Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ proclaiming their readiness to fight for freedom and justice, to die in a just cause, to defeat the machinations of those whom Simonds D’Ewes called ‘the wicked prelates and other like looser and corrupter sort of the clergy of this kingdom who doubtless had a design by the assistance of the Jesuits and the Papists here at home and in foreign parts to have extirpated all the power and purity of religion and to have overwhelmed us in ignorance, superstition and idolatry.’

      There were many, of course, who chose not to take sides, who considered local problems more important than national ones, just as there were thousands who were drawn into the conflict on the side that their landlords and masters elected to support, or who accepted orders from one side or the other merely for the sake of a quiet life. Most of these fought without any sense of mission, as was later to be shown by the ease with which Royalist prisoners were induced to come over to Parliament’s side after their capture and Parliamentary captives to join the ranks of the Royalists. Although religion certainly played an important part in determining allegiances, men like Lord Brooke, one of the King’s most obstinate opponents and, in Milton’s opinion, ‘a right noble and pious Lord’, who urged a crusade ‘to shed the blood of the ungodlie’, were not numerous on either side.

      It has been estimated that there were about 1,300,000 boys and men in England between the ages of sixteen and fifty in 1642, and that well over a quarter of them were to take an active part in the struggle. And of those who succeeded in remaining observers rather than participants there were few who escaped the war’s consequences. Even so, there were many who were not too sure what all the fuss was about, or, as Sir Arthur Haselrig said, did not really care what government they lived under, ‘so long as they may plough and go to market’. Some did not even know there was a conflict at all. Long after the war had started and the first battles had been fought, a Yorkshire farm labourer, when advised to keep out of the line of fire between the King’s men and Parliament’s, learned for the first time that ‘them two had fallen out’.

      There were also those who shilly-shallied, disguising such convictions as they had, like the Earls of Clare and Kingston. The former of these, in the dismissive words of Lucy Hutchinson, whose husband had been appointed Parliamentary Governor of Nottingham, ‘was very often of both parties and never advantag’d either’; while as for the Earl of Kingston, ‘a man of vast estate, and not lesse covetousnesse’, he ‘divided his Sonns betweene both Parties and conceal’d himselfe’. Then there were those, of course, who changed sides as opinions were modified and as the fortunes of war favoured first one side then the other.

      The Verneys were far from being the only family broken by the quarrel. When, for instance, a convoy of treasure was being carried to the King’s headquarters through East Anglia, Henry Cromwell, a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Cambridge, brought out fifty men to protect it on its way, while Valentine Walton, who was married to Oliver Cromwell’s sister, ordered two hundred men to seize it. The resultant fight was witnessed by a crowd of impartial, though fascinated villagers. There were similar disagreements in the family of Stephen Goffe, Rector of the parish of Stanmer in Sussex. One of his sons, a zealous Puritan, decided to join Parliament’s army when the moment came; another became chaplain to the King and a spy in the Royalist cause. John Hutchinson’s family was also divided, his Byron cousins fighting for the King and one of them, Sir Richard Byron, serving in the Royalist force which was to assault Nottingham in 1643. When the Royalists seemed close to taking the town, Hutchinson ordered his men to take Byron ‘or shoote him and not let him scape though they cut his leggs off’.

      Sir Henry Slingsby, a Yorkshire squire, described a savage fight ‘between two that had been neighbours and intimate friends’:

      At another part of the town of York, Lieutenant Collonel Norton enters with his dragouns, Captain Attkisson encounters him on horseback, the other being [on] foot; they meet; Attkisson misseth with his Pistol, the other pulls him off his horse by the sword belt; being both on the ground Attkisson’s soulgiers comes in, fells Norton into the ditch with the butt ends of their musketts; then comes Norton’s soulgiers and beats down Attkisson and with blows at him broke his thigh bone, whereof he dy’d.

      Slingsby himself was a characteristic example of a man who dismayed many of his friends by choosing what they took to be the wrong side. An opponent of Laudism, he thought ‘it came too near idolatry to adorn a place with rich cloaths and other furniture’, and was equally critical of the extravagance and superficiality of the King’s court, yet, while considering it ‘most horrible that we should engage ourselves in a war one with another [having] lived thus long peaceably, without noise of shot or drum’, he became a dedicated Royalist, refused to take oaths which would have allowed him to continue in possession of his estate, and, having taken part in a Royalist conspiracy, was beheaded on Tower Hill.

      John Hutchinson, the Nottinghamshire squire, who much resembled Slingsby in his tastes and outlook, was quite as firm in his support of Parliament. So was his wife, though she did regret that her husband – who, she was pleased to say, had declined to marry an heiress, the granddaughter of his family’s doctor, because he ‘could never stoupe to think of marrying into so meane a stock’ – had now to associate with ‘factious little people (by whom all the Parliament Garrisons were infested and disturb’d) insomuch that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some opprest by a certeine meane sort of people in the House whom, to distinguish from the most Honorable Gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men’.

      Other wives, and mothers and daughters, were often dismayed by conflicting loyalties: Frances Devereux was married to the Marquess of Hertford, a staunch Royalist and Governor to the Duke of York; her brother was to command the forces of Parliament.

      Nor was it only friends and members of the same families who were distressed to find themselves in opposing camps, but also men of different generations. Younger men with less experience of the King’s deviousness, and influenced by the opportunities presented by royal absolutism abroad for such as they, tended to be Royalist. Certainly this was so in the House of Commons, where half the Members were under forty years of age and where, as Professor Lawrence Stone has observed, of those under thirty twice as many chose to support the King as fought for Parliament. In the Upper House, of peers in their twenties and thirties who took part in the war, four out of five did so on behalf of the King.

      ‘Parents and children, brothers, kindred, I and dear friends have the seed of differences and divisions abundantly sowed in them,’ Henry Oxinden, a member of an old Kentish family, wrote home to a cousin from London. ‘I find all here full of fears and void of hopes…Sometimes I meet with a cluster of gentlemen equally divided in opinions and resolution, sometimes three to two, sometimes more odds, but never unanimous. Nay more, I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’

      Another country gentleman, Thomas Knyvett of Norfolk, wrote to his wife:

      Oh sweet hart I am nowe in a great strayght what to do…Walking this other morning at Westminster, Sir John Potts [a Member of Parliament]…saluted me with a commission from my Lord of Warwick [appointed by Parliament, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk] to take upon me (by virtue of an ordinance of parliament) my company and command again. I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse. ‘Twas no place to dispute, so I took it and desired some time to advise upon it. I had not received this many hours, but I met with a declaration point-blank against it by the King…I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times and to stay out of the way of my new masters till these first mutterings be over…I do fancy a little house by ourselves extremely well, where we may spend the remainder of our days in religous tranquil.

      The King was on his way north. From Hampton Court he had gone to Greenwich, then on to Royston and Cambridge where he was shown round Trinity College and St John’s. From Cambridge he had ridden on to Huntingdon, to the manor house at Little Gidding where the quiet orderliness of the kindly Ferrar family soothed his distressed СКАЧАТЬ