On 24 January 1649, a Rutland farmer named Humphrey Brown appeared before a committee at Westminster to relate what he could remember of the attack on Leicester that he had witnessed three-and-a-half years before. Brown attested the following: that after surrendering to the Royalists, Parliamentarian soldiers at the Newarke had been robbed, stripped of their clothes and, in many cases, cut and wounded – contrary to the quarter they had been promised. Brown (who had been about eighteen-years-old at the time) claimed that the King himself had done nothing to prevent this maltreatment. Rather, he had encouraged it: “I do not care if they cut them three times more, for they are mine enemies”, Brown claimed to have heard the King say (“or words to that effect”, Brown added). When asked to confirm that the King himself had said this, Brown swore that it had been unmistakably the King, “on horseback, in bright armour, in the said town of Leicester” (Howell, 1107). 

First-hand accounts of those who were injured or suffered loss in the royalist attack survive in ​Leicester's Borough Hall Papers, recently researched and digitised by the Civil War Petitions project. They make pitiable reading, even 370 years after the event. William Summer, a Leicester tailor, attested that his son had been killed in the fighting and his house plundered, both of which had contributed to his wife's mental collapse: “the fright whereof your petitioner's wife has been distracted ever since”. Katherine Palmer described how her husband Abraham, a weaver, was “totally plundered of all that he had” and imprisoned by the Royalists after the town's surrender, subsequently developing a sickness from which he died. Frances Stevens claimed a widow's pension of four shillings a week for herself and six children after her husband had been killed in the town's defence alongside his officer, Captain Farmer. Robert Holmes, a blacksmith, lost the use of one of his arms. John Hall, a shoe-maker, appealed for charitable relief after being wounded in the town's defence and having “his goods plundered to the very walls”. As the Civil War Petitions website persuasively puts it, bolstering the ranks of the garrison with armed civilians “made the boundary between soldier and civilian a blurred one in the eyes of their assailants” and raises the point that the parliamentarian captives, to whose deliberate wounding the King apparently turned a blind-eye, may have been civilians. Moreover, the plunder of the town following its capture appears to have been well-organised and not merely the result of soldiers running amok. A report that “140 cart loads of the best good and wares in the shops were sent away by Saturday noone towards Newark with a convoy of horse” (A Perfect Relation, 2-3) implies a deliberate and systematic looting of the town. Brown's statement regarding the King was unsupported, but injury clearly had occurred at Leicester and looting appears to have been sanctioned by the royalist command – the ultimate responsibility for which lay with King Charles.

The inclusion of Brown's evidence at the King's trial is something of an oddity. While others testified to witnessing the King's violent action against his subjects at Edgehill, Newbury, etc., they were major engagements that had resulted in far more deaths than had the action at Leicester. The inclusion of Brown's testimony may be explained by a large Leicestershire contingent among the commissioners of the High Court that tried the King, most notably Lord Grey. In December 1648, Grey helped orchestrate the expulsion of moderate voices from the House of Commons that led directly to a vote being carried to put the King on trial. Other Leicestershire men who sat in judgement of the King can be seen to have fallen within Grey's influence: fellow MPs Peter Temple and Thomas Wayte, who had been commissioned as officers by Lord Grey in the first Civil War; James Harrington, MP for Rutland, an area secured by Grey for Parliament in 1643; MP Henry Smith, who was elected to fill the Leicestershire parliamentary seat formerly held by Colonel Theophilus Grey's brother: all of these men put their name and seal to King Charles's death warrant, however reluctant they later claimed to be. Together with Thomas Horton, another Leicestershire army officer, men with close ties to Leicestershire and Rutland made up fifteen percent of the Regicides – surely spurred-on by the leading figure of Lord Grey, who almost certainly pushed for the inclusion of Brown's testament, and the case of Leicester, as evidence against the King.  

Today, the attack on Leicester may be considered a minor action in the Civil War but surviving evidence shows that it had real significance at the time. Indeed, the spectre of Leicester's sufferings shadowed King Charles to the very end: the officer into whose custody the King was placed during his trial was Francis Hacker. On 30 January 1649 the former garrison commander, captured whilst attempting to escape from Leicester three-and-a-half years before, escorted the King to his place of execution and as was present on the scaffold when the axe fell.

​Sources:

Howell, T. B. A Complete Collection of State Trials, Vol. 4 (London: 1816)

“The Petition of William Summer of Leicester, Leicestershire, 1645 to 1647”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-petition-of-william-summer-of-leicester-leicestershire-1645-to-1647/. Accessed 28/05/2021

“The Petition of Katherine Palmer of Leicester, Leicestershire, 1645 to 1647”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-petition-of-katherine-palmer-of-leicester-leicestershire-1645-to-1647/. Accessed 28/05/2021

“The Petition of Frances Steevens and Constance Brewine, both of Leicester, Leicestershire, 1645 to 1647”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-petition-of-frances-steevens-and-constance-brewine-of-leicester-leicestershire-1645-to-1647/. Accessed 28/05/2021

“The Petition of Robert Holmes of Leicester, Leicestershire, 1645 to 1647”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-petition-of-robert-holmes-of-leicester-leicestershire-1645-to-1647/. Accessed 28/05/2021

“The Petition of John Hall of Leicester, Leicestershire, 1646”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/petition/the-second-petition-of-john-hall-1646/.
Accessed 28/05/2021

“'Killing a King': The Sack of Leicester and the Trial of Charles I”, Civil War Petitions [website]. Available: https://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/blog/killing-a-king-the-sack-of-leicester-and-the-trial-of-charles-i/. Accessed 28/05/2021

A Perfect Relation of the Taking of Leicester (Thomason E.288[4])

Barber, S. “Temple, Peter (bap.1599, d. 1663). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004).

Coward, B. “Hacker, Francis (d.1660), parliamentarian army officer and regicide”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004).

Gardiner, K. R and Gardiner D. L. “Smith [Smyth], Henry (b. 1619/20, d. in or after 1668)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004).

Hopper, A. J. “Waite, Thomas (fl.1634-1668), parliamentarian army officer and regicide”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004).
​
Kelsey, S. “Harrington, James [formerly Sir James Harrington, third baronet] (bap. 1607, d. 1680)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004). 

Royalist foot appeared in strength on the 29 May, approaching Leicester simultaneously from north and south. Initially they occupied houses adjacent to St Sunday's Bridge, on the north bank of the Soar, but these were cleared by Grey's soldiers, who then fired the houses to stop them providing further cover for the enemy. Viewing the defences, it was clear to Prince Rupert that the Newarke's stone walls were a weak-point and by evening he had begun to establish gun batteries on high ground to the south of the town that were well established by daybreak. The following morning Rupert fired two cannon shots as a demonstration of his fire-power before sending a trumpeter into the town to demand surrender. Parliament's committee made such slow work of deliberating Rupert's terms that at three in the afternoon, before they had delivered their answer, Royalist batteries began firing on the town's southern defences. In three hours a large breach had been made in the Newarke's unprotected walls.  

​Leicester's defenders had had the foresight to organise teams, “imployed to bring Wooll-Packs, Baggs of Hops, and other necessaries, to stop the breaches”.. When the southern wall partially collapsed these “teames” began to raise a revetment - a second line of earthworks - immediately behind the breach. Royalist gunfire continued as “hundreds workt together to the amazement of the enemy” (An Examination Examined, 3), and although many of them were dismounted troopers more than one source refers to women working in the line under fire (A Perfect Relation, 1; A Narration of the Siege, 4). The Newarke's unprotected stone walls may have collapsed woefully quickly but in the event this worked to the defenders' advantage: with only a single breach in the line it was perfectly clear where the Royalists would drive home an assault and the Newarke was reinforced accordingly.  

​Impatient to have begun firing on the town that afternoon, Rupert was equally impatient to storm the defences. Accounts vary as to exactly when the attack went in, some writing that it was ten o'clock, others that it was in the early hours of 31 May. The royalists assaulted from three directions simultaneously, intending to stretch the defence to breaking. As the defenders had predicted, the main thrust was against the breach. This was undertaken by Colonel George Lisle's tertio, “tryed Souldiers . . . Edgehill Regiments”, as the royalist news-sheet Mercurius Aulicus described them. Even so, their attack faltered in the teeth of a well-prepared defence: “our best Cannon, drawn thither, and load[ed] with Case-shot, did wonderfull execution upon the Enemy”, was one parliamentarian account (A Exact Relation, 6), while another delighted in reporting the last moments of a royalist officer who “in a bravery, came up to our Cannon, and was by it shotter'd into small parcels” (A Narration of the Siege, 7). The attack was thrown back and subsequent attempts by the royalists to fight their way into the Newarke were similarly ineffective.

