Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars [1st ed.] 9783030545369, 9783030545376

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxii
The English Civil Wars (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 1-12
Selecting the Historical Fiction (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 13-23
As We Understand History, so We Understand Fiction (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 25-47
The Cultural Landscape of the Civil Wars (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 49-70
Great Men and Great Battles (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 71-107
Men and Women (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 109-141
Religion (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 143-174
By the Sword Divided (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 175-195
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 197-221
The Commonwealth and the Protectorate (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 223-250
The Restoration (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 251-264
Conclusion (Farah Mendlesohn)....Pages 265-269
Back Matter ....Pages 271-315

Citation preview

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Creating Memory Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars Farah Mendlesohn

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors Kerry Mallan Cultural & Language Studies Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD, Australia Clare Bradford Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on children’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contemporary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range of children’s texts—literature, film and multimedia. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14930

Farah Mendlesohn

Creating Memory Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars

Farah Mendlesohn London, UK

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature ISBN 978-3-030-54536-9 ISBN 978-3-030-54537-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover caption: Historical Images Archive/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Speaker Bercow who took his place in the history books in the defence of the parliamentary prerogative on 18 March 2019; to Gina Miller and the Justices of the Supreme Court, 26 September 2019: Lady Hale, Lord Reed, Lord Kerr, Lord Wilson, Lord Carnwath, Lord Hodge, Lady Black, Lord Lloyd-Jones, Lady Arden, Lord Kitchin, Lord Sales; and to Carole Underwood, 1943–2020, who gifted me her passion and politics.

Preface

We did ride as Ironsides, a king to overcome! Then as Levellers, Ranters, Diggers fought, To hold what we had won, won; To hold what we had won. Dave Rogers, 1976 (from Singing the Changes, Banner Theatre, 2005)

The ‘English Civil War’ is now referred to by most historians as The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The wars began in Scotland, and spread to Ireland and to England. Events in one country profoundly affected the outcome of events in the others. In reality it is not possible to segment the wars but two factors have affected the terminology in these books and led to my choice to use the term ‘English Civil Wars’ for the wars between King and Parliament, after Blair Worden’s choice in The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (2009). Contemporaries understood themselves as living in three separate countries with the same king but different political systems, traditions and dispensation. Charles’ attempt to unify this was one catalyst for the rebellions, and in the rhetoric of the various sides it is noticeable that there is a difference between the Royalists who saw the two islands as, in effect, one fiefdom or polity, and the Parliamentarians who were generally very clear that England, Scotland and Ireland were three distinct polities under one king. Indeed the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford in 1641 depended on the understanding of the Irish as ‘foreigners’ whose troops would be brought in to invade England, otherwise it could not vii

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have been considered treason; the raising of English troops to control Scotland (whether by Charles or Parliament) was understood by Parliaments in England and Scotland as invasions; the decision of the Scots to support Charles II’s attempt to retake England was seen similarly. Thus to the English, however affected they were by the Covenanter rising, or by Scottish politics generally, it remained an English Civil War. The second factor is that this has descended into the fiction about the period. Overwhelmingly the texts considered in this book focus on England, and construct an England in which the war takes place on a curiously isolated island. Not only are the Scots and Irish mostly absent from the texts written by English (and American) men and women, but the continent of Europe is shrouded in fog. The backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War is hardly to be seen, yet it is from there that many participants brought their experience, such as Sir John Hotham of Hull who became famous when he refused his town’s armoury to Charles (Reckitt 1988) (see Murdoch 2019 for an overview of the influence of the German wars on the British wars). And it is from Spain and France that the parties sought funding, and during the Commonwealth where both parties contributed soldiers, fighting their quarrels within the larger landscape of the Thirty Years War (Barratt 2016). Thus, whatever the reality, this book is overwhelmingly about the English Civil Wars. The terms used for the two sides will be Royalist and Parliamentarian throughout, except when discussing how texts use terminology. I will where possible avoid the term ‘moderates’ for the middling ground of Parliamentarians, as it is regularly used by too many historians and fiction writers to impose judgement, and the dividing line between the moderate and immoderate more often reflects the position of the historian or fiction writer than the self-perception of characters. ‘Radicals’ however will be used as a term that people used for themselves. For the period after the death of Charles, I will prefer the Commonwealth and then Protectorate, rather than the post-Restoration terminology the interregnum which implies a gap or space in which things are static (nothing could be further from the truth) and the inevitability of Restoration, which would not have been the case for those who were children in this period, and whom my authors are trying in some ways to recreate. Not every reader of this book will be familiar with the events and arguments of the English Civil Wars, either because it is not part of their own national and cultural history (sadly it is not taught in American schools even though ‘no taxation without representation’ is at the core of the

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conflict between Parliament and King), or because it was not on their school curriculum in England, as it was not for many years. Thus each chapter will begin with a short overview of the events and issues at stake. NB: Many of the books discussed are available only at the British Library or in facsimile reprints. Others (both old and contemporary) are available only on kindle. For the sake of consistency, all references to the fiction are to chapters. This is not a book about the Civil Wars, so I have chosen to be very selective with secondary references, offering relatively few and referring the reader to the most important and the most recently published. London, UK

Farah Mendlesohn

Work Cited Secondary Sources Barratt, John. Better Begging Than Fighting; the Royalist Army in Exile in the War Against Cromwell 1656–1660. Warwick, Warwickshire: Helion, 2016. Print.

Acknowledgements

My interest in the English Civil Wars started with a primary school text book called simply Looking at History: Tudors and Stuarts by R. J. Unstead (1974). It was printed on cream paper (or maybe it had just yellowed) with black and white pictures. I’ve never seen it since and the colour version I obtained has been a reminder of the very thin threads on which a childhood passion can be built: it has a mere four paragraphs about the war. My interest was further sparked with the verse that opens the book, from the radical theatre group Banner Theatre. My mother was a member and I spent several years of my childhood sitting in rehearsal rooms. It was nourished by a second-hand copy of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down which my mother gave me when I was a teenager, and by membership in the radical choir the Birmingham Clarion Singers, with whom I learned to sing Leon Rosselson’s The World Turned Upside Down and went to one of the early Burford commemorations. My interest in the intellectual thought of the seventeenth century was further stimulated by Dr. Ron Clayton at the University of York. In the 1990s I wrote my Ph.D. on Quaker relief work in the 1930s. Digging around in the history of Quaker thought took me back to the seventeenth century. Slowly, the English Civil War became hobby reading. Then in 2011 I took up the challenge to write fiction for NaNoWriMo and in order to teach myself to write fiction picked up an old favourite, Geoffrey Trease, to emulate. That led to the decision to write a book on Geoffrey Trease (it will be the next book). I wanted to compare his work

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directly to his predecessors and successors so took a look at which period he spent most time on, which turned out to be the English Civil Wars, so for a chapter of that book I scoured bibliographies and delved into the holdings of the British Library, and got buried in the historiography of the Civil Wars. It will surprise no one who knows me well that the resulting chapter was far, far too long. I put it to one side and ignored my partner who kept saying ‘that would make a good book’, until Palgrave Macmillan approached me and Edward reminded me, ‘you have the outline for a book over there’. So my primary overwhelming thank you goes to Edward James, without whom this book really would not exist. I am not a Civil War or Early Modern historian but several of my friends are. For their encouragement and assistance I offer grateful thanks to: Norah Carlin, Andy Wood, Diane Purkiss, Ian Atherton, Anne Markey, Ciara Boylan and also Chris Collingwood (artist) www.collingwoodhistori cart.com who shared his interest in visual recreation of the past. Invaluable web sites were The British Civil War Project: British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1638–1660, http://bcw-project.org/ and the Univerity of Leicester Civil War Petitions project: https://www.civilwarp etitions.ac.uk/. Facebook friends: I have no truck with people who argue online friends are superficial. Over the years mine have been stalwart researchers of lost references (such as figuring out which primary school history book I was thinking of, above, and visits to museums I could not reach), and writing cheerleaders, and have been there for me in some rather tough times. Particular thanks go to the 300 Word Daily Challenge Group who bring to life my mother’s sage advice about productivity: eat your elephant a spoonful at a time. Ian Atherton, Norah Carlin, Edward James, Ken MacLeod and Kari Sperring all did enormous amounts of work on this manuscript to help me avoid errors and assist me in melding the several stories I was trying to tell. Norah and Ian supported my attempt to write about a period I have only briefly studied formally; Kari helped me with the wider genre context for those fictions whose authors had frequently written many other books set in other periods; Ken MacLeod took me around Covenanter memorials and explained Scottish Protestantism to me; Edward James accompanied me to museums and re-enactments in which he was not the least bit interested, because in the early stages he was a necessary companion to a learner driver.

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Additional thanks go to Edward as always, for making sure my manuscript is fit to read, and because without his aid editing the manuscript, and indexing it, this book would never have been finished. It is the seventh of my books he has edited and they are all much improved for it. All mistakes and strange interpretations are my own.

Introduction

No event in English history has inspired as much lasting acrimony as the Civil War… For nearly two hundred years the writing of histories of the Civil War consisted really of attempts to marshal evidence to prove the virtues of the principles for which Royalists or Parliamentarians claimed to have fought. (Hutton 1982, xxxi)

This book is about memory, about the significance of memory, and the role which the wars that raged across the British Isles in the seventeenth century and which killed 11% of the population (compared to 3% in the First World War) have played in our understanding of nationhood. It is about the role that historical fiction—primarily for the young—has played in preserving and shaping those memories and in what Alan Robinson describes as creating an ‘afterlife of the past’ (2011, 7). All around us are markers of this past, some more obvious than others. The English Civil Wars or, as they are now referred to by historians, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, begin with the outbreak of war between the King and Scotland in 1638 over the imposition of a new Bible and service. When they end depends on what story is being told: they may end in 1649 with the trial and execution of the King; in 1660 with the Restoration; in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of Charles I’s second son, James II; or with the death of Queen Anne and the decision to overlook fifty-one Catholic heirs before the anointing of George of Hanover. Some feel that the wars ended only with the Battle of Culloden and the final defeat of the house of Stuart (Lenman 1986). xv

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The Civil Wars are central to the construction of English, Irish and to a lesser extent Scottish, political identity over the three and a half centuries that have followed the Restoration. The Civil Wars contributed to the construction of England’s and then Great Britain’s identity as a bastion of Protestantism, the construction of the concept of a constitutional monarchy, and the value of political gradualism. This narrative did not emerge organically, it was an active project. As Edward Vallance notes, suppressing the memory of the wars and their causes came to be a matter of government policy in the first century after the wars (2019, 5). And for the nineteenth century, Timothy Lang argues that the Victorians—aware of the parallels with contemporary sectarian strife, and the legacies of the French Revolutions—were drawn naturally to the period: ‘The Victorians wrote more on the Stuarts than on any other period in their nation’s past… producing a body of literature that was both scholarly and politically engaged’ (1995, 1), and which, as we will see in this book, spilled over into fiction. Furthermore, there has always been a counter narrative usable by radical movements: one of workers’ education, of the power of reading and speaking and thinking for oneself. At the People’s History Museum in Manchester, for example, there is a large ‘family tree’ of ideology and thought in the main hall that can be bought as a poster for £2. The root of the tree is the English Revolution and as it descends Roundheads become Whigs, Cavaliers become Tories and Levellers become radicals. In Ned Palmer’s A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles (2019) even the radical artisan food movement is positioned as a legacy of the Levellers and Diggers. Alan Robinson has argued that historical fiction is a kind of counterfactual, that seeks to rewrite the historical record (2011, 30). The English Civil War is a classic case of what Jerome de Groot describes as a conflicted national history (2009/210), and as such demonstrates vividly the potential for that counterfactual element. The English Civil War is part of a lived and living tradition. As Butler and O’Donovan observe, ‘The disputes that lie behind the English Civil Wars… are still to some extent current… We are to an extent living still living with the dispensation that arose directly out of the Civil Wars and the 1688 revolution’ (94). What one knows of the wars and what one believes about the wars shapes what one thinks now, and where one positions oneself now shapes how one thinks of the wars. At Cromwell’s house in Ely, visitors are invited to decide whether they think the Parliamentarians are right or wrong: the gentleman in front

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of us still thought it all hinged on whether it was right or wrong to execute a king. This author is Jewish and from a radical family; she is biased in favour of Cromwell. As a science fiction writer she is also attracted to the radical futurism of the Levellers. An entirely liberal colleague, from an Irish family, sees Cromwell the Genocide. Brexit has reignited the currency of the English Civil Wars. Between 2016 and 2019 over 50 newspaper articles used the divisions of the English Civil Wars as both comparison and metaphor. It is no longer amusing to read headlines and twitter feeds (see #EnglishCivilWar) which compare Theresa May’s defeat in the Commons with the King’s defeats in 1641, John Bercow with Speaker Lenthall, or to realise that the failure to take the Good Friday Accord seriously may reignite conflict with and within Ireland. Simon Heffer in the New Statesman (16–22 June 2017, 13) reflected ‘as with the English Civil War, ancient distinctions threaten to last a few generations yet’. Historical fiction about this period is a genuine cultural battleground: Geoffrey Trease’s 1948 complaints and those of Robert Leeson in 1976 about the overwhelming bias towards the Royalists in this body of fiction are more than simply a protest of unfairness, of a feeling that children are not getting a full picture. Trease and Leeson cared passionately about the story of the English Civil Wars in a way it is impossible to imagine transferring to arguments about Roman Britain, and which spreads far beyond the historical fiction that this book concerns itself with. The fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, for example, devotes pages to the theory of monarchy in his fantasy Nation (2008), while in his Discworld series he creates the historical character of Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes, ‘Old Stoneface’ Vimes, who led his Ironheads to victory against a corrupt king and ‘picked up the axe that had no legal blessing because the King wouldn’t recognize a court even if a jury could be found, when he prepared to sever what people thought was a link between men and deity—’ (Feet of Clay, 372). Sam Vimes’ grandfather, like Oliver Cromwell’s, is Guilliam; however, the revolution in Night Watch (2002) riffs on the French Revolution of 1789 (including the demands of the prostitutes for fair pay) and the Paris Commune of 1871. The Civil War is a contested history important to the national narrative not in the way in which it is unifying—it is not, despite the attempts particularly of nineteenth-century authors—but in the ways in which it is divisive.

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This book is trying to do something tricky, to explore how fiction and history have influenced each other. Part 1 sets up the context, beginning with a narrative history of the English Civil Wars from 1641 to 1648 for those new to the topic, focusing primarily on events in England. Part 2 focuses on the themes, both historical and historiographical, which have captured the attention of fiction writers, historians and both, and also tries to account for those themes and issues that fiction writers have ignored. The final chapter concludes by looking at the aftermath, the way the Restoration has been understood and depicted in fiction. One hundred and eighty-six works of historical fiction covering the period from the 1620s right up to 1688 are considered in this book, of which one hundred and seventy-two are focused on the war. The earliest was published in 1720 (Memoirs of a Cavalier, by Daniel Defoe) and the most recent in 2020 (The Puritan Princess by Miranda Malins, and Killing Beauties by Pete Langman). The selection of titles for this project has been drawn as widely as was feasible, using every available bibliography (see works cited). However not all titles could be sourced (even using the British Library and various electronic facsimile services) and twenty or thirty books were lost from the analysis in this way (and there is no certainty that they would have been eligible). Some authors are represented more than once: both Geoffrey Trease and Jane Lane (a pen name) wrote extensively of the period. In the twenty-first century the popularity of ongoing series led me to collapse each series into one ‘text’. I have included material which is about ‘the road to war’, such as Trease’s Curse on the Sea (1996) and his Mandeville stories, and also J. MacLaren Cobban’s Angel of the Covenant (1898) which tells the story of Montrose. I have excluded almost all novels set entirely during the Restoration (such as G.A. Henty’s When London Burned, 1895), but exceptions were made where their political concerns were directly tied to the Civil War and positioned the fall of James II as the final conclusion of that war, as with Trease’s Trumpets in the West and its opposite number the Royalist Jane Lane’s England for Sale (1943), and Georgette Heyer’s The Great Roxhythe (1923), or a novel such as Hester Burton’s Thomas (1969) which begins in the Commonwealth but whose crucial scenes take place in the Restoration. One novel, by Geoffrey Trease, is set in the present day: in The Gates of Bannerdale (1956) the protagonists search for silver plate which was hidden by the College Warden in the Civil Wars. These out of period novels are included in the bibliography, but not in the counts of bias, or in the list in Appendix C.

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Works Cited De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Legon, Edward. “Remembering the Good Old Cause.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 11–27. Print Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Cause. Glasgow: National Trust for Scotland, 1986. Print. Robinson, Alan. Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Contents

1

1

The English Civil Wars

2

Selecting the Historical Fiction

13

3

As We Understand History, so We Understand Fiction

25

4

The Cultural Landscape of the Civil Wars

49

5

Great Men and Great Battles

71

6

Men and Women

109

7

Religion

143

8

By the Sword Divided

175

9

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms

197

10

The Commonwealth and the Protectorate

223

11

The Restoration

251

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12

CONTENTS

Conclusion

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Afterword

271

Appendix A: Map by Nick Jenkins

273

Appendix B: Table of Bias

275

Appendix C: Civil War Novels, in Order of Publication

277

Appendix D: Families Divided

283

Works Cited

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

The English Civil Wars

May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak, in this place, but as the house is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly ask pardon that I cannot give any other answer to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me. —Speaker William Lenthall, 4 January 1642

The origins of the English Civil Wars lie in the failure of the Stuart state to secure its finances, the tension between political principle and practicality in its role as a Protestant State in Europe, and the unfinished business of a Protestant Reformation that was in many ways a compromise between a European intellectual tradition and an English state which saw the Church as a fundamental part of the cascade of central authority. It also lay in the personality of the King and the failure of attempts to unite the Scottish and English states under one crown. Not all of these things will be represented in the fiction. The English Stuart State regularly outran its finances: although it had access to customs duties, all direct taxation had to go through Parliament. Parliament did not yet sit regularly but was called by the King expressly to authorise taxes. James I was able to hold things together during his reign in part by ensuring that King’s men were elected to Parliament in rotten boroughs—seats with very few voters—but also through local influence, a practice illustrated in Geoffrey Trease’s Saraband for Shadows (1982).

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_1

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James I also avoided overseas entanglements. Charles I very quickly made the mistake of seeking a short victorious war, first in France, and then against the Scots when he attempted to enforce a new prayer book. Both were disastrous: the English had no standing army and those who served abroad as mercenaries were yet to return. It reduced Charles to ever-increasing financial dependence on Parliament. Very few of the books about the English war discuss the Bishops’ Wars: Daniel Defoe’s Cavalier (Memoirs of a Cavalier, 1720) serves as a volunteer, and a number of the Scottish texts such as James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie, or the Black Dragoons (1856) begin the civil conflicts in this first engagement, but generally, many of the novels treat the English war as discrete, not least because, as we shall see, most of the authors are uncomfortable with the religious aspects of the war. It is not clear whether the economy was a factor in the outbreak of war. The population had risen from around two million in 1500 to five million around 1630, but with no corresponding rise in food production, and prices had risen around 400%. A shift towards farming for the market helped, but led to an increasing number of larger farms, which displaced tenant farmers. However, the small-scale economy of the period meant that labourers moved in and out of different kinds of work with the seasons, and there was no mass layoff in the winter. The industry was small scale with only a few areas—the weapons trade in Leicester and Birmingham, Nantwich’s leather and salt industries—particularly specialised, and although manufacturing was growing it was still only a tiny fraction of the economy (Carlin 1999, 104–134). Perhaps only the wool trade had a major significance as an export, and increasingly cloth was exported fully finished. London had already become the first European mega-city, far outstripping other English urban settlements: between 1600 and 1640 the population doubled to at least 400,000 people, around 7% of the urban population. What happened in London affected the rest of the country. Thus it mattered that merchants tended to be undercapitalised, with low rates of profit which could be affected easily by foreign crisis affecting the price of imported raw materials, the safety of shipping or the assignment of monopolies (Coates 2004, 4–21). The organisation of England was intensely parochial: the King and Parliament could only rule through the cooperation of local authorities in the form of magistrates drawn from the local gentry and aristocracy. MPs divided roughly into court and country: court appointments were just that, MPs placed there by the King. Some were themselves local but many

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were not and did not represent local interest. When the system worked well local representation passed local interest up the chain. However, Charles’s decision to rule without Parliament between 1629 and 1640 disrupted this process. In addition, as the exchequer was empty, the King had to find other ways of raising money. With little feedback from the localities he regularly chose ways—such as the extension of ship money from the ports to inland—which challenged local prerogative. Furthermore, in an attempt to extend the resources of the crown he resorted to an old Elizabethan tactic of selling monopolies: however rather than supporting new ventures as monopolies (the predecessors of patents) were intended to do, these frequently undermined established businesses. This also challenged the City of London which was emerging as a rival to Parliament as a centre of political as well as economic power. When Parliament was allied with London, as it was to be during much of the war, it put the weight of a mini-state behind the Parliamentary rebellion, something which, of earlier authors, only Jane Lane notes (and that to deride) and which comes to the fore only in the twenty-first-century novels by authors such as Lindsey Davis and Gillian Bradshaw. In religion, England in 1640 was a hotchpotch. The Elizabethan Settlement had left the episcopate intact, had produced a Book of Common Prayer which was generally accepted, and supported by the King James translation of the Bible, which was accepted but was at this stage still what we might call a scholars’ edition, used in churches. Most lay Protestants used the Geneva Bible with its rather more Calvinist bent. Much of the matter of ritual was left to the local minister, and as local ministers were placed as much by local landowners as by bishops, there was a strong regional variation. In the 1630s the plainer and more Calvinist tendency dominated, but Charles was by nature inclined to ritual and despite having been raised in the Calvinist tradition rejected it for what is now known as Arminianism, which moved the act of salvation from a gift of God to works and rituals. From the point of view of the godly, it argued man could save himself (Fincham 1994, 161–186). In some areas the new High Church practices of the altar behind the rail, new glass put in place, and the churching of post-natal women were the norm; in others the communion table sat in the centre of the church and people (according to the scandalised) rested their hats there when it was not in use. Charles I’s favouring of William Laud (Bishop of London in 1628, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633), followed by Laud’s purging

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of Calvinists and others Laud considered too puritan, was a radical act designed to shift the belief system of the country, but which challenged local landowners’ rights of patronage, by which they often bestowed benefices on their relatives and clients (Davies 1992). Repeatedly, Charles attempted to generate central power through the episcopate which he controlled, in the face of a distributed and tight-knit power network; for many of the Parliamentarians who opposed him were related to each other, to the aristocracy and to the gentry (Tyacke 1973, 140), of which the most unnerving may be Sir Oliver Cromwell, who served the King. In contrast, Charles had a very small personal network of power and patronage. This brings us to the third problem which was Charles I’s personality and style of governance. Blair Worden is blunt: ‘He had alarming policies, which he pursed with alarming methods… He was incorrigibly deficient in political judgment… no one could trust him’ (2009, 7). Charles had not been raised as the heir to the throne: he was small and sickly. The historian Pauline Gregg has suggested rickets (1981, 12), but another possibility is cerebral palsy which would also explain what is described by contemporaries as a stutter. Charles was not raised in the court and did not make the generation of friends that would have supported his elder brother Henry (1594–1612). Henry died of a fever when he was sixteen, and Charles’s first and for a long time only friend was his father’s friend and perhaps lover, George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham (it was very unusual for non-Royals to rise to the height of Duke). Buckingham’s hostility to and later grooming of Charles is well documented (Carlton 1983, 22–34). It was with Buckingham that Charles undertook his politically rash journey to Spain to attempt to woo the Infanta (at one point he climbed over a wall to reach her and was halted by soldiers) (Samson 2006 for the full story, and Jane Lane’s The Young and Lonely King 1969, for ‘faction’). After his accession to the throne he eventually married Henrietta Maria of France. After Buckingham’s death in 1628—and particularly after Charles was forced to accede to Strafford’s execution in 1641—she became Charles’ closest friend and advisor. They posed as a model married couple (the most famous portrait is by Daniel Mytens and depicts them holding between them a peace wreath). Their letters reveal an extremely close and intense relationship which was to challenge the gendered norms of kingly power, and which placed a Catholic at the heart of policy discussion (Hibbard 1983; Cressy 2015). Buckingham, Strafford and then Henrietta Maria

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were not only Charles’ intimates but his primary political advisors. The King’s uxorious behaviour was also to form part of the construction of Charles the Martyr in the Interregnum and Restoration. Although Charles was admired for bringing order to a licentious court, he was also seen as stiff, overly grand, and what friends described as dignity was to others distance and aloofness. Charles admitted people into his confidence only slowly, but once they were part of the inner circle, they were close to unchallengeable except by other intimates. It is noticeable that he was loved by those with whom he became intimate, as with Clarendon who had originally chosen to serve the King in the 1630s precisely in order to bring better advice to the King and who felt he could not abandon him in the face of war; similarly Sir Edmund Verney who famously declared that he could not refuse to serve a man whose bread he had eaten. Charles used this circle not only for advice, but to ensure a distance from others. But there was no attempt to build the kinds of alliances on which James and Elizabeth had depended. Finally, almost without fail, whatever project the King attempted, whether the attempt to woo the Infanta, or the attempt to force the Prayer Book on the Scots, went wrong: the King appeared to have no sense of timing, and no sense of political judgement and he coupled this with a belief (exposed when his letters to his wife were captured) that he did not have to keep his agreements or promises with mere subjects.

1625–1641: The Road to War Charles I acceded to the thrones of both England and Scotland in 1625. Almost his first act was to declare war on Spain, stressing the exchequer, and his second was to use a loophole in Scottish law which protected minors from the appointments of regents, to revoke all appointments, thus instantly alienating the Scottish ruling class. In 1626 he sought to patch the state finances with a forced loan imposed on England and Wales and in 1627 went to war with France. In 1628, faced with the need to raise taxes Charles called his third Parliament: Parliament used this time to pass the Petition of Right which condemned non-Parliamentary taxation and a number of other royal policies. In response Charles dissolved Parliament and began a decade-long period of personal rule (Sharpe 1992 for the best account of this period). During this time he made peace with first France and then Spain, but rather than appease public opinion, this actually led to stress. He used the suddenly vacant see of London

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(due to a scandal) to bring in William Laud as the new Bishop in 1628. Laud’s preference for ritual sacramentalism raised fears that he would lead England back to Catholicism, worries begun when Charles married Henrietta Maria of France (Hibbard 1983, 96). In 1631 Charles appointed Thomas Wentworth as Governor of Ireland, thus succeeding—as Blair Worden has noted (2009, 35)—in uniting the Anglo-Irish, the native Irish and the Ulster Scots solidly in opposition, and in 1633 Charles finally travelled to Scotland to be crowned, an event that did not go as well as he had hoped. But it was in 1637 that things really began to go awry, when Burton, Bastwick and Prynne were mutilated for seditious printing of anti-episcopal pamphlets, while the imposition of ship money on inland counties aroused fierce resentment in England and led to the trial of MP John Hampden for refusal to pay in 1637. Hampden emerged as a celebrated hero and was to lead the Grand Remonstrance in the Commons in 1641. In Scotland things went no better: James had attempted to impose conformity with the Articles of Perth in 1621, but had failed. Under Charles the attempt to impose the new book of Canons in 1636 and the new prayer book in 1637 led to mass walk outs from the churches and the signing of the National Covenant in February 1638 (Stevenson 1973). In 1639 the General Assembly abolished the episcopate. The first Bishops’ War broke out and an almost entirely southern English army was sent to Scotland, though it stalled at Kelso. In 1640 the Scottish Parliament, meeting without royal summons, voted to curb the monarch’s powers. In August the Scots crossed the Tyne, threw back the English troops to Newburn and occupied most of the North, until a treaty was signed in Ripon by which the King paid the Scots to leave England. Meanwhile, Thomas Wentworth had returned to England to advise the King, and in 1640 Charles called, and then dissolved the ‘Short Parliament’ (it lasted only a month). Forced to call another Parliament in the same year (this one known as the Long Parliament) it demanded the impeachment of Wentworth, now Lord Strafford, for his conduct in Ireland, and brought the Root and Branch petition which attacked the episcopacy. In May 1641 Charles was forced to allow Strafford to go to the gallows: most historians feel he was innocent of the treason of which he was accused, hence the use of an Act of Attainder rather than a conventional trial. James A. Shearman’s Kathleen Clare: Her Book (1895) is a very deliberate attempt to reframe him as a kind and generous governor.

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By this time momentum to limit the powers of the King was gathering speed. The English Parliament passed an Act preventing its own dissolution without parliamentary consent, and in June 1641 an act declaring that customs duties—traditionally the one area the monarch had controlled outright—could be levied only with the consent of Parliament. In July Parliament abolished the courts of the Star Chamber and High Commission which had been used to bring the King’s own prosecutions. Ship money was abolished in August, the forced knighthood and accompanying fees, and the boundaries of royal forests, were limited. The King was losing control. Then Ireland erupted. In 1641, seeing central control slipping with the execution of the hated Strafford, the native Irish launched attacks on the eastern settlements: their cultural impact outweighed their military success. The deaths of civilians in Dublin and the arrival of refugees in England was a major factor in intensifying English hostility to the Irish. In the Commons (not the Lords) the Grand Remonstrance, led by Hampden, proceeded to list every calamity that had beset the kingdom during Charles’ reign. It passed by a narrow majority. Convinced that he had only to target the ringleaders and it would all collapse, in January 1642 Charles himself entered the Commons and tried to arrest five MPs—John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode: the first four would become major players in the next few years. Their escape left Charles looking weak. Charles decided to leave an increasingly turbulent London. It proved a fatal mistake: it meant that for the first part of the war, it looked very much as if Charles was making war on his own capital city, and it removed him from the instruments of government, of revenue and from the Eastfacing ports that were needed for international supply. The only eastern port the Royalists would control during the war was Newcastle-uponTyne. Knowing this Charles marched North but in an indicator of what was to come, he failed to seize the armoury at Hull, its governor declaring for the legitimacy of Parliament and ‘the King in Parliament’, the phrase that would be used until late in the war. In July 1642, Parliament appointed the Earl of Essex as commanderin-chief of its armies and in August Charles raised his standard in Nottingham and the war officially began.

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1642–1646: Edgehill to the Capture of the King Although there were a couple of minor skirmishes, the first major battle (first of the Big Three) took place at Edgehill, in Warwickshire, a county in the English Midlands where so much of the fighting would take place. The Earl of Essex commanded the Parliamentarian forces, and the King technically commanded the Royalists. In reality it was led by Prince Rupert, the King’s Own Lifeguard preferring to serve under the Prince. The King and his forces assumed a decisive win: they were gentlemen, trained to the sword. Cromwell reported to Hampden after the battle in a famous memo, ‘Your troopers are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters; and their [the Royalists’] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality’ (Abbott 1939, vol. 4, 471). The Royalists had far more of the returning mercenary captains; they were led by the King himself, by his nephew the cavalry captain Prince Rupert and Lord Byron. Had they won there is a chance that the war would have been over. Hampden, Holles, Haselrig and Pym would have been executed as traitors, and we would never have heard of Oliver Cromwell. But under Essex the parliamentarians stood their ground: too poorly trained to make a good attacking force at this stage, and led by a man who—Parliament later concluded—wanted to bring the king to the negotiating table rather than defeat him, they yet withstood wave after wave of attack over the course of a day. When Parliamentarian troops broke and ran, Prince Rupert’s unit lost all discipline and chased them, enabling Essex to regroup and press on. The day ended in a draw and both sides, exhausted and in shock from the reality of battle, withdrew. Charles decided to go around Essex, and set out for London. He got as far as Turnham Green, but the citizens of London, in an effort that has never been commemorated in fiction but is easily as heroic as the events of the Blitz, turned out to dig ditches, build walls and defend their city from their King. The King halted and turned back, heading for Oxford where he established his capital in the university. Parliament was still not determined on war and there were peace negotiations in Oxford. However, Charles had opened up negotiations with Ormond in Ireland with the plan to release English troops for the English war. Over the summer the Royalists made advances in the south, the Midlands and in the North of England. They needed to control the north-east in order to maintain access to the continent. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, they took Bristol. Parliament was able to relieve

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Gloucester from the Royalist occupation, but the death of Parliament’s leader John Pym (from cancer) was a blow to morale. At the end of the year, English troops arrived from Ireland for the King through Chester, causing the first of a number of panics about an Irish invasion. In January 1644, worried that they were losing, Parliament made an alliance with the Scots. Here it is important to remember that Scotland was an independent nation which had already rebelled against the King. In January Parliament also held Nantwich through a siege (see D. W. Bradbridge, The Winter Siege, 2013), was mauled outside Newark but went on to win battles in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. While the King was strengthening his hold in the South and Essex’s army collapsed in Cornwall, the North fell to Parliament with the decisive second battle of the Big Three, the Battle of Marston Moor. After this Parliament took York and eventually Newcastle, cutting the King off from supplies from the continent. At Marston Moor, the Marquess of Newcastle’s White Lambs (named for their undyed coats), refused to surrender, an act of bravery that resulted in the destruction of one of the King’s best armies. By November Parliament was critical of the performance of Essex, and of the army as a whole: fearing they might lose Parliament offered new and easier terms to the King. Another round of peace negotiations began, but, these failing, in December Archbishop Laud was executed and the Westminster Assembly approved the new (Calvinist) Directory of Worship to replace the old Book of Common Prayer. In April 1645 the self-denying ordinance was issued: this forced members of both Lords and Commons to resign their positions in the army, and allowed a whole slew of interpersonal conflicts to be swept aside (something the King never achieved). Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary armies, with Oliver Cromwell as his Lieutenant (exempted from the Act). Under Fairfax the army was New Modelled, its regional forces collapsed into one national army under one general its officers recruited from the godly (predominantly Independents), and famous for its cohesion and military discipline, despite the high level of conscription that continued. In June, at Naseby in Northamptonshire, Parliament won a stunning victory and in the next year began to clear Royalist pockets in the Midlands, South-West and Wales; in October a major Royalist stronghold, Basing House, was stormed and slighted (razed). In Scotland however Montrose was winning Royalist victories against Parliament’s allies, the Covenanters; but the Royalist plan to bring over Irish Catholics was

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revealed, and Charles’ letters to the Queen were captured and subsequently published, displaying the King’s machinations and his belief that he did not have to honour any promises he made. This did much damage to the King’s reputation and, worst, made it clear he was an unreliable negotiator. In February 1646 Chester fell to Parliament: this cut the King off from his major entrepôt for Ireland, the one place where he was still winning. Torrington in Devon fell shortly afterwards. In May, Charles surrendered to the Scottish army besieging Newark. Oxford surrendered in June, effectively ending the war of 1642–1646.

1646–1649: From Surrender to the Gallows In January 1646, Parliament paid the Scots for their promised aid, and the Scots withdrew, leaving Charles a prisoner of Parliament. Despite common allegations, this was not a trade. The Scots were already discovering what Parliament knew, that Charles was untrustworthy. With the war over, the Army began to be restive, wanting back-pay prior to being disbanded and knowing full well that if they were not paid before they were demobbed, they would not be paid at all. In June 1647 Cornet George Joyce, a low-ranking officer in the New Model, seized the king from Parliament’s custody at Holden House, and took him into Fairfax’s custody near Cambridge, thus tipping the balance of power to the army. He was imprisoned in Northampton. In July representatives of the Army met near Reading to debate a new set of Proposals which would offer the King easier terms, although some he would never accept, concerning parliamentary reform. These were known as the Solemn Engagement. In August, with London in a ferment as the Presbyterian faction in Parliament tried to reorganise the Church to exclude Independents, the Army sent units to occupy London. It all passed peacefully. In November the army was calmed by the Putney debates (made famous by the discovery of notes and their editing in 1891 by C. H. Firth, and arriving in the fiction in Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers in 1923), and although there would be a mutiny in Hertfordshire it was easily crushed. Charles escaped from Northampton in November 1647 and headed for the Isle of Wight where the Governor of Carisbrooke Castle promptly imprisoned him. In secret he concluded an alliance with the Scots who by this time were unhappy with the failure of Parliament to honour the

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commitment to convert England to Presbyterianism. When his letters were intercepted it revealed that Charles was playing off Army against Parliament, and England against Scotland, while holding out for rescue from Royalist Scotland, Ireland or France. In March he tried to escape, but became stuck in the bars of his window. He tried again in May and was betrayed. The invasion that resulted from his attempts to negotiate with the Scots was defeated by Cromwell at Preston in 1648 and sealed his fate. The anti-royalist Covenanters regained the upper hand in Scotland. Charles was taken to Hurst Castle. 1648 saw the events in England that we call the Second Civil War. There were anti-parliamentarian risings in Wales, in Norwich and in Kent. The most famous and contentious was the siege of Colchester. In June Royalists entered Colchester, a Parliamentarian city. Fairfax laid siege and starved the defenders (who were not supported by the local population) into submission, a full account of which is given in Hester Burton’s Kate Rider (1974). The subsequent military trial of Lucas, Lisle, Farre and Gascoigne on the grounds that they had broken their freely given paroles and the execution of Lucas and Lisle (Farre escaped and Gascoigne was an Italian citizen) is one of the controversies of the war. As we see in several texts, for Royalists this was murder, while for Parliamentarians it was a hint that the army, not Parliament, was in control. In December, fearful that Parliament was about to treat with the King on the King’s terms, the Army again entered London, and under Colonel Pride purged the House of Commons in preparation for seeking a trial of the King. What happened next will be outlined in Chapter 10, The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Abbott, Wilbur Cortez. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Volume 4. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. Print. Carlin, Norah. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Print. Carlton, Charles. Charles I: The Personal Monarch. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Print. Coates, Ben. The Impact of the Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004. Print.

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Cressy, David. Charles I and the People of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print. Davies, Julian. The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print. Fincham, Kenneth, ed. The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Print. Gregg, Pauline. King Charles I . London: Phoenix Press, 1981. Print. Hibbard, Caroline M. Charles I and the Popish Plot. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Print. Samson, Alexander, ed. The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’ Journey to Madrid, 1623. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I . New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 1992. Print. Stevenson, David. The Scottish Revolution 1637 –1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973. Print. Tyacke, Nicholas. “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution.” The Origins of the English Civil War. Ed. Russell, Conrad. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973. 119–43. Print. Worden, Blair. The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660. London: Orion, 2009. Print.

CHAPTER 2

Selecting the Historical Fiction

It is quite possible for books to be enthusiastically read by people for whom they were not ‘intended’… —Peter Hollindale, Signs of Childness, 1997, p. 9

When this book was first envisaged, it was intended to focus on books for children and teens. However, as the collection grew it became clear that the boundaries of historical fiction intended for teens were porous and ultimately changed over time. Furthermore, given the time span of this book across the eighteenth century to the present day, it is problematic to use the term children’s literature. At the same time, it became clear that the positioning of most English Civil War fictions as adventure narratives frequently led to their marketing (in covers and blurbs) as books for younger people (teens and adults) whether they were intended by the author that way or not: adventure fiction it seems fits many of the characteristics frequently identified by children’s literature scholars as markers for children’s and teen fiction. This remains relevant because it may explain the relatively limited engagement with politics that marks so many of the books about this intensely politicised conflict. The book covers 187 texts in all (172 specifically about the war or where the war is a significant presence in the plot) and spans three publishing eras, the first, in the nineteenth century in which ‘children’ referred to under-twelves, and books for teens were books for people who were considered semi-adult (Knoepflmacher 1998; Galbraith 1997); © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_2

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the second era is in the second half of the twentieth century in which a clear teen market developed as an extension of the children’s market, but in which teens were also expected to crossover to the adult shelves of the library (Hollindale 1997); and third the market of the twenty-first century in which there is a very clear ‘young adult market’ in which adults are crossing to the teen ‘shelves’ of the internet stores in search of fiction. Thus almost all of the novels discussed in this book, particularly those published before the 1930s and in the twenty-first century, are what Sandra Beckett terms crossover books, intentionally intended to appeal to an audience of teens and adults. Furthermore, among the 77 books with young protagonists (just over half of the titles) there are wide variations as to what is considered a child, and what is a young adult who can go to war or get married, and this is heavily inflected by gender: in Charlotte M. Yonge’s Under the Storm (1887), a 14-year-old girl is a little girl; in Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) Elizabeth at the same age is on the verge of marriage. In Rev. Alfred J. Church’s With the King at Oxford (1886), his 15-year-old hero is protected at university, while Percy Westerman’s titular The Young Cavalier (1911) is a cornet in the army. We also do not know if a given author seeks to portray a child or an adult of their own period, or whether they hope to reflect what they believe was true in the past—in the earliest of our texts it is clear that the authors knew little of the historical child—although it is noticeable that as we approach the end of the long nineteenth century and the approach of the Great War, the adventures of the teenagers become more daring and in line with the reckless approach we might think of as the ‘boys’ own’ adventure genre. Historical fiction is one of the gateway fictions to adulthood for many teens. The desire to educate which supports the historical fiction project intersects with that of children’s literature (Yeandle 2015). Many of the titles here were marketed generally: only some were marketed directly as children’s books within that 11–14 age range. Only a very few of the books discussed here are intended for children younger than 11. Thus the decision was taken to draw the net wide, and to draw in the majority of civil war fictions which displayed what Peter Hollindale has called markers of childhood, and to think of this as fiction for young people, recognising the fuzziness of the age boundaries indicated by and applied to the texts, which results in ‘a body of writing proven to appeal to present-day young people in the prevailing circumstances of youth; a body of work forming the combined outcome of intentions on the part of authors, publishers

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and booksellers; a genus of fictions concerned with young people, or with situations understood by young people as relevant to them and which is linguistically accessible; an aggregation of texts with certain features in common which enable meaningful transactions with young people; and a reading event in which a young person engages with a text’ (Hollindale 1997, 27–28). The initial focus of the selection of the texts was on a body of writing proven to appeal to present-day children in the prevailing circumstances of childhood and a reading event coupled with an aggregation of texts with certain features in common, which enable them to establish meaningful transactions with child readers has been added. In the event however, it proved hard to find texts that did not meet these criteria, and were thus excluded. What are these features? 1. Age of protagonist; 2. Voice or positioning of the protagonist: strong focalisation on the youthful protagonist either in close third person or first person; 3. The literalness of the titles of the books (Spufford 2002); 4. The choice of very basic plots (romance, spy thriller, military adventure); 5. Knowledge density, in which the book orients to explain factual or philosophical context (Mendlesohn 2009); 6. A trajectory of Bildungsroman; 7. A career book structure; 8. A book that espouses social mobility; 9. The presence of a first romance as the one and only romance; 10. Intergenerational relations as a core relationship (usual parent– child but sometimes mentor–protagonist). The first of these is self-evident. Very few of the texts selected lack either a youthful protagonist or sidekick (only thirty-seven of the novels have adult protagonists). The definition of youthful used here is unmarried and/or still establishing his or her place in life. In the exceptions either the marriage is between two very young people—and either not consummated or the result of an elopement—or the male protagonist is behaving as if he is unmarried. Most of the texts in the collection are written with a very strong focus on the protagonist: other characters are

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rarely fully drawn and there is a solipsism to many of these novels in which only the outcome for the protagonist truly matters. Points 3, 4 and 5 go together: of the titles of the texts, nineteen have the place in the title as in Emma Marshall’s Under Salisbury Spire or John and Patricia Beatty’s Campion Towers; sixty-one give the plot away as in Georgette Heyer’s Royal Escape or Jane Lane’s Escape of the King. There are only forty-three metaphor titles, almost all post-1950s and with the rate speeding up in the twenty-first century. Plots are overwhelmingly straightforward: only the modernist writers of the 1930s and the literary writers of the twenty-first century eschew the single plot story. Overwhelmingly the storylines are scaffolding for the desire to inculcate an interest in the period. The emphasis on these books as ways to teach history leads to the knowledge density. We do not need to assume that the novelists here were just writing a story. Many of them were explicit about their didactic intent: John Somerville notes that eighteenth-century Puritans and Dissenters produced a disproportionate number of children’s books (1992); and to the degree it can be measured, the same is true of this collection. Most of these authors saw historical fiction as a way to teach history, a way to teach children pride in their country, and a way to shape what their understanding of their country would be. Henty, Trease and Leeson made explicit statements to this end. They wanted to grow a particular kind of child, dutifully patriotic in some cases, critically patriotic in others. And there were actual things they wanted children to learn, from patriotism to politics, military history to religious thought. The result is that the vast majority of these novels, good or bad, are knowledge dense. At least half play close attention to the military history of the period: heroes regularly turn up at the major events of Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby; some of the novels are set at sieges of Bristol, Carisbrooke and elsewhere. Some like Jane Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937), Marie Beulah Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth (1899) and Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894), pay close attention to the formation of the New Model Army, and all of these describe battles, armour and the state of war in great detail. More than half of the novels detail the politics of the period, both religious and secular, but the religious—those actually concerned to explicate religious differences as if they matter—cluster in the late nineteenth century through to just before the Great War. Overwhelmingly, the novels have things they want to teach: military strategy, politics, religion or everyday life in the period. One reason this

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is so obvious is because the plots are often so simplistic. There are 56 military adventures in which we follow a young officer (never an ordinary soldier) as he experiences the war: Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), through the classics of Marryat and Yonge in which very little actually happens, J. MacLaren Cobban’s Angel of the Covenant (1898), which explores the experience of the early Covenanters or Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923), which follows the radicalisation of a young officer. The more military-oriented novels also double up at times with a strategy of Bildungsroman or more modern career titles (fifteen) in which boys (usually) are quite clearly being trained in a trade: sometimes this is war as in James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie and the Black Dragoons (1856), for the navy in Charles Vipont’s Blow the Man Down (1939) or the much later Ronald Welch’s For the King (1971). In later books something more peaceful sometimes looms large: medicine in Hester Burton’s Thomas (1969), for instance. The role of Bildungsroman, the career book structure and the tendency to espouse social mobility (the latter particularly in post-1950s books) are all linked. They are all elements of the quality of self-proof that Hollindale argued was at the heart of a literature of youth (131). In the later books, from around the 1880s onwards, the role of social mobility and the career structure becomes one of the contested elements in the text: novels about the English Civil Wars are often profoundly concerned with (on the Royalist side) social stability and (on the Parliamentarian side) with new opportunities. But when the Civil War books fade out in the 1980s so do the career books and the career books do not return in the twenty-first-century revival. Alongside the military novels sit the adventure books in which teens go on errands for one side or another, such as the boy in Leslie Cope Cornford’s Captain Jacobus (1896), Percy Westerman’s A Lad of Grit (1909), Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) or almost any of the Geoffrey Trease books. All of these are ‘treasure hunt’ narratives and they dominate children’s fiction more generally from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s and the rise of social realism. Then there are ‘home front’ adventures in which, after Captain Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest, families hide out in the woods in titles such as Charlotte M. Yonge’s Under the Storm (1887), Elsie Jane Oxenham’s The Girls of Gwynfa (1924) Barbara Willard’s The Grove of Green Holly (1967) and in others, as in Jack Lindsay’s Sue Verney (1937) or 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), Hester Burton’s Kate Rider (1974),

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Pamela Belle’s Wintercombe (1988) or Lawrence Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012), we simply see how war affects a family. There are a solid cluster of romances (at least fourteen) and romance is often a secondary plot in a conventional reward for the hero way. Many of the romances signal their young audience because the first romance is the one and only—and many of the novels use a lovers-divided trope. But there are also a small number of titles I have listed as ‘Mary Sue’ novels. The Mary Sue is a term from fan fiction, describing a character too perfect to be true, who is inserted into a canon often to function as the author present in the tale. Identifying Mary Sues is tricky because it is so subjective, but fanlore.org suggests that one indication ‘is that they often cause canon characters, established story lines, and the very inner consistency of the canon’s reality to behave wildly out of bounds’. Thus these are not the same as the novels in which boys (and some girls) get to do great deeds in the service of the King, or Cromwell, or Rupert, or Fairfax, or even those novels in which the entire novel is about helping a royal (usually in an escape) in which a relatively minor or fictional character is inserted to give a point of view. In the Mary Sues a character is inserted into the household usually as a relative and gives us a profoundly distorted idea of the main character. In James Shearman’s Kathleen Clare: Her Book 1637 –1641 (1895) young Irish Catholic Kathleen goes to live in Wentworth (Lord Strafford)’s household, and discovers what a wonderful man he is. Dora Greenwell McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell, Royalist (1897) is Cromwell’s fictional niece. J. Wesley Hart’s In the Iron Time inserts John Vyzart, a Huguenot refugee, into Cromwell’s household, where Cromwell helps him to his Royalist bride, and is overwhelmed by the wonderfulness of Vyzart. These first three are rather bad books but they don’t have to be: in Herbert Hayens, For Rupert and the King (1910) teenage Sir Ralph Clifton is left in the guardianship of his uncle George who, along with his cousin Alice, baits him into joining up and he rapidly becomes a favourite of Prince Rupert and manages to be at every key event in Rupert’s career, but the book is even handed about Royalist and Parliamentarian atrocity, and Parliamentarians are shown as people. In Jack Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1937), one of the characters is in place solely to introduce us into the debates of the Levellers in London, and similarly Bernard Marshall’s fascinating The Torch Bearers (1923) gives his protagonist a front-row seat at the Putney debates. Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General (1946) uses two, one wholly fictional—an unwanted son for

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Sir Richard Grenville—and one who she has appropriated from the graveyard, Honor Harris who she casts as a love lost when Honor is crippled in a riding accident at eighteen and who functions as a confidante and means to make Grenville rather more sympathetic than he actually was, without fundamentally changing his character. What raises these novels above the first three is that the inserted character, like the protagonists in almost all of the fictions here, functions the same way as a character in a portal fantasy: as a stranger entering into a new world, they give us access to knowledge about that world and it is delivering knowledge—educating—that is a driving force in many of these novels. Intergenerational tension emerges in at least 117 of the texts. In almost all of those novels, duty—the willingness to take one’s lead from one’s parent—dominates. Of the novels where there was a clear sense of a side being taken, seventy took the side of following the line of duty while forty-nine exhibited rebellion where for some reason a child chose a different path. Only in the 1920s, 1970s and 2010s did rebellion outweigh the call of duty. It is worth looking at what’s happening in greater detail. In the Civil War fictions duty and rebellion were profoundly shaped by ideologies of adulthood and parenting that connect unusually strongly with the rhetoric of the topic at hand the English Civil Wars. Treason in English law traditionally covered more than just the king. The king was the head of the national family under god. Within the family, a wife killing her husband was treason (not the other way around of course); an apprentice killing his master was treason. Charles I, a famously devout family man, and for all a complete fool on political matters actually rather intellectual in other ways. took the familial relationship between himself and his kingdom far more seriously than most. To a degree duty to family in these books is taken for granted: sons follow fathers. But in several books duty becomes a theme in itself—often in the absence of any political discussion—and of course, duty to the King is the motivation of most Royalists and the theme of the pro-Royalist novels. The linkage of family and King was part and parcel of the old order of hierarchy that the civil wars were to challenge. This position is used by Daniel Defoe in our initiating title Memoirs of a Cavalier. In text after text duty to follow one’s father is more important than actually thinking. This is as true of leftwing writers as right-wing writers so that in the world of Geoffrey Trease (Silver Guard, 1948), Rosemary Sutcliff (a conservative, Simon, 1953) and Ronald Welch (For the King, 1969) all the boys in the text follow the

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lead of their fathers and families. This explains why some of the Royalist texts contain no discussion of politics: intergenerational loyalty is so taken for granted that it is not only the motivating factor of the hero but a given in the text so strong that some pro-Royalist authors really struggle to understand the religious and political motivations of Parliamentarians as real. In other texts there is a conscious attempt to construct neutrality by avoiding the issues at stake. Here one of the best examples is in G. A. Henty’s superficially pro-Royalist Friends Though Divided (1883). In Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest duty to the King is entirely inherited: politics are constructed in such a way that renders only the opposition political, to be a supporter of the king is to be part of the natural order in which one also has a duty to oneself and maintenance of oneself in that order. Charlotte Yonge’s Under the Storm is entirely and nakedly driven by duty. Steadfast, the second son of the family, stands by his duty after his father is killed and his older brother takes this as an excuse to join the Parliamentarian army. Throughout Steadfast takes on the duty to look after his family, to protect the secret that has been entrusted with him (the hidden Church plate), and eventually even the duty to decide when a legitimate heir to the church key arrives. Eventually Steadfast dies in the performance of his duty. Beulah Marie Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth, A Roundhead Cavalier (1899) is as adamant in its own way. Hugh is brought up by his mother’s family as a Puritan, but also as a poor relation. When he seeks out his father, a mercenary captain in the King’s army, it is in part about familial duty. His father rejects him and much of the book proceeds as Hugh seeks to demonstrate that he is a worthy son of his father by taking abject pains to please, to obey and perform. This book is an uncomfortable read because it demonstrates the dysfunction of the patriarchal structure of kingship in which obedience and duty still do not earn love. Until the 1890s there are no protagonists who resist the call of intergenerational duty. Everyone follows the parental line. In the 1890s there is an even split of men and women, but we have the first sign of a difference in what motivates the genders. Men are motivated by political thought: in Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894), Jocelyn, the third son of Sir Thomas, is already uneasy when his father and elder brother musters for the King. An encounter with John Hampden at a friends’ house convinces him to volunteer for Parliament. At various points Jocelyn will express his belief that ‘loyalty has no necessary connection with the King… It means being faithful to law’ (20). In

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J. S. Fletcher’s Mistress Spitfire (1896) again the protagonist Dick makes a clear break with his family over principle. In the next two decades all but one of the men stand on principle to follow their ideology not their family. Sometimes this is laudable, as with the well-thought-through politics of Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) whose hero eventually sides with the Independents at the Putney debates, and sometimes it is frankly juvenile as in the mawkish Her Faithful Knight by W. Bourne Cooke (1908)—a book written entirely in cod medievalese—whose protagonist ‘Heritage’ chooses his side because he receives a letter from Sir Peveril (who is older) bidding him to side with the king. In pure juvenile rage, ‘From that moment I was a Roundhead—heart and soul. As ye will readily perceive, my reasoning was not of the soundest, being deeply tinctured with selfishness and envy; but it served me well enough at the time’ (Ch. 20). Naturally he will eventually win his Royalist sweetheart anyway because her politics do not matter. In contrast women are trapped in the framework of familial loyalty and a woman’s loyalty follows her man. This is even more explicit in Dora McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell (1897) where a fictional niece of the great man is persuaded by an injured cavalier to take a message to Prince Rupert: she instantly falls in love with him, and is protected by him. In the end she is killed by a bullet meant for him when she tries to warn him of an assassination plot. Ann Swinfen in This Rough Ocean (2015) and Margaret Cooper Evans in A Farthinge for Oxford (2018) both find a way to use this framework to put their heroines in motion: both engage in travel more usually reserved for male protagonists, by focusing their ‘treasure hunts’ on the search for imprisoned husbands and the need to protect the family estate. In the 1900s male protagonists rebel for political reasons while the female protagonist of Over the Border (1907) by Robert Barr does so to follow a lover. Generally the women are for their man’s politics, as in R. W. Mackenna’s Through Flood and Fire (1925) in which the hero fights for the King (in Scotland) and his lover refuses to sign the Covenant because she feels her lover would not approve. In My Lady’s Bargain by Elizabeth Hope, a very Georgette Heyer style romance, a Parliamentarian officer is given a Royalist lady’s hand and estate as part of the post-war settlement or compounding. In some of the more pro-Royalist books however, women stand for the moral centre which aims to subvert as in McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell or Lawrence Cowen’s Bible and Sword (1919) in which Mary Milton

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(John Milton’s first wife) and a fictional Brigit Cromwell are depicted as secret Royalists attempting to influence their men. In a similar but more extreme vein, in May Wynne’s ‘Hey for Cavaliers!’ (1912), Barbara Carcroft convinces her Parliamentarian lover to betray his friends in Pontefract Castle so it can be taken from the inside. Barbara’s much more naive friend Marjorie is betrothed to a Puritan she loathes but eventually gets her Royalist lover in conventional fashion. It is a very strange book because although clearly Royalist in orientation, Barbara is thoroughly dishonourable and persuades her lover to be so. From the 1930s all the subsequent female rebels do so for love or infatuation or sometimes neglect leading to the latter as in Barbara Softly’s Plain Jane (1961) in which a harsh uncle leads a Puritan girl to hold out against an arranged marriage. Consistently the child (of any age) is rebelling against the parent or guardian. The act of male rebellion against the parent reflects two issues: first and most obvious that as we move into the late nineteenth century this generally becomes more conceivable as boys no longer automatically follow their fathers into professions and children become generally seen as less perfect extensions of their familial unit. But a second aspect is that authors were becoming not only more aware of the fissures that emerged during the English Civil Wars but the fissure in the language and conceptualisation of that war by the two sides and the ways in which the Parliamentarians—despite constant reference to traditional liberties—were harbingers of modernism. The issue of rebellion and duty in these books is fascinating because it not only responds to shifts in the understanding of childhood vis à vis the older generation, but shows a growing awareness of the degree to which this was vital to Royalist rhetorics of loyalty.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Galbraith, Gretchen R. Reading Lives: Reconstructing Childhood, Books, and Schools in Britain, 1870–1920. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Thimble Press, 1997. Print. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairytales and Femininity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Print.

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Mendlesohn, Farah. The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Print. Somerville, John C. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Print. Spufford, Francis. The Child That Books Built. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Print. Yeandle, Peter. Citizenship, Nation, Empire: The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Print.

CHAPTER 3

As We Understand History, so We Understand Fiction

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands. —Lord Vetinari, to Samuel Vimes, descendant of ‘Stoneface’ Vimes, the Regicide: Terry Pratchett, Jingo, 1997

The children’s writers and critics Geoffrey Trease (1949) and Robert Leeson (1976) were both convinced that the novels set in the English Civil Wars were absolutist in their Royalism. Trease thought that ‘The fiction writer’s Cavalier sympathies are almost invariable’ (Tales Out of School, 120). Leeson wrote that he sampled around two dozen books: ‘I find that fourteen lean towards the Royalist side, some horizontally; five are in the increasingly familiar area of “conflict of loyalties”, and the other four we may be said to do justice to the Parliamentary side’ (1976, 176). Trease and Leeson both asserted that they were writing against the current when they chose to write. However both authors were limited in the number of texts to which they had access. The reality is somewhat more complex (see Appendix B). Not all the books in the bibliography are strictly Civil War (some focus on the period before, some after) but the books in the count in this chapter are the ones which take place specifically during the war or in the first year of the Restoration. From 1720 onwards, of the novels © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_3

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on which the book focuses, eighty-seven are ‘for the King’, fifty-four ‘for Parliament’ and thirty-one are ‘neutral’, a definition which ranges from ‘a plague on both your houses’ through novels gently critical of the side portrayed, and novels in which the war is simply the background to the story or the story is set in the run-up to the war. Superficially, and over almost three hundred years, the King wins the fictional argument. However, as a key issue in the Royalist texts is loyalty, in most of the books discussed there is no such thing as ambiguous loyalty: to be neutral is to lean towards Parliament. If one adds the neutral texts to the Parliamentarian texts then almost half of the texts are not supportive of the King to one degree or another. Furthermore, the titles are spread over almost three hundred years, although clustered in two hundred (1820– 2018). Over this period—and the subject of this book—the balance of bias has shifted. There were two clear ‘golden ages’ of Civil War fiction: the first is the surge of texts in the 1880s on both sides. The 1880s surge reflects a rising interest in Cromwell and what Lang (1995) sees as the Victorian obsession with the Stuarts, in which they sought political lessons from this period more than any other. The second began in 1910 and lasted through the 1960s. The 1910s saw the attack on the House of Lords by David Lloyd George as he sought to establish a rudimentary welfare state. In the 1920s political debate was forceful and open, and almost every idea about British governance was up for debate. By the 1930s, there was a backlash with large portions of the upper classes flirting with autocratic governments and a very real civil war pitting the Church against ‘Parliament’ across the water in Spain; as a strong feature of the 1930s pro-Royalist novels is a pro-Church position (missing from late twentieth-century iterations of the theme) this is not an unreasonable comparison. We also see a rise in numbers of texts in the 1950s and 1960s, some of which is a function of the rise of the children’s historical novel more generally, but some of which is also connected to the revision of history teaching in schools. The move away from Kings, Dates and Battles towards a ‘people’s history’ simultaneously left a gap for more traditional accounts, and an opportunity to tell them from this new perspective. Geoffrey Trease, interestingly, was not writing during a high point of pro-Royalist authorship: although the 1900s (the pre-war years) see the kind of classic King and Country-ism that is associated with all pre-Great War children’s literature, from 1910 through the 1940s the honours are relatively even. In

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contrast, while the 1960s see a strong pro-Royalist intervention—perhaps a reaction to the emergence of a new social order no longer based on deference—and this almost certainly shaped the perceptions of the field for Robert Leeson—the 1970s were evenly distributed. By the 1980s there is a small swing to neutral, and all four books fit the category of a plague on both their houses. By 2000 the distribution is more or less equal and has remained so, but with romance almost solidly Cavalier. Currently King and Parliament are running neck and neck. Royalist-centred texts are far more likely to be published by major publishing houses. The opening premise of this book is that the historical fiction tracks the changing historiography. To see this, we have to begin by laying out what that historiography is.

1660–1850: Constructing the Interregnum In the immediate aftermath of the war, a veil was dropped over the period 1641–1660 (Neufeld 2013; Legon 2019; Vallance 2019). To discuss it was dangerous. Although there were authorised writings, most of those who wrote, such as the Earl of Clarendon, even though members of the King’s party, kept their writings a secret, and Matthew Neufeld believes that no work of prose historical writing in sympathy with Parliament was constructed in these years (2013). The few sanctioned histories prior to 1688 such as that by James Howell, ‘blamed the wars on a cadre of plotters, usually identified as “the Faction”’ (Neufeld, 29) or George Bate who blamed the ‘deterioration of relations between the king and Parliament on a factious group that hijacked the legislature’ under the pretense of reform (Neufeld, 95). But more important perhaps is that we see a trend, of which the fictionalisations are a part to understand historical writing about the war as ‘not reliving the recent past so much as deliberately re-screening aspects of it for polemical reasons’ (Neufeld, 91). In 1688 James II departed into exile and was replaced by William of Orange and James’ daughter Mary in a revolution or coup: one consequence of this is that many felt the constitutional argument of ‘King in Parliament’ had been largely won, even while the period between 1649 and 1660 was to be decried. As Neufeld notes, ‘the greater a historian’s support for the outcome of the Glorious Revolution, the less likely the history was to blame the civil war on a Puritan conspiracy’ (167).

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However, while it was now possible to publish about the Civil Wars, what was published was shaped by the needs of contemporary politics. In 1698–1699 the printer John Darby published A Voyce From the Watchtower, the memoirs of the Parliamentarian officer and regicide Edmund Ludlow, who had died in exile in 1692. John Darby also published Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, and later John Milton’s memoirs. These three names entered into the pantheon of Republican history. But we have clear evidence that the published version of Ludlow’s memoirs, on which many nineteenth-century proparliamentarian fiction writers clearly depend, was bowdlerised. In 1970 the original manuscript was discovered in Warwick Castle, revealing that the published version had been heavily expurgated, stripped of its radical Puritanism and repackaged for the Country Whig party of the late Stuart era. Blair Worden has argued that the rewriting was carried out by the deist John Toland to present Ludlow as a Whig-like secular republican (Worden 2001, 12–13 and 65–85). ‘A reader of the memoirs… could be forgiven for wondering whether Ludlow had religious convictions’ (Worden, 44). Both radical Ludlow and parliamentarian Sydney had disliked Cromwell: Ludlow had broken with him over his role as Protector. Worden argues they hated him more than did the Royalists: ‘To them he was the destroyer of the Commonwealth… [who] sacrificed the cause of virtue to his own ambition. From the Restoration onwards his religious zeal was widely regarded as either fraudulent or fanatical, or both’ (Worden, 15). Both of these elements became stock characterisations of Cromwell, as we shall see. In response to these Whig outpourings, the Tories began a counterattack by printing three sets of Royalist memoirs: those of Sir Philip Warwick, of Edward Hyde (1st Earl of Clarendon) and of Sir Thomas Herbert. It is Clarendon’s memoirs which made the greater impact on the Cavalier side. Clarendon went into exile in 1646 at the end of the first Civil War, and wrote the first draft of the History of the Rebellion. Then, after his banishment by Charles II (for being the spectre at the feast, although his daughter’s elopement with the future James II had not helped), he completed his autobiography between 1668 and 1670. In 1671 the History was revised and combined with the Life with new sections covering the events after 1644, with the aid of information culled from his many visitors. The entire book was published in 1702–1704 as The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. The text argued the

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case of the King, but also declared that the King should never have tried to unify the English and Scottish churches. By 1730, when an English version of the General and Historical Dictionary of the French philosopher Pierre Bayle was compiled, the Parliamentarians who featured most prominently were Ludlow, Sidney and Cromwell (Worden, 45). This was replicated in The Biographia Britannica: or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Earliest Ages, down to the Present Time, which was published in seven volumes, 1747–1766 (Worden, 181). The Biographia was fundamentally Royalist. Its most favoured Civil War figure is Arthur, Lord Capel (captured at Colchester in August 1648, escaped, and eventually executed in March 1659) who unlike Parliamentarian heroes makes no appearance in the fiction. It reflected the persistence of Royalism and contained engravings of eighteen ‘noble lords and others, who suffered for their loyalty’ (Worden, 182) embedding the martyrology which becomes a part of the structure of Royalist fictions. Yet Worden offers a note of caution. By the 1740s, straightforward Cavalier and Roundhead allegiance was on the decline: sermons on the anniversary of the King’s execution became less strident. The Biographia Britannica may rebuke the rebels, but it disowns the ‘persecuting principles’ of Charles I’s rule and is sympathetic to ‘sober and faithful patriots’ such as John Hampden (who was lucky enough to die before he had to decide what to do with the King). By the 1720s, when Daniel Defoe’s heavily coded Memoirs of a Cavalier was published, the heat had seeped out of the argument enough to make room for fiction. These then were the key texts available, along with other memoirs, to those who sought to recreate the English Civil Wars in fiction between the end of the wars, and the mid-nineteenth century. However, if the heat had gone out of the war itself, when the very first of the English Civil War fictions emerge, they do so in a difficult political context. The first Georgians had to struggle with a very weak claim to the throne. George I (accession 1714) was fifty-first in line to the throne after fifty Catholic heirs. Even those who preferred a Protestant succession were uneasy at the upending of primogeniture. Under the Hanoverians regional ties frayed and they were beset with Jacobite rebellions. The country was poor: crime, food riots and the crisis of the national debt, which led in part to the scandal of the South Sea Company’s speculation (which involved bribery through a government minister’s mistress) and the subsequent collapse of the stock market (the South Sea Bubble),

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undercut the civic peace. Perhaps the one bright spot was that as George I spoke no English this is the period in which the British Parliament began to emerge into its modern constitutional form. The first book in the collection is Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720). G. A. Aitken writes that ‘The conflict of Defoe’s own views with the Cavalier’s strong Stuart bias and dislike of the Scotch has been noticed, but the writer of a novel in autobiographical form clearly cannot be held responsible for the opinions of the person whose history he tells’ (xxi, Everyman edition). Aitken might have taken this further to explore the novel as coded critique. Blair Worden believes that Daniel Defoe had read Ludlow for there is a pamphlet often attributed to him, A Brief History of Standing Armies (1698), which includes Ludlow’s Memoirs in its list of publications ‘hammered from the same forge’ (Worden, 87). It is likely Defoe had also read Clarendon and a number of other military memoirs. Sharon Alker notes that he was situated in wider a world of pamphleteering and propaganda around wars and ‘was an avid participant in the production of this mass of martial print. As a propagandist, he wrote both pro-war and anti-war pamphlets, and he was well aware of the role narrative played in constructing the conditions for war’ (47). The memoir mode had been briefly fashionable: people knew what to expect and that it was to be read ‘straight’; thus it was an ideal cloak for sly commentary. Furthermore, a pattern had already been set by Clarendon in which to be positioned for the King was not necessarily to admire the King. Defoe’s novel mimics the kinds of narratives being published, posing as a military memoir which covers all the major battles and many minor ones (anticipating the tendency of future authors to send their protagonists scampering around the country in order to appear wherever the action is most significant). Its purported author is a mercenary soldier, a younger son who chose a soldier’s career and fights for the King because his father asks him to—thus emulating Prince Rupert. From this position, the narrator is able to critique the King’s generalship, his management of his officers and his failure to follow-up any victory. Although he also pauses to criticise Parliament’s ambitions, factionalism and the Scots, he also criticises Charles’ decision to use Irish troops. The result is an account far more aligned with Ludlow’s memoirs than with Clarendon’s, a parliamentary account in Royalist clothing. The French Revolution contributed to a reappraisal of the Great Rebellion. The French historian and statesman François Guizot looked backwards, compared the events of the French Revolution with those of

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the English Civil Wars and concluded that the former, too, was a revolution (Armitage 2017, 157). This, presumably, rendered it too dangerous a topic for popularisation. By the 1820s however the nation had emerged from the Napoleonic wars with a greater sense of unity, and confidence in British structures, such that it could afford to look backwards, to explore what would become a theme within the novels we will be considering, of British gradualism rejecting the revolutionary moment. Timothy Lang, in his introduction to The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage, declared that the ‘Victorians wrote more on the Stuarts than on any other period in their nation’s past’. The Civil Wars as a topic for novelists emerged in the 1820s. Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock (1826) is the novel that sets up some of the patterns we will see recur over and over again. As with all but two of the novels that were published before 1850 (Rev. W. Gresley’s The Siege of Lichfield, 1840 and Henry William Herbert’s Oliver Cromwell: An Historical Novel (1838)), the novel is set after the end of the wars. Its main characters are an ejected minister, an honourable Royalist knight whose land is threatened by sequestration, his lovely daughter and his Roundhead nephew who is sheltering a Royalist friend. The nephew intervenes with Cromwell to secure the land and is requested to find Charles Stuart, who turns out to be hiding at Woodstock (his presence covered by stories of ghosts). Cromwell finds out and in a rage orders that the elderly knight be executed, although he does relent. The story ends with the descent of England into anarchy and its rescue by George Monck’s march into London and the subsequent Restoration. Horace Smith’s Brambletye House, or Cavaliers and Roundheads (1826) is set a little later in the Protectorate: it is a three-volume novel of a family’s adventures. The father, Sir John, names his horses for Cavalier generals and his stags for Parliamentarians. But although it is a pro-Royalist novel, it seeks as others will later (notably Jane Lane) to appropriate for the King the support of the country tradition. So at the end Jocelyn, the son of the house, is disappointed in Charles II and retreats to the countryside when James II comes to the throne: ‘he was not sorry to withdraw himself from the approaching struggle, at least until the arrival of the moment when he might contribute his individual efforts to the good cause, with some benefit to his country’ (368). This is a deliberate attempt to revision the fight as for a moderate monarchy, its hopes centred on Charles I in the war, but on William of Orange in

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1688. Brambletye is a model for many other texts in which loyal Royalists justify their rejection of the heirs of Charles I. We can argue whether either Woodstock or Brambletye is absolutely on the side of the King. Their protagonists certainly are, but it is not quite so clear that the narrative voice is. When Horace Smith wrote an introduction (1840) to William Henry Herbert’s Oliver Cromwell; A Romance (1838) he comes out very clearly on the side of Cromwell, dismissing many of the charges against his personal character, normalising his rise to power, and absolving him from the charge of conniving ambition. There is no such hesitation in William Gresley’s The Siege of Lichfield (1840). This romantic account of the conditions during the siege, and the battles the hero takes part in, is an unabashed argument for the King and for the Church who are linked together in a perpetual and self-supporting union. ‘Destroy the English monarchy and the Church, as an establishment, must fall; destroy the Church, and the monarchy cannot survive’ (Ch. 23). The emphasis throughout is on the horror of radicalism. The final novel published in this period—before the major shift effected by the publication of Thomas Carlyle’s edited collection of letters, and Eliot Warburton’s Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers (1849)—is Captain Frederick Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest (1847). This is also the first true children’s book in the collection, pitched at the younger reader in tone and focalised directly through the experiences of three children, two boys, both young teens at the start and their two pre-teen sisters. This is very much the most famous of the Civil War books for children, and the history it creates, like Scott’s Woodstock, leaves marks on the fictional landscape. Its narrative, one in which children flee their persecutors and hide out with those of a lower class than themselves, will be repeated endlessly over the next century and a half. The Children of the New Forest impresses upon children the wrongness of the Parliamentarian cause not through a discussion of politics, but through the creation of an atrocity narrative. The children flee to the forest because they are warned their home is to be burned with everyone in it, thus impressing on the reader the atrocities inflicted on Royalists by Parliamentarians. The children hide because we are told repeatedly their lives are in danger. Roundheads and Cavaliers can be identified immediately by their clothing, the differences being absolute. Roundheads are brutal in their manners and refuse to pay for things. But also in the book we see the framing of the Ludlow-style ‘moderate’ Parliamentarian, in the

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guise of the Intendant. As will become predictable, this is indicated when he not only drops out of politics after the execution of the King, but becomes a secret King’s man, one who will help Edward escape to Paris. From very early in this novel we have a sense of three rigid parties: Royalists, Radicals and Moderate Loyalists Led Astray. The first is the epitome of all things gracious: even Edward’s hatred of Covenanters, and his brain ‘teeming with thoughts and plans of vengeance’ are translated to nobility, for it is fair due to the men who killed his father and burned his property (Ch. 2). Poaching deer is acceptable because Edward is figured as a representative of the king, an extension of the idea of a natural right of governance. In this and later Royalist books, murder is defined by who kills, not by process, as in Edward’s declaration on the execution of Lord Capel at Colchester: ‘More murder! But we must expect it from those who have murdered their king’ (Ch. 14). The Radicals we are informed are a ‘large proportion of the Parliamentary army’ and hold a ‘hatred…to anyone above them in rank or property… and they were merciless and cruel to the highest degree’ (Ch. 1). They begin the story by burning Arnwood to the ground, containing, as far as they know, the Beverly children and their grandmother. One of the band compares the presumed death of the children with clearing out the pups from a rat’s nest (Ch. 3). The Intendant stands here for the Moderate Parliamentarian Led Astray. He signals his moderate status when he decries the burning of Arnwood: ‘It was a stain that can never be effaced—a deed most diabolical’ (Ch. 8). Further, he both exaggerates the danger and declares himself a sleeper ally, and gives what will become the classic declaration of the middling person in these novels: ‘When I joined the party which opposed him, I little thought that matters would have been carried so far as they have been; I always considered it lawful to take up arms in defence of our liberties, but at the same time I equally felt that the person of the king was sacred’ (Ch. 16). Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock (1826), Horace Smith’s Brambletye House (1826) and Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest (1847), are fictions about the interregnum, and the latter begins at the very end of the war, in 1647. But these books are significant here because they construct the mythos of the suffering royalists which we will see repeated throughout the collection. They may not be about the war, but much like a much later book about a different war, Margaret Mitchell’s

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Gone with the Wind (1936), they have a disproportionate effect on the understanding of it.

