The English Civil War: A People’s History. Diane Purkiss
to the Gentle Reader
If this were truly a seventeenth-century book or pamphlet, it would be likely to include an epistle to you, the reader. In the seventeenth century, with which this book is concerned, authors and readers approached each other more formally and courteously than is now customary. A book usually began with a polite letter to the gentle reader, a letter which asked for the reader’s attention, apologized for the book’s shortcomings, and explained what benefits patient perusal of the work might offer. The tone was often self-deprecating, and it was usual to deprecate the book itself as ‘my poor book’. The poet Robert Herrick thought his book was likely to be used as toilet paper when his readers were tired of it; Milton repeatedly asked God to fix his awful weaknesses. In addressing the reader as ‘gentle’, the author invited him or her to be so; to be courteous and polite in turn. Gentle also has a class meaning; it implies wealth, and with it education, power and discernment.
I hope it is not too self-conscious for me to emulate this charming tradition and thus to offer a tribute to it. In reviving a good custom and addressing you, gentle reader, my chief purpose is to welcome you to a story that greatly concerns you.
Frankly, I am in hopes that you may be among those to whom the words ‘The English Civil War’ have always stood for an unsolved mystery. The Civil War is perhaps the single most important event in our history, but for rather complex reasons many of the very intelligent readers who abound in these isles know little of it. The great battlefield sites of Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby are difficult to find and poorly marked. The siege sites of Basing House and Donnington Castle are ruins dotted with picnickers rather than sacred memorials to heroic endeavour and ideas. We have no Fourth of July, no Bastille Day to commemorate our own heroic struggle to define and enact freedom, even though on it depended the ideas that were later to lead to those two other revolutions. Self-deprecation can go too far, and as a nation we are perhaps too good at it, so good that it becomes a species of forgetting.
So it is that in these pages I would like to introduce you – gently – to the war and the men and women who fought in it. In this book I invite you with all respect to make the acquaintance of what we call The Civil War – the series of battles and campaigns fought on the field and also in people’s hearts and minds between 1642 and 1649, culminating in the judicial execution of a king and the creation of the only English Republic to date.
You, dear courteous reader, will come to know more anon. You will not come to know everything worth knowing from my poor book alone, but it may make you feel well enough acquainted with its subject to pursue the men and women it sketches through other books, to see them in the streets of your own town or city.
To some of you I should not presume ot offer such an introduction. For some of you, the civil war is an old friend, and I welcome you too to these pages. Among your number are doubtless the formidable amateur experts who also dot our landscape; those who know far more than I about the siege of Gloucester or the range of a demiculverin, those who could draw an accurate sketch of the battle lines at Newbury, those who have an especial hero among the fighting men and women whose stories burst from the pages of history – Fairfax, Cromwell, Charles I. I bow to you and apologize in advance for any errors you may discern. But I also beg you not merely to indulge your passion, but to make the acquaintance of persons whose stories you may not have considered important, especially the stories of noncombatants, the stories of those for whom war was not battle but privation or writing or ideas.
Finally, I address you, discerning and erudite readers, academic historians, colleagues. Not all of you will agree with what I have done here. So it must be, for I hope we might at least unite in stating that no history of this war has ever commanded universal acclamation. It may be that some of you may think, for instance, that cookery writers should not elbow parliamentary debates aside as they do here, for the reason that the latter have more serious influence on the lives of ordinary men and women. But do they? The democratization of simple knowledge is part of the political story of these years. And unlike the form of government, this reform is lasting. Bear with me, tolerate me, and you may find some profit in it.
I also want to say this to you, as an apology for my poor naked book; once upon a time, our courteous readers enjoyed academic history because it was grounded, as was the novel, in a drama of character. Macaulay and Carlyle were read and loved because their version of history was a guide to human nature. For complex and very good reasons, their approach has been largely abandoned by professional historians; indeed, for many a focus on individual character in history is now an irredeemable sign of the amateur. In all my work I am trying to seduce the academy into taking this human approach back, reviving it, and thus giving its revived force to the subjects of our ruminations. If the past is not to be dry, then it must live, and so must its people. I hope I may be forgiven much that is faulty or imperfect for my attempt to return to a moment when history was a vital part of the nation’s idea of who and what human beings are.
I also gratefully greet those of my profession who have made the present book possible by their tireless, often unrewarded and unrecognized attempts to labour through unread and grimy manuscripts and smudged public records in search of those most elusive of all historical personages, the ordinary man and woman. May we all, author and readers, unite in their name. And I commend this my poor book to you above all.
Your very humble servant,
THE AUTHOR
Oxford
February 2006
One night in 1712, a man named Thomas Neville lay dying in his own bed, surrounded by family and friends. He was an ordinary gentleman, but in his lifetime he had been among those who had seen the Middle Ages finally disappear, and the modern era emerge. He had seen wonders, and had even made them happen. But the changes he had witnessed were accompanied by violence and terror unmatched in the history of his country. Thomas Neville was the last man to remember that turmoil, the last surviving field officer from a once-great but defeated army, the army of King Charles I.
Thomas Neville had had better reason than most to join the king’s army. He had seen his rich father ordered to give up the house he had grown up in and had heard him say that ‘rather than yield to dishonourable persons, I will make my house my grave’. His enemy – the Parliamentarian Lord Grey of Groby – stormed the house and took his father prisoner; the building was burned to the ground. From then on Thomas Neville and his elder brother William were at war, whether they wished to be or not. In 1644, they fought at Newark; in 1646 at Ashby de la Zouch. Both brothers survived the war, but William was dead by 1661. Thomas survived to tell his stories of dashing Cavalier Prince Rupert galloping to the rescue of his children and grandchildren.
By the time Thomas Neville closed his eyes in death, the war he had fought in had become distant even for his grandchildren. In the decades that followed the war, throughout Britain, people began to make efforts to write down the Civil War stories that their grandfathers had told. Those who had fought themselves had spent the Restoration years writing down their experiences, fighting old battles again. And grandmothers wrote too, for grandchildren who would never know their grandfathers because they lay buried at Edgehill, at Newbury, at Marston Moor or Naseby, or by lesser towns or streams where short sharp engagements had been fought. Some wrote for the God for whom they had shed their blood; others for the Good Old Cause, and still others for the kings living and dead whom they had served. Some recounted their war experiences in the hope of a disability pension, or to explain to a sceptical community exactly what they had done. All of them wrote because they knew they had lived through a time like no other.
Their descendants kept their letters, their diaries, their memoirs faithfully, knowing that in those pages lay a link to a time fast passing from memory into history. Others sought to scrabble together the storm of paper the war had produced; George Thomason tried to collect every pamphlet, newspaper and ballad printed during the war, while Samuel Pepys put together ballads and Edward Hyde and John Aubrey wrote down soldiers’ and survivors’ recollections. Those who had been children