On the eastern side of the town, Colonel Grey was less successful in defending his position. Here, the royalists attacked over a much broader front and were able to use ladders to scale the earth ramparts. Though their first attempt was beaten back, a subsequent attack armed with “hand-granadoes” enabled the royalist foot to breach the defences, open the town's gates and allow cavalry to enter the line. Grey was reportedly “wounded on the face, and had two cuts on the fore-part of his head, one of them to the skull, and also a wound in the back with a Pike” (An Examination Examined​, 16). Of his three company commanders, one was killed and another wounded. Soldiers of Astley's brigade, fighting their way into the north end of the town, were counter-attacked by Colonel Pye leading a cavalry charge up the High Street, but the parliamentarians were overwhelmed and Pye was captured. There is some account of a fighting retreat being made through St Martin's churchyard as parliamentary resistance began to collapse and it was left to Major Innes, still holding the Newarke against repeated attacks, to agree to surrender. Captain Hacker again showed initiative when he managed to escape from the Newarke with a handful of men, passing unchallenged through the press of attacking royalists after overhearing their password shouted through the darkness. He was later captured some distance from the town.  

Mercurius Aulicus reported 80 royalist dead (“many whereof were killed at the Breach”) and 120 parliamentarian. A parliamentarian account, A Perfect Relation, put the number of dead higher, at 300. The London paper Mercurius Civicus referred to the action as “The bloudy Massacre” of Leicester, although reports of atrocities following the town's surrender, such as the wholesale seizure and hanging of the town's committee, were subsequently accepted to have been fabrications (Whitelock, I, 441, 443). “give the divell his due”, admitted one London pamphleteer (A Perfect Relation, 3), “I cannot learne of any such order given to destroy all, as is said by some.” 

Sources:
An Examination Examined: being a full being a full and moderate answer to Maior Innes relation concerning the siege and taking of the town of Leicester by the Kings forces, the last of May 1645 (Thomason E.303[13])

A Perfect Relation of the Taking of Leicester (Thomason E.288[4])

A More Exact Relation of the Siege Laid to the Town of Leicester (Thomason E.286[7])

Mercurius Aulicus, 25 May-8 June (Thomason E.288[48])

A Narration of the Siege and Taking of the Town of Liecester (Thomason E.289[6])

Whitelock, B. Memorials of the English Affairs, vol. 1 (Oxford: 1853)

the 1645 attack on Leicester and the Trial of King Charles I
​

​Although the attack on Leicester in May 1645 barely registers as footnote in the history of the English Civil War, this brief action was seized on by Leicestershire parliamentarians at the time as undeniable proof of the King's bloody treatment of his subjects and was used as evidence against him at his trial in 1649.​
​

​In early 1645 the principle objective of the King's army lay north of the River Trent and aimed to re-establish a presence in the north of England following the defeat at Marston Moor the previous summer. The King's nephew, Prince Rupert, proposed a bold strategy: to march north from Oxford and relieve the besieged royalist garrison at Chester, then to cross the Pennines and relieve the beleaguered castles of Pontefract and Scarborough. Others among the King's advisers were more cautious, reluctant to leave the royalist capital of Oxford to the mercy of a parliamentarian force advancing from London. Faced with conflicting advice, the King opted for a compromise: having joined with royalist troops in Staffordshire, his army would remain in the north Midlands and march for Newark, maintaining a threat to the Parliamentarian north while keeping within striking distance of Oxford: “the best way we can take in case we are to march immediately unto you”, Oxford's garrison was informed (Digby, 26 May 1645). The route from Staffordshire to Newark would take the King's army through Leicestershire.
​

​Although Leicester had been secured early in the war by the area's leading parliamentarians, much of the county was still dominated by local royalist garrisons at Belvoir Castle and Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Capturing Leicester would help the King secure the whole county and establish a line of communication and supply from Staffordshire to Newark.

​Fortifying Leicester had been a long-standing contention between military commanders and Leicester's civilian authorities. The town corporation had been reluctant to dig defences and raise earthworks, possibly for fear of lowering the value of their property. As a consequence, Leicester's defences were rather modest. Although the town was surrounded on three sides by a ditch and earth ramparts, high enough to require scaling ladders, the walls' effectiveness was compromised by their extreme length: a defensive line of nearly three miles could not be adequately manned by Leicester's garrison of just 500 soldiers.  

