake ye verie floures of the house’ – but then, what else could be expected, he wondered, from ‘the enemies of the cause of god and such as were liberall to that unjust way’.¹ While Gregorie had sought refuge in a parliamentarian garrison, the king’s forces had ransacked the surrounding countryside, leaving him with nothing.

Gregorie recounted his ‘woeful’ wartime experience in a petition presented to the Nottinghamshire county committee, in the hope that they might furnish him with some financial relief in his hour of need.² As Civil War engulfed Britain, he was only one of the thousands of men and women who found themselves forced to apply to local authorities for assistance following a wide range of wartime calamities and subsequent hardships. In recent years the petitions of two particular types of claimant – maimed soldiers and war widows – have received significant scholarly attention. Eric Gruber von Arni, Mark Stoyle and David Appleby have provided detailed studies of the petitions presented by, and relief provided to, injured servicemen, while Geoffrey Hudson, Hannah Worthen, Stewart Beale and Andrew Hopper have analysed the treatment of war widows by both local and national authorities.³ By comparison, the requests presented by those war victims, who, like Gregorie, fell outside the remit of the extensive maimed soldiers’ and war widows’ legislation have been largely overlooked. This chapter redresses this imbalance, offering the first detailed account of civilian petitions to various local authorities in the period between the outbreak of the war and the Restoration. In so doing, it provides a rare glimpse of the ways that ordinary English citizens chose to recall their experiences of war as well as of the strategies that they deployed in order to fashion themselves as worthy recipients of relief to partisan political and administrative bodies.

In focusing on the war stories of ordinary English citizens, this chapter is part of a wider shift within the field of early modern memory studies from an emphasis on the cultural products of educated and affluent elites to a concern with popular perceptions.⁴ Studies of personal memory no longer coalesce around a small minority of figures who produced diaries or memoirs, as a growing appreciation of the diverse range of texts that can be considered forms of life-writing has prompted historians to explore the narratives embedded in less conventional sources, including petitions.⁵ As Mark Stoyle has convincingly argued, in between the customary bookends – ‘humbly sheweth’, ‘your petitioner shall ever pray’ – that remind us of the formulaic nature of these documents (usually penned, not by the claimant themselves but by a local official), these accounts nevertheless contained a surprising degree of linguistic and descriptive variation.⁶ Scribes would have been forced to ‘rely on claimants’ own memories in order to draft those sections of a document which related to the events of the war itself’, and as claimants were often expected to appear in person alongside their petitions, any account that strayed too far from the subject’s own version of events would have proven problematic.⁷ Some petitions moved from the typical third-person into the first-person signifiers of ‘I’ and ‘we’, slips that imply that some scribes, at least, were transcribing the narrative of the petitioner more or less word for word.⁸ Though Stoyle’s work focuses on memories of the wars embedded in the petitions of injured royalist veterans, the narrative autonomy that he observes is even more pronounced in civilian petitions. To be entitled to relief under the terms of the various acts and ordinances that sought to provide for military casualties, veterans had to show that they had been a loyal parliamentarian – or, after 1660, a loyal royalist – soldier disabled through military service. Widows, meanwhile, needed to demonstrate that their husband had died as a result of his military activities, as well as their own financial need.⁹ As a result, the contents of these petitions tend to be principally – though not exclusively – concerned with memories of combat. Civilians’ claims, by contrast, were not guided by a coherent body of legislation, and their accounts exhibit rather more variation, originality and creativity than those of their maimed soldier and war widow counterparts.

In one of the few existing studies that consider civilian memories of the wars, Ann Hughes has used an initially unpromising body of material – lists of wartime losses drawn up by local communities in response to a 1645 parliamentarian ordinance – to show that financial accounting was used not only to enumerate the costs of war, but also as an opportunity for individuals to record and reflect on their experiences.¹⁰ When listing losses, people often included details which were, in strict accounting terms, entirely superfluous, but which personalised their encounters, transforming lists of losses into a form of memory work. This tendency towards reflection and narration was even more pronounced in civilian petitions. An effective petition required the claimant to recount their wartime experiences, albeit in a way that presented their request – whether for financial relief, for a reduction in taxes, or for removal from a burdensome office – in the most favourable light. They proffer a statistically significant collection of war stories in which civilians recounted their own, and their families’, experiences in the hope of securing assistance from local authorities.

