Gender and the English Revolution

Ann Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136642487
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In this fascinating and unique study, Ann Hughes examines how the experience of civil war in seventeenth-century England affected the roles of women and men in politics and society; and how conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity were called into question by the war and the trial and execution of an anointed King. Ann Hughes combines discussion of the activities of women in the religious and political upheavals of the revolution, with a pioneering analysis of how male political identities were fractured by civil war. Traditional parallels and analogies between marriage, the family and the state were shaken, and rival understandings of sexuality, manliness, effeminacy and womanliness were deployed in political debate.

In a historiography dominated by military or political approaches, Gender and the English Revolution reveals the importance of gender in understanding the events in England during the 1640s and 1650s. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in women's history, feminism, gender or British History.

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INTRODUCTION

On 30 January 1649, Charles I, the anointed king of England, having been condemned ‘in the behalf of the people of England’ for treason and ‘other high crimes’, was publicly executed. The actions of women, and troubling disruptions of conventional assumptions about gender were alike prominent in this most traumatic drama of the English revolution. This was a political culture where all relationships of authority were seen as connected and mutually reinforcing. The ‘Homily’ on Disobedience, read often in parish churches, taught the conventional position: ‘Take away kings, princes, rulers … no man shall keep his wife, children or possessions in quietness’. Armed resistance of a monarch, followed by regicide, was thus bound to raise questions about family structures and the proper relationships between men and women. Charles's father, James VI of Scotland and I of England, had often stressed that kings were like gods, or fathers, or husbands, ‘a King is truly Parens patriae, the politique father of his people’, while Charles himself, in the Eikon Basilike, a revised version of his own meditations and justifications, issued in a startlingly effective propaganda move in the wake of the regicide, was presented both as a ‘politic parent’ to his people, and as a good husband and father to his queen and children. The republican poet John Milton retorted with an extensive exploration of the political damage done by ‘effeminate and uxorious magistrates’.

Many women were political actors during the crisis. As the General Council of Officers of the Army debated what to do with the king in late December and early January 1648–49, one Elizabeth Poole, an Abingdon woman close to radical religious groups, was admitted to their debates. She urged them to draw back from regicide in conventional, gendered language: ‘You never heard that a wife might put away her husband as he is the head of her body’. A wife might defend herself against a violent husband but she could not take his life; by analogy the parliament might defend itself against an aggressive monarch, and perhaps put him on trial, but neither regicide nor murder of a husband could be legitimate. Although Poole's message was ultimately unwelcome, it is remarkable that the army officers, the dominant political force in England following their forced purge of the Long Parliament, broke off their debates to listen to her. Poole was not the only woman to oppose the regicide; as is well known, Anne Fairfax, the formidable wife of the army's commander Sir Thomas, made two brave public interventions at the trial itself. When the roll-call of commissioners appointed to try the king was read out at the start of proceedings, and Fairfax was found to be absent, she cried out ‘he has more wit than to be here’; then when the sentence was read out ‘in the name of the people’, she retorted, ‘no, not a half, not a quarter of them! Oliver Cromwell is a traitor.’¹ A more obscure woman, Mary Pope, issued a brave pamphlet in January 1649 condemning outright the proceedings against the king.² Some radical parliamentarians also opposed the new commonwealth regime; the London democratic movement known as the Levellers argued that a mere ‘change of bondage’ had occurred with the king replaced by an authoritarian oligarchy. When the Leveller leaders were accused of treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London for publishing a tactless pamphlet called Englands New Chains Discovered, a petitioning campaign for their release mobilised many women who claimed ‘an equal share and interest with men in the Commonwealth’, and ‘an interest in Christ, equal unto men’ to justify their activism.³

