The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638-1661

308 Pages·2000·2.44 MB·English

by  Martyn Bennett

THE CIVIL WARS EXPERIENCED
The Civil Wars Experienced is an exciting new history of the Civil Wars, which
recounts their effects on ‘the common people’. This engaging survey throws new
light onto a century of violence and political and social upheaval.
By looking at personal sources such as diaries, petitions, letters and social
sources, including the press, The Civil Wars Experienced clearly sets out the true
personal and cultural effects of the wars on the peoples of England, Scotland,
Wales and Ireland, and how common experiences transcended national and
regional boundaries. It ranges widely from the Orkneys to Galway and from
Radnorshire to Norfolk.
The Civil Wars Experienced explores exactly how far-reaching the changes
caused by Civil Wars actually were for both women and men and carefully
assesses individual reactions towards them. For most people, fear, familial
concerns and material priorities dictated their lives, but for others the civil
revolutions provided a positive force for their own spiritual and religious
development.
By placing the military and political developments of the Civil War in a social
context, this book portrays a very different interpretation of a century of regicide
and republic.
Martyn Bennett is Reader in History at Nottingham Trent University
THE CIVIL WARS
EXPERIENCED
Britain and Ireland, 1638–61
Martyn Bennett
London and New York
For Deborah
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 2000 Martyn Bennett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-98180-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-15901-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-15902-4 (pbk)
Stars blazed, protazoa coupled, apes levered themselves upright, generations
of men and women lived and died, and like them all I, Joan, have made
history.
(Kate Grenville, Joan Makes History, 1988)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Time line x
Maps xx
1 The Aberdeen doctors and history 1
2 Under occupation: the North of England, 1640–8 17
3 Experiencing rebellion in Ireland, 1641–9 43
4 The Scottish experience of the wars in the four nations, 1638–48 73
5 Experiencing war in Wales and England 91
6 The revolutionary period, 1648–53 127
7 Conquered nations: Republican and Restoration Scotland and Ireland, 163
1653–61
8 Republic and Restoration in England and Wales, 1653–61 191
Afterword 211
Notes 215
Bibliography 237
Index 261
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people to thank for their help with this work. I must thank the
Faculty of Humanities at Nottingham Trent University for the time, money and
space to work on this book. The Faculty as a whole and the History Section of the
Department of International Studies has been unfailingly supportive and
considerate. In particular I must thank the members of the research group,
Forward, and the early modern women’s manuscripts project, Perdita: Angela
Brown, Victoria Burke, Elizabeth Clarke, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Ken Gibson,
Stuart Jennings, Veronica Lawrence, Linda Lees, Kirsteen Macpherson, for their
suggestions, and information given when they have heard parts of this book as
papers. I must also record the similar debt due to the late Dr Anne Mitson, our
much-missed colleague. I also offer thanks to two former students in particular,
Sam Ratcliffe who worked on the Dublin Cess Book and Bryn Coldrick who
provided me with information about his native Meath for me. I also extend my
thanks to my students past and present who discuss all of these issues with me on a
weekly basis.
Thanks are due to the Scouloudi Foundation for enabling me to work on the
1641 Depositions with the aid of a grant towards the purchase of microfilm copies.
It goes without saying that the fifty-odd archive and record offices and libraries
consulted and referred to in the bibliography are due a huge debt of gratitude. It
seems churlish to single any out in particular, because they have all together made
this work possible. So I hope that the principal archivists and archival assistants
who made my work easier take this as a very grateful thank you.
I must also thank the organisations which had heard parts of the work in
progress as papers. Forward has already been mentioned, but alongside it stands
the Cromwell Association, Midland History, which published an earlier draft of
Chapter 4 as a conference proceeding entitled ‘“My Plundered Townes, My
Houses Devastation”: The Civil War and North Midlands Life, 1642–1646’,
Midland History 22 (1997) and the Seventeenth Century Studies Centre at Durham
University.
INTRODUCTION
I have worked on the mid-seventeenth century for almost twenty years. In the
optimism of my youth I harboured hopes that the mid-seventeenth century history
of the British Isles was the history of revolution. However, my Civil War
education coincided with the onset of two conservative impulses: Margaret
Thatcher’s twentieth-century Conservative ‘revolution’ and the publication of
Robert Ashton’s important work on the mid-seventeenth century, The English
Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution. In the wake of both of these potent
forces my optimism about the progressive nature of the Civil War period began to
dissipate. During my post-graduate years I became convinced, just as several of
my slightly older colleagues were, that a Royalist victory, whether in 1646, in
1648 or even 1651 could have involved some degree of political or even social
change too. Many Royalist activists were as much outsiders as some of
Cromwell’s russet-coated soldiers. I worked on the small Royalist army of the North
Midlands led by Lord Loughborough. The vast majority of the 350 officers under
his command were relative political, social and economic nonentities, in the world
beyond their parish boundaries. Had these men been on the winning side then it
was not beyond possibility they may have demanded some part of the spoils? They
would certainly have benefited financially, as many of their opponents were to do
after the war, and they would have weeded out and replaced the petty and middling
parliamentarian officials in the local county. Perhaps, if their service had been
exemplary they may have been rewarded with positions of national importance.
However, it would always remain true that the Royalist victors would have wanted
a place in the status quo rather than any part in a brave new world. Whilst many
parliamentarians would have also desired nothing more than this for themselves,
the fact is that some of their number forced major changes upon the four nations in
the wake of victory in 1648. There were limits to the notion of the conservative
revolution. Even if the revolution of December 1648 to March 1649 was in any
way conservative, the resulting political consequences, the restructuring of British
and Irish polity were radical.
The tide of the twentieth-century Conservative revolution also reached the high
