Battle-scarred

Mortality, medical care and military welfare in the British Civil Wars

David J Appleby, Andrew Hopper, David J. Appleby, David J. Appleby, Andrew Hopper

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526144850
  9781526124807
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526124821
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: British History

Battle-scarred investigates the human costs of the British Civil Wars. Through a series of varied case studies it examines the wartime experience of disease, burial, surgery and wounds, medicine, hospitals, trauma, military welfare, widowhood, desertion, imprisonment and charity. The percentage population loss in these conflicts was far higher than that of the two World Wars, which renders the Civil Wars arguably the most unsettling experience the British people have ever undergone. The volume explores its themes from new angles, demonstrating how military history can broaden its perspective and reach out to new audiences.

Part I

Mortality

Chapter 1

Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars

Ian Atherton

The idea that ‘military care’ extends beyond death to the treatment of the war dead is not new, though the forms it has taken have varied over time. Roger Boyle’s 1677 military treatise advised a victorious general to look after the wounded and prisoners, and see ‘his Dead honourably buried’. Similar ideas can be found in a number of sixteenth-century military manuals, and can be traced back at least as far as the Graeco-Roman world.¹ While the absence of discussion of burial in most manuals is striking, some did advise that burial of the dead was both a moral duty and good policy, since soldiers would be more likely to risk their own lives if they believed that they too would receive an honourable burial.² Such claims drew upon concerns for a decent burial, which scholars have noted as a significant pressure in early modern society, reflected in popular concerns about burial and funerals, as well as in the denial of burial in consecrated ground as a punishment for a variety of criminals and social outcasts from excommunicates to suicides.³ ‘Decent’ or ‘proper’ burial meant interment in a designated burial place (usually a church or churchyard) in a shroud or coffin, usually in a single grave, with the body laid on its back and orientated east-west, accompanied by customary religious and social rites. Many Protestant writers tried hard to square the circle of biblical precedent for decent burial, alongside the teachings of reformed theology which were often allergic to ideas of sacred space, and general Christian ideas that the fate of the body after death did not affect the passage of the soul in the afterlife. Typically, Protestants resorted to claims that decent burial showed a proper regard for others and, as John Dunster, one of Archbishop Abbot’s chaplains, put it, ‘manifesteth our Faith and Hope of the Resurrection’. Failure to accord a corpse proper burial was variously criticised as ‘inhumane and barbarous crueltie’, ‘impiety’, or as treating Christians like carrion or swine, unless it was a deliberate act to show ‘great indignation against sin’.⁴ Wills reveal that hopes for proper burial extended to the lower levels of society, with testators setting out their desired burial location, or at least requesting ‘decent’ or ‘Christian burial’.⁵

Elite burials during the civil wars reflected these ideas, continuing pre-war customs. Most spectacularly, the earl of Essex’s funeral in 1646 was on a quasi-royal scale,⁶ but elaborate heraldic funerals were not uncommon in war-time Oxford. Richard Symonds recorded five, such as that of Lord John Stewart, fatally wounded at Cheriton in 1644. His body, carried ‘in an open chariot with his Coates of Armes’ and accompanied by heralds and the queen’s troop of horse, processed into Oxford where it was met by the senior herald and the king’s troop of horse; the body was borne into Christ Church by colonels, with other officers carrying his armour; burial was on the south side of the quire next to the grave of his brother Lord D’Aubigny.⁷ Officers killed on the battlefield might hope to have their bodies recovered for burial in the family vault, as Captain John Horsey of Clifton Maybank, killed while besieging neighbouring Sherborne Castle, was given a funeral ‘after a martiall manner’ and buried in Sherborne abbey among his ancestors in August 1645.⁸ Death at a much greater distance from the family vault need pose no obstacle to the elite. When the earl of Lichfield was killed at Rowton Heath in September 1645 his body was marched by the victorious parliamentarians with a guard of horse and foot to a pre-arranged point where it was met by a comparable royalist military guard who processed into Chester garrison; the body was then embalmed awaiting collection. The earl’s master of horse, a prisoner at Nantwich, obtained a pass to bury his lord and, after the surrender of Chester in February 1646, carried the corpse to Oxford where it was buried on 1 March in Christ Church cathedral next to his two brothers, lords Stewart and D’Aubigny.⁹ Embalming the bodies of noble casualties to allow burial later was not uncommon: the body of Lord Brooke, killed while besieging Lichfield cathedral on 2 March 1643, was embalmed by the family’s surgeon, James Cooke, probably at Coventry, and buried in the family vault at Warwick a few weeks later.¹⁰ The social convention of fulfilling the deceased’s wishes about burial placed a heavy burden on others that only the most extreme circumstances obviated. Bishop Robert Wright of Coventry and Lichfield died in Eccleshall Castle (one of his episcopal residences) in the summer of 1643, requesting burial in either Lichfield cathedral or Wadham college. When the royalist garrison fled in August on news of a parliamentarian advance, they took very little of the castle’s provisions with them, but they did attempt to take Wright’s corpse, only to abandon it on the drawbridge in panic as the enemy neared.¹¹

If such proceedings were exceptional, officers might still expect that their bodies would be identified and given decent burial in the nearest church or churchyard. The morning after Marston Moor, the royalist prisoner Sir Charles Lucas was made to walk the battlefield to identify the bodies of royalist officers from among the dead lying on the field, all of which had already been stripped by the victors: one he recognised by a bracelet woven from his lover’s hair, while other gentlemen were said to be readily distinguishable by their ‘smooth, white Skins’.¹² A dead officer could expect a military funeral: Francis Markham’s military treatise had described the formalities of such a send-off, with the ensign-bearer trailing his colours behind the corpse and then tossing them up and displaying them after the burial.¹³ How far such rituals were followed is not known, but where financial accounts of officer funerals survive, they suggest elaborate affairs, such as the £11 3s 2d expended by Sir William Brereton’s forces on the funeral of Major Robert Jackson, killed at Farndon Bridge in February 1645.¹⁴ Just as elite prisoners were exchanged, so were their dead bodies.¹⁵ A further sign that elite corpses were usually treated with the same respect during the war as in peacetime are the consequences of those dramatic occasions where such respect was not shown. When the body of Sir Edmund Verney was not found after the battle of Edgehill, stories began circulating that his ghost stalked the battlefield.¹⁶ The lack of proper burial for Verney was accidental, but for the earl of Northampton, killed at Hopton Heath, it was initially deliberate, and provoked an outcry. Sir John Gell tried to ransom his corpse in exchange for the Parliament’s captured artillery. The outraged royalists refused, and though the earl’s body was not returned, Gell was forced to make some concessions to sentiment, taking the body to Derby, having it embalmed and then buried eleven weeks later in the vault of the earls of Devonshire in All Saints’ church.¹⁷ Pre-war practices for the elite continued in commemoration, with monuments and tombs recalling their service and sacrifice, though these were often not erected until after the Restoration. A memorial to Colonel Richard Bolles, killed at Alton in December 1643, with an inscription lauding his civil-war service, was erected by a relative in Winchester cathedral only in 1689. Even the middling sort might remember and commemorate their relatives who died in the wars. Nathaniel Friend, yeoman and schoolmaster, sought out the grave of his brother John, a parliamentarian quartermaster who had died of smallpox in 1645, paid for a gravestone in 1676 and visited it two years later.¹⁸

What of the corpses of the ordinary dead? In theory the same peacetime principles of decent burial applied. An army that made an orderly retreat from a defeat typically carried away its dead and wounded together in carts;¹⁹ sometimes a truce was arranged between the two sides for the recovery of the dead, particularly during a siege where the opposing armies remained facing one another, as at Lyme Regis in 1644.²⁰ Relatives might search the bodies for their loved ones, as Sarah Frampton hunted through the night for her four brothers among the dead clubmen after the battle of Hambledon Hill in August 1645.²¹ War, however, modified the customary treatment of the dead. Bodies left on a battlefield, the wounded and the dead, were routinely stripped, often within hours, sometimes even in the midst of a battle. Sir Adrian Scrope, left for dead on the battlefield of Edgehill, later explained his survival on the grounds that he had been promptly stripped, for the frost that night staunched the bleeding of his naked body.²² Stripping the dead and dying was mainly an act of plunder used, as at Naseby, to reward the victorious troops, but occasionally items of military or propaganda value turned up, such as the crucifix and rosaries reportedly found on dead royalists at Caversham Bridge in May 1643.²³ When parliamentarians quit the siege of Banbury in September 1644, they desired to leave with the bodies of their dead; the defenders agreed, on condition that the plunder of all corpses lying within pistol shot of the castle walls should belong to them. They stripped the bodies and delivered them to the town’s market place for collection; among the booty for the royalists were 120 arms and a collection of scaling ladders.²⁴ Prompt stripping of the dead, of course, rendered any attempts to distinguish friend from foe much harder.

The most detailed account we have of clearing an early modern battlefield comes not from the civil wars but from the battle of Sedgemoor, 1685. According to the parish register of Westonzoyland, only sixteen royal troops were reported killed: five of them were buried in the church, the remaining eleven in the churchyard; none were named. Monmouth’s followers appear to have been buried where they fell. Captain Edward Dummer of the royal artillery recalled that some of the rebels were buried by the victorious soldiers on the battlefield, while those who died as they fled were buried by the countryfolk. Adam Wheeler, drummer in the Wiltshire militia, claimed that the local inhabitants gave an account to the minister and churchwardens of Westonzoyland of 1,384 dead and buried, along with many more as yet unfound in the cornfields. Nevertheless, they noted only ‘about 300’ of Monmouth’s forces killed ‘upon the spott’ in their parish register. Wheeler also claimed to have seen 174 dead rebels lying in one heap about to be buried by locals in a pit.²⁵ Andrew Paschall, rector of neighbouring Chedzoy, provided a detailed account of the battle, including a map which noted, ‘Slain in the moor and buried in one pit 195’.²⁶ A week after the battle a royal army officer, Colonel Percy Kirke, ordered local parishes to impress plough-teams and men, at their own expense, to rebury many interred on the moor in a shallow mass grave by erecting ‘a mount’ over them.²⁷ It seems likely that the forced employment of locals by the victorious army hastily to bury the dead where they fell was commonplace in the civil wars as it was at Sedgemoor forty years later; certainly, it is known that local inhabitants buried the dead at Edgehill and Marston Moor, and were apparently ordered to do so after the first battle of Newbury.²⁸

The application of customary principles about decent burial becam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction: David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper
• Part I: Mortality
• Part II: Medical care
• Part III: The hidden human costs
• Conclusion: David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX