Women All on Fire

The Women of the English Civil War

Alison Plowden

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780752467245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Using personal accounts from both Royalist and Parliamentarian supporters to reveal the untold story of the women of the English Civil War, Alison Plowden illustrates how the conflict affected the lives of women and how they coped with unfamiliar responsibilities. Some displayed a courage so far above their sex as to suprise and disconcert their men. The Royalists included Queen Henrietta, who went abroad to raise money for the cause, and Mary Bankes who held Corfe Castle for the king with her daughters, heaving stones and hot embers over the battlements at the attacking Roundheads. On the opposing side, Lady Brillia Harley guarded Brampton Bryan Castle in Herefordshire against the Royalists and Anne Fairfax, wife of Cromwell's northern general, who was taken prisoner by the Duke of Newcastle's troops after Adwalton Moor. This is a fascinating look at the little reported, yet valient actions, of the women caught up in this tumultuous age.

Three

‘As His Shaddow’

I thought myself a queen, and my husband so glorious a crown that I more valued myself to be call’d by
his name than borne a princess.

Ann, Lady Fanshawe

In the late summer of 1643 the royalists were riding high. The king was now master of the west. From Cornwall to Dorset and Wiltshire only a few isolated pockets of resistance remained and the whole of Wales, apart from a corner of Pembrokeshire, was ‘at his devotion’. The Earl of Newcastle still controlled Yorkshire and more of Nottingham and Lincolnshire than Parliament did, while Parliament was no stronger in the north-west than it had been at the beginning of the year, at least according to Lord Clarendon.

Parliamentary morale was low, and in the first week of August the peace party in the Lords felt brave enough to draw up a set of propositions for a negotiated settlement which the Commons agreed to consider. This brought an immediate reaction from the City and the pulpits. The Lord Mayor organized a petition protesting against any talk of peace and the usual rumours about hordes of Irish papists poised to invade began to circulate. On 7 August a crowd about 5,000 strong came flocking to Westminster shouting ‘No peace! No peace!’ and the Commons voted to reject the Lords’ propositions.

Counter-demonstrations followed, culminating on 9 August when a mob of women, clamouring for peace, swarmed into Palace Yard. They hammered on the door of the Commons chamber, yelling ‘Give us those traitors that were against peace!’ and ‘Give us that dog Pym!’ When the militia men on guard tried to disperse them by firing powder, the women responded with stones and brickbats, so that in the end a troop of horse had to be called in to restore order. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the parliamentary diarist, disapproved. ‘No man can excuse the indiscreet violence of these women’, he wrote, ‘but the remedy used against them by the procurement of John Pym and some others, who were enemies to all kind of peace, was most cruel and barbarous; for, not content to have them suppressed by the ordinary foot guard, which had been sufficient, there were divers horsemen called down, who hunted the said women up and down the back Palace Yard, and wounded them with their swords and pistols with no less inhumanity than if they had been brute beasts, of which wounds some of the poor women afterwards died.’ Estimates of the casualty numbers varied widely. Ten were killed and more than a hundred injured, according to the Venetian ambassador. Other accounts say two men killed and a few women injured, but one unlucky maidservant, ‘that had nothing to do in the tumult’, was shot dead by a trooper – by accident, he afterwards claimed – as she crossed St Margaret’s churchyard on her way to draw water.¹

The incident was quickly taken up by the propaganda machines on both sides of the political divide. To one, the protesters were respectable wives wearing white ribbons in their hats, who came with their children in their arms to cry for peace; to the other, a mere rabble of whores, bawds, oyster-wives, and dirty tattered sluts, ‘the very scum of the scum of the Suburbs’. It was even suggested that the whole affair had been got up by the royalists and that there had been men disguised in its ranks.

It is not impossible that there was an element of ‘rentacrowd’ in the women’s protest but, although most Londoners were solidly parliamentarian in sympathy, an undercurrent of discontent and disillusion certainly existed. The general disruption of trade and communications had led to high prices and shortages (fuel was in particularly short supply) and those ordinary housewives uninterested in the finer points of the conflict, especially those left to cope on their own in the gloomy wartime city, were understandably bewildered and resentful. The individual complaints of such women were, for obvious reasons, seldom recorded, but Susan Rodway’s often quoted letter to her ‘most dear and loving husband’, a trained soldier away serving in Colonel Warren’s Westminster ‘Red’ militia regiment, surely speaks for very many of them. ‘I pray you to come whome [home], ife youe cane cum saffly [safely]. I doo marfull that I cannot heere from you ass well other naybores [neighbours] do. I do desiere to heere from you as soone as youe cane. I pray youe to send me word when youe doo thenke youe shalt returne. You doe not consider I ame a loen woemane; I thought you woald never leve me thuse long togeder, so I rest evere praying for your savese [safest] returne …’ Poor Susan may have had a very long wait, for it seems only too probable that her husband was killed in one of the first assaults on the Marquis of Winchester’s stronghold at Basing House.²

There was, of course, never any question of peace in 1643, and John Pym, now mortally ill with the cancer which would kill him before the end of the year, was working against time to negotiate the treaty with the Presbyterian Scots which would ultimately decide the outcome of the Great Rebellion. Meanwhile, early in September, parliament received some much-needed encouragement when the arrival of the Earl of Essex had forced Rupert and the king to raise the siege of Gloucester.