Drawing on the petitions presented to the Lancashire, Cheshire, Wiltshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Staffordshire, Devon and Somerset quarter sessions; to the Leicester borough sessions; and to parliamentarian county committees from across England between 1642 and 1660, this chapter explores some of the ways in which civilians remembered two particularly common wartime experiences: property loss and quartering. It demonstrates the importance of local places, domestic spaces and objects as loci of civilian memory as well as the significant degree of intersection between personal memory and broader local and national memorial cultures. Civilians drew on narratives and language circulating in the wider press and on existing rhetorical techniques in order to recount their experiences – but they also added to them, incorporating details of particular personal and emotional significance that, in turn, shaped what it meant to be a victim of war. Strategic attempts to present their claims in the most favourable light jostled with a desire to convey the hardship, emotional impact and, in some cases, the injustice of their experiences, producing a heterogenous selection of war stories that reflect the creativity and diversity of civilian memory.

The civilian subject

One difficulty that confronts historians of civilian experience is that the very notion of a ‘civilian’ is historically contingent. As Mark Grimsley and Clifford Rogers have noted, the term ‘civilian’ is anachronistic when applied any earlier than the Middle Ages.¹¹ It continues to pose significant difficulties in the context of the British Civil Wars, not least when attempting to distinguish between the petitions of civilians and combatants. The domestic nature of the conflict meant that the line between soldier and civilian was highly porous. Soldiers also suffered, and petitioned for, losses that they had sustained as civilians, and many petitions contained a combination of both military and non-military experiences. In 1647, for example, Joseph Curtis, a former parliamentarian soldier, applied to his local county committee for financial assistance. In his request he outlined his military service, before going on to explain that he had suffered significant ‘losses in his estate’, estimated to amount to £54 9s, at the hands of the Scottish Army, and a further £100 at the hands of the royalists.¹²

Nor were those men and women who did not serve as soldiers necessarily passive bystanders. In cities that were besieged, residents often found themselves forced to assist with the defences, and some, like Tobye Granham from the city of Gloucester, sustained injuries in the process.¹³ When, in 1645, Leicester was assaulted by royalist forces under the command of Prince Rupert, over 900 men who dwelt within the city walls were enlisted to fight alongside the garrison’s soldiers. This blurry line between participant and non-combatant was reflected in the petitions which were brought before Leicester’s borough sessions. John Stocker, a joiner, explained that he had been ‘att the works, and in armes for the Towne to defend it ag[ains]t the kings forces, and was then plundered of all he had’ during Prince Rupert’s sacking of the town, ‘and that his said estate was allso ruined’, while fellow townsman Michael Boulshawe noted that he had lost goods worth £30 when Leicester had been taken and had been ‘himselfe in Armes and did service at ye workes for defence thereof’.¹⁴ Similarly, the petition of the Cheshire war widow Margaret Knowlsey contained an account of her husband’s military service and death – but also a description her own intelligence activities, including the fact that she had ‘ventured her life in her journey to Wemm to prevent betraying of yt by the Kings partye’.¹⁵

The use of the term ‘civilian’ to refer to a general quality of ‘non-military’ persons did not emerge until the eighteenth century.¹⁶ Even Hugo Grotius, the early modern war theorist famed for his relatively humane treatment of non-combatants, did not coin a collective term for those who were not actively in arms, referring instead to different groups of people: women, children and those men ‘whose way of life is opposed to warmaking’, including clergy, agricultural workers, merchants and artisans.¹⁷ In this chapter, the term ‘civilian’ is used to refer to people who petitioned for losses which had not been sustained through their own, or their husband’s, military service and who did not identify themselves as either a maimed soldier or a war widow – but it should not be assumed that such persons were entirely without martial experience or that they perceived themselves simply as ‘non-participants’, as this chapter will show.

‘Robbed,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: remembering the English Civil Wars
• 1 Civilian memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642–1660
• 2 ‘When the Scotts army did march thorow our county’: space, place and remembering in the English Civil War
• 3 History, politics and power: shaping the recent past in Civil War Pembrokeshire
• 4 ‘Extreme trials of fidelity’?: Captain Bartholomew Gidley and royalist memories of the English Civil War
• 5 ‘All forms accustomed’: ritual, precedent and the past at the coronation of Charles II
• 6 The Farnley Wood plot and the memory of the Civil Wars in Yorkshire
• 7 From revolutionary bulwark to loyalist bastion: the Restoration refashioning of the London Artillery Company, 1660–1685
• 8 ‘Memories of the maimed’: the testimony of Charles I’s former soldiers, 1660–1730
• Index