1850–1919 The New History: Macaulay, Cromwell, Gardiner and Firth By the end of the nineteenth century, the high Tory and Jacobin interpretations and the fear of regional or class uprising which haunted the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had abated. Hampden’s refusal to pay ship money looked ever more reasonable to Victorian and Edwardian eyes and was increasingly seen as an inspiration for Parliamentary reform (the Hampden Club was established in 1812) rather than an alarm bell. Worden puts it neatly, and describes much of the nineteenth-century fiction, when he writes, that while sentimental affection for Charles I grew, ‘if many Victorians were against what Charles had been against, by the middle of the century few people were in favour of what, in political and constitutional matters, he had been for’ (Worden 2001, 229). In popular narratives such as Charles Dickens’ A Child’s History of England (1851–1853), J. R. Green’s History of the English People (1870) or H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England (1905), there had been a decisive shift of position in which Cromwell had become the hero, and Charles I if not the villain then a deluded, sad man. The accusations of hypocrisy cast at Puritans continued, but became ever more confined to an understanding of radical Puritans or Independents, rather than to the Parliamentary side as a whole. Of the fourteen novels published between 1850 and 1891 ten are for the king, but whereas there had been only three openly Parliamentarian novels in the previous period, now seven are against him (four for Parliament and one for the Covenant). The army, linked as it now was to imperial expansion, no longer seemed the source of despotism that it had to Ludlow and the Whig and American patriots (Worden 2001, 233). We see an increasing interest in writing accounts of soldiers as in the work of James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie (1856), Elizabeth Rundle Charles’s The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) and Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883), a trend that accelerated through the two World Wars, only to drop away with the next big historiographical shift in the 1960s, and then return in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

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On the religious side, the rise of the nonconforming sects—particularly Methodism, and its wildfire spread through eighteenth-century Wales, which had during the war been firmly Episcopalian and Royalist—the reform of the franchise and the role of the dissenters in social welfare reforms, and the growing respect for ‘piety’, as Victorian society came to see religion as a bulwark against disorder—all served to reorganise feeling about the religious principles that had driven the war. We can see this from both sides, the dissenting side represented by Elizabeth Rundle Charles in The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) and, for the later vociferous high Church revival, Charlotte M. Yonge in Under the Storm (1887). Meanwhile, the reputation of Cromwell underwent a dramatic makeover and as his profile rose he was claimed both by the nineteenthcentury dissenters, and by those who preached religious toleration (Worden 2001, 252–3, 258–259). Among some segments of society, admiration of Cromwell had not gone away. Portraits of Cromwell were preserved in Dissenting households. Dissenting churches did not keep January 30th as the Martyrdom of the King. But between Royalist (he was a radical regicide) and Whig (he was too extreme and a puritan fanatic) Cromwell’s reputation was traduced. In 1783 Benjamin West, the Quaker artist, produced a picture of Cromwell Dissolving Parliament. As the century passed that scene became a key metaphor in nineteenth-century rhetoric for dramatic reform, reproduced in both Gilbert Beckett’s A Comic History of England (1848) and Charles Dickens’ A Child’s History of England (1852–1854). By the early nineteenth century there was also some consensus emerging that Cromwell’s foreign policy had been to England’s glory, that his court was a model of probity, and that he valued ability over party (an important quality in the increasingly factional system of British politics). Nevertheless, in 1891 the new Federation of Canada could reject the term Commonwealth as tainted (Worden 2001, 244). In 1810, a Cromwellian Miscellania—a collection of letters and documents—was published. By 1821, Robert Southey could write, ‘No man was so worthy of the station which he filled, had it not been for the means by which he reached it’ (Quarterly Review, 1821, Worden 2001, 223). Key interventions came from the ageing radical William Godwin, and a younger historian, T. B. Macaulay. Godwin shared the revulsion to the Protectorate, saw Puritanism as an important contributing to the development of liberalism (Lang, 21) but saw Cromwell’s ‘ambition’ as a tragic flaw (Worden 2001, 226). Meanwhile Macaulay’s History of England from

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the Ascension of James II (1848), and those who responded to it, began to shift in favour of the 1640 revolution against that of the previously more respectable 1688. For some, it was the willingness to brave the king in person rather than bring in a foreigner, for others, it was a growing attention to the matters of debate. Crucially, attitudes to Cromwell’s background were changing. In 1834 Robert Lowery, attacking the verdict on the Tolpuddle Martyrs, warned that the ‘spirit which brought first Charles to the block is not yet extinct’ (Worden 2001, 246) and during the agitation for the Great Reform Act of 1832 Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian advertised for a man to clear the county of a ‘host of vermin who are fattening themselves upon’ the poor ‘any person of the name of Cromwell would be preferred’ (Worden 2001, 247). The hostility to a man of (relatively) modest origins, which is evident in much of the earlier nineteenth-century fiction, was fading. If anything, the position of a rising man was increasingly admired. Furthermore, adherence to a belief over a fealty made more sense to the later Victorians than it did to their forebears. To Macaulay Cromwell came to embody middleclass virtues. To Carlyle he was a ‘solid farmer’. Among the working class studying in Mechanics Institutes and Mutual Improvement Societies, there was a lurking admiration and a positioning of Cromwell as almost Arthurian. In 1877 the Mutual Improvement Society’s debate at Warrington (where there would eventually be a statue) decided with only one dissenting vote that Cromwell was a benefactor to the country. At Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire a similar discussion, after an Oxford University Extension lecture, ended with a vote in favour of the regicide (Worden 2001, 250). The key intervention was that of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches came out in 1845. The book rendered Cromwell both accessible, and also—due to judicious editing—comprehensible and usable by Victorian audiences. One of the points that Blair Worden makes is that ‘in all the eighteenth-century discussion of Edmund Ludlow, one subject is conspicuous by its absence, religion’ (2001, 195). Carlyle changed this. Worden argues that what Carlyle did was to recover the authenticity of religious conviction, the ‘sincerity and intensity of those Puritan beliefs which earlier writers had condemned as hypocritical or absurd’ (Worden 2001, 267). Carlyle also was able to rethink the link of religion to politics: ‘In his hands its [Puritanism’s] connection with revolutionary violence became

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not its curse but its virtue’ (Worden 2001, 271). Alongside it, Carlyle added an admiration for the Long Parliament, and for the Army that purged it. Carlyle argued that as the Rump no longer represented the majority of the country it was no longer legitimate and the army, with its wide constituency, represented a greater part of the country; regicide was ‘the supreme act of justice’ (Worden 2001, 274). Yet ironically what attracted Carlyle most to Cromwell was his heroic role, his position as Great Man. For Carlyle, Cromwell was attractive because he was an autocrat, and to the Victorians, he met the growing taste for identifiable ‘national heroes’. The success of the Letters and Speeches brought Cromwell to the fore of the fiction. In the fiction of the nineteenth century to 1919 there are seven texts in which the protagonists meet with the King. The first is in the 1870s, with an average of two per decade: four are for the King and, one for Parliament (Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong, 1894) and one is neutral. But twenty-four texts include a meeting with Cromwell, of which thirteen are Royalist, and the rest are split evenly between Parliamentarian and neutral. Meetings with Cromwell occur in two texts as early as 1826 and every decade after; then the frequency accelerates in the 1890s with closer to two titles every year with the exception of the war years. These meeting with scenes do not disappear as a trope until the 1960s (and then do not reappear until 2006 with the rise of military fiction). But it is that prevalence in Royalist texts which is striking: Cromwell has emerged as a figure that no one can ignore. Indeed often he is elevated far too early in internal chronologies. Perhaps the most impressive fictional output in the period influenced first by Carlyle is Elizabeth Rundle Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) and its second part, On Both Sides of the Sea (1868)— the two books read as if they have access to a far wider array of sources than one associates with the mid-nineteenth century. The books owe a great deal to Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs (1806) and to the work of Macaulay. Charles’s novel sets out to detail two closely intertwined families, one Parliamentarian and one Royalist, and the pressure the war places on the family friendship and in particular a romance between Roger (for Parliament) and Lettice (for the King). Whereas later books of this kind often render the romance front and centre, here other matters are brought to the fore: Charles’ protagonists are sincere about their religion, and clear about why they have chosen a side. There is very little of the knee-jerk Royalist fealty here, or the portrayal of Parliamentarian and

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Army representatives as ambitious or hypocritical. Puritans are dealt with in all sincerity and the opening divide between Presbyterian and Independent dealt with in detail, while the highest of high church worship is portrayed as equally pious and genuine. Although Cromwell is absent from these texts, the effect of the re-evaluation is clear. Thomas Carlyle was predominantly a literary scholar and a philosopher. The later nineteenth century saw the emergence of what we now understand as historical method: the search for primary material, the stripping back of accreted commentary and a genuine attempt at a nuanced examination of all sides. The modern analysis of the Civil War is considered to have begun with the publication of S. R. Gardiner’s magisterial History of the Great War (1886–1891) and his subsequent History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1894–1901), along with C. H. Firth’s The Last Years of the Protectorate (1909). Perhaps the significant intervention here was in considering the Commonwealth and the Protectorate as things unto themselves and not merely ‘the interregnum’ and we begin to see the start of novels sets not simply (as in Maryatt and Yonge’s work) in the period between regicide and restoration, but in a clearly delineated Republic and Protectorate. Although Royalist fiction continued to dominate the period, it is noticeable that a difference of approach had opened up: Royalist writers were increasingly focusing on the ‘Wromantic’ of 1066 and All That’ s coinage, ‘Right but Repulsive, and Wrong but Wromantic’. Parliamentarian writers, ever more confident, were drawing attention to the political differences of the war. In Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894) the hero has a very clear sense of what he is fighting for; he is neither a caricature or a fool. Samuel Harden Church does his best to explain and exonerate Cromwell’s actions in Scotland in John Marmaduke (1897) while in John A. Hamilton’s Captain John Lister (1906) the titular character is in the fens prior to the war and we learn of the issues that are causing local tensions and lead Lister to choose parliament and for the inhabitants, if not for Parliament, to be very clear that they are against the King. Older allegiances than that are pulled in, for these later writers are clearer on how religious allegiance shaped politics. J. Wesley Hart’s hero in In the Iron Time (1908) is a ‘natural’ Parliamentarian, bringing with him his Huguenot background and thus opposition to Episcopalianism, while Edna Lyall’s Gabriel, in In Spite of All (1901), is a free thinker attracted by the Army’s Independence.

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In contrast the Royalist texts remain relatively free from active political discussion or presentation. Over and over again in Royalist fiction (well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) loyalty is assumed to be inherited; unthinking loyalty is a compliment (as in Jane Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care, 1937). There are only two texts in the collection where a boy rebels from a Parliamentarian family to fight for the King: Ronald McDonald’s God Save the King (1901), where the mother is Parliamentarian and considered morally dubious, and Hester Burton’s Kate Rider (1974) in which a boy sides with his fiancée’s Royalism. But Royalist loyalty is fraying in the fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Most Royalist writers, having by this time accepted the poor show made by the King, depict their heroes’ wider loyalty to His Majesty framed within a story of personal loyalty to a commander. Yet it is in the Royalist books also that we also see a hardening of lines. Moving towards the Great War of 1914, and then to the extreme books of the interwar period, it is on the Royalist side that we see an absolutism of loyalty expressed in books such as Percy Westerman’s The Young Cavalier (1911) or May Wynne’s ‘Hey For Cavaliers’ (1912), a move in the opposite direction to the historiography.

1891–1945: Archival Energy and History from Below The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of what Worden calls the ‘era of archival energy’. Along with his major history, in 1891–1901 C. H. Firth also released his edition of The Clarke Papers which included in its opening volume the text of the Putney debates, the first time that authors could hear the voices of the army and of men of a wide range of social classes. In 1908, G. K. Fortescue issued his catalogue of Thomason Tracts, the collection of Civil War pamphlets donated to the British Museum by George III. These discoveries changed the understanding of the politics of the war and the direction of people’s attention. Groups such as the Levellers who had previously been regarded as mere rabble-rousers, came to the fore. Worden suggests that ‘from the late Victorian age the Levellers were thought of as the friends of the future’ (Worden 2001, 320). The new history had relatively little impact on the period leading up to the First World War, but was immediately visible in the interwar period. Both of the 1923 titles show the influence of the new mode of history,

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both its research and its tendency to focus on the underdog. R. W. Mackenna’s Through Flood and Fire (1923) is set around 1638, a tale of the son of a family set for the covenant, and the daughter of a family who breaks with their allegiance to the King to join him. The second is Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923).1 An otherwise conventional novel of friends divided (one of the major themes of late nineteenth century and pre-1960s books), the Puritan Myles Delaroche is present at the Putney debates, and eventually is driven by his own radicalism and disappointed hopes in the Republic to migrate to America. It is in this book that we first see the emergence of the ‘we can create a different kind of memory of England’ that Butler and O’Donovan (2012) identify in interwar and even more in post-war British children’s historical fiction, and which will be so strong in the post-war books of Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff and Barbara Willard. The book which owes most however to the new era of archival research is Jack Lindsay’s modernist 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), one of the crossover books, accessible to teens, with protagonists in their late teens. Told through vignettes of several characters, the individual stories are the kind of stories of social mobility that become common in the work of post-war writers for children, particularly that of Geoffrey Trease who moved in similar circles to Lindsay. Jack Lindsay, an Australian writer (son of artist and writer Norman Lindsay), came to the UK in 1926. By the 1930s he was a member of the Communist Party, and wrote for Left Review. He is best known for his historical novels set in Ancient Greece and Rome. His intense consideration of 1649, the first year of the Republic, clearly owes a very great debt to the new work on the Levellers and the Diggers, by socialists such as Eduard Bernstein (translated 1930), L. A. Berens (1906) and D. W. Petergorsky (1940) (Worden 2001, 333). This is the first time the Diggers appeared in fiction, and they are handled sympathetically. We won’t see them again until the substantial shift to ‘domestic’ novels in the twenty-first-century books.

1 Although Bernard Marshall (USA) had been a runner up for the Newbery medal for

Cedric the Forester (a tale of Anglo-Saxon social mobility), and even though it is the first of a trilogy in which the descendants of the main character take part in the American War of Independence and the War of 1812, The Torch Bearers has almost entirely disappeared. There seem to be extant copies in just three libraries, the British Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Toronto Library.

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Lindsay’s 1649 is significant in another way: it is representative of an extremism that characterises a number of the books in the 1930s. In the 1930s it is clear that a number of authors were consciously writing in response to current events. All the ‘faction’ of the period, by Margaret Irwin and Georgette Heyer, is extremely pro-Royalist; Jack Lindsay was on record stating that 1649 (1937) was an anti-fascist book. To my knowledge no such statement exists for Jane Lane, who is Lindsay’s opposite number: her work, which in this period includes Sir DevilMay-Care (1937) and England for Sale (a novel of 1688, 1943) is of the extreme Royalist sort. Lane cannot conceive that Parliamentarians have anything genuine in their beliefs. Lane, like the nineteenth-century Royalist writers, constructs Royalist loyalties as unthinking and inherent: in her world good English subjects should accept authority unquestioningly, and loyalty to Parliament is fundamentally unsound both in principle and in depth. Similarly in Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) the Royalist tomboy heroine has no trouble getting her Parliamentary Captain to change side, for he converts on the mere sight of the King, ‘I am amazed that ever I took up arms against one so gracious and kingly’ (Ch. 10). The other element however that we see emerging in this period is an attention to domesticity. In the nineteenth-century women left at home during the war do little more than worry over their absent lovers or anguish over their loyalty to the wrong side, unless of course they dress as boys and take the man’s part. But there is a growing sense in this period of women as actors and experiencers in war-time (Purkiss 2007), which is reflected in much of the literature of the interwar and post-war period.

1945–2000: Wedgwood, Hill and Home-Front History This period is frequently referred to politically as the period of the postwar settlement or post-war consensus. It is the period in which British schooling expanded to offer further and then higher education to a much wider social pool; a period of mostly full employment and one of the high levels of social mobility. It was also a period in which the experiences and interests of ordinary people and of women were increasingly regarded as important, presumably influenced by the stories of the Home Front from both world wars. All of this was reflected in the fiction both in the crossover books and the incredibly popular children’s historical

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novels of the period. The first post-war novel, Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General (1946), is a version of Gone with the Wind (1936), with an additional soupçon of Gothic: the heroine, crippled in a riding accident, maintains an affair with Sir Richard Grenville, a general who in reality was mostly despised by everyone for his appalling behaviour. Du Maurier uses this set up to explore the experiences of the home front. This element became steadily more important in the fiction of the late 1950s and 1960s as those who had experienced it began writing. Authors such as Barbara Softly, Sally Watson, John and Patricia Beatty and Frank Knight began increasingly to comment on the experience of women and children in war-time, waiting at home while others had the adventures. Between 1950 and 1990 perhaps the most influential historians of the period were C. V. Wedgwood and Christopher Hill. C. V. Wedgwood was the great narrative historian of the period. The King’s Peace, 1637 –1641 (1955) and its sequel, The King’s War, 1641–1647 (1958) set out the course of the war, its causes and its events. As the titles suggest however this is an account that is driven by the great men of history, and which circles around the figure of the king. Christopher Hill was one of a group of historians who re-centred the way the wars were considered. In 1946 he and other Marxist historians had formed the Communist Party historians’ group. In 1952 he was one of the team that created the premier academic journal, Past and Present, that focused on social history. His books include Puritanism and the English Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), The Century of Revolution (1961) and, perhaps his most influential book beyond the academy, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Although we cannot trace the historiography of the fiction of Geoffrey Trease and Rosemary Sutcliff to Christopher Hill, for both were writing too early, both Trease’s Silver Guard (1948) and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Simon (1953) have clear discussions of the issues at stake. Although to a degree all the boys in these books follow their Parliamentarian fathers, they all know why their fathers believe as they do. Sutcliff’s The Rider of the White Horse (1959) sets out to expand children’s historical knowledge from the basics, and from the by now overwhelming figure of Cromwell, by introducing them to Lord Thomas Fairfax, the General of the New Model Army. Both authors still have ranting but now interesting religious radicals, but in Trease’s Silver Guard and Barbara Softly’s Plain Jane (1961). Puritans are now fully rounded people with real beliefs that lead them to real acts of kindness and as we move into the 1960s and

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1970s. Royalist opinions are increasingly fleshed out and explained even if, as in Ronald Welch’s For the King (1969) it results in a rather reluctant Royalist protagonist. Yet even in 1988, it is somehow no surprise that the hypocritical rapist of three brothers, is the only one who holds fast to Puritanism and comes out for Parliament, in Elizabeth Gibson’s Sons and Brothers (1988). Between 1977 and 2001, for some reason, the English Civil War lost its attraction to fiction authors: Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne sequence, a siege romance which damns the representatives of the Puritans and the cause of the Cavaliers, is a lone intervention. It is only speculation but the decisive move of British politics to the right may well have been a factor. However, although there is a gap in the fictional record, there is no such gap in the historiography. In the 1970s and 1980s there was increasing interest in Royalism with work from Ronald Hutton, Martyn Bennett, Pauline Gregg and Ann Hughes, among others. The Marxist understanding of the war as a class struggle fell into abeyance as there was increasing evidence that revolts across the country happened for different reasons. Often, as in Nantwich and Worcester, towns took a position of ‘militant neutralism’, pushed into the wars by the demands of King and Parliament for free quarter, tax and supplies (Hutton 1982, 24). Hutton suggests although as we shall see there were social, political and religious cleavages, war was ‘an artificial insemination of violence into the local community… [the leaders] set leading men of each county against each other’ (1982, 201) in order to create the factions that fought the war. In the 1990s, attention turned to local religious and religio-cultural behaviour with Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994), Derek Hirst’s England in Conflict: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (1999) and David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997) which pointed to the survival of ritual practices through the Commonwealth. But with no fiction, we cannot see its influence for close to thirty years, when it clearly begins to feed into the more nuanced worldbuilding of twenty-first century in the work of the most modern writers such as Jemahl Evans, M. J. Logue, Arnold St. John, Lawrence Norfolk and S. G. MacLean. In recent years the period has rushed back into favour. There have been several new histories of the war (Austin Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution [2002], Trevor Royle’s Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660 [2004], Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A

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New History of the English Civil Wars [2008], among others), all of which are distinguished by their attention to the entirety of the British Isles (instead of mostly England) as it was consumed by war. All three books attempt to weave the politics and the military campaigns and to understand how the war that was embarked upon ended up in a very different place than its participants had anticipated. Alongside these, Diane Purkiss has offered much the best summary of the social side of the war, in The English Civil War: A People’s History (2007), and while Kevin Sharpe offers an analysis of the creation of royal imagery in Reading Authority and Representing Rule (2012), David Cressy in Charles I and the People of England (2015) pulls together the arguments about what we know of Charles I’s personality and how fitted with contemporary understandings of Kingship. Alongside this there has been ever more in local history so that what we know of the fractured and granular nature of the war becomes ever more detailed. David Flintham’s Civil War London (2017) and Robin Rowles, The Civil War in London (2018) are welcome additions to a mostly untold and uncelebrated story of the defence of London against its King. What remains noticeable however is that most military history still comes from outside the academy: Frank Kitson, author of Old Ironsides (2004), a military assessment of Cromwell, is himself a general; while almost all the campaign books, and the discussions of weapons and tactics are from small presses (particularly Helion), although increasingly both provincial and military historians, like many of the fiction authors of this period, have history degrees and their work is situated in the methodology of the academy. Since 2008 there has been at least one if not more Civil War novels every year, and several of these have been acclaimed fiction, from the problematic historical fantasy, I, Coriander by Sally Gardner (so inaccurate it has been excluded from the rest of this book) to Lawrence Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012) and Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt (2001). The books in print tend to four clear genres: romances, of which few are discussed here because of the degree to which the civil war is often only a backdrop; military novels in which a main character rises through the ranks and takes part at many of the great engagement (these novels are intensely committed to period detail and are often connected to and sold at re-enactment events); the home-front novel; and most recently the crime novel. What these books all have in common is a much more intense interest in the home front and the everyday experiences of people who

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lived in the interstices of war for close to a decade. The military novels tend to be interested in the mud, clothing, food, logistics of campaign and the kind of detail that passed earlier military adventure authors by. The romance novels, by authors such as Stella Riley (Roundheads and Cavaliers series 2014, ongoing), Chryssa Bazos (Traitor’s Knot, 2017) or Isabella Hargreaves (Charity’s Cavalier, 2016) are all Royalist: Wrong but Wromantic, and the Puritans are rarely sympathetic characters. Many of the new military novels are clearly informed by the work of the new university-trained local and military historians, many of whom have pursued careers outside the academy (Helion Books produces a high-quality line of military history, and runs an annual conference). Michael Arnold is the most classically ‘military’ of the military fiction authors, his pro-Royalist series beginning with Traitor’s Blood (2010); countering this are M. J. Logue’s pro-Parliamentarian Uncivil War stories, which begin with Red Horse (2015), and Jemahl Evans, The Last Roundhead (2015) and sequels. Yet history from below has become associated with the Parliamentarian side: whereas there are many modern stories of Parliamentarian troopers, stories of Royalists are always of officers. The domestic or home-front novels reflect the huge changes in knowledge of women in the English Civil War, summarised in Diane Purkiss’ The English Civil War: A People’s History (2007). Margaret Cooper Evans’ A Farthing for Oxforde (2018) is a detailed account of women’s work and their vulnerability in the period. Gillian Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2010) and its sequel A Corruptible Crown (2011) for example, reflect both our awareness of how much wider women’s participation in the workplace and in politics was than was previously understood, and also the ever-greater knowledge of Levellers, and of print and street culture. Along with Peter Ransley’s Plague Child (2011) and its sequels (which focus on the complex political manoeuvring in and between families as old certainties collapsed in the face of fines, appropriations and the destruction of property) and Lindsey Davis’ detailed Rebels and Traitors (2005), all of these novels benefit hugely from the interest in London as a place during the war, as detailed in the collection of essays edited by Stephen Porter, London and the Civil War (1996) and Ben Coates, The Impact of the Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50 (2004). Local history has played an increasing part with studies of every major city, siege and skirmish now illuminating the landscape (these are detailed in the bibliography, and some are discussed in the chapter, Great Men and Great Battles).

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The Civil War may be emerging as the new timescape for crime fiction: L. C. Tyler, A Cruel Necessity (2015), four by D. W. Bainbridge, The Winter Siege (2013) the first in a series set in Nantwich, and S. G. MacLean’s Seeker series (2014 onwards), but the period offers great scope for illegitimate murder in a world of huge social and physical mobility. One of the things the crime novels bring to the historiography which none of the other texts do is a sense of the localism of the war, of local politics, economics and social concerns and the sheer complexity of politics. Today the Protectorate and Commonwealth, once dismissed as the interregnum, is emerging into the light as a truly fascinating period that needs to be understood on its own terms. Almost every history book in the bibliography from Sean Kelsey’s Inventing a Republic (1997), Christopher Durston’s Cromwell’s Major-Generals (2001), and through to Bernard Capp’s England’s Culture Wars (2012) and Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents (2018) was produced in the past twenty years or so. This interest is reflected in the work of Jack Lindsay, Gillian Bradshaw, L. C. Tyler, S. G. MacLean and most recently M. J. Logue, Miranda Malins and Pete Langman. The succeeding chapters of this book will take a look at a range of themes and topics that emerge then disappear. Some novels are returned to over and over again, others barely rate a mention, but all contribute to a fictional history of the Civil Wars.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Armitage, David. Civil War: A History of Ideas. New York: Knopf, 2017. Print. Butler, Catherine, and Hallie O’Donovan. Reading History in Children’s Books. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Hutton, Ronald. The Royalist War Effort, 1642–1646. London and New York: Routledge, 1982. Print. Lang, Timothy. The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Leeson, Robert. “The Spirit of What Age? The Interpretation of History from a Radical Standpoint.” Children’s Literature in Education 7.4 (1976): 172–82. Print.

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Legon, Edward. “Remembering the Good Old Cause.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 11–27. Print. Neufeld, Matthew. The Civil Wars After 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. Print. Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print. Vallance, Edward, ed. Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Print. Worden, Blair. Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

CHAPTER 4

The Cultural Landscape of the Civil Wars

The virtual existence of the past may be deliberately reinvoked by monuments, memorabilia and architectural revivalism. —Alan Robinson (2011, 7)

The Physical Landscape of Memory There are two key places where people physically see evidence of the Civil War in the landscape, one so trivial it’s rarely noticed, the other so significant that they are celebrated and contested. The trivia—pub names—far outstrip the memorials in ubiquity yet are rarely noted by the modern casual drinker. In 2011, a Daily Mail survey of the most popular pub names found, of the 1001 names listed, that the Royal Oak (commemorating Charles II’s escape from Worcester) came in at third place with 434 pubs of that name. Only The Crown and The Red Lion did better (14 April 2011). The only Cromwell’s Bar is in the Protector’s home town of Huntingdon although the Red Lion in Holborn has a notice commemorating the resting of Cromwell’s corpse before dismemberment in their cellar; while the Hung, Drawn and Quartered near the Tower of London commemorates the execution of the regicide Colonel Thomas Harrison in 1660 (but not on that site). Royal Oak Day, or Oak Apple Day, was declared in 1660 for 29 May, by the Restoration Parliament as ‘to be forever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King’s return © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_4

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to Government, he entering London that day’ but the plan to create Knights of the Royal Oak, to be bestowed with a ribbon depicting the King in the oak tree, was abandoned for fear it would perpetuate dissension (it is amusing to note that one of the zealous Royalists on the list was one Henry Cromwell, a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, who had changed his name back to the old family name of Williams). But the event was commemorated in the work of the seventeenth-century Staffordshire potter, Thomas Toft (d. 1698), in large dishes in which the king’s face peeping from branches was painted in slipware. In the early twenty-first century the resonance of these names has diminished, but they recollect a time when it was one way to demonstrate a village’s loyalty. Restoration Day, or Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day (May 29) was accompanied by fights between villages in contested areas, and those not displaying the sprig of oak in Sussex were plagued by pinching and bumping, or in St. Neot’s (Cornwall) by thrashing with stinging nettles. Royal Oak Day has mostly disappeared from the public memory although a number of places such as Upton upon Severn (Worcestershire) and Moseley Old Hall (Staffordshire) keep it as an attraction for tourists. Memorials still stand, and here we need to divide them between roughly contemporary memorials, and those of the modern, performed revival of memory of the nineteenth century and beyond. Of the contemporary, Alana Vincent reminds us that, ‘One of the great risks of constructing memorials that carry the past forward into the present is that their consciousness of the present can, then, also infect the past. Memorials are too dependent on their readers ever to be truly stable texts’ (2013, 8). What they signify has mutated from mourning to marking, to story-making. They are, as James Loewen notes of Confederate memorials in the USA (Lies Across America, 1992), an attempt to claim the landscape. In 2020, we unexpectedly saw the conclusion to the long argument about the ubiquity of twentieth-century Confederate monuments in the USA thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the UK the statue of noted slave-trader Edward Coulson, erected in the nineteenth century, was toppled into the harbour in Bristol: in both cases, nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories were replaced by new narratives. Apart from the named and celebrated battlefields whose markers you can see in plain brown pointers from the roadside, near-contemporary memorials are overwhelmingly Royalist; but there are not as many as

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you might expect. There is Hubert Le Sueur’s statue of Charles I which was made in 1633, disappeared, was found again and has been standing looking down Whitehall since 1676. The English Civil War Society lays a wreath there and conducts a re-enactment each year. There are statues of the King and Queen in St John’s College, Oxford, in the quadrangle completed by Archbishop Laud in 1636. Otherwise Charles I is remarkably un-commemorated despite his two-hundred-year reign as saint and martyr. Perhaps his loyal son, aware that the country was not as peaceful as propaganda would have it, was concerned not to provide a physical focus for protest (Legon 2019). After the Restoration, in 1662, the Church of England canonised its last saint, ‘Charles the Martyr’, and placed the date of his death, 30 January, in the calendar of prayers. ‘a royal proclamation established the 30th of January as an annual day of fasting and humiliation that would serve as ‘a lasting Monument’ to the ‘villainous and abominable Fact’ of regicide’ (Peck 2019, 147). Imogen Peck notes that 30 January became increasingly politicised, with the day regularly used to deliver sermons against the Catholic Duke of York (148). Charles I was removed as a saint in 1859 but his feast day continued to be kept, and the Society of King Charles the Martyr continues devotional activities, as does the King Charles Club, a dining club at St John’s College, Oxford (which served as headquarters for one of Charles’ best generals, his nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine). In churches one sometimes sees memorial markers to soldiers who fought in the wars. That they are more often Royalist than Parliamentarian has as much to do with the status of the combatants as anything: while it is a mistake to assume that the Parliamentarians were of the lower sort, as they were disparaged by their enemies, they were more urban and it is the country gentry who were connected to those churches. Furthermore, relatively few bodies were returned for burial and many were buried in mass graves—only very recently, Durham University’s archeology department recovered the bodies of Scottish prisoners of war who perished in captivity in Durham after the Battle of Dunbar. Many churches make reference to damage done to their fabric during the war (although tourists should approach such claims with a critical eye, in King’s Lynn, for example, the dates inscribed in the walls are significantly too late to be Parliamentary in origin), and some have glass dating from just after it that does double duty as religion and commemoration. Elsewhere one can sometimes see a memorial in the gaps: in St John the Baptist Church,

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Chester, there is a list of the Mayors from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, with an interesting gap between 1640 and 1660. Elision can also tell us something about the ways in which a war mattered. The Civil Wars ‘end’ in England in 1660, but the Restoration reignites the crown’s attack on Scotland’s Calvinists, and it is that period which dominates the landscape. Although there are many memorials to the Covenanters and a Scottish Covenanter Memorials Association to care for them, these commemorate the consequences of the Sedition Act of 1661 which declared the Solemn League and Covenant illegal, and led to the martyrdoms of the 1670s and 1680s. Scottish engagement in the Civil Wars has almost disappeared from the landscape, although it is retained in the story of Jenny Geddes who threw a stool at the Minister of St. Giles when he tried to read the new book of common prayer in 1638. The importance of the 1670s and 1680s in the Scottish national narrative has overwhelmed the 1640s (not least because the earlier narrative is an unedifying story of inter-Scottish conflict, and defeat) which explains why there are relatively few Scottish texts to be discussed in this book. Halbwachs characterises history as consisting of an external framework which is devoid of personal connection, lacking meaning (1980), but the emergence of memorialisation, and its expression in both material markers and in the fictions suggests that this is precisely a process of constructing personal connection and narrative meaning. The emergence of a revivalist memorialisation began in the eighteenth century, with the origins of romanticism and tourism. Billie Melman (2006) offers a very good exploration of the rise of the past as spectacle, and of local tourism as a shaper of identity. The houses that Charles II hid in, such as White Ladies Priory, Boscobel and Moseley Old Hall near Wolverhampton, have all become markers on the narrated landscape. When the estate and house of Boscobel were sold to Walter Evans in 1812, he responded to the tenor of the times which were in full romantic reaction to the revolutions and turbulence of the eighteenth century, and encouraged the veneration of the site in the name of Charles II. The tree itself no longer stands— it was destroyed by souvenir hunters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—but the Son of Royal Oak stands and is surrounded by its ‘daughters’. You can buy saplings certified as grown from its acorns from the English Heritage shop at Boscobel. As late as 1819 the town of Royal Oak, Michigan was named such because during the Governor’s

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surveying expeditions, a large oak reminded him of the one at Boscobel, even though presumably it was not the same species. Artwork also reflected this romantic revival. The Victorians, as Lang has noted, were fascinated by the Stuarts. Benjamin L. Wild notes that the Victorians frequently drew on the Stuarts for theme for fancy dress balls; ‘a major source of inspiration for Carolingian fancy dress, worn by men and women, were the portraits of Sir Anthony Van Dyke’ (2019, 186) and Stuart costumes were common in fancy dress catalogues in the 1920s (they crop up in the Chalet School stories of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s—author of the Civil War novel Elizabeth the Gallant —well into the 1950s). The Victorians loved story paintings and the Civil Wars offered endless stories to tell. One of the earliest Victorian story paintings about the English Civil Wars is the American John Singleton Copley’s Charles I Demanding the Surrender of the Five Impeached Members of Parliament (1785). These paintings were intended not only as art, but as attempts to bring history into focus: Copley was assisted by his historian friend Edward Malone, and consultations with antiquarians in his construction of a seventeenthcentury House of Commons, and he travelled from one country house to another to find portraits of the men he would depict (Dobie 2019, 5–6). Perhaps the best known Civil War historical paintings are those of Abraham Cooper, at the start of the nineteenth century, which focus on Cromwell and Marston Moor (1819–1821); Charles Landseer’s The Plundering of Basing House (1836); and William Frederick Yeames’ When Did You Last See Your Father? (1878), which hangs in the National Gallery. The most prolific of the Civil War history artists was Ernest Crofts (1847–1911), who was particularly popular in the 1870s and 1880s. His work is rarely acknowledged now but it has entered into the popular psyche through becoming the images to which other artists have turned. A sizeable number of history books on the Civil War, including this one, bear his paintings as cover art. Crofts’ most influential painting is of a rather tall Charles walking to his execution, enhancing Charles I’s nonexistent majesty. It may be this painting and its repetition (for example in H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England, 1905; and in the Ladybird Oliver Cromwell, 1963) which legitimised the casting of the 6’ 1” actor Mark Gatiss as the 5’ 1” Charles I in a 2012 production of Howard Brenton’s 55 Days. This painting was chosen as the cover of this book precisely because it has proven a significant and distorting intervention in the narrative, which is emulated by several of the illustrators of the novels discussed.

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With the exception perhaps of Yeames, none of the paintings of the Civil War have found an iconic status which shapes perception in the way paintings of other wars have, perhaps because none are contemporary. These are illustrative history paintings and have little emotional impact. Their tradition is carried on by Christopher Collingwood, a modern artist. His engagement with his work offers insight: his pictures are reconstructions not dissimilar to the word fictions of the historical novelist. The emphasis is on research and accuracy and representation. He is, like many writers, fascinated by the period, by the ‘sad romanticism’ and the speed of technological and political change (correspondence, 15 August 2017). His eye is shaped by a passion. He is, like the author of this book, a pacifist. The interest of this period to pacifists would bear investigation itself. But it was not Charles and the Royalists who really benefitted from the urge to memorialise. Of Crofts’ twenty-one pictures, fourteen detail Parliamentarian ventures, overwhelmingly concentrating on Cromwell. The same imbalance is true of the fixed memorials, the statues. Cromwell has done better, as he generally has over the now almost four hundred years since the war. There are four statues of Oliver Cromwell. One is in Warrington, by the side of Warrington Academy, designed by John Bell and erected in 1899, and originally displayed at the London Exhibition of 1862. A second statue was erected in Deansgate, Manchester in 1875. This statue was highly controversial, but it survived in place until 1968 when road lobbies succeeded in having it moved to Wythenshaw Park. The same artist, Matthew Noble, created three busts, one of which is in Manchester Town Hall, and one in the Reform Club, London. There is one in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire proposed by Thomas Carlyle in 1849 but not sculpted by F. W. Pomeroy until 1899 (after Huntingdon abandoned the idea). And of course there is the statue of Cromwell outside Westminster, designed by Hamo Thornycroft and erected in 1899, the last of the quartet. All of the statues were controversial, but the Westminster statue has prompted three House of Commons debates, the most recent in 2004. The post-war restoration of Llandaff Cathedral included a series of heads as external corbels representing kings and queens of England which included Cromwell. The Penguin series The Monarchs of England is a series of white-spined books, but there is one also for Cromwell: a single black spine. Cromwell’s reputation has not diminished, but it has become distinctly more complex as he has become a British, rather than an English figure

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and Parliament’s activities in Ireland have come under scrutiny by historians. Alongside this there has also been a growing awareness of other participants and ‘sides’ in the conflict. In the village of Burford in the Cotswolds there is a plaque on the outside of the church wall, erected to commemorate the execution of Cornet James Thompson, Corporal Perkins and John Church on 17 May 1649 for their role as leaders in the Leveller-led Banbury mutiny. The commemoration of the Levellers at Burford Church (every year since 1975) is part of the annual cycle of re-enactment that has come to surround memory of the war. Re-enactment has been with us since the rise of antiquarianism in the eighteenth century; there were battle re-enactments at Vauxhall and at Astley’s amphitheatre; the Eglinton tournament of 1839; historical tableaux evidenced in Victorian photograph collections; the rise of the English Folk Song and Dance Society. The Sherborne Pageant of 1905 seems to have kicked off a craze for local history pageants and scenes of Charles I and Henrietta seem to have been popular (Betts 2019, 168). Restoration movements hark back to the romance of the gothic and the construction and preservation of ruins. Even the Ramblers Association were tangentially part of the re-enactment movement, re-constructing the freedom of the commons. The Sealed Knot, the best known of the Civil War re-enactment groups, began in 1968. It now has several thousand members split into various regiments. It stages regular events (as does the rival group English Civil War Society, founded 1980) which include the recreation of the Battle of Edgehill and of the Battle of Nantwich (Holly Holy Day), and there is a regular recreation of the Leveller intervention in the army at Audley End near Saffron Walden. In his book Consuming History, Jerome de Groot argues that ‘reenactment and living history raises the questions of education, ownership and authenticity’ (2009, 103). Re-enactment whether as pageant or participation not only constructs memory but asserts ownership. We can place the re-enactment culture around the Civil Wars in this context, as part of a resistant narrative. It is there in the ordinary people approach of the Sealed Knot, which concentrates less on the role of generals than the involvement of people as foot soldiers, pikemen, water-carriers, doctors, provisioners, and it is perhaps most vivid in the recreation that takes place at Burford each year. And yet, at the battle staged by the Sealed Knot at Malmesbury in 2017, the commentators treated it like a football match. There was very

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little explanation of the ideology that fueled the war. Similarly The Sealed Knot Souvenir Guide to the English Civil Wars, 1642–1651 is extraordinarily general in its description of the ideological differences between the two sides, reducing it to ‘unpopular political, economic and religious reforms’ (2). Although the account of the war as fought is solid and sensible, a reader uninformed about the causes of the war would remain so. It begs the question: close to four hundred years after the event, does the memory of the English Civil Wars still threaten the status quo? If we are looking for explanations in the landscape then the two places to turn, that most people experience, are school text-books and museums.

History for the Young History is a relatively modern subject in the British curriculum. For most of the nineteenth century, as Peter Yeandle observes, geography suited an expansionist empire far more readily. The rise of history seems to be connected to arguments about what and who the English (rather than British) really were, which became pervasive in nineteenth-century society. It came to the fore at the very end of the nineteenth century with the expansion of the school system and a growing concern for the morals of the nation’s working classes, that would once have been displaced onto catechism lessons. One consequence of this was a concern to ensure that students had ‘good material’ in a context in which books were expensive, and both schools and subjects were under-resourced. For many people their first more formal encounter with history is in school. The way history has been taught in schools has changed less than we might think. David Cannadine et al., in The Right Kind of History, trace the rise of history in schools as a subject and in doing so draw our attention to what may have been a constant tension, the use of history to teach patriotism and love of country, as set against (perhaps unnecessarily) a more critical approach. Although history was not part of the primary curriculum per se in the late nineteenth century (and became a statutory element of the secondary school curriculum only in 1900), one-third of all reading books used in literacy lessons in 1882 were supposed to be historical (Cannadine et al. 3). The selection of historical narratives such as those of Anglo-Saxon settlement, or Elizabethan privateers, was intended to inculcate beliefs about the nation and national identity. Sales of these reading books, or readers, outstripped those of subject-specific history text-books. The

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School History of England (1911) by C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling sold around 135,000 copies over forty years, but Longman’s New Reading Books sold 480,000 between 1805 and 1902, and 115 of its Ship Historical Readers were published between 1891 and 1902. Today, ‘readers’ have all but disappeared although they lasted well into the 1970s (and scouring my own memory I am fairly sure that a rather shabby navy blue ‘reader’ is precisely how I first acquired my fascination with history). But overlapping them and continuing today are the popular history books written for children. It would be wonderful to say that school text-books were the first place that children encounter the English Civil Wars but this is far from true. Abbas Vali has written that ‘To construct a narrative of the nation implies a large task of suppression and denial of undesirable or incongruous elements’ (cited Hodgkin and Radstone, 169). In constructing national narratives, in all the nations of the United Kingdom, the (non-)representation of the Civil Wars demonstrates the truth of this observation. Few modern children learn about the wars in school: currently they are not on the core curriculum in either England, Scotland or Ireland. In England the period can be studied at A-Level; in Ireland the Confederate Wars of Kilkenny, of which the Cromwellian invasion is the conclusion, can be studied for the Higher. Thus the first encounter with the wars for most children are in ‘popular’ narratives, books written, as Peter Yeandle has noted, with the intention of inculcating a sense of citizenship and belonging to the nation. This section summarises what a child might learn from such books. In England and Wales the key books, each representing a generation, are H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), the books by L. Du Garde Peach for Ladybird on Charles II (1960) and Oliver Cromwell (1963), F. E. Halliday’s Concise History of England (1964) and, for the current generation, Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories: Slimy Stuarts (1996, 1999). Marshall’s Our Island Story encapsulates the contradictions of the late nineteenth century: Charles succumbs to bad advisors, ‘one of the worst, perhaps, was his own wife’ (346) and, damning for an Edwardian, teaching to the public-school code of the day, and to a people for whom trading contracts and treaties were the security of the nation, ‘he could never keep his word’ (347). Yet, although the book is proParliamentarian in its politics, the imagery is romantic. The book opens with A. S. Forrest’s illustration, Charles the King walked for the last time

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through the streets of London, taken from a detail of Ernest Croft’s Charles on His Way to Execution (1883) and copying the same mistakes. This Charles is imposing, taller than his guards. Marshall has two full chapters on Charles I, ‘The Story of how the King and the Parliament Quarrelled and at Last Fought’, and there is a chapter on Cromwell’s assumption of the Protectorship ‘peaceful and prosperous at home, and famous abroad’. Marshall credits to him the establishment of the navy, and damns Charles II for limiting his amnesty. Marshall never comes out and says it, but Our Island Story asks us to remember the 1650s with some admiration. L. Du Garde Peach’s two Ladybird books were very heavily influenced by Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and perhaps also by the mood in the air that, while anti-imperialist, sought to position the House of Commons as the Mother of Parliaments. Crucially they avoid argument. In his book on Charles II, Charles II fails to take England in 1651 not because he wasn’t wanted but because ‘the English were tired of war’. As is common to more Royalist texts, political discussion disappears, and while it is a given that in books for small children things may be simplified, in this book the question is not King versus commons, but joy versus pettiness. An unacknowledged quote from Churchill asserts: ‘To the mass of the nation the rule of Cromwell manifested itself in the form of numberless and miserable petty tyrannies, and thus became hated as no Government has ever been hated in England before or since’ (18, from Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 1956, vol. 2, 242). There is no picture of Cromwell in the Charles II book but in 1963 Peach produced a sequel on Cromwell himself, which was clearly proCromwell and anti-Charles. Tom Holland, in his reminiscences about Peach’s Alfred the Great Ladybird book, writes: ‘Peach’s book was giving me less an Anglo-Saxon hero than a Victorian one… The Alfred of the Ladybird book holds up a mirror to all the virtues most prized by the Victorians’, and much the same is true of his depiction of Cromwell. Peach’s Cromwell is very much the Victorian Father of Democracy. Cromwell ‘was a wise man. He realised that England needed a king’ (40), but ‘At last even Cromwell recognised the fact that whatever promise Charles made would never be kept’ (42). In contrast to the Charles II book there is some social contextualisation, and a discussion of the issues which were being fought over, such as taxation, although there is very little mention of the very real religious issues. Puritans become bogeymen, divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’,

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the latter being those who thought ‘to be good you had to be gloomy’ (accompanied by a picture of two very nasty individuals glaring sidelong at a maypole, 16–17: the artist is John Kenny). Peach explains why Cromwell was hated in Ireland, but concludes lamenting that Cromwell’s head ended up on a pike for the entertainment of Royalists: ‘a mean and unworthy revenge on the part of those whom he had beaten in a fair fight’ (50). The conflicts lurking under Peach’s work are probably most succinctly summarised by F. E. Halliday in his Concise History of England of the same period, who elides over the King’s behaviour other than ‘His policy was to sow dissension among his opponents’ (118) while writing of Cromwell in ways that sound like he pities him: the execution of the king is a ‘tragic blunder’ which ‘roused such revulsion of feeling that the liberal order for which Cromwell had fought became impossible’ (119) so that Cromwell was ‘driven to rule by major-generals’ (119). He sees Monck as saving the country from anarchy and ‘The Puritan Republic was a joyless and tragic interlude, yet Cromwell made England a great European power, and simple Englishmen were for the first time allowed free expression of thought without fear of persecution from state or Church…’ (121). All of these texts while playing down political differences and simplify events for children, but the emerging sense that Royalist texts avoid and discourage political exploration is manifested in the current most popular source. Horrible Histories sweeps ideological differences aside. In ten pages, Charles’ shortcomings are described, but nothing of what Parliamentarians sought, and most seriously the 1650s are disappeared: literally an interregnum. Of the Scottish texts unearthed—H. E. Marshall’s Scotland’s Story (1906), Andrew Lang’s A Short History of Scotland (1911), P. Hume Brown’s Short History of Scotland (1930), H. W. Meikle’s The Story of Scotland (1938) and Judy Patterson’s The History of Scotland for Children (2002)—most are interesting for what they do not detail. As already discussed, the Civil Wars in Scotland are barely memorialised in the landscape. Scotland’s part in the wars was convoluted: the Bishops’ War in 1638 can be considered the first blow, but once the war broke out in England there are three parts to the story, one in which Scotland ends up at war with itself, with the cities declaring for the covenant but much of the North and rural areas for the King; the second in which the Scottish Parliament allies with the English Parliament; and the third in which

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the Scots accepted Charles as the rightful king, but would not instal him until he took the Covenant, which he did too late, and in which with the support of Scottish Royalists went down to disaster at Worcester and Dunbar, after which Scotland was under English control, something P. Hume Brown, oddly, sees as beneficial or at least a release from anarchy: ‘the Scottish people, though they hated the English, admitted that the laws were never better obeyed than under these Commissioners. Everyone got justice, and the country was … completely freed from robbers…’ (72/454). Patterson, writing in 2002, however, notes that during the Protectorate Scotland loses trade to English protectionist policies. H. E. Marshall’s Scotland’s Story came out in 1906 only a year after her Our Island Story (1905). Marshall exaggerates the horror with which Scotland greeted Charles I’s execution, but she is no friend to Charles II: ‘He wanted to be a despot, like his father’ (Ch. 86). It is Montrose who entrances her. Chapter 85 is dedicated entirely to the story of James Graham, the ‘soldier poet’ and his support for the King against the Covenanters and is told as a romance, in which it is the King’s poor arming and training of his soldiers that lead to Montrose’s downfall. ‘Montrose gave everything for his King, even his life, and his King rewarded him by forsaking him… There was very little gratitude in Charles II’. Marshall enjoys romance: her account of the Wars ends with the romance of Dunnotar, the last castle to hold out and where the wife of the Governor, Lady Elizabeth Douglas, hides the crown jewels to keep them safe from the English. The King is almost absent from the narrative. This focus on Montrose is common to these authors. P. Hume Brown writes, ‘A braver and truer man than Charles would have gone with Montrose and shared his dangers with him’ (412). H. W. Meikle’s The Story of Scotland does much the same. Having dismissed Charles I as unworthy and omitted the handing over of him to the English, he too turns to the heroism of Montrose (also to the cruelty of his Irish soldiers and his capture and death). For most Scottish authors however religion seems to have been more central in the popular memory than it was to the English authors of the same period. Andrew Lang’s A Short History of Scotland (1911) sees both England and Scotland ‘seething with religious fears’ and focuses on talks of the Protestant panic, the persecution of Catholics, and notes that ‘by the people the Anglican bishops were as much detested as priests and the Mass’ and the ways in which Charles’ actions upset the Scots, not the least of which was Charles’ visit to Scotland, with its Laudian trappings (167).

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P. Hume Brown, concentrating on the religious dissension, centres his narrative on the conflicts between Covenanters and Engagers. And like almost every author, non-fiction or fiction, who considers Charles II in religious terms, his verdict is disparaging, ‘he cared nothing for religion, and was quite willing to agree to [the Covenant] anything if he could gain his end’ (70/411). The best of the most recent popular books is Fitzroy MacLean’s Scotland: A Concise History (1970) which takes the reader through the Covenant, the rebellion, the Bishops’ War, and crucially the Scottish Civil War which accompanied and interacted with the English Civil Wars. There are clear accounts of the Montrose rising and its end, of the role of Argyll, and in a separate chapter the rule of the invading English Commonwealth and the Treaty of union and its rule, which is described as ‘probably the most efficient and orderly the country had ever experienced’ (133). The entire period is reduced to one line in the companion volume, England, A Concise History (1964) by F. E. Halliday (119). That this is not an entirely English approach however is demonstrated by Richard Oram’s The Kings and Queens of Scotland (2006) which gets the entire period from 1637 to 1649 into one page. It omits entirely Dunbar, or Worcester, and concludes, ‘Charles, for all his faults, was never as cruel to the Scottish people as Oliver Cromwell’s forces were to be’ (276). The book is fiercely anti-Cromwell and surprisingly soft (in the next chapter) on Charles II’s anti-Covenanter policy. Taking a look at modern books for children, Judy Patterson’s The History of Scotland for Children is a large double-page spread picturebook. James I’s reign takes up one double page and is very factual. The sense of trouble brewing is limited to ‘James decided that a United Kingdom needed a united church. By forcing his changes upon the Scottish church, James upset many of the Scots. They refused to obey’ (57). It is much clearer here than in the other Scottish children’s books that Charles surrenders to Scotland and is passed across; what is far less clear is why the Scots went to war with England, and which Scots. Charles II’s dealings with them are skated over. The next page details the impact of the Book of Common Prayer, and the page after that, the story of Montrose, again he is centred in the text, and the story moved away from a focus on either Charles I or II. Irish school and popular texts proved extremely difficult to secure. The period is not on the primary curriculum at all, and barely on the secondary curriculum. Irish history is of course itself a contested history, but we

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can draw a trajectory of the telling of that history from before independence, after independence and through the rise of nationalism. The texts included are Christopher Page Dean’s A Short History of Ireland (1886); P. W. Joyce’s Child’s History of Ireland (1897) (both of which have London publishers); the Christian Brothers School Reader from 1906— the text from which most vernacular accounts appear to be drawn; then two texts from 1914 published in Ireland, Irish History for Young Readers by H. Kingsmill Moore (Principal of the Church of Ireland Training College), and A Short History of Ireland, by Constantia Maxwell (1914), the first woman to be appointed a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin (then the Protestant university). For the post-war period we have Randall Clare’s A Short History of Ireland (1946), Martin Wallace, A Short History of Ireland (1973), Sean McMahon, A Short History of Ireland (1996) and finally Brendan O’Brien, The Story of Ireland, a cartoon history (2007). The amount of space devoted to the Confederation of Kilkenny or the Irish civil wars varies enormously. In Dean’s book, the chapter on ‘The Great Rebellion of 1641’ is seventeen pages long, in a book where ‘before the English conquest’ attracts nine pages, and most other chapters twelve to fifteen. In P. W. Joyce’s A Child’s History of Ireland (1897) there are six chapters (of forty-four) running from the Plantation of Ulster to Ireland after the restoration, with a chapter on Strafford, one on the Confederation of Kilkenny, and one on Cromwell. However all these texts try to contextualise the subsequent wars, in terms of the policies of James I and his successors, the land distribution and the poor management of the King, and the tyranny of Strafford. Furthermore, Dean, Joyce, Maxwell and Moore all make a clear link between the decision of the Irish to support Charles II, and the Cromwellian invasion: ‘in order to crush out the Royalists it was necessary to subdue Ireland, where so many were now for the cause of the King’ (Maxwell, 65). In all of these texts, the invasion is part of a wider picture. The war itself receives even more variable coverage not only on length, but it how it is represented. Dean takes us through the Long Parliament’s confiscation of land, the four-sided war, Ormonde’s attempt to strike a cessation with the Confederates in order to release soldiers for the King’s war in England, both English and Irish (which was to cause its own problems), and how the Irish become pulled in on the side of Royalism when in 1645 the King accepted the demands of his Irish subjects (freedom of Parliament, seminaries for Catholics, tying a seat in Parliament to owning Irish property, avoiding absentee MPs) in order to secure troops

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for his cause. Joyce too does his best to explain the divisions of Ireland with a clear break down of the four main parties (Old Irish, Anglo-Irish Catholics, Ulster Puritans and what became the Royalist party); and then in turn to explain the collapse of the Irish alliance as the Old Irish party by 1645 advocated continuing the rebellion while the Anglo-Irish increasingly wished to treat with the now established Royalist party in Dublin. Joyce frames the Parliamentarian invasion entirely in terms of the decision of Ormonde to support Charles II. These texts barely see it as a religious war, situating it far more as a colonialist conflict. In sharp contrast, and in the first indication of where the national narrative has emerged, the Christian Brothers’ account, unsurprisingly, emphasises the religious nature of the war. It is situated as Catholic history: the teacher ‘should dwell with pride, and in glowing words on Ireland’s glorious past, her great men and their great deeds; her devotion through all the centuries to the Faith brought to her by the National Apostle’. The Anglo-Irish Catholic Lords are seen as disinterested parties who become engaged only when Puritan armies ‘ravage’ their lands (195). The collapse of the Confederacy is lightly glossed as the result of internal quarrels. The role of the Nuncio in breaking the Confederacy by threatening to excommunicate those who allied with Anglicans, is glossed over. This religious frame gets stronger after Independence. Randall Clare’s A Short History of Ireland (1946) which was intended for pupils in both Eire and Northern Ireland (preface) frames the rebellion as a religious war: ‘If the Scots may fight for their religion, why not we?’ (31), and also strengthens the anti-colonialist argument. Cromwell in this version has three clear aims, ‘to bring the country under the complete control of the English Parliament, to punish the Irish for the massacre of 1641, and to stamp out Roman Catholicism’ (34). That brings us to the crucial issue in Irish historiography: the Cromwellian invasion. Cromwell is presented by both Protestant and Catholic narrators as a perpetrator of massacres. Cromwell’s actions at Drogheda, Wexford and Clonmel are hotly disputed (Drogheda and Wexford refused to surrender: under the rules of war a garrison that refused to surrender when it had clearly lost was subject to pillage; Clonmel surrendered on honourable terms which were strictly observed. This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9 (The Wars of the Three Kingdoms) but there is no divide of English/Irish or Protestant/Catholic in the verdict. Page talks about Cromwell coming with ‘the strong tide of enthusiasm of his fanatical Puritans’ and killing all 3000 inhabitants of Drogheda ‘in the

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name of Jesus’ (50). For him the defenders of Clonmel are ‘the besieged heroes’, and the defeated are no longer Royalists but Catholics (51). Joyce gives a fairly nuanced account of Drogheda: Cromwell’s proclamation against plunder and excess is reported, and so too is the fact that those towns which yielded avoided massacres, although it is not clarified that both Drogheda and Wexford were invited to surrender and had declined. Furthermore, Joyce distinguishes between Cromwellian and Parliamentarian policy. Joyce also notes that, ‘The poorer sort of people of the three provinces of Ulster, Leinster and Munster… were not to be disturbed; for the settlers would need them as mere working men’, but that the gentry were all ordered across the Shannon into Connaught and Clare (309). He adds, with a certain lack of sympathy, that these were ‘mostly families accustomed to a life of easy comfort’ (309). In his version, the entire blame is Cromwell’s: ‘This dreadful Cromwellian episode must be taken as proceeding, not from the English people, but from the will of one man, who then ruled as despotically in England as in Ireland, though not with such cruelty’ (310). It is an early hint, how very convenient it has been to blame Cromwell for a policy that began with James I and continued under the Restoration, and we see this again in the Christian Brothers version, where the section on Cromwell begins anachronistically: ‘Oliver Cromwell, who was now ruling the destinies of England …’ and continues with a highly coloured account: ‘After butchering the soldiers, the fury of the fanatical Puritans was let loose against the unarmed townspeople [of Drogheda], and every man, woman and child of Irish extraction was put to the sword. The slaughter lasted for five days’ (211). There can be no presumption that religious allegiance leads to an exoneration of Cromwell. The Protestant Constantia Maxwell in 1914 offers a description of Drogheda that is one of the most extreme: ‘Priests were also murdered, women were thrown over the walls, and children were cruelly slaughtered’. Yet, unlike in the Christian Brothers’ reader, there is context: ‘we must remember, as in the days of Elizabeth, that war was carried on everywhere with great savagery’ (65), and she gives some examples. Similarly, H. Kingsmill Moore reminds us that Cromwell was only a General, not yet Lord Protector, and that Drogheda was an English garrison, and ‘The barbarous customs of the time permitted this savagery in the case of towns which refused to surrender’ (105). But while Moore describes also the massacres at Wexford and Clonmel and the hostility Cromwell felt to Catholics, and also explains that other towns surrendered, there is no mention of the clemency given to other towns. We have

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to wait until 1973 until a clear statement of the refusal of Drogheda to surrender is made, in Martin Wallace’s A Short History of Ireland (1973): ‘The garrison refused to surrender, and Cromwell ordered that they be put to death as a warning to other towns. He then turned south and treated the garrison at Wexford in similar fashion’ (50). The most anti-Cromwellian account is that of Sean McMahon, in A Short History of Ireland (1996). This is clearly a consciously Marxist and postcolonial account and one which shows little awareness of the complexities of the Confederacy of Kilkenny and of attempts to turn a revolt of the aristocracy into a revolution from below. ‘The dispossessed Irish turned on their masters. 2,000 Protestant settlers were killed’, while many more were stripped, dispossessed and ‘driven into the waste’. ‘The massacre marked the beginnings of a struggle of extreme complexity…’ (79). McMahon is anxious not only (rightly) to contradict the accounts of the number of settlers killed, but to disparage Protestant historians: ‘The numbers of Protestant dead were greatly exaggerated and this distortion has been incorporated in all Protestant histories since’ (79). The words in bold are not correct: all historians are clear they are exaggerations. There seems to have been very little published in the past few years, at least with obviously searchable titles, but there is Brendan O’Brien’s The Story of Ireland, a cartoon history, gives the seventeenth century a double-page spread. The Rebellion gets a paragraph and unlike many texts makes explicit that the 600,000 deaths are over the entire twelve years (the failure to do this affects many popular books: Ned Palmer’s A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, 2019, is one of many that casually assigns the deaths in Ireland to the English conflict of King and Parliament, p. 185). The section on Cromwell is clear on the duality of his reputation but like all these texts, Irish and English, it sees him as an individual—‘he defeated and executed King Charles’—rather than part of a movement. If we are to summarise these national narratives, all take part in the seamless narrative of knowledge that Kinchloe (2001) and Sanders (2018) identify as a common flaw of history written for children (and which we will also see in the fiction). The English narrative is one in which the King was rightfully overturned (although not executed), and in which the essential battle was between tyranny and liberty or puritanism and joy, often both even when the author is Parliamentarian; the Scottish narrative is overwhelmingly of a Scotland trying to find the religious identity

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which will define it for the next several hundred years, accompanied by the Romance of Montrose; the Irish narrative has veered between anticolonialism, and religious identity as the major elements but often elides over the Confederate wars, focusing intently period of the Cromwellian invasion.

Museums For many people, museums are where they get their history both when they are children and as adults. But museums have complex agendas related to their own position in the historical narrative: the United Kingdom may be the only country in Europe not to have a museum dedicated to charting a historical and national narrative, probably because the United Kingdom, although a nation, is made up of multiple identities. The English Civil Wars rather goes missing in the London Museums. In the National Maritime Museum, the emphasis is on the Stuart navy, with relatively little attention paid to the emergence of the English as a maritime power during the Commonwealth. Only the National Portrait Gallery, with its portraits of the great and the good, has space to spare for this period. In Scotland the emphasis is on the Covenanters of the Restoration, in Wales it is barely covered—although Wales sent many soldiers into the Royalist armies, relatively little fighting took place there although Conwy, Caerarfon and Denbigh were held for the King until 1646 and all record this in their displays. There is very little in the National Museum of Ireland: the seventeenth-century exhibit is predominantly on clothing. In Collins Barracks there is information on the destruction of Gaelic as part of English supremacism, and the period 1641–1643 is represented as the Irish Wars of Religion. There is an excellent display of armour and uniform, and a hint at some of the issues which linked Ireland to England, in the display of Ormonde’s Royalist coinage and the coinage of Protestant Munster. The presence of international coinage also hints at the ways in which the wars in Ireland were linked to international events. But once more there is little in the way of explanation. In local museums, coverage varies reflecting both the importance of the location in the seventeenth century and the role of the Civil War in the area’s development and identity narrative: in Maidstone, site of an important battle in 1648, there is a substantial display, whereas in Birmingham, a city which traces its greatness from the eighteenth century, there is

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almost nothing in the Museum and Art Gallery, despite the destruction of the town by Prince Rupert and his men, although there are one or two interesting artefacts in the industrial gallery, including a Staffordshire slipware platter with a picture of Thomas Fairfax on his horse (mistakenly labelled as Charles I). Chester, which was for a long time a key port for the Royalist cause, although focusing on its mediaeval and Roman origins, has outside the walls is a clever construction of glass which allows you to see the walls under attack. The Isles of Scilly Museum has four boards explaining the divisions in Scilly, and the museum in Shrewsbury explains fairly well the division between the Royalist castle and the parliamentarian town. In Colchester, location of the devastating siege of 1648 (Royalists held the Parliamentarian town hostage; Thomas Fairfax refused to allow women and children to leave in order to increase the burden on the garrison), the Castle Museum’s prisons contain a display, in what is otherwise a museum more devoted to the town’s Roman heritage. In Representing the Nation (1999), Jessica Evans argues, ‘Museum displays are no longer defined by their collections but by the stories they tell, woven around artifacts or locations. This is particularly true of the museums dedicated to aspects of the Civil War’. There are three museums specialising in the period. The National Civil War Museum in Newark, despite its name, is both heavily regional—Newark was under siege three times and a third of the museum is dedicated to this—and distinctly pro-Royalist. The upstairs is different, focused on temporary exhibits: for a long time this was a really excellent exhibit from the University of Leicester on the development of medicine and social care in the Commonwealth. But downstairs the red walls are hung with Royalist portraits. There is one of Cromwell but none of the other Parliamentarian Generals. With the exception of two panels on Scotland this is a war fought only in England. The first panel is on the divine right of kings; the second on Laud and the need for money to fight the Scots; the third covers the trial of Strafford with no explanation of why he was disliked; the abolition of ship money—again no context—and the description of the uprisings in Ireland is incorrectly framed as Catholics versus Protestants. As we move around the room perhaps five of the eight titles begin ‘Charles…’. Many of the other titles, ‘1645 Parliaments’ New Model Army’ or ‘The Putney Debates’ have no accompanying text. Of the text there is one paragraph on Fairfax and Cromwell: it uses phrases such as ‘suppressed Wales’ and ‘ruthlessly put down the Royalist rebellion’. No such language is used of Charles or his general Prince Rupert. There are

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also some leaflets ‘digging deeper’ on selected topics: religion, Ireland and Scotland. One might at times pause to wonder who Charles was actually fighting. The overall narrative is focalised around a Charles who merely wants his rights, Charles the defender. Parliament (where it appears) is the aggressor. There are two museums for Parliamentarians. In Ely stands a house Oliver Cromwell occupied for ten years of his life. The museum is predominantly set up as a museum of the English gentry in the 1600s, but it does pay some attention to the war and it is interesting in the way the war is presented. In the introductory video for example, the emphasis is entirely on the religious differences between the King and the reformers, something which may make more sense in this still very Anglican part of the world than it might elsewhere. There is a domesticity to the exhibit, which extends beyond the sense of family life and into the domesticity of a soldier’s life. In the exhibition one of the displays is that of a soldier’s pack: knife and fork, tankard, trencher alongside pipe, dice and a copy of Cromwell’s Soldiers’ bible. There is also the heraldry of the Protectorate with lion and dragon instead of lion and unicorn, a nod they think to Cromwell’s Welsh connections, ironic given the solid Royalism of Wales. But the exhibit itself is close to neutral. Only in the bookshop does one notice that the merchandise and books on sale are solidly pro-Cromwell from Tom Reilly’s Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, through to the mugs demanding that we paint him, ‘Warts and All’. Finally, in Huntingdon is the Cromwell Museum: the smallest of the three, it is set in the one-room school–house that Cromwell attended, it is adorned with portraits, and holds some of his swords, his medicine chest, his hat and boots. It’s almost entirely personal. The docent at the museum takes time to talk people through the portraits and the objects, and although in some ways it functions more as a memorial than a museum, the docents are able and do discuss their displays and the war extensively with visitors in a way absent from other the other museums. In 2019 it underwent refurbishment and re-opened in 2020 with new items on display including a previously unseen portrait of Cromwell, the consummate cavalry general, on his horse. In a splendid twist, a section of the Sealed Knot re-enactment group turned up to join in with the festivities.

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Conclusion If the physical landscape of memorial, re-enactment and art, the imagery of the war, tilts Royalist, there is a sense from the history books, which is hard to pin down, that the intellectual landscape tilts parliamentarian. This I propose is less to do with the weight or enumeration of words, than it is to do with an issue that is going to arise as we turn to the fiction. Generally, when we look at the stories that are being told, the Royalist narratives—whether paintings, pub signs, tourist stops, artwork and museums—convince by telling less, by offering little context and much imagery. In contrast, Parliamentarian sources of all types offer more detail, more politics, more context, and crucially, more discussion.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Betts, Sarah. “Henrietta Maria, ‘Queen of Tears’? Picturing and Performing the Cavalier Queen.” Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Ed. Paranque, Estelle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 155–79. Print. De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Dobie, Judith. Illustrating the Past: Artists’ Interpretations of Ancient Places. Swindon: English Heritage, 2019. Print. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Trans. Douglas, Mary. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Print. Legon, Edward. “Remembering the Good Old Cause.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 11–27. Print. Melman, Billie. The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Peck, Imogen. “Remembering—And Forgetting—Regicide: The Commemoration of the 30th of January, 1649–1660.” Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Ed. Paranque, Estelle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 133–54. Print. Robinson, Alan. Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Vincent, Alana. Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative and Liturgy. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013. Print.

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Wild, Benjamin L. “Romantic Recreations: Remembering Stuart Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Fancy Dress Entertainments.” Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Ed. Paranque, Estelle Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 179–96. Print.

CHAPTER 5

Great Men and Great Battles

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. —Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841

Until the big historiographical shift after the Second World War, history for the young was overwhelmingly the history of great men and the occasional woman (De Groot 2010, 88). Historical fiction very much reflected this. Many of the fictions are intended to give us some understanding of a real personality. How real people are integrated into the narrative varies: there is faction, biographical stories ‘about’ a great figure; stories in which fictional characters are closely involved with real people; and stories in which the real person is a walk-on—a mere incident in the fictional characters’ lives or the context against which they take action.

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The chapter will begin with a short summary of the faction, but focus on the second and third of those three approaches, which are more highly fictionalised. It will consider briefly the representation of some minor but significant characters, then turn to focus on four actors who were key in real life, and who dominate the fiction as the sites and sights of the recreation of the war. Fairfax, Rupert, Charles I and Cromwell were the four people who aroused the most frequent and complex responses, in that order, because it reflects in ascending order the extent to which they are represented in the fiction. Finally, this chapter closes with a discussion of the three Great Battles of the Civil War: Edgehill (1642), Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645).

Faction Fictionalised biographies have been overwhelmingly Royalist: early factions include W. H. Ainsworth’s Boscobel, or The Royal Oak (1872), about the escape of Charles II from Worcester, and Mary Helen Keynes, The Spanish Marriage (1913). In the early twentieth century, the leading author is Margaret Irwin, whose The Proud Servant (1934) and The Stranger Prince (1937) tell the stories of Montrose and Prince Rupert from childhood onwards. She is followed in eminence by Jean Plaidy, gateway drug to so many teens for both historical fiction and rather spicy romance fiction. Her Stuart sequence includes three novels focused on Charles II: A Health Unto His Majesty (1956), The Wandering Prince (1956) and Here Lies Our Sovereign Lord (1957), and she goes up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and out of the scope of this book with The Three Crowns (1965). The Wandering Prince is told from the point of view of Minette, Henrietta Maria, and Charles II’s mistress Lucy Walters; it is very careful to lay blame on the Queen. Almost all the faction for younger readers focuses on the high adventure of escape. Jane Lane’s The Escape of the King (1950) is a child’s-eye version of Charles II’s escape after Worcester. She also wrote a series of close-up biographies. The Young and Lonely King (1969) seems to be aimed at teens, with a strong drive to construct empathy. An extremely sentimental account of Charles I’s childhood, the description of his childhood problems is explicit, and the horse seen as the solution. The book describes his relationships with Buckingham and Henrietta (Buckingham is detested, and there is much homophobia). The focus on relationships

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and feelings positions the book very strongly with the expectations of modern YA. Two books she most definitely wrote for children are The Escape of the King (1950) and The Escape of the Duke (1960). In the second, about the escape of James, the boy is used to focalise his father: ‘Dimly the Duke realised that his father was in great anguish at the thought of having to fight against his own subjects, even though they had refused him the allegiance which was his right’ (Ch. 2). The book is clearly influenced by the experience of civilian life in the Second World War, so that we see James watch the preparations in Oxford, and the crisis from London and see him trapped as a participant. There is ‘Hide and Seek’, by Geoffrey Trease, aimed at much younger children and published in The Young Elizabethan (1957). The Princess Elizabeth (who died in prison) persuades her little brother Henry to play hide and seek with her and James in order to provide cover for his eventual escape. In this portrayal James is depicted as not very likeable, willing to risk others and with a hint of cowardice. It is hard not to suppose that Trease was projecting ahead to James who would choose to flee England in 1688. Charles Buchanan’s Royal Escape (1894) is a lightly fictionalised version of Charles II’s escape from Worcester through the eyes of the boy/servant Will Symons, interesting only in that he is a Royalist by virtue of his father’s occupation as an actor. E. Everett-Green’s After Worcester: the History of a Royal Fugitive (1901) substitutes fictional characters for some of the key characters. Georgette Heyer’s Royal Escape (1938) is more interested in the human person rather than the details of the conflict (although the book is clearly ‘Royalist’ it has little to say of Parliament at all). In the Beattys’ Campion Towers (1965) the Puritan Penitence, who has travelled from Boston to inherit from her Royalist grandmother, is able to emulate the historical Jane Lane and help the King escape from Worcester. Even J. and P. Beatty’s Witch Dog (1968) tells of the (fictional) escape of Prince Rupert’s poodle from Parliamentarian capture. There are only two faction books about a Parliamentarian leader. The first, Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Rider of the White Horse (1959) has Thomas Fairfax told from the point of view of his wife. There is also John Attenborough’s Destiny Our Choice (1987) in which Henry Ireton is the focus, but these only barely fit the genre as both are conjured from little historical evidence. Rosemary Sutcliff resolves the problem by focalising the book through the eyes of Lady Fairfax (an even more shadowy figure). Attenborough’s novel resolves the absence of evidence by rendering Henry Ireton the background to a family saga about a local

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yeoman family. More recently in 2020, Miranda Malins published The Puritan Princess about the youngest daughter of Oliver Cromwell: reminiscent of the work of Margaret Irwin, this takes a different tack, using the eyes of Frances Cromwell to paint not her father, but a very effective study of the internal workings of the Protectorate court that reveals just how much more we have learned about the Protectorate in the past twenty years.