On 25 May Leicester was warned by parliament's garrison at Derby that the King's army was no longer heading north as expected and that Leicester was a possible target. Leicester's parliamentarian committee considered this to be “but probable, and uncertain” (An Examination Examined, 3) and troops were not recalled from outlying garrisons. Hundreds of soldiers that may have aided Leicester's defence thus  remained distant and without orders. A 350-strong force at Cole Orton, with valuable artillery, made no move as the Royalist army swept by them. Better initiative was shown by the garrison commander at Kirby Bellars Hall, Captain Hacker. Hearing of the King's approach, he gathered spare weapons and made for Leicester with 100 horse, leaving his foot soldiers to hold their position with two days supplies.​

​Leicester's parliamentarian garrison comprised of four companies of foot under the command of Colonel Theophilus Grey, together with approximately 200 of the Leicestershire Horse under Sir Edward Hartopp. In the event of an attack it was planned to strengthen the foot with 900 armed civilians that the town's mayor was authorised to impress for military service. In the event, only 400 were enlisted, probably due to a shortage of weapons. Leicester was fortunate that other troops were in the vicinity: Sir Robert Pye's Regiment of Horse, part of a brigade detached from Fairfax's 'new model' to shadow the King's progress from Oxford, happened to be quartered at Leicester on their return south and were called on to help in the town's defence. Similarly, 200 dragoons from Newport Pagnell under Major James Innes, en route to reinforce Nottingham, were diverted to defend Leicester and rode into town just as the Royalist advance cavalry appeared on the evening of the 28 May. It was a rag-tag assortment of Parliamentarian troops, then (approximately 1,000 foot and dragoons, and 750 horse), that prepared to offer resistance to the King's army. Facing them was a force of between 10 and 12,000 men.

​The twenty-three-year-old Colonel Pye held seniority and took overall command of the defence - Colonel Grey, though sixteen years Pye's senior, had only recently received promotion (see Colonel Henry Grey's letter of March 1644). They divided the fortifications between them, Grey commanding the north and east side of the ramparts while Pye took the south side and the south-east area of the town known as 'The Newarke'. The Newarke (literally, 'new work') had been a medieval ecclesiastical precinct, bounded by high stone walls and popularly supposed by Leicester's citizens to be the most easily defended part of the town, probably in the mistaken belief that its walls had been erected for defence (rather than as a property boundary) and a naive trust in stone buildings to withstand gunfire (A Narration of the Siege, 12). This, together with the corporation's reluctance to dig up the surrounding land, meant that the Newarke had not begun to be fortified until mid-May, and only then after pressure at Westminster from Lord Grey, the borough's MP and cousin to the garrison's colonel. The Newarke defences were still incomplete when the King's forces appeared in strength on 29 May.​

​Sources

Lord George Digby's letter to Secretary Nichols, dated 26 May 1645, in Hamilton, W. D. (ed.) Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1644-45, 507.

An Examination Examined: being a full being a full and moderate answer to Maior Innes relation concerning the siege and taking of the town of Leicester by the Kings forces, the last of May 1645 (Thomason E.303[13])

Grey, H. A Letter to the Lord Grey of Grooby (Thomason E.37[9])

A Narration of the Siege and Taking of the Town of Liecester (Thomason E289[6])

North African 'Barbary' pirates were a terror of the British south west in the 1640s and had been for generations. The Barbary (more properly 'Berber') peoples inhabited the southern Mediterranean seaboard from Morocco to Egypt as vassals of the Turkish Ottoman Empire – hence the name 'Turk', by which they were commonly known in England. Barbary pirates preyed on English shipping almost at will during the early seventeenth century, the Turkish Sultan having granted his subjects license to attack all Christian shipping and to enslave any non-Muslims that they captured. In the seven years between 1609 and 1616 they took nearly 500 vessels and made repeated attacks against coastal villages in Devon and Cornwall, as well as regular incursions into the Bristol Channel and venturing as far as the Dover straits. Perhaps the most notorious of their attacks on the British Isles occurred in 1631, when they raided the village of Baltimore on the south coast of Ireland, seizing almost all its men, women and children and selling them into slavery in North African ports. ​

​
​Sources

"B. E." A Dictionary of the Canting Crew. London (c.1690)
​
Bidisha, “Tudor, English and Black, and not a Slave in Sight”, The Guardian, (29/10/2017) [online]

​Fryer, P. Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press (1984)

Martone, E. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Blacks in European History and Culture. Connecticut: Greenwood Press (2009)

Onyeka, "Tudor Africans: What's in a Name?", History Today, 62, 10 (10/10/2012)

Peachey, S. & Turton, A. Old Robin's Foot: the Equipping and Campaigns of Essex's Infantry, 1642-1645. Partizan Press (1987)

SeeMeWiltshire: Capturing Living Stories [website] http://seemewiltshire.co.uk

Sprigge, J. Anglia Rediviva. Oxford: University Press (1854)

Stoyle, M. Soldiers and Strangers: an Ethnic History of the English Civil War. London: Yale University Press (2005)

Kaufman, M. “Slavery shouldn't distort the story of black people in Britain”, The Guardian (17/10/2012) [online]

Vizram, R. Asians in Britain: 400 years of history. London: Pluto Press (2002) ​

In the summer of 1642 leading parliamentarians vied with the supporters of the King for control of the Midland counties, each side attempting to gain control of strongholds and local militia forces as political tensions intensified and increasingly bitter confrontations began to look like civil war.
​
Lord Grey had been in the Midlands since late July. He had come down from Westminster to secure the Leicestershire county magazine that his father, the Earl of Stamford, had removed to the family seat at Bradgate Park. Grey was forced to hurriedly withdraw from the Leicester area at the approach of the King's forces on July 27 and the town of Leicester “sent to Lord Brook at Warwick for aid” (HMC, 5th Report, pp.182-183). However, Warwick Castle was subsequently besieged at the beginning of August by the county's leading Royalist, the Earl of Northampton, and Lord Brooke had to summon a force from London to hurry to the castle's relief. At what point Lord Grey's cavalry troop joined with the London force is unclear.

Failing to take Warwick Castle, the Earl of Northampton then turned his attention to the parliamentary town of Coventry, which barred its gates against him. Northampton's force was still before Coventry on 22 August when it was learned that Brooke's force has reached Southam, some twelve miles to the south. Northampton pulled his troops away from Coventry that evening to secure the road south, hoping to engage the parliamentarian force while it was still recovering from its long march.

In Southam, the resting parliamentary soldiers were warned that Northampton was on the move. Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton, a London painter serving in Hollis's foot regiment, wrote: "in half an hour all our soldiers, though dispersed, were complete in arms ready to encounter the enemy, crying out for a dish of cavaliers to supper". When the expected attack failed to materialise that evening, Hollis's soldiers stayed ready at their posts through the night, crying out instead “to have a breakfast of Cavaliers”.

Northampton's force did not push south until the following morning, and his force appeared in full-view of the parliamentarians shortly before eight o'clock on 23 August. Wharton understood this early advance as an attempt by the Royalists to catch the Parliamentarians unprepared. The Royalist force formed a line of battle some distance from the parliamentarians (Wharton describes a cornfield and a hill between them) and some time elapsed while Brooke waited to see if they would continue advance on his own position. As they appeared reluctant to do so, Brooke ordered his cannonier to open fire. Two salvoes were then fired from the Parliamentarian guns, under cover of which Brooke sent his regiments of foot forward to engage the enemy.

It is generally agreed from topographical references that the engagement took place in an area north-west of Southam, between the town and the River Itchen: the Royalists were approaching from the north and Wharton described Brooke's troops moving forward of their original positions and gaining the brow of a hill. Ten skeletons, uncovered while quarrying for stone in 1815, were found in the vicinity of Southam Fields Farm and were believed to be casualties from the day's fighting (Smith, 92). An account by chronicler John Vicars, published two years after the action, states that the parliamentary force at Southam numbered 6,000 foot and 300 horse, with nine field guns: the combined commands of Lord Brooke, Lord Saye, Lord Grey, and of colonels Hampden, Hollis and Cholmley (quoted in Fetherston, 97). Wharton believed Northampton's strength to be 800 horse and 300 foot.

London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington, who compiled his own version of events from news sheets published in the capital, wrote: “The enemy discharged three times their two pieces of ordnance upon the very body of our army . . . one went over the Lord Brooke's head, as also another bullet went close to the Lord Grey” (Wallington, pp152-153). Vicars wrote that the Royalist guns fired three times during the course of the short action. The failure of the Royalist guns to do much damage to the Parliamentarian formation was taken by Wallington to be divine providence. Similarly, the hand of God was observed in the effect of a parliamentarian gun “which was charged with musket bullets, which with the scattering, many of the adverse party were dangerously wounded”. More prosaically, it is possible that the ineffectiveness of the royalist heavy guns was due to the speed of the parliamentarian advance: “being on fire to be at them”, wrote Wharton, “we marched thorough the corn and got the hill of them, whereupon they played upon us with their ordinance, but they came short”. ​

We are lucky that the fighting at Southam was described in three contemporary accounts, no doubt indicative of how newsworthy the first pitched battle of the war was. Nehemiah Wharton went on to describe the aftermath of the battle, as he and his men picked their way down the hill towards the River Itchen:

"One drummer, being dead at the bottom of the hill, our knapsack boys rifled to the shirt. Another drummer we found two miles off with his arms shot off, and lay a-dying. Several dead corpses we found in cornfields, and amongst them a trumpeter . . ."

Members of the Sealed Knot at the re-enactment of the Battle of Southam in 2013
(southamcouncil-warks.gov.uk)
​

Sources:
​
“Narrative of the Battle-Fields in Warwickshire During the Civil War 1642-3, &c.”, in: Fetherston, J. (ed.) The Warwickshire Antiquarian Magazine, Part II (Warwick: 1860), pp. 83-105.
Smith, F. Warwickshire Delineated (2nd edn.) (Southam: 1820)
Wallingon, N. Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I (vol. 2) (London: 1869)​
"Nehemiah Wharton to George Willingham", in: Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1642-43, vol. 491: August 1642.

​In the 1600s the river was crossed by ferry but in the following century a stone bridge was built by the Cavendish family, which gave Wilne Ferry its modern name – Cavendish Bridge. The stone bridge was destroyed by floods in the 1940s and was replaced by the modernt road bridge in the 1950s.

Robert Hodkinson
July 2020
​

​St Bartholomew's and St Thomas's were both larger in capacity than the Savoy, with 200 and 249 beds respectively. At the Savoy, however, the ratio of nurses to patients was slightly better: one nurse to every twelve or thirteen patients, compared to a ratio of one to fifteen in the civilian hospitals. The Savoy's nurses were also paid 5 shillings a week, more favourable that the 3s 6d that could be earned by nurses elsewhere. Auxiliary staff from outside the nursing profession were employed to carry out menial duties: hospital accounts refer to “Goodey Swaine for emptying close stools, two shillings” and to “Old Bayley [for] bearing coles”. Children (possibly of nurses, but perhaps patients also) were paid to run errands.

Sources:
​
Commonwealth Exchequer Papers, Warrants issued by Army Committees (SP 28/104), The National Archives.

Robinson, G. (1966) “Wounded Sailors and Soldiers in London During the First Dutch War, 1652-1654”, in: History Today, 16 (1)

Von Arni, E. G. (2001) Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660 (London: Routledge).

Weinrib, B. and Hibbert, C. (1983) The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan).

British History Online (2019) “House of Commons Journal: 10 January 1644”, in: Journal of the House of Commons, Volume 3, 1643-1644 (London: 1802), pp. 362-363. British History Online [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol3/pp362-363

​The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy (2020) Who We Are [online] The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: http://royalchapelsavoy.org/who-we-are

​From this time Holmes became embroiled in plots to bring down the British monarch and his supporters. In 1683 he was Argyll’s agent, resident at the Cock & Bottle in Aldersgate, helping to pass correspondence between Argyll and London's Whig conspirators as they finalised the details of the Rye House Plot – the attempted murder of King Charles and James, Duke of York, as they travelled from London to the Newmarket races.
​

​
​Government sources learned of the plot by intercepting letters addressed to a ‘Master West’ and delivered to Mr. Staple’s Southwark Coffee House in Bartholomew Lane, half-a-mile from St Paul’s. When questioned by the authorities, Leonard Staples, the coffee house’s proprietor explained that he accepted the delivery of the letters, which Holmes ‘constantly called for and paid for’. He claimed never to have seen Mr West, the addressee. This is hardly surprising, as Mr West was an alias employed by Holmes. Another of Holmes’s identities was “Peter Harvie”, a supposed linen weaver, whose letters (actually from the Countess of Argyll) were addressed to a cider seller in Bow Churchyard and passed on to the Netherlands in a similar manner. Holmes job was to collect these letters and then sent them on to other agents of Argyll and Monmouth in the Low Countries. The correspondence was written using a simple cipher, with letters and words substituted for numbers. These ciphers were further disguised through pseudonyms: ‘brand’ stood for Scotland, ‘birch’ England, and there were disguised references to dubious ‘parcels of goods’ which were hoped would ‘please the merchants’.