Women petitioners and prophets, defiant women among royalists and parliamentarians alike feature in later chapters, along with quarrels over the proper manliness of the king and other political leaders, discussions of family structures and gendered political metaphors. These examples are introduced in order to indicate the range of this book, which is intended as a contribution to both women's history and the history of gender. Since the 1960s, women's history, encouraged by developments within the discipline such as a stress on family and social history, and also inspired by the modern women's movement, has immensely enriched historical scholarship. Women's history has been part of the women's movement's concern for identity, both personal and collective; it has underpinned quests to explain women's subordination, and has provided legitimation and inspiration. While ‘present-centredness’ can lead to some over-simplification, the general effects of feminist concerns have been overwhelmingly positive. Feminist commitment has ensured that most historians of women are self-conscious and reflective about their own purposes and methods. Certainly, the wealth of material now available on seventeenth-century women, from prophetesses to royalist conspirators, rioters to ministers' wives, would not have been discovered without the prompting of feminist politics. Historians of women have always aimed at the transformation of the discipline of history as a whole; a history of women which ignored their relationships with men would be trivial indeed. More recently, however, it has become common to stress a history of gender as an enterprise distinct from women's history. Where women's history focuses on the nature, roles and experiences of women in the past, gender history attempts to make gendered definitions of identity and gender hierarchies central elements in all historical problems and periods. This approach is summed up in the title of Joan Scott's classic article, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’. Scott's work suggests three ways in which gendered analysis can illuminate our understanding of the English civil war. In the first place, relationships between men and women are a central aspect of social organisation in all periods, and a full understanding of any historical process involves consideration of how such relationships are involved in, or affected by, it. Second, gender is socially and culturally constructed, so that what it means to be a man or a woman changes over time, albeit in slow and complex fashion. In Joan Scott's phrase, gender is ‘the multiple and contradictory meanings attributed to sexual difference’, while, of course, how societies understand sexual difference itself varies.⁴ It is important to discuss, then, how (if at all) a major political conflict affects gender identities. Finally, gendered contrasts are a major element in the cultural frameworks within which people understand their societies or imagine their potential development. Again, we need to ask how gendered understandings are implicated in political crisis; how political divisions might be seen in gendered terms, and how political crisis might transform these gendered cultural frameworks. In all three aspects of gender history, the specific experiences of men and understandings of manliness have to be considered as well as women and femaleness.

In some discussions women's history and gender history are seen as opposed. It has been argued that a focus on women risks assuming that women share a single identity and have a unitary female history; women's history may become a sort of ghetto with little effect on general historical scholarship. On the other hand, gender history has been accused of effacing women's agency, underplaying the degree to which women in the past, despite subordination and oppression, have been able to influence the conditions of their own existence and their broader societies. It can be seen as a way of restoring the masculinity of history, of using ‘the category of “woman”’ merely ‘as a metaphor for the insecurities of a patriarchal order’.⁵ This book, however, is based on the conviction that, in the words of a recent commentator, women's history and gender history are ‘best seen as complementary, interacting and overlapping approaches’. It deliberately offers a broad and eclectic approach, inspired by the increasingly rich literature on both the experiences of women and the meanings of gender in early modern England produced by literary scholars as well as historians. It will thus explore the experiences and activities of women during the 1640s and 1650s, contrasting implications for male roles, and the ways in which notions of gender were invoked and transformed by these upheavals.⁶ It seeks to demonstrate that attention to gender can enrich our understanding of much studied political developments. Until relatively recently political history ‘has been the stronghold of resistance to the inclusion of material or even questions about women and gender’. The rich rewards of integrating both women's history and gender history with analysis of major political upheavals is amply shown in recent studies of the French revolution, many prompted by the bicentenary of 1989. These include accounts of how some women supported the revolution in Paris clubs, while others rallied to the outlawed Catholic church and many simply tried to survive; discussions of the emergence of feminist ideas and their complicated relationship with revolution; analyses of how the overthrow of monarchy and the proclamation of the ideals of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ affected relationships between men and men (as brothers) and between women and men, as well as family ideals and structures; and explorations of the importance of gendered imagery in constructing new forms of political association.⁷ This book thus hopes to participate in the current welcome move in studies of the English revolution to overcome the unhelpful divisions between social, cultural and political history, and to draw on the inspiration of gendered studies of the French revolution to approach the English case in a comparably fruitful fashion.⁸