Characters as Context There are a number of characters who are relatively regular walk-ons in these novels, apart from Charles and Cromwell: Henrietta Maria, a number of the Royalist generals, and Archbishop Laud; of the Parliamentarians, Hampden, Pym, Ireton, Lilburne and Cornet Joyce all make appearances, and a radical all alone, the Quaker George Fox. In the past decade John Thurloe—Secretary and spy master—has emerged as a compelling figure. Perhaps the most important of the walk-ons, Henrietta Maria, was a complex figure. Married off to Charles at the age of fifteen she was initially jealous of Buckingham, gave birth to a stillborn daughter, and then to the Prince who would become Charles II. By the time war broke out they had a very close, and intimate marriage and Charles’ uxorious behaviour provoked suspicion. He ‘did not only pay her this adoration, but desired that all men should know that he was swayed by her: which was not good for either of them’ (Edward Hyde, Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1759). Sarah Betts summarises her portrayal in popular culture (literature and film) as ‘alienated from the English people, alienating Charles from them in turn’ (2019, 160). Henrietta arrived in England with a large Catholic entourage, which immediately aroused hostility. The presence of Charles I and later the Prince of Wales at mass contributed to suspicions that she hoped to reCatholicise England, but so too did the love of masque and pageantry which she encouraged in the king. Henrietta and Charles created a formal and mannered court known for its love of art and music. However by 1641 Henrietta Maria was under such suspicion that there is evidence that Charles I agreed to Strafford’s execution primarily to protect his wife. And as the war proceeded, Henrietta Maria was increasingly positioned in Parliamentarian propaganda as one of the King’s evil counsellors. There was some truth to this: Charles

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was a man who relied on intimates and none were more intimate than the Queen. We know from the letters exchanged, and from those found after Marston Moor, that he confided matters of state to her and that she exhorted him on, in one letter telling him if ‘you have broken your resolution, there is nothing but death for me’ (Plowden 1998, 11). What is less clear is whether he actively listened to her advice. Hughes argues that one problem was that Henrietta Maria was acting within a very specifically Catholic construction of marriage, one which ‘encouraged women to urge their husbands to virtuous conduct’ (2012, 64) but that this was at direct variance to the new Protestant traditions, which centred men as the origins of family virtue. What is certain is that her advice was resented as much by the Royalist generals as by Parliament. During the war, Henrietta styled herself the She-Generalissimo, and was understood as an enemy to Parliament in her own right: ‘Shee hath countenanced and maintained the horrid… Rebellion now on foot in Ireland… Hath by severall ways and meanes traitorously assisted and maintained a war against the Subjects of Scotland…’ (The Parliament Scout, 20–27 June 1643 in White 2006, 101). This led to a move to impeach her in 1644 after which she was forced to escape to France where she sat up what would become the court in exile (Plowden 1998, 1–31). Yet despite her very high profile in the anti-Catholic and often frankly sexist propaganda of the day in which the Queen’s role as a public woman was ipso facto to be castigated (White 2006, 97–122), Henrietta Maria is a slight figure in the fiction and one cannot assume that pro-Royalist authors will celebrate her. Betts argues that ‘Whilst Victorians might identify in the couple a model for the idyllic image of their own Victoria and Albert, a wife dominating her husband was hardly more conducive to nineteenth-century notions of domestic order and propriety than it had been to seventeenth-century ones’ (161). In H. A. Hinkson’s Silk and Steel (1902) Daniel O’Neill is in love with one of the waiting women of the Queen, and, a mercenary captain, his only loyalty to the Queen: she is figured as a distant employer, at most a Dumas-like Milady figure, and Hinkson uses the Queen’s perspective not to celebrate her but to castigate Charles. Elsewhere, the Queen is merely a name and a loyalty, as in H. Grahame Richards’ Richard Somers (1911), Constance Savery’s Green Emeralds for the Queen (1938), and Michael Arnold’s Traitor’s Blood (1914). In this last it is Lisette, the mercenary captain Stryker’s lover, who serves the Queen as a spy. In Helen Mary Keynes’ Honour the King (1914) our heroine Sophie is disappointed in both the King and the Queen: ‘Her

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habitual expression was one of pride’ (Ch. 7)—a portrait that Jean Plaidy recreates in The Wandering Prince (1956) in her bitter and querulous Henrietta. More recently Henrietta Maria is being rehabilitated in the faction, and Fiona Mountain’s Cavalier Queen (2018) takes an interesting approach. Her Henrietta Maria is a passionate young woman who has an affair with Henry Jermyn, something which was rumoured during the Restoration. In this book the affair is heated, physically intimate but not consummated fully until the final child who it is hinted is Jermyn’s. This Henrietta is proud, and loving of her husband, and continually blames him for not heeding her advice and for failing to support her, yet she emerges as a heroine. Apart from Prince Rupert, whom we will get to shortly, relatively few Royalist generals make it into the fiction—there is a relative paucity also of biographies, but John Barratt’s Cavalier Generals (2004) is useful. The unpleasant and drunken Lord Goring is frequently mentioned (notably in Lane’s Sir-Devil-May-Care and Du Maurier’s The King’s General ) but rarely met. ‘To the Victorian writers, Goring was “the worst of the bad men who brought reproach on the name of Cavalier’’ [an opinion shared] by many of Goring’s contemporaries’ (Barratt 2004, 94). Sir Richard Grenville in Du Maurier’s The King’s General was a figure of real opprobrium: he had gathered troops in the name of parliament, but then abandoned them to defect to the King. He managed the impressive achievement of being loathed even more by his own side. He was notorious for his cruelty, starved prisoners to death, was a brutal disciplinarian and, it was alleged, skimmed from the money received for equipping his soldiers. His major ‘success’ was the siege of Plymouth, but even here, he became known for hanging 300 of the captured troops. (In his defence, the Governor had executed a young man who was reputed to be Grenville’s illegitimate son.) He ended his days in exile. Despite all of this, Du Maurier attempts to turn him into a romantic hero. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose was, as Barratt argues, the romantic hero, both now and then—challenged only perhaps by Prince Rupert. But this romantic image of the parfait gentle knight obscured his tactlessness and egotism, and his tendency to job with the wind. He began the war as a moderate Covenanter; in 1643 sought to raise a Royalist rising in Scotland but failed to secure allies and had to flee, but succeeded in leading a rising in 1644. Despite some successes, Montrose was defeated by Leslie in 1646 at Philiphaugh and went into exile in Norway. In 1650 he invaded from Orkney; routed at Carbisdale he was

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hanged as a parole breaker in Edinburgh. Montrose turns up in J. M. Cobban’s The Angel of the Covenant (1898), as well as the Margaret Irwin book mentioned above. James, Duke of York also gets short shrift. He sits on a hillside at Edgehill in Geoffrey Trease’s Silver Guard (1948) watching the battle with his brother, and as we have seen appears as a child in escape narratives, but he is too young to be truly significant. William Cavendish, the Earl, Marquess and later Duke of Newcastle, does get some attention but it is always as a background figure, in part perhaps because he is very hard to pin down and also because he is more interesting as a Restoration figure (the most recent biography of him is Lucy Worsley’s excellent Cavalier, 2007). Contemporaries blamed him for the disaster at Naseby but as the leading magnate in the North his role in raising troops and securing supply lines should not be underestimated, and he was well aware of his lack of experience and appointed many professional officers. His failure to take Hull however left the Royalists vulnerable in the North-East in ways that would be exploited in the attack on York that led to Marston Moor (Barratt 2004, 159– 171). Penruddock, of Samuel Harden Church’s Penruddock of the White Lambs (1902), serves first in Newcastle’s regiment, and his betrothed, Blanche, is a fictional niece of the great man, but otherwise Newcastle is a background figure (Penruddock himself was a real person, and this book is the story of the Western rising of 1655 which cost him his life: Smith and Toynbee 1977, 169–171). We see a little more of him in the aforementioned Honour the King by Helen Mary Keynes, for Sophia’s erstwhile lover, Maurice Luscombe, serves with him, despairing when Newcastle quits the field after Marston Moor and goes into exile. Like many Royalist texts, Newcastle here is presented as perhaps cowardly, perhaps uncommitted, and certainly not admirable. Only Geoffrey Trease (who had already written a biography of the man) is admiring in his very late A Curse on the Sea (1996). Through the eyes of his hero Rob who travels to stage a masque at Bolsover (Newcastle’s retreat) Trease presents him as a family man, as warm and loyal and as a patron of both arts and sciences. Finally, there is Archbishop Laud, one of the great players in the lead into war. He is a device in Edna Lyall’s In Spite of All (1901) to demonstrate the good heart of the hero Gabriel, and it is to save Laud that Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) heads off into London, but he is otherwise never more than vague and shadowy. What is noticeable

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is that the leading figures of the Royalist texts are rarely to be admired, which is odd for the side most concerned with the natural investiture of authority. On the Parliamentarian side, as is fitting for the side that represented distributed authority, there are a range of minor characters who crop up with some frequency although as very minor characters. John Hampden MP is a man much admired in history and fiction. He led the revolt against Ship Money in 1636, and was on the Committee of Safety formed in 1642. He was positioned very much as a moderate anxious to work with the King—he refused to vote the Bill of Attainder of Strafford— but died as a result of injuries at Chalgrove Field in the first year of the war (Smith and Toynbee 1977, 80–82). He figures as a family friend in Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868); and in Church’s With the King At Oxford (1886). The narrator of the latter mourns the death of John Hampden in 1643, champion of the supremacy of the Commons and one of the architects of the Association system in the Parliamentary army. The hero records, ‘it troubled me not a little to hear that he had been slain, though he was an enemy to the King’ (p. 43). In Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894) it is meeting John Hampden, not any of the firebrands, that convinces Joscelyn to reject his family loyalty to the King and ride with the parliamentary army, and specifically with Hampden. The book concludes with Joscelyn visiting his wife: ‘I have been telling Mary how you and I owe our life’s happiness to one that was foremost in striving to right the wrong, and to set the oppressed free’ (Ch. 41). Of all the Parliamentarians Henry Ireton is the one to have attracted almost as much hatred from Parliamentarians as did Cromwell. Ireton was a competent soldier rather than glorious, but he was part of the sieges of Bristol and Oxford. He rose to prominence during the Saffron Waldon debates and was one of the authors of The Agreement of the People, opposing the Levellers. He was at Colchester and is sometimes held responsible for the execution of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle—Fairfax’s decision—and was one of the judges in the trial of the King. But there is very little in the fiction about Ireton. David Farr’s 2006 biography raises his profile considerably, as Cromwell’s best friend and closest personal advisor, but there is no fiction written about Ireton since this came out. John Attenborough’s Destiny Our Choice (1987) is the only faction to focus on him. The novel begins with his childhood, and as far as one can tell much of it is imagined. The focus of the third part is on his relationship with the Cromwell family, although his wife is rather

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invisible, and it spends very little time on Ireton’s time in Ireland, and fictionalises a situation in which he allows a soldier to marry an Irish girl (forbidden by the army’s ordinances) (Ch. 35). His service is so glossed that it supports the general tendency of these books to settle much of the opprobrium on Cromwell (who was there for only nine months, followed by Ireton, who died there). Ireton is positioned throughout the book as a man so moderate that he might almost be perceived as quietly opposing the regime. Overall, when Ireton appears it is to make much of his close relationship with Cromwell (eventually his father-in-law). In Captain F. S. Brereton’s In the King’s Service (1900) Dick the hero rescues Ireton from an unfair attack in the street and is later able to call on him to provide access to Cromwell so that he can reveal a plot in ways which imply moral suspicion. In Mrs Frank Cooper’s Hide and Seek (1881) she gets his name wrong, and Ireton and Cromwell (who is here promoted to be head of the army, several years too early) are spiteful radicals. They vindictively execute Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle ‘under the feeble plea that they were soldiers of fortune, and not men of family’ (the execution was for breaking parole). Cooper sets Ireton up in a nefarious plot to capture the Knollys family, and gives him a sister called Lettice who betrays him. He is finally condemned by his own mother. At the end, Ireton rides away out of the story, ‘into a life of unscrupulous ambition and unbridled passions. Rode away to marry Cromwell’s daughter; to increase daily his power and influence; to become Lord Deputy of Ireland, and to rule all under him with a rod of iron; and finally, according to the prophecy of the witch of St. Leonard’s, to die of the plague at Limerick’ (Ch. 16). Cooper is not fond. Neither it seems is Lawrence Cowen. In Bible and Sword (1919) Bridget Cromwell is married off to Henry Ireton by a harsh father; Ireton is depicted as a man who sneers at the travails of the King. Cornet Joyce may be a strange person to include here, for he is hardly a great man. The lowest kind of commissioned officer, he seems never to have been promoted, and he fell out with Cromwell in the 1650s. However, he crops up fairly regularly because of one specific act in 1647 when he claimed Cromwell’s authority to take the King from Holmby House and transfer him from the custody of Parliament to that of the Army. It is not totally clear that he did have Cromwell’s authority. When the King asked to see his commission, Joyce gestured to the five hundred men behind him. Fairfax wanted him court-martialled, but Cromwell and Ireton intervened. Cornet Joyce emigrated to Holland in the 1650s

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after a period of imprisonment that may have been due to a property dispute with Richard Cromwell; however his name crops up as a candidate for the masked executioner (this is unlikely simply because execution by axe was difficult and required a professional). But we know very little about him. In Percy Westerman’s A Lad of Grit (1909) he seems to have become Increase Joyce, enemy to the titular family. He turns up in Lindsey Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) where the hero—who does tend to get around—rides with him. Jane Lane takes time out to write a book just about him—The Severed Crown (1972)—which presents as faction but which uses faction to disguise fiction. Even by Lane’s standards this is a clear attempt to defame. It is a bricolage, a novel constructed from a combination of writings which the author has found and adapted. Thus she is able to draw from the actual letters of the ambassador Jean de Montreuil, the diary of Colonel Jack Ashburnham, and the post-Restoration memoirs of Thomas Firebrace. Only for Cornet Joyce does she have to make things from whole cloth, yet it is here, and only here, that she claims to be merely an editor, inserting an editorial note, ‘The scriptural passages quoted by Cornet Joyce being so numerous as to weary the reader, many of them are in this edition omitted’, unintentionally emulating the bowdlerisation of Ludlow’s memoirs. The note reinforces the veracity of a piece of fiction writing which is intended to render Joyce thoroughly odious. ‘I exulted to them upon our storming of Woodstock, whose garrison, being crypto-papists, could receive no quarter, and on the spoil of gold and silver we took, according to the command of the Lord not to leave Egypt empty handed’ (Ch. 3). Joyce is rendered a fanatic, one who murders Catholics and loots to order. And he is traduced in this way ostensibly through his own words. Among the radical personages to show up are John Lilburne—antiauthoritarian radical, printer, author and all-round thorn in the side of whoever was in power (Gregg 2000)—and Gerard Winstanley, leader of the short-lived agrarian communalist movement known as the Diggers (Bradstock 2000). Both make brief appearances in Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1932), which has the emulative tone of boys’ adventure fiction, and Jack Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938) which is not, in which one of the main characters goes off to be a Digger, only to observe it all collapse in acrimony as they discover the ‘common land’ is already claimed by locals. Winstanley is the focus of attention in David Caute’s Comrade Jacob (1961) which attempts some interiority in the philosopher’s life but which is predominantly concerned with demonstrating the

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brutality of war, and the general unpleasantness of men (in theory the novel is Parliamentarian but in practice it is neutral in a plague on both your houses fashion). Lilburne. along with the printer Richard Overton, is the subject of fascination for Lucy in Gillian Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2010) and its sequel, as the voice of justice and law for all. Printing generally has become the focus of new historical research as the vibrant culture of the Protectorate and Commonwealth has emerged. Before turning to the best known of minor characters, there is one unlikely one to note, and that is the Quaker founder, George Fox. Quakers are rather over-represented in this collection. However, although Quakers are common figures in the narratives, and there is a lengthy faction/biographical novel by Jan de Hartog, The Peaceable Kingdom (1991), George Fox as a person is strangely elusive. Of the nineteenthcentury narratives he appears only in Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) in which he quite literally has a walk-on part. Olive is with her daughter Maidi and her Quaker maidservant Annis when they are ‘benighted on the Surrey Hills’ (Ch. 6) when a man ‘clad in leather from top to toe’ appeared ‘his carriage was grave, not like any plunderer, and he accosted me soberly, though without any titles’. This is of course George Fox, and with Annis present Fox takes the party to a cottage to rest. Here Fox tells them his history (Ch. 7); ‘his discourse came with marvellous power’ but ‘The words were sometimes confused, as if they were burst and shattered with the fulness of the thought within them. Something of the same kind we had noticed of old in Oliver Cromwell’ (Ch. 7). Charles spends several pages with Fox and gives him a voice to delve deep into his theology and to give a very clear sense of ecstatic religion. Her journey home is lifted by Fox’s insight, and her understanding of the landscape around her rendered spiritual by this encounter. We have a similar walk-on in Howard Pease’s Magnus Sinclair (1903). It is slightly odd that the eponymous hero should side with the Royalists, because he is a London Protestant and he has a strong sympathy with the Quakers, but Pease, a Northern writer, was almost certainly a Quaker or descended from Quakers (it is a very well-known Quaker name). In the twenty-first century a new character came to the fore. John Thurloe, secretary to the council of state in Protectorate England, and spymaster, first appears in John Sanders’ A Firework for Oliver (1964) as a seventeenth-century ‘Q’ in which Thurloe shows Pym the detonating system on the gun they have captured. In Robert Leeson’s The White Horse (1977) he is the mastermind behind the rule of the Major-Generals.

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It’s in 2013 that Thurloe emerges from the shadows in Robert Wilton’s spy-versus-spy novel, Traitor’s Field. The two sides are represented by Sir Mortimer Shay who is the organiser of Royalist Resistance, and John Thurloe, the Commonwealth’s spy master. The story is set 1648–1651. Most of the novel is about Thurloe figuring out that there is someone coordinating resistance and chasing them down, while Shay realises that the death of Rainsborough is in part cover for a more personal conflict and a possible alliance between Levellers and Royalists (p. 452). Although with a Royalist focalisation it is, like many modern Royalist novels, well aware of the sheer incompetence of its own side: at the end Teach (a spy) is fed up. ‘I had a monarchy capable in the same breath of allying itself to the most stubborn Protestants and the most brutal Catholics’ (p. 460). And Shay cannot blame him: ‘When the King of England invades England with Scottish soldiers, and invades again, and thousand’s die, where is England’s stability’ (p. 463). In L. C. Tyler’s A Cruel Necessity (2015) the discovery of the body of a Parliamentarian spy leads the protagonist to discover that his own mother is the local Royalist spy coordinator. In the sequel, A Masterpiece of Corruption (2016), he is in London when he is mistaken for someone else and drawn into acting as a spy for parliament within the Sealed Knot and its connections in Brussels and comes into the orbit of Thurloe, but Thurloe remained a shadowy figure. It’s in 2020 that Pete Langman brought him into the light. In Killing Beauties a spy thriller about female Royalist agents, Thurloe is a lascivious puritanical hypocrite—reviving all the old slurs about Presbyterians—but one who does prove smart enough to outwit the spies set to distract and destroy him. The final ‘minor’ characters to consider are Prince Charles and Charles II. While these are of course the same person, there is a very clear difference between the way in which Charles as Prince/King at Worcester is written, and the ways in which the restored King is contemplated at the end of these books. Prince Charles who escapes from Worcester is dashing, generous and highly attractive. W. H. Ainsworth in Boscobel, or The Royal Oak (1872) sets the tone early: ‘Charles was then in the heyday of his youth… Though his features were harsh—the nose being too large, and not well-shaped— and his complexion swarthy as that of a Spanish gypsy, his large black eyes, full of fire and spirit, gave wonderful expression to his countenance, and made him, at times, look almost handsome’ (Ch. 2). This mode of description is taken up by Jean Plaidy’s rambunctious portrayal in The

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Wandering Prince (1956). Even a very late book such as L. C. Tyler’s A Masterpiece of Corruption (2016) presents Charles as magnetic enough to seduce a young Puritan and spy for Secretary of State John Thurloe to the Restoration cause. But we can already see that this Charles is admired for his charisma not his character. In Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883), Harry, a Royalist, feels that ‘Charles, indeed, although but a young man of twenty, was as full of duplicity and faithlessness as his father, without possessing any of the virtues of that unfortunate king’ (Ch. 20). Rosemary Sutcliff’s Simon touches on this when, listening to his friend’s descriptions of Charles I, he notes that the escaped Prince Charles ‘seemed by all accounts, to be a wild and rather unpleasant youth’ (Simon, Ch. 20). A very common theme, in the books of the Victorian writers in particular, is the degree to which Charles II as king is a disappointment. Maryatt in Children of the New Forest (1847) warns that Charles cannot be relied on to compensate his supporters on his return to the throne. Cooper takes the same position: ‘Neglect and ingratitude were all that most of the gentry of England received from the worthless son, for their long and faithful services to the father’ (Hide and Seek, 1881, Ch. 1). For Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937) the King disappoints because he is no longer the cavalier of before, and he appears to have forgotten his friends. ‘Yes, the King was magnificent; but unfamiliar. The King had come back, but not the old King; he was still Charles, but not the Charles of the Cavaliers; the Restoration was here, but not the Restoration dreamed of by old warriors. On the King’s right hand had ridden, not Rupert, but General Monck, a canting, hard bitten mercenary, who had played for his own interests, and had won; yes, that was it; it was not Royalism which was victorious; it was expediency’ (last chapter). For Geoffrey Trease it is that what little Charles does do involves reinstituting old monopolies (specifically the theatres) if it will fill his pockets (The Field of Forty Footsteps, 1977). Even Georgette Heyer, whose Great Roxhythe (1923) reads as an unrequited love triangle between Charles II, Roxhythe, and his servant Christopher, portrays Charles II as unworthy of Roxhythe’s singular and personal loyalty. For others, the King’s immorality was a source of disappointment. In Smith’s Brambletye (published in 1826 when Royalism was effectively unchallenged), the protagonist withdraws from the court of Charles II. Charles is a man ‘who always shrunk distastefully from any tidings likely to interrupt the placid equanimity which his courtiers pronounced to be

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good-temper’ (Ch. 9). Jocelyn watches as a King and court that pleads poverty gambles money away. Reverend Alfred J. Church mourns his lack of principle, concluding With the King at Oxford, with the lines: ‘I could wish that there were a better report of the new King …’tis much to be doubted whether England will get much advantage from his coming back’ (Epilogue, 198). And Sir Ralph, in his concluding thoughts in Herbert Hayens’ For Rupert and the King (1910), reflects ‘when the second Charles returned to take possession of his father’s throne, I felt no inclination to go again into the world of action. The “Merry Monarch” as folks dubbed him, was a far different man from the master I had served’ (Ch. 29). Emma Marshall in Under Salisbury Spire (1894) has her heroine lament, that ‘the fair promises of the restoration of our lawful king was clouded by the licence in which his Court indulged’ (p. 339). Only in the 1950s and 1960s as the world began to change, did the restored Charles II become a really attractive figure, but the texts that focus on this are beyond the scope of this book.

The Big Four In a just world, it is Thomas Fairfax the fiction would remember as the military hero of the English Revolution. Thomas, Lord Fairfax, later 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, was already a soldier when the war broke out, having commanded a troop of Yorkshire dragoons in the both the first and second Bishops’ War. It was Fairfax who was sent by Parliament to petition the King not to raise his standard. When Parliament went to war Fairfax served as Lieutenant General under his father, Lord Fairfax (which can render matters confusing). By 1644 when the Parliamentarian cause struggling, it was Fairfax who led the Parliamentarian army into battle at Marston Moor, destroying Newcastle’s army. When Parliament passed the Self-denying Ordinance in 1645 which required MPs to resign from the army, Fairfax was one of the restored members, appointed as Lord General with Cromwell as his Lieutenant General and commander of cavalry. In this position he won the Battle of Naseby. But Fairfax was not a political operator. His attempts to balance factions, his continued commitment to a negotiated peace with the King, and his loss of authority with the more radical officers began to tell. He approved Pride’s Purge, but although appointed to head the judges at the King’s trial, he absented himself. It is believed that his wife Anne was the woman who cried aloud at the opening of the trial that Fairfax

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‘had more wit than to be there’. By 1649 he was retreating from politics: he was active in suppressing the Leveller rebellion in Burford, but resigned when it was proposed to invade Scotland to prevent invasion of the Scots. Fairfax sat in the first Protectorate Parliament and thereafter lived in seclusion, until he threw in his support for George Monck and the restored monarchy. The result is that Fairfax is rather underrepresented. Edna Lyall’s Gabriel in To Right the Wrong (1901) is very keen on Fairfax. There is the classic faction novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Rider of the White Horse (1959), in which Fairfax is represented as the exemplar of sobriety: careful, methodical and far from rash; and in her children’s novel Simon (1953). Simon’s father loses a leg in Fairfax’s regiment, and it is Fairfax whom Simon admires. But otherwise we have to wait until Michael Arnold’s Marston Moor (2010) and M. J. Logue’s Red Horse (2015) for a re-centering of the narrative. Arnold is mostly concerned with the battlefield, but Logue’s books are much more about the experience of war and, in this series, we get a portrayal of working with and for Fairfax. Prince Rupert of the Rhine is a more dominant figure than his own commander (Hutton 1982, 129–142; the most recent biography is by Charles Spencer 2007). As Charles I did not engage in hand to hand fighting (he was on the battlefield at Edgehill, First and Second Newbury, Cropredy Bridge and Naseby, protected by his guards), as he was almost certainly not strong enough or large enough, Prince Rupert became the poster boy for the Royalists, and the epitome of what a cavalier was: dashing, brave, spirited, reckless, uncontrollable. This was of course a mixed blessing. As one of Charles’ commanders, Rupert acquired an impressive reputation for sorties, cavalry charges and fast strikes. He routed the Parliamentarian force at Powick Bridge, but his failure to control his cavalry at Edgehill probably contributed to the stalemate. Some of his weaknesses were not his fault: the assumption that the King was in command meant that the Royalists never achieved a unified command structure and Rupert was left arguing with native English commanders from a problematic position of far greater experience, but far fewer years. He also had the misfortune of serving a man who assumed command from a position of relative ignorance, which contributed to the disastrous loss at Marston Moor, as did conflict with Newcastle. Even when appointed General of the army in 1644, Rupert struggled to exert control, too often antagonising members of the peerage. After the loss of Bristol in 1644 (see Lynch 2009 for a discussion as to whether it could

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have been held), Charles dismissed him from his service and command. He crossed England to speak with the King and re-entered his service in time for the final defence of Oxford. After the first war he went abroad, returning briefly to serve in the Royalist navy in the Second Civil War in 1648 and organised a campaign of piracy against the Commonwealth. The darker side of Prince Rupert was that he brought with him the customs and practices of the Continental Thirty Years’ Wars of which he was a veteran. In 1643 in Birmingham, a key arms-producing town, Rupert faced allegations of wilfully burning the town to the ground. Shortly afterwards Rupert attempted to take the town of Lichfield, whose garrison had executed Royalist prisoners, angrily promising to kill all the soldiers inside. Only the urgent call for assistance from the King prevented him from doing so, forcing him to agree to more lenient terms in exchange for a prompt surrender. In Bolton, in 1644 it was alleged that up to 1600 defenders and inhabitants of Bolton were slaughtered when he sacked the resistant town after a rapid attack which was not preceded by the parleys which were common in sieges. Fighting took place in the town, and the Royalist troops were allowed plunder. The result is a divided picture of Rupert. Royalist authors such as Charlotte M. Yonge dealt with this by presenting iconoclasm as a more serious sin than rape (not called that of course). Dora McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell (1897) ignores it, portraying Rupert as the epitome of all things desirable. Parliamentarian Miriam Cromwell agrees to take a message from a wounded soldier to the Prince. She meets Prince Rupert, falls in love with him, and is protected by him. She sees the falling out of Rupert and the King but her loyalty is vested in the Prince not the Monarch: she has not actually changed sides. In the end she is killed by a bullet meant for Prince Rupert, when she flies (with one of her suitors) to warn him of an assassination attempt. But others are torn and try to sift through the complexities of the man. Herbert Hayens’ For Rupert, and the King (1910) focuses on personal loyalty to Rupert rather than to the Royalist cause. The young Sir Ralph Clifton serves with Rupert throughout much of the war and concludes, ‘I have heard him called mad, wild, rash, insolent, haughty and overbearing; but to me he was a very pleasant, gallant gentleman’ (Ch. 3). When discussing the King’s dispossession once more the loyalty is to Rupert: ‘there was no gainsaying the fact that he had dealt harshly and unjustly with Rupert’ (Ch. 25). He is all too willing to excuse Rupert’s lack of control over his men. Elizabeth Rundle Charles

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didn’t try: ‘The ruins Prince Rupert’s troops wrought were in poor men’s homes’ (The Draytons and the Davenants, Ch. 29). ‘The problem of Rupert’ to Royalist writers is perhaps best expressed in Frank Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964). In this Margaret’s eldest brother is for Parliament and her middle brother for the King. Neither brothers care about her or the house but see it as a resource. Margaret at home clings first to romance taking Harry’s side that Parliament is a rabble. Her hero is Prince Rupert. But little bit by little bit, she loses faith. First she hears of his attacks on Birmingham, on Leicester and Lichfield, and then she has his officers (and her brothers’ friends) quartered on Lallows. Their appalling behaviour leads her to fall rapidly out of love with the idea of Rupert and Cavalier gallantry. Harry Furness in Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883) follows a similar if more manly trajectory. Harry comes to serve under Prince Rupert and increasingly sees his recklessness and unreliability as problems. Royalist heroes seem to fallout of love with their role models. We turn at last to the key player in the war, Charles I. The verdict of history has not been terribly kind to Charles, either as King or Commander. He was born a second son and was not educated to take the throne: disabled and frail—something that clearly aroused protective emotions in the eyes of those who met him—he was cultured, well educated in the arts and in philosophy. What he was not, was educated in politics, the art of negotiation, or in making himself well-liked (as opposed to admired). As King, Charles confused his father’s theories of divine right with an assumption that people would obey him unquestioningly and constructed what David Cressy explains as the notion of a sacred kingship in which the state of being a king, was as important as the actions of the King, and the role of the subject in subjection was similarly one to be cultivated and graced. The royal marriage was represented in masque and art as ‘a model of government: joined as one, the king and queen, the Carlomaria as one masque described them, ruled by love and example rather than by force’ (Sharpe 2013, 143). Even his horse riding was framed as a model of rulership, ‘praised for his capacity to tame horses with no bits’ in Van Dyck’s Charles on Horseback, ‘he rides at the trot with relaxed ease, against the backdrop of a tranquil sky and a peaceful landscape pacified by beneficent rule’ (Sharpe 2013, 145). Under Charles, kingship was exalted in song and poetry, preached four times a year in the pulpits, and demonstrated in personal rule which could not be challenged because, in this model, only the King could rightly understand

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the needs of the country (Cressy 2015, 84–124). Unfortunately there was little evidence of this divinely inspired judgement (Sharpe 1992). He was a very poor chooser of advisors, not because they were necessarily bad people, or even gave bad advice; unlike either Elizabeth I or James I, he did not comprehend that one’s advisers needed to be drawn from the parties which one wished to woo. This proved an issue in his command structure as well, in that the Royalists never succeeded in dealing with the internal rivalry between generals because so much influence went through Charles, who favoured family and intimates over expertise. Charles’ lack of understanding of political coalitions followed on from this: repeatedly Charles negotiated coalitions of convenience in which he presumed that his convenience was paramount. If the coalition agreement did not deliver he broke it. Ironically he was highly principled on what he believed to be his rights, his duties and his Christian beliefs and regarded these as non-negotiable with the result that even when losing and offered better terms than those available in 1642, he remained obdurate. The result was that his word became regarded as unreliable. Once the cabinet letters to Henrietta Maria were published, in which he declared that he did not need to keep a promise made to commoners, he was revealed as wholly untrustworthy in negotiation. The result is that with the exception of the group that concentrates on Charles I’s graciousness or holiness, Charles is as damned by his friends as by his enemies and this emerges very strongly in the fiction of all but the most extreme Royalist authors. The titular hero of James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie, or the Black Dragoons (1856), for example, is unhappy that the Scots gave over Charles I to the English, but it isn’t because he wishes he had been saved. ‘Far less dishonourable had it been to their memory and to us, had they tried their native prince by a court martial and shot him before their camp at Newcastle; but to yield him up to his judicial murderers—oh, it was a deed well worthy of Gillespie the ill-favoured!’ (Ch. 8). Thomas Fitzpatrick in The King of Claddagh (1894) can only come up with ‘the despotism of Charles Stuart was purer and noble than the despotism of the plebeian autocrat [Cromwell]… Charles was only acting up to his own principles. Oliver had trampled under foot the principles he professed when fighting against the king. Charles never preached liberty or outraged it as Oliver had done’ (Ch. 11). By the late nineteenth century it had become quite common to tell the story from the position of a ‘critical friend’. Henty’s Friends Though

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Divided (1883) tells the story from the point of view of Royalist Harry, but the authorial voice notes of Charles I, ‘Unhappily, his disposition was even more obstinate than that of his father. His training had been wholly bad, and he had inherited the pernicious ideas of his father in reference to the rights of kings’ (Ch. 20). Harry even goes so far as to compare Charles I unfavourably with Cromwell. ‘It is a thousand pities… that His Majesty the King has not somewhat of this man’s quality. This is a strong man, and a true… Were he made king tomorrow, as I hear he is like enough to be, he would trample upon the Parliament and despise its will infinitely more than any English king would ever have dared to do. But for all that he is a great man, honest, sincere, and above all, to be trusted. Who can say that for the Stuarts?’ (Ch. 26). This is an opinion reinforced by those who dislike the manner in which the King fights the war. In Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867): ‘we could not but deem a king who would indiscriminately ravage whole counties of his kingdom, must look on it as an alien territory already lost to the crown’ (Ch. 29). Emma Marshall, in Under Salisbury Spire (1894), a novel which tries very hard to hold neutral line, finds Charles a terrible disappointment. Magdalen reflects at the end of the novel, ‘I was loyal to the last King Charles of unhappy, though, as they say, blessed memory… But I am bound to say the provocations were great, and that, in the first days of rebellion, there was right on the side of the people. Later, it was different; when evil passions were let loose and the people struggling for supremacy’ (Ch. 13). The king is not even particularly prepossessing. Royalist Sophie in Keynes’ Honour the King (1914) is certainly not impressed, and the author adds, ‘To the judgement of posterity, the man, Charles Stuart, appears bigoted, vain, weak, and shifty. One can but suppose that to the eyes of those who fought and died for him. his personality was lost in that of his office’ (Ch. 7). In Barr’s Over the Border (1907) Lord Strafford tells his (fictional) illegitimate daughter Frances, ‘He is not, as you think selfish, but ever gives ear to the latest counsellor. He is weak and thinks himself strong; a most dangerous combination’ (Ch. 3). When Charles I is redeemed both in the seventeenth century and in later fiction, it is through his sanctity, as Charles the Martyr. Andrew Lacey notes that this was constructed at least in part even before the war in the art and masque that depicted him ‘as warrior king, loving husband and bringer of harmony and peace’ (2003, 7). When he was taken prisoner, the propaganda turned to depicting him as ‘a lonely victim,

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defeated, treated with contempt… a man of sensibility and resources’ (Sharpe 2013, 160). Two days after his death, the publication of the Eikon Basilike, claiming to be the last words of the King (but possibly written by John Gauden, Bishop of Worcester), and combining prayers urging the forgiveness of his executioners with a justification of Royalism, proved a publication hit, and were quickly followed by elegies and commemorative verses (Lacey 2001, 225–246). Edna Lyall’s hero In To Right the Wrong (1894) concludes presciently, ‘He [the King] died like a Christian and a gentleman, but his words on the scaffold declaring that the people ought not to have any share in the government, that is nothing pertaining to them proves that he could never have been anything but a despot… the future is with those who trust the people’ (Ch. 41). This notion of the beautiful holiness of the King gets extended backwards from the execution in the works of the twentieth century. In the 1930s (the period of most extreme Royalism) the trope of the protagonist meeting with Charles I arrives. The Charles we meet at this stage is overwhelmingly the sanctified Charles. So in Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) England is ‘The most beautiful country on God’s earth, ruled by the most gracious King on earth…’ (Ch. 1). When she meets the king he is utterly gracious about the rebels: ‘They are misled, poor souls, by a fanatic few. England’s King can bear no malice to England’s people’ (Ch. 4). The only one present who refuses to agree to mercy is the young Prince James and we are told that Elizabeth remembers this when, forty years later, he orders the execution of Monmouth (58). This is the nearest this book ever gets to criticism of the Stuarts. Charles forgives her Puritan romantic interest when the man changes sides at Elizabeth’s urging: ‘His Majesty hath been very gracious to me. … Now that I have met and conversed with him, I am amazed that ever took up arms against one so gracious and kingly. The blame of it must lie with my training’ (Ch. 10; Brent-Dyer was in some ways an educational radical. Over and over again the emphasis in her books is that good training overcomes inheritance.) The king is a little less forgiving in Constance Savery’s Green Emeralds for the King (1938). In this book all the Parliamentarians are much nicer than the Royalists whom Tosty is serving in his attempt to find the family emeralds. And the King (depicted in the illustration as unnaturally tall) is lofty in his sanctity and, oddly, in his refusal to exercise power outside the legitimate route, which he had been quite willing to do before the War.

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The need to sanctify the King leads to a return to the ‘ill counsel’ structure of the seventeenth century. In Ronald Welch’s rather neutral For the King (1969) Neil Carey (who is, like the King, a younger son, small, slight, bookish and overshadowed by a dashing brother), sees the King as ‘a red-faced little man in a rich, dark doublet…his prominent eyes under heavy lids’ (7). But is troupe of horse frankly repels him—‘An arrogant and aggressive collection of men, Neil thought; there would be no compromise or toleration from them’ (7)—and that his brother is among them only confirms Neil’s feelings. This is as negative a personal description of the King as we shall get from an essentially Royalist author. As with other major figures Charles disappears from the fiction, but he reappears in Michael Arnold’s Royalist Traitor’s Blood (2010) where he becomes ‘Charles Stuart, a small man exquisitely dressed, poised but comfortable in a large and ornate oaken chair, feet perched elegantly on a stool to disguise the fact that they would not reach the ground. A magician conjuring theories from a sphere of legitimacy beyond his audience and spinning word tricks out of his lace cuffs’ (55: no chapters); and in Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows (2017) ‘There was something stiff and careful about the way he moved… he was stiff altogether, as if ready to bristle at the world for noticing his littleness’ (Ch. 22). The sanctified king has entirely disappeared. Even the Royalist plotting to release him from captivity in the Isle of Wight, in Philippa Gregory’s Tidelands (2019) regard him as obdurate and foolish. Although most of these books are Royalist, the image they construct is overall unimpressive, and perhaps most crucially, with the exception of Wilton’s Traitor’s Field (2013) where we see the King in negotiations, they do not depict a king at the heart of his own campaign. Fiction has rendered Charles the figurehead he went to war to resist becoming. At the end, one is forced to feel a little sorry for Charles I, for when it comes to the fictional narratives of the war. This small, slight, reticent man is, like all the other characters in both real life and fiction, pushed to one side by Cromwell. There are twelve titles where the characters ‘meet’ Charles I. But at least twenty-five titles contain significant meetings with or descriptions of Cromwell and I have discarded many minor ones.

Cromwell Oliver Cromwell’s great-grandfather, a Welshman and brewer named Morgan ap Gwilym or Morgan Williams, is the source of the constant dismissal of him by contemporaries and many eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury writers as ‘a brewer’, which he never actually was. He was also

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descended from Katherine, the sister of Thomas Cromwell. He was the fifth of ten children but the only boy to survive. His family was modest gentry and well enough off to send him to Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, thus the absence of classical allusions in his writing is unusual. There is some doubt as to whether he attended Lincoln’s Inn or not (they have no record), but we know he returned home to farm when his father died. In 1628 he was elected MP for Huntingdon but sometime later that year he sought treatment for melancholia, for which there is evidence of recurrence, that fed into his Godly faith (Morrill 2007). In 1630 he was in dispute with some of the local gentry and lost his case with the Privy Council. He sold up in 1631 and moved to St. Ives, dropping social status to yeoman farmer as he did so. Sometime in the 1630s he had a spiritual conversion expressed in letters saturated with the biblical language that would characterise his communications and speeches over the next twenty years. In 1635, he inherited his uncle’s property in Ely and was restored to the upper levels of the gentry. He became an MP again in 1640 when the Long Parliament was called. As a member of the Long Parliament he was mostly notable for being its poorest and most poorly dressed member (Sir Richard Bulstrode, Memoirs, 1721). For his first two years there he was linked to the group of ‘Godly’ in the Lord and the Commons (Roberts 2009). One of his first acts had been to sponsor a petition for the release of John Lilburne. At this stage although he was a member of the trained bands he had no military experience, what he did bring was the experience of a hands-on farmer used to organising time imperative tasks. Kitson suggests this fed into the levels of organisation and planning he brought to his campaigns, from ensuring supplies (at a time when armies were often expected to be provisioned either by their Captains or by wherever they were quartered) to moving supplies and horses in advance of his troops (Kitson 2004). In the first year of the war Cromwell demonstrated that he was decisive and strategic: he raised a troop of cavalry in Cambridgeshire and blocked the shipment of silver plate from the university to the King. He arrived too late for Edgehill, but was appointed to the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester. By 1643 he was a colonel; by 1644 and Marston Moor he was a Lieutenant General. His success there sealed his reputation. But he was in dispute with Manchester by this time over tactics and Manchester’s preference for a negotiated settlement. Most famously, he was accused by Manchester of recruiting men of low birth, which resulted in perhaps the second most famous egalitarian declaration of the

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Civil War: ‘I would rather have a plain russet coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’. In response to the failure to capitalise on Marston Moor, Parliament passed the Self-denying Ordinance which removed Peers and MPs from the army. Cromwell was exempt and under Thomas Fairfax was put in charge of the ‘new modelled army’ or as we have come to know it the New Model Army. As Lieutenant General of Horse he introduced new close riding tactics, but he was best known for his rigid command over his men and his talent for logistics. At Naseby the New Model destroyed the Royalists. In 1647 Cornet Joyce took the imprisoned King from the hands of Parliament into those of the Army, allowing Cromwell and Breton to present him with the Heads of Proposals which of course the King declined. This attempt to negotiate contributed to Leveller unrest and the New Model Army’s radicalisation. At the debates at Putney in Saffron Walden Cromwell acquitted himself well, and showed the first real signs of securing the army’s loyalty primary to himself. Then in 1648 during the Second Civil War, the army under Cromwell found itself facing in turn the Welsh, the Scots Engagers at Preston, and the clubmen of Cornwall. As Winston Churchill succinctly put it, ‘The army beat the lot’ (1956; 1974 edition 211). After a year of trying to negotiate with the King a segment of Parliament and most of the army had had enough. Cromwell was absent in the North in December 1648 during Pride’s Purge, but he was there when the Commons succeeded in securing a vote for a trial. Cromwell was certainly involved in the selecting of judges (many of whom, including Fairfax, recused themselves) and he is known to have coordinated the signing of the execution warrant although as the testimonies are from the Restoration, some of the more vivid ones which depict him flicking ink at people are probably fictional. By the end of 1649, Cromwell was the most important leader of the new Protectorate, but it is important to realise that this may have been less to do with his own advancement, than it was due to the death or retirement of other potential candidates: Hampden (in battle), Pym the leader of Parliament (cancer) and Ireton (in Ireland, typhoid). Manchester was discredited. Fairfax withdrew after the trial. Cromwell emerged as the leader in part because he was the last man standing. Contributing to it however was Royalist propaganda. There is comparatively little Parliamentarian imagery at this stage that publicises

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him (Knoppers 2000, 16). From 1647 onwards Knoppers suggests that Cromwell was the focus of Royalist satire: ‘rather than simply including him as only one target among many, such texts began increasingly to single Cromwell out’ (Knoppers, 15). Knoppers suggests that it was in part the Royalists who brought Cromwell to prominence in their hatred of him, so that to Parliamentarians, Fairfax is still more important. After the execution Cromwell tried to organise the Independent faction in parliament but it was too fractured. His very attempts allowed both Levellers and Royalists to depict Cromwell as duplicitous and ambitious, and to undermine the construction of an ideology of Republic (Knoppers, 19). These two qualities are common in the fiction. Cromwell tried to support the army and its aspirations but in 1649 was forced to act put down a mutiny, put down at Burford. In addition he was sent to Ireland in 1649 by Parliament to deal with the Royalist and Irish rebellion there and tarnished his reputation when he allowed his troops free rein at Drogheda and Wexford: the result of the two towns’ refusals to surrender (Ó Siochrú 2008; Reilly 1999), and Cromwell’s expressed belief that the Irish were barbarians (see chapter 9 for a detailed discussion). In May 1650 he was recalled to prevent the Scottish invasion of England which led in turn to the English invasion of Scotland, English victory at the Battle of Dunbar, and finally the decisive defeat of Royalism at Worcester in 1651. On his return Cromwell tried to galvanise a reluctant Rump Parliament to call a new election. It is still unclear precisely what happened, there is some evidence that Cromwell may have been precipitate, but in April 1653 Cromwell dissolved the Rump. This was replaced by a selection of 140 members, selected by the Officers in Council, only 18 of whom has sat in the Rump (Woolrych 1982, 171) and known as Barebones’s Parliament after one of its members, Nicholas Barebon, but it ran into trouble when the members felt they had been overtaken by revolutionary Fifth Monarchists (who believed the end of the world was imminent). John Lambert (a General and assumed by some to be Cromwell’s successor) put forward the Instrument of Government, under which Cromwell ruled until 1658, first through the Major-Generals (1655–1657) and later through county committees. Despite the popular notion of the rule as tyrannical, most modern historians agree that the social order remained relatively untouched (Hill 1970; Smith 2003). Cromwell died in 1658, leaving the Protectorate to his elder son Richard (rather than the army’s choice, Henry; or the other popular

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choice, John Lambert). The dissension Cromwell had suppressed quickly revived with the result that while a restoration may not have been the most popular choice, it was the only one around which there formed a meaningful coalition. There was a massive sea-change in the construction of Cromwell in the mid-nineteenth century, from a man ugly and harsh, to one increasingly viewed with sympathy, and admired by both friends and enemies: this trajectory—with the exception that Cromwell’s intense religious engagement remains invisible to the reader—is followed faithfully in the fiction. We kick off with the traducing of Cromwell very early, in Walter Scott’s Woodstock (1826). Cromwell, leader of men, who ended up as ruler of three kingdoms was, apparently, ‘perhaps, the most unintelligible speaker that has ever perplexed an audience. It has long been said by the historian, that a collection of the Protector’s speeches would make, with a few exceptions, the most nonsensical book in the world’ (Ch. 8). Similarly he could not be taken out in public. ‘His demeanour was so blunt as sometimes might be termed clownish, yet there was in his language and manner a force and energy corresponding to his character, which impressed awe, if it did not impose respect’ (Ch. 8). But also note the reluctant, oh so very reluctant, acceptance that there had to be something about the man. That reluctant admiration crops up again and again. In the same year, in Horace Smith’s Brambletye (1826), this most Royalist of texts, Cromwell is ‘a canting Roundhead-brewer of Huntingdon—for so the Royalists delighted to call him, though there was no authority for the averment, and no disgrace in it if true…’ (Ch. 4). In 1838, Henry William Herbert, in Cromwell: An Historical Novel still reproduces the description of the ugly, harsh voiced Cromwell, even while producing a romanticised version of Cromwell the hero (particularly at Marston Moor, end of volume 1). In James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie (1856) the hero can be a Royalist and still admire a man who ‘rigidly commanded his soldiers to abstain from all violence and plunder in and around the capital; and it is to the honour of the English army that he was implicitly obeyed’ (Ch. 35). Yet the more that was known about Cromwell, the more vicious some of the attacks became. Cromwell became the bogeyman in much proRoyalist fiction, often figured as more important than he was during the first stages of the war, and configured as almost overwhelming figure of virulent majesty. The result is an astonishing confusion of reputation

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and image through which the reader must sift. From W. H. Ainsworth’s Boscobel: or The Royal Oak (1872) we get a physical description—‘a large, ill-formed red nose… a stout ungainly figure’ and yet ‘he could put off this morose and repelling look when he pleased, and exchange it for one of rough good humour’. Courageous, crafty, ambitious, hypocritical, and almost a fatalist, cruel, unjust, and unrestrained by any moral principle, by the sole force of his indomitable will he overcame every obstacle, and reached the goal at which he aimed. His ambition being boundless, nothing less than sovereign power would satisfy him, though he affected to disdain the title of king, being perfectly aware that the Royalists would never accept a Regicide as kin … A profound dissembler, and fully capable of using religion as a mask, had it been needful to do so, it can scarcely be doubted that he was really religious; though few entirely believed in the sincerity of his religious professions. (Ch. 18)

The description is very similar to that in The Perfect Politician (anon. 1659), one of three near-contemporary biographies of Cromwell and much the most hostile (Gaunt 1996, 210). The visual image in particular lasts a long time. Despite being mostly a pro-Parliamentarian novel the Cromwell in Elizabeth Hope’s My Lady’s Bargain (1923) is an ugly fellow, his ‘naturally red complexion had assumed a purplish tinge, and the warts and pimples which disfigured it were more pronounced than ever; his corrugated brows were drawn together in an ominous frown, beneath which his eyes gleamed coldly at me’ (Ch. 12). Perhaps worse is the presentation of Cromwell as a hypocrite. Timothy Lang suggests that the historian Hume was partially responsible for this. For Hume Cromwell was the inevitable despot that was the end point of fanaticism, a hypocrite and a bundle of contradictions (1995, 11). Mrs Frank Cooper, in Hide and Seek (1881), describes Cromwell’s and Ireton’s positions on the Levellers thus: ‘finding that the levelling principles were spreading on all sides, they pretended to be converted, confessed the error of their ways in having opposed the sect before the whole army, delivered extemporary prayers of the of a most blasphemous description and finally declared themselves willing to use their utmost power to obtain the execution of the king and, if possible, the extermination of the whole nobility’ (Ch. 4).

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Yet by the 1880s Cromwell’s image was receiving a brush-up. Royalist texts began to present him in a favourable light and it becomes relatively common for Royalist protagonists to meet Cromwell and admire him. This from Henty, Friends Though Divided: ‘the charges of hypocrisy which have been brought against him, are at least proved untrue. He was a man of convictions as earnest as those of the King himself and as firmly resolved to over-ride the authority of Parliament, when the Parliament withstood him’ (Ch. 13). Everett-Green’s After Worcester (1901) offers this depiction of the Cromwell who arrives in search of Charles II: ‘The strong-built, stalwart figure, clad in semi-military dress, with no adornment save the few military accoutrements without which he seldom stirred, the bullet head with its straight hair, the plain features, and that great red nose (so mercilessly lampooned by Cavaliers), but that extraordinary power in the eyes and in the whole expression which caused men to forget the plainness in wonder at the immense personality of the man’ (Ch. 20). We are by this time well into the cult of the Great Man. Meetings with Cromwell increasingly depict him as incredibly wise. In Arthur Paterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1898) the hero is a cornet in Cromwell’s regiment, and there falls in love with Cromwell’s (fictional) niece and admires Cromwell from afar (until breaking with him over the matter of religion). ‘He had pictured to himself these two years what his father’s old friend would be like, and had always seen a tall, dignified person, a man who in manner and speech would be cold, formal, with the high-crowned hat and closelycut hair already affected by Puritans of the stricter sort.. [but] … he was broad, massive and strong. His lips were full, his eyes steel-grey, very large and depletes, his nose heavy, his chin long and deep—an ugly face, yet remarkable even at first glance by reason of its power and dignity of expression’ (Ch. 3). In Everett-Green’s After Worcester (1901) Cromwell listens to his mother who ‘would fain live to see my son’s name revered as that of a just and merciful man rather than that of a stern and bloody tyrant’ (Ch. 20) and pardons the two young men who helped Charles II to escape. In J. Wesley Hart’s In the Iron Time (1908), when Cromwell meets the Royalist heroine (betrothed to one of his officers) ‘Oliver looked at her for a while before answering, and as he did so the masterful look in his eye changed to one of fatherly regard’ (Ch. 28). Cromwell the soldier is relatively easy to admire, if one is not Irish. Cromwell the Lord Protector is harder to argue for. At the end of Lyall’s

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To Right the Wrong (1894) Joscelyn, an old man in the 1690s, defends Cromwell: ‘for a desperate disease he used a desperate remedy’ (Ch. 41). ‘I cannot… deem that men like Cromwell and Ireton, Bradshaw and Hutchinson, were “cruel and bloody men”. … “sons of Belial”…For stealing a sheep we hang a starving man. Is not the tyrant who steals the just rights of Englishmen more blameworthy?’ (Ch 41). Hope’s My Lady’s Bargain (1923), a pro-Parliament book set in the early days of the Commonwealth, however, depicts Cromwell as harsh and unjust. When Peter Williams helps his wife to escape with her not-dead-yet husband, Cromwell throws him into prison in place of the man, Lord Killigrew. This Cromwell is a complex man. Peter notes ‘I found it difficult to connect this stern, rock-like figure with the man who had a few moments before been lolling ungaintily upon the couch, throwing pillows at his subordinate’. A scene clearly taken from the accounts of Cromwell just prior to the trial of Charles I (Ch. 6). ‘The Protector was reputed to be a man of violent temper… it was whispered abroad that his Highness made no attempt to control his wrath, and was indeed beside himself with fearful passion’ (Ch. 12). Yet he had the judgement of Solomon, and was a man of great empathy ‘It spoke volumes for Cromwell’s capacity for understanding men of this genus and entering into their feelings, that he listened attentively and with quite a serious face to the fellow’s confused utterings’ (Ch. 12). By the mid-1950s the awareness of a polysemic Cromwell had entered into the fiction. In Leslie Turner White’s The Highland Hawk (1953) David, bastard son of a laird and out to see what he can achieve, finds himself trying to sort out what he thinks he knows about Cromwell. He ‘was a back-biting mongrel peasant; a dull-witted country bumpkin’, but ‘his dogged cross-bench intelligence and passionate sincerity had precipitated him to the heights of the new government’. Royalists said he was ‘a harsh, stiff necked, unsmiling Puritan’, and Puritans ‘charged him with having spent his early life in such dissolute pursuits as gaming and good-fellowship…’ (Ch. 12). Similarly in the very pro-Catholic, proRoyalist Dark Stranger by Dorothy Charques (1956), Dame Alys says of Cromwell, ‘His is an infectious greatness. Sick or well, he appears able to conjure up men like himself’ (Ch. 10), which is an interesting way of putting it, and he is considered to be a suitable target for witchcraft because he has ‘an inner self which we can influence, of which he is tormentingly aware’ (Ch. 92).

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Cromwell along with others subsequently disappears as the overwhelming Great Man. There are no appearances between 1965 (the last is in the Beattys’ Campion Towers ) and 2009. In Elizabeth Gibson’s Sons and Brothers (1988) he is in the background: the Royalist cloth merchants and tailors who are the main characters of this book, lament that ‘once so plain in russets and homespuns, [he] now affected the dress of French courtiers and smiled upon his daughters deckled like princesses in silken finery’ (Part 3, Ch. 1). Cromwell both betrays his class origins (in both senses) and the English wool industry. When Cromwell reappears on the scene, in Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) he is one leader among many, and in Tyler’s A Cruel Necessity (2015), set in the Protectorate, he is a politician not a general. This is a Cromwell far more integrated into his context and far more a part of events than bestriding them. Yet we have one more, quite recent outing for Cromwell as vicious and murderous dictator in Margaret Evans, A Farthing for Oxforde (2018), the female protagonist has a ‘Meeting Cromwell on the road to Bridgewater 1645’ to sue for her husband’s life; this Cromwell sneers at her husband for cowardice, is near accused of abusing young women, takes her estate as ransom for her husband, and declares he shot her husband in cold blood. When a sergeant reveals her husband was actually shot by accident, Cromwell shoots the sergeant dead at the table. Even given that the protagonist is a Royalist, this is extreme.

The Great Battles The English Civil Wars were fought in village lane skirmishes, in battles for bridges, towers, castles so small that they barely qualify as such and houses so large that they seemed like castles. This is not reflected in these books. Books in the collection range widely across England, Scotland and Ireland (Wales is mostly omitted) and as the nineteenth century threw up a great deal of antiquarian local history it similarly threw up fiction based on local history, such as Du Maurier’s Cornwall-based The King’s General (1946) or Winifred Cawley’s Newcastle-based Down the Long Stairs (1964). Elizabeth Gibson’s Sons and Brothers (1988) concerns itself with the Kent rebellions. But despite this is it relatively predictable which battles will crop up in the fiction. The three key battles are Edgehill (1642), Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645).

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Edgehill is often depicted in the fiction as the first engagement of the Civil War but this is not correct: on 23 August there was a battle at Southam, and on 23 September at Powick Bridge. Edgehill (23 October) was a serious confrontation for a number of reasons: it involved almost the entire armies of both sides, the Parliamentarians aiming to prevent the King reaching London, and everyone on both sides assumed the King would win (Jones 2017). Although the Royalists claimed victory, the Earl of Essex’s refusal to give way meant that the battle was fought to a draw. In a context in which the Royalists had assumed an easy victory, this was a blow to the morale of the Royalists. Their ‘gentlemen’ could not automatically ride roughshod over the middling men of Parliament (although the division was never that clear). This sense of a draw permeates the novels. Malcolm Wanklyn argues in his account of the battle (2006, 42– 56) that the strengths and weaknesses of the two forces were fully on display at Edgehill, above all Parliament’s ability to stand fast, to follow directions, and to regroup; and Rupert’s lack of control over his cavalry troops. Both regularly arise in the novels. The fighting of Edgehill as depicted in the novels varies. Defoe’s Cavalier is of course at Edgehill and is highly critical of the King’s preparation: the problem of ill-discipline is picked up over and over again. Disorderly on the field, they ‘committed great spoil among the country people’ off it (Part 2). That the king relied on volunteers who often ‘served at their own charge’ ‘and this obliged him to wink at their excursions upon the country’ (Part 2). Most of the nineteenth-century novels simply tell us it happened. In the twentieth century as the English Civil Wars became significant to arguments about expanding democracy and particularly in the midcentury it became important for authors to place their protagonists at the battles. Myles Delacourt, in Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923), is not only there, but significant, persuading his colonel that the troops are too inexperienced to manage ‘fire and wheel’ and that they should to stick to swords, in line with what we know of Essex’s choices in managing an inexperienced army (pp. 129–130). The description of the battle is vivid, mostly adhering to the consensus of bravery, instead of skill, but Essex is rather disparaged. Trease’s heroes in Silver Guard (1648) sneak out of college to be at Edgehill—or Bob does, for American Gervase merely chases after him, but finds himself sitting on a hillside chatting to Dr Harvey and the two princes, Charles and James, while Edgehill rages

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below. But in other novels the battle happens off-stage. It’s the protagonists’ fathers who fight at Edgehill in Sutcliff’s Simon (1953), Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964), and Burton’s Kate Rider (1974). Slowly the battle retreats from the fictional gaze. In Frederick Grice’s The Luckless Apple (1966) Martin at fifteen is told he is too young to fight—not of course true at the time but reflecting the retreat from the use of boy soldiers after the First World War—and instead watches from behind a hedge, and sees his master, who is very clearly intended as an Edmund Verney, charge into battle, ‘with no look of bravado but rather a strange, doomed expression’ (Ch. 11), and be killed. Martin stands watch over his body all night and eventually helps his father to ensure their Lord is buried in the nearby family vault (Ch. 11). The novel ends shortly after. In the most recent texts Edgehill is at the centre again in the military author Michael Arnold’s Traitor’s Field (2010) and Jemahl Evans’ The Last Roundhead (2015), but M. J. Logue’s novel The Red Horse (2015) begins after Edgehill, as the long slog of war begins: its significance is far more personal in that it is there that Hollie Babbitt loses his best friend and must begin reconstructing his life. Marston Moor (1644) should have been a Royalist victory. York was under siege by Lord Fairfax, the Earl of Manchester and the Scottish Covenanters under the Earl of Leven, and defended by the Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle. The King directed Rupert to march through the north-west and relieve the city. The result was one of the largest battles of the war. At first Rupert outmanoeuvred the Parliamentarians and was able to relieve the city, but despite the advice of Newcastle and Lord Eythin, who knew they were outnumbered, he decided to seek a pitched battle and advanced at a time when the Parliamentarians had been planning a retreat. The Parliamentarian army recalled its troops from Tadcaster, and during the day both sides assembled their forces on the moor. Meanwhile Newcastle’s troops in York refused to fight unless they received back pay and Newcastle arrived only with his gentlemen volunteers, the White Lambs. Towards evening (it was the height of summer) the Parliamentarians and Covenanters launched an attack. The fighting lasted into the night, and was conducted by the end under a full harvest moon. The Parliamentarian Cavalry under Cromwell, assisted by Leven’s infantry, annihilated the Royalists. Over 4000 Royalists were killed. Perhaps most significant in terms of morale, Newcastle’s foot, the Whitecoats, gathered for a lastditch stand. Refusing quarter they repulsed constant cavalry charges until

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infantry and Colonel Hugh Fraser’s dragoons were brought up to break their formation with musket fire. The last thirty survivors finally surrendered. In a period where to surrender often left troops to regroup (if stripped of arms) the decision to fight on was an idiotic choice and one which seriously weakened the Royalist army. Newcastle left for Antwerp. Rupert had lost not only his men, but also his white poodle which had become a mascot so significant that Parliamentarian propaganda figured it as a demon (Stoyle 2011; fictionalised in the Beattys’ Witch Dog, 1968) tries to capture the significance of this dog. Rupert also lost his seniority and was increasingly marginalised by the King’s advisors. It also proved to be the high point of the Parliamentarian–Covenanter alliance which was soon fragmenting. Yet there are few fictions set at Marston Moor, perhaps because it was a Royalist defeat. In Margaret Irwin’s The Proud Servant (1934) Montrose considered the motives for Rupert’s decision to fight, rather than to wait for reinforcements, and discovers that it was because he was threatened by his uncle with the taint of cowardice: ‘The heavy-lidded, lustrous eyes were raised to his,—the eyes of a dog, of a deer, eyes like his uncle, King Charles. In them, as in his uncle’s, lay the doom of his family,—childishly personal and too much concerned with family matters’ (Book 3, Ch. 2). Jane Lane prefers to blame Rupert: ‘The wound Rupert’s pride had suffered at Marston Moor was so severe that he must pretend to himself that it was inflicted by an individual, and soothe it with hope of revenge… Since that day Cromwell had been growing into the sort of legend embodied hitherto by Rupert. And if there was one thing Rupert could not bear it was a rival’ (The Call of Trumpets, 1977, Ch. 5). The significance of the battle is such in Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) that one of the characters is taken ill and turns to her bed while the paterfamilias dies shortly thereafter, of, it is implied, grief. The only text to identify strongly with this battle is Church’s Penruddock of the White Lambs (1902) in which the hero is one of Newcastle’s surviving officers who follows him into exile. The last of the three well known battles is Naseby, fought in June 1645, between the main army of Charles I and the Parliamentarian New Model army commanded by Fairfax. It began with the Royalists in retreat from the Parliamentarian town of Leicester (which they had sacked). Fairfax left off the siege of Oxford (the Royalist capital) and set off to pursue the Royalist army. The King, faced with retreating North into what was increasingly enemy territory, decided to give battle: it was a

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disaster for him. The Royalists lost 6000 out of over 7000 men. Charles lost his infantry, officers, artillery and stores. Crucially he lost his baggage train which contained the letters to Henrietta which were so incriminating, indicating his intention of recruiting Irish Catholics and foreign mercenaries. A number of the heroes of Royalist novels feel betrayed not by the contents of the King’s cabinet but by the publication of its contents; Harry in Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883), for example. However, by the Edwardian period the need to keep one’s word and to play fair was the very definition of an English gentleman, and the King’s behaviour and the contents of his letters felt increasingly out of line with this code. One of the reasons why Hayens’ For Rupert and the King (1910) often feels as if leans to Parliament despite its stated loyalties is that Ralph’s loyalty is strained by the contents of the letters. Similarly, Sophie in Keynes’ To Honour the King (1914) is disillusioned: her Maurice, a very clear facsimile of Rupert’s brother Maurice, fights with Newcastle at Naseby and is in despair when Newcastle decides to quit (Ch. 19). Eventually, like Rupert, he ends up on the wrong side of the King and is banished, choosing to go abroad as a mercenary, taking Sophie (Ch. 29). This may be why the ambivalent Neil Carey is absent from Naseby, although his older brother is killed there (Welch, For the King, 1969). But this and the return of a servant in Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012) do give us a sense of the desolation and abandonment of hope felt by the Royalists. Naseby was the occasion of one of only two major Parliamentarian atrocities in this first war. The attack on the baggage train led to the massacre of around one thousand women. It is very unclear from sources even today whether this was because the predominantly Welsh women were assumed to be Irish against whom Parliament had ordered no quarter (Singleton 2013, 21) or because the women seem to have defended themselves with knives, but the result was death on a massive scale. Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937) (Ch. 6) describes it in great detail, having skimmed over Royalist massacres and attacks on civilians; but it is mostly ignored by fiction until Ann Turnbull’s Alice in Love and War (2009). Abandoned by her Royalist lover, Alice is sheltered by the Welsh women of the baggage train, and when they are attacked at Naseby, their fate is her fate. She survives in a ditch to rescue a friend’s new-born infant. The scene is detailed, brutal and yet told without bias to one side or another. In this book sides are more about civilian and army, than army versus army.

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Sieges lack the drama of battles. There is a lot of sitting around. But around a third of the military actions in the Civil War were sieges, many of them very dramatic and the events of those sieges have formed the backdrop for several stories. The main point of garrisons is to block key strategic points to the enemy and to control essential resources (guns, leather, wool, salt, etc.) They also serve as bases for intelligence, supply and revenue gathering. The influence of a garrison could be felt over a twenty-mile radius, both in terms of the authority it wielded and its cost to the local population, the latter dramatised in Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne (1988) where the very point of the siege of the house is to keep a Parliamentarian community near Taunton under control. Although both sides maintained garrisons, Parliament had less need of garrisons in London or the East where support was strong, but relatively few Royalist territories were isolated from the enemy in such a way. Thus the Royalists had to maintain these garrisons in order to retain hold on areas outside the main areas of fighting in places such as Cornwall, Herefordshire and in the much disputed Midlands. But garrisons were both places of strength, and a weakness: they locked down troops and rendered them less mobile. If they were in enemy territory they could be traps (Barratt 2000, 161–177). Interestingly Newark, which was the site of three sieges, has not been fictionalised. Neither has Bristol, although it is mentioned in Keynes, Honour the King and Lane’s The Call of Trumpets (1977), in both cases focusing on the loss of Bristol by Prince Rupert (Lynch 2009). Basing House, the victim of three sieges and finally razed to the ground, might have been expected to receive more than a mention—the events are almost ideal for treatment in a novel—but it appears nowhere, although it might well be the source of the atrocity which begins The Children of the New Forest. Chester, which fell in February 1646 and which in some ways is the conclusion of the war, barely rates a mention (Barratt 2003). We are left then with just six sieges which appear in fiction. The first is Lathom House, 1644–1645, which the Countess of Derby defended in the absence of her husband. Lane’s The Lady of the House (1953) goes into great detail to describe the experience of the (well-provisioned) siege and in particular the mechanics of the defense. D. W. Bradbridge’s Daniel Cheswis is sent to find the traitor who is sending Parliament plans into Lathom house in A Soldier of Substance (2014). The siege of Oxford (1645) appears in Church’s With the King at Oxford (1898) and Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) in which the main characters experience the

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deteriorating conditions of the town. Both give a sense of the claustrophobia and overcrowding, but neither is very concerned with the military experience. The same is true of Burton’s Kate Rider (1974): when Kate is trapped in Colchester, we hear little of the politics. Colchester was a parliamentarian town, occupied by retreating Royalists and although the Royalist propaganda emphasises the harmony between town and occupiers (Fitzgerald 2018, 4) the truth was a town held hostage. But we do also see how a town prepared for siege and the many hardships. The main focus of the book is on the starvation and the anger which was much recorded at the time. An anonymous diary of the siege records that the horseflesh ‘was attended with Gentlewomen in white-gownes & black hoods (maggots) so that they could not eate it’ (from The Moderate Intelligencer, 9 August 1648). Stella Riley, who writes lovers-divided romances which have once more become popular, sets the first of her Roundheads and Cavaliers sequence, A Splendid Defiance (2014), in the four-year siege of Banbury. Drogheda of course is one of the most famous sieges. It appears in all of the Irish titles, and it is here that we see what the end of a siege can look like where a town has refused to surrender. Henty’s Harry in Friends Though Divided (1883) compares it to the vicious fights he has seen in Scotland, where no quarter was given. But Church’s John Marmaduke (1897) is an apologia for Cromwell so that here the emphasis is on Drogheda as a revenge for the 1641 massacre of Dublin rather than the experience of the garrison, while Randall McDonnell’s When Cromwell Came to Drogheda (1906) is told from the point of view of survivors. But it is not until 2013, that there is another account, in Wilton’s Traitor’s Field, and by this time we have an author who is more interested in re-creation than in the politics of the siege. One reason why it is surprising that sieges have not received more attention in the fiction is the rise in local history of the war. There have always been local studies by antiquarians, but local history has been increasingly professionalised (see Richardson, The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects, 1997). Relatively little of this has made it into the fiction. One exception is the siege and concluding Battle of Nantwich, which is the background for Bainbridge’s Winter Siege (2013). This book faithfully replicates the latest research on the siege and on the concluding battle. But it is noticeable that it is the battle that receives the attention on web sites, and rarely the siege.

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Works Cited Secondary Sources Barratt, John. Cavaliers: The Royalist Army at War, 1642–1646. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000. Print. ———. The Great Siege of Chester. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2003. Print. ———. Cavalier Generals: King Charles I and His Commanders in the English Civil War 1642–1646. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword, 2004. Print. Betts, Sarah. “Henrietta Maria, ‘Queen of Tears’? Picturing and Performing the Cavalier Queen.” Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Ed. Paranque, Estelle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 155–79. Print. Bradstock, Andrew, ed. Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Print. Churchill, Winston. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume 2, the New World. London: Cassell, 1956. Print. Cressy, David. Charles I and the People of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print. De Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Print. Farr, David. Ireton and the English Revolution. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006. Print. Fitzgerald, Jane. “Besieged: Civilian Communities’ Experiences of Sieges During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.” Durham Early Modern Studies Conference 2018: Authority, Gender and Social Relations, 2018. Print. Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell. Historical Association Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Print. Gregg, Pauline. Free-Born John: The Biography of John Lilburne. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. Print. Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970. Print. Hughes, Ann. Gender and the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Hutton, Ronald. The Royalist War Effort, 1642–1646. London and New York: Routledge, 1982. Print. Jones, Serena, ed. A New Way of Fighting: Professionalism in the English Civil War. Solihull, West Midlands: Helion, 2017. Print. Kitson, Frank. Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Print. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.