water mark. For all of Margaret Thatcher’s confidence, much of the brash
revolution of the 1980s was revealed in the wake of a deeply flawed economic
upturn to be little other than vindictive swipes at societal structures created since
the Second World War (and sometimes much earlier) and the social
viii
responsibilities imposed by the Welfare State. This attack diminished into a
confused, corrupt structureless ragbag of anti-radicalism.
The decline of the Conservative impulses became coupled with the realisation
that much work on the period, including my own, had largely excluded all women
and most men whilst at the same time effectively ignoring three of the four nations
of the British Isles. In some ways this was the legacy of the county-study
background which also informed my earlier work. I set out to make a small attempt
to offset some of these failings in my 1997 work The Civil Wars in Britain and
Ireland 1638–1651. By embracing the holistic view of the conflict and struggles in
the four nations the inescapable conclusion was that I was looking at not one, but a
series of revolutions each devouring its predecessor. It renewed my optimism in
the hope or belief that the progressive will eventually supersede the retrograde and
the reactionary in any century if not always directly, but by leaving indelible traces
for future societies to find, re-enact and re-use. But this new belief in the
revolution left some lingering doubts. In many ways the revolution of the
midseventeenth century did not advance the lot of the vast majority of the people
of the four nations. So, having now, after twenty years of studying the Civil Wars
period, set out in print how I think the revolution may have occurred and having
looked at how some ordinary people were dragged into the war, I decided that it
was about time to consider this latter perspective more thoroughly.
This book is then an account or series of accounts of the experiences of a range
of people across the British Isles. In it are narratives of segments of lives affected
by the Civil Wars. There is little here of the grand narrative in the sense that it is
always in the background rather than always to the fore. Some of the characters in
this book, like Robert Baillie or Archibald Johnston of Wariston are relatively well
known. Indeed in a work which has some similarities with this one, David
Stevenson’s excellent For King or Covenant? includes both these men. Others like
Lady Ann Halket may be familiar. Others, including for instance, Mr John
Clopton, are largely unknown. Some people here are represented in their own
words, because they were literate. Some of them wrote diaries, journals or
memorials. Other people here are accounted for by ministers, clerks, constables
and some collected information from those who could not write but had narratives
of their own to tell, because they had suffered, mentally, spiritually, financially or
physically the wars and revolutions in the four nations. Theirs are alternative
histories in some ways; they themselves, their stories and experiences do not
always appear in the general narratives of the period: in some cases their narratives
do not allude to the general narrative at all. Yet these narratives do not simply
offer some challenge to the general history much beloved by post-modernist
critics. Instead. they strengthen the narrative, give it new form and vigour, for
whether these people alluded to it directly or not their narratives are of the Civil War
period and instead of weakening the case for history they give it validity and
strength by enriching our impressions. Moreover, these narratives return history to
the people to whom it belongs, those who made it, endured it and lived it, without
stealing it from anyone else.
ix
Snippets or flashes of light have often occurred to reveal people who do not
shine in the firmament of history, but largely there is a shroud of darkness. I
originally wanted to name this book after Mr Clopton, because his diary
exemplified many things about this period. He was obsessed with the weather,
concerned to develop his house and land, keen to record the histories of those
people around him that he cared about. He knew that the world outside his home
was changing rapidly, he was involved at the fringes and he had a friend in the
parliamentarian administration of Suffolk. He was also possibly frightened. It is
well known that Samuel Pepys codified his diary because he was frightened that it
might one day be seized and used in evidence against him: he may also have
balked at writing explicit sexual language. Pepys invented a code. Clopton also did
so, in his case it was a code of silence, or more realistically, of referring to many
important events second hand. He did not use Walter Powell, the Welsh diarist’s
technique of compiling the diary later as a chronological list. Clopton was less
direct, recording the time he heard about the event. Thus the news of the
impending death of Charles I is recorded after the king was dead and the execution
was recorded on the day the news was well on its way to Edinburgh, never mind
just over the Suffolk border. Fear, personal concern and personal priorities dictated
many peoples’ lives and Clopton clearly shows this. For other people in this book
the Civil Wars and revolutions provided a very personal vehicle. For Alexander
Jaffray of Aberdeen they conveyed him from one set of religious or
cosmographical certainties, through soul-searching questions and sect-hopping to
Quakerism’s inner light. Fortunately for him they did not, as they were to do for
Archibald Johnston, lead from an outward appearance of certainty to a very evident
revelation of internal uncertainties. For Elizabeth Jekyll the war was one more
danger on the road to spiritual confidence in her salvation, and she was not alone
in this. For others, Mary Hammond of Tuam, the Gonne family of Connacht, or
the family of Gruffydd ap Stephen, the journey was more physical than mental,
involving the destruction of family, friends and home. Nevertheless, they were all
swallowed up in the Civil War and revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century,
whatever they themselves made of them.
The book opens with a discussion of one point at which the decline into conflict
was challenged. In 1638 the scholars of Aberdeen University raised objections to
the National Covenant then being signed across Scotland. They were concerned to
challenge on valid grounds the establishment of what they clearly saw as a new
heterodoxy being forced on the country at the expense of religious unity. That
these academics were sidelined along with their objections raises several issues.
Their defeat almost obscured their role in the developing narrative of the wars in
the four nations, but conversely opens the possibility of counter-factual history and
for a consideration of the roles of alternative narratives of the sort presented
throughout this book.
Martyn Bennett, Nottingham Trent University, April 1999