Although at the time this seemed no more than a disappointing setback, the royalist failure at ‘that unfortunate obstinate town’ has often since been pinpointed as the moment in the war when the tide turned, and the king himself was seen to be in a despondent mood. There is a local tradition that as his army marched in the rain to camp on Painswick Hill, Charles stopped to rest, sitting on a stone by the roadside. When one of his young sons, ‘weary of their present life’, asked him if they were going home, he replied sadly, ‘I have no home to go to’.³

At Gloucester, as at most sieges, the women had taken an active part in the defence of the town, ‘lining the walls and repairing the breaches’. It was not unusual for women of the labouring class, well accustomed to hard manual work and every bit as tough as the men, to join in the digging and building of fortifications, but when London had been threatened the previous year women and girls of every class had turned out to help, and

Raised rampiers with their own soft hands

To put the enemy to stands;

From Ladies down to oyster-wenches

Labour’d like pioneers in trenches,

Fell to their pick-axes and tools,

And help’d the men to dig like moles.

The Lady Mayoress herself, together with such patriotic ‘lady-volunteer engineers’ as Lady Waller, Lady Middlesex, wife of the self-made millionaire Lionel Cranfield, and Lady Foster, wife of the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, were all said to have ‘resorted daily to the works, not as spectators but assisters in it.’⁴

At Bristol, where Mary Smith had carried provisions to the men on the out-works, she, with Joan Batten and the suitably named Dorothy Hazzard (a parson’s wife, incidentally) and ‘divers other women, and maydes, with the help of some men, did with Woolsackes and earth, stop up Froome gate … being the onely passage by which the Enemy must enter’. Two hundred women are also supposed to have gone to the Governor, Colonel Fiennes, offering excitedly to put themselves and their children in the mouth of the enemy cannon to ‘keepe off the shot from the Souldiers’, and in the recriminations which followed Fiennes’s surrender it was being said that the very women had shown more resolution in defence of the town.⁵

By contrast, in Gloucester, where the garrison was commanded by the young, energetic Edward Massey, morale remained high. John Corbet, citizen and preacher of God’s word, recalled that ‘no great complainings were heard in our streets … the usuall outcryes of women were not then heard, the weaknesse of whose sexe was not overcome by the terrible engines of warre’; while the town clerk commended ‘the cheerfull readinesse of yong and old of both sexes … to labour in the further fortification of our citie. Nay, our maids and others wrought daily without the works in the little mead, in fetching in turfe in the very faces of our enemies.’⁶

Up in Yorkshire, where Hull was currently under siege by the Earl of Newcastle’s army, a maidservant was killed while carrying earth for the fortifications – an upsetting event which temporarily discouraged her companions. But afterwards ‘all the women, even those of the best rank, strangers and others, willingly helped forward the workes’. Indeed, the parliamentarian tract declared enthusiastically, ‘we can boast of our Troops of Virgins, who shewed so much diligence, that many of our fortifications may deservedly be called the Virgins Workes’.⁷

When Lyme, on the Dorset coast, came under siege by Prince Maurice Palatine with a force of about 6,000 men in April 1644, the royalists did not expect to encounter any very great difficulty. In fact, they confidently expected to be able to reduce this ‘little vile fishing town’ between breakfast and dinnertime. But the inhabitants of Lyme, inflamed by the hell-fire sermons of their numerous ‘puritanical lecturers’, resisted with such courage and tenacity that, after two months, Maurice was finally forced to admit defeat and withdraw to Exeter ‘with some loss of reputation’.

A few of the better-off women had been evacuated by sea, but the great majority stayed to fight and share the danger with their menfolk. The parliamentary lawyer and commentator Bulstrode Whitelocke records that the besieged ‘beat back the enemy at three assaults and forced them to leave behind them their scaling ladders’, as well as taking more than a hundred prisoners, three great guns and Prince Maurice’s own colours. ‘In these assaults they relate that the women of the town would come into the thickest of the danger, to bring powder, bullet, and provisions to the men, encouraging them upon the works.’⁸

The heroism of the women of Lyme, who also acted as fire-watchers and look-outs, was commemorated in a long piece of doggerel verse, written by several hands and entitled Joanereidos, or Feminine Valor discovered in Western Women at the Siege of Lyme:

The Roman Capitoll by Geese was kept

They wake’t, poore foules, when the dull Souldiers slept.