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Lacey, Andrew. “Elegies and Commemorative Verse in Honour of Charles the Martyr 1649–60.” The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I . Ed. Peacey, Jason. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 225–46. Print. ———. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003. Print. Lang, Timothy. The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Lynch, John. Bristol and the Civil War. Stroud: The History Press, 2009. Print. Morrill, John. Oliver Cromwell. Very Interesting People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print. Plowden, Alison. Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Print. Reilly, Tom. Cromwell. An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland. Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon, 1999. Print. Roberts, Stephen K. “‘One That Would Sit Well at the Mark’: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell, 1640–1642.” Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives. Ed. Little, Patrick. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I . New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 1992. Print. ———. Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England. London: Continuum, 2013. Print. Singleton, Charles. “Uncharitable Mischief”: Barbarity and Excess in the British Civil Wars. Oxford: The Pike and Shot Society, 2013. Print. Smith, David L., ed. Cromwell and the Interregnum. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print. Smith, Geoffrey Ridsdill and Margaret Toynbee. Ed. Peter Young. Leaders of the Civil Wars, 1642–1648. Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1977. Print. Spencer, Charles. Prince Rupert, the Last Cavalier. London: Orion, 2007. Print. Stoyle, Mark. The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011. Print. Wanklyn, Malcolm. Decisive Battles of the English Civil War. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books, 2006. Print. White, Michelle Anne. Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Woolrych, Austin. Commonwealth to Protectorate. New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print.

CHAPTER 6

Men and Women

I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else. —Letter from Cromwell to Sir William Spring, September 1643

The texts discussed in this book rely both for their plots, and for generating sympathy for a character, on a construction of gendered behaviour that simultaneously tries to grasp at historicity and attempts to appeal to the gender conventions of the contemporary reader. It is a doubled construction of gender. This is further complicated because the English Civil War itself challenged gender roles. Jerome De Groot in Royalist Identities (2004) argues that the ‘challenge to the structured models of language [of the Civil War] was mapped onto all facets of society: sexual identity, religious practice, education, gender organization’ (5) but that this offered different challenges to Parliamentarian/Puritan identities than it did to Royalist/Anglican identities. Just as the collapse of a belief that the King was father and husband of the nation challenged family structure, so too did the changing demands placed on men and women alter how their roles were understood, sometimes radically, sometimes intensifying already core beliefs. The tradition that it was family construction that brought adulthood to both men and women—problematic in a world in which around a fifth of adults did not marry and remained under

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the control of masters (Hughes 2012a, 19)—was undermined as military success and promotion became an alternate route to adulthood and status.

Men Royalist men fixed their gendered identity in many things but perhaps most memorably in their appearance. Jerome De Groot argues ‘They tied the physical body of the wearer to a set of principles and loyalties’ (2004, 101). Ornaments on the hat signified allegiance and could offer a challenge to Parliament. Long hair, in a poem allegedly written to the Queen by the King, becomes an identification with the Israelite’s champion, Samson; ‘to be a Doilila & betray/my strength unto their uncircumcised sway’ (101), while on the other side William Prynne had in 1628 railed against ‘Effeminate, Proud, Luscious, Exorbitant, and Fantastique Haires, or Lockes’ (102). Beards too acquired symbolic weight. ‘Roundheads’ wore their beards clipped or went clean shaven, in a mode that seemed to their opponents smooth and boyish (apprentices were shorn) and hence effeminate, while the Royalist beard, not unlike that of France or Spain, appeared to Puritans as Popish. Clothing and appearance, De Groot argues, was a way of imposing structure on an unstable society (103). This visible identifier of masculinity is the easiest for writers and readers to reach for and crops up early and often and commonly with far greater rigidity than was truly customary. However, because for almost the entire period in which this collection of historical novels was written, long hair on men was considered effeminate, the emphasis is often turned to the rejection of the ‘parliamentarian’ look rather than the embrace of the visible Royalist masculinity. Thus Edward in Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest (1847) is reluctant to wear a hat that suggests he might be a Parliamentarian. Westerman’s The Young Cavalier (1911) makes many references to ‘crop-headed’ roundheads or less politely, ‘crop-headed hounds’. Brent-Dyer has her heroine Elizabeth (Elizabeth the Gallant, 1935) take on the clothes of masculinity and crop her hair in order to pass as a Parliamentarian boy. In Frederick Grice’s The Luckless Apple (1966) Martin’s father is actively hostile to the new fashions for men, arguing that his wife’s longing for ‘a length of such stuff as they wear’ is proof that men’s clothes are too finicky, and he wants men to wear their hair as he does; ‘they’d look a deal more manly’ although Grice does not come out and say

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‘short’, which would be inaccurate (Ch. 3). Grice’s book is essentially pro-Royalist, but he cannot avoid labelling the King effeminate: his hand is ‘small and delicate, not at all like the hand of a man’ and he has a ‘slight and womanly figure’ (Ch. 3). Nowhere does any Royalist hero actively celebrate his own lovelock (a long lock of hair worn over the left shoulder—the heart side), his beard, or the ribbons on his new coat; a Royalist who makes much of his trappings, such as Neil’s elder brother Denzil in Welch’s For the King, is a scoundrel. Denzil ends up dead. Neither do these Royalist heroes dance or swear, both attributes identified with the Royalists by both sides, one in approbation and another in disgust (Capp, 96). Again, only scoundrels do this, such as the Royalist brother in Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964). A complication is that the definition of swearing seems to have been shifting in this period with Puritans continuing to regard the name of the lord as sacred, while for Royalists the impact of this was diminishing and offensive terms were increasingly what we class as bodily vulgarities. Of course to Victorian, Edwardian, new Elizabethan and modern children’s editors, all have remained problematic, but John Somerville (1992) found a similar division in nineteenth-century texts where books by Oxford Movement authors tended to focus on inner spirituality, and Dissenting authors on redemptive piety which resulted in suppression of the flesh. This is reflected in what each regards as the sins of the other side. It’s only in the most recent texts in the collection—many self-published—that representative swearing is in use. What authors were happy to celebrate was recklessness in battle and personal bravery. Diane Purkiss argues that the battlefield itself was understood as a place of ‘of chaos, dissolution of boundaries…loss of control’ (2007, 223). The victor on the battlefield was one who could keep chaos at bay and hold the boundaries; reflected in the kind of maps popular in records of battles. The ability of a general to maintain order on and off the battlefield, to hold back the chaos, was intrinsically tied in with his masculinity. Thus in Wenceslaus Hollar’s mapping of the armies in the English Civil Wars, they appear in neat blocks (see A Comparison between the Bohemian and English Civil Wars in ‘Wenceslaus Hollar as a map maker’, Peter Barber, available at the British Library). The charges against Prince Rupert’s and Lord Goring’s troops of poor discipline was a comment on the masculine physical body of these two leaders. In contrast the solid quartermaster approach of both Thomas Fairfax and

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Oliver Cromwell (see Kitson) comes to reinforce their masculinity and perhaps to redefine masculinity for the period. Strikingly for those used to reading fiction about later wars, one element missing from almost all of these texts is the disabling effects of the war. Some of this may be because this was a war in which rudimentary medical treatment meant that death, rather than disability, was a much likelier outcome of injury than was a survivable disability. Sir Edmund Verney’s death for example is presumed—his body was not found—because the King’s standard was found held in his severed hand, a devastating injury that we do know can be recovered from. Some of it is lack of research: it is only in the twenty-first century that there has been extensive research into the medical facilities provided by both sides (and the particularly impressive organisation of Parliamentarian hospitals in London, von Arni 2001; Appleby and Hopper 2018). All of the fiction books in the collection assume nursing in homes, and by women whether family, camp followers or landladies. However Diane Purkiss, in a 1999 article, argues that there are wider issues relating to the construction of masculinity which precluded the discussion of disability. ‘Mutilation’ she argues, was understood as ‘loss of self, loss of image and propriety, and loss of ownership and control over appearance and the body’ (223). When Cromwell is writing to his brother-in-law about the death of his son in battle, he is keen to emphasise that despite the mutilation of amputation, the son maintained the cohesion of his faith and his sense of self. He maintains his masculine integrity (226–7). While some major characters die (best friends or brothers) and Elizabeth Gibson has a deaf protagonist (a disability she uses to double down on the theme of Puritan hypocrisy: his deafness means he can focus on what he believes are God’s words) not a single protagonist in the collection is left injured at the end of the war. On the whole, injuries happen to other people: to Simon and Kate’s fathers in Sutcliff’s Simon and Burton’s Kate Rider respectively; or to comrades of Hollie Babbitt in Logue’s Red Horse series (from 2015 onwards). Missing too are many descriptions of shell shock or trauma. In Lane’s The Lady of the House (1953) a woman goes mad from the sound of guns, and there is some understanding of post-war trauma in the work of Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894), while in Charles [Elfrida] Vipont’s Blow the Man Down (1939) there is some indication that several of the naval sailors, many of them ex-soldiers including the real life Thomas Lofting, are suffering

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from PTSD, but otherwise war is something that is left behind. Yet, as von Arni (2001), Purkiss (2007), Peters (2012) and Appleby and Hopper (2018) all note, PTSD was not unknown in the period. Thomas Mince was a shoemaker who served in Colonel Whalley’s regiment. Shortly after a dispute with his mother over money, he shot himself, reaching in his letter for a ‘pure and undefiled’ space (Purkiss, 230). The recklessness and untouchability which was identified with masculinity (Hughes 2012a, 95) was particularly identified with the Royalist man, a model epitomised by Prince Rupert, and it is irrelevant whether the authors are pro-Parliament or pro-Royalist. One way this was expressed was in hard drinking. Denzil, Neil Carey’s brother in Welch’s For the King or Margaret’s Royalist brother in Knight’s The Last of the Lallows are both part of a drinking culture that was often structured around ‘healths’: ‘often bawdy and blasphemous’, they were competitive rounds in which toasts were used to force drinking, force quarrels and construct a bond of solidarity between men (Capp, 162–163). In Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne, although the Royalist hero is moderate in his habits, his commander is another Lord Goring and his Lieutenant is a sot. What this does not reflect is the sincere religiosity of the Royalists, which Margaret Griffin finds in her studies of the King’s Orders for the army that were issued at the start of each campaign. Here there are stern injunctions against drinking and swearing and an attempt to impose the King’s personal morality on his troops (2004, xiii). Hardness and firmness of body were strongly linked with masculinity. As Kelly Boyd notes in her study of boys’ papers, most of the boys’ papers of the Edwardian and Victorian period also felt ‘war was just another arena of sport’ (Boyd, 97), and there was a congruency between the behaviour of Prince Rupert and the expectations of readers. Hugh Gwyeth, the Roundhead Cavalier of Dix’s novel (1899), switches his personal allegiance from his unresponsive (estranged) father to the demonstrative Prince Rupert and quickly comes to overlook his predations, ‘Hugh, after he had once got used to riding with his hand on his hilt through villages of hostile, scowling people, had no quarrel with the life’ (Ch. 9). Lane’s Nigel Fitzhead sees it as all part of the joy of life (Sir Devil-May-Care, 1937). The most adoring book of course is John and Patricia Beatty’s Witch Dog (1968) which, in being seen through the eyes of Rupert’s dog Boy, emphasises that this is the best of men. But the elevation of Rupert the to the epitome of cavalier masculinity is not completely unchallenged. Hayens’ For Rupert and the King (1910)

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should really be titled For Rupert! For in this classic ‘ride with’ novel, the king barely gets a look in. The book is an active defence of Rupert, but it is one that is very aware of his wider reputation. Ralph argues, ‘There are many who can find little good to say of Prince Rupert, and I have heard him called mad, wild, rash, insolent, haughty and overbearing; but to me he was a very pleasant, gallant gentleman’ (Ch. 3). But Hayens sets against the ravaging of Leicester, which Rupert failed to control; ‘I like not to dwell on the doings of that night’. This being a book for teens, rape is not mentioned but the troops ‘ransacked the houses…. and behaved in a fashion that made my cheeks flush with shame’ (Ch. 17), and he stands in front of one house to protect the girl child who stands outside it. Yet despite this, after the loss of Bristol Ralph remains convinced that the King ‘had dealt harshly and unjustly with Rupert’ (Ch. 25). Rupert is the beau ideal but there are many emulators in fiction as in life. The chivalric ideal Rupert was intended to represent fitted well with Victorian ideas of manliness which were still very much structured around the brave and honourable individual. Kelly Boyd, in Manliness and the Boys’ Story Papers (2003), outlines some very clear changes that take place between the 1850s and the 1930s. The Victorians, she argues, had very clear and rather monolithic attitudes to masculinity, which ‘sited it clearly as the prerogative of the elite… focused on individualism, arrogance, and mastery of the people around you’ (45). This of course matched the virtues and image embraced by the Royalists rather well and is very much reflected in the earlier books in the collection. Phillimore’s The King’s Namesake (1873), for example, argues for intrinsic honour which, as De Groot argues, is located in an unthinking loyalty and bravery. ‘Arthur Harcourt was a Royalist in the truest acception [sic] of the word: he would never have dreamed of questioning his sovereign’s command’ (10). Westerman’s The Young Cavalier (1911) unsurprisingly glorifies the type. It even crops up in a Parliamentarian book, Marshall’s The Torchbearers (1923), which exhibits the kind of ‘boyishness’ that Kidd (2004) describes, and the reliance on the fist over the sword which Boyd associates with popular boy’s fiction: when Myles challenges some card sharps, he ‘delivered a lightning like blow with his brawny right fist’ (Ch. 5). This kind of physical dash demonstrates to his Royalist friend that despite his Puritan leanings he is still a real man. As we move further into the twentieth century however, novelists increasingly understood the aristocratic model of manliness as damaging. An example is Softly’s Place Mill (1962), which is almost certainly based

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on the incident at Beeston Castle in 1643. The castle is on a very steep hill, with a deep rocky canyon between the gate house and the keep, and a deep and craggy moat between the keep and the open space. Despite this, on 13 December Captain Thomas Sandford and a mere eight soldiers entered at night (probably with inside help) and surprised the Parliamentary castle governor, Captain Thomas Steele, who promptly surrendered on the promise that he would be allowed to march out of the castle with honours. Once one has seen the castle, Parliament’s decision to shoot him for failure to hold it is more understandable. It took them two years and a year-long siege to retake it. In Place Mill, Nicholas abandons his family after he sees his father executed as a traitor for surrendering their house to Parliament. Nicholas’s determination to secure his family’s honour overtakes any sense of responsibility for that family, whom he treats with contempt. We have already discussed Knight’s The Last of the Lallows in which the Royalist brother is a gambler and whoremonger and destroyer of towns. In Du Maurier’s The King’s General, Sir Richard Grenville, a real person, is consciously the dark side of the Royalist model of masculinity. In Softly’s Plain Jane (1961) the cavalier is willing to sell his daughter. In Welch’s For the King (1969) the more fervently Royalist, the less manly. Robin in Alice in Love and War (Turnbull 2003) is a seducer of vulnerable young girls. The last of the good Royalist men is probably Mandeville in Trease’s Mandeville sequence, but these books are set before the Civil War (1980–1984). Not until the rise of the romance and military novels of the 2010s do we again see ‘good’ Royalists and this in a context in which the romantic protagonists are often wild cards and reprobates, or as in Joanna Hines’ The Cornish Girl (1994) or Phillipa Gregory’s Tidelands (2019) men willing to abandon their vows in private, but not to step up in public to defend the objects of their love. Lurking behind this is the King as the alternative model of Royalist masculinity. The King quite self-consciously represented in his person the ideal model of the paterfamilias; courtly, considerate and a caring father. This seems to have been a model of masculinity almost unrecognisable to Victorian and Edwardian writers as inherent to an aristocratic familial structure, for it emerges only in the texts of the twentieth century with Amias’s father in Sutcliff’s Simon (1953) and Neil Carey’s father in Welch’s For the King (1969). In the nineteenth-century fictional texts Royalist fathers are at worst strict tyrants; at best adored at a distance. Royalist men in fiction do not take the King as their model.

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One area that has a stronger influence on the portrayal of the manliness of Parliamentarians than of Royalists is in the region of religion. Perhaps the one element of the King’s masculine performance is the idea of religion as masculine. This is relatively rare in the nineteenth-century texts. However Claudia Nelson suggests it is complicated by the attraction of nineteenth-century feminists to the historical novel as a mode of modelling male (and female) behaviour (1999, 97) which we see in the work of such diverse authors as Yonge and Dix. Certainly the mode of manliness exhibited in Under the Storm (1887) and Merrylips (1906) was distinctly gentler, with the prize going to those who proved protective of the weak rather than those who exhibited martial dash. Nelson (1999) argues that feminist and evangelical authors most often used their fiction to construct an image of masculinity and cites Yonge (96) whose heroes always ‘act on sound Church of England principles’ (97) something we can see in Under the Storm even though Yonge must tangle her family structures and write a simpleton for a hero to do it. In part this is because of the normalising of Anglicanism in the form that Charles I and Laud wished to shape it: it is hard for modern authors and readers to recognise that Laudianism was a disruption to the habits of many. Certainly Yonge writes as if this was the long tradition of the church rather than a challenge to the puritan ascendancy. But for the Parliamentarian side, religion was to become a key element in the story of the Civil War, and text after text reflects this. Ralph Dangerfield in Patterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899) is the son of a Socinian (unitarian) and within the book, the willingness to interrogate one’s own religion is key to the definition of admirable masculinity, The protagonist of Lyall’s In Spite of All (1901) for example moves further and further towards the radical end of the spectrum and by the end of the book is inclining to Quakerism. Miles Delacourt in Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) is similarly engaged in argument which leads him to independence (and eventually to America). In Lindsay’s 1649, however, there is a balance to be struck, and the character who is most attracted to radical fervour while in the army is the one who finally loses most. The final alternative Royalist model is that of the bluff squire. Smith’s Brambletye (1826) is the first to use such a model. The father, Sir John, comes over as a bit of a buffoon who names his horses after Cavalier generals, and the stags after Parliamentarians. The novel includes a retelling of a real incident: Sir Richard Shuckburgh MP, out hunting, encountered the King preparing for battle and joined him at Edgehill

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the next day. This incident and Sir John’s behaviour is remodelled to become an unthinkingly loyal John Bull. But interestingly it is not the model his son Jocelyn will follow, after the war. ‘Birth and education had indeed made him in earlier life a staunch, not to say a bigoted and obstinate, Royalist; but observation and experience had done much to qualify, and perhaps to exalt, the feeling, by reducing it to the government of reason’. And when faced with a King he cannot admire he withdraws from the court (Vol. 1, Ch. 28). Jocelyn perhaps has too much of the Puritan and the Victorian about him already. A clearer model of this bluff unthinking squire is Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937). Nigel Fitzhead is a Cornish country squire who still operates a feudal agricultural system. He is almost tricked into loaning money to Parliament but is saved in time by the mercenary who has come drumming up support for the King. Fitzhead is a supporter because that’s what you do: fight for your king. He is completely uninterested in politics. He has a good war, except that he kills his own son, who is fighting for Parliament, in battle (his wife has accidentally given the impression the boy has already died, fighting for the King); he goes into exile with Prince Rupert and becomes a pirate; comes back and becomes a Hampstead Heath highwayman, discovers his milk-and-water wife died defending his home; and eventually is killed just after the Restoration by the mercenary he challenges to a fight. But he is also a roisterer who celebrates the sexual excesses of which the Cavaliers were accused, whether with willing partners, or thinly disguised rape. Jemahl Evans revives the type in his Last Roundhead series (2015) with the twist that Sir Blandford Candy is, while clearly the type of bluff squire who serves his king as a consequence of family ill-feeling, ends up fighting for, and becoming convinced by, Parliament. Kelly Boyd describes four types of Victorian manliness—the chivalric, the sentimental benevolent, the sturdy English and the moral (Boyd, 46). As we have seen, the chivalric suited the royalist fiction writers well. The rise of the sturdy meritocratic English manliness in the fiction fits ill with the Royalist cause. However Boyd argues that the sturdy Englishman dominates the story papers of the Edwardian period (46). This model of ‘sturdy masculinity’ combines a belief in intrinsic quality with a belief in meritocratic reward. Both Fairfax and Cromwell also modelled an approach to war that was at variance with that of the Royalists. In place of treating war as an extension of hunting—essentially a high-spirited game—both generals favoured solid planning and—as emphasised in the remodelling of the army in 1645—competence over birth and utility over

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honours (Kitson 2004). This model of warfare bore a greater resemblance to the team games beloved of the Edwardians and which they themselves saw as preparation to serve the empire, than did the model of the brave and reckless huntsman. Thus in the American Beulah Marie Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth: A RoundHead Cavalier (1899), it is precisely Hugh’s sturdiness that wins him support even while the Cavaliers around him swear to knock him into the shape that they prefer, and also that mode of masculinity that leads him to resent ‘a mere boy like Frank should be preferred over him, because his kinsfolk gave him their countenance!’ (Ch. 11) which of course further identifies him as a meritocratic and thus dangerous roundhead. Sturdy masculinity is a much better fit with the aspirations of proParliamentarian writers. ‘Masculinity was no longer seen as something that resided naturally only in one segment of the population’ and increasingly ‘including sacrificing one’s own goals for the sake of the community’ (Boyd, 71) Increasingly. Boyd argues, the ‘individualism and arrogance of earlier aristocratic heroes… was portrayed as anti-social and suspect’ (Boyd, 73). A similar pattern can be observed in the construction of American masculinity, as noted by Judy Hilkey, in Character is Capital: Success Manuals in Gilded Age America (1997). The mid-nineteenth century celebrated the moral nature of the boy: morality—Christian or Republican—was a thing to be aspired to in itself. By the later decades, character was a capital good that could be invested: material success was increasingly seen as a consequence of moral virtue, and a rather utilitarian approach to moral behaviour, in which church going led to a better class of network and hence employment, was expressed in the success manuals (Hilkey 1997, 130–134). Combined with this was a list of vices—‘drinking, smoking, gambling, and immoderate amusements’ (Hilkey, 136) calculated to make a Puritan minister delight. The model of masculinity in the success manuals accorded very well indeed with the Roundheads of the seventeenth century. We can see it particularly in those texts where a Parliamentary officer is an intervener in a situation, often within a Royalist context. In Henry Peart’s The Loyal Grenvilles (1958) the Puritan uncle of the Royalist boys is much the fairest person in the book. In Softly’s Plain Jane (1961) it is a Parliamentary officer and his family who rescue Jane and her brother from the Royalist conspiracy that uses Jane as a pawn. Hilkey argues that membership of the middle class, because it was so strongly linked to an ideology of what manly success looked like,

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‘put a man in a community of believers without sacrificing either individual prerogative or individual accountability’ (138); in other words, not unlike the internal dynamics reported of the New Model army in which individual motivation was key criterion for an officer (Kitson notes that a major problem for the Royalists was persuading officers to accept demotion when a company had to be reformed due to death or injury). A particularly good example of the model of Victorian or Edwardian manliness is Hamilton’s Captain John Lister (1906). Lister is sent to raise a militia in the fens, an area that is definitely against the King but not necessarily pro-parliament. He is sent as a representative of the new power both in his role but also in his person. He is there to model the new model. He wins people to his side through his use of tact, fact, and the use of local power networks. He is a representative and educator for ‘liberty’ and the model of the sturdy Englishman, even lecturing the queen on the kind of apolitical politics that is associated with the ‘sturdy Englishman’ type, in which the details of politics are subsumed into rhetoric. ‘When the windy controversies about doctrines and modes of worship are hushed, and our disputes about prerogative and privilege are forgotten, I think it will be seen that Liberty, everywhere else persecuted, found an asylum in England and a throne’ (Ch. 20). In the interwar years the growing role of school in boys lives intensified a focus on manliness within institutions (Boyd, 101). ‘Boys were not so much tamed as forced to re-examine their basic reasons for disruptive actions’ (Boyd, 108), ‘to be a part of modern society one must yield to certain dictates of that society’ (114). Boyd argues that increasingly we see the rise of the inspirational adult, in the boys’ papers this was often the radical teacher (106). It becomes a common thread in the Parliamentarian novels from the inter-war period onwards as male protagonists become more engaged with the army in which they serve. Some of this is because historians knew more about those armies, but it is noticeable that Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) and Lindsay’s 1649 (1938) are tales about soldiers learning to be part first of an army, and then of a constitutional republic, while in Trease’s The Grey Adventurer (1942) and Silver Guard (1948) it is a teacher. For Jerome De Groot, one of the key differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians can be expressed as a respective belief in a monosemic world of single truths, and single behaviours, contrasted with an increasingly discursive, polysemic understanding of events, interpretation and behaviour. In Royalist Identities he is primarily concerned with print

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culture and shows through an exploration of legal documents, pamphlets and new books the ways in which the Royalist press consistently emphasised obedience, to a single voice of authority and sought to maintain that through a consensus of opinion; ‘Royalist textuality… was predicated on the authority of the King’s word’ (31). We see De Groot’s description played out in many of the texts in which Royalist fathers in particular take centre stage. Whether in Smith’s Brambletye (1824), Phillimore’s The King’s Namesake (1873), or Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937), one characteristic of Royalist masculinity is the acceptance of a monosemic world view in which what is right just is. These are not the books in which boys and young men are expected to question and search for new ideas. In Softly’s A Stone in a Pool (1966) Stephen is led into trouble, and effectively ruins his life, at the say-so of his headmaster, here again standing in for the King. The line of authority replicates what is being fought for. Rare exceptions are Welch’s For the King (1969) and Burton’s Kate Rider (1974). In For the King Neil does actually have his doubts, and does weigh the ideas at stake, but he chooses to follow his father through loyalty and affection—precisely the Royalist identities that De Groot emphasises, and which cannot be challenged intellectually. His questions go unexpressed. Not dissimilarly in Kate Rider, it is the eldest son Adam’s unasked questions that lead him to fight for the king, and I would suggest that unasked is significant in both these books. Both Neil and Adam hold beliefs they have not tested in conversation. Books where boys and young men are depicted as coming to their opinions through question and conversation are overwhelmingly proParliament, from Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) through Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894), where young Jocelyn is the only one of his family with a critical mind, Patterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899) in which Ralph is a Socinian (a unitarian) through Dix’s The Making of Christopher Ferringham (1905) in which the monosemy of Ferringham’s experience is challenged when he is sent to Boston. In the work of Trease, the encouragement of questions by Dr. Pharoah in The Grey Adventurer (1942) is what gets the hero expelled from his school, while in Silver Guard (1948) Gervase—less political than his cousin Bob—is ejected from Oxford for challenging authority. Both sides recognise this pattern of behaviour: Royalists obey through loyalty, Parliamentarians because they have chosen which side to support. Even when the text itself is pro-King or at least pro-Church, this pattern holds fast, but is held up as a flaw. In Yonge’s Under the Storm (1887)

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Steadfast the monarchist has a simple unquestioning faith, while his eldest brother Jephthah is there as much to demonstrate the dangers of a critical mind as the hypocrisy of puritans and parliamentarians. For Jane Lane of course this is a given: the sons of Samuel Guffin in London Goes to Heaven (1947) are all guilty of challenging authority through questions, with the exception of the youngest who accepts the authority of the bible and follows the King. Or alternatively as in Peart’s The Loyal Grenvilles (1958), where the Royalist boys come to terms with their Puritan and Parliamentarian uncle because he explains the lines of authority to them, and they accede to this where they refused to accede to reason. The irony is that the novelists have got this the wrong way round. Similarly however, while many of the Puritan ministers in the more extreme books seem obdurate and monosemic as in Watson’s Lark (1964) it is common for them to be seen as the ultimate expression of too many questions, men who have come unhooked from their proper place in society by the denial of the monosemic conversation of society, as in Hearn’s The Merrybegot (2006) or Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012). The presentation of Quakers of course—almost entirely by non-Quaker authors—emphasises this. Emma Jacobs, in her thesis ‘Independent Men: Radical Manhood During the English Revolution’ (2017), argues that ‘radical manhood’ continually emphasised the independence of the individual man who was not a householder (the traditional definition of independence) or economically independent. Radicals came from those areas of life which were not considered independent: ‘all of the men under discussion were in some way dependent on others: the soldiers were dependent on wages, wages that were routinely in arrears. The Levellers constructed their unlawful imprisonment as a form of dependency. Winstanley depended on his father-in-law and his friends for subsistence, while the Quakers and the Ranters had to rely on charity or deception for food and lodgings’ (Jacobs 2017, 26). Thus they turned instead to a philosophy of internal, spiritual and intellectual independence. The three radical novels in the collection, Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) and Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2010), all reflect the concerns for independence and householder status which Jacobs outlines as so essential for independence. In Lindsay’s novel, Ralph Lydcott resolves his disappointment in Parliament by marrying back into the hierarchy and becoming his uncle’s successor but will sacrifice his intellectual independence in the process.

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Roger Lydcott will follow the Levellers and then the Diggers to preserve his spiritual independence but will lose any chance of economic independence. In Davis’ Rebels and Traitors Gideon Jukes is one of the returning soldiers who finds it hard to settle back into civilian life, but the traditional order of apprenticeship and journeymen, is preserved and he takes over his master’s print shop. It is his older brother who is sucked into the intellectual mayhem of the sects which emphasises a spiritual masculinity rather than a propertied one. Similarly in Bradshaw’s novels, for all the Levellers argue for a wider franchise, Lucy’s direct experience remains locked into a system of hierarchy in which her lover’s masculinity is in the end best defined by his (hitherto unknown) status as gentry. This sense of a balanced radicalism is taken up by post-war second world war authors, suspicious of enthusiasm. Trease’s boys in Silver Guard, for example, are drawn to Dr. Pharaoh but are not overtaken by his ideas as is their predecessor in The Grey Adventurer, and Simon in Sutcliff’s novel has no difficulty resisting the preaching of Zeal-for-theLord Relf. The sturdy Englishman is one who is not swayed by extremes. When in 2009, Alice, in Turnbull’s Alice in Love and War (2009), falls in love with a Parliamentarian soldier, he is the same kind of stalwart moderate that Softly has cast as rescuer in Plain Jane. This is a model of masculinity women can trust. In the twenty-first century a new version of masculinity had emerged. This was a resistant, roguish masculinity: represented on the Royalist side by the dispossessed highwayman (long a popular figure) but increasingly on the parliamentarian side by the likes of Sir Blandford Candy in Evans’ series and by the figure of the mercenary, as in Logue’s Hollie Babbit sequence. These are men to admire and to follow, but not to emulate. Those who do tend to end up dead and injured. It is a combination of the sturdy Englishman, and the country squire, mixed with a boyishness associated more with the traditional portrayal of the Cavalier. These are men whose Puritan allegiance is thin and often contextual. Candy fights for Parliament because his family is on the other side. Babbitt does so because that’s who hired him, becoming convinced of the cause during his service. Belief has disappeared from the foreground of Parliamentarian masculinity.

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Women Many of the novels are largely devoid of women, yet women’s activities in the war are central to the collection, sometimes in romances, but as the nineteenth century wore on, increasingly as present on battlefields, as spies, nurses, defenders of their castles and holders of the home front. Except for those novels written very specifically about the battlefield, few of the novels lack at least one female actor. War often brings to women new roles and new opportunities, but as is often the case, one side was better able to exploit that than the other. Jerome De Groot argues that in many ways Royalist women, and by extension their men, were trapped by the models they adhered to and by their desire to express through the behaviour of women their own loyalties and values. ‘Royalist women were [not supposed to be] actors but ideals, passive examples of obedience and constrained behaviour’ (De Groot 2004, 118). The uxorious marriage of Charles I provoked concerns for his masculinity. Henrietta’s dominance ‘unmanned and, by implication, unkinged her husband’ (Hughes 2012a, 119). The Royalist news-sheet Mercurius Aulicus attacked parliamentarians in part by attacking the behaviour of their women: Sir William Waller’s wife is attacked as an intellectual dominatrix who would set up a ‘Reformed Nunnery’ where one qualification is to have beaten one’s husband (Hughes 2012a, 118). But this created a problem for Royalists: how then to frame the active participation of women who defended their homes, raised money for the armies, or, as with Queen Henrietta Maria, otherwise engaged in political activity? Mary Verney noted that ‘their sex entitles them to many privileges’, one of which was being able to challenge courts and ministers within a framework of seeking mercy and support for their families (Hughes 2012b, 157–8): it was perfectly possible to defend Royalist women who resisted eviction, pled for mercy for their husbands, or represented them before the compounding courts. Although an account of a Parliamentarian wife, Swinfen’s This Rough Ocean is one of the only books to represent the Esther-like role Royalist women frequently took on during the war years and after. However it was not always that way round. Charlotte Young notes that there were a few cases in which it was the women who were delinquent and their menfolk who were excused responsibility (30). The model of a Puritan marriage was supposed to be—within certain strict bounds—more equal. Lucy Hutchinson in her memoirs talks

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intensely about the equality of intellect within a model of submission that characterised her marriage. This is rarely recognised in the fiction, where Pamela Belle’s characterisation of Puritan husbands as harsh, restrictive and wanting submissive wives is more typical (Wintercombe, 1988). Royalists regarded this more egalitarian model, in which the one unit of the husband and wife was intended to be consultative, and saw undue influence. The wife of Sir William Waller was seen as a ‘Mother Midnight’, a malign influence. So too was Anne Fairfax, who followed her husband to war. In a world where respectable women occupied interior space, stepping out of it was dangerous to one’s reputation (Hughes 2012a, 97). As Ann Hughes notes, ‘Women’s interventions in political or religious affairs attracted derision or hostility from some men, even as others took advantage of their initiatives’ (2012b, 156, 160). Women’s Petitions of the 1640s included petitions for relief, particularly over excise duty which affected the trades in food and small goods in which women were particularly active (2012a, 34). All were mocked. The women’s peace petitions of August 1643 attracted particular hostility, with accusations that Royalists were hiding their resistance behind skirts (Hughes 2012a, 57). It was also clear from the language of rejection that women were not welcome in the public domain. As Hughes summarises, ‘Women’s activities were sometimes sanctioned or co-opted by male allies; [but] perhaps more often they were denounced or violently opposed’ (Hughes 2012b, 165). This was particularly true when they were engaged in Leveller activity in which the presence of women became a signifier as well as a consequence of radical politics (Hughes 2012a, 57). The Levellers and religious radicals may have celebrated some women such as Richard Overton’s wife whom we see in Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) and Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2010), and for a short while female prophets were popular, in particular, Elizabeth Poole who was granted an audience with the General Council of Officers in 1649— fictionalised by Frances Hardinge in A Skinful of Shadows (2016). But Elizabeth Poole had to construct her prophecies in terms of herself as vessel for her husband Christ, and she fell out of favour with the army council when she suggested that they were disobeying their husband and father the King (Davies 1998, 139–40). But by the 1650s the preaching of women had become associated with Fifth Monarchists and Quakers and was seen as an intrinsic sign of disordered behaviour and disordered theology (Hughes 2012b, 162–4). One of the most interesting characters in these novels is Annis, the Quaker who enters the household

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of the Puritan Davenants in Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) and Over the Sea (1868): she is both a disruptive force through her obduracy and insistence on conscience, and also a healing one as the family move from religious division to tolerance. Stevie Davies notes that women’s silence was radicalised by the Quakers, its stillness becoming a route to G-d’s message (222) and the passive resistance understood as a woman’s best defence in a marriage became a ‘Quiescence that was not acquiescence but self-affirmation… a moral posture which abdicated behaviour thought proper and natural to masculinity’ (Davies 1998, 224). Annis becomes the exemplar of this in her stubborn but gentle orneriness. Despite the popularity of the ballad female who dresses as a man to follow her lover, we do not know how much of a thing cross-dressing actually was during the English Civil Wars, but as Mark Stoyle records in ‘Give mee a Souldier’s Coat’ (2018) in 1643 Charles I felt it necessary to issue an edict forbidding this. Stoyle has found only five specific cases recorded between 1642 and 1646. For the most part the heroines of ballads seem to be a largely fictional construct. Why women wore men’s clothing was complex. Antonia Fraser suggests that women in the Civil War camps may well have worn men’s clothing for practical purposes, without ‘masquerading’ as men (237). This may explain why Charles’ initial draft of a memorandum at this time around this issue changed from ‘no woman to presume to weare mans apparel’ to ‘lett no woman presume to counterfeit her sex by wearing mans apparel’ (1642). Furthermore, Charles was aware that Henrietta Maria had been accused of ‘Amazonian habits’ when appearing in the court masque Salmacida Spoilia in 1640. But there were, as Stoyle has found, several genuine cross-dressers. Nan Ball was found in the King’s camp with her lover, a lieutenant. He was dismissed and she was subject to a whipping—probably for immoral conduct rather than cross-dressing—which may have been put aside after an appeal to the nine-year-old Duke of York. General Waller recalled Cromwell unmasking a cross-dresser in the Royalist Lord Percy’s army in 1645. Cromwell noticed a very young-looking soldier and requested that he sing, which unmasked her; she was, Storey suggests, assumed to be Lord Percy’s mistress. In the London diurnal The Scottish Dove there was also a story of the unmasking of a woman soldier in 1645: in this case the woman was clearly serving as a soldier, and was caught when she went to purchase a petticoat and waistcoat for her sister who was ‘just of my stature’. The suspicious tailor reported this as a cross-dressing man,

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and as the trooper did indeed have sisters we cannot be sure that the trooper was not indeed purchasing the items for her sister, and may not have been, in current parlance, male-identified as well as cross-dressing. Certainly a great deal of trouble was taken to preserve the performance: the soldier was reported as regularly paying extra for a separate bed. It is rather surprising, given the popularity of cross-dressing narratives generally in girls’ fiction (Flanagan 2013), that cross-dressing girls and women are relatively rare in English Civil War fictions. Given the clothing and dress of the period one might have expected that there would be a greater number as the long hair of Royalists and many Parliamentarians, combined with the looseness of men’s tunics would have rendered cross-dressing rather easier than from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. This difference may account for the relative absence: in a period in which both men’s and women’s clothing were tightly fit the relative ease of disguise for a woman may not be that apparent, and of the five texts which do use cross-dressing in the plot, three have very young female protagonists. Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) fits comfortably within Jackie C. Horne’s argument that the heroines of such texts ‘may be characterized by courage and heroism, but the text continually insists that such traits stem not from any masculine desire to venture from the domestic sphere, but from the feminine desire to connect (or reconnect) with a domesticity unnaturally torn asunder’ (2011, 212). Beulah Marie Dix’s Merrylips (1906) is one of the most radical in its presentation of cross-dressing. Dix was an American feminist and author, and her dedication, ‘To every little girl who has wished for an hour to be a little boy’ expresses that politics. Merrylips was written early in her career (and before she moved into screen-writing in the silent cinema) and after Hugh Gwyeth: A Cavalier Roundhead (1899). Hugh Gwyeth was notable for presenting a rather gentle model of manhood which eventually wins over those around him. In Merrylips Dix reverses this and demonstrates a boyish ‘manly’ girl who wins over those around her. As with Hugh Gwyeth this is a pro-parliamentary novel told from within the more romantic Royalist camp. All the children in the titular heroine’s family are awarded nicknames by their father. Sybil who is less than eleven years old is called Merrylips for her joyous smile and laughter. Dix codes this as androgynous. Merrylips longs to dress as a boy, plays with the boys, and wants to be a boy. When a romp goes too far her mother packs her off to her

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godmother who, when war breaks out, turns spy. When things go wrong in an attempt at jewel smuggling the godmother escapes but Merrylips is stranded with the Puritan branch of the family who dearly wants a little girl and also wants to marry her off to her cousin. In protest at both playing the girl and the marriage plans, Merrylips escapes and finds her brother Edmund (Munn) in the Royalist camp at Oxford. He bids her to dress as a boy in order to go unremarked. But it is no longer an adventure: ‘Instead of feeling bold and manly, she was suddenly afraid lest, in spite of the clothes, she should not be boy enough to please Munn’ (Ch. 13). But she does pass as a boy, becoming a great pet. Dix was also an active pacifist, in an era when the pacifist movement was seen very much as gendered. Thus although much is made of Merrylips’ stalwart performance—she helps in the stable, helps to fight a fire, loads and reloads for an older boy named Rupert; she stops a Royalist officer kicking a Parliamentary one (Dick Fowell will later repay this kindness)—Merrylips is very much presented as a girl in terms of her empathy. She sees civilian suffering and when she gives her last coin to a girl who comes to beg for her cow back ‘she saw that Storringham [Parliamentarian] was like Cuckstead, and the Storringham folk were like the Cuckstead folk who were her friends’. ‘She had thought that was all gallant fighting and brave deeds. She had never dreamed that it meant wasting poor folk’s food and making women cry’ (Ch. 14). Eventually Merrylips is found out. But by this time (Ch. 20) Merrylips is getting fed up of boys’ clothes and boys’ dangers and once home she is glad to see her mother, and relieved to don female clothing (Ch. 35) and when she is given a russet dress for the day by her godmother she chooses it over the blue suit. Thus the girl who wanted to be a boy is tamed by her experience of a boy’s life. However, as I will discuss in the next section, there is another role model dangled in front of her, when she discusses that her godmother, the Lady Sybil, has been serving as a spy for His Majesty. The one novel which celebrates female cross-dressing is the very recent novel by M. J. Logue, A Wilderness of Sin (2015), the third of the Hollie Babbit novels. Lurking in the background of the novel has been a soft, rather fat and distinctly feral Trooper Gray. Trooper Gray responds to insults by charging or biting people. Trooper Gray follows Cornet Lucille Petit (male) around like a puppy dog. At some point, Lucille Petit realises that Trooper Gray is a woman. But is she? The presentation of Trooper Gray is fascinating. Although Gray puts on women’s clothing temporarily

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to nurse Petit when he is injured, Gray is not a woman dressing as a man to follow a man (her brother) to war. That was just an excuse. Gray dresses as a man in order to fight, and it is strongly hinted because Gray is far more comfortable presenting as a man. Is Gray transgender? Logue leaves it complex: Gray does enjoy sex with Petite but the sex is nonnormative. Petit wonders himself if his attraction to Gray is indicative of homosexual desire both before and after Gray is unmasked. The sex they have in which Gray is dominant does little to change his mind. And in the end, when Gray dies, Gray dies as a man, in uniform, on the battlefield.

Women as Spies One role we do know that a tiny number of women engaged in, was spying. The best known of the female spies were Katherine Stuart, Lady d’Aubigny, who in 1643 was granted permission by Parliament to travel to London to deal with her husband’s affairs after he was killed at Edgehill but became involved in an abortive plot and spent several months in prison. Later she would attempt to rescue Charles I as he was transported to London for trial (Hughes 2012a, 36). Constance Stringer spied within Worcester when it was garrisoned for the King in 1644; and Elizabeth Alkin, known as Parliament Joan, was a publisher, nurse, and spy for Parliament (and had been wife to Francis Alkin who had been hanged for spying early in the war). That both of these women were widows may be a clue to their role, for widows were permitted a much more public role than were unmarried or even married women (Hughes 2012a 330–42; Akkerman 2018). The fiction divides into two categories, the earlier material which portrays female spies as caught up in the romance of the matter, and that of the twenty-first century which is more aware of spying as a business. To step outside the private role was both for women in the seventeenth century, and for Victorian writers, to put oneself outside the bounds of femininity and the protection of both convention and God. Barbara Carcroft, the spy in Wynne’s ‘Hey For Cavaliers!’ (1912) is positioned as threatening her lover’s manhood by persuading him to turn his coat, and corrupting her friend Marjorie whom she also persuades to spy. Aunt Sophia in Savery’s Royalist Green Emeralds for the King (1938) is behind sending Austin to his puritan cousins to find the family emeralds: he is merely her delegate and she is presented throughout as a very manipulative and unpleasant woman who is interested in Austin and his mother

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solely for their use value. McChesney dances around these transgressions with Miriam Cromwell, Royalist. It is a rather odd book, one of the texts that inserts a fictional relative to act as what we would now call a Mary Sue. Miriam Cromwell, positioned as Cromwell’s niece, is persuaded by an injured cavalier to take a message to Prince Rupert. Greenwell renders it acceptable by ensuring Miriam’s actions are motivated entirely by romance, first the romance of the cavalier’s loyalty to his king, and second when she meets Prince Rupert. This of course is true of those texts in which a woman helps Charles I or any other cavalier to escape. In Barr’s Friend Olivia (1890), the Royalist Anastasia tricks the Quaker Olivia into hiding Anastasia’s brother who is a pirate by disguising him as a Royalist in need of relief and this playing on her sensibilities. In the very recent Traitor’s Knot by Cryssa Bazos (2017) the need for sentiment to justify the role is still there. When Kate, the daughter of a dead Royalist, goes to live with her aunt who it turns out is running a safe house, Kate’s engagement with the cause is legitimated first by her mourning for her father and then her eventual entanglement with, and marriage to, Royalist Captain James Hart; but there is much here about her wanton and wayward behaviour which far from being celebrated is believed to draw undue attention to the cause. Her aunt, however, does seem to be a legitimate spy although as creator of a safe house this could be understood as well within the private sphere. Dix’s Merrylips (1906), already discussed in this chapter, has in its background the figure of her godmother, Lady Sybil. Dix was probably aware of the female spies on both sides of the American Civil War, but particularly Elizabeth Van Lew, a Southern woman who spied for the Union, and her freed slave Mary Elizabeth Bowen and although we learn very little about Lady Sybil there is a very strong sense of professionalism. Lady Sybil is a spy because she has chosen to be one. Another Sybil, this time in The Trumpet and the Swan (1938) by Mary Bowen, follows her father into the trade as her rival Mathew follows his. Parliamentarian spy Sybil poses as a Royalist orphan in order to persuade Matthew to take her with him on a mission to take jewels to the King. She then proceeds to trick him in order to obtain the jewels. Although both are engaged in a duty to their fathers, and Sybil declares of the war, ‘I don’t know anything about it… only that I do what my father tells me’, but it is Sybil who shows a greater political acuity. ‘He taxed the people without any right. The Queen tried to bring foreign soldiers over. We must be free of tyrants and King Charles is a tyrant’; Matthew counters

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with an image of the king ‘He has a fine, patient face and thick chestnut curls’ (Ch. 1 and Ch. 3) This may be less a consequence that Sybil is cleverer than Matthew (although she is) than a fair reflection of the way in which motive in this collection as already discussed, tends to assume that Parliamentarian heroes demonstrate political acuity and Royalist heroes demonstrate sentiment. Although the sample is small, there is a clear sense that spying is a more acceptable occupation for a Parliamentarian heroine than for a Royalist one. There is a real issue for Royalists that in demanding allegiance to very conventional sex roles, it then becomes hard to encompass those activities which demand that women step beyond them into the public frame. It is no surprise that both Barbara and her turncoat lover die. The real world demands that the fictional world punish this transgression: and there is an implication that her lover is bisexual, for Barbara spends much of her time separating him from the governor of the castle, ‘it was the jest of the countryside that Colonel Cottrell seemed unable to remain long without Dick Morrice at his elbow—in fact, when the latter stayed over the night at the castle, its governor insisted on his sharing his own bed, so great a store did he set on his companionship’ (Ch. 4). Dick’s ‘eagerness for a change of comrades did not at all please the avowed woman hater, James Cottrell…’ (Ch. 4). Not unsurprisingly, two modern novels, both pro-Parliamentarian, have found female spies easier to accommodate. In Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2009) and its sequel A Corruptible Crown (2011), protagonist Lucy Wentor finds work sewing printed sheets, and from there is drawn into the world of the Levellers. When her employer John Lilburne is arrested she becomes a printer of illegal publications and as such a ‘runner’ of Mercury women, the illiterate hawkers who circulated pamphlets, protected by their very illiteracy from charges of sedition. One of the reasons the book works is that Bradshaw combines what we know of the ways women’s roles expand in war-time, with the feminist friendly— although not feminist in the modern sense—theological positions of many of the radical independents who formed the backbone of the Leveller movement (William Prynne, for example, backed the value of the word of female witnesses in the trial of Nathaniel Fiennes for his premature surrender of Bristol: Lynch 2009, 102). Jemahl Evans in The Last Roundhead (2015) posits two: the first although she is not framed this way, is Sir Blandford Candy’s unmarried sister. She is both Candy’s spy within the family, and is also at the start of the book—although he does not realise

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it—Candy’s handler, placing him among Parliamentarians for reasons of her own and in order to funnel information about Royalist movements to the Parliamentarians. The second, more conventional spy figure and one from history, is Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle. Lucy Hay was an unlikely Parliamentarian spy in that prior to the war she was a lady of the bedchamber and rumoured to be the lover of Strafford (executed by Parliament for treason). But rumour also had it that she had switched her affections and allegiance to John Pym, leader of the Parliamentary party, and it is Hay who is believed to have warned the House that the King was coming in person to arrest five members of the Long Parliament, in 1642. However, during the war there is evidence that she was a doubleagent, playing both sides against each other. In 1647 she was part of the Presbyterian interest; in 1648 she raised money for the Royalists for the Second Civil War and found herself in the Tower. In The Last Roundhead she appears as a figure of both threat and mischief. The most recent novel to examine the life of a ‘she-intelligencer’ is Pete Langman’s Killing Beauties (2020). Focusing on Royalist spies Susan Hyde and Diana Jennings, it is inspired directly by Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2018). Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde later to become Earl of Clarendon, was leader of one of the networks unpicked by Thurloe’s Black Chamber: however she has been disappeared by her brother’s account of the conflict which does not mention her and only came to light with more recent investigations of his records. In this novel she is depicted along with Diana Jennings as part of a widespread order of women dedicated to each other and to their missions. When the order comes from Charles II to seduce Thurloe, Susan Hyde decides that she, and not her lower-class colleague, is the person to seduce Thurloe with pillow talk. In the end the plot does not succeed but Langman is particularly successful in showing women as self-motivated, politically engaged and with a wide range of roles and demonstrating the censure they would have received from their own side, even as they were proclaimed heroines. The eponymous heroine of Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) escapes censure both because she is prepubertal and because it is a highly performative representation in which the author could be sure her readers would think in part of the amateur productions depicted in her school stories. It is also very much in the tradition of the famous heroines of Stuart lore, such as Anne Bamford who aided the young Prince James to escape from St James’ Palace, and whose memoirs are full of derring-do

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(Hughes 2012a, 66–67). However, Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books are notable in part because of what many fans argue are coded representation of lesbians among both the girls and the mistresses. Elizabeth is the oldest daughter and second child in a family of five. Her father, elder brother Geoffrey and younger brother Humphrey are fighting for the King, and her youngest brother is offstage for the novel as he is studying in France. Elizabeth is dark and ‘boyish’, her little sister Althea is fair and feminine. Elizabeth is a patriot and a Royalist to the core. ‘England!’ she cried. ‘The most beautiful country on God’s earth, ruled by the most gracious King on earth and yet there are men who would defy the King’s rule and despoil this beauty by bloody war! Oh, were I but a boy!’ (Ch. 1). When Geoffrey arrives, carrying dispatches to the Duke of Newcastle but sorely injured, she decides to take his place. The quickest route is through Parliamentary lines so she dresses as a boy and cuts her hair to the nape in order to be disguised, reinforcing these hard lines in the fiction in the dress of men: ‘her cropped head and sober garments precluded any idea that she might belong to the King’s army’ (Ch. 3). At one point she takes refuge in a farmer’s house and the daughter begs a kiss: ‘With a wild laugh, Elizabeth slipped an arm round her and kissed her squarely on the mouth. The warm colour flooded Lois’ face, but she stepped back without a word…’ (Ch. 3)—as we will see later, there is no buss for her husband. Elizabeth is a lot like Joey in Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books in that her relationships with women are a lot more convincing than those with men. During her ride Elizabeth narrowly evades capture by a Parliamentary captain. Finding herself trapped in the house of Puritans, she escapes out of a window and falls into the arms of the same Captain Lionel Eccles she had evaded earlier. He decides to help her escape and we have a dramatic scene where, when all other routes are gone, Elizabeth dives into a river to bring back a small boat for Lionel to row. He deposits Elizabeth with an old family friend, telling him that they are married and then departs, to seek service with the King, because he has been convinced by the love and loyalty of Elizabeth that he is on the wrong side. For much of the rest of the book Elizabeth is confined to the manor in which she has taken refuge, makes friends with the owner, Sir Timothy and his housekeeper Moggie, and waits for Lionel. The adventurous and sexually transgressive Elizabeth disappears. Jane’s performance in Softly’s Plain Jane (1961) is self-conscious. This book is not actually about the war, although set during it. It is about the

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control that men have over women and it is about the misery of familial abuse. Jane is a twin and her brother Jeremy is as alike as possible save for different coloured eyes. Both children are around eleven years old. Although her father is cold to both children, her brother receives pride and praise, while Jane receives criticisms, and verbal and physical cruelty. Sir John Kester is a Royalist, and when he needs to get a packet of information through the lines he sends his son Jeremy. Things go wrong and Jane takes his place: she is timid but also rather cleverer than Jeremy and is able to hide the papers long enough for them to get to the right person after several misadventures, but both children end up coming into rather frightening contact with the Roundheads, and in particular with Captain Marston, who gradually emerges as a sympathetic figure. At no time is there any sense that Jane enjoys dressing as Jeremy. The clothes feel strange and she feels exposed. Jane’s bravery is that she keeps going when she is scared, she has none of the fearlessness of the three previous heroines. The novel concentrates on the ways in which girls are constrained, manipulated and punished for their female status. ‘Boyness’ is neither a desirable attribute nor a reward for alignment with male needs. The two most famous adventuring women in the English Civil Wars were Henrietta Maria and Anne Fairfax, wife of Thomas Fairfax. Both of these women were known to be strong-minded and to wield what their detractors believed was illegitimate influence over their husbands. Lucy Hutchinson, for example, thought that both the failure of the monarchy and of the Republic could be laid at the feet of the misguided and excessive influence of Henrietta Maria on Charles and Anne on Thomas Fairfax, respectively (Miller 2012, 679–80). Henrietta Maria has been discussed extensively in Chapter 4. Anne Fairfax is far less well known, but her decision to accompany her husband into battle in 1642, riding pillion with him on campaign is well known, as is the kidnap of her small daughter Mary (Plowden 1998, 32–33). It has been immortalised in Sutcliff’s Rider of the White Horse (1951) but the novel in many ways reinforces conventional gender focus, for this is a story about Thomas, told through Anne’s eyes. But Anne does appear occasionally in other texts: or at least, she is believed to appear, for it has long been rumoured that it was Lady Fairfax who cried out at the roll call of the Trial, ‘He has more with than to be here’ (Hughes 2012a, 2) when her husband failed to answer to his name. This scene is included in Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest, Charles’s On Both Sides of the Sea, and in any text where the trial is recounted.

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Women in Charge Although many women were left to hold the fort metaphorically in the English Civil Wars, taking responsibility for estates, crops and (on both sides) fines if their family were on the wrong side, the greatest attention from both contemporaries and our authors has been reserved for those who held the family house in the face of fire such as Brilliana Harley (wife of the iconoclast MP Robert Harley), who held off the Royalists for close to a year, until they could be relieved by Fairfax. She died a few months later. Or Lady Mary Bankes at Corfe Castle in Dorset who with five men, her servants and her daughters repelled Parliamentarian assaults in 1643. This attention was not necessarily respectful. The zeal of the Parliamentarian women of Coventry was derided in Mercurius Aulicus (Hughes 2012a, 39) and while Royalists presented the Countess of Derby as a heroine for holding Lathom House in the face of siege by Fairfax (see Plowden 1998, 94–126)—a symbol of aristocratic defiance, of ‘matchless courage’, Parliament saw her as a hoyden needlessly prolonging a struggle which cost men lives but never threatened her own as women in this situation were by tradition protected (Mercurius Aulicus, 17 April 1644; De Groot, 128). The Countess of Portland defended Carisbrooke; Lady Mary Winter wife of Royalist Commander Sir John ‘declined to give up Lidney House’ to the Parliamentary Commander Colonel Massey; Lady Banks, at Corfe Castle, on the Dorset coast was under siege several times and the house only fell in 1645 to a traitor who brought in soldiers as part of a purported reinforcement; Honora Marchioness of Winchester, the wife of a Catholic Royalist magnate but also half-sister to Parliamentarian earl of Essex, defended Basing House, and refused to move during a parley (Plowden 1998). ‘Then the Marchioness and her ladies set to with a will, casting bullets from lead hastily stripped from the roofs and turrets of the house’ (Fraser 2002, 206). Of these women only one has had appeared actively in the novels. Lane’s The Lady of the House (1953) tells the story from the point of view of a mercenary captain hired to organise the defence of Lathom House. It is particularly strong on military manoeuvres but the Countess of Derby remains a distant if commanding figure. The book is very harsh on the leadership of the Earl of Derby, describing him as losing ‘town after town through his own lack of leadership, vigour, and military skill’ (Part 1, Ch. 1) so that there is a strong feeling that both Captain Farmer

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and Jane Lane are rather relieved than otherwise that he is not present to lead the house. While Farmer is granted the authority to organise the defences, the Countess makes it clear that his command descends from hers: he is not a substitute, he is a support (Part 2, Ch. 2). Although she is by no means the protagonist of the novel she is undoubtedly its focus. The Countess crops up again in Logue’s Hollie Babbitt sequence, in Babylon’s Downfall (2017) but whereas in Lane’s book she is wholly admirable, here the emphasis is on the gendered treatment by which Babbitt regards the Countess of Derby engaging in an unequal fight in which she sacrifices men of both sides while remaining sacrosanct. Other authors have generally been inspired by such women. In Trease’s Silver Guard (1648) while the protagonists’ Uncle Will is in prison they learn that their old local enemy Sir Richard is planning to take Silver Guard by surprise and use the war to seize a long desired property. The boys arrive back in time to warn their great-aunt Kit, cross-dressing heroine of Cue for Treason (1940) and under her generalship the family defends the house until Gervase (the American cousin) and Bell can fetch Uncle Will’s Brownrigg cousins. But Kit is perhaps the most transgressive of such characters. Mrs. Killigrew in Sutcliff’s Simon (1950) contents herself by preaching at the Royalist troops who have occupied her home, and Simon and his troop drive them out. Cecily in Willard’s Harrow and Harvest (1974) has been positioned as the defender of the family secret (that they are descended from Richard III) and in this final book the defence of the secret becomes wrapped up with the defence of the house. With the men away and only boys at home, this becomes Cecily’s responsibility and although she acts through the figure of her cousin Nicholas, it is always Cecily who makes the decisions including, finally, to abandon both the secret and the house. Margaret in Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964) seeks to secure the house from both of her brothers but she and her estate manager Will can do little but hide valuables and crops from their depredations, and she cannot prevent Royalists quartered on them from stripping the estate. In Pamela Belle’s Wintercombe (1988) Silence struggles to keep her family safe when Royalists are garrisoned in her home (her husband is a Parliamentarian Colonel) but cannot prevent her step-daughter endangering herself, two of her maids becoming mistresses of the invaders, and her delightful oldest daughter developing a ruthlessness not short of sociopathy. Her protest is mostly verbal as is that of Lucretia, the daughter of the house in Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012) whose struggle to preserve the household and its dependents from

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the predation is of a particularly nasty Parliamentarian radical minister is part of the backstory of the novel. Finally there is Swinfen’s This Rough Ocean (2015). Wholly unreliable in its accounting of the experiences of MP John Swinfen at the hands of Parliament after Pride’s Purge—there is no evidence that Parliament ever tortured its own MPs, and Stafford Castle had been slighted (destroyed) five years before Swinfen has her hero held captive there—it is yet a vivid and plausible account of how a woman could hold her estate in the absence of her husband in this period.

Women Alone This takes us to the last aspect of this chapter. While for some women the Civil War brought opportunity, for others there was only hard work and grief, and the common lot of women left alone. Although there were threats of eviction, destruction and starvation, a key threat was of rape. Hughes notes that we really have very little evidence around rape because the sensationalism of recorded stories against the very real difficulties women had bringing charges obscure the evidence: rape was forbidden in the articles of war issued to discipline soldiers on both sides, but while we have evidence that some Parliamentary soldiers were executed for rape, there are no records for Royalist armies. The single worst atrocity recorded against women in the war was the slaughter of the Welsh baggage train by Parliamentarian soldiers at Naseby (Hughes 2012a, 35). Three novels explore what happens to women who are abused in war. Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1944), a novel that was intensely popular with contemporary teens, begins with the story of a young woman who is estranged from her betrothed when their families take different sides in the war. She meets up with him secretly, becomes pregnant and with his help runs away, but they are never able to meet to marry and she dies in childbed, while we are led to believe he dies in battle. Her daughter is raised as a farm child with no awareness of her past, and almost her first sexual experience is to be raped by a returned Cavalier and dragged into the dissolute world of Restoration London. Alice Turnbull’s Alice in Love and War (2009) makes the vulnerability of women central to the plot. Taken in by her uncle, Alice rapidly becomes a target for his sexual predation and her aunt’s anger. When she meets Robin, a cavalier soldier, she runs away with him. He turns out to be a Vile Serial Seducer but he does not actually tempt her to go with him. She lives with him

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for a year until he abandons her in winter-quarters where she miscarries; then she marches with the Welsh women of the baggage train—just some of the many women who often followed their men with their children alongside them (see O’Day 2007, 210), who provided food and nursing and care for their husbands and often ran the travelling markets from which soldiers bought their rations (Nusbacher 2000, 145–60)—and is with them when they are slaughtered at Naseby. Alice takes the baby of her best friend and takes shelter with a blacksmith and his wife who help her find a wetnurse, and in return she nurses a Parliamentarian soldier. They fall in love and marry and he takes her back to the great house where she had wintered, and waits out the war. It is a happy ending but one in which the tragedy Alice has experienced is both intensely female and will stay with her—in the shape of her friend Nia’s baby—forever. Lucy in Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2010) and An Incorruptible Crown (2011), which is essentially one book, has a far happier ending: Lucy has been raped during an attack on her family’s farm (as has Lindsay’s Sue Verney) and the cattle that would have formed her dowry have been stolen, but Lucy recovers, takes an offer to go to London to get away from her family, finds a place with a printer, becomes part of the Leveller movement, and eventually falls in love with a man who is the third son of a gentleman, and thus a step up for her. What Alice and Lucy have in common is that they both take their lives into their own hands. For Alice that means stepping into a dangerous man’s world: she is only ever safe when she is sheltered by women, and much of the novel is about the way in which women’s networks can continue to function when the men’s world is in chaos. For Lucy the step into the men’s world is much more reflective of our own contemporaneous ideas of war as a moment of opportunity. It is perhaps no surprise that the first of the novels to really focus on women on the home front are from the interwar years. While Britain had been at war for much of the nineteenth century these were essentially professionals’ wars, and the experience on the home front was barely changed from business as usual, a position reflected in Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867). Similarly the classic children and home novels of Maryatt and Yonge are not very much different in their expectations from Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1902). The experience of the First World War was of a world denuded of men, and of a world in which what women knew was relentlessly second-hand and isolating. Lindsay’s Sue Verney (1937) which is in many ways the

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British version of Margaret Mitchell’s contemporary Gone with the Wind (1936), sets out to capture this. Sue Verney is a modernist novel told from the point of view of Sue Verney, the eldest daughter of the Verneys, a Royalist family falling apart during the war. Edmund Verney is dead: serving the King out of duty not conviction. His son Ralph served for Parliament then balked at the Covenant and went abroad. The children are running wild. Incomes crumble, women are married off just to ensure they are no longer a charge on the family, and family homes become wrecks, with landlords in debt to tenants. Sue dies in 1651 after three stillbirths. Sue’s life becomes a metaphor for the decay of the kingdom. Similarly in Du Maurier’s post-war novel The King’s General (1946) the crippling of Honor Harris is in itself is a metaphor for the broken ‘marriage’ of King to country. Sue Verney is trapped by convention, Honor by both convention and her paraplegia. She watches the world from an upstairs room, she is moved from place to place; she is there when her ‘man’, Sir Richard Grenville comes home and like a good wife she defends him from the world, insisting that what the world sees is not the genuine man. Perhaps most unnervingly to a modern reader, she is the woman who insists that the perpetrator of atrocities is truly a good person underneath. Both novels capture a sense of estrangement and abandonment within the ruins. They express a helplessness in the face of war, and a sense that there is nothing that women can do, that war is men’s business and that if men abandon the domestic stage, all must fall apart. Both novels depict women as essentially passive. Most of the home-front novels in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries do not depict specific acts of martial heroism, but concentrate on exploring the ways in which women actively kept their worlds together. Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964) is the first of these and alongside Burton’s Kate Rider (1974), Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne (1988), Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009), Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012), Swinfen’s This Rough Ocean (2015), Bazos’ Traitor’s Knot (2017) and the character of Henrietta Sutcliffe in Logue’s Hollie Babbit novels (2015) all set out to explore the world of women in war-time: both The Last of the Lallows and Kate Rider spend a great deal of time on farming without men, the difficulty of ensuring harvests are brought in and fields ploughed when the horses have all been taken. Belle in Winterbourne, Swinfen in This Rough Ocean and Lucretia in John Saturnall’s Feast must go further, taking over the estate management itself: both

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women must persuade men to deal with them, must defend their reputations as they step out into the public sphere, and both have to steer their people through complex political times. Lindsay Davis makes use of the detail that women printers could inherit their husbands’ businesses (Davies 1998, 25) and thus female labour was not unknown. Her heroine first takes on the stitching of pages, then substitutes for a male apprentice as a printer’s devil (who inks the printer) and ends up working for Overton’s wife while he is in prison. Much is missed out of women’s experience and activity in the period: there is nothing in any of these novels of the women’s petitions of the early 1640s which opposed Charles I in the coded terms of wives and mothers or challenged Parliamentary excise taxes (Hughes 2012a, 56, 109), very little of the role in supplying men in the army, or of their role in maintaining civic society. Missed out too is the very gendered role that women in Royalist families took on, pleading for their estates and negotiation of ‘compounding’, the system of fines and penalties imposed on Royalists (Hughes 2012a, 43). Although this was very much a woman’s role which appears to have deliberately played on both sides’ belief that mercy should be meted out to women (so that it was probably common that fines were set high in the expectation that women would be sent to plead, and that the committee might then look merciful), it appears but rarely in the texts. Only in Tyler’s John Grey mysteries do we have a character, Aminta Clifford, who is sent to back from Brussels to secure her father and husband’s estates—and she is using it to cover up her activities as a spy.

Works Cited Akkerman, Nadine. Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in SeventeenthCentury Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Print. Appleby, David J., and Andrew Hopper, eds. Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Print. Bazos, Cryssa. Traitor’s Knot. London: Endeavour Press, 2017. Print. Davies, Stevie. Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640–1660. London: The Women’s Press, 1998. Print. De Groot, Jerome. Royalist Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Dix, Beulah Marie. Hugh Gwyeth: A Round-Head Cavalier. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Print.

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Flanagan, Victoria. Into the Closet: Gender and Cross-Dressing in Children’s Fiction. London: Routledge, 2013. Print. Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. 3rd ed. London: Phoenix, 2002. Print. Griffin, Margaret. Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies, 1639– 1646. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004. Print. Hilkey, Judy. Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Print. Horne, Jackie C. History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. Print. Hughes, Ann (a). Gender and the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. ———. (b). “Society and the Roles of Women.” The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 154–72. Print. Jacobs, Emma. “Independent Men: Radical Manhood During the English Revolution.” DPhil. University of Glasgow, 2017. Print. Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004. Print. Kitson, Frank. Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Print. Lynch, John. Bristol and the Civil War. Stroud: The History Press, 2009. Print. Miller, Shannon. “Family and Commonwealth in the Writings of Lucy Hutchinson.” The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 669–85. Print. Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Print. Nusbacher, A. J. S. “Civil Supply in the Civil War: Supply of Victuals to the New Model Army on the Naseby Campaign.” English Historical Review 115 (2000): 145–60. Print. O’Day, Rosemary. Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies: Patriarchy, Partnership and Patronage. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print. Peters, Kate. “Quakers and the Culture of Print in the 1650s.” The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 567–92. Print. Plowden, Alison. Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Print. Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.

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Somerville, John C. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Print. Turnbull, Ann. No Shame, No Fear. London: Walker Books, 2003. Print. von Arni, Eric Gruber. 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 and New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

CHAPTER 7

Religion

O Lord, Thou Knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not forget me. —Sir Jacob Astley, Royalist, at Edgehill, 1642

Chapter 1 primarily outlined the secular reasons for the English Civil Wars, and the secular conflicts that later developed. Alongside this and often inseparable by contemporaries—although not, as we shall see, fiction writers—were the religious conflicts. This chapter will reference Scotland, but is mostly about the splits in the English Church. As Tim Harris has argued it was people’s response to changes in the Church that were most likely to separate people into Parliamentarian and Royalist camps (Harris 2014, 458). In 1620 there was still very much a single English Church. A product of the trial and error compromises of the Tudor era, it was held together by the Book of Common Prayer. The 1552 version, issued by Elizabeth I, held sway for the next forty years, with revisions in 1604. This prayer book allowed for a belief in the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and for those who felt that this was Romish superstition (that is, it validated transubstantiation and metaphor). The second key document was the King James Bible. Until 1611 there was no English national consensus around a bible. William Tyndale’s 1525 bible had become the basis for all subsequent renditions; in 1539, it was edited and adapted by Myles Coverdale and this became the basis © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_7

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of the Great Bible, the first edition authorised in England. However, in part because of its proscription by Mary I, English expatriates undertook a translation based on Tyndale which was known as the Geneva Bible: essentially Calvinist, this did not conform to the theology of the Church of England and its beliefs about ordained clergy. It leaned towards Presbyterianism which understood clergy as functional rather than divine. In 1568, the Church responded with the Bishops’ Bible but this failed to replace the Geneva translation as the most popular of the age, in part because this full Bible was large and intended for lecterns. Lay Elizabethans read the Bible in the Geneva version which was available in small format editions. This was not just a market split: the idea that the bible and its interpretation belonged to the clergy was built into the decision not to publish the Bishops’ Bible in a cheap edition. In contrast the desire to own and read one’s own bible was itself an indication of a greater commitment to reformed Protestantism or what was often termed Puritanism; Cromwell was to purchase bibles for his army in 1650 (1s 8d each) and there are copies of an abbreviated army bible in Cromwell’s House in Ely. Yet as Derek Hirst and others have noted, there are real difficulties in defining a Puritan or Puritans (Hirst 1986, 65–80): they are held together as a group by a theology drawn from the Geneva Bible, a preference for sermons, and a dislike of ritual turned into sacrament. Puritans came from across the social spectrum; sometimes what they had most in common was simply a seriousness of mind, an active interest in a concern for salvation and a belief that while the outward life might demonstrate that one was godly, it was not in itself the route to salvation, which lay in God’s hands. The King James’ Bible, translated between 1604 and 1611, was intended to achieve a number of things: first to produce a bible which reinforced the theology of the English Church as a thing distinctive from European (and Scottish) Calvinism; to emphasise that reading the bible for oneself was part of one’s commitment to faith; to reflect the episcopal structure of the English church; and fourth to unify the church. This fourth aim failed because of the second. As Christopher Hill noted (1993), once people were able to read the bible for themselves they could also begin the process of interpreting for themselves. James I had promised to uphold the English Church. By the 1630s however the unity of this Church was coming apart. On the one hand, there were the traditionalists who upheld the settlement of the 1550s in which a reformed church united a certain level of liturgical formality and

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a belief in the saving role of the sacraments, with a rather low church approach to vestments and the layout of the church—in particular the placing of the communion table in the centre of the church to indicate the equality of the members of the church in spirit. On one side of them were the reformers who sought a more Calvinistic church where sacraments were regarded as superstition and only Grace given by God—a conversion experience—could save. On the other were those for whom the hierarchy and the formality of the Church meant an emphasis on the importance of ritual sacrament and along with that the importance of the apostolic succession—the idea that a particular spirit is passed down by ordination. Until the 1630s these were roughly in balance, but—and this is important because so much of the fiction gives the opposite impression—until Charles I came to the throne it was the supporters of a plainer Church who were in the ascendancy. Those who placed the emphasis on the sacrament, and on the reorganisation of the church to separate the congregation from the communion table by creating a fenced-off altar— those backed by Archbishop Laud and thus known as Laudians—were in their attempt to restore a more ritualistic Church, the innovators. Diane Purkiss notes that a surprising amount of what was destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts was new artwork and new interventions, particularly in the universities (Purkiss 2007, 214; Spraggon 2003, 217). One of the triggers for the war was the attempt by Charles I and Archbishop Laud to impose both a new prayer book and a new church layout. In Scotland, this unleashed the first Bishops’ War, the comprehensive rejection of the English Church, and a wholesale experiment in Presbyterianism promoted by the Covenanters. The outcome was to unify at least the Protestant portion of the country (the Highlands remained Catholic); unfortunately it was against the King. In England it had the opposite effect: although the protests in Parliament were predominantly led by Presbyterians, there was even at the beginning of the war a strong ‘Independent’ faction, people who felt that the entire structure of formal ministry, in which a minister was both teacher and judge, was inappropriate. For the Independents it was not necessarily even considered appropriate to have a sitting minister: the worshipper was understood to be a seeker after truth, to use a phrase that emerged in the 1650s and is strongly associated with the early Quakers. Far from listening to the received word from a single authority, those who would be saved should seek wisdom from as many interpreters/divines as possible, hence

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the delight in public lectures. The three positions of episcopacy, Presbyterianism and independency would map onto the political divisions of the war for they reflected not only how people thought Christianity should be practiced but also the ways in which the state should be organised. Thus James I was neither exaggerating nor creating a false equivalence when he declared that if there were no bishops there was no monarchy. At the beginning of the war the Presbyterian faction in the Long Parliament was identified with the Peace Party and led by Denzil Holles: they sought a negotiated settlement with King Charles rather than a military victory. As a group they were strongly in favour of cooperating with the Scots when it became clear that the Scots were willing to negotiate with the King to secure a Presbyterian settlement in England. After the end of the First Civil War the Presbyterians became the dominant faction in the House of Commons. However they made two misjudgements: first they believed that the King would negotiate, and second they attempted to disband the New Model Army without arrears of pay or settlement of other grievances. Their misjudgement with the Army and the growing influence of Independents in the Army increasingly politicised that body of men and again drew religious divisions into the political realm. After the Second Civil War, the Presbyterians’ insistence upon a religious settlement in their favour blocked the negotiations between the King and Parliament at the Treaty of Newport, and alienated Independent colleagues. The Third Civil War was in part a consequence of the new Commonwealth’s decision not to impose Presbyterianism. This angered the Scots. After their defeat in 1651 the possibility was lost. During the Commonwealth and under Cromwell the Independent faction succeeded in constructing space for toleration. Thanks to the memorialisation of Anglican memory through the collection of experiences published by John Walker in 1714 (Neufeld 2013, 169–201), we tend to see this period from the point of view of Episcopalians and the ejected ministry. It was in the interests of eighteenth-century Anglicans, who felt increasingly threatened by toleration, to emphasise the sufferings of their predecessors. But less than one-third of the ministry were ejected, and perhaps most important, ejections and new appointments frequently reflected the dominant beliefs of the gentry of a region so that the affect was both patchwork, and diverse (Coffey 2000, 113). Where there were no men such as Pym, Fairfax, Cooke or Bremerton to press the matter, local committees were relatively indifferent. Doran and Durston note that the

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largest number of ejections was in London where 36% of clergy were removed, but it was very much lower in the west Midlands, the Severn Valley, and the south Pennines (1991, 154–155). Between two-thirds to three-fifths of English livings were unchallenged. It was not the imposition of ‘puritanism’ which the Anglican party among historians and fiction writers would have us believe. Of all groups, only Catholics (and later on the Quakers) were proscribed. After the anti-popery campaigns of the 1640s died down draconian legislation remained on the books and two Catholic priests were executed in the 1650s despite Cromwell’s objections (Coffey 2000, 157). Yet overall the treatment of Catholics in England (Ireland is another matter) improved: Cromwell’s secretary, John Rushworth, helped to assist Catholic gentry to preserve their estates. Most versions of Protestantism were tolerated to a lesser or greater degree, and the Episcopalians, officially out of power and their ministers purged from the churches, even saw a growth in many of their congregations (see Cross 1972, 114). David Cressy records the persistence of surplices, baptism at the font, and the survival of godparents, even as people complained about the rules of common worship that prevailed in the churches and which forced baptism into the home in order to retain godparents (Cressy 1997, 178). Very little of the fiction reflects the religious situation, although when it does Royalist fiction is overwhelmingly hostile to the Puritan faction, who are portrayed, since Walter Scott, as dour fanatics, opposed to fun, and dressed in black, their theology rarely of interest. A rare exception is Frederick Grice’s The Luckless Apple (1966) in which although the eventually-to-be-Royalist hero Martin begins by regarding his friend Robin’s father as the usual dour kill-joy (Mr Godstow chops down the maypole), but comes to admire both him and his own brother for their richer and more genuine relationship to the commands of the bible to do good in the world (Chs. 4 and 15). This portrayal even turns up in ostensibly neutral or even vaguely pro-Parliamentarian fiction, notably in Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne: here, while Parliament is seen as on the side of right, the heroine’s father and husband are both portrayed as strict, dour Puritans who seek to suppress a joyous spirit, and the ways in which Puritans are held to (mis)treat children is central to the plot. In reality, Puritans were sufficiently concerned with the childness of children that they are central to the development of modern children’s literature as we understand it and to the understanding of children. John Somerville

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notes the schoolmaster Thomas Becon (1540s/1550s) writing against schoolmasters ‘beating like frantic men’ and Robert Cleaver (1598) advising parents to stick to gentle admonishment ‘for physical punishment is always resisted by our stubborn natures and spanking discouraged’ (Somerville 1992, 93–96). This chapter is concerned with the portrayal of lived religious experience in the fiction. And it is in this chapter that we often see most clearly authors’ contemporary agendas shaping their portrayal of the period. Although the Civil Wars of the Three Kingdoms were intimately connected with the religious life of Scotland and England, and to a lesser extent (ironically) with Ireland where the actual politics was far more about invasion and settlement. Religion entered into the public consciousness as a cause and motivating element in the fiction only in the later nineteenth century. It is, for example, of no interest to either Scott or Maryatt, although Scott applies to Cromwell the appellation canting. To a great degree it disappears as an interest in the second half of the twentieth century completely and does not return until the twenty-first century in the novels of Sally Gardner, Lindsay Davis, Frances Hardinge, M. J. Logue and others. This chapter will therefore concentrate predominantly on novels of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which the Church of England lost its hegemony in public life and in which the anxiety around this is clearly reflected or challenged. Some authors, such as Charlotte M. Yonge (part of the High Church Oxford Movement) or Howard Pease (probably a Quaker or of Quaker descent from Northumberland; not the well-known US author of the same name a generation later) have clear agendas. Others strive to be as fair-minded as they can. For quite a number religious innovation is a way to signal insincerity (Jane Lane) or mania and anarchy (Jack Lindsay) although they differ on what they present as innovation. One of the major issues of the Civil War was the relationship of Church to State, and Church to King. Separating this from the politics of the period, is, most historians agree, impossible. However the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists did just this, reflecting the nineteenthand twentieth-century settlement that accepted religious tolerance and an agreement not to talk about it as the price of stability. Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, for example, a passionate advocate of interfaith tolerance in her Chalet School books, simply ignores the faith issues at the heart of the war in Elizabeth the Gallant (1935).

