The Origins of the Verney Legend
He swore that no man could take the standard he bore without cutting his hand from his body – an oath he obviously kept, as the bloody standard was found clasped by his severed hand after the Battle of Edgehill.
The above retelling of the event, from a recent Telegraph article, shows that Verney's bloody fate has lost none of its fascination over the years. Yet there is no evidence that this story existed in the 17th century - Verney's legend seems to have developed at a much later date.
"[Sir Edward Verney] himself killed two with his own hands, whereof one of them had killed poore Jason [Verney's servant], and brocke the poynt of his standard at push of pike before he fell, which was the last account I could receive of anie of our owne side of him … he would neither put on armes or buff cote the day of battell, the reason I know not” (ibid., 119).
The servant referred to had spoken with several Parliamentarian officers, all of whom assured him that Verney “was never taken prisoner, neither were any of them possessed of his Body; but that hee was slaine by an ordinary trooper” (ibid.). The servant had subsequently informed Ralph that he had visited the parishes adjacent to the battlefield where his father might have been laid to rest: “none of them can give him any information of the body,” Ralph wrote, and surmised that his father's body must have had a similar fate to that of another high-status Royalist fatality that day: "my Lord Aubigney was like to have been buried in the fields, but that one came by chance that knew him and took him into a church” (ibid.) Recognised shortly before internment, Lord d'Aubigney's body had been saved from burial in an unmarked grave. If Sir Edmond Verney had similarly gone unrecognised it is likely that he was buried anonymously on the battlefield.
"My soro is beyond all that can bee sade; it tis not possibly to bee greater then it tis; but truly it trubles me much that his bodie was beriede amonst the multitude; I know itt coulde not have added anythinge to him, only have sattisfiede his friendes to have hade a cristan beriall" (ibid., 123)
In 1668 there appeared in print David Lloyd's 'Memoires', a Royalist hagiography that eulogised over 500 individuals who had suffered for their loyalty to the Crown, being either killed in the war or having lost their estates as a result of it. Lloyd immortalised Verney as "vere militis & Banneretti" - a true soldier and standard-bearer - and made-out that Verney had sold his life “at the rate of sixteen Gentlemen, which fell that day by his hand” (Lloyd, p.351) - quite a mark-up from the two Parliamentarians he killed in Sydenham's more reliable account. Despite this mythologising, Lloyd makes no mention of Verney's tenacious member that was left dangling from the standard when the roundheads made off with it. Lloyd's contemporary, the antiquarian Anthony Wood, was of the opinion that Lloyd's work contained “almost as many errors as lines” (Wood, iv, 349), but that is exactly the point: a biographical work that plays fast and loose with facts is just the place we could expect to find the story about Verney's hacked-off hand. Yet Lloyd's omission of this suggests that the story does not even have a basis as a 17th century fiction, let alone fact.
Perhaps the grisly details were omitted from Ralph Verney's letters to his mother for the sake of propriety, but the fact remains that there does not appear to be any written reference to Verney's severed hand before the 1890s. Clearly something occurred between the eyewitnesses of the Civil War and Frances Verney's rendering of the 'legend' (her word) in her family's official history. Sydenham's account of Verney's death is the most lucid; all the myth-making (starting with Lloyd in 1668) was done by those writing after the event, the people who were not there.
Robert Hodkinson
August, 2018
Lloyd, D. Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings, and Deaths of those Noble, Reverend, and Excellent Personages (London: 1688)
Verney, F. P. Memoirs of the Verney Family (4 vols.) (London: Longman, 1892-1899)
Wood, A. Athenae Oxonienses (3rd edn.) (London: 1820)
"Could You Share This Pile with a Ghost?", The Telegraph [online] available:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/6779441/Could-you-share-this-pile-with-a-ghost.html?image=1 accessed: 22.08.2018