Most participants in the English revolution did not self-consciously hail its novelty, unlike the French revolutionaries who believed they were witnessing the birth of a new age, but many, like Oliver Cromwell, did feel that they lived in unprecedentedly exciting and disturbing times: ‘the nation rent and torn in spirit and principle from one end to another … family against family, husband against wife, parents against children, and nothing in the hearts of men but overturning, overturning, overturning’.⁹ The very label ‘revolution’ is controversial in current historiography, with the ‘Great Rebellion’, ‘war in the three kingdoms’, ‘fall of the British monarchies’ and the more neutral English civil war among the alternative designations.¹⁰ One major initial justification for this book, however, is the conviction that it was a substantial conflict in its practical impact and its ideological implications, amply meriting the label ‘revolution’.¹¹ The English civil war, and still more the violent struggles in Ireland and Scotland with which I am only tangentially concerned, affected all of the population, if not directly through the fighting then through heavy taxation, plunder, free-quarter, trade disruption, troop movements and disease. At the battle of Marston Moor in June 1644, a royalist army of about 18,000 men was defeated by 28,000 parliamentarians, both English and Scottish. Thousands served in royalist and parliamentary armies, some in part-time attendance on garrisons near their homes, but many in dislocating service away from families in the marching armies on both sides. One historian has estimated that one in five English men fought in the civil war; this is probably too high, but an estimate of one in ten is entirely plausible.¹² It has been suggested that loss of life was as great, proportionately, in these wars, as in the first world war. Perhaps 85,000 people (almost all men) died in combat, and perhaps 127,000 men and women, soldiers and civilians, perished as an indirect result of war, especially through the infectious diseases spread by troop movements. There was plague in Oxford, Chester, Stafford and many other towns, while ‘camp fever’ came to Devon in 1644 with parliament's army and spread from the troops to this civilian population.¹³ The figures are estimates, and open to debate, but all commentators now stress the scale of mobilisation. Any war blurs gender divisions in some ways, intensifies them in others. Insofar as the civil war involved minor skirmishes and sieges of local strongholds, distinctions between civilian and military, or between male and female experiences were relatively limited. Elite women often organised the defences of their family homes, while women as well as men helped fortify towns threatened by the enemy. But where men left home on military service, women were left behind to maintain their households in very difficult circumstances. Women's burdens continued if men returned crippled, or not at all.

Besides the direct military impact of the war, Englishmen and women faced significant economic and social dislocation. Taxation rose to unprecedented levels, perhaps to ten times pre-war rates, and affected more of the population than ever before. Whereas in the 1620s, direct national taxation was paid only by a very small minority of the landed classes, and then at easy rates, in the 1640s the weekly tax, parliament's main levy, fell on anyone with any property. And taxation was often the least of the burdens of civil war. Many villages lost almost as much in money or in kind, in informal or illegal exactions which fell on anyone with anything that could be requisitioned or stolen by force. Inhabitants were liable to forced labour to fortify local garrisons, to provision of compulsory board and lodgings for soldiers and their horses (the inappropriately named free-quarter) and to outright plunder by unruly troops.¹⁴ Troop movements and a divided country led to disease, as we have seen, and to significant disruption of trading networks.

The heavy loss of life, along with the other burdens of war, contributed to a second crucial context within which gendered analysis must be placed — the rich variety of political and religious theorising and agitation that developed through the 1640s and 1650s. The increasingly radical demands and daring intellectual speculation that emerged on the parliament's side were driven by a passionate insistence that the sacrifices of ordinary people required some transformation in their lives rather than a simple ‘change in bondage’. The soldiers who had fought for parliament were predictably inspired, declaring when they faced a humiliating disbandment once the war was over, that they ‘were not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth and conjured, by the several declarations of parliament, to the defence of our own and the people's just rights and liberties’. The conviction that the war was fought for ‘just rights and liberties’ and a bitter sense that they were to be cheated of any reward, shine through radical contributions to the famous debates on political settlement within the Council of the Army at Putney in October 1647. Captain Edward Sexby declared, ‘We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen; and by the arguments urged there are none’, while Colonel Thomas Rainsborough demanded, ‘I would fain know what the soldier has fought for all this while? He has fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave?’¹⁵ Civilians too stressed that the sufferings of war called out for recompense. The ‘Digger’ or communist Gerrard Winstanley appealed to an Old Testament precedent he called ‘David's law'; the principle established by David after his defeat of the Amalekites, that the spoil should be shared between those who had fought, and those who had stayed at home, not given to the fighters only as ‘the wicked men and men of Belial’ desired.¹⁶ When Leveller women petitioned parliament for the release of the movement's leaders, they stressed the sacrifices of blood and treasure including ‘plate, jewels, rings, bodkins’ that demanded redress, while the prophetess, Anna Trapnel, justified her public interventions with referenc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women and war
• 3 Manhood and civil war
• 4 Bodies, families, sex: using gender, imagining politics
• 5 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index