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When writers do write about religion most of the British writers position it solely as a faith position, and it is not uncommon for protagonists to marry across the divide in a representation of national healing. Most of the American writers, who had themselves relatively recently experienced a religious-political conflict in the American Civil War, grasp the interaction between the two, but the response is choppy. This chapter will take a closer look at five different areas which attracted writers: Episcopalianism, Catholics, Presbyterians, Puritans, Independents, and finally (and disproportionately) Quakers.

Episcopalianism and Arminianism In the early nineteenth century the Church of England once again began to fissure. Two different groups could be identified: the latitudinarian broad church tendency who were strong in the parishes and behind the nineteenth-century church-building movement (a response to the realisation that large areas of the new cities were ‘unchurched’), and a movement to restore liturgical and devotional customs which borrowed heavily from pre-Reformation practices, the Tractarian or Oxford movement—a new Laudianism. In the understanding of the Tractarians, Anglicanism was divorced from continental Protestantism and became one of three ‘branches’ of the universal church of which the other two were eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. The Oxford Movement centralised the eucharist, reintroduced vestments and intensified liturgical responses. In this construction the more puritanical expressions of Anglicanism became the non-traditional version. The new Laudianism was intensely associated with the Universities which had in the seventeenth century, particularly during the Commonwealth, also nourished this movement. There were other parallels: the impulse for the Tractarian/Oxford Movement was the Whig administration’s attempt to reform the structures and revenues of the episcopalian Church of Ireland. This would have reduced the number of bishoprics and made changes to the leasing of Church lands and would have enabled the appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The Oxford Movement was over by 1851, killed when John Henry Newman joined the Catholic Church (and eventually became a Cardinal). However it left its traces in the English Church: by the 1870s, high church incumbents were running into conflict with the Public Worship Regulation Act, sponsored by Archbishop Tait. This established a new

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court that could rule on the alteration of the fabric or decoration of a church, on the use of ‘any unlawful ornament of the minister’ or if the minister was felt to have failed to observe the directions in the Book of Common Prayer relating to burial, services or other rites and ceremonies. The act resulted in the imprisonment of five clergy; and although prosecutions ended in 1906 when a Royal Commission recognised the legitimacy of pluralism, it remained on the books until 1965. Thus the arguments which bedevilled the period from 1620 through the 1680s were far from historical. The religiously inclined authors were in part using the English Civil Wars to explore contemporary argument. The most liberal of these was Elizabeth Rundle Charles who was, not coincidentally, a friend of Archbishop Tait. The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) and its sequel On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) are also easily the most complex religious texts in the collection. She is firmly broad church and her portrayal of the religious conflict is of a house sundered not by belief per se, but by the insistence that there is only one path. While Charles has issues with hypocrisy and obduracy, in every position she finds beauty. Elizabeth Rundle Charles has a strong sense of the complexity of religious positions in a time of flux, for she explores the degree to which the individualisation of religious faith has unpredictable results. The first novel deals with the origins of the war and the war years, ending with the execution of Charles I and the decision of the Royalist Davenants to go into exile. The story is told from the points of view of the daughters of each house, Olive of the Draytons, and Lettice of the Royalist Davenants, an interesting choice and one which might well have reflected what she knew of the piety and pious writings of Civil War women such as Lady Brilliana Harley (Presbyterian), Anna Trapnel (separatist), or Lucy Hutchinson (Independent) (Harris and Scott-Baumann 2011). Among the Davenants, Aunt Dorothy is low Church of England, wedded to the liturgy; her nephews and nieces are loyal to the moderate puritan counsel of George Herbert, while cousin Placidia is a hypocritical Puritan who thinks she can bargain (rather than covenant) with God and of whom Olive complains bitterly that ‘in later days it became the fashion to assert that characters of that stamp formed the staple of our Commonwealth’ (The Draytons and the Davenants, Ch. 12). Olive insists, ‘The Puritan religion was one of principle and doctrine. When inspired by divine love, it was gloriously deep and strong’ (Ch. 13). The Davenants’ Lady Lucy, painted and patched as she is, yet has a religion of ‘tender,

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devotional emotions, minute ceremonial and gorgeous ritual’ (Ch. 13). Rundle accepts that all believers, whatever their doctrine, believe. In Olive and her husband we see a demonstration of the ‘godliness’ that Hirst describes; a life of studying, meditating on scripture and a construction of a household religion which dominates over the role of the church (Hirst 1986, 71). Influenced by her High Church father, and by her near neighbour John Keble (vicar in nearby Hursley), Charlotte Yonge is frequently referred to as the novelist of the Oxford Movement. Yonge was a passionate communicant of the Church of England and a key player in bringing the evangelical revival to the young. The author of many books for children, she has an ill-deserved reputation for ‘piety’, ‘goodness’ and ‘didacticism’. It is not that these accusations are incorrect but that they have been used to suggest that she was a poor writer whose success lay in her respectability: nothing could be further from the truth. Her work is exciting, full of adventure and rather sly. Her contribution to the Civil War debate is Under the Storm (1887), which sets out to tell the story of ordinary people in the English Civil War. It is the tale of a boy uninterested in the affairs of King and Parliament, but loyal unto death to the Church. Under the Storm reflects two key aspects of the Oxford Movement: its insistence that it is the high liturgies and rituals that are the traditional and essential element of Anglican Christianity, and that the Church consists of wise leaders and humble followers. Her highly enjoyable novel is propaganda, one that underscores the Restoration-Laudian insistence that the period was an ‘interregnum’ in which heresies proliferated and that the Laudians were the true heirs of the Tudor church. Consequently, it also functions as propaganda to persuade readers that the Oxford Movement too is ‘traditional’ and not a new-fangled imposition. In Under the Storm, the children’s mother was a Puritan (hence their names) but this is oddly unassociated with any other aspect of Puritan beliefs. The children are clearly communicant members of the local parish, which is Laudian, so there is a clear attempt to reduce ‘Puritan’ to a mere plainness of dress and speech. Yonge’s novels are marked by a distinctive and childlike piety which regularly enjoins children to accept authority over intellect; quickness is frequently derided and seen as both a religious and educational distraction. The eldest son Jephthah is caught up by any idea and uninterested in the farm. Looking for a cause, he rushes off to join Parliament, leaving

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his siblings to fend for themselves, and turns into a canting puritan who is secure in his self-justification. This is symptomatic of a particular kind of propaganda which we will see again in Jane Lane’s work, in which the author cannot see the opposition as merely misguided, but must always posit them as hypocritical, their professed faith a hollow sham. The second son, Steadfast, is a ‘clown’, a ‘lump’ but hard-working, conscientious and, like his sister Patience, is able to read. Steadfast is a holy fool a traditional literary device that emphasises the link between God and the humble. Steadfast demonstrates by his unwavering and unquestioning loyalty to the Church—not the King—that it is possible to align the puritan tendency (indicated in their names) with the Laudian hierarchical church as an institution. Steadfast is determined that the church plate shall only be bestowed on the representative of apostolic succession. One of the tricky aspects of Yonge’s work is that she posits most people as ignorant. She does not trust ordinary people to have political opinions: ‘many of the country people were too ignorant to understand the difference between the sides, but only took part with their squire, or if they loved their clergyman, clung to him’ (Ch. 12). At the same time, she validates strong faith: a certain kind of ignorant belief is, in Yonge’s work, admirable. Thus true religion passed down from the minister becomes increasingly important in the lives of ordinary people as they cannot be expected to find it themselves. The character of the true believer is the very opposite to the seeker after truth who emerged in this war: Jephthah is led astray by seeking in both his travels and his enquiries, whereas Steadfast is led to the truth by staying home both physically and intellectually. The decks are rather continually stacked in this book. It is impossible to avoid that Jephthah is the familial representative of the Independent movement and this is presented as a hypocritical mania. We see Jephthah acquire the canting language of the extreme Puritan, castigating Emlyn (the Royalist child they take in) as ‘The child of a Midianitish woman!’ (Ch. 11). Of Jephthah she writes that he ‘expounded his singular mercies, which apparently meant his achievements in killing Cavaliers…’ (Ch. 11). Later, he acquires an Irish estate and a Papist wife. His Puritanism is only skin-deep; his understanding of God is based on contingency. The priest is elderly and an innocent, one of the ‘guiltless victims of vile men’ (Neufeld 2013, 182) who appear in John Walker’s eighteenth-century collection of parish memories.

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Yonge is too good a writer to allow one person to represent an entire movement. Steadfast, for all he will be a model of obedience to order, must simultaneously serve as Yonge’s observer and the result is deliberately muddled: in dealing with Roundheads, Steadfast is ‘a good deal confused between the piety and good conduct of these Roundheads, in contrast with their utter contempt of the Church, and rude dealing with all he had been taught to hold sacred’ (Ch. 12), while the Royalists doffed their hats at clergy and harassed the women of the town. Of a new minister, part of the new dispensation, ‘Steadfast was puzzled. The minister was not like the soldiers whom he had heard raving about the reign of the saints, and abusing the church. He prayed for the King’s having a good deliverance from his troubles, and for the peace of the kingdom, and he gave out that there was to be a week of fasting, preaching and preparation for the Lord’s Supper’ (Ch. 15). Steadfast reads his bible and thinks (if slowly) and goes his own way, which of course has far more in common with radical Protestantism, than it does with the ‘listen to the vicar’ teachings of the Oxford Movement which we see restored at the end of the book. But in the end, Under the Storm, presents ‘true’ religion in terms of apostolic succession. The Puritans do not descend from the true order of things: they are not legitimate, and thus threaten the social as much as the spiritual order (Harris 2014, 261) and it is that to which Steadfast is loyal.

Catholics Britain in the eighteenth century was profoundly anti-Catholic, something which is encoded in many of the gothic novels which are the precursors to historical fiction. There were regular anti-Catholic riots; 5 November (Bonfire Night) was the occasion for attacks on Catholic properties; and Catholics were marginalised from civic life in many of the same ways as were dissenters. In the 1820s and with the prospect of Catholic Emancipation (which passed in 1829) there were more riots. Yet the Catholic Emancipation Act brought Catholics into full citizenry in Britain and what seems to have proceeded is a conciliation through erasure. Thus one of the oddities of the collection of texts discussed here is how rarely Catholics are mentioned. In a war in which the King was purportedly fighting for the Anglican Church, Catholic support was an embarrassment even within his own followers (Griffin 2004, xxiii). In the nineteenth century Anglicans seeking the moral high ground preferred

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not to draw attention to the Catholic presence in the religious disputes. The result is very few novels which focus on the Catholic experience, but several in which Catholicism is the subject matter. J. Henry Shorthouse’s John Inglesant (1881) is a philosophical exploration of the authority over private judgement he saw exercised in Catholicism. Highly admired by contemporaries it is an example of philosophical romanticism and what we might now term spiritual literature. The characters are declared to be essentially avatars, functional pieces in a philosophical problem. Shorthouse declared in an introduction: ‘The characters are, so to speak, sublimated: they are only introduced for a set purpose, and having fulfilled this purpose—were it only to speak a dozen words—they vanish from the stage.’ Which, as he points out, is in a way not so unlike real life and thus aligns unexpectedly with Jack Lindsay’s social realism. Yet it is also a Gothic novel complete with ghosts, Italian stilettos, and premonitions. The Catholic priest who is so influential on John Inglesant is, it is intimated, a magician. And for all that it is in many ways sympathetic to Catholicism, the education of John Inglesant as a sleeper within the Arminian wing of the Church—encouraged to explore Catholicism but never to convert, to wait for his chance to bring the Arminian Church to Rome—rather confirms seventeenth-century beliefs around Catholic activities in England. But Shorthouse’s intention was to use this to rethink the alignment of loyalties in England during the war. For a novel set in Ireland, Shearman’s Kathleen Clare: Her Book (1895) is remarkably unconcerned with religion as a genuine faith but sees it instead as an indicator of political intransigence. Kathleen, the Catholic cousin and poor relation, is brought into the household of Lord Wentworth precisely to be absorbed as the country will be absorbed. As she accepts the rule and traditions of England, so too will her country. This theme is repeated in Church’s John Marmaduke (1897) in which John Marmaduke despoils the land of the lovely Catherine, is partially responsible for the death of her father (in battle), while her brother dies defending her honour against another. Yet she still falls in love with Marmaduke, and marries him—although the last Irish priest in the area has been hanged—and defies her aunt who is, unsurprisingly, appalled that her daughter married an invader. That sense that Catholicism is there to be conquered not only physically but ideologically turns up in H. A. Hinkson’s Silk and Steel (1902). The story is about an Irish soldier of fortune, the flexibility of whose loyalty is central to the plot: loyalty is depicted as professional and

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therefore for sale. The result is to reduce the depicted integrity of Catholic characters. Although Daniel O’Neill cleaves to the Queen and hence the King, his uncle, Don Eugenio O’Neill makes peace with General Monck. His men need food and pay. ‘I will no longer accept promises in payment of my services. All this tell to his excellency. I care not for King nor Parliament, but only to serve my religion and my country’ (Ch. 47). A rare novel to explore the tensions between religious groupings and the role of Catholicism is Howard Pease’s Magnus Sinclair (1904) for the main character (unnamed) falls in with his cousin Eve’s Catholic family. Although her religion is of little import it brings him into contact with Father Cuthbert who (like his Covenanting grandfather) sees him as one of the lost (Ch. 7). He meets a Mistress MacGregor, and we are casually told that as a Catholic, like her cousin Argyll, she may be ‘steemed for her good works’ but she is ostracised for her religion. When he is discussing religion with Magnus, Magnus compares religious toleration for the different Protestant factions with that of Gustavus for both Protestants and Catholics, something that is desirable but should be segregated into different territories (Ch. 9). This idea was reflected in Arthur Paterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899) for although the protagonist dooms himself by proving a deist like his father (Coffey 2000, 111)—someone who does not believe in the divinity of Jesus or as a result, the trinity—it is in part his toleration (and love for some) Catholics that has him sentenced at court martial where he is accused of being ‘a friend of Papists, a scoffer at all true religion…’ (Ch. 40); papistry is the primary crime. What often strikes the reader is how little authors understand Catholicism and its relationship to the King and to the Royalists. This is noticeable even in a recent novel, such as Philippa Gregory’s Tidelands (2019): in a novel that imposes twentieth-century cross-class romance devices onto the seventeenth century, a Catholic priest serving the King under cover falls in love with a cottager (who is, inevitably, a healer and midwife and thus a ‘cut above’). Neither his vows nor religious differences prove an impediment.

Presbyterians In the period in which religion is of most interest in these texts, roughly the 1860s through to the 1920s, there seem to be very few English authors who grasp the nature of Presbyterianism. It is very rarely discussed in terms of what Presbyterians wanted in the way of Church governance,

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and then only from the Scottish viewpoint. For example, in Charles Vipont’s Blow the Man Down (1988), set on a navy ship during the Commonwealth, we are told that Presbyterians and Baptists are at loggerheads but we are not told why. The reliance on Ludlow’s memoirs is one cause. Another is that although we associate English non-conformism and Dissent with the seventeenth-century Presbyterians and Independents, the direct descent of Scottish Presbyterianism is absent; they only share some spiritual overlap. Although fascinatingly, there is one direct line of descent: Samuel Annesley, John Wesley’s maternal grandfather, was appointed by Richard Cromwell to the vicarage and living of St. Giles Cripplegate, only to refuse the oath of conformity and be ejected from the Anglican Church. Thus this section, which should be about the depiction of Presbyterians, has little to offer. This is particularly strange given that, as Timothy Lang has argued, part of the historiographical trajectory which England travelled in the nineteenth century was the absorption of its Puritan heritage into the religious and political mainstream (1995, 20–21). Only those authors concerned with Scotland such as R. W. Mackenna (Through Flood and Fire, 1923) or MacLaren Cobban (The Angel of the Covenant, 1898) pay very much attention to the arguments about both Presbyterian organisation and Calvinist theology. For example, the end of Through Flood and Fire emphasises less the religious impetus of Presbyterianism than a rhetoric of martyrdom. ‘The long dreary night of her persecution was ended; the sun had risen upon a land made glorious by the sufferings so dauntlessly borne. The heart of the people, which had been bowed down but never broken, was lifted up again’ (313). After we finish considering Scotland, and turn to England, what we find is a confusion or conflation in the texts, in which Presbyterians are disappeared into two groups, first, ‘Parliament’ becomes a shorthand for the Presbyterian faction—this is relatively accurate—and second, and our concern here, that ‘Puritan’ becomes the generic stand-in. ‘Puritan’ is a term that emerged in the late sixteenth century to describe one who wanted to purify the Church, to remove what were thought to be the last vestiges of Papistry in terms of ritual and decor. Puritans were not separatists, and until the 1620s could have been considered to be at the heart of church teaching and governance. Charles I’s championing of Laudianism pushed this group to the margins. They generally believed in some version of Calvinism with its faith in the process of inner conversion, the idea that only the Elect would enter heaven, and

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that this was entirely God’s choice. Puritan communities tended to be sober and restrained in dress but this was as much a function of their tendency to be lower gentry and artisans as it was belief, and there were plenty of upper-class Puritans who at least in dress were the match of their Cavalier colleagues. Perhaps crucially, the Puritans were biblically inspired: they promoted translation of the bible, encouraged their children and servants to read it, held house services and were passionate seekers after sermons. A common conflict in communities was whether there should be sermons as well as who was to be employed to give them. What is then most noticeable in the nineteenth-century texts is that very few of the authors seem to be able to accept puritanism as something that people genuinely believed in, even though Somerville found that non-conformists were disproportionately represented among nineteenthcentury children’s writers (1992). The result is a portrayal not so much of Presbyterians as a caricature of Puritans. Even Charles cannot resist this in The Draytons and the Davenants (1867): cousin Placidia is a hypocritical Puritan, one who can always find a reason not to give charity. Although in Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894) there is an example of the good sort of Puritan, Sir Robert, a genial, tolerant man who strongly resembles a Church of England vicar, and who dismisses those of a ‘fanatical turn’ who crop their heads and eschew a game of tennis, a more typical example is Original Sin Smith, narrow-minded and hypocritical who demands of the hero absolute political conformity. All too often Presbyterianism is seen as the church of the tradesman not only in terms of demographics but in utility. In Arthur Paterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899), Capell, the hero’s rival for Cromwell’s approval and later for the love interest, is described as having ‘been born and bred a Presbyterian, but his religion has been merely a ladder by which to climb into favour with the elders of his father’s church’ (Ch. 9). Roger’s master in Lindsay’s 1649 (1938) is a Presbyterian because that is where his trading network—the printers’ guild—sits. Harrod-Eagles in The Oak Apple (1983) presents them always as hypocrites, and the wife of the heir to the house is in the grip of a religious mania. Puritans are generally depicted as nineteenth-century kill-joys, with strict and plain dress (ironically rather like male nineteenth- and twentieth-century dress), no theatres, no music, no alcohol. In reality most Puritans enjoyed music, dancing and drink (although in moderation) (Daniels 1991). Sometimes it is even more malicious. Jane Lane’s Nigel Fitzhead in Sir Devil-May-Care argues that Puritans always have

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dirty linen, and the idea of the Puritan with the dirty collar crops up often, originating first with Sir John Philip’s famous description of Cromwell when he first arrived in Parliament, but by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resonating with the nineteenth-century phrase ‘the great unwashed’. One of the features of anti-Catholicism and anti-Laudianism, was iconoclasm, which became strongly associated with Puritanism. Iconoclasm was officially encouraged in the reign of Edward VI, of course, and stricter Protestants were inclined to revive it once Mary was dead. The English church under Elizabeth I had not encouraged the use of decoration in churches but it had been left much to initiative of individual dioceses. As the Laudians encouraged the intensification of religious practice however—such as insisting on ‘churching’ women—the presence of painted walls, stained glass, elaborate crucifixes became ever more strongly associated with what we would now call a High Church Episcopalianism. What had been in the background, ignored and allowed to decay, was now brought back into the light and often added to. Images and figures were for many puritans the visible sign of the imposition of a ritualistic and papistical church (Aston 1996, 92–122). Iconoclasm is not one thing although the authors of novels often treat it as such. It is very clear that for some soldiers iconoclasm was simply vandalism of areas through which they marched and which were dominated by the opposition. Some was a functional consequence of a theology that understood a ‘church’ as a body of people and not a specific building or ‘steeple house’, which meant that a church was no more sacrosanct a place than a stable and could legitimately be used as such; and other activities, such as pulling down market crosses, defacing fonts, smashing glass or confiscating painted icons were very deliberate attempts to change the visible religious culture of England. The difficulty is that all the authors whether pro-Royalist or pro-Parliament group all these things together, and all of them condemn it. Where some Royalist authors see it as a religious sin, all of the authors understand it as destruction of artwork. There is not a single text which actively supports any activities that can be loosely constructed within this category. What nuance there is, is in the understanding of where this stands in the grand sum of things: for many Royalist authors such as Yonge and Lane, iconoclasm appears to be a greater sin than the destruction of people. Parliamentarian authors still regard it as wrong, but as a lesser wrong (as in the work of Marshall).

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Iconoclasm had both an official, parliamentary form, and a less official local and military expression. The real-life personality most strongly associated with iconoclasm was Sir Robert Harley (now rather less wellknown than his letter-writing wife Brilliana). In 1643 Robert Harley was given responsibility by the Parliamentary Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatory for searching out and destroying idolatrous artwork, initially in the churches, and later in the private homes of Royalists (Spraggon 2003, 83–98). Harley is curiously modern, often giving receipts for items taken (88), but he was clearly also a zealot: items he ordered removed were at his direction actively destroyed. When he is portrayed in fiction, as in Arthur Patterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899), it is this side of the man which is brought to the fore in his portrayal as a hard-line, ranting puritan. But it would be a mistake to see the Parliamentary order of 1641 as entirely an imposition from above. Nehemiah Wallington, a godly Londoner recorded his joy in the destruction of what he understood as blasphemous art (Aston 1996, 119). Spraggon notes the speed with which Church officials in Derbyshire, in Hertfordshire and in Essex quickly moved to restore churches to their pre-Laudian state and to strip them, as they saw it, of Popish embellishments (101). However the sense of iconoclasm not as a thought-through theological position but as military devastation (Spraggon 2003, 105) or as religious mania crops up rather more frequently in the fiction than does its rationalised for version. Beyond the official destruction put in place by Parliament there was clearly also an overspill as neighbours spied on neighbours. Some Puritans took to policing each other, as with Kent Puritan Sir William Springate who cut out pictures of the Crucifixion and Resurrection from their frames in the house of a friend and neighbour (Aston 1996, 120). Puritans are presented in Dix’s The Making of Christopher Ferringham (1905) as deeply moral but also very boring people. When Ferringham is shipped off to New England, his Puritan relatives cannot cope with his wild ways, and their moral values seem dull and controlling. But the book also demonstrates a relative lack of interest in the actual belief systems of Calvinism, and this is not unusual. Yet there are some exceptions. In Lyall’s 1901 romance In Spite of All the divide between Gabriel and his lover Hilary is as much the manner of their religion as it is that they are different sides: Hilary understands religion as a thing inherited

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along with one’s name, while Gabriel is a Puritan by conviction. He demonstrates his worth by assisting the Bishop of Hereford in the tower, by his forgiveness of Laud for his persecution of Puritans, and gradually emerges into the classic Puritan grace of God, a slow, gentle trajectory lacking either conversion moment or rhetoric, but a trajectory which emphasises the personal over the ritual. It is likewise a rarity when, in Howard Pease’s Magnus (1904), we get to listen into the discussions of a group of ‘respectable looking merchants’ in Northumberland as they debate the issues at hand. For them Presbyterianism is moderation, and it is a freedom constructed by limits. One says ‘there should be a limit or boundary fixed by the Parliament, otherwise of a surety ye well e’en have crazy pates… whose doctrines are scarce compatible with any civil or religious government whatsoever’ (Ch. 1), while another notes that the Scriptures have set ‘Presbyter above Parliament, and are for setting up Kirk as king’ (Ch. 1). The men all assert the primacy of scripture over priest and yet many continue to insist that the Bible itself provides the argument for the ministry. This book successfully encodes the passion and the entanglement of these arguments and understands that the attempt to disappear Puritan and Presbyterian religion removes depth from the political argument of the period. When the Presbyterians in Parliament renege on the rolling-out of the Covenant, that too becomes tavern talk (Ch. 16). There are remarkably few Puritans to admire in these books: Dr. Pharaoh in Trease’s The Grey Adventurer (1942), some historical figures such as John Hampden, John Gifford, and various background characters such as uncles and guardians, the landlady in Trease’s Silver Guard (1948). The conversion of John Gifford (the model for Bunyan’s evangelist) to Presbyterianism and a life of a Puritan minister is the background of Jones’s fictionalised biography, A Soldier of the King (1901) but this is more of a prequel in positing a failed romance that reveals to Gifford that his future lies elsewhere. In Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) we see a range of belief but as in both Lindsay’s 1649 (1938) and Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) the faith of Presbyterians is rarely explored and its political implications are often left untouched. It is only in texts from the twenty-first century that we see, for example, a character with a clear theology and understanding that the opposition to bishops is more than just an opposition to ritual or to the extension of the state, but a fundamental disagreement on a theology which has as a consequence a very different worldview. In Logue’s Uncivil War sequence,

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Reverend Babbitt (Captain Hollie Babbitt’s father) is a Puritan minister, while Lieutenant Thankful Russell is a child of godly parents who has been raised by a Puritan sister. By using two characters with similar understandings of the role of grace and conversion in one’s life, Logue (like Charles) is able to create a variety of expression: Thankful Russell’s sister may be a sociopath who uses her faith to bully her little brother, but Reverend Babbitt loves his son enough and seeks his salvation most determinedly to follow him to the ends of the earth. Almost without fail, Puritan is such an epithet that when characters are deemed admirable they are separated out from the fold. This may be one reason we have such a disproportionate representation of Independents and Quakers in later texts.

Independents Frequently Independents in these novels are seen as mad, or just as extremists, and there is some conflation of Independents with Quakers (not helped by the lack of a clear date of ‘establishment’ of the Society of Friends). But Independents were just that, people who wanted to worship in their own way and were often strong advocates of localism. In the novels, the godly communities are primarily poor, and the role of godly artisans and merchants is barely touched on. House churches, innocuous as they may seem, were regarded as a major threat to the established order by Episcopalian and Presbyterian alike, and this is conveyed by the novelists. In Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) Aunt Dorothy is imprisoned under the Restoration for holding a service in her house. Where Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism are depoliticised, Independency is understood almost entirely as a political position. Set in the first year of the Restoration, in Cumbria, Caine’s Shadow of a Crime (1885) acknowledges the repression that Independents experienced. Ralph, out of touch while he is on the run has missed the declarations of the Act of Uniformity, the Five Mile Bill and the Test Bill. ‘“You see, sir, the old episcopacy is back again, and the John Presbyters that joined it are snug in their churches, but the Presbyters that would not join it are turned out of their livings. That’s the Act of Uniformity.” “The Act of NonConformity, I should say” replied Ralph’ (Ch. 33). Of the proposed Test Act Ralph declares, ‘“…that’s a Burial Act, an Act to bury the Presbyters alive. They’d be full as well buried, I think”’ (Ch. 33). Eventually this will result in Ralph refusing to acknowledge the authority of the court.

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In Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894) Joscelyn, the protagonist, is a representative of the undecided, the people happy to align themselves as Presbyterians but without much zeal. However, Joscelyn’s encounter with John Hampden the Independent, and his own independence of conscience leads to Joscelyn’s separation from father and family. Equally important is his tendency to melancholy. This is an interior and selfcastigating religion (Cromwell gave his faith credit for lifting him from attacks of melancholy). Independency is in the rejection of ritual, in line with the new customs of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and the refiguring of certain acts as secular. Thus, when Lyall’s heroine is challenged by a Puritan why she is wearing a wedding ring, a relic of superstition, she takes it off, and explains that it is just a distinction of the married from the unmarried, and that Joscelyn too wears one—a reflection more of American feminism than seventeenth-century practice. Joscelyn’s Independence is fierce and centres his politics: when the Scots win the Covenant as part of the alliance with Parliament he accepts it but hopes for toleration in the future, yet in his old age Joscelyn still refuses to compromise his conscience. He will not say the prayers for King Charles on May 29th: ‘“I cannot, as the Prayer-Book says, ‘reflect upon so foul an act with horror and astonishment,’ or deem that men like Cromwell and Ireton, Bradshaw and Hutchinson, were ‘cruel and bloody men.’ ‘sons of Belial’…”’ (Ch. 41). In the sequel, In Spite of All (1901), in which Joscelyn appears as a minor character, Gabriel Harford (a real person) and Hilary Unett are parted by politics and religion. She is for King and Church; he is for Parliament and for free thought. Gabriel is the eldest son of Dr. Bridstock Harford, who was MP for Hereford in the Long Parliament. Gabriel is profoundly influenced by his father who as a minister is brought to book for refusing to bow the head when the name of Jesus was spoken, which had become a requirement of the Laudian Church, and by a woman who protests the enforcement of Churching and the wearing of a white veil when returning thanks for a safe delivery. Dr. Harford, at this moment unaligned, raises the point that will become the breach not only between Presbyterians and Laudians, but between Presbyterians and the Independents. When Gabriel kisses his father’s hand, Laud offers, ‘“Your own son teaches you that outward ceremonies are not valueless”’ but Dr. Harford responds, ‘“should I value my little son’s demonstration if there were compulsion in it—if it were a ceremony performed at fixed moments?

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And would it be worth aught to me if I were fined so many shillings for omitting it?”’ (Ch. 2). Gabriel is sent for his education to live with the Harleys and becomes a friend of Ned and Brilliana, but Lyall, while she celebrates these two (whose letters have come down to us), regards Sir Robert Harley as ‘of the somewhat hard and narrow school’ (Ch. 1) and in his rejection of the iconoclasm of the radical Waghorn—a communicant in Hereford— Gabriel will also be rejecting Harley and hard-line Presbyterianism. In this book the radicals are often the consequence of Laudianism, not the cause. When Hilary is repelled by a radical, a ‘fanatic’ ranting against ‘this House of Dagon’, Joscelyn notes that ‘this is a carpenter driven from a village in your neighbourhood who was driven half demented by Dr Laud’s cruelty to his father’ (Ch. 14). The message in this book is that compulsion breeds extremism, tolerance breeds moderation, in a reverse of Laudian assumptions. Lyall shows Gabriel’s personal growth into Grace through works (or actions): he demonstrates his worth by looking after the Bishop of Hereford in the Tower, and even helping up Laud when he falls, despite resenting him for the vicious punishments Laud had imposed on dissenters. But the Grace he grows into is one of Independence, shaped by his experience of the treatment of those he regards as most stalwart. In a collection of books full of Cromwell-worship, Gabriel admires Lord Falkland, who served as MP for Newport, supported the prosecution of the King’s friend and ally, Lord Strafford and argued strongly for a separation of the ecclesiastical from the secular jurisdiction although opposing the abolition of the episcopacy. However, just prior to the attempt to arrest the five members, the King had offered to Falkland the position of Secretary of State and thus, when the war broke out, Falkland felt that he must fight for the King. As the factions drew apart he was caught in an ideological no-man’s land. By the Battle of Newbury in 1643 he was clearly in despair. Instead of taking a leadership role, he served as a volunteer under Sir John Byron, and riding into a gap in a hedge commanded by the enemy’s fire he was killed. His reputation was besmirched and when Gabriel is taken captive after Newbury, he must listen to his fellow prisoners defame the man he admires. Lord Falkland is accused of deserting his friends (Pym and Hampden) and seeking Court favour, but worst of all he is accused by a Presbyterian of committing suicide and thus condemning himself to hell. Gabriel makes the declaration that sets him on his road: ‘I will have no more

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to do with what you call religion… It is these accursed systems that are the root of all our misery—there’s not a coin to choose betwixt your bigotry and the bigotry of the Archbishop. England is going to the dogs because Churchmen wrangle over ceremonies and trappings, and Puritans squabble over Holy Writ’ (Ch. 21) [my bold]. Falkland becomes ‘the forerunner of a vast multitude who, in future generations, would band themselves together and resolutely stand for peace, permitting only such force as was needful for the protection of hearth and home, and the maintenance of the just laws of their own country’ (Ch. 24). This is a radical vision of nonconformity. By the end of chapter 29, Dr. Harford can make clear to Hilary that ‘More and more we both tend to the Independents, who desire the nearest approach to religious toleration that is at present compatible with the safety of the country’ (Ch. 29). At the end Gabriel is inclining to Quakerism, on a path recorded by many later ‘convinced’ Friends: he serves first as a soldier and later as an apprentice surgeon, is wounded, he recovers and fights again. While the romantic plot includes a moustachetwirling Royalist colonel with (mostly honourable) designs on Hilary, the stronger narrative trajectory is Gabriel’s personal ‘growing into grace’ (a Quaker phrase to describe a process that is neither instantaneous salvation through grace, nor salvation through works). Ralph Dangerfield in Paterson’s Cromwell’s Own (1899) is inspired by his father (mutilated by the star chamber for being a Socinian). Ralph flees to the continent and with his friend Charleston becomes a soldier. But by the time he falls in love with Cromwell’s (fictional) ward Rachel he too is a Socinian and the Presbyterian minister will not marry them. Rachel ends up as the focus of three men, and much of the story is concerned with the rivalry between the three and the ways in which Ralph’s faith is used against him. This enables Paterson to explore attitudes to toleration. Rachel’s other guardian Sir Isaac Hepworth is horrified that she is coming into contact with a Socinian and threatens to remove her from the household: ‘he is not, cannot be, a fit member of a godly household!’ (Ch. 10). Cromwell holds out, and is presented as a champion of tolerance, ‘Wherefore, be his views touching religion what they may—Arminian, Socinian, Anabaptist even—I shall appoint him this day, and no man or men, understand me, shall in this matter set my will aside’ (Ch. 10). But even Cromwell will not go so far as to permit Ralph

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to marry Rachel, and while he will defend him in the army from insinuations that his friendship with a Cavalier renders him unreliable, he will not admit him to the household. Rachel, who by this time has rejected Cromwell’s son Oliver (who dies in 1644) is at an impasse: ‘To love a man who denied the divinity of Christ Rachel believed to be a sin. Marriage was out of the question’ (Ch. 35). Ralph is castigated for his deism, and for his willingness to give mercy to papists. Some of the nicest men here—his old friend, his godfather—are papists or churchmen, while the nastiest are those that think themselves godly. Cromwell, who himself was by this time emerging to historians as a closet independent, is here presented as a Solomonlike figure, cutting through the legalism of the Pharisees to the truth at the heart of Christianity. Furthermore, Arthur Paterson was an American writer (and author of The Gospel Writ in Steel ), and at the end of the nineteenth-century Protestant ecumenicism in the USA was taking hold. Running through Cromwell’s Own is a very strong argument for toleration between Protestants. In Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year the interaction between politics and religion is clear, but religion here is presented as a distraction; the main character, Ralph Lydcot, serves in the army, is infected by Independency but sticks with the secular arm of the movement and is eventually merged back into the body politic of the bourgeoisie, and into a Presbyterian party that knows how to accommodate the secular. His friend Roger Cotton (and Cotton is an indicative Protestant name) is seduced by the wilder ideas of religious independents and radicals and loses his livelihood, his soul and eventually his faith in a Godly kingdom here on earth. Roger Cotton’s story is from the start one of mania. He is consumed by voices that tell him he must stand up for his beliefs, and witness for God. His first attempts are the catalyst for disaster as he takes his master to task for printing and selling illegitimate copies. He ends up in jail but succeeds in rescuing both himself and the young woman with whom he becomes attached, who has been selling her body to survive. Roger’s religious independency is one that is unhooked from any outward measure and is thus self-consuming. When he confesses his belief to Ralph it is entirely centred on himself: ‘And none sees my pain, none cares, none understands’ (Ch. 4). He is lost in self-abnegation and this isolates him. Roger is so independent that except for the brief period with the Diggers, with whom he appears to find no religious connection, he is a Church of

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one, a seeker of Truth who cannot find any Truth that meets his exacting standards. Lindsay seems to argue that this is the ultimate destination of the independent who cannot find a party. Jane Lane’s London Goes to Heaven (1947) is, unsurprisingly, rather hostile to the independent movement. Sarah Guffin, the oldest daughter, ‘gets religion’ wandering from sect to sect, ending up with James Nayler (the Quaker prophet) and posing as his religious bride in the fatal procession—in which he re-enacted Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem, riding into Bristol which concluded with a charge of blasphemy—at which point she is frightened to death, is rescued by her father and returns to be a dutiful daughter. Her brother Thomas is pressed into the army and converted to Anabaptism (much like Jephthah in Yonge’s Under the Storm). He spends much of the book preaching and prating at the young wife of the barber-surgeon who has a habit of seducing young men, and he is part of the mutiny against Cromwell who in this book stands for the forces of religious and secular order. Set against both of them is Simon, the youngest son, who reads the Old Testament for himself and fights back against his elder siblings’ Independent arguments, accepting the Church of England, joining the Sealed Knot and becoming a young hero of the Restoration. In Davis’s Rebels and Traitors (2009) Independents are similarly only shown at the most extreme, as part of the religious ferment and radical imagination (see McDowell 2003). While the protagonist Gideon is unaligned (although his wife is Episcopalian), his sister-in-law Ann joins the Diggers while her husband Lambert becomes embroiled with the Ranters (Ch. 69). After he is released from prison, Lambert and Ann seek to heal their marriage through a number of mystic sects. ‘They chose a visionary, Deist, anti-Trinitarian group called Reevonians… established in February 1652 when John Reeve, a London tailor, received three visions which appointed him God’s Prophet (he said) along with his cousin Lodowick Muggleton’ (Ch. 70). Gideon finds them confusing for they believed the soul was mortal and that heaven was to be looked for and made on earth not in an afterlife, but they also believed in the imminent coming of the millennium. Gideon is relieved: because they met quietly in taverns, sang songs, and declined to actively recruit, welcoming only seekers, they stayed mostly below the eye-line of the authorities. What we do not see in these books are those who were members of quiet house churches, close to Presbyterianism in belief but dissenting from the theocracy the Presbyterians would have enforced. A recent

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exception is in Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows (2017), written at a time when the independent ‘house church’ movement is once again strong. In this novel the young Makepeace grows up in the east London town of Poplar, among a godly community. ‘Everyone they knew was godly. That was what the community called themselves, not out of pride, but to set themselves apart from all those on a darker road with Hell’s mouth at the end’ (Ch. 1). There is a smattering of virtue names like her own, and each evening her Aunt’s room is used for prayer meetings, and sermons are given by a minister both kindly and terrifying. But as the war approaches members of the congregation begin to have visions of the end of the world: ‘The sea brimming blood and the Woman Clothed with the Sun from the Bible walking down Poplar High Street’ (Ch. 2) so that the heart of radicalism is there even in this quiet, restrained community. Yet it is also a world of prophecy; she meets the Lady Eleanor, the mystic that fascinated parliament and is herself painted as a prophetess until she is labelled as a witch. And when Makepeace acquires the soul ghost of an Independent soldier, Livewell Tyler, she hears from him about the mania of iconoclasm, in which in their terror at what they had done, he and his friends ‘all grew fiercer, more eager to smash and tear. You tried to outdo each other, so you wouldn’t have to look at those broken eyes [of the Christ on the cross] on the floor’ (Ch. 28).

The Quakers The Quakers occupy an interesting position in historical memory, a distinctly minority expression of the radical ferment. Visionary and ecstatic in a period that was, if anything, trying to integrate the Bible into Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas of rationalism, they outlasted the turmoil of the seventeenth century, reconfigured themselves as a Quietist and inward-looking movement in the eighteenth century (purging some of their own history as they went), only to re-emerge in the nineteenth century as very middle class but active social campaigners. By the twentieth century, the Friends had refound their radical interventionist roots even if they have never returned to the visionary and ecstatic modes of their founders. They were avid pamphleteers whose writings—both manuscript and printed—were circulated and collected (see Peters 2012, 569), which has helped their historical memory to survive. Quakers function as a representative of principled religion, even when it is principle seen as an extreme. Twelve of the books in the collection

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feature Quaker characters. If we include Restoration stories the proportion is higher and reflects the trouble the Friends ran into during the Restoration settlement: Margaret Roberton wrote an admiring depiction of Quakers in the ‘Time of Trial’ of the 1670s, in A Gallant Quaker (1901); the well-known Quaker writer Elfrida Vipont wrote (as Charles Vipont) a boys’ adventure Blow the Man Down (1939) in which her boy hero sails with Thomas Luttering the Commonwealth and Restoration first mate and later ship captain who was converted to Quakerism by his best friend and crewmate. Hester Burton’s Thomas (1969) follows two young men one of whom becomes a Friend; Ann Turnbull wrote Alice in Love and War (2006) after a series about post-war Quakers starting with No Shame, No Fear (2003). The portrayal of Quakers, with the exception (as so often she is exceptional) of Elizabeth Rundle Charles, follows the practice of writing back into the seventeenth century the Quakers of a later time, so that overall what we see is the quiet, steadfast eighteenth-century Quaker, rather than the turbulent Friend of the Civil War years. It is only in the work of Charles, of Vipont, and then of later twentieth-century authors that a picture of the ‘turbulent people’ who earned the name Quakers for their passion begins to emerge. In Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) Quakers are present only in discussion and as an extreme. In a discussion on toleration with her husband Dr. Anthony, in which it is anticipated that the Independents and Presbyterians shall soon come to terms, Olive considers that ‘Of toleration towards Papists, Infidels, or Quakers, no one dreamed…. As to Quakers, they were reported to be liable to attacks of objections to clothes very perplexing to sober-minded Christians and were probably many of them lunatics. These should not indeed be burned, but they should at all events be clothed and, if possible, silenced, until they came to their right mind’ (Ch. 27)—an approach Davis records in Rebels and Traitors (2009), in which the hero’s brother is imprisoned until he comes back from the religious mania which led him to follow James Naylor. In Charles’ sequel, On Both Sides of the Sea (1868), Olive is surprised by her husband’s rescue of a young Quaker woman from the jail to serve as a nurse. Annis Nye appears rather peaceful: ‘no unusual or alarming symptoms had appeared in Annis, nothing to indicate her being capable of the offence for which it was said she had been cast into prison, which was that, one Sunday, she had confronted a well-known Presbyterian minister in his pulpit… and in a calm and deliberate voice had denounced him in

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the face of the indigent congregation as a “false priest”, “hireling shepherd”, and a “minister of Antichrist”’ (Ch. 3). But Annis turns out to be calmly and respectfully obdurate, using thee and thou, addressing people by their full names, and proving extraordinarily difficult to argue with, as Job Forster—a labourer but also close affiliate of Roger’s—discovers. There is, as Job observes, no debate: ‘Debates are only possible with people who are amenable to Scripture and reason’ (Ch. 3). In a world in which ministers preach to change minds, and Cromwell beseeches, consider that you may be mistaken, and in which the passion of all sides can disguise the degree to which the religious world was moving from a dictated religion to a critical one, the Quakers, the most radical of them all, refused to engage in the discourse which was the heart’s blood of the English revolution. And this, as Olive notes, affects every single day: ‘The points at which she and her sect came into antagonism with the rest of the world were scattered all over the surface of every-day social life’ and each one was a ‘citadel of her most central convictions’ (Ch. 7). Annis—calm, quiet, good with the children—is hard work. Judging by contemporary accounts of Friends, Annis is a very real representative of early Quakers. But Annis serves a complex purpose: she demonstrates the true Christianity and charity of her hosts who take a considerable risk in harbouring her, and that ‘friendship over ideology’ which marks out these two books for by the end she has been adopted by the two servants of the household, Job and his wife Rachel. She is as much carrier of the novel’s ideology as she is subject to it. Amelia Barr’s novel Friend Olivia (1890) is in some ways anachronistic. Set in the Commonwealth when Quakers were still very new and mostly lower class, Olivia Prideaux’s father is a well-to-do merchant and landowner. The acknowledgement that the marriage would separate Nathaniel from his friends and from civil society—because by this point officials are being asked to take oath to support the Commonwealth— does not truly reflect the gulf between the two parties. But despite a tendency to ‘gentle’ her Quakers, Barr does a decent job of conveying what a thorn in the side the Friends were to the sober puritans of the Commonwealth. Barr uses this novel to give us a very attentive account of Quaker thought and behaviour. Almost our first encounter with the Friends is in a conversation between Nathaniel and Roger, Olivia’s father. Roger is complaining of the treatment of Friends by Cromwell, but Nathaniel comments ‘They preach peace, but their lives provoke a constant breach

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of the peace’; and Roger confesses that he is glad of this, and that ‘if it pleases God, prisons shall be schools for prophets and nurseries of strong men in Jesus Christ’ (Ch. 3). Later we learn that theirs is an earthly faith: in conversation with George Fox, the Presbyterian Duttred is reprimanded by Fox for despising the body: ‘It is easy to call the body “vile” and then use it vilely. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels and our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost’ and thus may not be sullied with either sin or ill treatment. Barr spends several pages exploring the Quaker position on the inner light, but although she emphasises the masculinity of Fox, her admiration for the faith is expressed most fully in the ways in which it is situated in Olivia in whom the sitting in still silence, the care of the weak and of those in jail is an intensification of her femininity. It is noticeable that the loudest and most radical of the Quakers we meet, a teenage boy, taken up for preaching, dies in prison. For all the celebration of Quaker faith, Barr admires and supports a feminine intransigence and quiet persistence that is more associated with later Quakers than with the turbulence of this period. Thus our most detailed account of Quaker practice is in Chapter 8, in which at the trial of Roger Prideaux the Friends resist oath, insist on hospitality even to the iniquitous, refuse to take off their hats, and face down the absolutist and hierarchical mode of religion of the Presbyterians. At the end of this Roger is sent to jail. The feminine portrayal of Quakerism is reinforced even through the eyes of Lady Kelder, Nathaniel’s mother, who is shocked that Olivia dares to interrupt a discussion of her elders to express her opinion. ‘These emotional young girls who talked of an indwelling Christ, and of heavenly visions, inspired her with no other feeling but that of dislike’ (Ch. 7). But Olivia’s heart and spirituality are described as ‘a garden’ and we get to see her at her best when visiting the jail with Nathaniel (Ch. 14) in which she nurses their servant Asa, and then De Burg (in prison for failing to compound) and then stays for ‘long hot days’ bringing succour to the women prisoners. Male Quakers are rarer in the fiction. Whereas the fiery spirit of a female Quaker was attractive to the early feminist writers and has continued to be so, the quiet fortitude of later male Quakers was a larger struggle. Jacobs argues that the presentation of male Quakers always ran counter to standards of masculinity. Their itinerant preaching led them to charges of vagrancy, defended only in part by framing preaching as labour, and identifying themselves with the apostles (Jacobs 2017, 28).

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But this still positioned them as either ranting rebels, or as expressing a peaceableness in their later years that framed them as less than manly. Howard Pease’s Magnus Sinclair (1903) is clearly modelled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1893). It is narrated in the first person by a Londoner who shortly before the defeat of Charles II and Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland goes north to live with his family in Northumberland. Magnus is a Royalist Protestant, his family Catholic, which leads to many theological discussions. Although the book is intended as an adventure, religion, conviction and the role of fate on faith appear central and the Quaker presence is an element of that (and carefully footnoted to sources). We meet George Fox (naturally) while he is on one of his roving ministries, coming out of an inn: ‘a thick-set figure of peaceable aspect and quiet demeanour, quaintly clad in leather breeches, who was being heartily belaboured and vociferously abused by a thin, squinting female’ (Ch. 2). Our narrator watches Fox ‘quietly remonstrating’ as he is led away and it is left to a bystander to note that George Fox is an idealist, who would do away with priests and magister and thus leave the ordinary man vulnerable to evil. In Chapter 10, our hero falls in with a Quaker family. While in the tavern in Sandgate, Newcastle, he and his friends see a much wilder Quaker preacher, Nathaniel Adamson, preaching from a chair on a barrel, and much abused by the Presbyterians thereabouts. ‘The man’s face was white with enthusiasm, his eye distraught and rapt with fire of emotion as he flung his garments from him, proclaiming his mission’ (Ch. 10). When he begins to give away his clothes the troopers intervene, and so to does his master, an elderly Quaker gentleman who notes: ‘Tis true the Holy Apostles took no thought for their raiment, but thee must remember that they did not dispense with their garments altogether, but always, like the holy Apostle Paul, did “do all things decently and in order”’ (Ch. 10). Nehemiah Wintrip’s is the voice of the late seventeenth-century Quaker. And this will continue to be the case as we meet his wife: ‘she was one brought up in the straitest sect of the Puritans, by whom all things are seriously taken, but without a trace of harshness withal, for the Quaker doctrines of peace and charity to all men had been absorbed into the very fibre of her being’ (Ch. 10). Their daughter Ruth is ‘serene with sunshine’ (Ch. 10). Perhaps most noticeable is that he prays, in orderly fashion, on his knees, he leads prayer in a way quite alien to Quakers of the time who had already begun their practice of silence.

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Pease here wants to do two things: to rescue Quakers for respectability and to ensure that they meet his own, Edwardian sense of masculinity. Thus the father is ‘Square in figure, high-browed, with long white locks, board-cheeked, big-lipped and a strong resolute nose, he seemed to be as he sat in his high-backed oaken chair the type of patriarch of old who ruled his household like a righteous judge and father in Israel’ (Ch. 10). Here is no awareness of the challenges to gender identities that the Friends offered. The Quakers disappear off the radar for the next fifty years: one suspects that their popularity between 1890 and 1910 may well have been linked to the rise of the international peace movement for, as we have seen, an anachronistic pacifism is written into all of these books. But it would not survive a war in which the Friends were at the forefront of an extremely unpopular conscientious objection movement. Elfrida Vipont’s Blow the Man Down (1939) although it gives a really good picture of the ways in which the obdurateness—rather than the quietness—of early Friends was to cause the authorities so much trouble, is not really about either the Civil War or the Commonwealth. The first hint that the Friends might reappear as actants in civil war novels comes in Trease’s The Grey Adventurer (1942). Dr. Pharoah, the radical school teacher who mentors Dick in America is not a Quaker, but in his behaviour and radical egalitarianism in the colonial settlement, he is precisely the kind of person who, in the seventeenth century, might have identified with the term ‘seeker’ which was later to become an element in the full title of the Religious Society of Friends. In the 1960s and 1970s however, right in the middle of the peace movement and during a period in which radical modes of activism descending from Gandhism and the US Civil Rights movement (both with strong links with Quakerism), two novels actively about Quakers appeared, one for children, Hester Burton’s Thomas (1969) and, for adults, Jan de Hartog’s The Peaceable Kingdom (1977) which is an idealistic (but notably homophobic) faction about the founding of the Society of Friends. The key issue that stands out with all three of these texts, is that we see a radical shift from a ‘quietist’ portrayal of Quakers, one rooted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Quakerism, to a return to the ‘turbulent Friends’ of the seventeenth century. This is particularly true of Hester Burton’s Thomas which although set in the years after the Restoration harks back to the Civil War years in the main protagonist’s memories of the wilder sects from that time: ‘they ran through the streets prophesying doom and destruction for the nation’s

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sins’ (Ch. 8). But by this time the main ‘wildness’ of the Friends is their refusal to accept the rules against house meetings and conventicles and the reinstitution of the recusancy fines. The Friends in this book and in this period, as also in Ann Turnbull’s novel of Quakers in the Restoration, No Shame, No Fear (2003), both of which like Margaret H. Roberton’s A Gallant Quaker, are set in ‘The Time of Trial’, are obdurate, not aggressive.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Aston, Margaret. “Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660.” The Culture of English Puritanism. Eds. Durston, Christopher and Jacqueline Eales. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 92–121. Print. Coffey, John. Persecution and Tolerance in Protestant England, 1558–1689. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Print. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Cross, Claire. “The Church in England, 1646–1660.” The Interregnum; the Quest for Settlement 1646–60. Ed. Aylmer, G. E. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972. 99–120. Print. Daniels, Bruce C. “Did the Puritans Have Fun? Leisure, Recreation and the Concept of Pleasure in Early New England.” Journal of American Studies 25.1 (1991): 7–22. Print. Doran, Susan, and Christopher Durston. Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1529–1689. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Griffin, Margaret. Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies, 1639– 1646. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004. Print. Harris, Tim. Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567 –1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print. Harris, Johanna, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds. The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Hill, Christopher. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Allen Lane, 1993. Print. Hirst, Derek. Authority and Conflict: England 1603–1658. London: Edward Arnold, 1986. Print. Jacobs, Emma. “Independent Men: Radical Manhood During the English Revolution.” DPhil. University of Glasgow, 2017. Print. Lang, Timothy. The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

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McDowell, Nicholas. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. Neufeld, Matthew. The Civil Wars After 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. Print. Peters, Kate. “Quakers and the Culture of Print in the 1650 s.” The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 567–92. Print. Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print. Somerville, John C. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Print. Spraggon, Julie. Puritan Iconoclasm During the English Civil War. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003. Print.

CHAPTER 8

By the Sword Divided

That great God who is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy … We are both upon the stage and must act such parts as are assigned us in this tragedy, let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities. —Sir William Waller (Parliamentarian) to his good friend Sir Ralph Hopton (Royalist) on the eve of the Battle of Roundway Down, 1643.

One of the commonest tropes powering Civil War novels is the idea of the family divided: father against son, brother against brother, friend against friend and lover against lover. It is such a common trope that it is taken as given by many historians and fiction writers. Its power as a trope lies in part because the rhetoric of government of both King and Parliament was freighted with familial metaphor. The English Civil War is a time of passion, but it does not begin that way: the early protests against the king are couched with civility, the King himself expresses sadness. It is as the war progresses that hatred intensifies on both sides: the Royalists, who already viewed their opponents with class-based contempt, rage that they are being beaten by a professional army (frequently it sounds in the documents as if they are accusing the Parliamentarians of cheating). The Parliamentarians who describe the king in 1641 as surrounded by evil counsellors are by 1649 positioning the King as the villain. © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_8

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In the fictional texts, where the text takes a side (and even in some of the more overall neutral texts) the passion is always there from the beginning. In Yonge, Brent-Dyer, Fenn, Henty, Sutcliff and others, passion is felt deeply. The terminology used in reality, rarely such as this man of blood to describe Charles Stuart (William Allen in his 1669 account of a prayer meeting of offices at Windsor in 1648) recurs frequently as an indication of extremism (Carlin, forthcoming). In those texts, where a son chooses to rebel, ironically he often does so because he brings nuance to the debate (and where he does not, as in Yonge’s Under the Storm he is shown to be a canting hypocrite). It is mostly Parliamentarians who have arguments; Royalists who express their loyalty as passion. In the neutral and Parliamentarian novels, the trajectory of many of these books is from passion and extremism to temperance and nuance as in The Children of the New Forest in which the Intendant moves away from his passionate Parliamentarianism to a more moderate position at the end of the book. This makes sense if one understands passion and extremism as childish; temperance and nuance as adulthood. It means that the authors are paralleling the Whig interpretation of history, in which the Great Rebellion was a disturbance in the natural temperament of English development which reached its apotheosis in the relatively nonviolent Glorious Revolution of 1688; a growing up from childish passion to adult nuance. This ties in particularly well with some of the tensions that authors brought to the writing of the historical child and also to the understandings of the parent–child relationship presented in these pages. The King regarded the structure of the family and the role of the father as a metaphor for the role of the king: the sanction of the King descended from the biblical sanction for patriarchal power. In responding to Parliament he continually placed himself in the position of the father dealing with rebellious children, offering threats of chastisement alternated with threats of forgiveness. King Charles’ world aligned with one in which the killing of a parent or Master was a form of petty treason. Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, written just prior to the outbreak of war, ‘stressed that both kings and heads of families exercised their power as descendants of the first father, Adam’ (Durston 1989, 4). Parliament too saw the family as crucial. They however tended to see the family as the key unit in society, and from the dissension in families arose dissension in society. Robert Abbot wrote in 1653, ‘If families had been better, Churches and Commonwealths all along had prospered’ (Durston, 4–5). But as Ann Hughes has pointed out, in a world in which

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social change had made it more difficult for poorer men to achieve the role of head of the household/father, the ‘republican masculinity of heads of households and citizen soldiers’ was under threat (Hughes 2012, 08). The more distant the family explored, the more likely that there are family members on both sides of a conflict, so most historians and fiction writers focus on intimate family relations. One historian to take a closer look at this is Christopher Durston, in his 1989 study The Family in the English Revolution. Durston does not have a large number of sources (presumably these could be added to by local historians): ten father and son pairings; fourteen divided brothers and nine divided families, the latter of which is probably an underestimation even when just looking at aristocratic families (see Appendix D). The most famous of these divided families is the Verneys. Edmund Verney was to die at Edgehill, his body not discovered, his severed hand still clasping the King’s colours: his son Ralph Verney was for Parliament. Sir Edmund, ‘like a good servant I believe is much for his master’, wrote his wife, Margaret, to Ralph (Purkiss 2007, 165). Not far after is Basil Fielding: his father had declared for the King, but after he declared for Parliament, his mother put a great deal of effort into trying to persuade him to change his mind: in ways that mimic the novels, ‘Susan did not use reasoned political argument to try to win Basil to the Royalist case, but arguments based on feeling and on family ties’ (Purkiss 2007, 167). Although ten pairings are not really enough to make a wide judgement on the reality on the ground, there is a slightly greater tendency in these figures for rebel sons to be rebelling against Parliamentary fathers in favour of the King. Puritanism may have felt very old-fashioned to younger men; Laudianism was the new movement. Yet of the fiction assembled very few show this trend. The Whig interpretation of the English Civil Wars has very much shaped a narrative in which Parliament is the party of progress, and thus perhaps of youth. There is a strong association of popular support with youth, and with a sense of making over the world we associate with a successor generation. In the Civil War fictions duty and rebellion are profoundly shaped by ideologies of adulthood and parenting that connect unusually strongly with the rhetoric of the English Civil War and only to a lesser extent with contemporary concerns. For many of the protagonists, both Royalist and Protestant, which side they take is decided not by discussion or belief, but by what their parents (for which mostly read fathers) believe.

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One hundred and seventy or so novels is not a huge sample. Divided into decades the figures are too small to make any deep analysis. Yet in almost all of those novels duty, the willingness to take one’s lead from one’s parent, dominates. Of the 117 novels where there was a clear sense of a side being taken, 70 (59.8%) took the side of following the line of duty; 47 (40.1%) exhibited rebellion where for some reason a child chose a different path. Only in the 1910s, 1920s, 1970s and 2000s did rebellion outweigh the call of duty. However, in line with John Somerville’s observation of Puritan authors across two centuries, there are some differences: ‘only Puritan authors reminded their readers that the child’s obedience to God overrode that due to parents’ (1992, 29) and it is in those books that we will see sons break for the Parliamentarian side. To a large degree duty to family is taken for granted: sons follow fathers. But in several novels duty becomes a theme in itself, and of course, duty to the King is the motivation of most Royalists. This position is used by Daniel Defoe in our initiating title Memoirs of a Cavalier. The protagonist begins as a professional soldier in the continental wars, and fights for the King because he owes a duty to his father to follow his lead. It is then his duty as professional soldier and as subject to both King and father, that keeps him there when it is quite clear from the text that his inclinations lie elsewhere. In text after text duty to follow one’s father is more important than actually thinking. This is as true of left-wing writers as right-wing writers so that in the worlds of Geoffrey Trease (Silver Guard, 1948, very left-wing at this stage in his career), Rosemary Sutcliff (a conservative, Simon, 1953) and Ronald Welch (For the King, 1969) all the boys in the text follow the lead of their fathers and families. Three books which are conspicuous in rendering duty as the driving force of the plot are Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest (1847), Charlotte M. Yonge’s Under the Storm (1887) and Marie Beulah Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth: A Round-Head Cavalier (1899). In each of these books there is a certain illogic to the plot unless one believes firmly in duty as a dominating parameter. In The Children of the New Forest duty to the King is entirely inherited. This is a book in which politics are constructed in a way that renders only the opposition political: to be a supporter of the king is to be part of the natural order in which one also has a duty to oneself and maintenance of oneself in that order. The relationship between the two brothers in which the younger backs the older is entirely one of duty. The older daughter takes up the duty of housewife. Duty here is a process, and when the Intendant changes sides after

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the execution of Charles it is in part because he is recalled to his duty. Yonge’s Under the Storm is entirely and nakedly driven by duty. Steadfast, the second son of the family, stands by his duty after his father is killed and his older brother takes this an excuse to join the Parliamentarian army, rejecting both the patriarchal authority of the king and his own patriarchal duty and the older brother. Throughout Steadfast takes on the duty to look after his family, to protect the secret that has been entrusted with him (the hidden Church plate) and eventually even the duty to decide when a legitimate heir to the church key arrives. Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth: A Round-Head Cavalier (1899) is as adamant in its own way. Hugh is brought up by his mother’s family as a Puritan, but also as a poor relation. When he seeks out his father, a mercenary captain in the King’s army, it is in part about familial duty. His father rejects him and much of the book proceeds as Hugh seeks to demonstrate that he is a worthy son of his father by taking abject pains to please, to obey and perform. This book is an uncomfortable read precisely because while not particularly partisan, it demonstrates the dysfunction of the patriarchal structure of Kingship in which obedience and duty still do not earn love. In this book however, it is his Parliamentarian family that Hugh rebels against. His motivation is almost entirely a longing for his father. There is relatively little discussion of politics in the book, and his family eventually accepts his choice while praying that he remains uncorrupted. A rather subversive take on the message of duty is Constance Savery’s Green Emeralds for the King (1938). Austin (or Tosty) is likewise a poor relation; he and his mother (a second wife) were banished from the family estate by his grandparents. But his half-siblings have declared for Parliament and his grandmother has come to find a loyal grandchild to search for the family’s lost treasure that it is donated to the King’s coffers. The subversion is that the grandmother is a nasty piece of work, while Tosty’s siblings and many of the Parliamentarians we meet are very nice. His eldest brother, in particular, Sir Miles, is a man driven by duty to what he believes and his duty to his honour so that while in the end he is in a position to take back the emeralds, he instead expedites Tosty’s safe arrival to Oxford while placing his own life in peril. We must wait for Kate Rider, by Hester Burton (1974), before we have a clear split between a father and son in which the son chooses for the King. Kate and her family live on a farm not far from Colchester. Her father is away fighting for Parliament; her middle brother is an apprentice on a river boat; her older brother Adam is working on the farm. But all

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is not well. The first incident that warns Kate that her brother Adam is not a Parliament man is when she calls the King, ‘Charles Stuart’ (Ch. 1), after the manner of the minister. Adam is furious. ‘“Father hasn’t been fighting all these years to turn the King off his throne. He’s been fighting to uphold our English law”’ (Ch. 1). Adam is motivated in part by love: as we shall see later in this chapter, when people change sides in fiction, it is almost (not quite) always the woman who is pulled across a political divide. Adam wants to marry a neighbour’s niece, Kate’s friend Tamsin. But Tamsin is a Royalist orphan and it is not clear which is worse, that she is a Royalist or dowerless. When Adam is told ‘“Tamsin and her brother are not of us. They have been brought up in the King’s Party”’, he replies bluntly ‘“t’was you who fought against Captain Pascoe, Father. Not me”’ (Ch. 6). But the confrontation as it takes place, and the one that sends Adam and Tamsin to live in Colchester, is over politics and it may be deliberate that Adam dies for the sin of rejecting his father’s guidance. Poor family relations are often key to the decision to cross over the political line. In Winifred Cawley’s Down the Long Stairs (1964), Ralph declares for the Royalists (and gets caught up in the siege of Newcastle) far more because he is hostile to his Parliamentarian stepfather than because of any deep felt political opinions, although he quickly learns to side with those who resent the taxations imposed by Parliament. Kevin Sharpe, in Reading Authority and Representing Rule (2012), argues that ‘the transference to Oliver Cromwell, especially after he became Lord Protector, of these tropes of the father figure’ was problematic. ‘To royalists… Cromwell could be nothing other than a stepfather’ (211). Thus the role of stepfathers may be precisely to emphasise Parliamentarian usurpation. In Hendry Peart’s The Loyal Grenvilles (1958), the Grenvilles find themselves with a Parliamentarian brother-in-law, who is given guardianship over them. Lucy Underwood in Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (2014, 102–108) details examples where Royalism, and particularly the Catholicism of parents, really was the reason why guardianships might be made by the courts (including the allpowerful Court of Wards) outside of the immediate family. Although the boys eventually come to terms with their guardian, as they realise he is protecting them from the Major-General, there is a strong sense that his guardianship is as temporary as the Commonwealth itself. Few of these books demonstrate clear motivation. We learn more of what Adam in Kate Rider does not believe than what he does believe. The one area where we can see clear motivation is when the theatre is involved.