Alas! who now keepes Lime? poore femall Cattell

Who wake all night, labour all day in Battell,

Geese, as a man may call them, who doe hisse

Against the opposers of our Countries blisse.

And by their seasonable noyse discover

Our Foes, when they the Workes are climing over.⁹

Casualties were heavy on both sides throughout the siege, and at one time the town’s water supply was said to have been coloured with blood. At about noon on Saturday 1 June the attackers had fired burning arrows dipped in tar or pitch into the west end of the town, and since the weather was hot and dry two streets of little thatched houses were soon alight. According to the diary kept by Mr Edward Drake of Colyton, if it had not been for a south wind which helped to blow the flames northwards and away from the town, the whole might have been destroyed; especially as ‘the enemy this while was not idle but played with their small shot amongst the fire very hotly to the intent the fire might not be quenched by any within the Town that should endeavour it’. But it took more than small shot to intimidate the men and women of Lyme, and being well provided with water and ‘wet hydes’, they were able to contain the damage. The enemy bombardment continued and a shot from a piece of ordnance killed two and caused a number of injuries, including one woman carrying a pail of water who lost both arms, and a maid whose hand was struck off. When this girl was asked how she would now manage to earn a living, she replied: ‘Truly I am glad with all my heart I had a hand to lose for Jesus Christ for Whose Cause I am as willing and ready to lose not only my other hand but my life also.’ This was considered to be ‘a sweet and most saint-like speech indeed’.¹⁰

There was, however, nothing sweet or saint-like about some other members of the sisterhood. A gruesome story is told concerning the fate of a poor old Irishwoman, presumably a camp-follower of one of the Irish regiments under Maurice’s command, who got left behind in the retreat. Wandering about in search of her friends, she was set upon by a group of women, who drove her through the streets to the seaside, stripped and robbed her and almost tore her to pieces, before, so tradition says, rolling her into the sea to drown in a hogshead stuck with nails.¹¹

It was not only parliamentarian women who helped to defend their towns. After William Waller’s attack on royalist Worcester was driven off in the summer of 1643, ‘the ordinary sort of women to the number of 400’ turned out armed with spades, shovels and mattocks and within a very few days, by ‘their own industry and free service’, had levelled the fortifications left by the enemy, ‘to prevent Sir William Waller’s approach near if he should return suddenly against them’. They also ‘and with their own hands sleighted the worke that had sheltered his Musketeirs, and the day after very orderly levelled all the ditches in and about the Town; which will make them so famous, that no honest maid of that Corporation shall hereafter want a good husband.’¹²

The English Civil War was a curiously domestic affair. Locally raised troops were always reluctant to serve outside their own familiar counties or neighbourhoods and would often take their wives and sweethearts along with them. Where it was felt they could be useful by nursing the wounded or freeing the men from menial chores, these women were encouraged and would, from time to time, dress in men’s clothes for convenience and protective colouring; although when the king got to hear about it, he was deeply shocked at such defiance of ‘Nature and Religion’, and issued orders that any woman who presumed to counterfeit her sex by wearing man’s apparel should be subject to the ‘severest punishment which Law and our displeasure shall inflict’.¹³

Some women not only dressed as men, but fought beside them on the battlefield. It is impossible to say with any kind of accuracy how widespread this practice was – for obvious reasons the ‘She-Souldiers’ did not advertise themselves – but it seems fair to assume that it was a pretty haphazard sort of business, to fill a gap in the ranks, to help out in an emergency, or even perhaps just for the hell of it. Certainly documented accounts of women acting as regular soldiers are very few and far between. The Scots were reported to have made use of females to swell their numbers when they marched on Newcastle in 1644, ‘and their women (good Ladyes) stood with blew caps among the men’. When Shelford near Nottingham was taken for the Parliament in 1645, one of the royalist prisoners is said to have been a woman corporal, and a popular ballad of 1655 told the story of a woman who had served for some years in her husband’s regiment under the name ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Note on Dates
• Chronology of Events
• Introduction
• Map Showing Principal Places and Battles of the English Civil War
• ‘Her She-Majesty Generalissima’
• Heroic Englishwomen
• ‘As His Shaddow’
• ‘A Courage Even Above Her Sex’
• ‘Love Loyalty’
• In a Free Republic
• Postscript
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright