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Siege_of_Leicester_Part_Three

5/26/2021

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Signing his own Death Warrant:
The 1645 attack on Leicester
​and the Trial of King Charles I
Part Three
​

Leicester and the King's Trial
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). 
Picture
The Painted Chamber in The Palace of Westminster (William Capon, 1799), where Humphrey Brown gave evidence to the Court of High Commission in January 1649. Depositions were taken down in this chamber to protect the witnesses from public view in Westminster Hall.
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.

Picture
Detail of a German engraving of King Charles's execution in Whitehall. Francis Hacker is shown on the far right of the group, labelled 'D' (British Museum)
​
Picture
Robert Hodkinson
May 2021

​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). 

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Siege_of_Leicester_Part_Two

5/26/2021

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Signing his own Death Warrant:
The 1645 attack on Leicester
​and the Trial of King Charles I

​Part Two
​
The Royalist Assault
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.  
Picture
Leicester's defence and the royalist assault of the night of 30/31 May 1645. Plan based on that in Agnes Fielding Johnson's Glimpses of Ancient Leicester (1906)
​
​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.  
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The remains of the Newarke's wall in the mid-nineteenth century, showing the loop holes made at the time of the defence (thiswasleicestershire.co.uk).
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.” 
Robert Hodkinson
May 2021
​

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)
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Siege_of_Leicester_part_One

5/25/2021

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Signing his own Death Warrant:
the 1645 attack on Leicester and the Trial of King Charles I
​
Part One
​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.​
​

Picture
14th century gate, originally part of Leicester's medieval castle. It formed part of the town's Civil War defences and is now known as 'Prince Rupert's Gateway' [Andrew H. Jackson, via BritishListedBuildings.co.uk]

​The Military Situation, Spring 1645
​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.
​
The Opening Moves
​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.  
Picture
The Royalist advance on Leicester, May 1645, and the disposition of local parliament forces.
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.
Picture
A 19th century conjectural view of Leicester's defenses. It mistakenly shows the rectangular layout of medieval walls round the town's centre. In fact, these had been demolished at the end of the 16th century. [University of Leicester]

​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.​
Robert Hodkinson
May 2021

​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])
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African Soldiers in the British Civil Wars

10/25/2020

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"too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe"
African Soldiers in the British Civil Wars
​

Picture
A European artist's depiction of a North African corsair: "The Eastern Warrior, or the Barbary Pirate", Pier Francesco Mola (1650), Musee du Louvre.
​

The notion that the only black people living in England before the 19th century were indentured servants or slaves has been difficult to dispel (see Kaufmann, 2012). However, there is ample evidence to show that African people were leading independent lives in England two hundred years before the end of slavery, and that they played an active role on both sides during the English Civil War.
When the Earl of Stamford took command of parliament's forces in south-west England in early 1643 his Royalist opponents accused him of resorting to the worst kind of people to fill the ranks of his regiment, and of dredging the local gaols for recruits: "when the Earl of Stamford was last at Exeter he tooke divers Turkes out of Launceton goale [sic] and listed them (forsooth) for King and Parliament" (quoted in Peachey & Turton, 23). Accusatory and disparaging as this assertion is, the presence of Turkish men in a Cornish town at this date is nevertheless quite plausible.
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. ​
The Royalists were understandably gleeful to report a prominent Parliamentarian like Stamford allowing such men to bear arms: an army that recruits the nation's enemies into it ranks can hardly have the people's well-being at heart. However, despite an element of propaganda, there was at least a kernel of truth in the Royalist report. We know of at least one "Turke" serving in the garrison at Exeter because his name appears in the city's siege accounts (Stoyle, 245 n.13) and there were other minority ethnicities to be found in parliament's ranks. Theophilios Palaelogus, a lieutenant in the Earl of Essex's army of 1642, claimed descent from the Emperors of Byzantium, while the ranks of General Edward Massey's western brigade was said to include Ethiopians, Egyptians and Mesopotamians when it was disbanded at Devizes in 1646 (Stoyle, 92; Sprigg, 315). Royalists were not adverse to recruiting similar men into their cause either. Twelve "black moore" pirates served as crew aboard one of the King's ships at Bristol in 1643 (Stoyle, 93) -  blackamoor, moor and Ethiopian were interchangeable in this period and meant someone of Negroid appearance (Onyeka, 2012). Charles I's commander in Cheshire, Lord Byron, argued that the Royalists should actively recruit from other nations: "I know no reason why the King should make any scruple of calling in the Irish, or the Turks if they should serve him" (ibid., 71). Byron clearly thought that ethnicity should be no bar to serving in the King's army.
Further evidence of black people in the south west during the Civil War can be found in the relation of the siege of Wardour Castle, Wiltshire. Captured from the Royalists in May 1643, Wardour's new parliamentarian governor, Edmund Ludlow, reportedly “took a servant of the Lord Arundel's (a blackmoor)”, who was resident at the castle (SEEME, Black History References). Wardour Castle is only thirty miles from Poole, so the case of Arundel's servant is another instance of African people in 17th century England living close to the southern and western sea ports.
​

Picture
Wardour Castle under siege, from the 1685 publication Mercurius Rusticus
In all probability the black soldiers who were encountered on both sides in the English Civil War were neither pirates nor slaves, but free men. Although England's role in the transatlantic slave trade began as early as the 1560s (Kaufman, 2012), the presence of black slaves in England (collared and tagged with their master's name and address) appears to be unknown before the 1670s, at a time when the demand for coffee from English plantations led to an escalation in the slave trade (Fryer, 14, 22-23).
When John Lilburne stood trial in 1637 for distributing banned puritan texts he declared, as an assertion of free speech, that "England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in" - that slavery was not possible in England as long as common law was upheld (Martone, vol. 1, pp.200-203). An African slave named Diogo reported that when he had been captured by an English pirate in 1614 and taken to England he "immediately became free, because in that reign nobody is a slave" (Kaufmann, 2012). In the Civil War period many black people in England were financially independent and owned property. Some, such as Reasonable Blackman, a Southwark silk weaver, pursued skilled trades. Others were valued for their qualities in service: "James the Blackmoor" earned his board and lodging as cook to the Earl of Tavistock during the 1640s, and was paid £4 a year on top of his keep. In 1625 a black woman by the name of Cattelena, living at Almondsbury in south Gloucestershire, was wealthy enough to possess a cow, which surely places her above the servant class in terms of affluence (Kaufman, 2012). It is noticeable, however, that many such people we know of had their African origins all but erased, and their names re-jigged into anglicised forms and many Africans gained English names by accepting, and being accepted into, baptism in the English church. By the 1690s the black presence in Wapping, a centre of maritime trade, was noteworthy enough for the area to be known as 'Little Barbary': a derogatory term, perhaps, but which may also be taken as evidence that definite, black communities had begun to appear by the end of the century. That black people had begun to integrate with the English population by the time of the Civil War is beyond doubt: interracial marriage is evidenced in Depford in 1613 when Jane Johnson married Samuel Mansur, a man with a noticeably Egyptian surname and who was described as "a Blackamore" (Vizram, 7). Moreover, more than 30 instances of children with mixed Anglo-African parentage have been identified in English parish registers up to 1642 (Kaufman, 2012).
​
The African soldiers in Massey's brigade were given passes to leave the country at the end of the Civil War, suggesting that they had been mercenaries rather than settled Englishmen. Nevertheless, the above evidence shows that Black people were firmly established in England by the time of the English Civil War, and had been for generations. Many were financially independent and some played their part in the Civil Wars, not as slaves or servants but as free people.


​        Robert Hodkinson, 2017
        (updated 2020)
Picture

​
​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) ​
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Southam

8/23/2020

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First-Blood in Warwickshire
Southam, August 1642
Picture
Battle Scene detail, Philips Wouwerman (attrib.) Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Two months before the Battle of Edgehill, and one month before the skirmish of Powick Bridge, the Warwickshire town of Southam saw the first clash of Royalist and Parliamentarian forces in the field - and Lord Grey's first taste of military action.
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.
Picture
Area north of Southam, showing conjectural positions of the Royalist (red) and Parliamentarian (blue) forces, and Brooke's forward movement from his original position just north of the town. Southam Fields Farm, where the remains of ten bodies were uncovered in 1815, can be seen top left.
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”. ​
The second volley from the Parliamentarian guns (Wharton writes of six guns, Vicars nine) seems to have caused Northampton's foot to break, the Royalists having already witnessed some appalling casualties amongst their ranks, though Brooke's artillery was few in number. The reaction of the Royalists is understandable. \this was the very beginning of the Civil War: few men, if any, would have been subject to artillery fire in open battle before. Vicars describes the Parliamentarian shot as carving “a lane” through the ranks of Northampton's foot and “cut off a whole file of the enemy's horse at the first shot”, and Wharton described seeing dead horses “some of them having their guts beaten out on both sides”. Wharton wrote that fifty of Northampton's men were killed in the action, by the Royalists own estimation. Vicars noted “forty found slaine in the field”, and nine Royalists taken prisoner – a modest figure, which gives some credibility to his account.
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 . . ."
The latter still had the trumpet in his possession. The Parliamentarian soldiers retrieved it from the corpse and sounded it in triumph as they marched their way into Coventry later that day. Wharton's description of the aftermath of the fighting is vivid in its detail. Wharton drew great strength from his religious faith (there are continual references to hearing sermons and the pillaging of Papists in his letters), yet in his grisly report of the field at Southam, God is strikingly absent – a stark contrast to the allusions of divine intervention repeatedly made by the civilian writers, Vicars and Wallington.
Brooke was unable to pursue and harry the fleeing royalist foot due to his lack of horse. He was content to hold his high ground, then push on to Parliamentarian Coventry that afternoon. His local rival, the Earl of Northampton, subsequently withdrew his forces from the area and joined the King's main army, which based itself at Shrewsbury in late September. Brooke was reinforced when the Earl of Essex brought more troops up from London in early September, and Lord Grey's troop became part of the large Parliamentarian army that began to coalesce in the Midlands. The two sides would face each other again in open battle at Edgehill on 23 October - just nine miles from their first encounter at Southam, two months earlier.

Robert Hodkinson
August, 2020
Picture
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.




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Wilne_Ferry

7/10/2020

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The Adventure of the Burning Hay Carts
Picture
Phillips Wouwerman, 'The Interior of a Stable' (detail) National Gallery

​​English Civil War strongholds were typically taken by siege or storm, but in July 1644 Lord Grey had other plans – all he needed to capture a royalist garrison on the river Trent was several cartloads of hay and a lighted match.
The royalist garrison near Great Wilne, Derbyshire, was established in the winter of 1643. Its purpose was to maintain a direct line of communication between Lord Hastings' Leicestershire royalists and the Earl of Newcastle's forces, who at that time were advancing into Derbyshire from the north. It also aimed to disrupt traffic crossing the Trent, particularly the lead trade in which the foremost Derbyshire parliamentarian, Sir John Gell, had a considerable interest.
The destruction of the Earl of Newcastle's army at the battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644 left Derbyshire royalists in a vulnerable position, and Gell and Lord Grey sought to further isolate them by severing their passage across the Trent. Hastings was in no position to retaliate as much of his own force had been sent into the north to support Newcastle and had yet to return.
Gell, in his personal account of the war, described the royalist position at Wilne Ferry as “a strong fort”, although he appears to have exaggerated the garrison strength. Contemporary reports suggest that the fort consisted of earth works and ditches, with two light field guns to guard the approaches. Passage across the river was provided by a rope-hauled ferry boat. The garrison's commander was Captain Robinson of Hastings' regiment. There were two other captains in the garrison, which could indicate three companies, although the garrison's total strength was about 70 men.
​

Picture
The Trent Valley, July 1644, showing royalist (red) and parliamentary (blue) garrisons. Grey and Gell aimed to cut the line of communication between Leicestershire and Derbyshire royalists by taking Wilne Ferry.

​Lord Grey's Leicestershire parliamentarians rendezvoused with Gell on the banks of the Trent and, Gell recorded, “soe immediately environed the ffort and planted there ordinance, and the next day made ready to storme it”. The unorthodox manner of the attack is recorded in John Rushworth's Historical Collections, dated 17 July 1644:​
...they got about sixty Cartload of Hay, and other Combustible Stuff, which they drove up to the Works of the Garrison, and brought up their Souldiers behind them in security. Then they set the Hay on Fire, the Smoke whereof being driven by an high Wind, fell upon the Garrison, so grievously annoy'd them within that they were soon driven from their Works.​
Another account of the action, recorded by Bulstrode Whitelocke, is similar to Rushworth's but not identical. Whitelocke read or heard report that once the fort's outlying defences had been cleared “their trenches [were] filled with the hay and other stuff” to prepare they way for an assault. Captain Robinson had initially offered to surrender on the guarantee that would be allowed “to march away with bag and baggage”. This had been refused. Now that an assault was imminent, Robinson surrendered unconditionally. Whitelocke recorded one royalist soldier killed and 70 taken prisoner.​​
​

Picture
The area on the Leicestershire/Derbyshire boundary now known as Cavendish Bridge. The Royalist fort stood on the south side of the Trent. Marked in yellow is the probable site of the 17th century ferry.

​The Site Today
Sources agree that the royalist fortification was demolished following its surrender, and it is impossible to distinguish any traces of it from the ditches and embankments that form the area's later flood defences. The 19th century topographer Daniel Lysons tells us that the fort stood on the Leicestershire side of the river, though he is in error as placing the attack in April 1643.
​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
​
Sources:
Gell, Sir J. 'A True Relation', in: Noble, T. (ed.) The History, Gazeteer and Directory of the County of Derby (Derby, 1829), p.67

Lysons, D. and Lysons, S. Magna Britannia, vol. 5 (London, 1817) pp. 3-23. British History Online [viewed 9 July 2020] http://www.british-history.ac.uk/magna-britannia/vol5/pp3-23
Polkey, A. 'Civil War Derbyshire: Sir John Gell's “True Relation” reconsidered', in: Derbyshire Miscellany, 14, 6 (Autumn 1997), pp.151-176
Rushworth, J. 'The Civil Transactions of the Year 1644', in: Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 5 (London, 1721) pp. 748-787. British History Online [viewed 9 July 2020] available: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol5/pp748-787
'Shardlow History', Triposo Travel Guide [viewed 9 July 2020] available: https://www.triposo.com/loc/Shardlow/history/background
Whitelock, B. The Memorials of the English Affairs, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1853), p.282
'OS Map name 005/SW', in Map of Leicestershire (Southampton, 1884-1892), British History Online [viewed 9 July 2020] available: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/os-1-to-10560/leicestershire/005/sw
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SavoyHospital

4/8/2020

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Picture
The Savoy Hospital from an eighteenth-century engraving (Wellcome Library, London)
In 1642 Parliament established the first dedicated military hospital in London at the site of the medieval Savoy Palace, at what is now the north end of Waterloo Bridge. Although almost nothing of the building remains the hospital's financial records, held in the National Archives, provide a vivid picture of those who worked and were treated there.
Begun at the end of the 13th century by Peter of Savoy, the uncle of King Henry III's wife, Queen Eleanor, the palace of the Savoy was left semi-derelict for much of the later middle-ages after it was plundered and burned in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In 1505, Henry VII ordered the palace to be rebuilt as a hospital, providing a night's lodging for up to 100 “pour and nedie” men. The hospital continued to function in its charitable capacity for more than 130 years, until the autumn of 1642 when parliament urgently required beds to accommodate the wounded of the Battle of Edgehill and the fighting at Brentford. On 14 November 1642 parliament established 'The Committee for Sick and Maimed Soldiers', with the power to reorganise the Savoy as a military hospital. The poor and needy that relied on its charity were required to leave - anyone refusing was threatened with arrest for vagrancy. It is probable that those who occupied the Savoy at this time were predominantly homeless men and alcoholics: the area around the Savoy had a reputation for being the haunt of 'loiterers, rogues, idle and drunken persons, vagabonds and strumpets'.
The Hospital Buildings
The main building in which the wounded were to be nursed was the “dorter” or dormitory, a church-like structure some 200 feet in length and 30 feet wide. At the hospital's founding in the Tudor period this had been designed as a single, oblong dormitory with three chapels off its east end. By the end of 1643 the building housed four designated wards: Long Ward sited in original dormitory, Chapel Ward at the east end, and Reading and Newbury wards (named after parliamentarian victories) forming the north and south wings. The interiors were well lit, from the great windows that stood at the far end of each of the old chapels, and from above by an octagonal roof lantern at the centre of the cruciform. Wards were subdivided between nurses, each of whom were responsible for a particular line of beds: there are references to “nurse Jackson['s] side”, “nurse Sharmans side”, and so forth. The total number of available beds was about 150, although this could be expanded. The House of Commons Journal for 10 January 1644 records 200 patients. Average occupancy is thought to have been 92, and it is possible that a number of beds were deliberately kept vacant for use in an emergency. Any over-spill of casualties could be accommodated at London's established hospitals, St Thomas's and St Batholomew's, as well as at Charterhouse school.
Details gleaned from the hospital's surviving accounts reveal much about the workings of the hospital, adding to what we know of its structure from illustrations and plans. For instance, there must have been a range of domestic buildings to use and store the numerous kettles and iron pots which were purchased, and trenchers from which the men ate. Newbury Ward, at least, was furnished with cupboards, shelves and a water tub, and perhaps other wards were the same. We know that a large hall existed, separate to the dormitory, where the more able-bodied would have gathered for prayer, and for which a brass-bound Bible was specially bought. There are references to a wash house, a clerk's office, and a kennel that was home (inexplicably) to a pet fox. Even the colours and textures encountered in the hospital can be discerned from the archives. As Gregory Robinson points out in a 1966 article on London's Civil War hospitals, references to black and brown thread for mending sheets imply that the bed linen was not fine-quality white but an unbleached grey. Bed sheets were “Royal ruld” - ruled with a dark stripe to mark them clearly as hospital property and to dissuade anyone from selling them on. Feather ticks, feather bolsters, blankets and woollen coverlets completed the bedding.
Picture
Plan of the Savoy Hospital (via grenwillow.co.uk)
The Staff
The small pile of bills and receipts in the archives allow us to know the hospital workers by name. William Bradley was employed as the hospital's carpenter, and was able to turn his hand to a variety of jobs: mending the window shutters, repairing the floors, mending beds and replacing bed cords. He also crafted wooden legs and crutches for amputees. Though a skilled craftsman he was only semi-literate, signing his name merely with the initials “WB”. Mary Haslam was the “washer”, responsible for the laundry, although to judge from the lucrative amounts she was paid (between £11 and £12 weekly in 1659), she was most likely the head of a large staff. The laundry lists that bear her name were meticulously detailed, with each sheet and every piece of “small linen” itemised against the name of the nurse who had stripped it from bed or patient. This is a testament to the strenuous efforts made to keep the wards hygienic, together with the “searcher” who was employed to scrutinise clothes and bed linen for vermin: any infested cloth was baked in an oven to destroy fleas and lice before washing.
The hospital's senior medical staff comprised a physician, an apothecary and at least two surgeons (Mr Dunn and Mr Lewis), the latter assisted by five surgeons' mates. Naturally, much of the day-to-day work in the wards was undertaken by the dozen-or-so nursing staff. In 1654, the sicked and wounded were tended by nurses Cole, Titus, Sharman, Fletcher, Cooke, Jackson, Balmer (or Palmer), Tims, Blessington, Kich, Hastings and Dyos. Nurses were primarily chosen from among the widows of those soldiers killed in the fighting: familiar, perhaps, with army life and the men who served. There was a belief that such women were dependable in their dealings with the wounded men. Scottish veteran of the Thirty Year's War, General Robert Munro, described army wives in his memoirs: “no women are more faithful, more charitable, more loving, more obedient or more devout than soldiers' wives”. This testament to good behaviour is perhaps undermined when we look at the regulations that had to be introduced to the Savoy to curb poor behaviour of patients and nursing staff alike. In fact the general standard of conduct at the hospital was, to say the least, dubious. Rules were introduced in November 1644 to provide a framework for behaviour and also to ensure a structure and discipline to the patients' day. This included attending morning an evening prayer in the wards and compulsory church attendance on the Lord's Day and fasting days. There was also a set time of day for men's dressings to be changed. Drunkenness was apparently rife among patients and punished by a spell in the stocks. Repeated offences meant expulsion from the hospital. Nurses' behaviour also came under scrutiny, with fines introduced for using profane language, negligence, scolding, brawling or chiding the patients - and this despite the fact that prospective nurses had to be approved of by a least two of the hospital's treasurers. Questions also arose over the relationship between nurses and patients, the rules of the hospital stipulating: “If a soldier marry a nurse they are both to be expelled”.
​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.
Alongside the nurses, patients were tended by four 'sisters', although they do not seem to have been senior the nurses. Their title was an echo of the nuns who had worked at the hospital before the Reformation and who had ministered to the sick when the Savoy had functioned as a charitable refuge. When the hospital had been requisitioned for military use, the sisters were requested to remain and care for the soldiers. In 1649 they were named as Sisters Ann, Collyns, Bird and Maud.
The whole staff worked under the direction of the Master of Hospital, who lived in chambers on the hospital's west side. During the first Civil War the office was held by Samuel Adams, who had replaced Dr Walter Balcanquall in the summer of 1642 when the latter had fled London to join the king. Adams held his appointment until 1648, when he was replaced by Richard Malbon who remained as Overseer until the Restoration. 
Picture
The ruined interior of the hospital's north wing (either Newbury or Reading Ward), circa 1796.
J. M. W. Turner (Tate Gallery)
Caring for the Wounded
The Savoy was supported, in part, by donations from London parishes. Just under £200 was received from church collection plates between December 1642 and April 1643, with an additional £700 received directly from Parliament for approximately the same period. Roughly one quarter of the hospital's finances, then, may have come from charity. Material donations were also accepted. In November 1642 the London militia regiments donated bundles of old linen to the Savoy for bandages. In October the following year, the Commons ordered that all places of worship should surrender their (papistical) surplices so they could be made into dressings. Whether this sacrifice was of much practical help to the wounded, or whether (like the cutting down of iron railings for the war-effort in 1940) it was simply a good-will exercise, is uncertain.
Nurses usually only worked during the day, the ward doors being locked at night. Auxiliary staff were paid to watch the sick between dusk and dawn, with nurses only in attendance for urgent cases. It is clear, however, that it was not just for physical ailments that patients were admitted. There are several references to soldiers described as “distracted”, a common seventeenth century term for mentally unbalanced, and it is possible that these patients were suffering from what is now called combat PTSD. There are entries in the accounts of payments for watching these men at night, as well as a receipt for “straps, girts [belts], handcuffs, etc.” for use as restraints. One of the saddest references is that which reads: “a surgeon cal'd up at midnight to a soldier who cut his own throat” and, alongside this entry, a note of ten shillings payment to the surgeon for his trouble.
Further military hospitals were established in London later in the war. In late 1643, or early 1644, at Parsons Green in Fulham, a hospital was established near the bank of the Thames and maintained until the end of hostilities. Later that year a temporary landing stage for wounded soldiers was set up at Queenshithe, just over a mile downstream from the Savoy. The timing of these new establishments would suggest that they were intended to cater for the wounded of the Second Battle of Newbury in late October 1644. A payment at the Savoy in late 1642 of £40 “for the carriage of wounded causalities from Brentford to the Savoy by water” shows how valuable the proximity of the Thames was to the hospitals' ability to bring in wounded. In 1648, the former bishop's residence of Ely House, already requisitioned as a prison for Royalist officers, was converted to take in sick and wounded soldiers from the Second Civil War. Treatments here may have been more advanced than those at the Savoy: there are references to a “hot house”, evidently a kind of sauna where patients would be sent to sweat out their sickness and for which (for the sake of modesty) they received an issue of linen drawers.
Following the Civil War the Savoy's wards were converted into a barracks and military prison, and other buildings converted into private dwellings. Following the Religious Toleration Act of 1689 some of the buildings became places of worship for Nonconformists, such as French Huguenots and German Lutherans. The hospital was formally dissolved in 1702. In the Regency period the (by then derelict) site was cleared to make way for the construction of Waterloo Bridge. The only part of the original structure that remains today is the former chapel of Saint John the Baptist, that stood to the north west of Long Ward and now called The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy. Still the property of the Duchy of Lancaster, it is designated as “a private royal chapel of Her Majesty The Queen”. 380 years ago it is where Parliament's wounded soldiers prayed and gave thanks for their survival in the Civil War.
Robert Hodkinson
April, 2020​
​(revised January 2022)
Picture
Bob Dylan, shooting the promotional film for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', London, 1965. To his right are his tour manager and poet Allen Ginsberg. The building behind Dylan's left shoulder is the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy, the last remaining part of the Savoy Hospital (image via greenwillow.co.uk)

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
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Abraham Holmes

7/6/2019

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The Last Republican
Picture
​Monmouth's Rebellion of 1685 lasted less than a month, from the Duke of Monmouth’s landing at Lyme Bay on 11 June to his defeat at the battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July. But for one officer in the rebels' ranks, that summer's brief rebellion had been forty years in the making.
The Bloody Assizes of September 1685 put an emphatic end to Monmouth's Rebellion against King James II. Under the aegis of lord chief justice Jeffreys, 320 suspected supporters of the rebel duke were tried and sentenced to death across the West Country. In most cases, those found guilty were hung, drawn and quartered. A further 800 prisoners were transported. Among the hundreds condemned for treason was Abraham Holmes. Holmes was found guilty at the assizes in Dorchester and then conveyed to Lyme Regis, to be executed at the place where he had landed in England with Monmouth in order to overthrow the Catholic King James. Elderly and infirm (one of his arms had recently been amputated), Holmes presented a pathetic sight as he attempted to mount the scaffold. He humbly apologised to the presiding sheriff: “you see I am imperfect, [with] only one Arm, I shall want assistance to help me up on this Tragical Stage”. Given a hand to steady him, Holmes proceeded to climb calmly to his death.
Surprising though it might be that this aged man had taken up arms against the Crown, Holmes had in fact been in rebellion against the Stuart kings for much of his life. The treasonable act for which he was executed in 1685 had begun in the Civil Wars, forty years before.
​

​Civil War Service
Nothing definite is known about Holmes's early life, although he seems to have been born in County Durham. He first appears as a lieutenant in Robert Lilburne's regiment of Parliament's northern forces in 1644. By early 1646 he was serving in the south of England, having followed Lilburne into the 'new model' army. By 1647 Holmes (who was reputedly a Baptist by faith) had became prominent in army politics. He was an 'agitator', or political spokesman, for his regiment and he signed 'The Vindication of the Army', which asserted the rights of Parliament's soldiers against the moderate MPs at Westminster.
After August 1648 he returned north and served in the garrisons at Newcastle and Tynemouth. In June 1650 his foot company formed part of a new regiment under George Monck that would evolve, in the fullness of time, into the Coldstream Guards. Holmes served as the regiment's major and fought at Dunbar. He remained under Monk in Scotland as part of the occupying English forces after 1651, and was appointed as a justice of the peace in Edinburgh.
Holmes’s radical politics were widely known when, in 1654, he was approached by the ringleaders of what would become known as the Overton plot - a design by English republicans to remove Cromwell as Protector. Holmes however refused their request to stir up rebellion among English troops quartered in Scotland, either because of his own convictions or his belief that such a revolt was unlikely to succeed. However, in 1659, following the demise of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorship, Holmes’s political radicalism put him in good stead with the newly restored Rump, who promoted him to lieutenant colonel. In May that year he signed a petition to parliament, calling for energetic steps to be taken to countenance godliness and secure the rights and liberties of the people. In December 1659, he anticipated Monck’s purge of pro-Rump officers and fruitlessly attempted to hold Ayr in support of the army in England. Holmes was formally dismissed from the army in early 1660.

Ciphers & Conspiracies
Holmes’s Baptist faith meant that he fell foul of the newly restored monarchy and religious conformity it demanded. It is not surprising that we see Holmes associating with republican insurgents after 1660. By 1662, still referred to as ‘Major Abraham Holmes’, he was officially labelled as “a person of dangerous consequence”. In 1664 he was arrested for suspected sedition and was imprisoned in Windsor Castle. He was released three years later, after successfully petitioning that he, and others with whom he was imprisoned, had “never heard of any particular crime objected against them”.
The exact date of Holmes’s release is not known, but fourteen years elapse until he again surfaces as an ally of the Whigs. In 1681 he helped shelter the fugitive Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, who had absconded from Edinburgh Castle. Argyll had been found guilty of treason after objecting to the wording of the Scottish Test Act, which required Scottish subjects to swear to uphold the Presbyterian church whilst at the same time declaring loyalty to the King – himself head of the Anglican church and harbouring Catholic leanings. Suspecting that his execution was imminent, Argyll promptly escaped from Edinburgh Castle dressed as his stepdaughter’s manservant. He then made his way to London where Holmes accommodated him until he could escape to the safety of the Netherlands.
​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.
​

Picture
Satirical playing cards (c.1685) depicting the events of Monmouth's Rebellion, including [right] the interrogation of Holmes and other rebels.
​
​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’.
Holmes was arrested and subjected to lengthy interrogation in which the King himself (who had come very close to being assassinated) took a close interest: “You know this business concerns me and the safety of my three kingdoms,” the King told Holmes, “I am resolved to carry it on very vigorously, therefore say the truth.” Under examination, Holmes freely divulged much of the information contained in the letters (although he must have suspected that the alphabetic cipher had already been worked-out – both the letters and the keys to decipher them had been in his possession). Holmes admitted that the letters were conveyed to and from the Netherlands aboard the Success, a merchant ship out of Colchester, and confessed that he was engaged Argyll's scheme to raise £10,000 in England to pay for weapons to use in armed rebellion. He acknowledged that the ‘parcel of goods’ referred to were political writings, aimed at stirring sedition among the King’s subjects. Holmes however refused to reveal the identities of any persons referred to in the letters who had donated money to Argyll’s cause.
Holmes was committed to the Gatehouse prison for high treason. Whilst there, he divulged more information to the authorities, including the use of his alias ‘Harvie’. Whether such admissions softened the Crown’s attitude toward him is unclear. It is possible they thought Holmes was more useful to them if he were free to act as Argyll’s agent, sending and receiving correspondence which they were confident they could intercept and decipher. It is still uncertain whether Holmes was released or if he effected an escape, but by 1684 he was in the Netherlands, where he was joined from London by his son, Blake, and they became part of the group of dissenters and Whigs that had gathered around Argyll and Monmouth.
​

​The Road to Sedgemoor
Following the failure of the Rye House Plot, plans were discussed to forcibly overthrow James II (who had by now succeeded his brother) through armed rebellion, led by Argyll in Scotland and Monmouth in England. Monmouth's small force landed at Lyme on 11 June 1685, and over the next few days he was able to gather local support from the south-west counties while a government force was sent from London to oppose the rebels. Holmes received a commission from Monmouth as commander of the Green Regiment of foot, with Blake made a captain. However, in the first contact with leading elements of government forces at Norton St Philip on 27 June, Blake was killed and Holmes severely wounded in the arm.
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Despite his wound, Holmes continued in Monmouth's service. On the night of 5 July, hemmed in by closing government forces, Monmouth's men attempted to break out of Bridgewater and attack the government camp under cover of darkness. Among the enemy troops facing Holmes's Green Regiment was the Coldstream Guards, in which Holmes had served when it was Monck's Regiment at the Battle of Dunbar, thirty-five years before. Government troops were alerted to the rebel advance, however, and in the ensuing battle on Sedgemoor the rebel army was annihilated. Holmes, in the forefront of the infantry attack, had his horse shot from under him and was captured. When Lieutenant-Colonel Churchill (later the Duke of Marlborough) demanded to know his identity, Holmes grimly replied that he was in no condition to tell. Holmes was stripped and escorted to the nearby house of a local JP, where he remedied his now festering wound by amputating his own arm with a kitchen knife.

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Holmes was sent to London for interrogation before James II. Holmes gave little away and was stoically resigned to his fate. He showed no remorse for his actions, refusing to demonstrate any loyalty to the Crown and reportedly saying: 'I am an aged man, and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or baseness. I have always been a republican, and I am one still.' Little more should have been expected from a man who had spent forty years fighting for his political and religious freedom.
Subsequent Whig histories did much to mythologise the fate of Holmes and his fellow rebels, and doubtless embellished the account of his execution. It is reported that Holmes sat at the foot of the gallows and regaled the spectators with reasons why he had rallied to Monmouth's cause. He believed, he said, that 'the protestant religion was bleeding,' and that while God had not graced his cause with victory he 'doubted not but that God would make use of others that should meet with better success'.
Robert Hodkinson
July 2019


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
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Jane Joyce

6/6/2019

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The Curious Case of the Leicestershire Spinster
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'.
​
Picture
Leonhard Thurneysser's 'Quinta Essentia' (Leipzig, 1574), illustrating the influence of masculine and feminine humours on the human body.

​​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]
Richard Joyce named three children in his will, but at no point did he mention a son. Instead, there is an extraordinary reference to “my daughter Jane alias George”. Jane was twelve-years-old when her father wrote his will. Sometime during her early childhood, then, Richard Joyce recognised that his son 'George' was really a girl. The will of Richard's wife, Sarah, was proved in 1656, by which time Jane would have been nineteen. Sarah makes no mention of a 'George' at all and simply refers to “my daughter Jane”. [3] What had happened, then, to Jane Joyce between her baptism and her early adulthood that led to this apparent re-assigning of her sex?
​

Picture
Blackfordby's medieval chapel, pictured shortly before its demolition in 1857.

​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. 
​
The Compleat Midwife's reference to an 'over-far extension of the Clitoris' leads naturally to the conclusion that Jane Joyce is an early-modern case of an intersex child – one whose ambiguous physicality leads to uncertainty as to what sex they are. Intersex is a modern scientific term that has now replaced the looser, more anecdotal term 'hermaphrodite' which would have been used in Jane's lifetime. Jane's case was by no means unique in the early modern period. In 1629 Thomasine Hall was accepted by the Virginia General Court as being both male and female, and required to wear a combination of female and male attire as a fitting indication of her true sexual identity. [5]
The most common cause of an enlarged clitoris – 'clitoromegaly' – is an exposure to hormones in the womb which causes a girl's genitals to appear masculinised. There is nothing in surviving documents to indicate that Jane's twin, Sarah, was anything other than a typical female. For Jane to be intersex while her twin sister was not is an extremely rare occurrence, through not unknown. [6] The number of intersex births is today estimated as being 1 in 4,500, although it may be as high as 1 in 2,000 [7]. Given that the population of England and Wales in the mid-seventeenth century was roughly five million, this would mean there would have been perhaps 1,000-2,500 people with some form of intersex condition during Jane's lifetime.
The accepted remedy for clitoromegaly at the time was to remove the clitoris by amputation. A graphical depiction of a clitorodectomy is included in The Chyrgeon's Store-house of 1674. [8] Surgical removal of the clitoris is a procedure still commonly carried out intersex births today in a parental belief that “irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live with”. [9] Given what we know of the Joyces' social standing such a procedure was not beyond their finances, although it is impossible to say whether or not such an operation was carried out on Jane.
​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.
​

Picture
Jane's burial entry in the Blackfordby parish register

​There are hints that Jane's life was not as straightforward as one might wish. Following their mother's death in 1656, it was the daughter Sarah who was given sole responsibility for overseeing the family affairs. The eldest daughter, Mary, had by this time married and lived away from home, but why should the responsibility have not fallen on Jane who, as her mother's will indicates, was the first-born of the twins? [11] There has to be the possibility that Jane was considered to lack the temperament needed to oversee her mother's estate and manage the family financial affairs. Instead, Jane was given £25, the largest single amount of money in her mother's will. This, along with other substantial bequests (a bed, the “best bolster”), suggests that the nineteen-year-old Jane was being prepared for life on her own, while Sarah was to oversee the family's land and other property. This was despite the fact that their father's will of 1649 stipulated that the family wealth be divided equally between the three daughters on the mother's death. [12] Jane was also granted “the coffer which was her ffathers”, phrased in such a way as to suggest a sentimental attachment which was somehow more important to Jane than to her sisters: the eldest daughter Mary was simply bequeathed 'a coffer'. All of this intimates an isolated life, emotionally difficult and out of joint with the people around her, feelings which have been recognised in many people who are intersex. [13]
If Jane's intersex condition was observable in her appearance, maybe the surroundings of a crowded market town or city would have rendered her unobtrusive. But in a small village such as Blackfordby it could hardly have gone unnoticed that the Joyces' son, George, had grown into Jane.
What other people might have thought of Jane's hermaphrodite condition is revealed in The Compleat Midwife's phrase “the evil conformation” of a subject's ambiguous genitalia. The sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambrose Pare termed hermaphroditism and its inherent sexual confusion an “extremly monstrous thing”. Like cross-dressing, it was considered a dangerous and wicked distortion of true reality in the early-modern period. [14] Older anatomical theory, still current in the early 17th century, maintained that the boundary between the sexes was dangerously unstable, and that adopting manly fashions and acting in a masculine way was enough to tip a woman over the edge and become a male in physical form. Instances had been recorded of girls who, it was believed, through some violent conduct in adolescence sprouted a penis. Clitoromegaly could be thought as symptomatic of a woman who was metamorphosing into a man because she had not conducted herself in a suitably feminine manner. It was considered “a common disease among the Aegptians and Arabians”; it was pruriently associated with lesbianism because the condition was believed to make a woman “able to converse with other Women like unto men”. It was therefore the province of the exotic and the strange. Responses to hermaphroditism were, predictably, caustic. The Compleat Midwife warned against the “unworthy Reader, that makes use of such things only for mockery, and a May-game, and to promote idle and lascivious discourse.” [15] But the reaction produced could be much stronger than derision. It could be sinister and, in Jane Joyce's case, murderous.
At some point during the night of 13 April 1674 Jane Joyce was killed by an unknown assailant. The entry in the parish burial register in the only source of information as to the circumstances:

George alias Jane Joyce one of the coe heires of Richard Joyce of this towne had her throate cut in the night uppon the thriteenth day of April & shee lived until the fifteenth day & died & was buried in our chappell [16]
That the act was carried out “in the night” intensifies the menace of the situation, and that Jane 'had' her throat cut would appear to rule out any possibility that this was suicide. It is by no means certain that her intersex condition was the reason for this apparent attack, but given the circumstantial evidence it should not be ruled out. The identity of Jane's killer is unknown and there is no reference to the murder in surviving court records of the period. [17] A theory put forward by writer John Harrison, that Jane was really a male Parliamentarian in disguise and murdered by Royalists, is wholly unfounded, and clearly demonstrated as such by the surviving source material referenced above. [18]
One last note ought to be made about the wording of the burial entry in the parish register. It has been seen that Richard and Sarah Joyce referred to 'George' as Jane and considered her their daughter. The burial register's reference to 'George' reveals that, while acknowledging Jane's femininity (“her throate”), there must have been some people in the wider community continued to recognise the ambiguity of her sex – Jane Joyce's true intersex nature.
Robert Hodkinson
​June 2019

​Notes

1. Payne, B. (2003) Transcriptions of baptisms of the chapelry of Blackfordby, RootsWeb [online]. Available: http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brett/genealogy/blackfordby/bfordby_bap_1700.html
[accessed 24.02.2019]
2. Gresley, J. M. (1862) “Blackfordby, Leicestershire”, in: Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society, vol. 1, part 1 (Leicester: Crossley and Clarke), pp.27-30
3. Will of Richard Joyce (1649) PROB/11/208. The National Archives, London. Will of Sarah Joyce (1656) PROB/11/260. The National Archives, London.

4. Pechet, J. (ed.) (1697) The Compleat Midwife Enlarged (5th edn.) (London), p.288
5.'Molly' (2011) "Discussion of Elizabeth Reiss's 'Impossible Hermaphrodites'”, slideshare.net [online] available: https://www.slideshare.net/PerpetualRevision/mb-presentreishermaphrodites
[accessed 24.02.2019]
6. see for example, Jinadu, F. O. et al. (2013) “Clitoromegaly with Associated Anomalies in the Female of a Fraternal Twin: A Case Report”, in: Asian Journal of Pharmacy, Nursing and Medical Services. Vol. 1, (4), pp. 109-112.
7. Weil, E. (2006) “What if It's (sort of) a Boy and (sort of) a Girl?”, in: New York Times Magazine [online] available: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html
[accessed 22.02.2019]
8. Traub, V. (2002) The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.434, n.90
9. Weil, op. cit.
10. The Compleat Midwife Enlarged, p.289
11. Will of Sarah Joyce, op. cit.
12. Will of Richard Joyce, op. cit.
13 “These are not all happy people either . . . Some of them have isolated, difficult lives. Some of the surgery patients are fine, and some of them are not, and it’s very hard to separate all the things out.” Quoted in Weil, op. cit.
14. Pare, quoted in Park, K. (1997) “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620”, in: Hillman, D. and Mazzio, C. (eds.) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge). For further reading on the issue of cross-dressing in the period see Capp, B. (2003) “Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The Bridewell Evidence”, in The Seventeenth Century, xviii, pp.159-71.
15. The Compleat Midwife Enlarged, pp.289-90
16. Blackfordby Parish Registers: Baptisms, Marriages, Burials 1653-1746
17. see for example DE2392/99-153, “Misc. quarter sessions working papers, etc., 1662-1867”; “Quarter Session Papers, 1665-1973”, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.
18. Edwards, J. (2003) “He cut the King's head off, then fled”, Mail Online [online] available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-229598/He-cut-Kings-head-fled.html 
[accessed: 20.02.2019]. See also, Aylmer, G. E. (2004) “Joyce, George (b. 1618)”, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Maiden troop

3/8/2019

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"The Famous Maiden-Troop"
Female Agency Behind Parliament's Civil War Army
Picture
The cornet of Captain John Blackwell, captain of the City of London's 'Maiden Troop', c.1644
The role of the single woman, unmarried and economically independent of men, has been overlooked in the context of the Civil Wars: a lack of surviving historical documents concerning such lives has effectively rendered these women 'voiceless'. It can thus be too easily assumed that such women had little or no influence on the events of the war around them. One exception is the case of a particular Parliamentarian cavalry troop, famous in its day for being raised and equipped with money donated by London's unmarried women.
In April 1644 the Parliamentarian newspaper Mercurius Civicus announced the furnishing of a new body of cavalry to swell the Parliamentarian ranks: “the well affected Maidens in and about the City of London . . . are now collecting what quantity of money they can amongst themselves for the raising and setting forth of a Regiment of Horse” (1).​
The area of London where the young women referred to lived was adjacent to Cheapside, in London's commercial heart. There were plenty of independent, young women in this part of the capital who had money to spare for Parliament's cause, earning a living as highly trained, skilled workers. Indeed, half of all London apprentices in this period were girls (2). It can be supposed that those involved in helping to raise the Maiden Troop earned their money in London's cloth trade, which was dominant in Cheapside. The average age of marriage for women in this period was twenty-four, but for women in the cloth trade the average age was into the thirties: women who were able to support themselves through skilled work had no need of a husband to keep them (3). Parity of male and female labour at this time is evident in studies made of women corn shearers, who received the same pay as their male counterparts at harvest. At the end of the seventeenth century the philosopher John Locke would write of female workers: 'we should do [women] an injury if we should take them from their company and not make them equal to those in wages they can equalize in work' (4). Locke's father, incidentally, served with Parliament's cavalry in the Civil War.
​
​
The Importance of Nonconformity
Picture
'A London Merchant's Daughter', by Wenceslaus Hollar (British Museum). Drawn just a year before the Maiden Troop was raised, this image depicts the kind of moneyed, young woman likely to have contributed to Parliament's cause.​
​

​These young, independent women would have learned the value of hard work from scripture:
“Who can find a virtuous woman? . . . She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands . . . She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms . . . She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff . . . She maketh fine linen and delivereth girdles unto the merchant." (5)
Diligence and labour were Christian virtues, and the thread which drew these young women together were the parish churches where they worshipped - it was the place where they met and associated, and where their contribution to the war effort was channelled. Money for the new cavalry troop was gathered via the collection plates at St Mary Magdalene in Milk Street, St Michael's Crooked Lane, St Margaret Moses and St Thomas the Apostle (6). Other parishes may have been involved but, if so, details have not survived. The congregation of St Thomas the Apostle, in particular, were notable for the reforming mood that fuelled so much of the religious and political unrest of the period. In 1643 they had the incumbent minister committed to the Fleet prison for speaking out against the Parliament and for supporting Archbishop Laud's High Church doctrine (7). It was no coincidence that the Maiden Troop's cornet (the unit's colours) carried an image of the city of London accompanied by the Latin motto, Accendia Cura Zionis - 'Kindle the Care of the People of Zion'. This was London re-cast as the Holy City - England's New Jerusalem - and the zealous young women who lived there were said to be 'not willing to subject themselves to the outrageous usage of the Cavaliers' (8).
The officer appointed to command the new cavalry troop was John Blackwell. Often described as merely the son of a grocer, his father had in fact earned a fortune as supplier of food to the Stuart court. At the outbreak of the Civil War he turned his back on royal patronage and joined Parliament's army as a captain in London's Blue Regiment. He was puritan in his faith: in 1641 he vociferously objected to new altar rails at the church of St Thomas the Apostle, decrying them as being nothing more than a Papist ornament. He organised their removal and burning, for which public disturbance he was fined £10 (9).
The younger John Blackwell had joined the Parliamentarian cause early. In April 1642 he was an ensign in his father's infantry company, but by the end of 1643 he had transferred to the cavalry as cornet in the City Horse regiment. Also known as Colonel Harvey's Regiment, the City Horse was a part of the London Trained Bands militia and maintained through public funds. In early 1644 it still required a final, sixth troop to bring it to full regimental strength. The Maiden Troop was intended to fill this gap - paid for not through taxes (which by this point of the war was becoming a considerable burden to Londoners) but through voluntary contributions.
In April 1644, the same week that news of the Maiden Troop was announced in the press, the newly promoted Captain Blackwell was busy buying horses for his troop at Smithfield market. He was aware that money was in short supply and had to repeatedly badger the Treasurers at War for funds: 'When more moneys come in I shall be more troublesome', he jokingly commented (10). Blackwell appears to have been immensely proud of his appointment, often signing his letters not merely as 'captain' but 'Captain of the Mayden Troupe' (11), and it was with good humour and enthusiasm that he prepared for the coming summer campaign.
​

Funding the Troop
By 2 May 1644, Parliament understood that Blackwell's troop was ready for service and ordered it to march - which must have come as a surprise to Blackwell because he was still trying to purchase arms for his men at the time (14). Lack of money was a continuing problem, and costs were beginning to mount. Surviving documents reveal that the contributions from the young women in their parishes had yielded £41 by late May, but this fell far short of the amount required (15). The troopers were to be expensively armed, each equipped with armour, helmet and two pistols. Half the troop were also equipped with carbines (16). Blackwell provided nearly eighty pounds of his own money for the cost of pistols, the largest sum provided by any single contributor (17). A further £60 was provided by a 'Mr. Dawlinan', the churchwarden at St. Giles Cripplegate. Given the size of the sum, it is possible that this money was not a personal donation but was received from Dawlinan in his capacity as a Commissioner for the Public Assessment – which raises the possibility that the Maiden Troop was partially funded from the public purse after all (18).
Picture
Map of London showing (in orange) the parishes known to have contributed money to the Maiden Troop. From left to right: St Margaret Moses, St Magdalene Milk Street, St Thomas the Apostle and St Michael Crooked Lane. The dark blue line marks the catchment area of the London 'Blue Regiment' (Based on John Roque's 1746 map).
Picture
'A London Citizen's Daughter' Hollar, 1643. (British Museum)
Raising a force through voluntary contributions, then, seems to have been only moderately successful. Surviving accounts show that donations from London's young women amounted to only a quarter of the cost required to raise the troop, with some parishes able to provide the cost of only one horse. Donations were supplemented by Dawlinan's payment (one third of the total) and from the captain's own pocket. Even so, the young women's contribution was significant, not least in the troop's sense of identity. The troop's standard, besides depicting the city of London, was notable for its device of silver love hearts issuing forth grenade-like flames – a considerably less-masculine image than the typical cavalry colours of the period, with their death-or-glory display of swords and thunderclouds. The Maiden Troop's motto also betrayed a feminine sentiment in its call to care for and nurture the city and its church. Despite the short-fall in the contributions from working women, then, the troop maintained a close affiliation with London's spinsters. The unit was always referred to as The Maiden Troop in official documents, as distinct from nearly all other troops in the army, which were simply referred to by their captain's names.
On the evening of 27 May 1644, Captain Blackwell's troop was finally able to muster with the rest of its regiment at London's Artillery Ground. On paper, a full-strength troop should have been able to muster 60 men and horses; the Maiden Troop fielded just 47. Its first duty was to escort pay wagons destined for the Earl of Essex's army at St Albans, before joining Essex for the summer campaign (19).
​

​London was not the only city where young women were helping to fund Parliament's war-effort. In August 1643 Nehemiah Wallington recorded:

The virgins of Norwich, hearing of the Cavaliers' violent outrages committed upon their sex wheresoever they get the victory, are so sensible of their reputations that they have readily contributed so much money as hath raised a goodly troop of horse for their defence, which is called the Maidens' Troop. (12)
​

The War in the West
Oliver Cromwell (in whose regiment the Norwich troop served, under Captain Swallow) noted that contributions were received from both 'young men and maids' (13), although it seems to have been the efforts of the women on which the press dwelt, and which caught Wallington's attention. It is possible there were also male contributors to London's Maiden Troop, but that these were overshadowed by the efforts their female counterparts, which Parliament's press-writers deemed more newsworthy. Norwich's maiden troop became part of Cromwell's cavalry regiment under the command of Captain Swallow.
​

Picture
'Manoeuvres in the south-west, 1644', tracing the march of Essex's troops into Cornwall [BCW Project]
Following its departure from London, the young women's role in the account of the Maiden Troop diminishes. The rest of the troop's story is shaped by the actions of men.
In June 1644, the Earl of Essex embarked on a campaign to gain the south west of England from the Royalists that would see Blackwell's command, painstakingly assembled over the previous two months, dismantled with heart-breaking speed. Blackwell recorded eight horses either dying on the march or being so exhausted and lame that they had to be abandoned en route. One mount died in its London stables before the troop even marched. Each of these horses had cost London's women £5 of hard-earned money.
Essex advanced into Cornwall, only to find that Royalist forces had pursued him and succeeded in cutting off his homeward route. By August his army had been manoeuvred into a hopeless position, trapped on a narrow headland with their backs to the sea. With little chance of being evacuated by ship it was decided that the horse should attempt to break-out of their beleaguered position.

In the early hours of 31 August, under cover of darkness, Blackwell's troop was among the Parliamentarian cavalry that escaped through the Royalist cordon, desperately heading for the nearest Parliamentarian garrison at Plymouth. Not all made it: nearly a quarter of the Maiden Troop were lost at Lostwithiel - some through sickness before the breakout, others being captured and having their horses taken from them 'contrary to the Articles made with the enemy' (20). Some of these troopers appear to have been subsequently remounted, but 'divers of them had their horses killed & tired breaking through the enemy' (21). Despite this, the bulk of the Maiden Troop succeeded in reaching Plymouth, where they were subsequently besieged by Royalist forces under Sir Richard Grenville.

The troop spent the following month at Plymouth, garrisoned by Essex's second-in-command, Lord Robartes. On 4 October the garrison attempted to seize back the initiative from the Royalists by launching an attack to take Saltash, on the opposite side of the river from Plymouth, hoping to threaten the Royalist lines of communication. They withstood two Royalist counter attacks before Grenville retook Saltash three days later. Most of Blackwell's men managed to escape but seven are recorded as having been captured. Grenville had a reputation of dealing brutally with prisoners, of hanging first and asking questions later. This reputation was borne out in the fate of Blackwell's troopers: the seven men were imprisoned in Lydford Castle on the edge of Dartmooor. Five of them are believed to have starved to death there (22).
​
The End of the Maiden Troop
Picture
Part of John Blackwell's accounts for his troop, with names of individual troopers and equipment issued.
The losses sustained at Lostwithiel and Plymouth broke the back of the Maiden Troop. Blackwell's command was disbanded and its surviving mounts distributed among other Parliamentary units: 11 of the troop's horses were left for the use of Lord Robartes' Regiment and a further 5 with the local Plymouth forces (23). No blame was attached to Blackwell for the demise of his troop. In the late summer of 1645 he was given a command in Cromwell's regiment of horse, replacing a captain who had been killed at Naseby. Blackwell continued in the army until 1648, when he took up a permanent clerical post at Westminster.
Blackwell's service for Parliament led to him being barred from public office after 1660. Times and politics changed, however, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 allowed old Parliamentarians back into positions of influence. In that year, Blackwell, by then aged 64 and living a nonconformist's exile in Massachusetts, was appointed Governor of Pennsylvania, recommended for the post partly on the reputation of his old command: “he commanded in the beginning of the wars the famous maiden-troop”, was the endorsement of the colony's founder, William Penn (24). Forty years on the name of the Maiden Troop still resonated, long after the lives of the young women who had helped raise them had been forgotten.

Robert Hodkinson
March 2019

Notes:
1. Mercurius Civicus, 11-18 April 1644. Thomason Tracts, British Library, E. 43 (10)
2. Greer, G. 
Shakespeare's Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p.84
3. Lawrence, 
Women in England, p.10, quoted in Greer, p.170
4. John Locke, 
Journal, quoted in Greer, p.159
5. Proverbs, 31 (KJV)
6. The National Archives, Commonwealth Exchequer Papers, SP28/15, f.49
7. 
House of Lords Journal, vol. 6, p.25
8. Mercurius Civicus, ibid.
9. 
House of Lords Journal, vol. 4, pp.295, 312. For more detail on John Blackwell junior see Aylmer, G. E. “John Blackwell (1624-1701)”, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
10. Letter of John Blackwell, SP28/14, f.96
11. ibid., SP28/15, f.47
12. Nehemiah Wallington, 
Historical Notices (London, 1869) vol. 2, p.171
13. Carlyle, T. The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London 1904), vol. 1, pp.145-146
14. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 2 May 1644; SP28/15, f.47
15. SP28/15, f.49
16. SP28/22, f.279
17. SP28/14, f.96
18. ibid.
19. 
The Weekly Account, 23-30 May 1644, Thomason Tracts, E. 49 (36)
20. Blackwell's account of his troop's equipment losses is found in SP 28/22, f.278
21. ibid.
22. ibid; for Grenville's attrocities in Cornwall see Long, C. E. (ed.) 
Richard Symonds's Diary of
the Marches of the Royal Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.127
23. SP28/22, f.278
24. Hazard, W. D. (ed.) 
Register of Pennsylvania, vol. 4 (Philadelphia, 1829)


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