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In Charles Buchanan’s Royal Escape (1994), Will Symons is a Royalist only by virtue of his father’s occupation as an actor. Trease, an otherwise generally pro-Parliament writer, balks at the Commonwealth’s dislike of the theatre (like many earlier writers he is unaware of how much theatre still existed: see Clare 2008). In Trease’s The Field of Forty Footsteps (1977), it is love of theatre that leads Jeremy to reject his father’s Parliamentarian stance, and follow his Royalist actor grandfather to London. Similarly in Barbara Willard’s The Grove of Green Holly (1967), Rafe inherits his politics from his actor grandfather, rather than his Parliamentarian mother, and although he eventually abandons the dream of the theatre, his loyalty is distinctly Royalist in part because it is regional. What then of sons who choose to fight for Parliament over a family loyalty to the King? Until the 1890s there are no protagonists who resist the call of duty. In the 1890s there is an even split of men and women, but we have the first sign of a difference in what motivates the genders. In Edna Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894), Joscelyn, the third son of Sir Thomas, is already uneasy when his father and elder brother musters for the King. An encounter with John Hampden at a friends’ house convinces him to volunteer for Parliament. At various points Joscelyn will express his belief that ‘loyalty has no necessary connection with the King… It means being faithful to law’ (Ch. 3). In J. S. Fletcher’s Mistress Spitfire (1896) the protagonist Dick makes a clear break with his family over principle. But in Emma Marshall’s Under Salisbury Spire: In the Days of George Herbert. The Recollections of Magdalene Wydville (1894) a woman’s loyalty is to her husband first. Thus Magdalene, loyal to King Charles, suppresses her feelings in order to support her Parliamentarian husband, but encourages her daughter’s mild rebellion to marry the Royalist (and cousin) Carlo. A woman’s loyalty follows her man. This is even more explicit in Dora McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell (1897) in which a fictional niece of the great man is persuaded by an injured cavalier to take a message to Prince Rupert whom she instantly adores and by whom she is protected. In the next two decades all but one of the men stand on principle to follow their ideology not their family. Sometimes this is laudable, as with the well-thought-through politics of Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923), whose hero eventually sides with the Independents at the Putney debates, and sometimes it is frankly juvenile as in the mawkish Her Faithful Knight by W. Bourne Cooke (1908), whose protagonist, ‘Heritage’ chooses his side because he receives a letter from Sir Peveril

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(who is older) bidding him to side with the king. In pure juvenile rage, ‘From that moment I was a Roundhead—heart and soul. As ye will readily perceive, my reasoning was not of the soundest, being deeply tinctured with selfishness and envy; but it served me well enough at the time’ (Ch. 20). Naturally he will eventually win his Royalist sweetheart anyway because her politics do not matter, but more important even here is this constructed relationship between Parliamentary passion and childishness, while Royalism represents the adult behaviour of the protagonist’s rival. Durston’s list of real families divided is interesting in part because his list consists overwhelmingly of eldest sons. When this is fictionalised it is linked with the idea that this fracture between father and son will destroy the family. The act of male rebellion against the parent reflects two issues: first and most obvious that as we move into the late nineteenth century this generally becomes more conceivable, as boys no longer automatically follow their fathers into professions and children become generally seen as less perfect extensions of their familial unit. Trease’s Trumpets in the West (1947) is a harbinger of this: however, in this text it is his patron that the protagonist rebels against, and the book is a not so veiled argument about the British election of 1945. But a second aspect is that authors were becoming not only more aware of the fissures that emerged during the English Civil Wars but the fissure in the language and conceptualisation of that war by the two sides and the ways in which the Parliamentarians—despite constant reference to traditional liberties—were harbingers of modernism. The issue of rebellion and duty in these books is fascinating because it not only responds to shifts in the understanding of childhood vis-à-vis the older generation, but also shows a growing awareness of the degree to which this was constructed in Royalist rhetoric. Jane Lane’s Sir DevilMay-Care (1937) is a particularly good example. Nigel Fitzhead is the lord of a feudal manor. He expects his people to obey him, to accept a call to arms without the necessity of ‘recruitment’, and despises those who have moved over to rents. In return he thinks of his company as his family and cries when he feels forced to hang one of his men for murder (killing a prisoner after he cried quarter). Fitzhead is to the King as his villeins are to him and it makes perfect sense to him that ‘He loves the rebels of his, the very men who fight against him. I suppose that so I should love Robin, should he rebel against me’ (Ch. 11) (unbeknownst to him, Robin has). In fact Nigel Fitzhead does not love his son particularly, yet he is a man ruled by passion. Lane continually uses the term ‘a simple

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man’ but what she means is that he is childlike, he is a man ruled by very simple loves and hates. Jack Lindsay’s Sue Verney (1937) uses the peripheral family member Susan Verney (eldest daughter but sixth child) to narrate a story about the collapse of the Verney family, as different members take different sides. When Edmund dies at Edgehill, and Ralph Verney goes into exile rather than take the Covenant (required of MPs to secure the Scottish alliance), the family falls apart. The most extreme of the texts is Lane’s London Goes to Heaven (1947). This ultra-Royalist text maps family to civic order. As Samuel Guffin, tavern keeper, watches the government lose control of the army and the political debate, he too loses control of his family: his daughter wants to marry the apprentice hangman and becomes involved in radical religion; his eldest son allies to a radical MP; his middle son is converted to Anabaptism; and his youngest reads the Old Testament and is converted to Royalism, becoming a spy for the Sealed Knot. The world is turned upside down, to be restored only by a truly religious understanding of the order of things. Frank Knight’s The Last of the Lallows (1964) depicts the fracturing of family particularly well. In this novel loyalty to respective sides leaves the family itself unguarded. Margaret stays home during the war: she is supported by Nat, the estates-man who has a crippled leg. Her father John, although he would prefer to be neutral, fights for the king, and her younger brother goes with him, seeing the Parliamentarians as a ‘rabble’. Ironically, the younger, Royalist brother is the rabble, a young roisterer whose activities and those of his closest friends succeed even in alienating Prince Rupert, but he uses his loyalty to the king to attempt to dispossess his older brother when their father dies. This is no advocacy for Parliament. The older brother regards the house as his to plunder on behalf of Parliament and returns only to steal the plate. At the end the house is destroyed by Royalists as they flee from Caversham bridge; both brothers are dead; and Margaret and Nat flee to America, from whence their descendants will one day return to a place in the wood, and a statue that looks like the girl of the party. The dissension and ruin of the state is mirrored in the dissension and ruin of the household. In Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ The Oak Apple (1983) breaking away is because the older son is already in rebellion. Richard, Edmund Moreland’s eldest son, simply does not get on with his father. His choice for Puritanism and Parliament (although he does not go to fight) is spite, not fellowship. His

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brothers and cousins all choose the King, even while their father strives for neutrality. All but Richard die. Barbara Willard’s Harrow and Harvest (1974) is a little more complex, in that the heir to the farm, Edmund Medley, begins as a Royalist, but in the process of being absorbed into the Mantlemass household is also reconfigured as a Parliamentarian. While it is the Royalist sympathies of the presumed heir that leads to Cecily’s decision to reveal Edmund’s claim, there is a very strong sense that Edmund’s declaration for Parliament is a demonstration of his fitness to inherit. The final destruction of Mantlemass, and the death of Edmund then lead in turn, and very effectively, to the abandonment of the family ‘secret’; for if the family eschew their personal loyalty to the crown, in favour of a loyalty to parliament, the information that they are direct descendants of Richard III becomes not just an irrelevancy but a counter-narrative to the future that Cecily in particular wishes to advance. Thus, and taking the familial metaphor as far as we can, this book looks forward to both a familial and national republic in which monarchy and inheritance are no longer relevant, for Cecily chooses merit above both. Not all books assume that it will be the older son who rebels. In part because the fairy-tale narrative of the youngest, rejected son, has been absorbed into much historical fiction, and because the younger child has more freedom to go than has the eldest, a number of authors chose the younger child to rebel (or at least consider it). Thus in Lyall’s To Right the Wrong (1894) Sir Thomas favours Jervis, the eldest of his sons, and rather ignores the others. When the war breaks out, Sir Thomas, Jervis, and the youngest son Dick declare for the King, but the middle son Jocelyn is uneasy. An accident that leaves him recovering at the house of a local Parliament supporter, and which introduces him to John Hampden, leads to him declaring for Parliament. He is cast off. Over the course of the book Joscelyn has a number of adventures with the army, and the book becomes increasingly pro-Parliamentarian as it proceeds (this is a text written before the breach between army and parliament became embedded in common narrative, and very dependent on S. J. Gardiner). But this is a text which seeks to heal both nation and family. Joscelyn is reconciled to his father, and helps his brother Dick secure the match he wants. But when Jervis dies, Joscelyn is disowned by his father, in a speech that emphasises the link between father-son/king-subject. Jocelyn insists that the estate goes to his younger brother Dick, across the rules of primogeniture, a settlement that allows the family to remain intact.

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The fairy-tale narrative is strongest perhaps in Peter Ransley’s Plague Child (2011) for here it is the decision of an elder (and dissolute) son to fight for the King, that leads a lord to search for a discarded but legitimate grandchild. In breaking the bonds of primogeniture, Lord Stonehouse has reinforced his identification with Parliament’s argument that even inherited rule must be subject to both competence and consent. In the sequel, Cromwell’s Blessing (2014) this is made explicit as Tom’s inheritance comes to depend on the settlement that Parliament and King may make in 1647. Similarly Jemahl Evans’ The Last Roundhead (2015) sends its hero Blandford Candy into the Parliamentarian army partially in revenge for being the abused, left-over son, aided and abetted by a Parliamentarian and Godly sister who wants to use him as her proxy in the war. It is clear that in some of the novels discussed here, it is a brotherly rivalry that is driving the division. In Lyall’s To Right the Wrong, Savery’s Green Emeralds for the King, Knight’s The Last of the Lallows, Ransley’s Plague Child and Evans’ The Last Roundhead, the dislike of brothers for each other brings vindictiveness to the division. These are brothers using a civil war to further a familial conflict. Perhaps the most complex of the books is Elizabeth St. John’s By Love Divided (2018). In this book we follow first Lucy Appsley, widow of Sir Allen Appsley whose fortunes had been wrecked by his support for the King’s foreign ventures. As the novel develops however St. John very cleverly explores how similar stances result in different opinions, as Lucy’s eldest son Allen sees his loyalty to his father expressed through a relatively uncritical Royalism, while her bright daughter Luce/Lucy is wed to Colonel John Hutchinson and goes on to become one of the chroniclers of Parliament and the Independents. In also exploring the roles and motives of the Villiers cousins, and relationships with John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, all of whom are also cousins (see Roberts 2009 for the degree to which Cromwell was related to other Parliamentarians), St. John manages the rare trick of demonstrating just how complex family loyalties can be and the extent to which they shape behaviour if not allegiance. One last point to note is the relative absence of apprentices in these books. In a world in which most young men of the middling sort would have been apprentices or journeymen—and the number of apprentices in London actually went up during the war years—the focus on the aristocracy and gentry is very noticeable (Coates 2004, 37). Even Trease,

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interested as he is in social mobility, takes his Civil War and Restoration heroes from the ranks of the country yeomanry and gentry. We do however see apprentices in some of the more recent books: two of the protagonists of Lindsay’s 1649 (1938) are apprentices although at the top of the age band (Wells, Webb and Minns argue that the average starting age was seventeen, so that apprentice riots would have been as threatening as—for example—the mods and rockers clashes of the 1960s: 2016, 379) and much of the plot revolves around not so much duty and rebellion, but differing ways to express these. While one apprentice follows his duty as he sees it to God and ends up in inadvertent rebellion to the secular order, his friend finds accommodation with the system in approved rebellion. In Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) and Bradshaw’s London in Chains (2011) apprenticeships are the core background against which the stories take place, and Norfolk’s John Saturnall’s Feast (2012) is almost entirely about an apprenticeship in baking and cooking in which the civil war is the background that disrupts a boy’s ambition. When we come to friend versus friend the scenario becomes more intimate. No longer are we considering rivals playing out their rivalry on a larger field, but a genuine tragedy in which people who love each other find themselves trying to protect their emotions through heartbreak. It is through these relationships that authors often frame their hopes for a political reconciliation and for a consensus politics that dominated the rhetoric of the governing classes in the mid to late nineteenth century. We see this in Maryatt’s The Children of the New Forest (1846), which set the pattern for many future novels. In this novel although we begin with a very rigid divide between the family and the political structures of the Commonwealth, the Intendant’s break with his Parliamentary colleagues over the execution of the King and the friendship between the Intendant’s daughter and the Beverly girls points us to a peaceable future. Charles’ duology, The Draytons and the Davenant s (1867) and On Both Sides of the Sea (1868), is meticulous in charting the heartbreak caused to two families who had long been close, but who take different sides in the war. Although the second of the books focuses on the relationship between Roger Drayton and Lettice Daventry, the first book is far more about the ways in which the friendship between Olivia and Lettice, and also Olivia and her Laudian but still Parliamentarian Aunt Dorothy, is fractured by the growing sense that their beliefs are incompatible. Much of this is shown through Dorothy’s growing objection to the scientific education the girls are receiving and Roger Drayton’s belief

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that the history he is being taught, of kings and queens, is inadequate for a true understanding of the world. Throughout Lettice’s exile in France, she remains in touch with Olivia even when she is not in correspondence with Roger. The classic novel, that even makes use of the common phrase as its title, is G. A. Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883). Henty has an undeserved reputation for gee-whizz jingoism and in this novel, he demonstrates the degree to which he can both create a nuanced scenario and understand it in political terms. The novel begins with a short preface situating the Civil War as an ongoing and relevant argument, and reminding us that most readers had inherited their opinions. Although so long a time has elapsed since the great civil war in England, men are still almost as much divided as they were then as to the merits of the quarrel… Most of you will probably have formed an opinion as to the rights of the case, either from your own reading, or from hearing the views of your elders.

And he constructs neutrality by casting blame on both sides. Upon the one hand, the King, by his instability, bad faith, and duplicity, alienated his best friends and drove the Commons to far greater lengths than they had at first dreamed of. Upon the other hand, the struggle, begun only to win constitutional rights, ended—owing to the ambition, fanaticism, and determination to override all rights and all opinions save their own…

In Friends Though Divided, Harry Furness is the son of a local landowner, and a Royalist, and his friend Herbert Ripinghall, the son of the local wool-stapler, a parliamentarian. Both boys are too young to join up at the beginning of the war: both are ‘convinced’ by their father. Eventually both will join, Herbert to fight for Parliament only in the First Civil War (by the late nineteenth century, the usual way for authors to indicate an acceptable moderation), and then to retire to the country after his father dies and Charles I is executed. Harry becomes more embroiled, as a boy spy, and then a captain of one his father’s troops, and then under Prince Rupert. But he will come to distrust though admire Charles I, regard Prince Rupert as a problem, and despise Charles II. He fights in Ireland at Drogheda, is captured and used for forced labour as a prisoner of war in Barbados before escaping to Hamburg. At the end, he warns

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Cromwell of an assassination threat, and is given his ticket to remain in England. He is brought back into the body politic. Finally, at the Restoration, both boys become MPs in Parliament, realigned through their dislike of the court of King Charles II. Throughout the novel, their friendship has remained ‘above’ political affiliations. So too, in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Simon (1953). The story opens when Simon and his friend Amias are 11 years old and about to go to school, but the friendship is broken when the war breaks out four years later. When Amias’s father declares for the King, and raises a toast to his standard, there is a breach between the boys. Amias is too passionate even to shake hands. He cannot believe that his friend disagrees with him, because Simon has always been the follower. Sutcliff here mirrors the horror of Royalists that ‘natural’ followers (whether Parliamentarians, City men or gentry), should refuse to be led. But Simon will later rescue Amias, and when Amias invades Simon’s home to look for a spy (which is indeed Simon) he walks away empty-handed. The book signals reconciliation at the end of the war when once again Simon and Amias occupy the same window seat of the opening scene. Ronald Welch’s slightly later book, for a slightly older audience, For the King (1969) does not have the same happy ending. Here Neil’s friend Francis sides for Parliament, and challenges him ‘if you don’t agree with Denzil and his courtier friends, you must be on our side’, Neil responds, ‘I am on no side’ and cites Plato. ‘Plato! What can he teach us today?’ ‘Tolerance,’ Neil said sweetly, and smiled at his cousin’s angry face. (Ch. 1)

But Francis dies and the reconciliation is between Neil’s father and Francis’s father when they come together to release Neil from a death sentence passed after he is accused of breaching his parole in 1648. By 1969 this ethos has disappeared: there are no novels after this period which emphasise the friends on either side of the divide, not even in the twenty-first-century revival. One possibility is that as we draw to the end of the 1970s, the consensus politics which had dominated the postwar period was drawing to an end. By the 1980s, as the Conservatives expressed a radically different vision for Britain, it became even harder to envisage a friendship across core political divides.

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Women are not granted the complexity assumed by men. From the 1930s all the subsequent female rebels, rebel for love or infatuation or sometimes neglect leading to the latter as in Softly’s Plain Jane (1961) in which a harsh uncle leads a Puritan girl to hold out against an arranged marriage, or Pamela Belle’s Herald of Joy (1988) in which the eldest daughter of the house rebels against her Parliamentarian family by exposing that they are hiding a cavalier, in order to secure the young man she thinks she wants to marry. Consistently the child (of any age) is rebelling against the parent or guardian. But overwhelmingly, the motivation is romance. When we turn to romance across the divide, the reality of romance in the seventeenth century is that most marriages were ‘made’ by families. Thus the plot of lovers divided is in some ways rather unrealistic: allegiances were often fairly solid by locality so that marriages arranged across political divides in the rural regions at least were not all that likely. It may have been more common in urban areas. But Hughes records that when a Royalist garrison was established at Hillesdon House in Buckinghamshire, the Parliamentarian daughter of the house fell in love with the commander of the garrison, while his sister married a parliamentary captain who escorted the women and children from the house (Hughes 2012, 37). The exigencies of war may have loosened formality, and the awareness of a growing shortage of men (more were lost in the civil wars as a proportion of the population than were lost in the Great War) may, as it did in 1918, led to downward mobility for women in marriage It is relatively rare for those who romance across the divide to remain politically split unless the book is already positioned neutrally as in Pamela Belle’s Wintercombe (1988) where Silence, husband of a Parliamentarian Colonel, is relatively unaligned, and her Cavalier lover is already disillusioned. Romantic conversion is usually tantamount to political conversion, although we cannot assume that we know which sex will convert which way. The classic Romeo and Juliet is first expressed by Elizabeth Rundle Charles. In her first book, The Draytons and the Davenants (1867) Roger Drayton and Lettice Davenant have fallen in love. But Roger is present in the guard for the King’s execution and for that Lettice cannot forgive him: in On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) she goes into exile with her father in France (where her aunt does her utmost to convert her to Catholicism). The two do not reunite until the Restoration, and that proves bitter. His presence at the execution and his role in the Protectorate means he is not safe, and the entire family migrates to

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the American colonies. The reconciliation of the families is not mirrored in any sense of a reconciliation of the country. In some texts marriage dissolves all loyalties and women appear to undergo Stockholm syndrome. When John Marmaduke meets Catherine, a Catholic spy, in Church’s John Marmaduke (1867), even though he is responsible for her father’s death in battle, and he has hanged the last Irish priest in the area, she still falls in love with him, defies her aunt who is, unsurprisingly, appalled, and marries him. When she is told her husband’s troop were some of the most zealous at Drogheda, she declares, ‘And whether he be guilty of wanton cruelty or not, he is still my wedded husband, and I refuse to leave him’ (Ch. 37). Although the relationship is that of foster daughter rather than wife, we see the same in Kathleen Clare, her Diary (1895) by James A. Shearman. Here Kathleen Clare is willing to hand over her mind. A remote cousin, the Catholic Irish woman of the titular finds herself fostered into the household of the dreaded tyrant of Ireland, Wentworth (later Lord Strafford). There she listens to him, learns to love and admire him, and then to support his wife as he falls from grace and is executed. At the end they are admonished not to blame the King. But most significant is this statement from Wentworth: ‘“Thou art very Ireland, Child, with thy smiles and tears,” he said. “Surely he who hath conquered that wayward will of thine, may one day win thy nation too”’ (21 June 1639). Kathleen here is not only in loco lectoris, she is a stand-in for her entire country. If Kathleen can be seduced, so can Ireland. The lesson is that Ireland should adopt the religion and politics of her marriage partner, England, however forced the marriage. Edna Lyall’s In Spite of All (1901) is perhaps better understood in terms of ‘her for honour in him’ if not as extreme as in John Marmaduke. Gabriel and Hilary grow up together but when the war breaks out it is clear that Gabriel’s choice for parliament is ideological, whereas Hilary’s loyalty to the King is, unlike Lettice’s, entirely based on supporting her father’s position. The difference between conviction and inheritance is a big issue in the book. Throughout the text Gabriel makes much of Hilary’s ignorance, and although Gabriel ‘proves’ his own honour by being kind to Laud when he meets him in a garden, and looking after the Bishop of Hereford in the Tower, the trend of the book is that if the romance is to be completed, Hilary must be converted by Gabriel. Similarly John Lister, in the otherwise very politically nuanced Captain John Lister (Hamilton 1906), regards his beloved as someone he must educate:

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this girl, whose knowledge of the past was ‘fairy tale about the splendour and clemency of princes, the beauty and charm of queens’ (Ch. 4). The other way in which women (but not men) cross the lines of loyalty is as gifted rewards. In the cod-medieval Her Faithful Knight (1908) by W. Bourne Cooke, a young man joins Parliament in part because he is disappointed in love and because his rival advises him to fight for the king (Ch. 20). But he fights bravely, rescues his Cavalier rival and is rewarded when Sir Peveril dies and leaves her to his care. The lady in this case does not seem to have much say in it. In J. Wesley Hart’s In the Iron Time (1908) Cromwell becomes a matchmaker, assisting John Vyzart, son of a Huguenot, to his Royalist bride. This notion of a woman as a reward is very effective in Elizabeth Hope’s My Lady’s Bargain (1923). As with a number of the novels that respond to the growing social history emerging around the English Civil Wars, this is a story in part about the social mobility engendered. Peter Williams fell in love with the daughter of the manor when he was but the son of the blacksmith. Now a General in the New Model, when offered land and a bride, he chooses the newly widowed woman who had once struck him with a whip, and from whom he forced a kiss when he laid siege to her home. As the story plays out Peter falls into an adult love but becomes aware that his wife is hiding something. There are numerous adventures in which it appears that his wife’s husband is not dead, but concludes with a reveal worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan: Peter has married not Lady Killigrew, who knew about her husband’s survival two weeks before the marriage, but her cousin, Una Lovett who looks just like her and has fallen in love with Peter. All ends happily with reprieves, the sale of the land to pay Killigew’s fine, and the purchase of it by Una’s father (which you would have thought would have caused more resentment, not less). Startling are those novels in which it is women (and love) who convert men and it is probably not coincidental that these are all Royalist: in this construction, women bring men back into both the domestic and the royal family. In J. S. Fletcher’s Mistress Spitfire (1896), Dick starts out as a Parliamentarian but his allegiance is weak: he is a poet who has sworn to Parliament because his Oxford friends did so. When his cousin Alison is kidnapped by a suitor, his rescue of her inadvertently allies him with the Royalist cause. The two of them go into exile in Holland. Already in exile, the loutish young Royalist Christopher Ferringham in the book of the same name (Dix 1905), is converted towards a godly life (and Parliamentarianism) in part by the influence of his sweetheart. In

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Brent-Dyer’s Elizabeth the Gallant (1935) Elizabeth rescues her Parliamentarian captain from his misconceptions as he rescues her from the Royalists. In May Wynne’s ‘Hey For Cavaliers!’ (1912), which very much centres women’s agency, Barbara Carcroft—niece of a man who does not love her, and daughter of a man who died without disclosing her mother—persuades her lover, Richard Morrice, to switch sides, and to betray his Parliamentarian friends in Pontefract Castle, allowing it to be taken from the inside. Barbara is hanged as a highwayman, suggesting that an overly strong woman is dangerous. Although clearly Royalist in orientation, Barbara is thoroughly dishonourable and persuades her lover to be so. Generally, however, the women are for ‘politics in him’ as in R. W. MacKenna’s Through Flood and Fire (1923) in which the hero fights for the King (in Scotland) and his lover refuses to sign the Covenant because she feels her lover would not approve. The theme of lovers on either side of the divide disappeared almost completely for many years although Pamela Belle’s Winterbourne (1988) featured a Puritan wife involved in an illicit affair with the Royalist captain holding her house as a garrison, and in the sequel they are united after she is widowed and he fights at Worcester. But it returned in the historical romance boom of the past decade. Authors who use this idea include Stella Riley, Isabella Hargreaves and Alison Stuart. Stella Riley’s Roundheads and Cavaliers novels begin with A Splendid Defiance (2014) in which Puritan and repressed Abigail Radford is liberated by her love for the defending Cavalier Justin Ambrose. In Hargreaves’ Charity’s Cavalier (2016), Charity Goodwin helps a Cavalier to escape the battlefield in return for an escort to her aunt. Alison Stuart’s Guardians of the Crown series begins with By the Sword (2015) in which a Parliamentarian woman falls in love with a Royalist fugitive. More common now perhaps is the novel in which war affects the trajectory of the romance. In Turnbull’s Alice in Love and War (2009) Alice uses a romance with the Royalist Robin to escape from an abusive home with her father, and then watches as it goes sour because Robin is using the war to engage in extramarital liaisons. When she finally finds love and peace it is with a Parliamentarian she has nursed, but this is an unconventional family which hosts the child of another woman. It is family as consensual rather than constructed, and fundamentally aligned to the more radical notion of the social contract as understood by most Parliamentarians and was evident in the stripping of religion from the marriage ceremony, and the flirtation with the idea of divorce laws.

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One of the odder phenomena of the late nineteenth-century novels is the inserted fictional relative as an observer within a household. Although there are one or two male manifestations of this (the Beverlies of Children of the New Forest are fictional relatives of the Villiers), boys and young men, whether faux relatives or not, are more likely to be positioned within the career book structure, riding alongside a famous figure as in Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) or the hero of Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009). One of the most unnerving aspects of this trope is the degree to which in one way or another, the fictional women placed in the real households are often to some degree traitors to their family allegiance. In Cooper’s Hide and Seek: A Story of the New Forest (1881) for example, Lettice, best friend of the protagonist, is the fictional sister of Henry Ireton (who had seven real siblings) and together they plot to support the Royalist cause, eventually ending up in France as refugees married to courtiers. Miriam in McChesney’s Miriam Cromwell, Royalist (1897) is a mythical niece of Cromwell persuaded by an injured cavalier to take a message to Prince Rupert. She is persuaded when his silk falls from his hand and she whispers ‘the colours of my king’. Her main purpose is to give us a fireside view of the Royalists. She refuses refuge in the houses of friends of the family several times, and in the end is killed by a bullet meant for Prince Rupert, when she flies (with one of her suitors) to warn him of an assassination attempt as he covers the King’s flight from Broad Moor. Betraying one’s family is clearly what good Puritan women do. If there is one aspect of the Civil War that is handled relatively weakly in these texts, it is the sense of the rivalries and divisions within regions that we know shaped the war. Although the South-East of England was relatively sound for Parliament, and Wales for the King, the rest of the country was a palimpsest of loyalties. John Lynch in his study of Bristol (1999) alerts us to the degree to which the sieges of that city were profoundly influenced by the loyalties of different members of the council. Bristol had attempted to stay neutral (as did Nantwich, Leicester and Birmingham). Parliamentarian occupation revealed the degree of support both for Parliament and the King. In mid-1643 Bristol saw an internal plot which involved at least 100 individuals (Lunch, 47). R. G. Blackwood in his article on Lancashire (1997) finds a region that is 60–70% Royalist, but that there were more passive Royalists than passive Parliamentarians (264–6). In Suffolk and Norfolk, two-thirds of the families identified as neutral, but among the aligned twice as many supported Parliament as supported the King (266–7). C. B. Phillips uses the Calendar of

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the Committee for Compounding to assess support in Royalist Cumberland and Westmoreland (1997). The allegiance of the North was in part assumed because these were purportedly strongholds of Catholicism. Yet Phillips found that perhaps 45% of male members of Catholic families were Royalist (243). Even in the Second Civil War it rose only to 58% of the male members of gentry and aristocratic families. Of the remaining portion half were neutral or for Parliament. The texts rarely show this regional split except through friendships (Sutcliff and Henty) or romances, as in Lyall’s In Spite of All, in which Gabriel and Hilary’s families are near-neighbours in Tunbridge Wells, as, in Burton’s Kate Rider, are those of Adam and Tamsin in Colchester. Enmities too are framed far more as personal enmities played out through the taking of different sides as in Brereton’s In the King’s Service (1901) or Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923): in these and other books taking the wrong side is a clear indication of a character defect rather than a political difference. This is true even when it reflects on regional conflicts, as in Trease’s Silver Guard (1948) in which a local landowner attempts to use the war as an excuse to settle a land dispute from the 1590s (see Cue for Treason, 1940). Of the older books perhaps only Hamilton’s Captain John Lister (1906), set in Lincolnshire and the fens, captures the sense of areas divided among themselves. Of the newer ones, one may note Softly’s A Stone in a Pool (1966), set in Carisbrooke, where the King was imprisoned, Cawley’s Down the Long Stairs (1964), set in Newcastle, and Willard’s Harrow and Harvest (1974), set in the depths of Ashdown Forest. In each of these there is a strong sense of local loyalties tested, and coming into conflict with trade, with industry, with wider loyalties, and how those wider loyalties divided regions, traders and councils. Most recently newer writers such as L. C. Tyler and D. W. Bainbridge have taken up this challenge. It is probably no coincidence that they are crime writers: the twists and turns of local allegiances make a perfect context for their work.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Carlin, Norah. Regicide or Revolution? What Petitioners Wanted, September 1648– January 1649. London: Breviary Stuff, forthcoming. Print. Clare, Janet. “Theatre and Commonwealth.” The Cambridge History of British Theatre. Volume 1, Origins to 1660. Eds. Milling, Jane and Peter Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 458–76. Print.

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Coates, Ben. The Impact of the Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004. Print. Durston, Christopher. The Family in the English Revolution. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Print. Hughes, Ann. Gender and the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print. Roberts, Stephen K. “‘One That Would Sit Well at the Mark’: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell, 1640–1642.” Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives. Ed. Little, Patrick. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Somerville, John C. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Print. Underwood, Lucy. Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. Wells, Patrick, Cliff Webb, and Chris Minns. “Leaving Home and Entering Service: The Age of Apprenticeship in Early Modern London.” Continuity and Change 25.3 (2016): 377–404. Print.

CHAPTER 9

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms

And for further prosecution of his said evil designs, he the said Charles Stuart doth still continue his commissions to the said Prince and other rebels and revolters both English and foreigners, and to the earl of Ormond, and to the Irish rebels and revolters associated with him… —The charge against Charles I, 20 January 1649.

Reading many of the novels of the English Civil Wars, one could be forgiven for believing that the war never spilled from the boundaries of England: less than a quarter stray over the border. In reality, as modern nomenclature indicates, the war covered the whole Atlantic Archipelago of Great Britain and Ireland. It was not one war, nor was it confined to one kingdom, and nor did it begin in 1642. The primacy of the English Civil War in the narrative is in part because of the victory of Parliament over the King’s forces in Ireland in 1649, and two years later the English Parliament’s victory over the Scottish attempt to impose Charles II on the English throne in 1651, combined with nineteenth-century (and early twentieth-century) assumptions that England was the heart of Great Britain; but it is also in part because the Scottish Covenanter movement, which was at the heart of the Scottish war, was to face far greater tribulation under Charles II and this has overwhelmed the Scottish popular narrative of the seventeenth century (there are twenty-three Covenanter novels listed on Goodreads ). The Irish might have been expected to generate their own fiction narratives of the war, but have rarely done so. © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_9

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Understanding the wars in the other kingdoms is complicated by how contemporaries understood the political connections of the kingdoms. There is a clear political division in contemporary sources between those who see it all as one war in one kingdom spread across Scotland, Ireland and England; and those on the other who see them as separate wars, and thus the Scots as invading England, and England invading Ireland. In this period there were very few Scottish or Irish migrants in England. In London, the heart of the rebellion, Eleanor Hubbard estimates that only 0.6% of all female immigrants and 0.4% male apprentices in London came from Scotland or Ireland. It is not a perfect split but the one polity people tend to be Royalists while the separate polities are Parliamentarians: this is then reflected in the fiction where the modern Left/pro-Parliamentarian writers are also more likely to present the situation as separate nations with different agenda. It is in this context also that we will see racism among many of the English and American authors, targeted overwhelmingly at the Scots, Irish and Welsh.

Wales In the 1600 s Wales was, as it was until the devolution of 1998/1999, a part of England, integrated by conquest, with its own MPs and no separate legislature. Wales was overwhelmingly Royalist (although South Pembrokeshire emerged as a very well-organised enclave of Parliamentarianism). As the King was pushed further to the West and eventually lost even the English seaport of Chester in January 1646, Wales became the main supplier of men, money and material (Gaunt 1991). This is barely reflected in the fiction and can be dealt with quickly. Elsie J. Oxenham’s The Girls of Gwynfa (1924) is a home-front novel which reflects how solidly Royalist the area is. A family of girls is sent to live at the North Welsh estate inherited by the father to put them out of the way of the King’s armies (the family live on the route between Oxford and London). However, this puts them solidly in Royalist territory, and their neighbour, Madoc, has eyes on their property. One day the servants are all gone. That night there is a pitchfork mob and the house is burned down. The girls (and small brother) and their two Royalist cousins hide out in the stone part of the building. There they are found by Madoc’s son Owen and daughter Deiza. The novel is distinctly hostile to the Welsh: everything honourable about Owen is ascribed to his inheritance from his English mother and everything savage to his Welsh father,

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although the author also moots that the worst savagery among Madoc’s men is from his English troops. Welsh writer Ronald Welch’s For the King (1969) is ‘Welsh’ by default, as his Carey family whom he had been following since Knight Crusader (1954) are Lords of Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire. The Earl’s troops leave Wales early in the book, and Neil returns only when the war is lost in 1646. However, it is his loyalty to Wales that leads him to participate in the Welsh uprisings of the Second Civil War. The taken for grantedness of the Welsh support for the King is perhaps best expressed in Ann Turnbull’s Alice in Love and War (2009). The Welsh here is positioned as troopers and pikemen and the women of the baggage train. They are the unsung heroes of the King’s army, but depicted as little better than mercenaries, serving for pay and promises, not from the idealism with which the troopers of the Parliamentary side are so often presented by authors (although in reality, infantry changed sides relatively regularly as this was often on offer at the end of sieges).

The Scottish Civil Wars In 1641 Scotland was a separate country ruled by the same King as ruled England and Ireland. This had been the case since the ascension of James VI to the crown of England and Ireland in 1603 as James I. The war in Scotland emphasised this, and so too does the fiction. There are only fourteen novels in which Scotland is a significant focus and only six of those are actively set in Scotland. With the exception of Geoffrey Trease’s late novel Curse on the Sea (1996), these are all written by Scottish writers and focus on Scottish interests. James VI of Scotland inherited a notoriously turbulent country. James I’s attempts to curb disorder ended in his assassination, James III was killed in civil war led by his own son; James IV, who had attempted to supress his nobles, died at the Battle of Flodden and his wife Margaret ruled as regent for their son James V until she was unseated by noble feuding. Mary of Guise proved a powerful regent for the minority of Mary I but mostly through bribery, and, as is well-known, Mary I fled to England for fear of both her own nobles who had murdered her husband (who had in turn murdered her private secretary), and of the clergy whose Calvinism would not tolerate her own Catholicism. Reid sums it up thus: ‘traditionally the Scots took a far more robust view of kingship than might be supposed from the later cult of romantic Jacobitism’ (2012,

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2). David Stevenson argues that the nobility of Scotland, ‘as a whole believed that they had the right to share power with a king’ (2003, 19). The philosophy of divine kingship was an expression less of ambition than of insecurity. James VI spent his childhood in the care of the Earl and Countess of Mar, and his senior tutor George Buchanan. The aim was to bring him up as a god-fearing Calvinist Protestant with a suitably restricted idea of the power of kings. During his time as a minor James experienced a number of regents, including the Earl of Moray (assassinated by James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh), his paternal grandfather Matthew Stewart 4th Earl of Lennox, who died after a raid on Stirling Castle by Mary’s supporters; the Earl of Mar who succeeded in dying of a sickness; and then James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, executed in 1581 on a belated charge of being part of the plot to murder the King’s father. James at the age of 15 came under the influence of Esmé Stewart, Sieur d’Aubigny, cousin of Darnley, whom James made a Duke of Lennox. This was the first of James’ favourites and his court quickly decided that Lennox ‘went about to draw the King to carnal lust’. In the Ruthven raid the Earls of Gowrie and Angus imprisoned James in Ruthven castle and forced Lennox to leave Scotland. When the King was released from captivity in 1583 at the age of 19 he set about gaining control of the kingdom. He pushed through the Black Acts to assert authority over the Kirk and to strengthen the power of the episcopacy, and denounced the writings of his tutor Buchanan. In 1586 he signed the Treaty of Berwick which proposed amity with England, and paved the way for his inheritance of the English Crown in 1603. There was one last attempt on his life in 1600 by the younger brother of the Earl of Gowrie. Both brothers died in the attack and there was suspicion that this was James clearing his house. In 1597–1598 James wrote his own theory of monarchy, The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron (Royal Gift), in which he argued for the Divine Right of Kings. Basilikon Doron was written for Prince Henry but it is safe to assume that Charles also read it. When James left Scotland he promised to return every three years. He did not keep this promise, going back just once in 1617. Although the Commons refused him the title, James insisted on The King of Great Britain on his personal documents and insisted that the Parliament of Scotland use it. James tried to build a country under one monarch, one parliament and one law: it was in this area that he angered the

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Scots. James’ failure to return to Scotland, his decision to rule through a committee, meant that by his death the monarchy had become estranged from the political infrastructure of Scotland, and Scotland had effectively experienced twenty years without a resident king. This situation was passed on to Charles I. He made it worse. Charles came to the English throne in 1625, but waited until 1633 to be crowned in Edinburgh. It was traditional for monarchs who came to the Scottish throne as minors to be entitled to revoke any land grants made during their minority. But Charles, who was only a few months short of that landmark, had not been expected to exercise it: when he indicated that there would be mass revocations, he alienated many of his natural supporters. His demonstration of authority failed and it also did little to swell royal coffers (Stevenson 1973). Charles’ coronation in Edinburgh was held at St. Giles and was conducted under the Anglican service. The hostility this led to is remembered in Geoffrey Trease’s Curse on the Sea (1996). Using the perspective of a London boy who first goes to the Duke of Newcastle’s Nottingham seat to help with Inigo Jones’s masque for the King and then to Edinburgh to meet his Scottish paternal relatives, Trease gives an impression of a dour, unfriendly place. Rob’s grandfather is a minister of the Kirk, and disapproves of Rob’s activities as an apprentice stage manager in the theatre so Rob heads off to Edinburgh where Trease takes the opportunity to have Rob notice the hostility to the Laudian service with which Charles was crowned. Charles had continued his father’s policy of working towards greater uniformity, but increasingly it was clear that this was uniformity to Church of England practices (and Laudian ritualism at that). When he attempted to impose the Book of Common Prayer in 1637 it sparked rioting, and an opposition formalised as the National Covenant which swept the Lowlands of Scotland. R. W. Mackenna’s Through Flood and Fire (1923) dramatises the conflicts in loyalties and among families. Set around 1638 this is a tale of the son of a family set for the covenant, and the daughter of a family who breaks with their allegiance to the King to join him. He joins the rebels. She refuses to sign the test set by the King’s agents. The break with the king is forced upon them. An elderly lady says it: she acknowledges the king ‘in things temporal’ (139). The young woman’s acknowledged beau eventually yields to his rival whom he saves from the gallows. The victory of the Covenanters is described in rhapsodic terms. ‘The old evil order had changed: a new day had dawned upon Scotland.

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The long dreary night of her persecution was ended; the sun had risen upon a land made glorious by the sufferings so dauntlessly borne. The heart of the people, which had been bowed down but never broken, was lifted up again’ (313). Charles’ attempt to control this from London exacerbated tensions. He agreed to a General Assembly of the Church of Scotland which met in Glasgow in 1638 in order to buy time but this backfired: the Assembly deposed the Bishops and rejected the prayer book (Stevenson 2003; Stewart 2018). In 1639 Charles gathered a force of 20,000 poorly trained and armed men and marched to Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the English side of the border, where a Scottish army of 20,000 under David Leslie, well-trained and well-equipped, faced them off. After a number of skirmishes and short sieges, the King agreed to a treaty that would refer all matters to another General Assembly, this, naturally, came to the same decision and abolished the episcopacy. Charles called an English Parliament but the Short Parliament was dissolved when it began instead with the redress of grievances. With Strafford Charles attempted another military venture into Scotland. This went even worse and the Scots came down as far as County Durham. They had to be paid off. In 1641 Charles went to Scotland and agreed to all the terms of contention. He left Scotland further down the Presbyterian road than it had been when he came to the throne.

The War in Scotland When Civil War broke out in England, the Scots played a number of different parts. But it is crucial to hold on to the idea that the Scots were fighting for their own reasons and purposes and, whatever the appearance at the beginning of the war, there was no neat alignment of sides: in popular accounts by English authors it is frequently forgotten that Scotland was a separate country with a quite distinct agenda, which just happened to coincide at times with those of Parliament, but which was contested also within Scotland. According to Trevor Royle (2005, 606), Scotland suffered a higher level of casualties than England. In a population of one million there were approximately 28,000 military casualties, and around 15,000 noncombatants killed as a result of internecine incidents ranging from the destruction of the Campbells at Inverlochy, to Alisdair MacColla’s massacre of Campbell women and children at the ‘Barn of Bones’.

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Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, had proposed raising an army of Irish Catholics to put down the Scottish rebellion of the previous decade, which had already aroused resentment. It appeared to the Scottish Covenanters—mostly urban and Lowland—that the Presbyterian-leaning English Parliament was a potential ally. An alliance—the Solemn League and Covenant—between the Covenanters and Parliament was signed in 1643. One of the requirements of the treaty was that England would roll out Scottish-style Presbyterian reforms and abolish the episcopacy. Although events incline us to see this differently, the reputation of the Scottish army after the Bishops’ War allowed Scotland to contemplate a cultural influence over England. This split Scotland. A Royalist contingent, most prominent in the Highlands and north-east Scotland and in areas where Catholicism and Gaelic continued to dominate, sided with a distant king over a closer Presbyterianism. However the largest Highland clan, the Campbells, led by the Marquess of Argyll, declared for the Covenanters. Protestant Highland Clan rivals, the MacDonalds (Catholic and Gaelic-speaking with strong Irish kinship links) took arms for the King. Finally there was James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, Lowland and Presbyterian, who initially sided with the Presbyterians under the National Convention of 1638, but in 1644 declared for the King and recruited an Irish Confederate army of 1500 men under the command of Alasdair MacColla, a MacDonald clansman, with Manus O’Cahan, an Irish cousin and his 500-man regiment. They were well-trained but disliked fighting far from home (a problem for all armies prior to the nationally organised New Model) and lacked the cavalry needed for open country. These are the Scottish and Irish Royalists whom Montrose led first to six victories over Covenanting armies in Scotland, and by 1645 apparent victory. However, Montrose was unable to win over lowland Royalists. His use of Irish Catholic soldiers and his covenanting past alienated potential allies. It became clear that Charles would not be able to join the Royalists in Scotland and the alliance fractured as the MacDonald and the Campbells went to war. Montrose was defeated by David Leslie at the Battle of Philiphaugh and fled in September to Norway. The Royalist victories evaporated in the face of a hostile environment and fractured allegiances. Meanwhile the Covenanters had supported the Parliamentarian forces in England. In 1644 the Parliamentarians, aided by the Scots Covenanters, defeated the Royalists at Marston Moor and laid siege to Newcastle. Charles surrendered to the Scots Covenanters in 1646. The Covenanters

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found Charles I as slippery as did anyone else. As is well-known, they handed him over to the English Parliament in return for the payment of arrears owed for their contribution to the Parliamentarian cause. This is often presented as a bribe but although negotiated at the same time it was money owed. Furthermore, it draws attention to the degree that this was a foreign army and treated by Parliament as such, an ally in part, but also a hired mercenary army. By 1647 it was coming unstitched. The Parliamentary armies and Cromwell in particular were not all that impressed by the Scottish troops who were not having a ‘good’ war. The rise of Independency in the army and in Parliament led to a reluctance to institute the full Presbyterian reform programme. A faction of the Covenanters known as the Engagers and led by the Duke of Hamilton sent an army to England in 1648 (the Second Civil War) where they were defeated by Cromwell and the New Model at Preston. This defeat triggered yet another civil upheaval at home. The main Scottish army had been defeated at Preston, and those who had taken part in it were purged from Parliament and ordered to do penance in their own parishes. In September 1648 Cromwell visited Edinburgh with three or more New Model regiments to support the clamp-down. We only have English and American stories for this period, perhaps because of the ignominy felt by Scots over the collapse of Scottish solidarity and the uneasy relationship with the King. In Cooper’s Hide and Seek (1881) the failure of the Royalist cause at Preston is blamed on the Scots and assumed to be cowardice: ‘The English cavaliers fought bravely, but the Scots… behaved in a manner which has never been satisfactorily explained, and brought about, by their cowardice or uncertainty, the destruction of the whole army’ (Ch. 4). It had far more to do with poor training and the misjudgement of Cromwell’s tactics by David Leslie. Although Myles Delacourt in Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) does not fight with or against the Scots he has a similar low opinion, for his father taught him that ‘all that race is false’. Most recently, in Roger Wilton’s Traitor’s Field (2013), set in 1648–1651 in the middle of the Second Civil War, the Royalist Shay has had enough: ‘When the King of England invades England with Scottish soldiers, and invades again, and thousands die, where is England’s stability?’ (463). By 1650, Scotland was in the grip of its own civil war, reflected in the background of John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927) in which the strife in a small Scottish village is fuelled by the strife in the outside world. Scotland

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lost their natural alliance with the English Parliament when the Independents, having purged Parliament of Presbyterians, put the king on trial without consultation. At no time during the trial had Charles Stuart’s occupation of the Scottish throne been mentioned. In 1650 Montrose, who had been appointed by the exiled Charles II to the nominal lieutenancy of Scotland, tried to raise the clans, but was routed at the Battle of Carbisdale, brought to Edinburgh, and hanged. By this time he was a folk hero. In J. MacLaren Cobban’s The Angel of the Covenant (1898), the main character Alex is a young lad who had met Montrose, and becomes his close companion and friend. The novel can be understood as fan fiction. While in France they run into ‘a certain Monsieur D’Artagnan, a lieutenant of the King’s Musketeers and a gentleman of proved discretion and valour’ (86); D’Artagnan helps them to rescue Montrose’s sister Katherine from her abductor (and incident also recounted in Irwin’s The Proud Servant (1934) but framed as an elopement), and this becomes a counter-narrative as the woman he loves falls in love with his cousin Magdalene/Maudlin who in turn falls in love with Montrose, but stays chaste (because Montrose is married) and becomes the Angel of the Covenant, a passionate figurehead. Making a far greater attempt to be accurate and with narrative focus specifically on Montrose, is Margaret Irwin’s The Proud Servant (1934). This is a gentle narration of the life of Montrose from a small boy to his death and beyond. We see Charles I but rarely, and through Montrose’s eyes. Challenged to prove his loyalty, after letters are released from between him and Charles, Montrose sees him as ‘a man too weak to play the tyrant, who had fallen back on the old treacherous methods of assassination’ (Part 2, Ch. 20), so that the entire tenor of the book is to promote Montrose—the turncoat—as a man of principle. Meanwhile Charles II had opened negotiations with the Covenanters, with whom he signed the Treaty of Breda in May 1650. The Covenanters—concerned about the intentions of Parliament and watching Cromwell in Ireland—wanted an independent, Presbyterian Scotland. Charles II now seemed their best hope to secure this. It backfired. Cromwell left Ireland and arrived in Scotland in July 1650, and advanced up the East Coast. David Leslie, seeing what he thought was a remnant of a weakened army, made ready to attack. Instead he went down to a crushing defeat at Dunbar, with 14,000 men killed, wounded and taken prisoner. The Kirk party was destroyed and Cromwell took Edinburgh and much of Southern Scotland. The prisoners ended up in

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Durham where many died; some of their bones were rediscovered in a dig in 2013 (Webb 2017). For Henty this is all good news. In Friends Though Divided (1883) Harry Furness, the Royalist hero, is deeply unimpressed with the Kirk. At one point Harry is sent to Scotland to take messages, and he and a colleague interfere with London preachers coming to meet with Scottish divines. They pass themselves off as preachers themselves and Jacob actually engages in debate, thus demonstrating and discrediting the flawed theology and exegesis of Scottish Presbyterianism. Furthermore, the control of the Kirk over military matters is depicted improperly. ‘It was they who insisted upon terms, they who swayed the councils of the nation, and it was not until Cromwell, after overthrowing the King, overthrew the Parliament, which was for the most part composed of their creatures, that the power of the preachers came to an end’ (Ch. 10). So that Cromwell is here presented almost as the liberator of the Scots. With the radical Kirk Party discredited, the remaining Covenanters and Royalists passed a Scottish Levy act in Parliament in December 1650. A conscripted and national Army of the Kingdom was put under the command of Charles II. Although the largest force raised so far, it was badly trained and divided within itself. In July 1651 a section of this army was defeated by General Lambert at the Battle of Inverkeithing. In an attempt to avoid being outflanked Charles took his army south into England, where he went down to defeat at Worcester, and many of his Scottish soldiers were taken and sold into indentured servitude in the West Indies. Cromwell had followed Charles to England, leaving General Monck in Scotland. It is this incident that both Howard Pease and James Grant choose. Howard Pease’s main character in Magnus Sinclair (1903) is a London boy who, in a very Walter Scott type adventure, goes to live with his family in Northumberland and falls in with Stirling, a mercenary soldier. With his Protestant father and Catholic mother (very much nineteenth-century ecumenicism) it may not be a surprise that he sides with the Royalists. The novel is a spy thriller and mostly focused on adventure. In James Grant’s Harry Ogilvie, or the Black Dragoons (1856), Ogilvie is an orphan whose mother dies outside a Church. He is taken in as a baby, educated for the church but proves wild and ends up a dragoon in the Covenanter army attempting to defeat Cromwell. The book aptly presents the hostility to Charles I, but also a sense of shame, ‘Far less dishonourable had it been to their memory and to us, had they tried

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their native prince by a court martial and shot him before their camp at Newcastle; but to yield him up to his judicial murderers—oh, it was a deed well worthy of Gillespie the ill-favoured!’ (Ch. 8). Consequently he finds himself serving with Charles II against Cromwell, is captured and gets his face-to-face moment with Cromwell, and is given his parole (Ch. 58). And there is also here a great deal of the admiration for Cromwell that we see generally from the late nineteenth century onwards, in this case, presumably, set against the devastating attacks on civilians that were a feature of the Scottish Civil Wars. He ‘rigidly commanded his soldiers to abstain from all violence and plunder in and around the capital; and it is to the honour of the English army that he was implicitly obeyed’ (Ch. 35). Henty’s Royalist hero Furness in Friends Though Divided (1883) was also concerned with how the war is fought. He ‘knew that in Scotland very different manners prevailed to those which characterised the English. In England, throughout the war, no unnecessary bloodshed took place, and up to that time, the only persons executed in cold blood had been the two gentlemen convicted of endeavouring to corrupt the Parliament in favour of the King. But in Scotland, where civil broils were constant, blood was ever shed recklessly on both sides; houses were given to the flames; men, women and children slaughtered…’ (Ch. 10). Later, of course, Harry will be at Drogheda. But there is little political in the aftermath for Ogilvie: he returns home to discover that he is the long-lost son of an important family. He does not experience in fiction the occupation of Scotland. When Cromwell left Scotland, he left George Monck in place with a field force of 6000, an artillery train, and English troops occupying the garrisons at Edinburgh, Leith and Perth. ‘Ranged against him was a disparate grouping of Royalists, Covenanters and Highlanders [mostly Catholic] who should have been able to offer a spirited opposition’ (Royle 2005, 606); but they were unable to combine. Reluctant to be tied down to a siege in enemy territory, Monck battered Stirling Castle into submission within a week, and continued to bring Scotland under control. The news of the defeat at Worcester led to a collapse in Scottish resistance and Scotland was for a time under martial law. Lambert, Monck and other senior officers were granted lands. Cromwell encouraged the Council of State to declare a ‘union’ of Scotland into England in ways which left in place religious toleration of all except Episcopalians and Catholics, required forfeiture of royal property and revenue and that of those who supported the Stuarts. Scots law was left intact, but English commissioners were appointed to execute the

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policies. It was an imposition and Scotland and England were now one nation, in a way they had not been under Charles I. There were rebellions throughout the Commonwealth years. Perhaps the most Scottish-centred book in the collection is Leslie Turner White’s The Highland Hawk (1953). David is for himself first, the clan next, the Kirk after that and perhaps if convenient for Parliament, but as the novel goes on the impatience with the Royalist cause becomes stronger. Davy is groom to Lord Ian the psychopathic heir of Clan Dugald, and lover of the laird’s second wife. When asked to accompany Lord Ian to see his betrothed, he falls in love with Olivia and accidentally kills Lord Ian. He runs off, inadvertently masquerades as Lord Ian, gets caught up with a thief called Half Hanged Smith, and with Hogge, who turns out to be a renegade Royalist lord. He finds himself serving Cromwell to persuade one of the Scottish lords to stand aside from the war—so tipping the balance. At the very end he turns out to be Lord Duggan’s son and the Laird forgives him killing Ian and installs him as the heir; he races off to find Olivia. Allegiances beyond the clan are incidental: When Davy refuses to kill a man for being a Cavalier it is with the declaration, ‘Aye, and so would I be—had the wind blown the other way’ (Ch. 6). And he realises that much of what he knows of Parliament is rumour, gossip and propaganda: ‘He had never before seen any Parliamentary soldiers, and he had been led to believe them a poorly equipped, rag-a-tag collection of jailbirds and tosspots, but these troopers were splendidly accoutred and mounted on excellent horseflesh’ (Ch. 3). In Chapter 12 he tries to sort through the contradictory descriptions of Cromwell: he was ‘a back-biting mongrel peasant; a dull-witted country bumpkin’, but he had ‘dogged cross-bench intelligence and passionate sincerity’. For Royalists he was a ‘stiff-necked, unsmiling Puritan’, while ‘Puritans charged him with having spent his early life in such dissolute pursuits as gaming and good-fellowship’ (Ch. 12). Davy tells Cromwell that the Kirk ‘in its extreme zeal, has perverted the Gospel into an instrument of intolerable oppression’ (Ch. 12); and his love tells Davy that ‘Father has been growing weary of the broken promises and vacillations of Charles’ (Ch. 19). The sense of politics as it is understood in the English novels about this period is just not there.

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The Confederate Wars and the English Civil War in Ireland The war in Ireland, which we will call here the Irish Confederate Wars, had its roots in the settlement of Ireland by the English and Scots in successive waves. The Irish and Scots were for many centuries linked peoples (see the clan wars in Scotland) and, at least until the Reformation, Scots settlement does not seem to be regarded as an alien invasion in the way that English settlement has been. Although the desire for land was ever-present in England’s conquest of Ireland, the military relationship between Ireland and England by the mid-1600 s was also concerned with the nearness of Ireland and its role as a launching station for England’s enemies. In the fifteenth century the Fitzgerald dynasty of Kildare—effective rulers of Ireland— invited in Burgundian troops to crown the Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel, leading to a Tudor invasion of what had been seen as a Lordship, and its absorption as a kingdom. In some ways this was an improvement as native Lords now sat in the House of Lords; in other ways it was a downgrading as it was now the Lord Deputy of Ireland—nominated by the King—who was the true power. Over the next century there were continuous rebellions, including internal rebellions among the Irish (see Fitzpatrick 1988) and a policy of ‘surrender and re-grant’ brought Ireland under English control: the Desmond Rebellions, 1569–1573 and 1579– 1583, in Munster; the Nine Years War 1594–1603 in Ulster which led to a nationwide result supported with military aid from Spain. Hugh O’Neill surrendered to James I in 1603 shortly after he took the English crown. Many of the Earls fled in 1607, and the English crown established an administrative capital in Dublin. During this time the attempts to impose Protestantism on the population failed. The reasons are varied but include the association of Protestantism with brutal conquest, and a counter-reformation campaign by Irish Catholic clergy, many of whom were educated on the continent (itself a factor in later English Parliament hostility). Invasion and colonisation were changing the demographics of Ireland. In the pre-Elizabethan period the population divided roughly into the ‘Old’ or Gaelic Irish, and the Old English, the descendants of the Norman settlers. Both groups now spoke Gaelic; both embraced Irish poetry and music; and, crucially, both groups were Catholic, which promoted a joint antagonism to the new conquest, and subsequently intermarriage. From

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the mid-sixteenth-century Scottish and English Protestant colonists were ‘planted’ in Ulster, Munster, Laois and Offaly. By 1641 there were around 80,000 English and Scots (Presbyterians) in Ulster. We thus have roughly a three-way split: Old Irish, Old English and new settlers. The Old Irish hankered for independence but not a unified one (Fitzpatrick 1988, 174), the Old English wanted to be full subjects within the Stuart monarchy and to hold on to the lands they had secured during the Reformation, while remaining loyal to the Catholic Church (Fitzpatrick, 176), and the new settlers wanted land. From 1607 to 1641 there was a constant pressure from the settler-dominated government of Ireland to confiscate more land by threatening medieval land titles and punishing non-attendance at Protestant services. The Old Irish and Old English responded by appealing directly to the crown but even a deal of increased taxation in return for land rights led only to the increased taxation. By the 1630 s Ireland was in a state of rebellion exacerbated by further widespread land confiscations intended to break the power of the Irish upper classes, led by Wentworth, and by his attempts to manipulate the Old English Lords, and his very clear policy of converting Ireland to Protestantism. It is thus ironic that in 1641 he was impeached by Parliament on the grounds of ‘misdemeanours’ regarding his conduct in Ireland. But in the charges placed against Wentworth (by now Lord Strafford) is a key line that he was purported to have conducted to the King: ‘You have an army in Ireland you may employ in this kingdom’. For Parliament, the real fear was not that Strafford might fail to pacify Ireland: it was that in doing so he would create a source of financial, military and political support for the King that was outside the control of the Commons. In October 1641 rebellion broke out in Ulster and many Scots and English Protestants were killed. The rebellion had been intended to be small, secretive and bloodless. However the plot to take major garrisons was betrayed and the rebellion exploded into a range of small groups taking up arms. Irish Catholic bands turned on the Scottish and English settlers; Irish Catholic gentry raised militias to control the violence but when they came to believe that the Dublin government was prepared to punish all Catholics for the rebellion, they became involved in the attacks. In areas where English and Scots were settled—Cork, Dublin, Carrickfergus, Derry—they raised their own militias. English Protestant propaganda hugely inflated the numbers of Protestants killed or displaced and created a level of fear of the Irish that would have

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serious consequences. Massacres of Catholics in turn occurred at Rathlin Island and elsewhere: at Rathlin Island they were connected to the clan rivalry between invading Covenanter Campbells, against local Catholic MacDonalds who were related to the Scottish clan. The massacres were brought under control to a degree in 1642 when Owen Roe O’Neill (Old Irish) arrived in Ulster to command the Irish Catholic forces and impose order. After that, the conflict was fought in line with the code of conduct brought from professional service on the continent. The rebellion spread with four main concentrations of rebel forces; in Ulster under Phelim O’Neill; in the Pale around Dublin led by Viscount Gormanstown; in the south-east, led by the Old English Lord Mountgarrett and in the south-west by Donagh MacCarthy, Viscount Muskerry. Charles I sent an army to put down the rebellion, as did the Scottish Covenanters. Between them they drove the rebellion out of Dublin and Ulster, respectively. The Irish responded by forming the Association of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, with its capital at Kilkenny. They controlled two-thirds of Ireland, and the loyalty of most Irish Catholics, but not wholly those of the Irish lords who feared losing their lands. Furthermore they were weak in battle and by 1642 had lost several encounters. What changed the situation was the outbreak of war in England: most of the English troops were recalled to fight on the Royalist side, ironically leading to a belief among Parliament troops that ‘Irish’ armies were being called into England, which exacerbated resentment against the King and led to the accusation that he was bringing in Papists to attack English subjects. Furthermore, Royalist troops who were told they were to receive Irish reinforcements threatened to mutiny, and some threatened to kill them on arrival. Joyce Malcolm has argued that individuals who defected at this time, meant it when they declared that their consciences would not allow them to fight for a King who employed Papists (often from Catholic Lancashire) and Irish rebels in his army (Malcolm 1983, 120–121). In mid-1642 Charles had signed the Adventurers Act into law, whereby loans raised in London would be paid off by sales of the Irish rebels’ land. This increased anger, but with Charles in trouble, the Confederates also sought to negotiate in 1643. They took Limerick and Galway. Ulster, Dublin and Cork remained in English hands, but Cork and Derry came out for Parliament, while the Earl of Ormonde on the East Coast sided with the King, and the Scottish Covenanters around Carrickfergus sided with Edinburgh. The period 1642–1645 consisted of skirmishes, mass

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destruction of crops, major movements of refugees in both directions, but relatively little movement in terms of control of the country. By 1646 the Confederates had created regular, full-time armies of around 60,000 men under the command of professional soldiers such as Thomas Preston and Owen Roe O’Neill who had served on the continent. But they were taking subsidies from France, Spain and the Papacy, thus emphasising that an independent Ireland was likely to be allied to England’s enemies. And in addition they had signed a truce with the Royalists in 1643 (the ‘cessation’) and spent the next three years in abortive negotiations with what was, in the end, the wrong side. Thus the end of the Civil War in England promised disaster. After ousting the Confederate Supreme Council who had signed a peace treaty with the Royalists, the Confederates tried to retake all of Ireland before the English Parliament could launch an invasion. They were supported by the Papal Nuncio, Rinuccini, in both arms and money, and initially were able to take several Parliamentarian strongholds, smash the Covenanter army in Ulster and take Sligo, but were halted when they tried to lay siege to Dublin. Ormonde, whose Royalists held the town, declared he preferred English rebels to Irish ones, and handed over the garrison to Parliament. In August 1647 Thomas Preston’s army tried to take Dublin and was annihilated at the Battle of Dungan’s Hill. The Parliamentarians based in Cork devastated the territory around Munster provoking famine and in September stormed Cashel, massacring the garrison and its inhabitants. Bit by bit the Confederates were pushed back, each time with massive loss of life. Absent from this conflict were the conventions of surrender and regrouping that we see in the war in England. In desperation the Confederates sought an alliance with the Royalists, to put their troops under their command, and accepted the leadership of Ormonde who had now changed sides. This proved untenable. Rinuccini threatened to excommunicate anyone who accepted the deal, and withdrew financial support. In 1648 Owen Roe O’Neill and his Ulster Alliance went to war with the new Royalist-Confederate alliance but was unable to supply his troops. When they finally rejoined, Ormonde tried to take Dublin but was routed at the Battle of Rathmines. By the time the Parliamentarian army had finished mopping up the Second Civil War, and putting down the Leveller rebellion, the coalition was already vulnerable. Elizabeth Charles Rundle, the most informed of the fiction authors, has her hero Roger writer to his sister Olive: ‘loyal Catholics of the Pale, disloyal Catholics beyond the Pale, Presbyterian

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Royalists, and Papists of the massacre. Now their union seems to be crumbling to pieces again, being founded not on love, but on hatred; and out of hatred no permanent bonds can, I think, be woven’ (Ch. 5). In contrast the Parliamentarian troops were organised, well-armed and trained, and well-supplied—Cromwell wanted to avoid living off the land. The outline of Cromwell’s nine months in Ireland is well-known. He moved eastward paying for support and supplies in ways intended (successfully) to draw support from the local population who had been reduced by the scorched earth approach of both sides in the rebellion against Charles I and the subsequent Confederate wars (Dorney 2012). He took Drogheda and Wexford by force, and the rest of Ireland fell into place. Ormonde made the mistake of relying on walled towns, but the new artillery took easy care of them. The reduction of Drogheda and Wexford has entered into popular memory as atrocities. Randal McDonnell’s When Cromwell Came to Drogheda: A Memory of 1649 (Dublin, 1906) contains vivid depictions. Captain F.S. Brereton’s The King’s Service (1900), a story of exiled Royalists in Ireland, is rather typical in its description. In this book Drogheda is a gallant little town, the use of guns somehow a little unfair, and the end is described as a breach of the rules of warfare in which ‘Cromwell’s officers promised their lives to those of the defenders who would surrender’ and then ‘by Cromwell’s orders the soldiers turned fiercely upon their helpless prisoners and brutally slaughtered them in cold blood’. ‘In this same church all the inhabitants of the town, old men and helpless women, children and priests… more than a thousand of these perished miserably’. Brereton rushes to assert that ‘never, even in the greatest heat of battle, did a Royalist soil his hands with the blood of a helpless enemy’ (Ch. 7). Modern historians—including Irish historians such as Tom Reilly, and the more hostile Micheál Ó Siochrú—no longer take such an absolutist view. Both Drogheda and Wexford took place within the conventional traditions of continental warfare: a garrison that did not surrender was at the mercy of the victor. They were appalling massacres fuelled by contempt for the Irish but they did not exceed the rules of contemporary warfare. What seems clear is that in both places garrison commanders knew this but expected the level of mercy that Parliament had demonstrated in England (even in Colchester). Instead, Cromwell, deeply prejudiced against Catholicism and with an army fresh from its own conflicts over being sent to Ireland in the first place, offered unacceptable terms—specifically that the Mass could not be celebrated—and deeply

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prejudiced against the Irish on the basis of both real and exaggerated atrocities of the previous decade, was determined to put a stop to the rebellion and close down a potential source of support for Charles II, evidenced by the Confederates’ acceptance of money from France and Spain. The result was that although Cromwell did operate within the conventions of continental warfare, it was at the extreme: where quarter might have been expected, it was not given. At Drogheda, although two thousand soldiers were slaughtered, civilians were spared. The worst of the atrocity stories, according to Trevor Royle, stems from the memoirs of Thomas Wood, ‘a soldier whom his colonel thought to be too fond of buffooning’, published in 1663. Others were disseminated by the Irish clergy (Royle 2005, 529). At Wexford the town had wished to capitulate but was forced to hold out by the garrison commander Sinnot, who hoped for relief from Ormond; Ormond meanwhile was hoping for support from abroad. In F.S. Brereton’s In the King’s Service (1900) he is portrayed as betrayed by the Irish commissioners, by his overseas paymasters and by the refusal of Charles II to cross to Ireland (Ch. 12). During the eight-day period this took place, there was an evacuation of all non-combatant civilians (Royle, 533). The bombardment when it came forced Sinnot to renegotiate but his demands for the preservation of the Catholic faith and the safe evacuation of the garrison were rejected. Meanwhile Captain James Stafford surrendered the castle, and its guns were turned on the garrison in the city (the evidence is that this happened before Cromwell was aware of the surrender: Royle, 534). Parliamentarian soldiers stormed the city, and slaughtered the garrison, who were mostly novice recruits. Again, Brereton repeats propaganda: ‘Three hundred or more helpless women were furiously set upon as they crouched at the foot of the market cross and with a merciless ferocity were cruelly put to death’ (Ch. 12), along with the murder of four thousand people in the local area. It is unlikely that there were that many people in the area at the time. After Wexford Cromwell left Ireland to pursue the Scottish rebellion. The Parliamentary army moved rapidly to control Ireland and by 1651 the Royalist-Confederate alliance had collapsed and formal resistance was over. In order to defeat the rebels, the army had extended the scorched earth policy in land and across Ireland, and in order to defeat the English the Confederacy did the same (Dorney 2012). The Confederates resorted to guerrilla war which led in turn to Parliament evicting Irish civilians from areas which had been helping them. This however was only an

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excuse for what happened next, a naked land-grab. Parliament had long supported the settlement of Ireland for a range of reasons: an attempt to destroy Catholicism, and a desire to ensure that England could not be attacked via Ireland. That the first was true does not negate the second reason. The Act of Settlement of 1652 was severe: pardon was refused rebels and priests (believed with some cause to have fomented the 1641 rebellion) could be executed on capture. Bystanders who had not declared support for Parliament were regarded as complicit. Anyone who had lived in Ireland any time from 1 October 1649 to 1 March 1650 and had not ‘manifested their constant good affection to the interest of the Commonwealth of England’ lost one-third of their land and were expected to accept transportation to Connacht or Clare and the receipt of poorer land. Many Catholic landowners ended up as tenants on their own land. Protestant Royalists who had surrendered before 1650 were treated less harshly, and despite the legends, the majority of the unlanded population was left in place. The policy was Parliament’s. Charles II would decline to restore Catholic land, but even though the policy was one begun Elizabeth I, extended under Charles I and concluded by William, it would be Cromwell—conveniently—carried the blame in the fiction and in popular memory, ‘“Cromwellian” is used as a generic term to describe the activities of Protestant settlers and the series of settlements enacted to govern Ireland between the reigns of Elizabeth I and William III’ (Singleton 2013, 28). Catholics were barred from the Irish Parliament, forbidden to live in some towns, and from marrying Protestants. Overall a third of the Irish population had died. At the end of Parliament’s invasion and re-conquest of Ireland, around 50,000 Irish soldiers, and in some cases their wives, were sent to Barbados to work in the colonies. The decision to deport the Irish as forced labour was a political statement recognisable to everyone that the English Parliament did not regard the Irish as coming within the compass of English rights and liberties. These were not sentenced indentured servants with a clear term limit to their labour. The fictions overwhelmingly use the term slavery. However, because slavery has come to be the term we use almost entirely for chattel slavery of the inherited, multigenerational slavery instituted in the Americas and solely absorbing Africans, a better term is prisoners of war, with the caveat that the Irish did not know that there would be an end to their forced labour, nor were there any humanitarian agreements framing their treatment.

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Three types of books came out of this history. There are those written from the point of view of the Parliamentarian conquerors, those from the Royalists in Exile and those from the point of view of the Irish in Ireland. The first category, those which are from the point of view of Parliament, includes Elizabeth Charles Rundle’s On Both Sides of the Sea (1868), Charlotte M. Yonge’s Under the Storm (1887), Samuel Harden Church’s John Marmaduke (1897), Jack Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), and Lindsay Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009). Of these however, only John Marmaduke is are actually set in Ireland. In Rundle’s On Both Sides of the Sea, only the yeoman Job serves in Ireland and the reports in his letters are brief. In Yonge’s Under the Storm, it is the older brother who serves in Ireland and his poor character is betrayed in part by his willingness to marry a local girl (actually expressly forbidden) and to accept Irish land. In the work of both Jack Lindsay and Lindsey Davis Ireland is where the army is sent, but the heroes do not participate. In all of these books, although there is an awareness of atrocity, it is only background for the sense that the real conflict is in England. Ireland feels like a nuisance, a prolongation of conflict and a distraction. Irish aspirations are often presented at best as false consciousness, and at worst as merely a disguise for Royalism. In Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea, for example Olive, the Puritan residing in England whose brother Roger is with the army, talks of ‘to battle a whole nation in insurrection, or rather in tumult’ (Ch. 5): the distinction is specific for by calling it tumult it denies to the Irish the organisation by which the Parliamentarians categorised their own insurrection as legitimate. In this account the invasion of Ireland is a mission: one of the characters, Olive’s friend Job writes, ‘We have had to do ‘terrible things in righteousness,’…. For years the land has been like one of the wicked old Roman wild-beast shows in the Book of Martyrs; the wild beats first tearing the Christians in pieces and then in their fury falling on each other’. For Job this is a civilising mission, a chance to save the ‘peaceable folk’. ‘Many of them are kindly creatures, well understand fair treatment, and generously return it’, but they are still savages ‘brought up without knowing either the English tongue or Christian religion’ (Ch. 5). It is hard to know from this distance but one wonders if this is sarcasm, a comment perhaps on the missions to Africa of Charles’ own day. The strangest of the books is Samuel Harden Church’s John Marmaduke. In this book, an apologia for Cromwell, John Marmaduke is posted to Ireland, meets and despoils the land of the lovely Catherine,

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is partially responsible for the death of her father (in battle) and while her brother dies defending her honour against another. She falls in love with him, marries him—though the last Irish priest in the area has been hanged—and defies her aunt who is, unsurprisingly, appalled that her daughter married an invader. This kind of Stockholm syndrome is not unique to pro-Parliament books of course. In James A. Shearman’s Katherine Clare: Her Book (1883) we have the unedifying journey of Katherine, sent to live in the house of Lord Wentworth, being seduced by his behaviour into believing that he is the saviour of Ireland and transfigured into a representative of the humble and submissive Ireland which accepts that England knows what is best for the inhabitants of the island. The sense of Ireland as a sideshow or continuation of the war in England is there in the Royalist books as well. Both Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883) and Brereton’s In the King’s Service (1900) send their heroes to Ireland to continue the fight after the end of the Second Civil War. Henty’s Harry is at Drogheda and is sent as a prisoner of war to Barbados from which he escapes to Hamburg, eventually to warn Cromwell of an attempt on his life, and to win a pardon. Brereton’s Dick is at Drogheda, is taken prisoner, escapes, lives to defend his cousin’s Irish castle and on saving Cromwell’s life is pardoned (the coincidence of plot between the two relates to Brereton’s deliberate emulation of Henty). It is—unsurprisingly—only when we get to those few books (five) concerned solely with the Irish experience that we get a sense of the war in Ireland as a thing with its own agenda. All of these books are clustered in a relatively short time frame, one which covers an upsurge of Irish Nationalism, with the founding of the United Irish League, a nationalist political party in 1898, the erecting of the statue of Cromwell outside the House of Commons in London, and the Great National Convention in Dublin in 1902. Thomas Fitzpatrick’s The King of Claddagh, A Story of the Cromwellian Occupation of Ireland (1894) is made up of three stories: the fate of the King of Claddagh during the occupation of Galway; the occupation of Galway by Cromwellian troops, and the romance between a cavalier, Charleton, and the daughter of an Irish tobacco merchant. The first of these stories is thin, the King of Claddagh being an old man, existing as an aristocracy in a hovel. He is a memory of the old order, and there is much made of the difference between the Irish and the AngloIrish, with the implication that the Irish are suffering from the fallout between the English. The second is a very political tale in which almost all

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the Roundheads are canting Puritans. This is a story in which the kidnapping and deporting of the Irish are depicted as ethnic cleansing; however it acknowledges that tensions among the Irish rendered them vulnerable. Inevitably, the book is Royalist in its sympathies, but it is not unquestioningly so: Father Dominic (boatman to our hero) notes: ‘Do you suppose the Royalists in England care a straw about what the foolishly-devoted Irish have suffered? You think they are wroth with the Cromwellians for doing boldly and on a handsome scale what the English, in a jerky sort of way have been doing in Ireland these five years!’ (Ch. 9). There is a discussion about Anglo-Irish behaviour in the years before Cromwell, and particularly of James I’s decision to break the land tenure to the advantage of tenants (a matter that F. S. Brereton had presented in the contemporary In the King’s Service as tantamount to socialist land redistribution). A priest explains to an Anglo-Norman, ‘“Bear in mind that your countrymen always raised that cry when confiscation was intended. Any attempt to resist the extortion or tyranny of the administration afforded the desired pretext for putting down the ‘rebellion’ and confiscating the rebel’s lands”’ (Ch. 14). The priest also notes the hypocrisy of the Old English: ‘“Who are the people,” continued Father Dominic, “that suffer most in the present Transplantation? Are they not the descendants of the very men who, in every reign since the first Plantagenets, have been doing their utmost to root out the native Irish?”’ (Ch. 14). The third part of the story can be understood as a classic ‘Vietnam romance’, for this time it is the hero who goes native. Major Charleton arrives as a young officer, is rescued from a bog by a boatman who turns out to be a priest, whom he then befriends and employs. He falls in love with Gertrude, the daughter of a merchant, and is slowly pulled away from the Parliamentarians. At the end of the novel Charleton gives up his claim to confiscated lands, and after Cromwell dies, Richard Cromwell retires and Charles Stuart is called to the throne, he converts to Catholicism and marries Gertrude. There is a final scene in which the priest’s chalice is recovered and the Governor cursed for his sacrilege in trying to drink from it. This is easily the most religious of the books, and the one that most emphasises the religious difference that some parties on both sides wanted the war to be about. H. A. Hinkson’s Silk and Steel (1902) is at the other end of the spectrum in that it is a book about the looseness of loyalty. Daniel O’Neill is an Irish soldier of fortune who signs for the King but feels little actual loyalty to anything but the immediate mission. The book is a romp, a tale

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of adventure in which the Civil War provides opportunities to be wild and dashing. O’Neill himself spends the book taking messages back and forth, being doubted, carrying deception and mostly being the carrier of bad news: all of this against the background of Ormond and Owen Roe O’Neill’s rivalries and machinations. The protagonist is held to the crown only because he is in love with one of the Queen’s waiting women. If O’Neill has any loyalty it is to the Queen. However, his uncle, Don Eugenio O’Neill makes peace with General Monck. His men need food and pay. ‘I will no longer accept promises in payment of my services. … I care not for King nor Parliament, but only to serve my religion and my country’ (Ch. 46). Similarly in Randal McDonnell’s When Cromwell Came to Drogheda: A Memory of 1649 (1906, the only book in the collection published in Ireland), the focus is on the messy and fractured loyalties. This is not adventure or romance but a fictional memoir. We barely get to meet the main character before he is enjoined by his cousin to sign up with General Owen Roe (Dom Eugenio) O’Neill. When the protagonist is recruited he is told by Father Latham, ‘This is essentially a Catholic movement … but nevertheless Irishmen of all creeds are welcomed to our ranks’ (Ch. 1), and already you can hear the seeds of failure. One of the protagonist’s cousins, aptly named Rupert, ‘was a member of the Royalist Catholic party in Ireland and was as infatuated a follower of the Stuarts as the most ardent Cavalier in England could have desired. He would have sold his house and small belongings to have assisted in that cause, and would have been rewarded with the same measure of treachery and lies which seem to have been the chief inheritance of the Stuart Race’ (Ch. 4), by which we can presume that our narrator is not so infatuated. Later he declared to his cousin: ‘Has the rising of ’41 taught you nothing? Will nothing prove to you that these English robbers are bent on the extermination of our race— the blotting out of the old religion. Yet look at Ireland now and what do you find? The Catholic party stands divided—one half is flirting with His Holiness the Pope and the King of France, the other half is gazing on HIs Majesty of England’ (Ch. 4). Chapter 7 explores the different parties in Ireland, the Old Catholics, the Anglo-Catholics of the Tudor Settlement, the Ulster Puritan settlers and the English Royalist party in Dublin, while the second half of the book tells of the battles and skirmishes he fights, ending with Cromwell’s siege of Drogheda. Chapter 20 however details the devastation of the Settlement. The narrator estimates that 616,00 perished out of a population of 1,466,000 from famine or

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war or plague. As the country is destroyed, the tax revenue collapses, and many of the new settlers discover they have no one to work the land. The final book set in Ireland is F. Frankfort Moore’s Castle Omeragh (1903). In many ways this another Henty-esque novel but its perspective is different. It is the tale of a younger son left behind to help defend the home while his elder brother is off having adventures. At the opening of the novel Harry has been captured and shipped off to Barbados as prisoner of war: there are lots of comments about how terrible this is and how Walter, the younger boy has seen slaves in America, but any sense of political critique is undercut when he notes that Harry was meant to be ‘the master’. Much of the novel is spent railing at the oncoming Parliamentarians who are indulging in rapine and slaughter. Sometimes it is very witty. ‘Cromwell’s expedition to Ireland had for its object the promulgation of religious tolerance by an universal massacre of Papists’ (Ch. 8). But he is just as witty about the Irish. ‘The Irish were overawed by the constant show of force and forethought; but they hated Cromwell all the more on this account, for they really seemed to think that there was something desperately mean about a commander who made war on a fixed principle. They actually seemed to think that warfare was a game of chance, and that the general who left nothing to chance was on a level with the man who examines the cards before dealing them round’ (Ch. 27). As it happens, Cromwell makes peace at Clonmel, the novel ends and Walter marries Kathleen (who had rejected his brother the year before). The priest, Father Mahoney, relates in a letter that he has given up on converting Charles II but ‘he hath great hopes of his brother’ (Ch. 38).

Works Cited Secondary Sources Dorney, John. “War and Famine in Ireland, 1580–1700.” The Irish Story, 2012. www.theirishstory/2012/01/03.war-and-famine-in-ireland-1580-1700/. Web. Fitzpatrick, Brendan. Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The War of Religions. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. Print. Gaunt, Peter. A Nation Under Siege: The Civil War in Wales, 1642–1648. London: HMSO for Cadw Welsh Historic Monuments, 1991. Print. Malcolm, Joyce. Caesar’s Due: Loyalty and King Charles, 1642–46. London: Royal Historical Society, 1983. Print.

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Reid, Stuart. Crown, Covenant and Cromwell: The Civil Wars in Scotland, 1639– 1651. London: Frontline Books, 2012. Print. Royle, Trevor. Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660. London: Abacus, 2005. Print. Stevenson, David. The Scottish Revolution 1637 –1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973. Print. ———. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2003. Print. Stewart, Laura A. M. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637 –1651. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Print. Singleton, Charles. “Uncharitable Mischief”: Barbarity and Excess in the British Civil Wars. Oxford: The Pike and Shot Society, 2013. Print. Webb, Simon. The Dunbar Martyrs: Scottish Prisoners of War in Durham Cathedral, 1650. Durham: The Langley Press, 2017. Print.

CHAPTER 10

The Commonwealth and the Protectorate

The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under. —Thomas Rainsborough, October 29, 1647, Putney, England, during the ‘Army debates’.

The Execution Charles was tried, as King of England: the charge was treason, under the resolution passed on 1 January 1649 (by the Commons only, but it required no other consent) stating that ‘by the fundamental laws of this Kingdom, it is treason in the king of England … to make war upon the Parliament and Kingdom of England’. The resolution was followed by the setting up of the court, and witnesses were called to testify to Charles’ presence on the battlefield. It is in the construction of a court to try a king that the first sense of a new order emerges. No one had tried a king before. Kings were supposed to die in battle, cut down by conquerors or cousins. Thus first there had to be a legal philosophy which permitted this. In January 1649 the Rump Parliament (that which was left after Pride’s Purge) indicted the King on a charge of treason. This was rejected by the House of Lords, and the Chief Justices © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_10

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of the three common law courts of England—Henry Rolle, Oliver St. John and John Wilde—all maintained that it was unlawful. But the war had been fought over the supremacy of Parliament over the King. The Commons now decided it had supremacy over the Judges. They passed a bill which created a separate court for Charles’ trial, and in doing so, made their first act of government without even the fiction of acting in the King’s name. The High Court of Justice established by the Act selected 135 commissioners. Many either refused to serve or, like Thomas Fairfax, simply stayed away: ironically by doing so they ensured the court more likely to find the King guilty. Only 68 men attended the trial that began on 20 January 1649. The trial was the site of high drama. Few historians can resist trying to recapture this occasion with the result that otherwise conventional narratives suddenly turn into melodrama on the page, as in C. V. Wedgwood’s account (1983, 119–129). Three key things are regularly repeated: that Charles lost his legendary stammer, and was noted as speaking slowly and with intent, which lent him gravitas; that one of the key moments was when he dropped the head of his cane, and no one picked it up (no one ever notes that the cane was probably a necessity, not an ornament, for the boy who had once walked in callipers); and that both the charges made, and the King’s response, set precedents with which the twentieth century would become very familiar. The charge constructed the radical notion that command responsibility belonged to Charles, and thus he was ‘guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby’. The court argued that the ‘King of England’ was a office, not a person, and that each occupant was entrusted with limited power. Charles responded by refusing to recognise the court. In a tactic tried by so many fallen rulers since, to as little effect, he continually challenged the court: ‘I would know by what power I am called hither, by what lawful authority…?’ insisting that only God could judge a King, but also noting the absence of the House of Lords (also soon to be abolished). Furthermore, by refusing to acknowledge the court, and eventually refusing to plead, the King lost the chance to speak. This was English law: only if the accused entered a plea could they speak on their own behalf, so that what has often portrayed as an injustice, was an injustice only in that the same treatment was meted out to the King as was the norm in his own court and of which Englishmen, for whom the law courts were a form of

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popular entertainment, were aware (Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief , 2006). At the end of the third day, Charles was removed from court and the court heard over 30 witnesses. Charles’ refusal to plead lost him the chance to challenge these witnesses. On 26 January Charles was declared guilty and sentenced. Only 59 of the 68 commissioners signed the death warrant. The trial itself has received little attention in the novels. In Lawrence Cowen’s Bible and Sword (1919) Cromwell’s daughter Bridget Cromwell weeps and tries to dissuade her father from going ahead. Recently Anthony Anglorus places his hero the (real-life) highwayman James Hinds as an observer at the trial (Prince of Prigs, 2015). Only Howard Brenton’s play 55 Days (2012) gives direct attention to the days of the trial itself. It is the execution of Charles that has attracted the most attention. Charles’ walk to the execution through the midwinter weather, flanked by guards, has become an iconic image thanks to Ernest Crofts and other Victorian painters, but it is the scene on the scaffold that we find in the fiction. Charles, wearing two shirts to hold off the cold, his hair in a snood so the axeman would have a clear blow, the speech few could hear, the feeling that he was led to this moment by his unjust sacrifice of Strafford, his declaration that he had desired the liberty and freedom of the people as much as any, ‘but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having government… It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining unto them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things’. His final line, ‘I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be’. Harry, in Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883), mounts an abortive rescue attempt, in a fine moment of alternate history. Roger, hero of Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1868), is actually at the execution, as is the hero of Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009). In those last moments, the King reinvented himself as a martyr for the Church of England, as a saintly father and perhaps most important as a sacramental figure, and it is this that is clearest in the fiction, as in Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868). In Olive’s recollections, ‘The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most noble in the king. The haughty glance which had been resented on the throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended’ (Ch. 1).

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In novels, both Royalist and Parliamentarian, the execution serves as a clarifying moment. Parliamentarian after Parliamentarian sees this as going too far, and resigns from the lists. This trope first appears in Marryatt’s The Children of the New Forest (1847) where the local Intendant actively switches sides and becomes pro-Royalist after the death of the King. Sutcliff’s Simon leaves the army when the King is executed and makes rapprochement with his Royalist friend Amias (Simon, 1953); and of course so too does Thomas Fairfax, about whom Sutcliff writes in The Rider on the White Horse (1959). In Sally Watson’s Lark (1964) the uncle of spy James Trelawney is a Parliamentarian who has left the army after the execution, and James seeks to bring him further into the Royalist network. Even Myles Delacourt, the hero of Marshall’s rather radical The Torch Bearers (1923), rides to London to try to stop the execution. In this vision of the execution, ‘The Londoners, who at the outbreak of the war and all through its course had formed the very heart of the opposition to a sovereign that overstepped his powers, now stood aghast at this bloody and merciless act against a helpless prisoner’ (Ch. 21). Curiously, in this book the execution is not the end point of an army exasperated with the King, but rather something plotted and planned from 1647 onwards. There are a few texts that do not unify around a horror of Charles’ death. In Charles’ The Draytons and the Davenants (1867), for example, although Lettice is horrified by the news that Roger is to escort the King from Windsor to London, accusing him of ‘taking the King to London to die’, Roger is clear-minded: ‘It is the King who has betrayed us… who has refused to let us save him and trust him. … It is falsehood that is leading the king to this end, not the country, nor the Parliament, nor General Cromwell’ (Ch. 33). On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) begins on the day of the execution. Olive Drayton recalls: ‘To the army, and those who felt with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant vengeance. To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow and bitter inward vows of retribution; to the people generally a day of perplexity and woe’ (Ch. 1). Her memory of the scene is coloured by distance and romance. In Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938) Ralph Lydcott is in the crowd, a soldier waiting for what he sees as the end of one phase and the beginning of a new. His account is mundane. Written several years too early for Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the mundanity of horror and evil, Lindsay captures the ways in which the Parliamentarian judges sought to strip the scene of any of the things that might have made it either a celebration of victory

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or a moment of mourning or a spectacle for the mob. Here the soldiers do not face the scaffold, revelling in their victory, but instead face the crowd, concerned to ensure that all goes off efficiently. The king’s speech, recorded for posterity, is inaudible. The scaffold is surrounded by cloth in case the king has to be forced. There are no pie sellers for this is not to be compared to the usual execution. And while Olive is sure that the gasp of the crowd is shock, here ‘from the watching masses came a strange cry, something of fear, something of exultation, both half-strangled; and more than fear or exultation, a thankfulness that it was over, a mere statement, that something had happened, irrevocably’ (Ch. 1). In its aftermath Ralph visits Overton and Lilburne and hears them discourse not just on the execution of the king but, they hope, the execution of the kingly principle. At home his father examines his own conscience and resolves it by placing the blame on the Independents. His Presbyterians emerge—as they do in so many of these books—with clean hands, but here Lindsay does not allow the hypocrisy. Elsewhere, Lindsay shows the city going on much as normal, the activities of fornication and finance dominating its rhythms. In contrast, in Lane’s London Goes to Heaven (1947), the execution is a brawl. Sam McGuffin’s son Thomas—a bookish boy impressed into the New Model and turned by them into a soldier—‘related with relish how, after the fatal blow was struck, Colonel Harrison had snatched the head form the hands of the executioner and flung it on the scaffold with such force that the face was bruised. Of how the foot soldiers who had formed a cordon around the scaffold had clambered up, laughing and shouting, to collect mementoes, hacking off pieces of the dead King’s hair, scooping up the reeking sawdust, dipping their handkerchiefs and their swords in the pools of blood’ (Part 1, Ch. 1). It is unclear whether Lane intends this to be read as Thomas’s exaggeration but she provides no counter-narrative and alone of the authors here, she does not follow Philip Henry’s description of the execution, and attributes to the troops a disorder uncharacteristic of the New Model. Ten days after Charles I died, on the day of his internment, a memoir purporting to be the late King went on sale. Eikon Basilike was an apologia for royal policies. Despite the rejoinder by John Milton, Eikonoklastes, it was the pathos of the King’s book that captured the imagination. But what it did not do was mobilise resistance. The enormous sales of Eikon Basilike may have been as much to do with the popularity of scaffold confessions, and of the fashionable necessity of owning 1649’s coffee

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table book. And, as C. V. Wedgwood wrote, the various ways of hailing Charles’ memory ‘were not the prelude to action, they were a substitute for it’ (Wedgwood 1983, 212).

The Commonwealth and Protectorate On 4 January 1649 the House of Commons declared itself sovereign. A new Great Seal, inscribed ‘in the first year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored’ and with a picture of the Commons in session, was commissioned. On 13 February the executive functions of the Crown were transferred to a new Council of State; the monarchy was abolished on 17 March and the House of Lords two days later. Bishops had been abolished in 1646, and in 1649 their lands were confiscated and sold. Some Cathedrals became parish churches, others were divided between congregations of varying allegiances (see Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture Without Kings, 1995, 7–25, for a discussion of the relatively few new churches). On 19 May 1649, England was declared to be ‘a commonwealth and free state’. However at that point the reforms of the Commonwealth came to a grinding halt as they were faced with competing demands on their time. The Government needed to disband the army, but the army would not disband without pay, which led to the Leveller-influenced muster Banbury (Rees 2016, 296–9). By the end of 1649 there was rebellion in Ireland as exiled Royalists joined their cause with that of the Irish Confederacy—one element of the mutiny was over the threat of being sent to Ireland— and Parliament found itself fighting the Scots again in 1651, leading to the eventual conquest of Scotland 1649–1652 which created yet more administrative headaches (see Reid 2012). There were real issues over legitimacy with challenges from both the Royalists, and the London radicals popularly known as the Levellers (see Rees, 2016). The fear of more rebellion led to a demand that local administrators and officials take the Oath of Engagement in 1650: ‘I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now Established, without a King or House of Lords’. This hardened boundaries between fence-sitters and supporters, as Ann Swinfen details in her novel This Rough Ocean (2015). She has John Swinfen, MP for Stafford, imprisoned and tortured, neither of which is historically accurate, but does reflect ways in which the Oath hardened

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lines. It became a key pressure point around the Quakers whose disruption to the social order included a refusal of oaths; it also drove many Episcopalians and Presbyterians into open opposition. And then there was the issue of paying for it all: the inability to demobilise the army, both because it needed paying and because of the fear of unrest, meant that taxes continued very high. The chosen way to raise money without raising taxes further was to fine ‘malignant’, but this system of compounding went against the terms of surrender negotiated by Fairfax and Cromwell and caused resentment although, as we shall see, it is far more that it created a focus for resentment than that it imposed the hardship memorialised in Royalist propaganda. The Commonwealth Parliament seated 210 MPs of 507 seats. Of these only 60–70 were active, and typical attendance was 40–50. This needs to be seen in the context that, before the 1600s, Parliaments had been short and periodic. To sit permanently, as this Parliament did, created strains on local affiliations and personal business. But it is reasonable to see this as less a full parliament than a large committee. It also had more support than was apparent. Of those 210 MPs, 83 were ‘moderates’ returning to Parliament. Between 1649 and its dissolution in 1653 the Rump passed over three hundred Acts, but half of these were in the first year. Over 52% of the Acts focused on security and tax, with 30% on local government or the army. Very little was done for the legal reform many radicals wanted to see (and which had been at the heart of many protests in the lead up to the war: Smith 1992, 1999). Crucially however, the Rump, which had been intended to rule as an interim measure, was slow to construct a basis for a new election. It is not at all clear why Cromwell dissolved the Rump (a crucial document—possibly a proposal for new elections— has gone missing), but arguments include that Cromwell feared the Rump trying to perpetuate itself; that Cromwell feared that the election system proposed would bring back Royalists and strengthen the Presbyterian faction (which was intolerant of independents and freedom of conscience); that the Rump refused to deal with legal reform; and that it was rumoured that MPs were seeking to reduce the pay of troops returning from Ireland. And of course, anti-Cromwell/pro-Royalist historians have argued that Cromwell was actively seeking power. Sean Kelsey sums up the uncertainty when he argues that it was ‘pressure for godly reformation … mixed up inextricably with much more prosaic and earthly

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matters relating to power, office and influence’ (Kelsey 2009, 336). In other words, all of the above. The Rump was replaced by the Nominated Assembly, known as Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, Nicholas Barebon. This attempt at a rule of the saints collapsed in December 1653 when it declared itself unable to rule, and produced the Instrument of Government, which installed Cromwell as Lord Protector. Cromwell ruled with a Council of State, and for the period September 1655–1656, in response to Penruddock’s rising, deployed his regional influence through the ‘rule of the Major-Generals’, a brief-lived experiment in a form of regional governorship which failed because it cut across local lines of influence and authority (see Durston 2001). Although this is often seen as a period of tyranny and moral puritanism, Christopher Durston has demonstrated that this view is influenced by propaganda. The rule of the Major-Generals combined a general concern both to suppress Royalist spy-rings and to deal with the domestic needs of the population (Durston 2001; Hindle 2008; Healey 2014).

Life in the Commonwealth Jack Lindsay’s 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938) is an unusual book in covering exactly one year from the death of Charles I. Punctuated by contemporary letters and speeches, 1649 follows a number of characters of which the men are: Ralph Lydcott, Will Scanlan, Randol Lydcott, Roger Cotton and Arthur Boon (who will marry Ralph’s sister Margaret), and Ralph and Randol’s father, Isaac Lydcott. The two most interesting characters for the purposes of this chapter are Ralph, ex-officer in the New Model, and Arthur Boon, a clerk at Whitehall. Both follow a trajectory of disillusionment. Ralph begins the novel as a dedicated man of the New Model who has left it because he has broken with what he sees as first Parliament’s and then Cromwell’s betrayal of the Cause. Ralph is a Rainsborough man. He has fallen in with the Levellers and is waiting for what he hopes will be a great uprising. But Ralph is not uncritical so that we see the Levellers through his judgement: Lilburne, who will eventually become so distracted by legal arguments that he will lose momentum, and Overton the organiser who cannot reach the army. Ralph can see that there are competing interests at work, that the alliance between Levellers and Independents cannot hold, and that the decision to send the army to Ireland is as much an economic one, driven by the desires of the City

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to secure its investments, as it is a political-military decision to defeat the Royalists. The petition for the Agreement of the People secures over 10,000 signatures, but the Rump resolves a ‘sharp reprehension’. Ralph, convinced that the time is ripe is caught up as a street organiser and is there in Moorfields when Tom Lockyer is defeated and arrested by Cromwell. Depressed by this Ralph decides to head west, to Banbury to join the Leveller mutiny he knows is gathering, but his sister persuades him to see his uncle first. His uncle, a progressive man interested in manufacturing improvements and free trade, gives him messages to take to Cornwall as cover. In this he begins on the path of corruption. He goes to Cornwall for his uncle to secure tin, as his uncle thinks there will be soon a run on it. He is arrested for conspiracy: he thinks it is for being a Leveller, but realises it to allow someone else to secure the tin. But as he sees the poverty in the country and realises it is genuinely for want of work, he is slowly drawn to his uncle’s side. By August Ralph has decided to marry a young woman whom he has rescued from an overturned carriage. Joan Carew is the daughter of a business colleague of his uncle’s, and the two men extract from him a promise to abandon the Levellers. This he cannot quite do. But he is losing faith in Lilburne, and although he watches his trial—dramatised in its entirety in ‘October’—with admiration it is also with nostalgia. Faced with a choice, he chooses domesticity and his uncle’s argument for free trade as the cure for poverty and inequality. He visits the Whalebone tavern once more, and observes the old men making old arguments and walks away. Ralph loses faith because the cause fails. Arthur Boon loses faith because he sees corruption all around him. He begins the year full of hope, recording the supplication of the Lords to the Commons as they begin to realise they are being cut out of the committees. But even by March he is unhappy: Parliament needs to raise funds he accepts but the resort to excise he sees as a tax on the poor, ‘the dirtiest thing that ever was done in England’ and he regards as ill done the leasing of confiscated land (Ch. 25). In April he notes the contempt that Parliament appears to have for the poor. As the year progresses he records more and more corruption. Eventually he takes it to Isaac Lydcott, father of Margaret. It is unclear what his intention is, but any intent to see it exposed comes to nothing; Isaac, judging by his own standards, sees this information as a bribe to secure consent, a gift that will aid him against his rivals.

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In accepting this interpretation, Boon too is pulled back into the ordinary way of doing business. The lesson from both men is that revolution is novel but the day-to-day business of exploitation, the reassertion of hierarchy, is unavoidable. Jane Lane offers a similar lesson, but while Lindsay is narrating good people trying to create a good new world, Lane offers a rather less pleasant interpretation. One of the issues that render Lane so problematic is that unlike other Royalist writers such as Maryatt, Henty or even Brent-Dyer, who is almost as extreme, she never once believes that Parliamentarian sentiments are honestly or intelligently held. How much she despises Parliamentarians is vivid in her depiction of Praise-God Barebone in her non-fiction book, Puritan, Rake and Squire (1950). Only the monarchical party appears to be entitled to integrity. In London Goes to Heaven (1947) Jane Lane seeks to write of a revolution in which the divide between ordinary folk and those in the army or active in politics is absolute. This is contradicted by the reality on the ground in which the City of London was intensely involved in the war, with seats in Parliament, close engagement with policy, actively supporting the cause in money and plates and through the support for the Trained Bands—an army of the citizens of London, formed into five corps and led by Philip Skippon, a Thirty Years’ War veteran. These bands successfully defended London against the King at Turnham Green in 1643 (Rowles 2018). But Jane Lane’s Sam Guffin, tavern keeper, is situated as the representative of the simple: to him, the execution is ‘an act of violence committed which I fear me will make our nation odious in the eyes of Christendom’ (Part 1, Ch. 1). Thomas, the eldest son, is in the army. James, the middle son, is a political visionary, who holds firm in his belief that ‘’Twas necessary Charles Stuart died this day that his people might live in freedom’ (Part 1, Ch. 1). Simon, the very youngest, cries at his brother Thomas’s brutality but begins to arm himself with books. The new order takes hold very quickly and visibly on the streets of Sam Guffin’s London. When he goes to watch the Trained Bands at the Artillery Grounds, he finds not the buffoons of the pre-war period but closely drilled soldiers. When someone utters a jest at the recreation of the Battle of Naseby, that person is arrested. Later he learns that the soldiers have quartered their horses in St Paul’s, and when, on Sunday, he takes his younger children to church (James having deserted for the Presbyterians), it is only for the sermon to be interrupted by a buff-coated

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captain, the incumbent pulled down, and the captain, surrounded by his troops, to deliver the sermon, before over-turning the communion table, destroying the organ, pissing in the font and looting the silver (this reader is surprised that there is any left after the fundraising for the war). The worst thing for Lane’s Guffin is that the new Commonwealth breaches the border of his private domain. Into the tavern come the newspapers from different sides: Thomas brings in the army papers, James the Leveller’s A Perfect Collection, and his labourer Ned Walsh, the Levellers’ The Moderate, which Guffin is convinced the boy cannot understand, and which ‘succeeded in making simple Ned Walsh a thorn in the side of his easy-going master’ (Part 1, Ch. 3). To add insult to injury his son Thomas cheerfully goes to Ireland on the payment of his arrears (the mutiny does not merit a mention) and Guffin finds himself with soldiers quartered in the tavern, something that Thomas, returned a year later and now of a bloodthirsty and prating turn of mind, insists is a blessing and an honour (Part 2, Ch. 1). Furthermore, Thomas, in bringing his religious conversion into the household renders the home a place of conflict. James the middle son is absorbed into the Presbyterian faction, and goes to work for Sir Arthur Heselrig [sic]. He becomes the representation of those who support the transfer of property to the new class, and the emergency of oligarchic rule. ‘James had never the slightest sympathy with the Levellers; as in religion he was satisfied with the elaborate organisation of the Presbytery, so in secular matters was he satisfied that a small group of men like Sir Arthur Heselrig should take upon them the governance of the nation’ (Part 2, Ch. 3). Jane Lane lingers long on the wealth and property that Heselrig has acquired: wealth is something that is proper when owned by the proper, improper when it is owned by the wrong people, wherein it becomes a symbol of corruption. It is also through James and his opportunity to observe the leaders of the government that Lane conjures the impressions with which she wishes to leave us: Cromwell the manic, who ‘would turn the solemn debate into a carouse’ who had wept for the King’s children and ‘was always liable to burst into tears in public’ (Part 2, Ch. 3), ‘his simple and sincere belief that he was right in whatsoever he said or did, and that any who opposed him were wicked or mistaken’ (Part 2, Ch. 3); James comes to distrust Cromwell as an irresponsible sort of man, on the one hand suppressing the petitions of the common soldiers, on the other encouraging those of the officers. Present when the Parliament is debating the dissolution of the army, James is there to see the Rump dissolved, and Cromwell,

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‘straddling apart from the disgraceful mêlée, verbally insulted each victim as he was hustled past’ (Part 2, Ch. 3). Sam Guffin meanwhile observes the changes from his position of domesticity; the censorship of the news sheets and their reduction to The Mercurius Politicus edited by Marchmont Needham; the new Parliament with its reign of the saints and the construction of a larger Council of State, the purging of the admiralty, the setting up of new justices, the clamp down on baiting and cock-fighting and the construction of the system of Ejectors to eject scandalous ministers and teachers; eventually also the creation of the Protectorate which alienates James from the Commonwealth. All of these are presented as somehow equally absurd, ‘hacking at the already defaced Constitution’ (Part 2, Ch. 3). There are other absurdities: Guffin receives a visit that demands he changes the signs on his inn to avoid idolatory. In Lane’s construction of the Commonwealth, the ordinary citizen is constantly policed for religious and rhetorical transgression; he is even prevented from reading Morning Prayers in his own home on a Sunday, all soldiers having been ordered to confiscate copies of the Book of Common Prayer they see. When they are shot at on the banks of the Thames by soldiers in a barge, young Simon declares for the King. By the end of book three it is clear that he is involved with the Sealed Knot; meanwhile Sarah is involved with first the Fifth Monarchists and then James Naylor. Thomas comes home from Scotland, a sergeant, more diligent for the cause than ever, while James becomes steadily disillusioned, continuing to believe the Long Parliament the only true one, and regarding the first Protectorate Parliament as a corrupt thing. Lane criticises both, and having dismissed the MP Haselrig earlier now has him as the voice of reason and accusation: ‘For Cromwell will have to sit in the House none but those who are his absolute slaves’ (Part 3, Ch. 1). Yet James rejoices when this Parliament is dismissed for he feels it a false parliament, the only true one for him is the Long Parliament. Perhaps most distasteful is the way both James and the authorial voice disdain ‘cits’ (City of London men). James is positioned as an enthusiast in an age of enthusiasts, and his disillusionment is sped forward when he realises that his father, and father’s friend, and the young woman he admires, all lack such enthusiasm, that for them, the absence of merry England and the rise in taxation is of greater concern than the nebulous liberties for which he fights. James sees them as interested only in the protection of their trade, all other liberties may be sacrificed but in seeing them as ‘simple’ and presenting

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them throughout as victims of the Parliament rather than as players in the Commonwealth, Lane patronises them. Lindsey Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009) covers the period from Charles I’s coronation through to the late 1650s, stopping shortly before the end of the Protectorate. It follows a number of characters of whom the main parliamentarian is Gideon Jukes, apprentice printer, who we meet first as a young boy, and Julianna Lovell, a Royalist woman with whom he will fall in love and eventually marry after her husband disappears. Jukes does not leave the army with the execution. On the contrary he seeks to join the Trained Bands when he is demobbed, and is rather supportive of the trial and the execution. Davis may be the only author in the collection who grasps why the army wanted Charles I to be tried: that justice be seen to be done, a formal and public accounting, not the usual quiet assassination. After the execution is over, Gideon Jukes returns to pick up his trade, and although his master is imprisoned for sedition and dies in jail, Jukes never loses faith with the Commonwealth or Protectorate, even while he may disagree with the direction it has taken, falls out with the Leveller leadership and comes to question Cromwell. Thus while he objects to the engagement in Ireland which he understands as crossing frontiers, he agrees with the invasion of Scotland, whose purpose is to repel Charles II. Gideon exists as a citizen within the Commonwealth. He falls in love with and marries Julianna Lovell, who is a beneficiary of the divorce and abandonment laws passed by the Commonwealth and constructs a middle-class marriage in which he runs his printing shop and she continues with her haberdashery, set up with cloth she collected in Colchester, and emulating her grandfather’s trade. One quite small symbol of this establishment as citizens of the new order is his and Julianna’s choice for a secular marriage without rings, their banns called in the market place and their vows taken in true Commonwealth form. For Gideon, despite the closely detailed and followed political arguments (both Lindsey and Bradshaw are wise in using printers as their points of view), the Commonwealth brings peace and a safe space to bring up a family, and thus to enter upon manhood. Finally, the most recent novel to deal intimately with this period is Miranda Malins’ The Puritan Princess (2020). This novel focuses resolutely on the life and machinations of the Protectorate court through the eyes of Cromwell’s youngest daughter, Frances. The most significant contribution the book makes to the fictional historiography is that

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it draws our attention to the degree to which the families of the leaders of the Commonwealth were absorbed back into the Restoration aristocracy, many of them to become stalwarts of Whig Loyal Opposition in the century to come.

Royalists in the 1650s: Wronged but Wromantic Almost all the novels concentrate on the efforts to suppress potential Royalist uprisings. The loss of the war was a social as well as military defeat for the Royalists. What emerges from their writings, and from the fiction, is a deep sense of a world turned upside down, a profound injustice. The Earl of Manchester, arguing for peace with Charles after the second Battle of Newbury (1644), declared, ‘The King need not care how oft he fights… If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be King still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates and our posterities be undone’. Yet in the event that had not been how it had turned out. The King had won once, had won many times, but if the war had proven anything it was that Divine Right was an airy nothing without Force. Yet this was not what Royalists and those who later wrote about them took away. For them, force usurped right. A classic statement can be found in Mrs Frank Cooper’s Hide and Seek in the voice of one of the characters, retired Royalist, Colonel Knollys: ‘As long as might was right, and this horrible spirit prevailed, every Royalist gentleman was in danger of his life’ (Ch. 4). This sense that Royalists were in danger in the new Commonwealth runs right through the fiction, even though there is relatively little evidence for it in the historical record. The result is a set of stories in which children go into hiding. In the classic story, The Children of the New Forest (1847), Marryatt proceeds from this premise that the Beverly children were in danger because of their inheritance and their family loyalty. The theme gets picked up over and over again: in Under the Storm by Charlotte M. Yonge, where Steadfast must hide his loyalty to the Church; or in Peart’s The Loyal Grenvilles (1958), in which Royalist children are protected by a Parliamentarian uncle. In reality, and with the exception of the three of the King’s children—James, Elizabeth and Henry—held by Parliament, the Parliamentary side showed little interest in the families of Royalists. For Edward Beverly in the New Forest, the Commonwealth offers a number of challenges. First is the fear that as relatives of senior Royalists

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they will be persecuted. The second fear however is the fear of loss of station as figured in manner and dress. In hiding Edward dresses as much like a local man as he can, but when the Intendant offers him work he agonises over the hat he will wear and what it will indicate (a reflection of the degree to which hats did become profession- and class-coded in nineteenth-century England). There is also the deep fear that Edward’s sisters will not be reared as ladies, and when an opportunity comes to correct that, it is seized eagerly. In Yonge’s Under the Storm, Steadfast Kenton’s world is full of threats, to his family, to his beliefs and to his promises. In this story the family is not initially physically in hiding: they are on their farm striving to keep it intact in the face of marauding soldiers. In some ways the book leans towards Parliament. Royalists loot or pay in scrip, while the Parliamentary army forbids looting: ‘Captain Venn,… never sanctioned plunder’ (Ch. 14). The novel focuses intensely on a belief that Steadfast Kenton is in real and physical danger because of his commitment to what Yonge frames as the traditional church, and in the end, Kenton does indeed die to save the Church plate and honour his promise. In this novel, the iconoclasm of the Puritans is posited as a very real threat not only to the Church and to artworks, but to individuals. In reality, the Commonwealth avoided vindictiveness: although exile was forced on some, such as the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Goring, and many other soldiers went into exile as mercenaries or semi-mercenaries (in the Flanders campaign of 1657–1659, while Cromwell’s Protectorate fought with Catholic France, the predominantly Irish Royalist-Army-inexile under Charles II fought for Catholic Spain as part of a long-term strategy of resistance: Barratt). But most Royalists retired to their estates and compounded with the government. Women were rarely targeted and as we saw in earlier chapters were considered acceptable negotiators for their husbands; nor did the new government force marriages as in Hope’s My Lady’s Bargain (1923). One issue regularly raised is that of compounding: Royalists whose estate had been sequestered as areas came under parliamentary control ‘compounded’ a single payment for their offences. It was intended to be punitive, reparative (to pay for the army that the King’s actions had forced Parliament to raise) and also controlling: it ensured that Royalists were too poor to raise local armies (Young 2018). Compounding was mostly undertaken locally through local commissioners—which almost certainly created resentment as many found themselves being assessed and judged

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by social inferiors—but it was not uncommon for compositions to be appealed in London (where the landowner was in exile this might be done by female relatives: the Duke of Newcastle’s daughters did this for him). One reason it became controversial is that faced with a shortage of money the Parliament repeatedly returned to this pot. Woolrych asserts that one very real issue during the Rump Parliament (1650–1653) was that ‘the successive acts for the sale of delinquents’ estates often contravened the spirit and sometimes the letter of the terms of surrender that military commanders had had negotiate with their Royalist opponents, and the wretchedly imperfect Act of Oblivion increased the officers’ suspicion of the Rumpers’ motives’ (1982, 519). The sense that the Rump was keener on this activity than actually governing was underlined in July 1653. Instead of focusing on constructing the basis for new elections and a successor constitution, they ‘spent day after day in selecting one by one the 678 unlucky Royalists whose estates were to be put up in their third Act of Sale. This in itself angered Army officers, for the victims included many who had surrendered on a promise that their estates would not be forfeit’ (Woolrych 1982, 524). After the army coup in 1653, many Royalists had their lands restored by a committee of officers. However, Phillips and Holliday both note that the general narrative of an impoverished-through-compounding Royalist gentry is problematic. There is relatively little evidence for example of the kind of situation that comes up in many texts, of land sold for compounding or taken by jealous neighbours. It is certainly not true that exile had the consequence of automatically denying someone their inheritance as in the Beattys’ Campion Towers (1965). Yet the following, from Elfrida Vipont’s Glorious Revolution novel Bed in Hell (1974), is not uncommon in the fiction. The anti-hero reflects, ‘My father, as a Catholic and a cavalier, had everything to fear and everything to lose, and by his flight he saved his life and his honour, which were indeed all that could be saved from the wreck of his fortunes. All his inheritance fell to strangers, and for the little he was able to regain at the Restoration—smouldering house and a waste of land and water—he paid a heavy price’ (Ch. 1). In Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883) we see this attitude writ clear. Although the book has much to say of the depredations of the Royalist armies, it is qualified: ‘Cavaliers, or rather the roughs of the towns calling themselves Cavaliers, brought much odium upon the royal cause by the ill treatment of harmless citizens, and by raids on inoffensive country people. Later on this conduct was to be reversed, and the Royalists were to suffer tenfold the outrages now

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put upon the Puritans’ (Ch. 3). In reality, while over a hundred castles were slighted (pulled down) in order to prevent the Royalists using them as garrisons, relatively few estates changed hands. Holiday argues that around 67% of sales of estates in Yorkshire in the 1650s ended up back in the hands of their original owners. Despite the propaganda only 3% ended up with parliamentary grantees. 8% went to local purchasers and only 10% to non-locals (Phillips 1997; Holliday 1970). But one of the things that run through both the contemporary texts and through later fiction, is the injustice of poverty when imposed on the wrong sort of people. Although Charlotte L. Young in her 2018 thesis records that ‘far from being a policy which exclusively targeted the gentry… sequestration did not discriminate by class. Juxtaposed with the names of earls, dukes, knights, and ladies were clerks, innkeepers, students, drapers, apothecaries, grocers, and yeomen. The estates of landed gentry were worth more, but irrespective of gender or status, if the committees received information that someone supported the King by word or deed, he or she could be sequestered’ (10), the popular narrative is of a process targeted at the upper classes. One reason for this, Young notes, is the degree to which this was a process that often moved money from the countryside into the city of London where money was owed for troops and munitions (50–51), or where it was used to support the maimed and injured in the city’s hospitals (34). Crude though this may sound, in most of these texts and particularly those of the nineteenth century, poverty is for the poor. Lindsay’s Sue Verney (1937) is very like Gone with the Wind in this approach: the family’s poverty and collapse and the titular character’s death after three stillbirths are all accusations against the Commonwealth. Royalists and the Royalist texts, as we have seen, regularly magnify the threats and hardships they expect to experience to match those that they might have visited upon their enemies. We can see this even from historians. Clive Holmes, writing in 2006, argues that the king’s supporters were treated savagely, proscribed, their estates confiscated, denied any prospect of pardon and heavily fined. While most Royalists were excluded from office by refusal to take the Oath, very little of the rest is true.

Resistance Although the Church of England was on the run, there is some evidence that rather than withering it may well have been gathering strength, precisely because—as Charlotte M. Yonge depicted—it had become a

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resistant Church. After the abolition of the episcopate in 1646, older members of the clergy seem to have hunkered down for the duration. Bishop Brian Duppa of Salisbury opted to survive ‘as the tortoise doth, by not going out of my shell’ while Bishop Henry King of Chichester devoted himself to poetry and Bishop William Juxon of London went hunting with his hounds (Doran and Durston 1991, 138). In the parishes, a total of around 28% of the clergy were purged. This leaves around twothirds to three-fifths of English livings unchallenged. Doran and Durston assume that this was because in the main these men had been ordained by Laud’s predecessor, the Calvinist George Abbot, ‘and they shared the firm attachment of the laity to the doctrines and liturgy of the traditional pre-Laudian Church’ (Doran and Durston, 156) Among these were men preserved in position because their pre-Laudian and Arminian leanings coincided with those of their parish. While new candidates for the ministry had to go before the Triers, a shortage of candidates and the relative toleration of the Commonwealth, ensured that prosecutions and disbarments were avoided. Bosher (1951) argues that the relatively mild measures against Anglican worship in the early 1650s encouraged a ‘widespread resumption of clerical ministrations’, citing Dr Peter Heylyn’s memoirs. Heylyn was clear the Book of Common Prayer was in use whenever ‘an ejected minister could find a handful of loyal clergymen’ (Bosher 1951, 111). In addition, many Royalist households employed Episcopalian chaplains, often as tutors and this alone may have intensified the Royalism of the Restoration generation, as in Elfrida Vipont’s Bed in Hell (1974), although in this case the fourth son, the protagonist, rejects what his elder brothers absorb. One way we can judge the persistence and perhaps rise of Laudianism among the population is in the persistence of Laudian practices in the parishes. There was a surge in marriages shortly prior to the passing of the Act Touching Marriages and the Registering Thereof in August 1653 which rendered marriage a secular act before the Justices of the Peace. Derek Hirst notes the rise of the catechism both because ministers became frustrated with the lack of engagement with sermons, and because of the shortage (made worse probably by the abolition of plural livings) of ministers (Hirst 1999, 338). In 1645, Parliament had passed the ordinance replacing the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory for the Public Worship of God. As had long been the case in Scotland, it replaced the patronage of

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godparents with the direct presentation by parent—a reflection of the preference of the nuclear family headed by the father, over the great chain of being, or the family of Christendom, headed by the King as representative of God. By 1658 Hirst can point to the resurgence of ‘parochial Anglicanism’: ‘Assize judges on two different circuits advised unhappy parishioners that they were not obliged to pay tithes to ministers who withheld sacraments’ (Hirst 1999, 338). Godparents too survived, almost certainly because they were a key part of familial and local alliance networks. Both Cambridge and Oxford began the war as Royalist. When Cambridge was ‘regulated’ in 1643, it led to the expulsion of 230 masters, fellows and chaplains and more and more than 400 scholars and exhibitioners. Yet at the same time, as Bosher records, there is ample evidence of a growth in Anglican intellectualism in which younger academics promoted a rebellious religious Royalism. Despite the imposed leadership—which some colleges resisted into the 1650s—the members of the universities were predominantly young, many training for the ministry or waiting for appointments. At Oxford Royalist students tended to congregate in certain colleges. Queens was the college with the largest number of sons of Royalists as its students, and it produced no Puritan divines. Only Oriel could match it for distinctive Royalism (Worden 2012, 182). Of course some Royalists took part in active resistance (Smith 2011). L. C. Cornforth’s titular Captain Jacobus (1896) turns spy and highwayman and our hero, Anthony Langford, threatened with the loss of his land, joins him. Although he refuses to turn highwayman (only preying on Parliamentarians of course) he is quickly cozened to act as messenger for Charles II for whom he professes loyalty. Meanwhile his rival Manning has turned spy for Parliament and tried to sell him to Parliament, his lady’s fortune to the King, and eventually hands in the Penruddock men to Parliament after their rather pathetic plot—which the King is shown to be too sensible to have supported—fails. Their death is portrayed as murder rather than a legal trial, Colonel Penruddock protesting that he cannot be a traitor for one cannot be a traitor to the Protectorate. But throughout this is presented as a romantic, Robin Hood resistance in which Jacobus/Penruddock takes from Parliamentarians to give to Royalists. Some resistance is of course even less constructive. Sir Nigel Fitzhead in Lane’s Sir Devil-May-Care (1937) ends up as a thief on the King’s Highway, one of the growing number of ex-cavaliers to render the roads

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unsafe from the Commonwealth through the Restoration. And then there are the stories of more active resistance, of those who actively plotted against the Commonwealth. There are a number of times in which we hear of a plot foiled, or a plot failed and often the foiling of the plot is a way of demonstrating the probity of a young hero. In Henty’s Friends Though Divided (1883), for example, Harry helps Charles II to escape, but while in exile in Hamburg he overhears a plot against Cromwell. Deciding this is dishonourable, he determines to intervene. His reasons are complex: ‘In battle he would have gladly slain him, but he was determined to save him from assassination. He felt the man to be a great Englishman… Most of all, he thought that his assassination would injure the Royalist cause… At Cromwell’s death, the chief power would fall into the hands of fanatics more dangerous and more violent than he. His murder would be used as a weapon for a wholesale persecution of the Royalists throughout the land, and would create such a prejudice against them that the inevitable reaction in favour of royalty would be retarded for years’ (Ch. 25). This is both a very modern understanding of the process of radicalism, but also perhaps a reflection on the effect of Charles I’s execution on popular sentiment. For all Jane Lane was a convinced Royalist, she does not actually seem to have been that enamoured of Cavaliers as people. In The Sealed Knot (1952) the basic premise is that Sir Richard Willis creates the Sealed Knot to raise money for an uprising, aided and abetted by his friend, the reckless and lower-class yeoman, Broderick. Willis is a romantic, who believes, ‘Why, when such numbers of loyal gentlemen throughout England yearn for a restoration, did they not rise for their King?’ [in 1655] (Part 1, Ch. 1). For him money is the answer. So he is very vulnerable when Morland ‘made Sir Richard see himself as a romantic dreamer’ (Part 1, Ch. 2). It doesn’t help that Hythe and Villiers see it as hopeless, or that others point to the use of foreign troops as alienating Royalist supporters. At the same time however, the characters continue to dismiss the very people who first defeated them: ‘In an age when the closest relation if noble was addressed as “my lord”, this yeoman accosted his betters by their surnames only’ (Part 1, Ch. 1) or Compton’s declaration that the people of London are ‘a parcel of mechanics. They will talk, my lord, but they will not act’ (Part 2, Ch. 2), which is a rather odd thing to say given the previous decade. Sick, and desperate to keep his mistress, Willis sells them all out, and ends up praying that Charles does not return.

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Church’s Pendruddock of the White Lambs (1902) is one of the texts that sees the Commonwealth as a needed scouring for Royalists. The book begins firmly pro-Royalist. Colonel Penruddock is a soldier serving the Duke of Newcastle in Holland, having followed him into exile, first to Antwerp and then onwards. Penruddock was one of Newcastle’s White Lambs and throughout this is held up as something special. We open in the poverty of the Duke of Newcastle’s exile and move on to the factual matter that Charles II endeavoured to have Cromwell assassinated. Our hero, Penruddock, is horrified by this and resolved to try to foil it, but in a way that will not rebound on Charles II for his loyalty to the man is absolute. In England he joins the conspirators and is accepted into the Guard. Penruddock succeeds in preventing the attack on Cromwell but is taken up as one of the conspirators. Only at the last minute is he pardoned and the book ends with a peculiarly tangled romance in which Penruddock’s Royalist bride turns out to be unfaithful and he ends up with his Parliamentarian love. Although the book ends firmly proCommonwealth, the book is far more about how someone can choose their allegiances. What is noticeable is the degree to which this is personalised, rather than systematic, so that Penruddock, who has fought against Cromwell can say ‘I cannot hate such a man. He is too big, too terrible to be hated’ (Ch. 3). It is one of a number of books from the early twentieth century that instead of bringing Parliamentarians back to the King, uses the experience of exile to bring Royalists in closer sympathy with Parliament by showing the Royalists in exile to be generally dishonourable and it does so by showing the great variety of opinion. As the book moves to America its democratic tones become stronger and at disembarkation: ‘there were the gentlemen, and the handicraftsmen, and the husbandmen, thinking to preserve their castes in the New World, yet all so soon to intermingle in the exercise of their talents and in building a government where men might rise above hereditary stations’ (Ch. 31). By the end, the Commonwealth has become the moral victor. Three novels focus entirely on the defeat of the Sealed Knot. In A Firework for Oliver (John Sanders, 1961), the first of a series about the James Bond figure Nicholas Pym, the search is on for a super-weapon, a riflebarrelled gun that uses a percussion detonator (invented in actuality in the 1740s and not produced until 1820). There are secret agents, doublecrosses and betrayals; Pym ends up in a Hungarian monastery. One of the monks is the inventor (who also came up with a steam-engine). Naturally the invention and inventor are lost. Pym has no interest in the

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religious aspects of the conflict: they are ‘so much froth’. ‘The issues were simple. Selfish, feudal arrogance combined with a ridiculous belief in the Divine Right of Kings, against the liberty of freeborn Englishmen’ (Ch. 1). Sanders talks about the way exiles abroad form small societies all of which know each other; they are fools, too interested in revenge to plan properly (Ch. 6). L. C. Tyler’s Cruel Necessity (2015) features a cosy village crime with national implications, as the dead body may or may not be a Royalist spy. John Grey is nothing like as sophisticated as Sanders’ Pym. He is a smart but naive young man manipulated by the women in his life, for while he is committed to the Commonwealth he becomes gradually aware that the Royalist spy coordinator in the village is his mother. To protect her, he turns the gaze to his cousin Aminta, who marries his rival Viscount Pole and goes into exile. In the sequel, A Masterpiece of Corruption (2016) he is in London when he is mistaken for someone else and drawn into acting as a spy for parliament within the Sealed Knot and its connections in Brussels. He turns out to have been stitched up by his cousin Aminta who had been sent to London to arrange for Cromwell’s doctor to poison him. Most recently, Pete Langman’s Killing Beauties (2020) is focused on Susan Hyde, sister of the Earl of Clarendon, and about whom we know little other than that she appears to have served as a letter drop for the Sealed Knot. Using the real-life women in Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents (2018) as inspiration, Langman constructs a story of a female secret society, offering its services to the King but ultimately loyal only to each other and masquerading as a lay sisterhood. For many the loss of the war brought devastation and exile. In Brambletye (Smith 1826) the father and son spend volume 2 in exile in the French Court, embroiled in local plotting and striving to survive. At the conclusion of The Children of the New Forest (Marryatt 1847) Edward joins Charles II’s abortive invasion from Scotland and is forced to flee to France. The end of Church’s With the King at Oxford (1886) sees the family dispossessed by local dignitaries who have taken the Parliamentarian side, and the protagonist—who has not fought but has remained in Oxford with the king—travels to Rotterdam. Perhaps the exile novel par excellence is Elizabeth Rundle Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868). Counterbalancing Olive’s diary from the heart of the Commonwealth, is Lettice’s experience in exile with her father in France. Lettice—repulsed by Roger’s part in Charles’ execution

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(he is one of the guards)—initially leaves the house of her friends and goes to stay with their aunt Dorothy who although a Parliamentarian cannot support the execution of the king. Where Olive remarks on the shock of the king’s death, Lettice takes us through the rituals of grief as constructed by the Royalists: the creation of shrines, the purchase of Eikon Basilke. From there she goes to stay with her father in Paris who is not entirely pleased to see her as she imposes on him a grief he does not truly feel when she sets a fast day on the anniversary of the King’s death. Already we can see the differences between the generations, of those who fought for the King because they supported the established order, in contrast to the younger generation for whom Charles I is emerging as an untouchable icon and martyr. This generational gap becomes one key aspect of Lettice’s narrative as she observes the growing corruption of ‘the cavalier party’; but the other side is the degree to which Lettice and her father are increasingly swayed not to support the new Republic but at least to admire it as it does what Charles I was never able to do: support the Huguenots and the other pressured Protestants of the European Catholic Kingdoms. By the end of her time in exile, while Lettice’s loyalties have not been shaken, her political (and as we saw in the previous chapter, religious) world has become distinctly more complex. Although none of the European powers was willing to aid Charles, they were all willing to accept his soldiers, and as the Royalist effort collapsed more and more cavaliers turned to opportunities in the French court. When Charles decided to join the Spanish side of the war in Flanders he pulled together several thousand exiles (many who had previously fought on the other side for the French under his brother, James Duke of York who was forced to abandon his own carefully constructed French alliances) to form the companies that fought (and lost to Parliamentarian troops) at the Battle of the Dunes outside Dunkirk (Barratt 2016). Very few authors detail this: a mercenary has lost something of his self. Thus when Sir Nigel Fitzhead ends Sir Devil-May-Care (1937) as a mercenary and then a highwayman the route from one to the other seems natural. Similarly the decision of Richard Grenville (in real life) to depart for the continent to serve as a mercenary is linked to his appalling behaviour on the battlefield and among civilians. A man who treats the people of England as if they are the civilians of the Thirty Years War clearly belongs there (Du Maurier, The King’s General, 1944). One of the most vivid descriptions of an exile is in Davis’ Rebels and Traitors (2009). Again, the career of Orlando Lovell abroad is connected

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to his career at home: deliberately choosing to marry a woman of small dowry, with no parents or guardians to protect her, he uses her as his shield of respectability. Although genuinely a Royalist he is also an opportunist. At the close of the war he disappears into the underground of Royalists in exile, to crop up at every rebellion and conspiracy for the next decade. After Worcester he goes with Prince Maurice into exile with the Royalist ships of the English navy and serves for several years as a pirate. When Prince Maurice’s ship is sunk, Orlando is presumed drowned and his abandoned wife remarries, only for him to resurface as ‘Boyer’ in a series of plots to blow up Parliament or assassinate Cromwell. By the end it is unclear that Lovell has any loyalty to anyone but himself, and he dies trying to kidnap his wife’s baby daughter as a hostage for the son he wants for his own purposes. One of Davis’ achievements in this book is to demonstrate the degree to which Lovell’s attitudes to his family—they are his to use how he feels, to have close when wanted, and to ignore when not, but always to be unquestioningly obedient—parallels that of Charles I’s attitude to the country. It is fitting that in trying to take what he wants, he is killed by his own ‘subject’, his youngest son. One last area of resistance worth mentioning, because it causes one of our authors to ‘change sides’, is the theatre. Nine days after Charles raised his standard in Nottingham, Parliament decreed that public sports and play going should be suspended for the duration, as a kind of spiritual fast. However, as Janet Clare has noted (2008, 458) there was no actual closure of the theatres and it was framed as a temporary expedient. Following the end of the First Civil War in 1646, plays began to be staged in private theatres such as the Salisbury and the Cockpit. It is this that prompted the 1648 Act ‘for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stage-plays and interludes’ (Clare, 459). Even so however, Clare suggests that the closure of theatres, in the form of raids, may have been carried out more zealously by soldiers than by the city leaders. ‘The most comprehensive raid on record is that which took place simultaneously at three theatres on 1 January 1649; the date suggests that the theatres were playing as part of traditional seasonal festivities’ (Clare, 461). Although in 1655 several of the private theatres were dismantled, theatre passed into private houses, both Parliamentarian and Royalist, but became to an extent a focus of Royalist identity. This hostility to the theatre has passed into tradition, and been rendered absolute. In Barbara Willard’s The Grove of Green Holly (1967) the Grandfather is in hiding, in fear of persecution

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because he is an actor; while in The Field of Forty Footsteps (1977) Geoffrey Trease comprehensively switches sides to tell the story of a boy who joins his actor grandfather to revive theatre in the Restoration.

Parliamentarians For Parliamentarian authors, the trajectory is one of disillusionment. The first novel to draw our attention to the experience of the Commonwealth among those who supported it was Elizabeth Rundle Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea: A Story of the Commonwealth and Restoration (1868) (the sequel to The Draytons and the Davenants, 1867). I have already used this novel extensively to explore the experience of exile and the growing chasm opening up between generations among the Royalists. In its consideration of the citizen supporters of the Commonwealth, Charles focuses on the different trajectories that Parliamentarians took. Her narrator for this side of the tale is Olive, by this time married to a Huguenot doctor. Where Lettice’s experience is all of the intimate, Olive’s recollections are far more a historical narrative as she seeks to capture the mood when Charles I died, and the response to the changing policies of the Commonwealth. Her narrative is channelled through concern for her brother Roger, for his trooper, Job, through her aunt Dorothy, a stern Presbyterian and through the Quaker maidservant Annis. Chapter 1 spends some time on the development of what Sean Kelsey (1997) identifies as the new rituals and accoutrements of the republic. In Chapter 3 Olive details the rebellions and mutinies of the army and the degree to which Roger as a man loyal to both his troops and the republic is torn, then in Chapter 5 sends Roger and Job to Ireland. This chapter is perhaps the most conventional for although there is some glimpse of the actions of the army, for the most part because we see through the honourable Roger’s eyes, and for him, the war in Ireland is primarily a war against Royalists. He notes that the towns that surrender are not slighted, but he is less eager to talk about the others. By Chapter 8 Olive is beginning to note the cracks opening up. Her Aunt Dorothy, a fierce Presbyterian, is horrified by the execution of the King. She retreats to Kidderminster to live with Mr Baxter, a noted theologian who seeks to negotiate a theological path to restoration and to a new kind of unified church. Roger is sent to Scotland in Chapter 12 and there he discovers yet more religious dissension and feels, for the first

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time that, that he is there as the extended arm of tyranny. The Commonwealth’s clamp down on dissent leads to the imprisonment of the young Quaker Annis Nye, and in securing her release to act as a nursemaid for Olive, her husband Anthony aligns himself with the Independents and the radicals. Aunt Dorothy is horrified and much of the conflict across and in the household through the rest of the book will be Dorothy’s attitude to Annis. But the house becomes ever more ecumenical and Roger and Anthony, increasingly disillusioned by religious argument turn instead to science, attending lectures at Gresham College, engaging in the ferment of scientific idea that became a hallmark of the 1650s and 1660s. The death of Ireton is presented by Olive as a precursor to another funeral, the death of the Commonwealth. In Chapter 13 Roger finally distances himself from his loyalty to Cromwell and the household mourns his investiture as Lord Protector. Bernard Marshall’s The Torch Bearers (1923) is fiercely Parliamentarian, pro-Leveller, against the execution of the King, and anti-Cromwell. Myles Delaroche has had a good war. Though injured in 1644 he is there to serve at Naseby, rises from Lieutenant to Major and achieves accolades from Manchester and Fairfax. But in defending the house of his friend when he is taken prisoner (Ch. 16), he earns the enmity of Cromwell, who arrests him, convinced he is a spy or secret Royalist. When he finds his friend Arthur Hinsdale dead at Naseby, he agrees to bury him using the Prayer Book at the wishes of Hinsdale’s man-servant; caught again by Cromwell, he is reprimanded. When the war ends, Delaroche is in the peculiar position of being a Rainsborough radical, fully in support of universal manhood suffrage but yet an opponent of the King’s execution. He is an independent, yet dislikes Cromwell who is portrayed as arrogant, unthinking and careerist (the self-denying ordinance is presented as convenient for ‘two or three of those who outranked him were removed from his path’, Ch. 20). When the King is executed, Myles is ‘aghast’, it is ‘madness and a crime at once’ (Ch. 21). He rides to London to prevent it. He remains in London and finds that his uncle and cousin are under arrest as malignant. In this version the Commonwealth is vindictive, its early days spent sending out warrants all over the Kingdom. The lists are posted on London Bridge. Fearing for his Uncle’s life, he approaches Cromwell. But this is not the forgiving and generous Cromwell whom we have, ironically, seen in the Royalist texts. This is a man who sees all opposition as ‘enemies of the Commonwealth, whether with carnal

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arms in their hands or with faltering and double dealing in their minds and hearts’ (Ch. 22). This Cromwell regards Myles’ concern for his kin as ‘another reason your allegiance has been somewhat divided’ (Ch. 22) and will not even agree to them going into exile ‘making a court for the young Stuart’ (Ch. 22). Myles leaves London, convinced that Cromwell will have his name on a list very soon. Eventually Myles will leave Grimsby, taking with him the title to his brother’s land in New England in exchange for the work he has done on the entailed estate.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Barratt, John. Better Begging Than Fighting; the Royalist Army in Exile in the War Against Cromwell 1656–1660. Warwick, Warwickshire: Helion, 2016. Print. Bosher, Robert S. The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649–1662. London: Dacre Press, 1951. Print. Doran, Susan, and Christopher Durston. Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1529–1689. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Durston, Christopher. Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Print. Clare, Janet. “Theatre and Commonwealth.” The Cambridge History of British Theatre. Volume 1, Origins to 1660. Eds. Milling, Jane and Peter Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 458–76. Print. Healey, Jonathan. The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730. People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2014. Print. Hindle, Steve. “Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647– 50.” The Economic History Review 61.1 (2008): 64–98. Print. Hirst, Derek. England in Conflict, 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth. London: Edward Arnold, 1999. Print. Holliday, P. G. “Land Sales and Repurchases in Yorkshire After the Civil Wars, 1650–1670.” Northern History 5 (1970): 67–92. Print. Kelsey, Sean. Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Print. ———. “Unkingship.” A Companion to Stuart Britain. Ed. Coward, Barry. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 331–49. Print. Marryat, Captain Frederick. The Children of the New Forest. London: H. Hurst, 1847. Print.

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Phillips, C. B. “The Royalist North: The Cumberland and Westmoreland Gentry, 1642–60.” The English Civil War: Local Aspects. Ed. Richardson, R. C. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997. 238–59. Print. Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. London: Verso, 2016. Print. Reid, Stuart. Crown, Covenant and Cromwell: The Civil Wars in Scotland, 1639– 1651. London: Frontline Books, 2012. Print. Rowles, Robin. The Civil War in London: Voices from the City. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword History, 2018. Print. Smith, David L. “The Struggle for New Constitutional and Institutional Forms.” Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s. Ed. Morrill, J. S. London: Collins and Brown, 1992. 15–34. Print. ———. The Stuart Parliaments. Oxford: Hodder Education, 1999. Print. Smith, Geoffrey. Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. Print. Wedgwood, C. V. The King’s Peace, 1637 –1641. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Print. Woolrych, Austin. Commonwealth to Protectorate. New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print. Worden, Blair. God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Young, Charlotte. ‘The Gentry are Sequestred All’ : A Study of English Civil War Sequestration. PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2018.

CHAPTER 11

The Restoration

I went out to Charing cross, to see Maj.-Gen. Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered—which was done there—he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. —Samuel Pepys, 13 October 1660

In 1657 Cromwell was offered the throne, but refused. He died in 1658, and was succeeded as Lord Protector by his oldest surviving son Richard—and it is notable that the army made no attempt to put the younger and more military son Henry in his place. In May 1659 Richard abdicated. General George Monck, stationed in Scotland, had originally been a servant of the King. In 1644 he had been captured and spent two years in the Tower. He was released to be sent to Ireland. When he was sent to Scotland, he lost many of his soldiers who defected to the Royalist side, but he himself fought alongside Cromwell at Dunbar. In 1654 he was sent to Scotland as governor, and here he seems to have secured his own internal power, purging his troops of ‘enthusiasts’ or radicals. Monck rejected an overture from Charles II in 1657 and contemplated supporting George Booth’s failed rebellion in 1659. He chose not to join Charles Fleetwood and John Lambert when they declared against the restored Long Parliament—their armies collapsed due to lack of pay—and he was offered the commission of commander-in-chief of the

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Parliamentary forces on 24 November 1659. He came to London on 3 February, and although he urged submission to Parliament he refused to take an oath abjuring the House of Stuart. In February he readmitted the Presbyterians who had been excluded from Parliament in Pride’s Purge and convinced them to dissolve Parliament and call an election. It was this new Parliament, the Convention Parliament, which despite exclusions was dominated by returned Royalists, that decided to restore the monarchy and offer the crown to Charles II (Reese 2008, 141–144). Monck himself took a seat as MP for both Devon and Cambridge University in the new Convention Parliament. It was then Monck himself who accepted Charles II’s Declaration of Breda, which offered a general pardon for all but the Regicides, the retention by current owners of property purchased in the previous twenty years, religious toleration, pay arrears to the army and the recommission of the army under the crown. Very little of this happened—the New Model was disbanded although Monck’s own regiment was renamed the Coldstream Guards (Reese 2008, 105–146); property became a source of contention, as we shall see in the fiction; and Charles’ promises of religious freedom rang hollow to English Quakers and Scottish Covenanters. Twelve of the regicides were condemned to death, along with the ten judges on the panel who did not sign the death warrant, and John Cooke who directed the prosecution (Robertson 2006). Cromwell, Ireton, Pride and Bradshaw were all posthumously attainted for high treason and the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were exhumed, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Monck organised the Convention Parliament which met on 25 April 1660. On 8 May it proclaimed Charles II king from 30 January 1649. It was a very real attempt to erase the previous decade. Charles landed at Dover on 25 May and entered London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday. A new Parliament was called, which was pro-Royalist, and full of young men. This ‘Cavalier Parliament’ endured for seventeen years, not dissolved until 1679. By the Act of Oblivion, August 1660, indemnity was given to all crimes and misdemeanours committed since 1637 (thus including the Irish and Scottish rebellions). ‘The civil wars were legally declared never to have existed…[at the same time as 29 May was decreed to be a celebration of the Restoration each year] …The English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s was simultaneously forgotten and remembered’ (Atherton 2019, 27).

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The City in Lane’s London Goes to Heaven (1947) boils and seethes with discontent and rebellion in the last years of Cromwell’s Protectorate. But when Cromwell dies Simon, now a Royalist, must twiddle his thumbs for there is no rising, only a loss of direction. The Rump is restored and begins its own purge of the army, then this too is ousted. James thrills at the thought that the Long Parliament is to be restored, only to discover that his younger brother sees it as a bringer of tyranny, that ‘laid the nation in blood’ (Part 4, Ch. 3). Simon is the voice of the future. Yet all the brothers are able to configure around Monck. Thomas sees Monck as the new beloved of Jehovah, James that he will restore Parliament, and Simon of course that he will restore the king. The last pages see Thomas and James disillusioned. Finally both witness the crowd acclaim the restoration of the King. At the conclusion, Thomas reorients his biblical quotes to enable him to think of Charles II as David and remain in the army, while James finds peace and contentment as a tavern keeper, his abdication from politics framed as ‘he had become a man’ (Part 4, Ch. 4). Sam Guffin has his sign repainted and sets up to watch the processions, with the City and the Liverymen accompanying the King reassuring him that all is now well with the world. That the Restoration was a carefully managed coup is rarely reflected in the fiction. Instead, the end of the Commonwealth is almost without exception presented as being received with widespread relief even though in many novels there is an afterword in which the hero turns against the Stuart monarchy once again. There are reports of an upswing of popular settlement in which the King was welcomed home, Maypoles were erected and ‘merry’ England was restored under a Merry Monarch. The idea that the Restoration is natural, and the decade before is an interregnum is constructed in many texts. At the end of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Simon, Simon and Amias reflect on the country. Simon began, and broke off to get his argument straight in his own mind. ‘You’re a surgeon, leastwise you will be soon. You know how you deal with a man who’s sick; you knock off all the things he likes doing, and make him eat plain food, and bleed him and give him black draughts; and maybe he doesn’t like you while the treatment lasts, But he’s all the better for it afterwards’. Aye, but is there going to be an “Afterwards”? Amias countered. Surely. This isn’t—natural, somehow, not for England. One day we shall have a King again. (Ch. 21)

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However, as the Glorious Revolution itself demonstrated, things were not as ‘restored’ as this narrative suggests. Edward Vallance and Edward Legon have both challenged these narratives with their studies of sedition (2019), and Ian Atherton and Edward Vallance in their studies of local memorials of local conflicts (2019). Jean Plaidy captures this. Her Charles is cynical: ‘[he] stroked his lined face and remarked with a slightly cynical smile that it must have been his own fault he had not returned before, since every man and woman he met now assured him with tears and protestations of loyalty that they had always wished for the King’s restoration’ (The Wandering Prince, 1956, Ch, 7). What there is no sense of is the reality that many people had assumed the Protectorate would continue. Charles in On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) is interested in why the Restoration becomes so inevitable. Like later historians, her analysis is that the forces of the Protectorate, right down to the populace, were divided in their desires. Olive’s daughter, observing the conflicted sadness around the death of Cromwell, notes that in her family no one used the title of Protector, and that ‘we grew up with a great tenderness for the Royalist side’ (Ch. 17). There was a failure of Parliament to seize the narrative: ‘In all the fairy tales and romance and poems we knew, there was no such prosaical title as Lord Protector’ and somehow ‘the Bible history itself became much more interesting after the judges were changed into kings’ (Ch. 17). Yet when Cromwell dies, Olive records how hard it was to replace him, recording the eulogies from such as Philip Henry (a tepid Royalist diarist, and later apologist for the Parliamentarian cause) and Lucy Hutchinson, and that at the end of a year, ‘the whole nation, distracted to madness from end to end… threw itself at the feet of Charles the Second, in a frenzy of loyalty, without conditions, simply entreating, like a child wearied with its own wilfulness…’ (Ch. 18): an idea which has entered historiographical mythology. Lettice, the royalist, is delighted to return and sees only the huzzahs and the ‘delirium of delight’ (Ch. 20) and the old men who ‘thanked God they saw this day before they died’. But it is not all glorious. The description she gives of the death of the Regicides, the ‘legal butchery’ and the constant rebellions of Protestants, makes it clear that the Restoration is far from the joyous time often described. And even within her family there is division. A generation gap has opened up. Her father mourns for the old king and struggles to celebrate the new; her younger brother Walter has followed Charles II to Bruges and into dissipation; her elder brother has followed the line of rigid royalism and resentment even of the Draytons

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who have saved his property and Lettice comes to dislike the sheer ungenerosity of the Restoration, the pursuit of the regicides and the apparent cynicism which she sees her eldest brother mirroring in which there is nothing to believe in (Ch. 22). Olive, Anthony and Roger become ever more hostile as they see the growing persecutions of first the Quakers, and then the Conventicle Act, which in forbidding house churches brings into its orbit their passionately Royalist but also passionately Presbyterian Aunt Dorothy (Ch. 24). Eventually they chose to migrate to the New World. For them, the Glorious Revolution brings a sense of vindication and completion (Ch. 28). Mrs. Frank Cooper’s Hide and Seek (1881) is not untypical in disparaging the Restoration settlement. ‘Some [Royalists], of course, lived to see the Restoration, and a few of these were repaid for what they had given and suffered. But there were the exception. Neglect and ingratitude were all that most of the gentry of England received from the worthless son, for their long and faithful services to the father’ (Ch. 1). Although many Royalists were able to reclaim lost land, many others were not. At the end of The Children of the New Forest, Edward resigns himself to the idea that he is better off purchasing his lands than waiting for Charles II to make restitution, and when they are offered back to him via marriage to the Intendant’s daughter, it is in one of those familial allegories in which the unification of family and property mirror the unification of the country. Three books focus on the immediate aftermath of the Restoration: Percy Westerman’s A Lad of Grit (1909), Geoffrey Trease’s The Grey Adventurer (1942) and Robert Neill’s Rebel Heiress (1954). Westerman is pro-Royalist (Under Fire in Spain, his 1937 novel, is pro-Franco). For Westerman’s hero, the Restoration is a time of delight and opportunity. Aubrey has been disinherited by the consequences of the war and the Restoration brings no direct relief. But it does allow him to take revenge on his enemy (one Increase Joyce) who attacks him on the news of the Restoration and kills his father. The novel sees Aubrey go to sea and enjoy many adventures, but running through it is his search for Joyce, for vengeance and for the justification that comes from proving that one’s enemies are immoral. Aubrey has inherited only a small locked box which Joyce steals: when he finally kills Joyce and retrieves the box it reveals a map, and the location of a chest which contains some plate ‘such as had not been melted down for the use of His Late Majesty King Charles, the martyr’ and below it the

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deeds and evidence that secure Aubrey’s claim on his family lands, essential in a world in which lawyers were dealing with the many competing claims that dogged the Restoration. All is happily restored. When Charles took the throne, one of the ways in which he dealt with restoration and reparation was to divide the matter between those estates bought directly from Royalists—to be left in new hands—and those which because they had first been confiscated, would be returned to their original owners as stolen goods without recompense to their new owners. For Percy Westerman that was a restoration of the natural order. Geoffrey Trease, writing in 1942, is not so sure. The first of his Civil War novels, The Grey Adventurer, opens as Dick Caldwell and his mother are displaced from their home by the returning Cavalier family—the house was prize in warfare, and is therefore forfeit (Ch. 2). When several years later Dick loses his position with a book-dealer during the Great Fire, he signs on to a ship for Carolina as an indentured servant, only to find that he has signed an agreement to serve his old enemy—the younger son of the cavalier family—for seven years. Where Aubrey’s adventures continually reinforce the social order Dick’s are an attempt to evade and eventually challenge it. On board ship as a prisoner awaiting deportation to the colonies is his old school-teacher Dr. Pharaoh who had been expelled for radical teaching methods and refusal of the act of uniformity (we meet him again in Silver Guard, 1948). The two of them organise a prisoner rising which fails. As they are about to be hanged the ship runs aground and all flee; the sailors head off, stranding the passengers, who are organised by the Doctor. The Doctor and Dick head in land to find a place to settle, meet the locals and make a treaty. But when they go back to the ship the order is changing and the settlers ignore the plea for common work and property and elect the cavalier Oswald Ferrers their leader. Within months they are in conflict with the Indians. Eventually Oswald Ferrers dies and the Doctor and Dick make a new treaty based on a different order. There are speeches and references to radical writers intended to intrigue a child reader and which whether deliberately or not on Trease’s part, seek to preserve the Good Old Cause in the minds of future generations, although interestingly that phrase, which was to be so ubiquitous in Whiggish rhetoric, is never used in any of the fiction (Vallance 2019, 13). Dick and Dr. Pharaoh’s hopes for the colony in Carolina are unabashedly Puritan. Dick suggests to his Royalist wife, ‘Suppose we

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don’t imitate Virginians… and suppose we build up a God-fearing, decent colony like Massachusetts’ (Ch. 9). He becomes a representative of what Legon has identified as a second-generation enamoured of the opposition and resistance of their ancestors (Ch. 18). Robert Neill’s Rebel Heiress is more neutral. Ostensibly Royalist, it follows two friends, Sir Giles Orton, very much the typical cavalier, who will discover that, because his father sold the estate to support the King and to pay fines, he will have no restitution, and Richard Carey, who steps into a well-ordered estate vacated by the daughters of a man who was awarded it for loyalty to Parliament. However, Richard falls in love with the dispossessed elder daughter and in doing so is reconciled to the Puritan rector who all know will eventually be faced by a requirement he cannot accept. Much of the novel is devoted to Richard discovering the complexities of Puritanism and a dislike of the encroaching and insistent elaborations of the new Restoration Church. In contrast Sir Giles is all resentment, becomes subject to suspicions that he may be engaging in highway robbery, and in the end secures his own through a rather complex set of tricks in which he robs the younger sister who owns it, then woos her and finally weds her with both knowing full well he has stolen her money. Sir Giles’ sense of rightfulness is preserved but we leave the novel with very little sympathy for him, and far more for the reconciliation represented by Richard and Barbara. A side note in this novel is that the apparently loyal inn, the Royal Oak, will turn out to be a hotbed of thieves: the irony is one must presume, deliberate and indicative of the sense that Charles II’s restoration is but a shallow and unreliable thing. In the Victorian novels narrative support for Charles I does not necessarily translate to Charles II. Lettice in Charles’ On Both Sides of the Sea (1868) is given the voice of many Victorians who were not enamoured when despite her joy at the restoration she still finds herself musing, ‘this king, I think, is scarce like to be better’ (Ch. 20), and her reaction to the deaths of the regicides and the new reign leads her to accept Roger’s plan for migrating to the new world. Mrs. Frank Cooper, in Hide and Seek: A Story of the New Forest in 1647 , is even more resentful. Of the Royalists she declares, ‘Some, of course, lived to see the Restoration, and a few of these were repaid for what they had given and suffered. But these were the exception. Neglect and ingratitude were all that most of the gentry of England received from the worthless son, for their long and faithful services to the father’ (Ch. 1). Reverend Church’s protagonist (With the

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King at Oxford, 1886) plans to return from Rotterdam with the Restoration but notes that Charles II is lacking in his father’s best virtues, and that he does not see that England will gain from his return. We can see doubt even in otherwise strongly Royalist novels. In Smith’s Brambletye (1826), for example the young hero returning from exile finds that he is no longer an enthusiast for the absolute monarchy for which he once fought. Although he could honour the bravery of many cavaliers, ‘He could not do homage to that unreasoning, abject, dog-like fidelity which levels man to the brute, by making him crouch to the earth and lick the feet of his master, and only increase his crawling submission as his oppressor becomes more cruel and tyrannical’ (Vol. 3, Ch. 21). Charles II (and later James), in some ways, became a better argument for the Commonwealth than for the Restoration. Penruddock, in Penruddock of the White Lambs (1902) dislikes Charles II immensely: his ‘reign which, for indecency and uncleanness, for the mean and cruel revenges which it wreaked on the living and the dead, for its ingratitude to all heaven and earth, has become the basest record in the history of the world’ (Ch. 29). He declares ‘Yes, I fought for the old institutions, as did thousands of cavaliers. … Often we do not know the meaning of the conflict until it is all over. All men now know that Cromwell’s triumph destroyed feudalism and enlarged the boundaries of human liberty everywhere’ (Ch. 29). The Victorians found Charles II’s court objectionable, and saw the Restoration, however welcome as a restoration of order, a blockage on the road to the Whig emergence of democracy which the 1688 installation of William and Mary would represent.

The Glorious Revolution When a historian, or a fiction writer decides that the Wars of the Three Kingdoms are over, is as informative of their understanding of the wars as any other stated opinion. The use of the term interregnum for example, tends to a view of the wars which see them as self-contained, an interruption in the status quo, an unfortunate mistake. For these writers the war ends with the Restoration. But for others two other dates lend themselves to a sense of an argument completed: 1688 and 1745. The 1745, and the Battle of Culloden, is out of the reach of this book (see Davidson 2003; Lenman 1986 for a good account of the assimilation of Scotland, and the construction of the Jacobite cause, respectively). The last battle of Charles Edward Stuart saw a united British army of

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English Protestants, Scottish Lowlanders and Highlanders, wipe out the Jacobite army consisting of largely Scottish Catholics and Episcopalians. Many novels have been set in this period or shortly after it, including John Buchan’s Midwinter (1923), Naomi Aitchison’s The Bull Calves (1947), and Diana Gabaldon’s Dragonfly in Amber (1992), but the best known novel of its aftermath is probably Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) and the best known fictional character is Jamie McCrimmon (played by Frazer Hines in the BBC science fiction series, Dr Who, from 1966 to 1969). The Battle of Culloden is rarely talked about in terms of wider political theory, but almost always in terms of the direct right of succession, or the romance of the lost King. It is the revolution (or coup) of 1688 that functions to settle some of the key issues of the wars: the primacy of parliament is settled but the Church of England succeeds in maintaining an established Church with a lock hold on the universities and some of the professions, that will last into the 1830s. It is, as Colin Brooks has said, a ‘check-point where English, even British liberties were confirmed’ (Brooks 2009, 437). James II came to the throne in 1685. He was not unpopular—he had been in the forefront of the battle to save London in 1666 and had been a reasonably successful commander of the Royal Navy. However in 1669 he converted to Catholicism, and although the Exclusion crisis of the 1670s—a long-running series of debates and complaints—came to nothing, in part that was because James had two Protestant heirs, his daughters Mary and Anne. When James’ succession was challenged by Charles II’s illegitimate son, Monmouth, the rebellion was easily crushed, but the aftermath of the Bloody Assizes and the savage punishments of Judge Jeffreys (depicted in Jane Lane’s pro-James The Crown for a Lie, 1962), did little to settle the country. Neither did his attempt to promote civic equality for Catholics (even though dissenters would also have benefited). When he issued a Declaration of Indulgence and required clergy to read it from the pulpit, Anglican clergy rebelled. When in June 1688 his second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, the fear of a Catholic succession triggered a coup. A group of Protestant nobles appealed to William of Orange, husband of Mary, to intervene (which supported William’s own desire to prevent an Anglo-French alliance). In November William landed in Devon and the army and navy quickly joined him. James fled abroad— dropping the Great Seal in the Thames—and in February 1689 William and Mary were crowned jointly. In what felt like a repeat of his father’s

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wars, James assembled an army of Irish and French, and lost to William at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690. That England would be the dominant kingdom in the crown was now assured. The coup was orchestrated by people for whom the horrors of the Civil Wars were in living memory. While the term ‘bloodless revolution’ was an exaggeration, and untrue of Scotland and Ireland, the consensus that it was in part a reflection on the experiences of the Civil War and of Monmouth’s rebellion. Although forced to cede the crown entire to William III, Parliament succeeded in embedding the principle that the powers of the Crown were fundamentally tied to the will of Parliament; and that crucially the succession to the crown (even if coerced) was Parliament’s choice also (exercised with the Hanoverian succession in 1714 and the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936). In these terms it was an end point. Two of the authors in this collection also clearly felt the same way: their respective novels are clearly presented as conclusions to the Civil War, but for one it feels disastrous, the loss of true sovereignty and ‘natural’ law. For the other it means precisely the same, but this is to be celebrated for it is human beings taking their future into their own hands. Jane Lane’s ultra-Royalist England for Sale was published in 1942. For Lane, the events of 1688 are the result of a vile conspiracy and a failure of the system of divine hierarchy. England for Sale quite visibly arises from the fear and anticipation of social upheaval that had marked the end of the Great War, the revolutions of the interwar period and the threats of deeper social changes that marked the war conditions of the Second World War. The opening of England for Sale is strongly reminiscent of the opening of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It conjures an older world in which squires trace back their heritage to before the Conquest and in which holding to the old ways will at last undo them. The Montagues are a respectable gentry family, who still maintain old feudal traditions: the servants eat in the hall, there are no enclosures, the manor is the centre of village life. The Montagues are Catholics and as such increasingly side-lined from even local politics. For them the ascension of James II however brings hope. The older son is found a place in the mostly Catholic Fourth Division of the Life Guards, while the younger and unloved son Michael—a budding philosopher who is writing a treatise on kingship—is found a place as a Gentleman Pensioner. Much of the book is dedicated to Michael’s distaste at the airs and pretensions of his colleagues at court.

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‘From their conversation, it appeared that they regarded their country estates as mere refuges in time of trouble and at all other times as mere investments… there was none of that interest in one’s own household, and protection of it, which was an essential part of the old order’ (Part 1, Ch. 3). Thus Michael struggles at court. He cannot accept the corruption and bribery to which his older brother attempts to introduce him (Part 1, Ch. 1). His brother is borrowing heavily, and we see how bad things are, because he thanks Cromwell for bringing back the Jews to act as bankers (Part 1, Ch. 1). Michael’s response to the ways of the world is reflected in his treatise on monarchy. Interestingly, Michael makes not a religious argument for monarchy but one rooted in natural history. Throughout the book there is a constant tension between the belief in God inspired Divine Right, and Natural Order and Michael’s attempt to reconcile them. In keeping with the monosemy Jerome de Groot identified as characteristic of Royalist writing, and the clear structures of hierarchy we have seen in these fictions, Lane is careful to provide Michael with a single mentor, a single point of explanation of the world. Sir Noel—the Lieutenant of the Pensioners—is a committed Royalist, but one for whom the Restoration was a false flag; the process of Restoration undermined the definition of kingship by accepting an invitation rather than seizing and conquering. Sir Noel is politically alert and very likeable and he uses Michael’s philosophical thoughts to breed bitterness and draw him to the side of the conspiracy to protect the king. He convinces Michael that William of Orange is plotting to displace the King, and notes that ‘when Orange comes, if he comes, he will not come in the guise of an invader. Oh dear me, no! He will come as a liberator, to free the nation from arbitrary power and from the menace of Popery’ (Part 2, Ch. 1). However, James II betrays Michael’s belief in the Divine Right by refusing to stand his ground. Lane gives Michael these thoughts: ‘If he stayed, we could make a fight for it at least; if he goes, many among the loyal ones will lose heart and throw in their hand. … But he beat down his emotion; he was acting under orders, he was a puppet and must obey the master’s string’ (Part 2, Ch. 5), and he begs the King not to go. ‘For the love of God, do not abandon us to the mercy of greedy traitors. With all respect I say to you that, though so many of your subjects have failed in their duty towards Your Majesty, your duty to your people remains. Theirs is to obey and serve you, yours is to protect them and their liberties’ (Part 2, Ch. 6). Michael, like other Tories, is caught unable to

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disentangle ‘their unwillingness to support the tenor of his rule from their recognition of James as their lawful monarch’ (Brooks 2009, 444). The King goes, and Sir Noel goes, with the parting shot that ‘I do believe that the people of England have common sense at bottom; I do believe that monarchy is the best form of government’ (Part 2, Ch. 6). The Parliamentarians have won, and all is corruption and ruin. The book is peculiar for its definitions of monarchy and defence of a particular king become entangled. Britain (or England in this book) will be no less a monarchy with William on the throne. But Michael has not only been obsessed with the nature of monarchy but with the line of true kingship. For him it was the Lancastrian ‘usurpation’ that truly undermined the monarchy. Michael and Jane Lane are thus focused squarely on the natural right of hereditary kingship, one which when disrupted undermines kingship itself. On the other side of the argument is Geoffrey Trease’s Trumpets in the West (1947), written while serving as an education officer in India. In the Afterword he notes that the only history book he had available was Macaulay, and this is a very Whiggish approach to the events of 1688. This James II stands in the way of progress. The trajectory of the book however is also almost the direct opposite of Jane Lane’s. In Lane’s England for Sale, leaving home was, for Michael, an entry into corruption. All that is good is at home and in the past. For Jack Norwood the world is an opening up of opportunities, the chance to learn new things, from the violin to politics; it is a space for growth not corruption. Jack will fall in love with a young woman who is also learning new things and making her own way in the world and expanding similarly. Jack’s first encounter with the Civil War and its consequences is when he is incited by his friend Barbary to watch part of the Battle of Sedgemoor. In the aftermath he goes to his local church to practice his composition on the organ and is there overheard by Major Denzil Sinclair, once a Parliamentarian and now a Monmouth man on the run. Sinclair likes the music and gives Norwood an introduction to Purcell. But where Lane sees the rebellion justly put down, for Norwood the bloody assizes of Judge Jeffries become a thing to remember, ‘fresh sounds, the hammering of scaffolds and the clank of chains… It is not only fruit that swings from the trees’ (Ch. 3). But after that he very much goes about his own way, his encounter with politics emerging only in the odd conflict between his friend Hugh (Barbary’s brother) who insists that

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‘The King has a right to do just anything he likes!’ and his friend Harry who declares ‘He hasn’t then! Else why was his father beaten in the Civil War, and his head cut off—’ (Ch. 3). Jack stands by and tries to keep the peace. It is not until Chapter 8, when Major Sinclair returns to London that Jack begins to think on politics again, and learns from Sinclair to think of the coming conflict not as about Catholicism but ‘“the real fight is between this, behind us”—he indicated the Palace of Whitehall—“and that.” He pointed to the darkly massed buildings of Westminster in front of them’ (Ch. 8). Trease does not involve Jack in politics. In a mode he excised from the later edition, many of the explanations of what is happening, the conspiracies and conversations, happen offstage and are here merely recounted. But Jack meets the fallout. His father—a vicar—declares he shall not read the King’s declaration of indulgences. He is there in Westminster Abbey with his aunt when it is read by the Dean and the congregation gets up and walks out, and on Hounslow Heath he gets into a fight with an Irish officer over his right to read a seditious leaflet. It is this incident that starts Jack on the road to understanding that to live and exist, to make the life one wants, is a political act. His friend Barbary has put him in the way of musical patronage from a Lord Bablocke. All is going well after a series of concert rehearsals, when the Irish officer he fought with at Hounslow Heath arrives on the scene, drunk, and challenges him. Bablocke, discomfited, asks Jack to confirm his allegiance to the King, and takes for granted indeed that he will. Jack balks. ‘I don’t think I realised it fully till to-night but I—I think I’m a Whig’, and in an almost perfect parallel of the accusations Michael makes, Jack declares, ‘You want to buy my music—you can have it, it’s for sale. But if you think you can buy me with it, buy my mind as well as my fingers, you’re mistaken’ (Ch. 10), and with that Jack walks out and into a different future in which he will carry papers for Colonel Sinclair, first in encoded music, and later stuffed in his violin. This is an action that almost gets him hanged, until he is rescued by the same Colonel Trelawney, of the King’s Own Royal Regiment, who was the first to go over to the Prince of Orange. Jack makes his mind up through encounters with multiple views; Michael is a follower as a matter of principle. In these two novels the fundamental political divisions which emerged in this collection are preserved and projected into future political alignments.

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Works Cited Atherton, Ian. “Commemorating the English Revolution: Local Deliverance and Thanksgiving.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 27–44. Print. Brooks, Colin. “The Revolution of 1688–1689.” A Companion to Stuart Britain. Ed. Coward, Barry. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 436–54. Print. Davidson, Neil. Discovering the Scottish Revolution, 1692–1746. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Print. Legon, Edward. “Remembering the Good Old Cause.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 11–27. Print. ———. Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories After the British Civil Wars. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Print Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Cause. Glasgow: National Trust for Scotland, 1986. Print. Reese, Peter. The Life of General George Monck: For King and Cromwell. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2008. Print. Robertson, Geoffrey. The Tyrannicide Brief . London: Vintage, 2006. Print. Vallance, Edward, ed. Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Print. ———. “Remembering the Regicide in an Age of Revolutions: the Case of Mark Noble.” Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti. Ed. Vallance, Edward. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 45–60. Print.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion

Hodgkin and Radstone point out that ‘In nationalist movements and achieved nation states alike, the appeal to memory articulates the narrative of the nationalist past, and enjoins its subject to recognise and own it’ (2003, 169). These Civil War fictions, continue to contest memory, to argue over what should be recognised and what should be owned. They are nakedly persuasive fictions. The accusations made by Geoffrey Trease and Robert Leeson that English Civil War fiction was overwhelmingly pro-Royalist, does not really hold up to scrutiny: although the strict majority is with the Royalists, they are balanced by the Parliamentarians and neutral authors in concert, and the balance is further tipped by the long nineteenth century’s cult of Cromwell. By the twenty-first century they are fighting it out for dominance. But what is true is that until the renaissance in the twenty-first century, these are remarkably constrained fictions, with an outline history of the war barely changed—with the exception of notable authors such as Lindsay and Marshall—from that found in H.E Marshall’s, Our Island Story (1905). The war remains predominantly confined to an England (Wales barely appears) that seems monolithic. It is at the end of the nineteenth century that local history begins to appear. While there are a small number of novels set in and produced from Scotland and Ireland, it is only in the twenty-first century that there is an emerging sense of this as © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6_12

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a set of inter-locking wars which involved three distinct polities: there is little sense that modern historiography has yet truly influenced the fictions produced. It is still possible to say that most Civil War fictions continue the argument about the war as both English, and about the construction of Englishness, sometimes in tension with Scottishness or Irishness, but never in any wider sense about the Britishness of this history, or even the connection with the north-eastern colonies of the Americas, from where many Puritans would return to fight. Furthermore, it became very noticeable how rural these fictions were. The sieges of the major cities are very rarely the focus of the novels, yet there are stories of heroic defences of Bristol, Chester, Newark, York, Colchester, which are untold. Although a relatively minor incident, if crucial, the absence of any story of the defence of London and the Battle of Turnham Green, is a disappointment. London is in general an odd absence from this tale. We know that much of the political and religious change of the period took place in London, particularly during the Commonwealth, but only Lindsay, Lane and Hardinge spend any time there. One possible reason is the overwhelming focus on the aristocracy and gentry in these books. The lowest ranking hero until the twentieth century is gentry. In the twentieth century we still have only a yeoman (Trease), merchants and craftsmen (Gibson) or apprentices (Lindsey). And perhaps most notable of all, there is not a single novel in the collection which tells the story of an infantryman (the lowest rank served in any of the novels is Cornet). For all that many of the authors here (particularly the Parliamentarians) would position themselves as telling the story from below, it would be more accurate to say they tell the story from the middle, with that class of boys who might consider entering the army as an officer, but never as a private, and, as noted earlier, drawn from predominantly rural and semi-rural backgrounds. In the post-war Second World War era, unsurprisingly, the home front becomes the focus of the work of many authors. This shift in focus, interestingly, coincides with a much clearer division between books intended for children and those intended for adults. With a few exceptions, it is in the children’s books that the adventure approach to the Civil War continues; the home-front novels are aimed predominantly at older teens and adults. There are other omissions. All of the Civil War novels discussed here focus on a small range of topics: the war on the battlefield, to a far lesser

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extent the political issues at stake, or the experience of war-time at home. But while the military authors have paid great attention to battlefield tactics, to armour, and to fighting techniques, there is very little attention to the war as a logistical matter—how people negotiated the countryside with only the most outline maps, the supply of the army and the difficulties of moving armies around the countryside. This is fiction for the able-bodied. This is a war, but until very recently, protagonists and their friends and fathers, returned home whole or not at all. Injury either heals through private nursing, or kills. Yet despite the incredibly high level of casualties we know that many were nursed in the hospitals of both sides: the Parliamentarian ones were on the Strand in London, funded by taxes; and soldiers billeted in areas where they were injured were supported by fees paid to their hosts (von Arni 2001, 59). We know less about Royalist medical care which tended to be seen as the responsibility of the command structure for each regiment (von Arni 21–24). Medical care and the institutions that arose as part of the construction of the New Model are one of the more interesting civilian aspect of the period, but we only ever see the troops, and not the incredible bureaucracy and management structure which grew up and which helped take Parliament to victory. Pension applications prove that men returned home, scarred, and traumatised (a really odd omission is that in this ear of guns, no one seems to be deafened by their battle experiences). Matthew Neufeld (2013), the Civil War Petitions project at Leicester, and Norah Carlin’s forthcoming book on petitions (2020), all demonstrate the sheer wealth of material available. When told with nuance the Civil Wars have the potential to capture the intellectual child and some authors recognise this, and recognise it in part as an element in the construction of the child. All children’s fiction invents childhood. But what is rarely noted is that all fiction invents personhood, and to invent childhood, children’s fiction has to very specifically invent ‘adulthood’ (Joosen 2018). In these books this is done in terms of the relationship that children and other readers are expected to have to the war, whether unquestioning (Royalist) or critical (Parliamentarian or Independent). When we consider how duty is expressed—taken for granted, or gifted—and the premises under which rebellion is legitimated, we need to understand that this not only seeks to express the tenor of the contemporary world of the author, their own agenda, the world they wish to depict, but with the more informed books is often— as in Jack Lindsey’s 1649 (1937), Geoffrey Trease’s Trumpets in the West

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(1947) or Marie Beulah Dix’s Hugh Gwyeth (1899)—a genuine attempt to ask readers interact with the political rhetoric of the period and particularly that of the Royalist side and to frame the growth into adulthood in terms of the growth into different modes of loyalty. Yet the attempt to create a consensus response to the war, and specifically to what victory is and looks like, particularly in attempts to position the Restoration as either the natural end to the period, or simply a hiatus in a longer argument draws attention to the ways in which politics is rather ill served in these texts. Reading for this book drew attention to how rudimentary political discussion is in the texts (and almost absent from most of the Royalist texts). There are no novels that focus on the debates in Parliament, the arguments between Presbyterians, Independents, and Radicals. Only Bernard Marshall and Jack Lindsay, Lindsey Davies and Gillian Bradshaw touch on a period in history where political debate has never been so fervent, nuanced and widespread. Where ordinary people left letters and diaries, and a collection of newsprint and pamphlets can be so large that it is its own collection in the British Library (the Thomason Tracts consists of over 20,000 printed items). This remains a period which has not yet struggled free of the censorship that would reduce it to Royalists, Wrong and Wromantic; Roundheads, Right and Repulsive. Alana Vincent writes: ‘The process of memorialization is never complete; memory is not set in stone—it is constantly open to renegotiation, and “reading backwards”—an insertion of more recent understanding and experience into discourse about the past’ (2013, 1). If this book had been written prior to 2000, the impression would have been of a rather stable and consensus understanding of the wars having emerged from a new knowledge and consensus politics. The reemergence of such fiction and its reinvigoration, and particularly the continual use of the English Civil Wars and citation of its events during the debacle that is Brexit, has demonstrated the truth of this.

Works Cited Secondary Sources Carlin, Norah. Regicide or Revolution? What Petitioners Wanted, September 1648– January 1649. London: Breviary Stuff, forthcoming. Print. Hodgkin, Katharine, and Susannah Radstone, eds. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

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Joosen, Vanessa. Adulthood in Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Neufeld, Matthew. The Civil Wars After 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. Print. Vincent, Alana. Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative and Liturgy. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013. Print. von Arni, Eric Gruber. 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 and New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Afterword

Coincidence is a funny thing: I was born in Wythenshawe hospital the year the Manchester Cromwell statue was moved to the park outside. I refused to go to school assemblies because I objected to being made to sing At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow, when it was so clearly untrue, and it was one of the objections of the anti-Laudians to his demand that people bow to the cross (see Chapter 7). I have written much of this book while living very close to Newcastle-under-Lyme, represented by the MP Thomas Harrison, Regicide. Each of these things has created moments of identification while writing this book.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

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Appendix A: Map by Nick Jenkins

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

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274

APPENDIX A: MAP BY NICK JENKINS

Appendix B: Table of Bias

Books focussed on the war or its rights and wrongs. Decade 1700s 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

King

Parliament

Neutral 1

2 2

2 4 6 13 6 1 5 2 7 13 3

2 1 2

1 4 4 4 2 4 4 1 3 3

2

1 3 1 1 1 3 2 5 1 4

(continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

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276

APPENDIX B: TABLE OF BIAS

(continued) Decade 1990 2000 2010 2020 one year only

King

Parliament 5 3 12 1 87

4 13 1 54

Neutral 2 3 3 1 32

Appendix C: Civil War Novels, in Order of Publication

Defoe, D. (1720). Memoirs of a Cavalier. Scott, W. (1826). Woodstock. Smith, H. (1826). Brambletye House. Or, Cavaliers and Roundheads, a Novel. Herbert, H. W. (1838). Cromwell. An Historical Novel. Gresley, W. R. (1843). The Siege of Lichfield. Marryat, F. (1847). The Children of the New Forest. Grant, J. (1856). Harry Ogilvie, or the Black Dragoons. Martineau, H. (1856). The Settlers at Home. Charles, E. R. (1867). The Draytons and the Davenants. A Story of the Civil Wars. Charles, E. R. (1868). On Both Sides of the Sea. A Story of the Commonwealth and Restoration. Ainsworth, W. H. (1872). Boscobel, or The Royal Oak. A Tale of the Year 1651. Phillimore, C. M. (1873). The King’s Namesake. A Tale of Carisbrook Castle. Cooper, Mrs F. (1881). Hide and Seek. A Story of the New Forest in 1647. Shorthouse, J. H. (1881). John Inglesant. Henty, G. A. (1883). Friends, Though Divided. Caine, H. (1885). The Shadow of a Crime. Church, Reverend A. J. (1886). With the King at Oxford. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

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278

APPENDIX C: CIVIL WAR NOVELS, IN ORDER …

Yonge, C. M. (1887). Under the Storm. Barr, A. E. (1890). Friend Olivia. Marshall, E. (1892). Under Salisbury Spire: In the Days of George Herbert. The Recollections of Magdalene Wydville. Fitzpatrick, T. (1894). The King of Claddagh, A Story of the Cromwellian Occupation of Ireland. Lyall, E. (1894). To Right the Wrong. Quiller-Couch, A. (1895). The Splendid Spur. Being Memoirs of The Adventures of Mr. John Marvel, A Servant of His Late Majesty King Charles I In the Years 1642–3, Written by Himself. Shearman, J. A. (1895). Kathleen Clare. Her Book, 1637–1641. Cornford, L. C. (1896). Captain Jacobus. Fenn, G. M. (1896) Roy Royland: Or, The Young Castellan. A Tale of the English Civil War. Fletcher, J. S. (1896) Mistress Spitfire. Church, S. H. (1897). John Marmaduke. McChesney, D. G. (1897). Miriam Cromwell, Royalist. A Romance of the Great Rebellion. Cobban, J. M. (1898). The Angel of the Covenant. Dix, B. M. (1899). Hugh Gwyeth. A Round-Head Cavalier. Paterson, A. (1899). Cromwell’s Own. Brereton, C. F. S. (1900). In the King’s Service. Everett-Green, E. (1901). After Worcester; the History of a Royal Fugitive. Jones, D. M. (1901). A Soldier of the King. Lyall, E. (1901). In Spite of All. McDonald, R. (1901). God Save the King. Church, S. H. (1902). Penruddock of the White Lambs. Hinkson, H. A. (1902). Silk and Steel. Moore, F. F. (1903). Castle Omeragh. Pease, H. (1903). Magnus Sinclair. Dix, B. M. (1905). The Making of Christopher Ferringham. Dix, B. M. (1906). Merrylips. Hamilton, J. A. (1906). Captain John Lister. McDonnell, R. (1906). When Cromwell Came to Drogheda. A Memory of 1649. Pease, H. (1906). Of Mistress Eve. Barr, R. (1907). Over the Border.

APPENDIX C: CIVIL WAR NOVELS, IN ORDER …

279

Cooke, W. B. (1908). Her Faithful Knight. Being the Statement of Will Heritage, of the Beacon Farm, by Woodhouse Eaves Sometime a Trooper in the Parliamentary Forces. Hart, J. W. (1908). In the Iron Time. Westerman, P. (1909). A Lad of Grit. Hayens, H. (1910). For Rupert and the King. Richards, H. G. (1911). Richard Somers. Westerman, P. (1911). The Young Cavalier. Wynne, M. (1912). “Hey for Cavaliers!”; A Romance. Keynes, H. M. (1914). Honour the King. Cowen, L. (1919). Bible and Sword. Hope, E. (1923). My Lady’s Bargain. Mackenna, R. W. (1923). Through Flood and Fire. Marshall, B. (1923). The Torch Bearers. A Tale of Cavalier Days. Oxenham, E. J. (1924). The Girls of Gwynfa. Berridge, J. (1926). The Stronghold. Buchan, J. (1927). Witch Wood. Irwin, M. (1934). The Proud Servant. Brent-Dyer, E. M. (1935). Elizabeth the Gallant. Irwin, M. (1937). The Stranger Prince. The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. Lindsay, J. (1937). Sue Verney. Lane, J. (1937). Sir Devil May-Care. Bowen, M. (1938). The Trumpet and the Swan. London. Heyer, G. (1938). Royal Escape. Lindsay, J. (1938). 1649. A Novel of a Year. Savery, C. (1938). Green Emeralds for the King. Graves, R. (1942). Wife to Mr Milton. Trease, G. (1942). The Grey Adventurer. Lane, J. (1943). England for Sale. Winsor, K. (1944). Forever Amber. Du Maurier, D. (1946). The King’s General. Lane, J. (1947). London Goes to Heaven. Trease, G. (1947). Trumpets in the West. Trease, G. (1948). Silver Guard. Lane, J. (1950). The Escape of the King. Lane, J. (1951). Dark Conspiracy. Lane, J. (1952). The Sealed Knot. Lane, J. (1953). The Lady of the House.

280

APPENDIX C: CIVIL WAR NOVELS, IN ORDER …

Sutcliff, R. (1953). Simon. White, L. T. (1953). The Highland Hawk. Neill, R. (1954). Rebel Heiress. Charques, D. (1956). The Dark Stranger. Trease, G. (1956 [2007]). The Gates of Bannerdale. Plaidy, J. (1956). The Wandering Prince. Trease, G. (1957). ‘Hide and Seek’. Peart, H. (1958). The Loyal Grenvilles. Goudge, E. (1958). The White Witch. Lane, J. (1959). The Escape of the King. Sutcliff, R. (1959). The Rider of the White Horse. Lane, J. (1960). The Escape of the Duke. Macaulay, R. (1960). They Were Defeated. Caute, D. (1961). Comrade Jacob. Forest, A. (1961). Peter’s Room. Softly, B. (1961). Plain Jane. Softly, B. (1962). Place Mill. Sanders, John. (1964) A Firework for Oliver. Cawley, W. (1964). Down the Long Stairs. Knight, F. (1964). The Last of the Lallows. Watson, S. (1964). Lark. Beatty, J., & Beatty, P. (1965). Campion Towers. Grice, F. (1966). The Luckless Apple. Softly, B. (1966). A Stone in a Pool. Willard, B. (1967). The Grove of Green Holly. Beatty, J., & Beatty, P. (1968). Witch Dog. Lane, J. (1969). The Young and Lonely King. Welch, R. (1969). For the King. de Hartog, J. (1971). The Peaceable Kingdom Garner, A. (1973). Red Shift. Bibby, V. (1974). Many Waters. Burton, H. (1974). Kate Rider. Willard, B. (1974). Harrow and Harvest. Trease, G. (1976). When the Drums Beat. Lane, J. (1977). The Call of Trumpets. Leeson, R. (1977). The White Horse. Trease, G. (1977). The Field of Forty Footsteps. Harrod-Eagles, C. (1982). The Oak Apple.

APPENDIX C: CIVIL WAR NOVELS, IN ORDER …

281

Attenborough, John. (1987) Destiny Our Choice: A Novel of Cromwell’s England. Belle, P. (1988). Wintercombe. Gibson, E. (1988). Sons and Brothers. Belle, P. (1989). Herald of Joy. Hersom, K. (1989). The Half-Child. Buchanan, C. (1994). Royal Escape. Adventure with the Stuart King. Hines, J. (1994). The Cornish Girl. Thomson, P. (1995). A Ghost-Light in the Attic. Hines, J. (1996). The Puritan’s Wife. Trease, G. (1996). Curse on the Sea. Gregory, P. (1998). Earthly Joys. Gregory, P. (1999) Virgin Earth. McCann, M. (2001). As Meat Loves Salt. Usher, F. (2001). The River Runs to the End of Time. Gardner, S. (2005). I, Coriander. Hearn, J. (2006). The Merrybegot. Forsyth, K. (2008). The Gypsy Crown. Davis, L. (2009). Rebels and Traitors. Turnbull, A. (2009). Alice in Love and War. Arnold, M. (2010). Traitor’s Blood. Bradshaw, G. (2010). London in Chains. Bradshaw, G. (2011). A Corruptible Crown. Mountain, F. (2011). The Cavalier Queen. Ransley, P. (2011). Plague Child. Howarth, F. (2012). By Loyalty Divided. A Scandalous Seduction. Norfolk, L. (2012). John Saturnall’s Feast Bradbridge, D.W. (2013). The Winter Siege. Wilton, R. (2013). Traitor’s Field. London. Bradbridge, D.W. (2014). A Soldier of Substance. Falkland, W. (2014). The Royalist. Riley, S. (2014). A Splendid Defiance. Anglorus, A. (2015). The Prince of Prigs. Evans, J. (2015). The Last Roundhead. Logue, M. J. (2015). Red Horse. Logue, M. J. (2015). A Wilderness of Sin. MacLean, S. G. (2015). Seeker. Stuart, A. (2015). By the Sword. Swinfen, A. (2015). This Rough Ocean.

282

APPENDIX C: CIVIL WAR NOVELS, IN ORDER …

Tyler, L. C. (2015). A Cruel Necessity. Hargreaves, I. (2016). Charity’s Cavalier. Bazos, C. (2017). Traitor’s Knot. Hardinge, F. (2017). A Skinful of Shadows. Logue, M. J. (2017). Babylon’s Downfall. St. John, Elizabeth. (2018). By Love Divided. The Lydiard Chronicles, 1630–1646. Learner, T. (2018). The Magick of Master Lilly. Evans, M. C. (2018). A Farthinge for Oxford. St. John, Elizabeth. (2019). Written in Their Stars: The Lydiard Chronicles 1649–1664. Gregory, P. (2019). Tidelands. Langman, Pete. (2020). Killing Beauties. Malins, Miranda. (2020). The Puritan Princess. Not included in the count for this book were plays, TV and films. Allen, Irving (1970). Cromwell [Film]. Company Pictures. (2008). The Devil’s Whore [TV]. Brenton, H. (2012). 55 Days [Play]. Wheatley, B. (2013). A Field in England [Film]. Children of the New Forest was produced by the BBC in 1955, 1964, 1977 and as a TV movie in 1998. The 1998 version added an extra villainous Puritan preacher with designs on the Intendant’s daughter, Edward Beverly’s love interest.

Appendix D: Families Divided

From Durston, The Family in the English Revolution (1989)

Father

Son

William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh; son Basil Henry Carey, Earl of Dover; son, John (Viscount Rochford) Sir Edmund Verney; son Sir Ralph Verney Henry Belasye, Durham; son Thomas, Viscount Fauconberg (later married one of Cromwell’s daughters) Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick; son Robert Baron Rich of Leighs, spent the war at Oxford Edward Bulstrode, Inner Temple lawyer; Sir Richard for the King Sir John Corbet in Parliament for Shropshire; eldest son John for the King John Lisle of Wooten (Regicide); son William Lisle Sir Thomas Maulever, Yorkshire (Regicide); son Richard Mauleverer Anthony Stapley (Regicide); Second but eldest surviving son John Stapely

K K K K

P P P P

P

K

P P

K K

P P P

K K K

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

283

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Bradshaw, Gillian. London in Chains. Sutton: Severn House, 2010. Print. ———. A Corruptible Crown. Sutton: Severn House, 2011. Print. Brent-Dyer, Elinor M. Elizabeth the Gallant. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1935 (Reprinted Bath: Girls Gone By, 2006). Print. Brenton, Howard. 55 Days. London: Nick Hern Books, 2012. Print. Brereton, Captain F. S. In the King’s Service: A Tale of Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland. London, Glasgow and Bombay: Blackie and Sons, 1901. Print. Buchan, John. Witch Wood. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927. Print. Buchanan, Charles. Royal Escape: Adventure with the Stuart King. Saffron Waldon, Essex: Anglia Young Books, 1994. Print. Burton, Hester. Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Print. ———. Kate Rider. Oxford University Press, 1974. Print. Caine, Hall. The Shadow of a Crime. London: Chatto & Windus, 1885. Print. Caute, David. Comrade Jacob. London: Andre Deutsch, 1961. Print. Cawley, Winifred. Down the Long Stairs. New York etc: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964. Print. Charles, Elizabeth Rundle. The Draytons and the Davenants: A Story of the Civil Wars. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1867 (Eilbron Classics facsimile, 2006). Print. ———. On Both Sides of the Sea: A Story of the Commonwealth and Restoration. London: T. Nelson, 1868. Print. Charques, Dorothy. The Dark Stranger. London: John Murray, 1956. Print. Church, Rev. Alfred J. With the King at Oxford. London: Seeley, 1886. Print. Church, Samuel Harden. John Marmaduke. New York and London: G. P. Putnam, 1897. Print. ———. Penruddock of the White Lambs. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1902. Print. Cobban, J. MacLaren. The Angel of the Covenant. London: Methuen, 1898. Print. Cooke, W. Bourne. Her Faithful Knight: Being the Statement of Will Heritage, of the Beacon Farm, by Woodhouse Eaves, Sometime a Trooper in the Parliamentary Forces. London: Cassell, 1908. Print. Cooper, Mrs Frank (E.E.). Hide and Seek: A Story of the New Forest in 1647. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1881. Print. Cornford, Leslie Cope. Captain Jacobus. New York: Stone and Kimball, 1896. Print. Cowen, Lawrence. Bible and Sword. London etc: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919. Print. Davis, Lindsey. Rebels and Traitors. London: Century, 2009. Print. de Hartog, Jan. The Peaceable Kingdom: An American Saga. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971. Print. Defoe, Daniel. Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720). London: Everyman, 1908. Print.

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Dix, Beulah Marie. Hugh Gwyeth: A Round-Head Cavalier. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Print. ———. The Making of Christopher Ferringham. London and New York: Macmillan, 1905. Print. ———. Merrylips. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Print. Du Maurier, Daphne. The King’s General. London: Gollancz, 1946. Print. Evans, Jemahl. The Last Roundhead. London: Holland House Books, 2015. Print. Evans, Margaret Cooper. A Farthing for Oxforde: The Story of One Woman’s Life During the English Civil War. UK: Nuova Stella, 2018. Print. Everett-Green, Evelyn Ward. After Worcester; the History of a Royal Fugitive. London etc: Thomas Nelson, 1901. Print. Falkland, William. The Royalist. London: Headline, 2014. Print. Fenn, George Maville. Roy Royland; or, the Young Castellan: A Tale of the English Civil War. London: W. & R. Chambers, 1896 (Reprinted as The Young Castellan by Filiquarian Publishing, typescript, no date). Print. Fitzpatrick, Thomas. The King of Claddagh, a Story of the Cromwellian Occupation of Ireland. London: Sands, 1894. Print. Fletcher, J. S. Mistress Spitfire: A Plain Account of Certain Episodes in the History of Richard Coope, Gent., and of His Cousin, Mistress Alison French, at the Time of the Revolution, 1642–1646. London: J.M. Dent, 1896. Print. Forest, Antonia. Peter’s Room. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Print. Forsyth, Kate. The Gypsy Crown. London: Scholastic, 2008. Print. Gardner, Sally. I, Coriander. London: Orion Children’s Books, 2005. Print. Garner, Alan. Red Shift. London: William Collins, 1973. Print. Gibson, Elizabeth. Sons and Brothers. London: Lion, 1988. Print. Goudge, Elizabeth. The White Witch. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958. Print. Grant, James. Harry Ogilvie, or the Black Dragoons. London: Routledge’s Railway Library, 1856. Print. Graves, Robert. Wife to Mr Milton. London: Cassell, 1942. Print. Gregory, Philippa. Earthly Joys. London: St Martins, 1998. Print. ———. Virgin Earth. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Print. ———. Tidelands. London: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Print. Gresley, W. (Rev). The Siege of Lichfield. New York: James A. Sparks, 1843. Print. Grice, Frederick. The Luckless Apple. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Print. Hamilton, John A. Captain John Lister. London: Hutchinson, 1906. Print. Hardinge, Frances. A Skinful of Shadows. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2017. Print. Hargreaves, Isabella. Charity’s Cavalier. Divided Isles, 2016. Kindle. Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia. The Oak Apple. London: MacDonald, 1982. Print. Hart, J. Wesley. In the Iron Time. London: Robert Culley, 1908. Print.

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Hayens, Herbert. For Rupert and the King. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1910. Print. Hearn, Julie. The Merrybegot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Henty, G. A. Friends, Though Divided. London: Henry Frowde, Hodder & Stoughton, 1883. Print. Herbert, Henry William. Cromwell: An Historical Novel. Harper & Brothers, NY, 1838. Print. Hersom, Kathleen. The Half-Child. London: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Print. Heyer, Georgette. The Great Roxhythe. London: Hutchinson, 1923. Print. ———. Royal Escape. London: Heinemann, 1938. Print. Hines, Joanna. The Cornish Girl. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994. Print. ———. The Puritan’s Wife. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996. Print. Hinkson, H. A. Silk and Steel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1902. Print. Hope, Elizabeth. My Lady’s Bargain. London: Nisbet, 1923. Print. Howarth, Francine. By Loyalty Divided: A Scandalous Seduction. UK: Black Velvet Books, 2012. Print. Irwin, Margaret. The Proud Servant. London: Chatto & Windus, 1934. Print. ———. The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937. Print. Jones, Dora M. A Soldier of the King. London etc: Cassell, 1901. Print. Keynes, Helen Mary. The Spanish Marriage: A Romance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1913. Print. ———. Honour the King. London: Chatto & Windus, 1914. Print. Knight, Frank. The Last of the Lallows. London and New York: Macmillan, 1964. Print. Lane, Jane. Sir Devil May-Care. London: Methuen, 1937. Print. ———. England for Sale. London: Andrew Dakers, 1943. Print. ———. London Goes to Heaven. London: Andrew Dakers, 1947. Print. ———. The Escape of the King. London: Evans Brothers, 1950. Print. ———. Dark Conspiracy. London: Robert Hale, 1951. Print. ———. The Sealed Knot. London: Robert Hale, 1952 (Reprinted Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2001). Print. ———. The Lady of the House. London: Robert Hale, 1953. Print. ———. The Escape of the Duke. London: Evans Brothers, 1960. Print. ———. The Crown for a Lie. London: Frederick Muller, 1962. Print. ———. The Young and Lonely King. London: Frederick Muller, 1969 (Reprinted Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2002). Print. ———. The Call of Trumpets. London: Frederick Muller, 1971 (Reprinted Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2002). Print. ———. The Severed Crown. London: Peter Davies, 1972. Print. Langman, Pete. Killing Beauties: Or, the Chronicle of Susan Hyde. London: Unbound, 2020. Print.

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Learner, Tobsha. The Magick of Master Lilly. London: Little Brown, 2018. Print. Leeson, Robert. The White Horse. London: Collins, 1977. Print. Lindsay, Jack. Sue Verney. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1937. Print. ———. 1649: A Novel of a Year. London: Methuen, 1938. Print. Logue, M. J. Red Horse. Uncivil Wars. UK: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Print. ———. A Wilderness of Sin. UK: Rosemary Tree Press, 2015. Print. ———. Babylon’s Downfall. UK: Rosemary Tree Press, 2017. Print. Lyall, Edna. To Right the Wrong. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1894. Print. ———. In Spite of All. London: Longmans, Green, 1901. Print. Macaulay, Rose. They Were Defeated. London: Collins, 1960. Print. Mackenna, R. W. Through Flood and Fire. London: John Murray, 1923. Print. MacLean, S. G. Seeker. London: Quercus, 2015. Print. Malins, Miranda. The Puritan Princess. London: Orion, 2020. Print. Marryat, Captain Frederick. The Children of the New Forest. London: H. Hurst, 1847. Print. Marshall, Bernard. The Torch Bearers: A Tale of Cavalier Days. New York and London: D. Appleton, 1923. Print. Marshall, Emma. In Colston’s Days a Story of Old Bristol. London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1884. Print. ———. Under Salisbury Spire: In the Days of George Herbert. The Recollections of Magdalene Wydville. London: Seeley, 1892. Print. Martineau, Harriet. The Settlers at Home. Originally Published as Part of Martineau, the Playfellow. London: George Routledge, 1841. Print. McCann, Maria. As Meat Loves Salt. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Print. McChesney, Dora Greenwell. Miriam Cromwell, Royalist: A Romance of the Great Rebellion. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1897. Print. McDonald, Ronald. God Save the King. London: Hutchinson, 1901. Print. McDonnell, Randal. When Cromwell Came to Drogheda: A Memory of 1649. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1906. Print. Moore, F. Frankfort. Castle Omeragh. Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1903. Print. Mountain, Fiona. The Cavalier Queen. London: Preface, 2011. Print. Neill, Robert. Rebel Heiress. London: Hutchinson, 1954. Print. Norfolk, Lawrence. John Saturnall’s Feast. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print. Oxenham, Elsie J. The Girls of Gwynfa. London: Frederick Warne, 1924. Print. Paterson, Arthur. Cromwell’s Own: A Story of the Great Civil War. London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899. Print. Peart, Hendry. The Loyal Grenvilles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Print. Pease, Howard. Magnus Sinclair. Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1903. Print.

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———. Of Mistress Eve: A Tale of the Southern Border. London: Archibald Constable, 1906. Print. Phillimore, Catherine Mary. The King’s Namesake: A Tale of Carisbrook Castle. London: Christian Knowledge Society, 1872. Print. Plaidy, Jean. The Wandering Prince. London: Robert Hale, 1956. Print. Quiller-Couch, Arthur. The Splendid Spur: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of Mr. John Marvel, a Servant of His Late Majesty King Charles I in the Years 1642–3;Written by Himself. No details: No details, 1889. Print. Ransley, Peter. Plague Child. London: Harper Press, 2011. Print. Richards, H. Grahame. Richard Somers. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1911. Print. Riley, Stella. Black Madonna. Roundheads and Cavaliers: Stella Riley, 2013. Print. ———. A Splendid Defiance. UK: CreateSpace, 2014. Print. Roberton, Margaret H. A Gallant Quaker. London: Methuen, 1901. Print. Sanders, John. A Firework for Oliver. London: Heinemann, 1964. Print. Savery, Constance. Green Emeralds for the King. London etc: George G. Harrap, 1938. Print. Scott, Sir Walter. Woodstock. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Archibald, Constable, 1826. Print. Shearman, James A. Kathleen Clare: Her Book, 1637–1641. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1895. Print. Shorthouse, J. Henry. John Inglesant. London and Edinburgh: Macmillan, 1881. Print. Smith, Horace. Brambletye House: Or, Cavaliers and Roundheads, a Novel. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1826. Print. Softly, Barbara. Plain Jane. London: Macmillan, 1961. Print. ———. Place Mill. London: Macmillan, 1962. Print. ———. A Stone in a Pool. London: Macmillan, 1966. Print. St. John, Elizabeth. By Love Divided: The Lydiard Chronicles, 1630–1646. UK: Falcon Historical Press, 2018. Print. ———. Written in Their Stars: The Lydiard Chronicles 1649–1664. UK: Falcon Historical Press, 2019. Print. Stuart, Alison. By the Sword. UK: Escape Publishing, 2015. Print. Sutcliff, Rosemary. Simon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Print. ———. The Rider of the White Horse. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1959. Print. Swinfen, Ann. This Rough Ocean. UK: Shakenoak Press, 2015. Print. Thomson, Pat. A Ghost-Light in the Attic. London: A. & C. Black, 1995. Print. Trease, Geoffrey. The Grey Adventurer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1942. Print. ———. Trumpets in the West. 1st ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947. Print. ———. Silver Guard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948. Print. ———. The Gates of Bannerdale. London: Heinemann, 1956. Print.

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Index

A Ainsworth, William Harrison, 72, 82, 96, 277 Aitken, G.A., 30 Akkerman, Nadine, 46, 128, 131, 244 Alker, Sharon, 30 Anglorus, Anthony, 225, 281 Anne, Queen, xv, 259 Arendt, Hannah, 226 Arminian (-ism), 3, 154, 164, 240 Arnold, Michael, 45, 75, 85, 91, 101, 281 Atherton, Ian, 252, 254 Attenborough, John, 73, 78, 281 B Bainbridge, D.W., 46, 105, 194 Ball, Nan, 125 Bankes, Lady Mary, 134 Barebon, Nicholas ‘Praise-God’, 94, 230, 232 Barr, Amelia, 129, 169, 170, 278 Barratt, John, 76, 77, 104, 237, 245 Barr, Robert, 21, 89, 278

Bate, George, 27 Bazos, Chryssa, 45, 129, 138, 282 Beatty, John, 16, 42, 73, 99, 102, 113, 238, 280 Beatty, Patricia, 16, 42, 73, 99, 102, 113, 238, 280 Beckett, Gilbert, 35 Belle, Pamela, 18, 43, 104, 113, 124, 135, 138, 147, 189, 192, 281 Bennett, Martyn, 43 Betts, Sarah, 55, 74, 75 Bishops’ Wars, 2, 6, 59, 61, 84, 145, 203 Blackwood, R.G., 193 Bolton, 86 Book of Common Prayer, 3, 9, 52, 61, 143, 150, 201, 234, 240 Boscobel, 52, 53 Bosher, Robert S., 240, 241 Bowen, Mary, 129, 279 Bradbridge, D.W., 9, 104, 281 Braddick, Michael, 43

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 F. Mendlesohn, Creating Memory, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54537-6

307

308

INDEX

Bradshaw, Gillian, 3, 45, 46, 81, 98, 121, 122, 124, 130, 137, 162, 186, 235, 252, 268, 281 Brent-Dyer, Elinor M., 14, 17, 41, 53, 77, 90, 102, 110, 126, 131, 148, 176, 192, 232, 279 Brenton, Howard, 53, 225, 282 Brereton, Captain F.S., 79, 194, 213, 214, 217, 218, 278 Brexit, xvii, 268 Bristol, 8, 16, 78, 85, 104, 130, 166, 193, 266 Brown, P. Hume, 59–61 Buchanan, Charles, 73, 181, 281 Buckingham, Duke of (George Villiers), 4, 72, 74 Burford, 55, 85, 94 Burton, Henry, 6 Burton, Hester, xviii, 11, 17, 39, 101, 105, 112, 120, 138, 168, 172, 179, 194, 280 Butler, C., xvi, 40 C Calvinist, 3, 4, 9, 144, 156 Cannadine, David, 56 Capp, Bernard, 46, 111, 113 Carisbrooke, 16, 134, 194 Carlin, Norah, 267 Carlyle, Thomas, 32, 36–38, 54, 71 Catholic(s), xv, 4, 9, 29, 60, 62–64, 67, 74, 75, 80, 82, 103, 145, 147, 149, 153–155, 171, 190, 194, 203, 206, 207, 209–212, 214, 215, 219, 238, 259, 260 Caute, David, 80, 280 Cavaliers, xvi, 2, 21, 25, 28–32, 43, 76, 83, 85, 87, 97, 105, 113, 115–118, 122, 129, 136, 152, 157, 165, 181, 189, 191–193, 204, 208, 217, 219, 238, 242, 245, 256–258

Cawley, Winifred, 99, 180, 194, 280 Charles, Elizabeth Rundle, 34, 35, 37, 86, 150, 168, 189, 244, 247, 277 Charles I, King, xv, 2–8, 10, 11, 19, 29–31, 34, 36, 37, 44, 51, 53, 55, 57–61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 75, 78, 81–83, 85–91, 98, 102, 103, 116, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 137, 139, 145, 146, 156, 161, 162, 168, 176, 181, 186, 187, 200–206, 208, 211, 213, 215, 216, 223–228, 230, 235, 236, 242, 244–247, 252, 254, 256, 257 Charles II, King, 28, 31, 49, 52, 58, 60–63, 72–74, 82–84, 97, 131, 171, 187, 188, 197, 205–207, 214, 215, 220, 235, 237, 241–244, 251–255, 257–259 Chester, 9, 10, 52, 67, 104, 198, 266 Christian Brothers, 63, 64 Church, Alfred J., 14, 78, 84, 104, 244, 257, 277 Churchill, Winston, 58, 93 Church, Samuel Harden, 38, 77, 102, 105, 154, 190, 216, 278 Clarendon, Earl of (Edward Hyde), 5, 27, 28, 30, 74, 131, 244 Clare, Randall, 62, 63 Clonmel, 63, 64, 220 Coates, Ben, 2, 45, 185 Cobban, J. MacLaren, xviii, 17, 77, 156, 205, 278 Colchester, 11, 29, 67, 78, 105, 179, 180, 194, 213, 235, 266 Collingwood, Christopher, 54 Confederates, 62, 66, 203, 211–214 Cooke, W. Bourne, 21, 146, 181, 191, 279 Cooper, Abraham, 53

INDEX

Cooper, Mrs Frank, 79, 83, 96, 193, 204, 236, 255, 257, 277 Copley, John Singleton, 53 Cornford, Leslie Cope, 17, 278 Covenant(ers), 9, 11, 17, 21, 33, 34, 40, 52, 59–61, 66, 76, 101, 138, 145, 150, 160, 162, 183, 192, 197, 201, 203–207, 212 Cowen, Lawrence, 21, 79, 225, 279 Cressy, David, 4, 43, 44, 87, 88, 147 Crofts, Ernest, 53, 54, 225 Cromwell, Henry, 50 Cromwell, Oliver, xvi, xvii, 8, 9, 11, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34–38, 42, 44, 49, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61–65, 67, 68, 72, 74, 78, 79, 81, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93–98, 101, 102, 105, 109, 112, 117, 125, 129, 144, 146–148, 157, 158, 162–166, 169, 171, 180, 185, 188, 191, 193, 204–208, 213–218, 220, 225, 229–231, 233–235, 237, 242–244, 246, 248, 249, 251–254, 258, 261, 265, 271 Cromwell, Richard, 80, 156, 218 Cromwell, Sir Oliver, 4 D Darby, John, 28 Davies, Stevie, 4, 124, 125, 139 Davis, Lindsey, 3, 45, 80, 99, 104, 121, 122, 124, 138, 139, 148, 160, 166, 168, 186, 193, 216, 225, 235, 245, 246, 266, 281 Dean, Christopher Page, 62, 263 Deary, Terry, 57 Defoe, Daniel, xviii, 2, 17, 19, 29, 30, 100, 120, 178, 277 De Groot, Jerome, xvi, 55, 71, 109, 110, 114, 119, 120, 123, 134, 261

309

Derby, Countess of, 104, 134, 135 Dickens, Charles, 34, 35 Dix, Marie Beulah, 16, 20, 113, 116, 118, 120, 126, 127, 129, 159, 178, 179, 191, 268, 278 Drogheda, 63–65, 94, 105, 187, 190, 207, 213, 214, 217, 219 Du Maurier, Daphne, 18, 42, 76, 99, 115, 138, 245, 279 Durston, Christopher, 46, 146, 176, 177, 182, 230, 240, 283 E Edgehill, Battle of, 8, 16, 55, 72, 85, 92, 99–101, 116, 143, 177, 183 Elizabeth, Princess, 73 England, xvi, xviii, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 31, 35, 40, 44, 51, 52, 54, 57–62, 64, 66, 67, 73, 74, 81–84, 86, 90, 94, 99, 116, 119, 144–151, 154, 156–158, 164, 166, 187, 188, 190, 193, 197–204, 206–209, 211–213, 215–219, 223–225, 228, 231, 234, 237, 239, 242, 243, 245, 253, 255, 257, 259, 260, 262, 265 English Civil Wars, xv–xviii, 1, 13, 17, 19, 22, 25, 29, 31, 43, 45, 53, 56, 57, 61, 66, 100, 109, 111, 125, 126, 133, 134, 143, 150, 151, 175, 177, 182, 191, 197, 265, 268 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), 7, 8, 100 Evans, Jemahl, 43, 45, 101, 117, 130, 185, 281 Evans, Jessica, 67 Evans, Margaret Cooper, 21, 45, 99, 282 Everett-Green, E., 73, 97, 278 Execution of Charles I, 150, 179, 225

310

INDEX

F Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 9–11, 18, 42, 67, 72, 73, 78, 84, 85, 93, 94, 101, 102, 111, 117, 133, 134, 146, 224, 226, 229, 248 Falkland, Viscount (Lucius Cary), 163–164 Farr, David, 78 Fenn, George Maville, 176, 278 Fielding, Basil, 177 Filmer, Sir Robert, 176 Firth, C.H., 10, 38, 39 Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 88, 217, 278 Fletcher, J.S., 21, 181, 191, 278 Flintham, David, 44 Forrest, A.S., 57 Fortescue, G.K., 39 Fox, George, 74, 81, 170, 171 France, 2, 4–6, 11, 75, 110, 132, 187, 189, 193, 205, 212, 214, 219, 237, 244 Fraser, Antonia, 125, 134 G Gardiner, S.R., 38 Gardner, Sally, 44, 148, 281 Geneva Bible, 3, 144 George I, King, 29, 30 Gibson, Elizabeth, 43, 99, 112, 266, 281 Goring, Lord (George), 76, 111, 113, 237 Grant, James, 2, 17, 34, 88, 95, 206, 277 Green, J.R., 34 Greenwell, Dora, 18, 129 Gregg, Pauline, 4, 43, 80 Gregory, Philippa, 91, 115, 155, 281, 282 Grenville, Sir Richard, 19, 42, 76, 115, 138, 180, 245 Gresley, W., 31, 32, 277

Grice, Frederick, 101, 110, 147, 280 Guizot, François, 30 H Halliday, F.E., 57, 59, 61, 238, 239 Hamilton, John A., 38, 119, 190, 194, 200, 278 Hampden, John, 6–8, 20, 29, 34, 74, 78, 93, 160, 162, 163, 181, 184, 185 Hardinge, Frances, 91, 124, 148, 167, 266, 282 Hargreaves, Isabella, 45, 192, 282 Harley, Brilliana, 134, 150 Harley, Robert, 134, 159, 163 Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia, 157, 183, 280 Hart, J. Wesley, 18, 38, 97, 191, 279 Hartog, Jan de, 81, 172, 280 Hayens, Herbert, 18, 84, 86, 103, 113, 114, 279 Hay, Lucy, 131 Hearn, Julie, 121, 281 Heffer, Simon, xvii Henrietta Maria, 4, 6, 72, 74–76, 88, 123, 125, 133 Henty, G.A., xviii, 16, 20, 34, 83, 87, 88, 97, 103, 176, 187, 194, 206, 207, 217, 225, 238, 242, 277 Herbert, Henry William, 31, 32, 95, 277 Herbert, Sir Thomas, 28 Heyer, Georgette, xviii, 16, 21, 41, 73, 83, 279 Heylyn, Peter, 240 Hilkey, Judy, 118 Hill, Christopher, xi, 42, 94, 144 Hines, Joanna, 115, 281 Hinkson, H.A., 75, 154, 218, 278 Hirst, Derek, 43, 144, 151, 240, 241 Holles, Denzil, 7, 8, 146 Hollindale, Peter, 13, 14, 17

INDEX

Hope, Elizabeth, 21, 96, 98, 191, 237, 279 Hotham, Sir John, viii Howell, James, 27 Hughes, Ann, 43, 75, 110, 113, 123, 124, 128, 132–134, 136, 139, 176, 189 Hutchinson, Lucy, 37, 98, 123, 133, 150, 162, 254 Hutton, Ronald, xv, 43, 85 Hyde, Susan. See Clarendon, Earl of (Edward Hyde)

I iconoclasm, 86, 158, 159, 163, 167, 237 Independents, 9, 10, 21, 34, 38, 94, 121, 130, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 156, 161, 162, 164–168, 181, 185, 205, 212, 227, 229, 230, 248, 267, 268 Ireland, Irish, vii, 6–11, 55, 57, 59, 62, 66, 67, 75, 79, 94, 99, 147, 148, 154, 190, 197, 198, 205, 209–211, 213–217, 219, 220, 228, 233, 235, 247, 251, 260, 265 Ireton, Henry, 73, 74, 78, 79, 93, 96, 98, 162, 193, 248, 252 Irwin, Margaret, 41, 72, 74, 77, 102, 205, 279

J Jacobs, Emma, 121, 170 James I, King, 1, 2, 61, 62, 64, 88, 144, 146, 199, 209, 218 James II, King (formerly Duke of York), xv, xviii, 27, 28, 31, 259–262 Jermyn, Henry, 76

311

Joyce, Cornet George, 10, 74, 79, 80, 93 Joyce, P.W., 62–64 K Kelsey, Sean, 46, 229, 230, 247 Keynes, Helen Mary, 72, 75, 77, 89, 103, 104, 279 King James Bible, 3, 143 Kitson, Frank, 44, 92, 112, 118, 119 Knight, Frank, 42, 50, 87, 101, 111, 113, 115, 135, 138, 183, 185, 280 L Lacey, Andrew, 89, 90 Lambert, John, 94, 95, 166, 207, 251 Landseer, Charles, 53 Lane, Jane (author), xviii, 3, 4, 16, 31, 39, 41, 72, 73, 76, 80, 83, 102–104, 112, 113, 117, 120, 121, 134, 135, 148, 152, 157, 158, 166, 182, 183, 227, 232–235, 241, 242, 253, 259–262, 266, 279, 280 Lane, Jane (17th century character), 73 Lang, Andrew, 59, 60 Langman, Pete, xviii, 46, 82, 131, 244, 282 Lang, Timothy, xvi, 26, 31, 96, 156 Lathom House, 104, 134 Laud, Archbishop William, 3, 6, 9, 51, 74, 77, 116, 145, 160, 162, 163, 190, 240 Leeson, Robert, xvii, 16, 25, 27, 81, 265, 280 Legon, Edward, 27, 51, 254, 257 Leicester, 2, 67, 87, 102, 114, 193, 267 Lennox, Duke of (Esmé Stewart), 200

312

INDEX

Levellers, xvi, xvii, 18, 39, 40, 45, 55, 78, 82, 85, 93, 94, 96, 121, 122, 124, 130, 137, 212, 228, 230, 231, 233, 235 Lilburne, John, 74, 80, 81, 92, 130, 227, 230, 231 Lindsay, Jack, 17, 18, 40, 41, 46, 80, 116, 119, 121, 137, 148, 154, 157, 160, 165, 166, 183, 186, 216, 226, 227, 230, 232, 239, 265, 266, 268, 279 Lisle, Sir George, 11, 78, 79 Logue, M.J., 43, 45, 46, 85, 101, 112, 127, 148, 160, 161, 281, 282 London, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 18, 31, 44, 49, 50, 54, 62, 73, 77, 82, 100, 104, 112, 125, 128, 136, 137, 147, 166, 167, 181, 185, 198, 201, 202, 206, 211, 217, 226, 228, 232, 234, 238–240, 242, 244, 248, 249, 252, 259, 263, 266, 267 Lucas, Sir Charles, 11, 78, 79 Ludlow, Edmund, 28–30, 34, 36, 80, 156 Lyall, Edna, 16, 20, 37, 38, 77, 78, 85, 90, 97, 112, 116, 120, 157, 159, 162, 163, 181, 184, 185, 190, 194, 278 Lynch, John, 85, 104, 130, 193 M Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 35, 37, 262 Mackenna, R.W., 21, 40, 156, 201, 279 MacLean, Fitzroy, 61 MacLean, S.G., 43, 46, 281 Malcolm, Joyce, 211 Malins, Miranda, xviii, 46, 74, 235, 282

Malone, Edward, 53 Manchester, Earl of (Edward Montagu), 92, 101, 236 Marshall, Bernard, 10, 17, 18, 21, 40, 80, 100, 114, 116, 119, 160, 181, 193, 194, 204, 226, 248, 265, 268, 279 Marshall, Emma, 16, 84, 89, 181, 278 Marshall, H.E., 34, 53, 57–60, 265 Marston Moor, Battle of, 9, 72, 84, 99 Maryatt, Captain Frederick, 17, 20, 32, 38, 83, 110, 133, 137, 178, 186, 226, 232, 236, 244 Maxwell, Constantia, 62, 64 McCann, Maria, 44, 281 McChesney, Dora, 18, 21, 86, 129, 181, 193, 278 McDonald, Ronald, 39, 278 McDonnell, Randal, 105, 213, 219, 278 McMahon, Sean, 62, 65 Meikle, H.W., 59, 60 Milton, John, 22, 28, 227 Mitchell, Margaret, 33, 138 Monck, George, 31, 59, 83, 85, 155, 206, 207, 219, 251–253 Montrose, Marquess of (James Graham), 76, 203 Moore, F. Franfort, 220, 278 Moore, H. Kingsmill, 62, 64 Mountain, Fiona, 76, 281 Muggleton, Lodowick, 166 Mytens, Daniel, 4 N Nantwich, 2, 9, 43, 46, 55, 105, 193 Naseby, Battle of, 72, 84, 85, 99, 102, 232 Naylor, James, 168, 234 Neufeld, Matthew, 27, 146, 152, 267

INDEX

Newark, 9, 10, 67, 104, 266 Newcastle, Earl, Marquess and then Duke of (William Cavendish), 77, 101, 132, 201, 237, 238, 243 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 7 New Model Army, 16, 42, 67, 93, 102, 119, 146 Norfolk, Lawrence, 18, 43, 44, 103, 121, 135, 138, 186, 193, 281

O O’Brien, Brendan, 62, 65 O’Donovan, Hallie, xvi, 40 O’Neill, Hugh, 209 O’Neill, Owen Roe, 211, 212, 219 Oram, Richard, 61 Ormonde (Earl, Marquess, then Duke) (James Butler), 211 Ó Siochrú, Micheál, 94, 213 Overton, Richard, 81, 124, 139, 227, 230 Oxenham, Elsie Jane, 17, 198, 279 Oxford, 8, 10, 51, 73, 78, 86, 102, 104, 111, 120, 127, 148, 149, 151, 153, 179, 191, 198, 241, 244, 283

P Palmer, Ned, xvi, 65 Parliamentarian(s), viii, xv, xvi, 4, 8, 11, 17, 18, 20–22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37–39, 41, 42, 45, 51, 54, 59, 63–65, 67–69, 73, 74, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90, 93, 94, 100–105, 110, 112, 114, 116, 119–123, 126, 129–131, 134, 136, 137, 143, 147, 158, 175, 176, 178–185, 187–189, 191–193, 198, 203, 204, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 226, 232,

313

235, 236, 241, 243–248, 254, 262, 265–267 Paterson, Arthur, 60, 97, 116, 120, 155, 157, 159, 164, 165, 278 Patterson, Judy, 59, 61 Peach, L. Du Garde, 57–59 Peart, Hendry, 118, 121, 180, 236, 280 Pease, Howard, 81, 148, 155, 160, 171, 172, 206, 278 Peck, Imogen, 51 Phillimore, Catherine Mary, 114, 120, 277 Phillips, C.B., 193, 238, 239 Plaidy, Jean, 72, 76, 82, 254, 280 Poole, Elizabeth, 124 Pratchett, Sir Terry, xvii, 25 Presbyterian(s), 10, 38, 82, 131, 145, 146, 149, 150, 155–157, 160–163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 202–205, 210, 227, 229, 232, 233, 247, 252, 268 Preston, Thomas, 212 Pride, Colonel Sir Thomas, 11, 252 Protestant(s), 3, 29, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 75, 81, 82, 145, 155, 158, 165, 177, 206, 210, 215, 245, 254, 259 Prynne, William, 6, 110, 130 Purkiss, Diane, 41, 44, 45, 111–113, 145, 177 Putney debates, 10, 18, 21, 39, 40, 67, 181 Pym, John, 7–9, 74, 81, 93, 131, 146, 163

Q Quaker(s), 35, 81, 121, 124, 125, 145, 147–149, 161, 164, 166–173, 229, 247, 252, 255

314

INDEX

R Radicals, viii, xvi, xvii, 4, 28, 33–35, 42, 74, 79, 80, 84, 90, 116, 119, 121, 124, 126, 130, 136, 153, 163–167, 169, 170, 172, 183, 192, 206, 224, 226, 228, 229, 248, 251, 256, 268 Rainsborough, Thomas, 82, 223, 230, 248 Ransley, Peter, 45, 185, 281 Ranters, 121, 166 Reid, Stuart, 199, 228 Restoration, xv, xvi, xviii, 5, 25, 28, 31, 38, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 62, 64, 66, 76, 77, 83, 84, 93, 95, 117, 136, 161, 166, 168, 172, 173, 186, 188, 189, 236, 240, 242, 247, 252–258, 261, 268 Richards, H. Graham, 75, 279 Riley, Stella, 45, 105, 192, 281 Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista, 212 Roberton, Margaret, 168, 173 Robinson, Alan, xv, xvi, 49 Roundheads, xvi, 21, 29, 31, 32, 105, 110, 118, 133, 153, 182, 192, 218, 268 Rowles, Robin, 44, 232 Royal Oak, 49, 50, 52, 257 Royal Oak Day, 50 Royle, Trevor, 43, 202, 207, 214 Rupert, Prince, 8, 18, 21, 30, 51, 67, 72, 73, 76, 85–87, 100, 104, 111, 113, 114, 117, 127, 129, 181, 183, 187, 193, 219 Rushworth, John, 147 S Sanders, John, 65, 81, 243, 244 Savery, Constance, 75, 90, 128, 179, 185, 279 Scotland, xv, 5, 6, 9, 11, 21, 38, 52, 57, 59–61, 65–68, 76, 85, 94,

99, 105, 143, 145, 148, 156, 171, 192, 198–209, 228, 234, 235, 240, 244, 247, 251, 258, 260, 265 Scott, Sir Walter, 147, 148, 206 Sealed Knot, 55, 68, 82, 166, 183, 234, 242–244 Sharpe, Kevin, 5, 44, 87, 88, 90, 180 Shay, Mortimer, 82 Shearman, James A., 6, 18, 190, 217, 278 Sidney, Algernon, 28, 29 Smith, Horace, 31–33, 83, 95, 116, 120, 244, 258 Softly, Barbara, 22, 42, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122, 132, 189, 194, 280 Somerville, John, 16, 111, 147, 148, 157, 178 Stevenson, David, 6, 200 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 171, 259 Stewart, Esmé, 200 St. John, Arnold, 43 St. John, Elizabeth, 185, 282 Stoyle, Mark, 102, 125 Strafford, Earl of, vii, 4, 6, 7, 18, 62, 67, 74, 89, 131, 163, 190, 203, 210, 225. See also Wentworth, Thomas Stringer, Constance, 128 Stuart, Alison, 192, 281 Stuart, Katherine (Lady d’Aubigny), 128 Sutcliff, Rosemary, 19, 40, 42, 73, 83, 85, 101, 112, 115, 122, 133, 135, 176, 178, 188, 194, 226, 253, 280 Swinfen, Ann, 21, 123, 136, 138, 228, 281

INDEX

T Tait, Archbishop Archibald Campbell, 149, 150 Thornycroft, Hamo, 54 Thurloe, John, 74, 81–83, 131 Toft, Thomas, 50 Toland, John, 28 Trapnel, Anna, 150 Trease, Geoffrey, xi, xvii, xviii, 1, 16, 17, 19, 25, 26, 40, 42, 73, 77, 83, 100, 119, 120, 122, 135, 160, 172, 178, 181, 182, 185, 194, 199, 201, 247, 255, 256, 262, 263, 265–267, 279–281 Turnbull, Ann, 103, 115, 122, 136, 168, 173, 192, 199, 281 Turnham Green, 8, 232, 266 Tyler, L.C., 46, 82, 83, 99, 139, 167, 194, 244, 282 U Underwood, Lucy, 180 V Vallance, Edward, xvi, 27, 254 Van Dyck, Anthony, 87 Verney, Sir Edmund, 5, 101, 112, 138, 177, 183 Vincent, Alana, 50, 268 Vipont, Charles (Elfrida), 17, 112, 156, 168, 172, 238, 240 W Wales, 5, 9, 11, 35, 57, 66–68, 74, 99, 193, 198, 199, 265 Wallace, Martin, 62, 65

315

Waller, Sir WIlliam, 123, 124, 175 Walters, Lucy, 72 Wanklyn, Malcolm, 100 Warburton, Eliot, 32 Warwick, Sir Philip, 28 Watson, Sally, 42, 121, 226, 280 Wedgwood, C.V., 42, 224, 228 Welch, Ronald, 17, 19, 43, 91, 103, 111, 113, 115, 120, 178, 188, 199, 280 Wentworth, Thomas, 6, 18, 154, 190, 203, 210, 217. See also Strafford, Earl of Westerman, Percy, 14, 17, 39, 80, 110, 114, 255, 256, 279 Wexford, 63–65, 94, 213, 214 White, Leslie Turner, 98, 208 Wild, Benjamin L., 53 Willard, Barbara, 17, 40, 135, 181, 184, 194, 246, 280 William and Mary, 215, 258–262 Wilton, Roger, 91, 105, 204, 281 Winsor, Kathleen, 136, 279 Winstanley, Gerard, 80, 121 Woolrych, Austin, 43, 94, 238 Worden, Blair, 4, 6, 28–30, 34–37, 39, 40, 241 Worsley, Lucy, 77 Wynne, May, 22, 39, 128, 192, 279

Y Yeames, William Frederick, 53, 54 Yonge, Charlotte M., 14, 17, 20, 35, 38, 86, 116, 120, 137, 148, 151–153, 158, 166, 176, 178, 179, 216, 236, 237, 239, 278 Young, Charlotte, 123, 237, 239