Sources:
Cobbett, W. State Trials, vol. 9
Green, M. A. E. (ed.) Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II
Holmes, R. Marlborough (London: HarperCollins, 2008)
Zook, M. 'Holmes, Abraham (d.1685', in: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online]. available: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13588. accessed 06/08/2019
Zoyland Heritage Fund, 'The Battle of Sedgemoor', zoylandheritgae.co.uk [online]. available: 
http://www.zoylandheritage.co.uk/the_battle.htm. accessed 06/07/2019
'Monmouth's Rebellion Playing Cards (c.1685)', The Stuart Successions Project [online]. available: http://stuarts.exeter.ac.uk/education/objects/monmouth-rebellion-playing-cards-c-1685/. accessed 06/07/2019

George Joyce's life should have been wholly uneventful. Born in Leicestershire in 1636, he appears to have lived his whole life in the village of Blackfordby, some three miles from Ashby-de-la-Zouch. While Ashby, a Royalist stronghold, saw a good deal of fighting in the Civil War, neighbouring Blackfordby escaped relatively unscathed. The young George Joyce seems to have been unaffected by the conflict and after the war he continued to live a quiet life: he never married, and was eventually laid to rest in the same village chapel in which he was baptised. ​Yet by the end of his life it is clear that there was something very curious about George Joyce, because when he was buried in 1674 he was no longer called 'George'. He was 'Jane'.
​

​​Jane's baptism is recorded in the registers of St. Magaret's chapel, Blackfordby (hereafter I will refer to George as 'Jane'). She was baptised 'George' on the 13 December 1636 together with a sibling, Sarah, evidently a twin sister. [1] They were the children of Richard and Sarah Joyce, members of a prominent Blackfordby family whose importance was attested by numerous memorials in the chapel's burial ground. As well as their twins, Richard and Sarah also had an older daughter, Mary. Richard Joyce described himself as a carpenter and, later, a husbandman. His will (dated 1649) tells us he possessed a house and “yard land or farm” with tenements or cottages. At his death he left a gift of money to the village poor. Though perhaps not a major land owner, Richard Joyce appears to have been a local figure of some wealth and standing. [2]

​Certainly, in the 17th century there was report of children's sex being mis-assigned at birth. The Compleat Midwife's Practice Enlarged of 1656 explained such errors as “a mistake of not over-expert Midwives, who have been deceived by the evil conformation of the parts”. It is worth noting that The Complete Midwife was compiled from the writings of male anatomists and physicians, who were never shy in pointing out the deficiencies they saw in untrained, female midwives. The authors cited the example of a girl christened in Paris who turned out to have been a boy, and they went on to explain that “the over-far extension of the Clitoris in female Births, may have occasioned the like mistake”. [4] Here, then, is a 17th century explanation of the confusion surrounding Jane's sex at her birth – an over-large clitoris that was mistaken for a penis. Consequently, she was baptised as a boy. At some point (before Jane was twelve) the mistake was acknowledged by the parents, who accepted that their son was in fact a daughter and referred to her as Jane thereafter. ​

​It would be good to think that once her true sex had been recognised and accepted that Jane could have continued to lead a typical, quiet life. However, there are indications in the written sources that this was not the case. While hermaphroditism was seen in the 17th century as a purely physical condition, evidenced solely from a person's sexually-ambiguous anatomy, the intersex condition is today understood to be far more complex and to work on a chromosomal level. Those who are intersex but live their lives as women may encounter a host of symptoms that set them apart from others. Many such women articulated the problems they encountered in their day-to-day lives in a 2006 article for the New York Times magazine. Some could not menstruate. Some had difficulty finding women's clothes that would fit them. Some described simply being unable to look or feel as other women do: “I grew up a girl [but] I was always a tomboy, I wrestled, I played softball”, sentiments which echo The Compleat Midwife's observation that some hermaphrodites might chose to live as a women “yet still retaining a manlike fashion, both in voice and gesture.” [10] Indeed, in renaming their child 'Jane' and encouraging her to live as a girl, the Joyces' may have been responsible for forcing someone into the persona of a woman who was neither wholly female nor suited to such a role.
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​These young, independent women would have learned the value of hard work from scripture: