The Three Kingdoms and the First Civil War:

Though they are usually referred to as the English Civil Wars, the wars of the 1640s and early ’50s are more accurately described by the name used by generations of Irish historians – ‘the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. The economically dominant gentry and merchants of south-east England, East Anglia and East Midlands, including most of the English ports, generally opposed the king, while the royalist support was strongest in the poorer and more peripheral west and north of England, as well as in Wales. After winning the ‘Bishops’ Wars’ of 1639-40 against the King, the Scots then remained neutral before the Presbyterian ‘Covenanters’ took to the field in support of the English Parliament in 1644. Charles I’s strategy of using both royalist Protestants and rebel Catholics, together with Montrose’s royalist Scots, linked the three kingdoms together in their struggles against the Stuarts, which turned against the king in 1644, culminating in his loss of York in July.

The Drudgery of it all – War Weariness:

By the winter of 1644-5, the first ‘English Civil War’ was already more than two years old, and it was clear by the end of the long and hard-fought campaigning season that if the parliament was to win in the field against the forces loyal to Charles I, it must concentrate its resources and reorganise its armies. But though this imperative was obvious, the obstacles to carrying it into effect were formidable. The overall commander of the armies, the Earl of Essex, although recently defeated, still had powerful friends and allies and remained popular with all who hoped, as he did, for a negotiated peace with the King. Sir William Waller, a seasoned campaigner in the Thirty Years’ War on the continent, had once seemed a plausible alternative commander since he had shown a far stronger fighting temperament. But the battle of Cropredy Bridge, fought near Banbury at the end of June 1944 (see the map below), and the second battle of Newbury, at the end of October, had exposed serious limitations in his generalship, and by his own admission, he had become so perfectly tired with the drudgery of the military command that he was ready to lay it down.

As for the Earl of Manchester, whose Eastern Association had once been the great hope of the war party, he had been so reluctant to engage in sorties against the royalists that a running quarrel had developed between him and Cromwell, his Lieutenant-General. Following the failures of the 1644 Campaign, there had been a concerted effort to remove Manchester from the command of the Eastern Association. The conflict between Cromwell and Manchester had begun in early 1644. Religion, as well as political views, played an important role in the dispute. In a Statement by an Opponent of Cromwell, it was claimed that, like Cromwell, …

… Colonels Montague, Russell, Pickering, and Rainsborough’s regiments (are) all of them professed Independents, entire.

Both Manchester and Major-General Crawford, his strongest supporter, were ardent Presbyterians, at least in a political sense. Cromwell had had a famous row with Crawford, the Scottish commander of the infantry in Manchester’s army in March 1644, when the latter arrested the lieutenant-colonel of his own regiment and sent him up to headquarters, apparently because he was unwilling, as a Baptist, to sign the ‘Covenant’, the agreement to impose the Scots’ system of church government on England. It was hardly the place of the lieutenant-general of Horse to rebuke the major-general of the infantry for disciplining a subordinate officer who was not complying with the law as laid down by parliament, but that was what Cromwell did, and in writing:

Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies … Take heed of being sharp … against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.

Matters of Religion – High Churchmen, Puritans & ‘tub-thumpers’:

It is difficult to overstate the importance that matters of religion played as a backdrop to both the military campaigns and the debates in parliament. As Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Charles I and his bishops had angered the Puritans, or Calvinists, within it, by giving their support to a group of High Church clergy called Arminians, who supported the Stuart doctrine of the ‘Divine Right of Kings.’ Laud ‘s enforcement of High Church ceremonies and his persecution of Puritans had aroused the passionate anger of the Puritan middle class. Besides, the Stuarts’ pro-Catholic foreign policy aroused suspicions that they were ‘closet’ Catholics at a time when most Englishmen and lowland Scots had a fanatical hatred of ‘Papists’. The Church of England still remained the established national church requiring all the king’s English subjects to attend for communion every week. As the ‘Anglican’ Church, often referred to the ‘Episcopalian’ Church in Presbyterian-controlled Scotland, it retained bishops and archbishops and also continued to derive much of its iconography, liturgy and teaching from the traditional Catholic model. Its greatest defendant in this was Archbishop Laud, who by the beginning of 1645 had lain in the Tower of London for over three years before parliament, at the insistence of the Scots, had proceeded with his impeachment in March 1644.

As the proceedings dragged on into the autumn, it became doubtful whether the remnant of the House of Lords still in attendance at Westminster would convict Laud of treason, so the Commons switched to an ordinance of attainder, for which they no longer needed the King’s assent. They sent it up to the Lords on 22 November but despite pressure from the London mob the peers held out against passing it until 4 January. The seventy-one-year-old prelate was then beheaded on Tower Hill, although he had long ceased to be a threat to the parliament. The malignity with which it pursued him to death, largely as an act of revenge for the brutal persecution that they had suffered at his hands, in the 1620s and ’30s, is a mark of the power of the adversaries of Episcopalianism, who were often lumped together under the single nomenclature ‘puritan’, but, in reality, they were very diverse in their beliefs.

The most influential puritans in Parliament were the Presbyterians, who had been predominant in Scotland since the time of the return of the reformer, John Knox, from John Calvin’s Geneva. They also existed both inside and outside the Church of England and their aim was to replace its episcopalian structure with a system of presbyteries, something like local church committees, and regional ‘synods’. Their brand of Protestantism was very strong in the House of Commons and its adherents hoped to use Parliament to enforce its doctrine upon the Chuch of England and upon the whole population of England and Wales. The Independents were opposed to both the Episcopalians and to the Presbyterians. They did not believe that either the King or Parliament should dictate how they should worship. Among their numbers were Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers, together with a large number of sects. The single point of agreement between them was that there should be a separation between the Church and the State, though many, like Cromwell himself, wanted there to continue to be a national church in both England and Scotland, though with the local congregations able to choose their own ministers.

But whilst Royalists tended to be Episcopalian, Parliament was solidly Presbyterian and the Army was largely Independent in religion and increasingly radical in its politics, some puritans supported the King and some Episcopalians who opposed him. Also, as the war dragged on, there were Independents, increasingly ‘pacifist’ in perspective, who wanted to reach an ‘agreement’ with the King. Much also depended on the social ‘orders’ to which people belonged. But war-weariness in the country at large and divisions at Westminster were further impediments to the forging of the means of victory. The previously strong ‘middle group’ in Parliament were finding it increasingly difficult to hold together a solid parliamentarian centre together in support of the war effort while fending off the defeatest ‘peace party’ on the one hand and a disruptively radical tendency on the other.

York to Westminster: Presbyterians v Independents:

During the winter of 1643-44, as both sides looked for military allies, John Pym, the puritan leader in the House of Commons negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, which was then enacted by parliament. Scotland’s leaders saw that a victory for Charles in England would doom their Presbyterian revolution, so they abandoned their neutrality in favour of an alliance with the English Parliament in January 1644. Meanwhile, Charles sought further reinforcements from Ireland, but their military value was not worth the damage that his willingness to accept Catholic support did to his cause in England and Scotland. This resulted in the military intervention of the Scots on the side of the English Parliament.

Reinforced by Scottish forces under Alexander Leslie, the Yorkshire Army of Lord Thomas Fairfax and the Eastern Association cavalry commanded by Oliver Cromwell decisively defeated the main royalist army under the King’s nephew Prince Rupert and the earl of Newcastle at Marston Moor on 2 July. Cromwell’s cavalry proved its worth and the ‘cavaliers’ lost the North of England. But in the West Midlands, the Welsh marches and the South-West, Charles was still on the offensive. An attempt by parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex to capitalise on the success in the north by invading the West Country was heavily defeated at Lostwithiel in Cornwall in August. The picture below shows Restormel Castle, which was captured by Grenville.

Throughout 1644, parliament increasingly tended to polarise between two parties, which came to be commonly referred to as the ‘Presbyterians’ and the ‘Independents’. As the nomenclature implied, religious differences had much to do with this division, but religion was never the sole cause of it and labels were partly misleading. In Parliament, the old middle group and the original war party coalesced as Independents, covering a broad political spectrum, so that they were not homogeneous. The Presbyterians included the old peace party, though some who were Presbyterian in religion remained strongly committed to the war effort. The political differences between the ‘parties’ at this stage have often been exaggerated, for neither was contemplating a post-war settlement that would exclude the king. Cromwell, Saye and other leading Independents were still seeking for a means to reinstate the king on safe and honourable conditions more than three years later, before the Second Civil War.

Charles attempted to retrieve his fortunes in Scotland and to relieve the pressure in England, through a series of campaigns led by James Graham, the marquis of Montrose, a resourceful commander, but the royalist position in Scotland was a microcosm of that in England. Royalist support was strongest in the largely Catholic Highlands, but this was also the poorest part of the country; the richer and more populous Presbyterian Lowlands remained committed to the Covenanter alliance with the English parliament. Reinforcements from Ireland never arrived in sufficient numbers, the two thousand sent in June being the only significant contribution. Montrose was eventually crushed by Leslie’s Covenanters in September 1645, but not before he had unnerved them and distracted them from the siege of Chester earlier that year, as detailed below.

In 1644-45, the parties differed on the terms rather than the principle of a future settlement, and religion was a major point of contention in this. It came to the fore because all through 1644 the Westminster Assembly was debating the form of government which it would recommend for the Church of England. The Scottish Commissioners were pressing for a pure Presbyterian model, with a church session exerting its coercive jurisdiction in every parish, with parishes grouped in classical presbyteries, provincial synods elected by and from presbyteries, a national synod at the summit, and with lay participation by ruling elders at every tier of the pyramidal structure. Since episcopalians were unrepresented in the Assembly, most of the English divines were prepared to endorse such a system in its essentials, but they were persistently opposed by a small group of Independents who became known as ‘the Dissenting Brethren’. Unlike the ‘separatists’, however, they fully accepted the authority of the civil power in matters of religion, so long as it did not oppress the churches over essential matters of faith and conscience.

Doctrinal matters were not at issue, however, as in theology, the moderate Independents professed a common orthodox Calvinism with the Presbyterians. What many of them rejected was the concept, common to Anglicans and Presbyterians, of a church coterminous with the nation-state; they could never accept that church membership was conferred simply by being born and baptised in a particular parish. A true church for them could only consist of a congregation of committed believers, men and women who had given mature covenant to live in accordance with it. Every such ‘gathered church’, they argued, should have the right to choose its own pastor and the power to discipline its members, even in the last resort to cast them out; so the Presbyterians’ entrustment of ordination and ex-communication to presbyteries was unacceptable to them. But they did not claim the right to total autonomy for each congregation that most separatists demanded, but rather proposed a kind of federal association. They didn’t like being called ‘Independents’, because they believed …

… the truth to lie and consist in a middle way betwixt that which is falsely charged on us … and that which is the contention of these times, the authoritative Prebyterial government in all the subordinations and proceedings of it.

Although they were few in number in the Assembly, the Independents had powerful supporters in parliament, including Cromwell in the Commons and Viscount Saye and Sele in the Lords. These and most of the other lay Independents were strongly committed to a vigorous prosecution of the war, so, understandably, ‘Independent’ became a loose label for all who pursued total victory and ‘Presbyterian’ for those who preferred a negotiated settlement. It was also generally true that most Independents advocated some degree of liberty of conscience in religion, whereas most Presbyterians favoured the continuance of a single national church, conformity to which would be enforced by the state. Yet even here the labels could be misleading, and religious beliefs were not always matched by political practice and priorities regarding church governance. Thus, it is often necessary to distinguish between the political and religious senses of the terms ‘Independent’ and ‘Presbyterian, since the correlation between them was so imperfect. References to political groupings should, therefore, be made without capitalisation, and ‘parties’ suggests a greater degree of identity, coherence and organisation than actually existed in the 1640s. There was also a social dimension to the mutual opposition between Presbyterians and Independents. Politicians like Cromwell would have extended liberty of conscience not only to their fellow Independents but also to the more peaceable separatists – Baptists, Quakers, Seekers – which were proliferating in the unsettled climate of the mid-1640s. Conservative souls, however, distrusted the whole principle of electing ministers of religion and were horrified by the prospect of giving free rein to sectarian ‘tub-thumpers’ without academic training who were elected by their fellow plebeians.

The Westminster Assembly promised the continuance of a single national church in which the majority of the parish clergy would continue to be chosen by wealthy gentry patrons.  Such a church was likely to cement the existing structures of society, whereas sectarian preachers were seen as potential social dynamite. In December 1944, the Earl of Essex, in overall command of the parliamentary forces, was complaining that:

Posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the King we have subjugated them to that of the common people, (whose) audacity (he would henceforth) devote his life to redressing.

 

Right: The title page of an anti-radical tract. Moderate ‘independents’, horrified by the growing extremism engendered by the war, struggled to make their voices heard.

How to Win the War? Parliament & The Army:

When Oliver Cromwell emerged as the leader of the ‘war party’, linking up with radicals in many locations, it was natural that there should be social overtones to this shift in national policy. These radicals were described by their enemies as a company of Brownists, Anabaptists, … factious inferior persons. He had built up a virtually impregnable position for himself before he struck at Manchester and all he stood for. Not only was he a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons as one hostile fellow-MP put it. By sheer hard work and military efficiency, he had become the outstanding figure in the Eastern Association, which after London was the main centre of support for parliament, especially in Essex and Suffolk. In June 1644 his leadership had been decisive at the battle of Marston Moor, the first really crushing victory the Parliamentarians had won. Cromwell’s troopers, originally,  were picked men, well equipped, well horsed, well paid. All these factors enabled him to use the cavalry charge as a battering ram instead of as a mobile infantry lightly armed with pistols. Prince Rupert’s horse charged once, often with devastating effect, but then lost cohesion in destroying enemy stragglers or in the search for plunder; a rabble of gentility, as Monck (below left) called the Cavalier cavalry. As Claredon (below right) put it, …

… though the King’s troops prevailed in the charge and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day … whereas Cromwell’s troops, if they prevailed, or thought they were beaten and presently routed, rallied again and stood in good order till they received new orders.

This, Clarendon added, was only under him, and had never been notorious under Essex or Waller. At Marston Moor, it had been the repeated charges of Cromwell’s horse that had turned apparent Parliamentary defeat into complete victory. Yet he had remained in the background when the London radicals had tried to build up Sir William Waller as a rival commander to the Earl of Essex, and so had not suffered their discomfiture when ‘William the Conqueror’ was routed by a royalist cavalry charge at Roundway Down in July 1643. On the question of winning the war the issues between Cromwell and Manchester and between the two ‘parties’ were clear-cut. Manchester is often quoted as saying:

If we beat the King ninety-nine times, yet he is King still. … but if the King beat us once, we shall all be hanged.

To which Cromwell is said to have retorted with irrefutable logic:

My Lord, if this be so … why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter.

The dispute between the Independents and Presbyterians within the Army was part of the process that led, despite its military successes, to the eclipse of the Eastern Association army under Manchester’s generalship. The conflict, in political terms, was between those who believed the war could be won and those who did not want to defeat the king. It was the success of the Independents, like Pickering and Montague, which enabled the creation of an army committed to winning the war. Manchester, for his part, alleged that Cromwell had admitted to packing the Eastern Association Army with men of his own principles …

… so that in case there should be propositions for peace, or any conclusion of a peace, such as might not stand with those that honest men should aim at, this Army might prevent such a mischief.

Cromwell did not contest this charge, but soberly told the House of Commons that:

I had a great deal of reason to think that his Lordship’s miscarriage in these particulars was neither through accidents (which could not be helped) nor through his improvidence only, but through his backwardness to all action; and had some reason to conceive that that backwardness was not (merely) from dullness or indisposedness to engagement, but (withal) from some principle of unwillingness in his Lordship to have this war prosecuted unto full victory, (but rather end it) on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.

Cromwell was not pursuing a personal vendetta against Manchester, nor did he relish the antagonisms within and between the two Houses that their quarrel was generating. He was waiting only for the Committee of the Army to endorse the evidence of Manchester’s persistent unwillingness to fight since the fall of York. It did so when it reported to the House on 9 December, and towards the end of a long debate, Cromwell rose to make the most important speech of his career to date. He was speaking to a report from a committee which had been set up to inquire into the quarrel between himself and Manchester, but he succeeded in elevating the dispute to one of principle. It was this speech, and what immediately followed it, which demonstrated his consummate skill as a Parliamentary tactician:

It is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less to save a nation out of  a bleeding, nay, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of this war hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war – casting off all lingering proceedings like … soldiers of fortune beyond sea, to spin out a war – we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament.

For what do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands, and the sword, into their hands; and what by interest in the Parliament, what by power in the Army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it. This I speak here to our own faces is but what others do utter abroad behind our backs.

… I know of the worth of those commanders, members of both Houses, who are yet in power; but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the army be not put to another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.

So then, he concluded, let them cease pursuing particular complaints against any single commander, since none was infallible, but apply themselves instead to the necessary remedy; he hoped that no member of either House would take offence at his speech, or hesitate to sacrifice private interests for the public good. He had clearly prepared his ground well behind the scenes, colluding with the Presbyterian chairman of the Committee for the Army, Zouch Tate, a firm believer in fighting the King to a finish. Tate immediately moved that …

… during the time of this war no member of either House shall have or execute any office or command, military or civil, granted, or conferred by both or either of the Houses. 

Above: The House of Commons in 1640. It changed little over the following five years.

This was a master-stroke of parliamentary manoeuvring since, as a presbyterian, Tate could be seen as a political opponent of Cromwell. But it was Oliver’s close colleague, Sir Henry Vane, who seconded the motion, who offered to lay down his commission as co-Treasurer of the Navy, and Cromwell himself then offered to resign his own military command. This ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’, as it was more formally adopted by the Commons ten days later, was one half of the remedy; the other would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be fruitless unless they were put under commanders with a wholehearted will to win. Removing Essex and Manchester was the first problem to be faced, though other peace party peers and MPs were holding less exalted commands, including Thomas Fairfax, Haselrig, Brereton, Cromwell himself, and half-a-dozen others who were equally committed to total victory. For Cromwell to have hung up his sword would have been a serious strategic loss to the army, but he told the House of Commons that the recall of their fellow-members to Westminster …

… will not break, or scatter our armies. I can speak this for my own soldiers, that they look not upon me, but upon you, and for you they will fight, and live and die in your cause.

The Radicals of the Eastern Association:

Cromwell’s enemies no doubt saw the Ordinance as a means of getting rid of him; he and his friends saw the broader problem of removing peers and all those who owed their military commands to social rank rather than to ability. It was a logical extension of the policy of promoting ‘russet-coated men’ within his own regiment according to merit.

The New Model Army, according to one of its chaplains, Richard Baxter, was partly the envy and partly the scorn of the nobility. Baxter was a Presbyterian both in religion and politics. He joined Colonel Whalley’s regiment of horse in the New Model because he thought that the King should often do what Parliament wanted and that people should not be forced to accept bishops or the Prayer Book. However, he was soon shocked to hear how the troopers spoke of the King:

We that lived quietly did keep our old principles and took the true happiness of King and people, Church and State, to be our end. But when I came among Cromwell’s soldiers I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of. I perceived that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended to master him or ruin him.

Although there were not that many radicals in the army, they were already beginning to influence among the ordinary soldiers whose hatred for the King was becoming more extreme as the war continued. Baxter blamed himself and other nonconformist ministers for not persuading Cromwell and other commanders to be more peaceable in outlook earlier in the war. In assessing Cromwell’s statesmanship in parliament and the army, we suffer from hindsight. Baxter had been invited by him to become ‘pastor’ to his troops at the beginning of the war when his officers had purposed to make their troops a gathered church’, but he had believed, like many others, that the war would soon be over and there would soon be a peace settlement with the King. When by the end of 1644, this was obviously not the case, he decided he must support Parliament and go to minister to the ’roundheads’. From the start, Cromwell’s troops had enthusiastically carried out the Commons policy of destroying stained glass and images in the churches, for which he was wrongly blamed. In his home city of Ely (pictured below) in January 1644, he had warned Canon Hitch …

… lest the soldiers should in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the reformation of your cathedral church, I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offensive, and this as you will answer it, if any disorder should arise therefrom. … leave off this fooling and come down.

When Hitch ignored the warning, Cromwell emphasised that he was a man under authority, … commanded to dismiss this assembly. Whether or not they were ‘under authority’ to carry out their acts of iconoclasm, there can be little doubt that Cromwell and his troopers were willing to do so, though not altogether as wantonly as many others in East Anglia. It was in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, in January 1645, that Cromwell summoned a conference to plan the formation of the New Model Army. The half-trained county levies had proved more than a match for the royalist forces, but they had been reluctant to fight far from home or to permit their military duties to interfere with the demands of their farms and businesses. This was certainly true of the Suffolk men who frequently had to march to distant parts of the realm. Six months later, Cromwell urgently called upon Suffolk’s cavalry to muster at Newmarket and for the infantry to muster at Bury. Each trooper, he promised, would receive fourteen shillings per week and each dragoon 10s. 6d. per week.

But the growing power of the army and the fanaticism of some of its leaders and troops also alarmed many Suffolk people. The use of churches as stables and their ancient windows and monuments for musket practice made the soldiers increasingly unpopular. Added to this disrespectful treatment, William Dowsing of Laxfield was appointed to the post of ‘Parliamentary Visitor’ by Manchester, as General of the Eastern Association. Between January and October 1644, he toured Suffolk with a troop os soldiers, smashing stained glass, defacing bench ends and carved fonts, breaking down crucifixes, tearing up brasses and obliterating inscriptions. In the course of his disastrous rampage, he visited 150 churches at random and carefully noted down his work of destruction in a journal. The entry for the parish church of Clare reads:

… we broke down one thousand pictures superstitious. I broke down two hundred; three of God the Father and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the twelve apostles were carved in wood, on the top of the roof, which we gave order to take down; and twenty cherubims to be taken down; and the sun and the moon in the east window, by the King’s arms to be taken down.

Some parishes welcomed Dowsing and co-operated with him, but others, such as Ufford, put up a show of resistance, locked the church and tried to keep the desecrators at bay. Even where there was support for his actions, many churchwardens resented having to pay the standard charge of 6s. 8d. for his visitation. Meanwhile, Cromwell’s protection of religious radicals under his command had won him respect from all those who feared a Scottish-imposed Presbyterian discipline. On one of his rare visits to the Commons during the campaigning season, in September 1644,  Cromwell had suggested to one of his independent allies, Oliver St John the wording of a successful motion that asked, failing substantial agreement in the ‘Assembly of Divines’, that the House should continue:

… to endeavour the finding out of some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word as may stand with the public peace.

The ‘Self-denying’ & ‘New Model’ Ordinances enacted:

We also know now that Cromwell and other MPs retained their commands, while the Self-denying Ordinance got rid of Essex, Manchester and other ‘peace party’ peers in the army. But it was by no means clear in advance that this would be the outcome. Tate’s original resolution had proposed that ‘no members of either House’ should hold a military command. Yet Cromwell ended up playing a leading role in the whole course of events which led from the Self-denying Ordinance to the formation of the New Model Army. He also ensured that Sir Thomas Fairfax was to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of the new force in January, although this was not finally confirmed until April.

Above: Sir Thomas Fairfax. General of the Parliamentary forces.

Both Fairfax and Cromwell were eventually exempted from the ordinance, though they could hardly have expected this when they first offered to resign. Despite reports of a mutiny in his regiment at the prospects of it being put under another colonel, Cromwell was actually at Windsor, paying his respects to Fairfax before laying down his commission, when he was ordered by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to prevent a rendezvous between the King’s forces and those of Prince Rupert before moving northwards. No doubt Cromwell’s supporters hoped from the start that he would survive the Self-Denying Ordinance, the issue remained in doubt for at least six months after it was first proposed. Cromwell’s political tactics at that first point were superb, but they included the risk that he might have to pay the price of political eclipse himself. The fact that he survived and went on to become Lord General and Lord Protector should not blind us to the chances he took, and to his clear belief in personal providence over ‘blind’ individual ambition.

These twin measures to transform the conduct of the war, the Self-Denying Ordinance and its follow-up the New Model Ordinance, were not solely the product of the war party within the Commons but were devised with the small group of like-minded peers who included Viscount Saye and Sele and the Earl of Northumberland. These formed a coherent group of with their allies in the Commons, a group that some historians have called the ‘royal independents’ because of their subsequent importance in the brief period between the first and second Civil Wars. Saye proposed the Self-Denying Ordinance in principle in the Lords the same day as it was proposed in the Commons, but the peers took ‘great offence’ and rejected it ‘out of hand’. When it came up to them having passed the Commons on 19 December, they laid it aside and resisted all pressure to take it into consideration until 13 January, when they threw it out formally following a ‘vote’ in which only four peers recorded their dissents in favour of it. What finally moved the Lords to action was the reading of the New Model Ordinance later that month, when the Committee of Both Kingdoms recommended the formation of a new army of twenty-two thousand men, to be supported by a levy of six thousand pounds per month on a number of the districts controlled by Parliament.

The establishment of this New Model Army was set at twelve regiments of foot each of twelve thousand men, eleven regiments of Horse of six hundred men each, and one regiment of a thousand dragoons, divided into ten companies, each of a hundred men. The senior officers of the army were selected on 21 January, and Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed as Commander-in-Chief (on a salary of ten pounds a day) and Philip Skippon as Sergeant-Major General (two pounds per day). Cromwell was only nominated as Lieutenant-General of the Horse (two pounds per day) on the eve of the Battle of Naseby in June and was not appointed as Commander-in-Chief until after Fairfax’s retirement five years later in June 1650. The choice of Fairfax was far from simple because the Self-Denying Ordinance ruled out almost everyone who had commanded anything larger than a regiment. Philip Skippon was an exception and was nominated to the post which best suited him, that of major-general of the infantry. Sir Thomas Fairfax was only thirty-two and had had no pre-war military experience, his highest command having been that of the Horse in his father’s small army, and he had not distinguished himself, unlike Cromwell, at the Battle of Marston Moor. But wherever he had fought he had shown the flair of a born leader of cavalry and he communicated his calm nature in the heat of battle to his officers and men: Cromwell had seen him in action more than once. Although an MP for Yorkshire, he had no known political leanings beyond a steady devotion to the parliamentary cause, and in religion, he was a devout but undogmatic puritan.

The Commons passed the Ordinance without a division. The measure had three main objects, the first of which was to forge a genuinely national army out of the remnants of earlier ones, an army free of the regional ties which had made Waller’s London trained bands and Manchester’s East Anglian foot look over their shoulders when they had been away from home ground for any length of time. Three regiments of horse and foot were to come from Essex’s army and two from Waller’s. The remaining nine regiments of horse and four of infantry were to be from the Eastern Association. This comprised 3,578 men, consisting of four regiments of foot, Crawford’s, Rainsborough’s, Montague’s and Pickering’s. The second aim of the Ordinance was the creation of a fully professional army whose officers were wholly dedicated to the prosecution of the war, without political control. Thirdly, this army was to have an undisputed first call on parliament’s financial resources. The creation of so powerful a force aroused the deepest misgivings of the Lords, especially since peers were to be precluded from holding command in it. Its proposers sought to appease their potential opponents by writing the names of its generals and colonels into the ordinance itself.

The Lords delayed passing the New Model Ordinance until 15 February, despite constant pressure from the Commons, and they disputed the lists of officers submitted by Fairfax for more than a month after that. Although he proposed no-one for the service who did not already hold a commission, they tried to make no fewer than fifty-seven changes in his recommendations, most of them politically motivated; thirty-five of the fifty-two of the officers whom they tried to remove were independents or men of radical views. They tried to make every officer take the Covenant and undertake to conform to the church government to be settled by parliament and to cashier or disqualify any who refused. Under extreme pressure from the Commons and the City, and under the threat of both to withhold essential financial provisions until they gave way, an evenly divided House of Lords finally approved Fairfax’s nominees on 18 March. Even then, at the end of the month Essex, Manchester and Denbigh had still not resigned their commissions and the presbyterian peers were holding up Faifax’s appointment because it did not bind him to preserve the safety of the King’s person. Essex’s infantry was in a state of mutiny and some of his cavalries had refused to serve under Waller. The Lords were jeopardising the whole parliamentarian cause, and they still had not passed the Self-Denying Ordinance. The Commons then threatened to discharge all members of both Houses from their military commands or civil offices. The Lords then approved Fairfax’s commission by one vote, enabling him to gain control of all the troops. Essex, Manchester and Denbigh resigned their commands on 2 April, and the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed by the Lords the following day.

Beyond the obvious sense of injured pride felt by Essex and Manchester in particular, it is difficult to explain why the Lords obstructed the measures which were essential for the prosecution of the war by Parliament. There is some evidence to suggest that Essex’s aim was to revive the medieval office of ‘Lord High Constable’, which had carried supreme military authority, and to occupy this position as a possible step towards even more vice-regal powers. His repeated refusals to obey the Committee of Both Kingdoms’ directions may be attributable to an ambition become not just the master of the war but also the architect of the peace. If this was his plan, the New Model Army and its political sponsors in the Lords soon put paid to it. At the same time as parliament passed the New Model Ordinance, it appointed Northumberland, Saye’s ally and the most senior peer still attending the Lords, as Governor of the King’s children, and it was reported that if the King still refused reasonable terms for a settlement, his youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester, would be made king and Northumberland would become Lord Protector. The rapid elevation of Northumberland by the war party looks very much like an aristocratic move to block Essex’s pretensions and his potential path to power.

The Radical Regiments:

Thus, the New Model Army was finally established in April 1945 under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, while Cromwell was only later appointed to the command of the cavalry. But it is surely to Cromwell that we must look to see why Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments were put forward for inclusion in the new army. Both had been regiments in the Eastern Association army, which had proved itself by the end of the 1644 Campaign to be the best organised and most successful parliamentarian forces. Besides, Pickering, Montague (who was distantly related to the Earl of Manchester) and their officers had demonstrated that they had all the right credentials to fulfil Cromwell’s objective of creating an effective national standing army committed to complete military victory. But when the list of officers for the New Model was debated in parliament, their names were struck out by the Lords, along with others. Although his elder brother, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was a well-respected MP, John Pickering was described as a fanatical Independent, and his regiment had earned a reputation as being the most radical of all the parliamentary forces. Therefore, the Lords voted to leave out the entire regiment at first on both political and religious grounds, undoubtedly reinforced by Manchester’s determination to purge his personal enemies from any new army that was created.

Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments had already been reported to the Committee for the Army for, on Cromwell’s instructions (as claimed), absolutely refusing orders from Major-General Crawford during 1644. Crawford himself refused to serve in the New Model Army after the failure of presbyterian MPs to control its formation and eventually transferred to Leslie’s presbyterian Scottish army. He was sent to command at the siege of Hereford where he was killed in August 1645. The religious controversies he sparked with Cromwell are revealed in the various disparaging remarks made about Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments by Sir Samuel Luke, governor of Newport Pagnell, another presbyterian. John Pickering was one of the officers who were questioned by parliament, in December 1644, about the events surrounding Manchester’s seeming unwillingness to prosecute the war against the King’s forces. He had reported on the Earl’s failure to capitalise on the successes of the early summer, 1944, and his wish to winter in East Anglia rather than advance into the west with Pickering’s infantry. It was in this acrimonious atmosphere that the ‘radical’ regiment was to be excluded by the Lords, but when the pressure from the Commons eventually led to the passing of Fairfax’s original list by just one vote, Pickering’s became the twelfth regiment of the New Model Army.

After the Battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644, fighting had tended to be concentrated around the royalist strongholds of Newark, Chester, Exeter and Oxford. Oxford was the king’s headquarters; its garrison dominated the main routes to the West Country. Large parliamentary forces were committed to besieging these centres, while the king prepared a new offensive. Colonel John Pickering’s Regiment of Foot had been quartered at Abingdon throughout the winter, and it was there on 4 January 1645 that the regiment was paid, and it was still there in April. The regiment was therefore probably involved in the defence of the town when Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the King’s nephew and commander of his cavalry, attacked with eighteen hundred troops on 10 January. New works had just been constructed around the garrison and these proved effective, the royalists being driven back with heavy losses. On 5 April, two days after the establishment of the New Model Army in Parliament, Sir Samuel Luke wrote that two of Pickering’s soldiers were among prisoners held by the royalists at Boarstall, one of the cavalier garrisons that ringed the king’s capital at Oxford.

Although the New Model was being formed from the existing units of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, these had suffered so many losses in the campaign of 1644 that they could supply only seven thousand of the required fourteen thousand plus infantry. It was intended that the balance should be provided by impressment in London and the south-east, but when the New Model began its first campaign it was still short of four thousand men. Nevertheless, it was an instrument of war by which its professionalism, courage and discipline would bring victory for Parliament. Sheer military necessity forced the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with the Commons’ backing, to go ahead with the forming of the Army before it received parliament’s legislative backing. The general aim was to embody in it intact such units in the armies as had proved their military worth. Fairfax was entrusted with the nomination of all officers below the rank of colonel,  and he faithfully observed the principle of keeping together officers and men who had already forged a bond in war. Despite acute Scottish suspicions to the contrary, there was no deliberate design to create an army of a specific political or religious complexion. The overriding criterion for appointment and promotion was military effectiveness. The senior officers named in the ordinance covered a wide ideological spectrum, though the greater commitment of Independents, both religious and political, gave them greater preponderance.

There was no difficulty in filling the ranks of the cavalry in the New Model Army, with a large number of redundant officers enlisting as troopers. The service carried much more prestige and better pay and conditions than the infantry enjoyed. A trooper’s two shillings a day was about twice what he basically needed to feed man and horse, whereas a foot soldier’s eightpence was the wage of a common labourer, and his rations in the field usually consisted of cheese with bread or biscuit. Proven fighting quality ensured the embodiment of most of Cromwell’s Eastern Association cavalry, furnishing five of the New Model’s original regiments of horse. In his efforts to enlist men who knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew, Cromwell had found them mainly among those who saw their cause as that of the people of God, and so many of them were puritan enthusiasts. He was accused unjustly of favouring sectaries at the expense of moderate, orthodox men, for he did not probe into their beliefs if he sensed that he had what he called ‘the root of the matter’ in them. For a while after the incident with Crawford related above, he did promote Independents and sectaries in preference to rigid Presbyterians, not because of the latter’s religious convictions but because of their intolerance towards comrades-in-arms who did not share them. But  this phase did not last long, and his true spirit spoke in his dispatch to Speaker Lenthall after the New Model Army’s heroic storming of Bristol in 1645:

Presbyterians, Independents, all had the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious because inward and spiritual. … As for being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit; and from brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other things God hath put the sword into the Parliament’s hand, but the terror of evildoers and the praise of them that do well.

Re-organisation, Recruitment & Religion:

Thomas Ayloffe was a presbyterian who had originally been included in the list of colonels for the New Model. During the winter of 1644-45, as the conflict between the independents and Presbyterians was fought out in parliament, Ayloffe’s were in the garrisons at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell, under the command of Crawford and Luke. Ayloffe was not selected to serve in the New Model because of the failure of the Lords to purge it of radicals like Pickering. It was another ‘independent’ regiment, Rainsborough’s, which accompanied  Pickering’s and Montague’s from the Eastern Association into the New Model Army. However, because of the drastic collapse of the numbers in Pickering’s regiment during 1644-45, it was decided by the Commons, on 16 April, that Colonel Thomas Ayloffe’s regiment should be reduced into Pickering’s to help restore the regiment to strength. Ayloffe’s, which probably drew its men from Essex, had spent most of 1644 in the garrison at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell and did not see action in any of the major battles of that year, although they were involved in the storming of Hillesden House. This process of consolidation was repeated throughout the parliamentarian army because most regiments were under strength. Ayloffe’s men had been with him throughout 1644, while Pickering’s had supported him throughout the winter of 1644-45. The soldiers from Ayloffe’s were successfully transferred to Pickering’s in early April, as Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson reported to the Army’s Treasurer:

… the officers of Collo. Aliffs Regiment did with all willingness and request deliver unto us ther men according to order… 

However, more recruits were still required and though recruitment was still carried on in East Anglia, Pickering’s likely acquired some men from other areas. Pickering took with him into the New Model seven of his company commanders, including Hewson. Not one Captain from Ayloffe’s regiment was included, indeed it would appear that no commissioned officers transferred, for Hewson’s letter clearly states that Ayloffe’s officers ‘delivered’ their men. This was not simply a matter of political or religious differences. One objective of combining regiments was to redress the balance of officers to men. Even when the number of common soldiers in Pickering’s reduced to below three hundred they retained a nearly full complement of officers. The infantry of the older armies was so depleted that just over half of the New Model foot had to be raised by conscription, and they were not raised easily. An impressment ordinance was quickly passed at the end of February, with most of the burden falling on London, which had to find 2,500, and on East Anglia and Kent, whose quota was a thousand each. Pressed men were so prone to mutiny or desert that they had to be guarded all the way to their regiments. They were drawn from the lowest orders, for those worth three pounds in property or five pounds in goods were exempt, as were a whole range of occupations. The penalty for desertion was death, but many were homeless men who could easily disappear without a trace. During the New Model’s first year, nearly twice as many men were pressed as actually served. Desertion rendered it chronically short of infantry, who were down to only eight thousand by September 1945. As Ian Gentles has written, conscripting infantry in 1645-6 was like ladling water into a leaky bucket.

The New Model was better armed and equipped than its predecessors, and it was the first English army to wear a uniform: red, or ‘russet’ coats faced with blue (Fairfax’s colour) with grey breeches. It was even paid fairly regularly, but that did not stop the looting large quantities of livestock, bacon, beer, grain, firewood and household goods wherever they marched. The Eastern Association regiments had always paid their way but in the ‘transition’ period before the Battle of Naseby. The figure below is of a warrant for payment for bullocks delivered for Pickering’s regiment, signed off by Manchester. But in its early months, many of the new infantry recruits behaved as one would expect of unwilling conscripts.  We have seen already how a silk-weaver captain in the garrison at Newport Pagnell incurred the wrath of Sir Samuel Luke by refusing to take the Covenant. But the ordinary soldiers commanded by such men of religious conscience were described by Luke as ‘an ungodly crew’ as they trained for what, for many, was to be their first battle:

 I think these New Modellers knead all their dough with ale, for I never see so many drunk in my life in so short a time.

As Underdown has pointed out, the effect of the establishment of military committees was to supplant the role of JPs, and as many of their members came from origins less elevated than those of the substantial gentry who made up the Commission of the Peace, they were often unpopular with the leading men of the county, even those of nominally Parliamentarian persuasion. The moderates, peace-party men or political ‘Presbyterians’ thus wished to curb the powers of the County Committees; the radicals, war-party men, pro-Army ‘Independents’, wished just as passionately to maintain them. The issue on which local quarrels often turned was finance. The original committee members were anxious to protect their friends and relations, to keep money and troops inside the county and not to be compelled to pay for military activities which did not directly affect their mainly parochial, interests. The radicals who gradually displaced them were less interested in ‘county’ society and property rights; and were more outward-looking. To begin with, it had been assumed that the war would be financed by voluntary subscriptions and loans: Cromwell himself had contributed a thousand pounds in this way, but as it became clear that these would prove inadequate, an excise was introduced and then a land tax. In addition to the sequestered property of loyalists were used for military purposes. This led to tensions between the local sequestration committees, dominated by men with purely local interests, and ‘London’, to which more and more radicals looked for national leadership as well as for finance.

Thus, winning the war became a matter of financial as well as a military re-organisation. The New Model Army was financed by a policy of ‘compounding’ with delinquents, i.e. allowing them to buy back their sequestered estates for a fine calculated according to the degree of their delinquency. This was a compromise, falling short of the confiscation the radicals wanted, but the military revolution necessitated a financial revolution. As Colonel John Pickering took up his new command at Abingdon, where his regiment had been in winter quarters, the Eastern Association ceased to be responsible for his regiment on 5 April. The total cost of maintaining it had been over four and a half thousand pounds, of which three hundred and fifty was for provisions and fifty was for the payment of staff officers. The administrative system of the Association had been unable to raise adequate resources to cover such large sums of money for so many regiments. This is why the pay to Pickering’s regiment had fallen into arrears and the situation regarding supplies and equipment for it and other Eastern Association regiments may however have been better than for some other Civil War armies due to its efficient organisation before the creation of the New Model Army.

However, the problems over pay did not improve after the transfer into the New Model. For forty-two days in April and May, the regiment went without pay. This may have been a factor leading to the mutiny later in April, but the catalyst was apparently a sermon preached by Colonel Pickering following the confirmation of his command of the regiment. This apparently antagonised the men who had transferred from Ayloffe’s regiment who were strongly influenced by the strong presbyterian views of their former commander. According to a royalist broadsheet, it was Pickering’s condemnation of the proposed imposition of the presbyterian church system to which the men particularly objected. It was not unusual that Pickering should have preached to his troops their commanding officer, in the absence of an ordained chaplain, and his strong Calvinist beliefs would have been appreciated by religious Presbyterians and Independents alike. Lay preaching was, after all, an evolving nonconformist practice at this time, but the Presbyterians were determined to impose new conformity in religion through their ‘Covenant’ with the Scots. Parliament, with its presbyterian majority, issued an order which instructed Fairfax …

… that no person be permitted to preach who is not ordained a minister …

But the bad feeling between the regiments of the New Model Army and the other parliamentarian regiments was only in part due to religious and political views. It reflected more the growing resentment at the apparent rise in the status of the New Model regiments, especially when this was exacerbated by the competition for resources. This can very clearly be seen as a primary ‘feeder’ of the conflict between the garrison of Newport Pagnell and Pickering’s regiment while it continued to be billeted in the south Midlands during May 1645. On the 19th, Sir Samuel Luke wrote:

There is such an antipathy here between my men and the New Model that you will every day hear of new encounters. My party which encountered Col. Pickering is returned with the loss of one man only, whom I intend to relieve so soon as I know where he is.

There is some evidence to suggest that, in keeping with Underdown’s thesis, that the general population in the town did not share the hostility of the county gentry and the garrison towards Pickering and his troops, as Luke himself later wrote:

Col. Pickering exercises … twice at North Crawley last Lord’s Day, as I hear, and our townsmen at Newport admire him beyond Mr. Birdett (the commander of Newport Pagnell garrison).

Hostile commentators, both royalist propagandists and Presbyterians like Samuel Luke, misrepresented the general character of the new army from the start. They sneered at the base birth of its officers, though of the thirty-seven who fought at the Battle of Naseby a few weeks later, with the rank of colonel or above, nine were nobles and only seven others were not gentry, while a high proportion of the more junior officers were also of gentry stock. On the other hand, the New Model was widely feared as the supposed military wing of the independent party, but in fact, it refrained from engaging in any kind of collective political activity before 1647. In its early years, it was not indifferent to political issues, for most of its officers and any of its ordinary soldiers, especially its troopers, cared passionately about what they were fighting for. But over these two years, under Fairfax’s leadership, it remained wholly and solely dedicated to beating the enemy in the field, as its creators had intended. At the outset, the high proportion of Independents and sectaries in regiments drawn from the Eastern Association retained much of their old character, especially in Cromwell’s cavalry. But in choosing officers for regiments that had to be reorganised or newly raised, the criteria were previous service and military fitness.

In practice, broad toleration prevailed in most of the army during its fighting years. Something can be gleaned from the names of its chaplains, whose appointment, outside army headquarters, lay with the regimental commanders. Over thirty have been traced who served with various regiments between 1645 and 1651, but few stayed with the colours for more than a few months. Of the nine appointed during 1645, five were Independents and four certainly or probably Presbyterian. Chaplains in the New Model Army preached to civilian congregations as well as to soldiers. Some, like Richard Baxter, were ordained ministers before the war (see above), but these were hard to find and reluctant to leave their ‘flocks’ at home. An increasing number of common soldiers took upon themselves preaching functions, having much in common with itinerant mechanic preachers. Army chaplains also included many radicals, including Henry Pinnell, who became chaplain to Pickering’s regiment, presumably following the complaint from Ayloffe’s men about the Colonel’s preaching and the prohibition on lay-preachers. Later, in 1647, it was Pinnell who defended the ‘Agitators’ to Oliver Cromwell’s face. He was a classical scholar, translator and pamphleteer, and therefore probably an ordained minister, like Baxter. Pinnell was an ‘Antinomian’, contrasting the way a man knows a thing by the reading of it with experimental certainty of it in himself. Although an Independent who championed the rights of ordinary soldiers and was radical in political views, Pinnell also wanted to see an agreement reached with the King. Both were critical of the ‘presbyterian’ parliament, as Baxter often heard men say:

It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s sores. It will never be well with us till we have Parliaments of countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants. 

The Campaign of 1645 – Long Marches & Sieges:

Even at full strength, the New Model accounted for less than half the men in arms in England. Although it absorbed most of what was left of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, Massey’s Western Association Army, the Northern Association Army under Major-General Poyntz, and Brereton’s Cheshire brigade continued in force. There were also numerous local garrisons, as well as the London trained bands. But it was the New Model Army which was to seal Parliament’s victory in the first Civil War. But the delay in getting the New Model ready for action allowed the initiative to pass to the royalists in the early months of 1645. They took Weymouth in February, though it was soon recovered. Colonel Mytton then scored a rare success for parliament by capturing Shrewsbury on 22 February. Plymouth and Abingdon managed to survive determined royalist assaults, but Goring’s cavalry captured Farnham, only thirty-eight miles from London, though he was soon forced to draw them back. More threateningly, the king sent the Prince of Wales with a group of privy councillors to Bristol, to reanimate the war in the West Country and create a new field army there with the specific aim of besieging the much-contested town of Taunton. But the royalists had quarrels of their own in the west country. Charles’ indulgence of Goring led to him becoming commander-in-chief of all the western forces, but neither Grenville, besieging Plymouth, nor Berkeley, governor of Exeter, were willing to take orders from him.

In March 1645, Prince Rupert was sent to relieve Chester, which was threatened by Brereton. Leven had dispatched five thousand Scots under David Leslie to reinforce Brereton, and it looked as though a major battle was impending. However, Rupert was forced to fall back by a popular uprising in Herefordshire and Worcestershire which threatened his rear. Exasperated countrymen had formed themselves into an association to defend themselves against plundering soldiers from both sides. They were nick-named ‘Clubmen’ because most of them were armed only with cudgels and farm implements, though some of them had firearms. They were crushed by the combined forces of Rupert and Maurice and then punished by having the princes’ troopers quartered in the county. But though the cavaliers’ force of arms stamped out the movement in the Marches, for the time being, Clubmen risings followed in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset in the late spring. The Clubmen were not just aggrieved with having the armies in their midst, but also by the New Model Ordinance and the increased power of the county committees which stemmed from it and the way it impinged on the local rights of property.

Rupert then wanted to march north, first to relieve Chester from Brereton’s besieging forces and then to attack Leven’s now much reduced Scottish army, which was besieging Pontefract Castle. But Cromwell was still in the field with a brigade of horse, making the most of the forty days that the Self-Denying Ordinance allowed him. When Fairfax took to the field at the end of April, his army still at barely half strength, his main impediment was the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which insisted on directing his operations from Westminster. It ordered him, against his own better judgement, to march to the relief of Taunton, so on 1 May, the bulk of Fairfax’s New Model Army marched into the west, leaving Cromwell and his party of horse and dragoons …

… and four regiments of foot besides, who were ordered, when their recruits were come up, to joyn with him to busie the Enemy about Oxford.

These were likely the four regiments of Foot from the Eastern Association, with which Cromwell had worked so well in 1644. Pickering’s regiment was already with Cromwell in late April. Moreover, the brigade of infantry accompanying him was under the command of Richard Browne, Major General of Oxfords, Berks and Bucks (left), under whose command Pickering’s had remained throughout the winter. Rainsborough’s, another of the former Eastern Association regiments, had also been placed under Browne’s overall command in April and May 1645.

Cromwell was already involved in an attempt to clear several small garrisons around Oxford.  On 25 April, following a cavalry skirmish, he had taken Bletchington House, an important garrison only seven miles from Oxford, and went on to harry the outer defences of the city itself, frustrating the northward movement of the king’s artillery by driving off most of the draught horses. From there he turned his attention to Faringdon Castle, then in Berkshire. This was a more difficult challenge, so he had to wait until 29 April, for a body of infantry to join him before he could attack. Five to six hundred infantry were sent by Browne from Abingdon where Pickering’s were quartered. Sprigge recorded that Captain Jenkins was killed at Faringdon, the first of Pickering’s officers to be lost, along with fourteen ordinary soldiers. The regiment may have numbered between five and six hundred by this time since their ranks had been swelled by the men from Ayloffe’s regiment, so they may have been the only regiment involved in the siege.

Above: The Campaign of 1645

This caused Charles to change his plans; he recalled Goring from the west and to summon all his army, including Maurice’s forces in the Marches from Worcestershire southward, to a general rendezvous at Stow-on-the-Wold on 8 May. The results of the siege of Faringdon were inconclusive and on 3 May Goring’s cavalry and dragoons, from the south-west, attempted to ‘beat up’ Cromwell’s quarters and to relieve Faringdon. They were engaged at Radcot Bridge by Cromwell’s horse, but although there were some losses, Goring did not press home his advantage. Having survived Cromwell’s attack, the garrison at Faringdon remained in the royalist’s hands for a further year. At Stow, Charles mustered at least five thousand foot and six thousand horse, as much as Fairfax had when he set out for the west, and the arrival of Langdale with his northern horse gave him an appreciable advantage in cavalry. Meanwhile, when the New Model Army reached Blandford on 14 May, Fairfax was recalled to besiege Oxford and directed to detach six regiments to reach Taunton. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was alarmed by the movements of the Charles’ forces and lured by a false report that the faithful governor of Oxford was ready to betray the city. Fairfax must have thought that there were better ways of raising the morale of raw and reluctant infantry than taking them on long marches for no apparent reason. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was determined to take Oxford before engaging the King’s army in the field. With five thousand men detached for the relief of Taunton, Fairfax was temporarily very vulnerable, yet the Committee ordered him to advance against Oxford.

At Stow, however, the king’s council of war was as usual divided, and it proceeded to throw away its advantage. Rupert and Langdale wanted to stick to their plan for a northern campaign, but most of the rest, including the civilians, pressed for the whole army to move westward and engage Fairfax while the New Model was still raw and under strength. That surely was what the parliament and its general had most to fear, but Rupert opposed it strenuously, and he broke what was becoming an impasse by proposing a division of forces: Goring and his men would be sent westward to check Fairfax, while the rest of the royal army proceeded northward. It was not a good solution, but it pleased Goring, whose authority was enhanced, and it was adopted. It did at least force Brereton to lift the siege of Chester. The strategically-placed city was also the port that Charles hoped to use to land further reinforcements from Ireland. The Committee of Both Kingdoms had tried to keep the siege going by requesting Leven to hasten to Brereton’s assistance and by ordering all available local forces, including Lord Fairfax’s Yorkshiremen, to do likewise. But Leven, though he did not refuse, was deflected by the news of the most brilliant of all Montrose’s victories at Auldearn. He feared that Montrose might advance through the lowlands to join up with the royal army moving northwards, so he made a long detour through Westmorland, so Brereton did not receive the help he needed in time.

The Committee of Both Kingdoms was still transfixed by the mirage of an easy siege of Oxford, and the independent politicians were looking for an ultimate victory which would owe as little as possible to the Scots, who had become a political liability at the same time as their military value had shrunk. As a result, a proposal to send the New Model north was lost by one vote in the special committee of both houses. As a compromise, Fairfax was ordered to send 2,500 of his cavalry and dragoons to assist Leven and to move his remaining troops against Oxford. His political masters had therefore succeeded in splitting his army into three parts before it was even up to strength. , with nearly half his cavalry moving northwards, four thousand men still in Taunton, where they were trapped by Goring after relieving the town, and maybe ten thousand men preparing to lay siege to Oxford. Cromwell’s and Browne’s forces were also instructed to rejoin the army, which they did at Marston on 22 May. Pickering was with the army at Southam in late May and Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson was active in carrying arms and surgeons’ equipment to the siege.

By the end of May, Fairfax had received at least four thousand infantry recruits since first taking to the field, but had also lost three thousand through desertion, disease or skirmishing in the course of his gruelling march into Dorset and back. Rupert also had to contend with politically-motivated civilians in the king’s council of war, but now at Market Drayton, he guided it towards wiser decisions than those he had urged at Stow. Though he had been keen on a northern campaign, he was aware that the major part of the divided New Model had returned as far as Newbury, and he was eager to engage it while he could still catch it at a disadvantage. He had already sent orders to Goring, who had become obsessed with retaking Taunton, to return with his whole force and rendezvous with the main army at Market Harborough in Leicestershire. He now successfully urged that by striking eastwards towards the parliamentarian heartland he would be sure to draw off Fairfax from Oxford, and hoped on the way to collect three thousand Welshmen that Charles Gerrard had been raising and the bulk of the cavalry from the Newark garrison. Since the royal army already numbered eleven thousand, he had a good prospect of giving Fairfax battle on equal or better terms. But Goring decided to ignore his orders to return to the Midlands and remained in Bath, besieging Taunton.

To draw Fairfax off, Charles and Rupert marched upon Leicester, launching what effectively amounted to an invasion of the parliamentary stronghold of the East Midlands, which took its inhabitants by complete surprise. Although it was a wealthy city, it was inadequately garrisoned, and its hastily built fortifications were compromised by suburban buildings which gave cover to an attacking force. Its plunder would fill the soldiers’ stomachs and still leave plenty of loot for the king’s coffers. Rupert invested it methodically and summoned it to surrender on 30 May. Without a response, the royalist guns opened fire in mid-afternoon, and by six they had breached its best-defended quarter, the Newark.  At midnight, they launched a general attack which was resisted by the defenders, a mere 480 foot and 400 horse, assisted by 900 townsmen in arms. They had to be driven back street-by-street until they were finally cornered in the market place and forced to surrender. They did not all receive quarter, and both men and women were killed during the night since Rupert had lost thirty officers and was exasperated by the city’s resistance. The ensuing plunder went on for days, at the end of which 140 cartloads of ‘booty’ were carried off to Newark. It was reported that no royalist taken prisoner between Leicester and Naseby had less than forty shillings on him, two months’ pay for a foot soldier.

Following the fall of Leicester to the royalist army on 31 May, Cromwell (right) was dispatched to secure Ely while Pickering’s regiment remained with Fairfax. Leicester’s agony had the expected effect of making the Committee of Safety abandon the folly of besieging Oxford. Parliament promptly accepted its recommendation that Fairfax should now take the field against the king forthwith, thus removing the New Model’s shackles, simply instructing its general to follow the royal army’s movements and leaving the rest to his own judgement.

(to be continued…)

Sources:

Oxford: OUP (2002).

The cover of the book shows a section of ‘England’s Miraculous Preservation’. The ark contains the two Houses of Parliament, and among those struggling in the flood are Archbishop Laud, Prince Rupert and the Earls of Hamilton and Newcastle, as well as Oliver Cromwell (centre).

Whitstable: Pryor Publications (1994). In the acknowledgements, Glenn refers to the work he and this author did on the history of the regiment:  ‘It had been intended that we write the book together, before his departure to Hungary.’

Harmondsworth: Pelican Books (1972).

Christopher Hill (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas  During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

David Smurthwaite (1984), The Ordnance Survey complete guide to the Battlefields of Britain. Exeter: Webb & Bower (Publishers).

John Hayward et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

The Royal Oak & the Graf Spee; Orkney to Montevideo:

Above: HMS Royal Oak at anchor in 1937

Eighty years ago, On 14 October 1939, HMS Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland, when she was torpedoed by Lieutenant-Commander Günther Prien’s submarine U-47. It got through a fifty-foot gap in the defences of Scapa Flow and fired seven torpedoes at the 29,000-ton battleship, of which three hit the ship, capsizing it. After the sinking of HMS Courageous the previous month, this was an almost equally spectacular symbolic success for the Kriegsmarine. Of Royal Oak‘s complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed, 810 in only thirteen minutes that night, the others dying later of their wounds.  While the loss of the outdated ship, the first of the five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War, did little to affect the numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its Allies, the sinking had a considerable effect on wartime morale. The raid made an immediate celebrity and war hero out of Günther Prien, who became the first German submarine officer to be awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Before the sinking of Royal Oak, the Royal Navy had considered the naval base at Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack, and U-47‘s raid demonstrated that the German Navy was capable of bringing the war to British home waters. The shock resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.

One task of the U-boats was to place magnetic mines in the sea-lanes around the British Isles; this could be done by low-flying Heinkel He-IIIS and by E-boats (motor torpedo boats, shown in the painting on the right) and destroyers. Lacking a large surface fleet, the German Navy used small vessels for fast hit-and-run attacks.

By the end of November, these had sunk twenty-nine British ships, including the destroyer HMS Gipsy and had also put the brand-new cruiser HMS Belfast out of action for three years. Through the immense bravery of bomb-disposal experts Lieutenant-Commanders R C Lewis and J. G. D. Ouvry, who removed the two detonators, one of which was ticking audibly, from a mine spotted in the Thames Estuary, the secrets of the steel-hull activated device were discovered. Within a month, Admiralty scientists had discovered ways of counteracting the mines by fitting electric cables around ships’ hulls, to create a negative magnetic, or ‘degaussed’ field. Soon afterwards a means of blowing up the mines, using wooden-hulled trawlers towing buoyant electrical cables, was also invented.

The map above shows the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, from 1939 to 1941, with the green line showing the areas of severe U-boat impact. While in the U-boat Germany had deployed a potentially war-winning weapon and it also had three purpose-built ‘pocket-battleship’ commerce raiders and two powerful modern battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, launched early in the war, there were always too few to challenge the Royal Navy directly. Instead, as in the First World War, Germany was once again made use of its limited naval resources to attack Britain’s sea communications. Its formidable capital ships were used as raiders against British commerce. Tracking down and destroying these threats severely stretched British resources. It was the spotting, disabling and forced scuttling of the German pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee that was the RN’s greatest victory during the so-called Phoney War. Operating off South American coast, Captain Hans Lansdorff’s ship had enjoyed considerable success at the beginning of the war, sinking ten ships totalling more than fifty thousand tons. The term ‘pocket’ battleship is somewhat misleading, however, since although a limit of ten thousand tons had been imposed on German warships by the Treaty of Versailles, once the Graf Spee was loaded up with her six eight-inch, eight 5.9-inch and six 4.1-inch guns, as well as ammunition and stores, she weighed more than half as much again.

In the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December, off the coast of Uruguay, the German ship took on the eight-inch guns of the cruiser HMS Exeter, along with the six-inch guns of the light cruisers HMS Ajax and the New Zealander-crewed HMS Achilles, badly damaging the first two ships. However, she was eventually outfought by the three British cruisers and was forced into the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, on 15 December by the pounding she had received. Langsdorff then magnanimously released the Allied sailors he captured from ships he had sunk, who reported they had been well-treated. Then, mistakenly trusting to BBC radio broadcasts about the imminent arrival of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battlecruiser HMS Renown, and unable to hire a small plane to see whether this was in fact so, Langsdorff then sailed the Graf Spee to the entrance of Montevideo  harbour just before dusk on Sunday, 17 December and scuttled her. The explosions were watched by over twenty thousand spectators on the shore and heard on the radio by millions around the world. In fact, only the cruiser HMS Cumberland had managed to reach Montevideo; the BBC had patriotically participated in releasing a giant ‘fake news’ story. Five days later, Langsdorff shot himself.

Back to Europe: Poland, the Baltic States & Finland:

Meanwhile, in Poland, by 5 October, resistance to the Nazi-Soviet Pact forces had ended; 217,000 Polish soldiers taken captive by Soviets, 619,000 by Germans; up to 100,000 escaped via Lithuania, Hungary and Romania to join Free Polish forces under General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Prime Minister in exile in Angers, France. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers and twenty-five thousand civilians had been killed, and 130,000 soldiers lay wounded. A hundred thousand Poles in the Russian ‘sector’ were arrested by the NKVD and sent to concentration camps, from which hardly any returned. Adolf Hitler travelled to Warsaw by special train to visit victorious troops. Then, on 10 October, Admiral Erich Raeder urged Hitler to consider invading Norway as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from northern Sweden to Germany and establishing U-boat stations along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Hitler ordered the OKW to start planning for an invasion in January 1940. At that point, Hitler did not want to divert troops from the attack he was planning in the west and was persuaded to do so only by signs that the Allies were planning to invade Norway themselves, possibly using aid for Finland as a cloak for their actions.

The Eden Memorandum on Migration to Palestine:

The National Archives in London has recently released a secret document from 8 August 1944, a Memorandum prepared for the War Cabinet by Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of an “offer” from Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, that, provided the United Kingdom and the United States governments could find sufficient accommodation, the Hungarian government would be prepared to allow all Jewish children under ten years of age, with visas for other countries, and all adults and children with Palestine immigration certificates, to leave Hungary. Horthy also announced that there would be no further transportations of Jews to Poland, i.e. to Auschwitz. This document, and the attached correspondence between Washington and Whitehall, is significant in that it clarifies the controversy about if, when and how Horthy acted to bring the deportations to an end, and to enable the remaining Jews (mainly trapped in Budapest, many of them refugees from other countries) to seek asylum elsewhere. The matter was discussed at the War Cabinet Committee on Refugees meeting on 4 June, although Eden himself was not present. The Government faced a dilemma, since refusing to accept this offer would result in a hostile public reaction both in the United States and Britain, but accepting it would be ‘risking civil war in Palestine owing to the inroad of Jews from Hungary into the Levant.’  Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the Cabinet reached a ‘no-decision’. The proposal of the International Red Cross for the almost immediate removal of 41,000 Jews from Hungary to Romania alarmed the meeting, which was generally against joining the US in accepting. The Secretary of State for the Colonies argued that the British Empire would be signing a blank cheque which we could not honour.

Although both Foreign Office and Home Office secretaries argued that the offer should be accepted in concert with the USA, they felt that in doing so the US Government must accept that the British authorities should not be forced to deliver the impossible in terms of accommodating the refugees, and it was eventually agreed to extend the transit camp originally established for Yugoslav refugees, especially to contain a potential sudden influx of immigrants to Palestine. There had even been suspicions expressed within the Cabinet that Hitler himself had inspired Horthy’s offer in order to create fundamental difficulties for the Allies in the Near East by allowing an exodus of Jews. Certainly, at this point, we know that the Regency in Budapest was incapable of acting independently from the occupying Nazi forces and Hitler’s all-powerful agent in the capital, Veesenmayer. It was not until the end of the month that the Romanians defected from the Axis camp and it became possible for a more independent Hungarian government to be formed again, so the Allies were rightly cautious about any overtures from Budapest at this stage.

Colonel Koszorús’ Unparalleled Action:

However, not to accept the offer would give the Nazis and the pro-Nazi Hungarian government a propaganda coup, and Eden agreed that the acceptance of the offer should be widely publicised and that the Dominion governments should be asked to help in receiving some of the refugees. He also suggested that it might be necessary to establish a transit camp in Syria in order to prevent the situation in Palestine from becoming ‘acute’. In a flurry of telegrams, the US Government agreed to wait before accepting the offer until after the full British War Cabinet on 8th, although before writing his Cabinet memorandum, Eden had already sent a third telegram to Washington signalling the British Government’s acceptance, subject to the detailed terms of transport and accommodation being agreed by the two governments. What effect this agreement had in Hungary we do not yet know, neither can we say that the deportations had been ended by this time, whatever the Regent’s intentions might have been. Horthy had originally ordered their suspension on 6 July, but a further 45,000 Jews from Transdanubia and the County of Pest had continued to be deported after that date. The most effective action to shield the Jews of Budapest had been taken on the initiative of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús in July, having important consequences for the survival of the Regency into the later summer and autumn:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself and a liberal Democrat who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, recognised Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg , who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszurús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

We know that the Sztójay Government had rescheduled the deportation of the Budapest Jews for 27 August, but the Romanians switched sides on 23rd, and it was Himmler who cancelled any further deportations on 27th.

Raids on the Roma & Horthy’s ‘Hiatus’:

Throughout August and September, the horrors of ‘all-out’ warfare had continued within Hungary and its occupied territories, with massacres by government troops and continued forced marches. These were also experienced increasingly by the Roma communities (pictured above). In August and September, the remaining Roma were subjected to raids on their villages, pressing the men into forced labour companies. The first massacre of gipsies took place on 5 October in Doboz, Békés County, where twenty Roma, including women and children, were killed by hand grenades and machine-guns of the Hungarian first armoured division’s military police, acting together with the local gendarmes. Later that month, the Roma were ordered not to leave their permanent residences. At the same time, there were some signs of hopes for peace that late summer. Regent Miklós Horthy could no longer stomach the activities of Eichmann’s SS, and this led to a ‘hiatus’ in the anti-Jewish campaign. On 29 August he sent word to Edmund Veesenmayer that he had decided there would be no more deportations, at least for the time being. With the transportation of Jews from the provinces completed, there were only the Jews in the capital left. Himmler approved the suspension of deportations and the continuation of negotiations through Kasztner and Brand. Himmler, like the Hungarian government itself, had been thinking of an acceptable way of bringing the war to an end. Once back in his office in Budapest, Kasztner was astonished to learn from Dieter Wisliceny that Eichmann and his unit had been ordered out of Hungary. You have won, the Nazi officer told him, the Sonderkommando is leaving. Eichmann, furious with Himmler’s vacillations, retired to sulk at his estate near Linz. The latter later compensated him with the order of an Iron Cross, ‘Second Class’.

In spite of the change to a more ‘neutral’ government under General Lakatos, Hungarian troops occupied parts of Southern Transylvania, Romania, and massacred hundreds of Jews, starting on 4 September. Soviet units then reached the borders established by Trianon later that month and then moved across these into Szeged, where Horthy had begun his journey to power twenty-five years earlier. His failure as an Axis ally was now complete as a gigantic tank battle took place around Debrecen in early October. By mid-October, the Soviet Red Army entered the outskirts of Pest and Horthy, finally, tried desperately to agree on an armistice. Throughout the short period of Géza Lakatos’ premiership, rumours had abounded in Budapest that Horthy was getting ready to exit the war and that all he needed was an honourable way out. He wanted to sue for peace, but not if that peace included Stalin. The British and the Americans were not interested and insisted that nothing less than unconditional surrender would do. Horthy’s insistence on hanging onto his German alliance, however reluctantly, did not help his country’s cause. In final desperation, Horthy sent Lieutenant General Gábor Faragho across the front lines to present Hungary’s case to the Russians. On 11 October, Faragho cabled a draft armistice agreement from Moscow requiring Hungary to give up, once again, its historic territories in Transylvania, everything he had fought for during his years as head of state. Horthy’s hesitation over this gave the Germans the time they needed to prepare a coup.

On Sunday morning, 15 October, there were rumours that the Regent’s son had been abducted, together with a general and two senior officers. It was a warm, sunny autumn morning. German planes had dropped leaflets over the city urging a rebellion against the government. Politicians had also been arrested. Hungarian Radio announced that the Regent would make a general proclamation at 1 p.m. In a soft and shaky voice, Horthy gave a long, detailed statement, in which he announced his decision to sign a separate peace treaty with the Allies, that Hungary had withdrawn from the war and had declared that it is returning to its neutral status. All laws relating to the repression of the Jewish population were revoked. The Reich had lost the war and had also broken its obligations to its Hungarian partner when it had occupied the country in March and arrested many Hungarian citizens. He blamed the Gestapo for dealing with the “Jewish problem” in an inhumane way and claimed that his nation had been forced to persecute the Jews.  The news spread like wildfire on what was a glorious autumn afternoon: Anna Porter has described the scenes…

…the sun was shining and the trees along the boulevards displayed their startling red, yellow and deep-purple colours as if the horrors of the past few weeks had not happened, as if the houses lining the avenues had not been turned into rubble. People came out of their cellars, put on their best clothes and walked, holding hands and greeting each other as in peacetime. Many Jews who had been in hiding paraded their newfound freedom; some tore the yellow stars off their breasts and ordered shots of pálinka in bars where they used to go, or dared to use a public telephone and take rides on streetcars where the tracks had not yet been bombed..

But the atmosphere of general euphoria did not last long. The Germans had listened into every conversation in Buda Castle and were not surprised by the attempt to break free. They were aware of the plan to bring two Hungarian regiments into the city and knew of the arming of the Jewish battalions. German troops and armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of Budapest and set up control points. A further announcement came over the waves: Horthy had been forced to abdicate, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross (Nazi) party has formed a government under its leader Ferenc Szálasi. Hungary was back in the war on the Axis side, and all anti-Jewish legislation was back in force. With the Arrow Cross in charge, the Jews realised that Eichmann would be back to complete their transportation and that random killings would be carried out by the Arrow Cross units themselves. Tom Leimdörfer recalls his family’s fears:

The lives of all of us were in immediate danger. What followed was six months of hell redeemed by some amazing bravery and kindness on the part of some who were willing to risk their lives for us.

Rudolph (Rézső) Kasztner, unlike the members of the Jewish Council, had no faith in Horthy’s protestations that he had been duped into allowing deportations in the first place and even less faith in Himmler’s change of heart. He pressed on with his negotiations for the lives of the remaining Jews of Budapest, Bratislava and Kolozsvár. In the late summer of 1944, a bloody insurrection erupted in Slovakia. A few parachutists from Britain and two Soviet airborne brigades also took part in the uprising, as did some Jewish partisans, including Rudolf Vrba, one of the authors of The Auschwitz Protocols. The uprising failed and led to further reprisals against Bratislava’s Jewish community. In Budapest itself, there was what Kasztner described as a brief lull in the terror in the early autumn. Nevertheless, there was a widespread belief that the Germans would pack up and go home. The cafés and restaurants were full, and no-one left even when the sirens sounded. By mid-October, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts were ready to execute Stalin’s order to take Budapest quickly. Arrow Cross newspapers accused the Jews of signalling bombers from rooftops, directing bombs to specific targets. Raoul Wallenberg had opened the door of the Swedish Embassy and directed his staff to hand out Swedish protection papers to all Jewish applicants. The certificates claimed that the holders were Swedish citizens awaiting exit visas. The number of Jews with official Swedish papers exceeded 4,500 by the end of October, and another three thousand fake Swedish certificates were handed out by the Rescue Committee and its Halutz workers. They all waited for permits to leave the country and be allowed into Palestine. The Swiss Red Cross had received over three million Swiss francs from the Jewish ‘Joint’ in the US to pay for food in the protected Star Houses bearing the Swedish colours and in the Columbus Street camp.

Victims, Survivors and Heroes:

Tom Leimdorfer, pictured here as a young child during the war, has narrated the effect of the events of 15 October on his family’s struggle to survive in Budapest, and especially in terms of their decision to go into hiding:

By now, my grandparents (Sári and Ármin) and my aunt Juci all lived in our flat. Juci’s husband Gyuri was in a labour camp. He had a dreadful accident there in March 1943 when he fell off a scaffolding. For some time, his life was in the balance, but he recovered albeit with a back injury which gave him much pain for the rest of his life. He was allowed home when he was in plaster recuperating, but was then back again in the forced labour camp outside Budapest. As the family wondered what to do on the evening of my eventful second birthday, Dr. Groh arrived. A kindly medical consultant, he was one of my grandfather’s customers who became a friend. He was a Roman Catholic who was appalled by the treatment of Jews and by the apparent acquiescence of his church. He said we were in danger and should leave our home immediately as Jews were being herded from ‘marked’ houses to designated ghettos. He insisted that we should all (15 of us!) go into hiding with his family even though that risked their lives.

Dr. Groh and his wife had six children. They made a room available for us and kept its shutters closed. For the next eight days we huddled together in that room, joining the family when there was nobody around who might report our presence. With Arrow Cross gangs and police raids everywhere, this was not a safe hiding place and the Groh family were at great risk. In spite of their protests, we crept back to our home one night to pick up some essentials and left for different destinations. Soon after we left, an Allied air raid hit the Groh’s house and tragically one of their daughters was killed. The room where we had been hiding was a pile of rubble.

My mother and I first headed across the Danube to the Pest side, to a house protected by the Swedish Embassy, where ‘Feri bácsi’ and ‘Manci néni’ (my grandparents younger siblings) were already staying. The Swiss and Swedish embassies as well as some churches had tried to set up ‘protected houses’ outside the overcrowded main Jewish ghettos. These were not always ‘safe’ as the Arrow Cross raids were unpredictable and (depending on the particular gang commander) would carry out atrocities without respect for any foreign diplomacy or even orders from their own Nazi puppet government, with its very thin veneer of legality. There were no more trains for Auschwitz, but there were the ‘death marches’ towards Austria organised by Eichmann as well as the random Arrow Cross raids. Diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg did all they could to thwart the murderous onslaught by distributing Swedish and Swiss passports and demanding safety for their ‘citizens’, by declaring houses as being under their protection and by threatening allied retribution after the war. With the Russian army advancing, this had some effect.

 

After the Arrow Cross coup d’état on 15 October, tens of thousands of Jews of Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches, and most of the remaining forced labourers under Hungarian Army command were deported to Bergen-Belsen. One of these forced labourers was the poet, Miklós Radnóti.

 

On the same day the War Cabinet met in London, 8 August to discuss the proposed evacuation of Jewish children from Budapest, Miklós Radnóti wrote the following from his work camp in the mountains above Zagubica in Yugoslavia:

ROOT 

Root, now, gushes with its power, 

rain to drink and earth to grow,

and its dream is white as snow.

Earthed, it heaves above the earthly,

crafty in its clamberings,

arm clamped like a cable’s strings.

On its wrists pale worms are sleeping,

and its ankles worms caress;

world is but  wormeatenness.

Root, though, for the world cares nothing,

thrives and labours there below,

labours for the leafthick bough;

marvels at the bough it nurses,

liquors succulent and sweet,

feeds celestially sweet.

Root is what I am, rootpoet,

here at home among the worms,

finding here the poem’s terms.

I the root was once the flower,

under these dim tons my bower,

comes the shearing of the thread,

deathsaw wailing overhead.

Radnóti’s words continued to be prophetic. The death saw continued to ‘wail overhead’ for many caught up in the Hungarian holocaust. Miklós Radnóti himself was one of these, and one of Hungary’s greatest poets of the twentieth century. Born in Budapest in 1909, from its very beginning, Radnóti’s life was overshadowed by tragedy. At his birth, both his mother and twin brother died. The ‘Numerus Clausus Act’ of September 1920, the first anti-Semitic law in Europe, required that the number of Jews in Hungarian universities be reduced to six per cent. Barred from the University of Budapest, Radnóti enrolled at Szeged University, where he read French and Hungarian literature and was awarded a PhD in 1934. In response to the country’s shift to the right, there were a number of groups arising on the centre-left, liberal, populist and social democratic. Continuing in the liberal tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungarian poets, Radnóti was among the young people in favour of social change. He joined the Art Forum of Szeged Youth, a populist movement addressing the plight of Hungarian peasants, supporting agrarian reform. Drawing on Hungarian folklore, they identified with the national poet Sándor Petőfi and musicians like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.  Inspired by the left-wing idealism common among writers and artists of the time, both inside Hungary and from outside, Radnóti cherished the values he developed in this group for the rest of his life. He also insisted on his identity as a Catholic and a Hungarian poet for the rest of his life, though his country branded him as a Jew. Once identified as such, regardless of his own detentions, he was effectively sentenced to death.

Despite his darkest premonitions, Radnóti’s work also continued to flourish, especially after his marriage to his high school sweetheart, Fanni Gyarmati, who had been the central focus of his love poems since the late twenties. By the late thirties, he was widely recognised in literary circles. However, within three years, from 1938-41, three sequences of anti-Jewish laws were introduced. The first two defined who was Jewish and regulated the percentage of Jewish participation in various economic activities. The third created a forced labour system that became responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including that of Radnóti himself. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg on Poland, he anticipated the full-scale destruction of Hungary, and became sick in the stomach, ridden by insomnia and near to collapse. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to produce work of great innovation in the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. In 1938 he published a collection of poems, Steep Road, and in 1940, three more collections, including a volume of prose writing, a selection of translations and his own Selected Poetry. Two more volumes followed in his lifetime.

He was caught up in the whirlwind of the Hungarian Holocaust which followed the Nazi takeover of the country in March 1944. He suffered unspeakable deprivation and died a horrifying, anonymous death. Taken by a freight train from Hungary to Yugoslavia in May 1944, he was shot and buried in a mass grave with twenty-one other forced labourers, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November. He left behind poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate Hungarian culture. Many of them convey moods and perceptions untainted by the horrors, while others offer first-hand accounts of the wholesale murder. Taken as a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti’s imagination and the obligation he felt to give testimony to an existence engulfed by catastrophe. As well as being masterworks in the annals of the poetry of the last century, they are also documents of destruction. Through them, Radnóti subverted the horror of the Holocaust, in helping us to understand it.

Much of what he started, however, he was unable to finish, as from 1940 he was called up three times into slave labour units. He was worked to exhaustion in coalfields, sugar plants and ammunition factories during his first two call-ups and in his last, he was taken to the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia. However, under pressure from Soviet and Partisan forces, the German Army was forced to evacuate the Balkans. Radnóti’s squad was force-marched back to Hungary, to be transferred from there to slave-labour camps in Germany. Cold weather, exhaustion, hunger, savage beatings and killings meant that of marching column which contained 3,600 men on leaving Bor, only eight hundred crossed the Hungarian border. Marching on through Western Hungary in November, Radnóti began to lose his strength. His feet were covered with open blisters, such that he could no longer walk. It was probably on 8 November that the squad reached a brickyard in a town near Győr, where they spent the night. Next day three NCOs of the Hungarian Armed Forces separated Radnóti and twenty-one others from the column. Crowding them onto two borrowed carts, they took them first to a hospital, then to a school housing refugees. Neither had room for them, so the soldiers took them to the dam near Abda, where they were ordered to dig a ditch. The guards then shot them one by one into the ditch.

When his body was exhumed a year and a half later, his last poems, stained by dirt and blood, were found in the pocket of his raincoat. Within a few years of the end of the war, his poems, including these resurrected ones, became well-known to Hungarians, exalting and moving millions of them in the continuing gloom which followed. Radnóti’s place among the Hungarian masters was confirmed. Until now, they have not been so well-known outside Hungary, but Ozsváth and Turner’s recent volume seeks to call the attention of the English-speaking world to them, giving them the means to resound… and communicate the vital, immediate sense which characterizes the original. Radnóti’s last volume of poetry, Foamy Sky, was published posthumously in 1946, a volume which did not then contain the last five poems. Only after his body was exhumed were these five poems found, inscribed in the small camp notebook (pages of which are shown below) he had obtained in Bor. Two years later, the entire and complete volume was re-published. Since then it has been re-published many times in Hungary, but never in English, until now. Ozsváth concludes:

…the unforgettable formal music of his poems not only preserves his most personal perceptions but also echoes the lives and culture of all those who were murdered in the Holocaust.  And while they give account of the darkest hours of history, they also demonstrate the tremendous power of the human spirit to triumph over death.

The Swiss & Swedish Missions:

Meanwhile, the remaining Jewish population of Budapest were living at the same subsistence level as the general population, despite the claims of the political far right that they were having a cushy time. As a result of the persistent removals of rights, men away on compulsory forced labour, and the deaths of many in the process, mass impoverishment and demoralisation were more and more in evidence. Applications to officialdom from widows who had lost husbands went unanswered. The Jews’ yellow ration cards bought less food of inferior quality in the shops.

The Swedish and Swiss embassies and their diplomats Wallenberg, Anger and Lutz did all they could to ameliorate these conditions and to protect the Jews against recurrent threats of deportation, providing safe houses, exemptions from wearing yellow stars and from forced labour in the army. Wallenberg was appaled at the helplessness of the Jews crammed into the starred houses. Those in need were quickly given financial assistance. A wide range of Jews doing forced labour, who were reduced to rags, were helped and enabled to obtain shoes and clothing. A separate purchasing section of the Swedish Embassy was set up for this purpose.

Wallenberg had arrived in Budapest on 9 July with a brief as embassy secretary of assessing and reporting on conditions in Hungary with a view to the organisation of further ‘humanitarian’ action. The director of the American War Refugee Bureau (WRB) and of OSS, Iver C Olsen, had chosen him for the mission in Hungary. He also had the backing of the US ambassador in Stockholm and the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He was charged with a number of tasks: in addition to reporting on the situation in the country, he was to build up and run a Swedish relief organisation, and to support persecuted Jews and registered persons in Budapest with a view to their rescue. He was to collaborate closely with the International Red Cross, thereby to organise escape routes in various directions. In this matter, from mid-July, he called on the services of Carl Lutz at the Swiss Consulate, from whom he learnt of the talks between the officials of the ‘Reich’ and the Hungarian authorities, and of the purpose and text of the Swiss protective documents.

Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s Vice-Consul, worked from the US Legation, declaring seventy-two buildings in Budapest as annexes of the Swiss Legation, thereby saving over sixty thousand Jews. On 24 July, Lutz moved the Emigration Section to a building in the old business quarter of Pest. It was granted extra-territorial status, and the series of numbered emigration documents prepared in its offices was called a ‘collective passport’. This originally contained the names of 7,800 ’emigrating’ Hungarian Jews. From October, Swiss protective letters (Schutzbrief) in Hungarian and German were also issued. With the assistance of Zionist members of the opposition, these were steadily circulated to the nominated Jewish families, who also received certificates like the one pictured below which they could display on doors and in windows to declare their protection by the Swiss Consulate. When Szálasi came to power, these were mostly of symbolic value. Lutz’s wife, Gertrud Frankhauser was also devoted to this humanitarian work, and both of them were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem later in their lives.

Above: Daisy Lászlo, as named on her letter of protection

(to be continued)

Transatlantic Diplomatic Adventures:

While Operation Garden suffered 1,500 casualties, Operation Market lost five times that number of Britons and Poles at Arnhem, massacred on the Lower Rhine by tank, mortar and artillery fire. On the night of 25 September, 3,910 of the 11,920 men of the 1st Airborne Division and Polish Independent Brigade Group managed to withdraw to the south side of the river, the rest having been killed, wounded or captured. It was, however, the British Army’s last defeat. What became known as Operation Market Garden used up scarce resources and manpower at precisely the moment that Patton was nearing the Rhine without opposition, but short of supplies. The Allied forces were unable to cross the borders of the Reich for another six months. The Germans, on the other hand, were able to use the breathing space bought by their victory in Holland to rush defenders to the Siegfried Line, previously undefended. From late September, Allied forces founded themselves fighting determined German counter-attacks in the Vosges, Moselle and the Scheldt, as well as at Metz and Aachen.

With mixed military fortunes on both western and eastern fronts in mid-September, Churchill and Roosevelt met for the second time in Quebec. It is not now recognised today as one of the iconic meetings of the war, unlike Tehran, Yalta or the Newfoundland conference which inaugurated the Atlantic Charter. Nonetheless, it was a highly significant moment in the development of the relationship between the two leaders, one that helps us to debunk the rose-tinted wartime mythology which became part of the contemporary consciousness of a ‘special relationship’ based on personal ‘chemistry’. Significantly, Poland was not discussed in any detail, neither in connection with the current crisis nor the country’s future. Roosevelt dealt with this unpleasant political reality by ignoring it, emphasising the importance of the bigger picture.

What was prominently discussed in Quebec was the post-war future of Germany. The question had proved divisive at Tehran, as evidenced by the infamous dinner at which Stalin had called for fifty thousand Germans to be shot in the immediate aftermath of the war. The dinner in Quebec on 13 September rivalled the one in Tehran for contentiousness and emotion. Roosevelt asked his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to outline for Churchill just what the Americans had in mind for Germany. Normally, this would have been a matter for the State Department. Morgenthau proceeded to describe one of the most radical and destructive proposals ever formulated by any democratic state in the twentieth century. Not only was Germany to be split into two countries, but all its industrial capacity was to be destroyed. Churchill, trusting his emotions on this occasion, was outraged. Even before Morgenthau could finish his piece, Churchill turned the full flood of his rhetoric, sarcasm and violence on the man from the Treasury, telling him that his proposal was unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary. The Prime Minister’s protest was as clear and rational as it was emotional, however:

I’m all for disarming Germany, but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bonds between the working classes of all countries, and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating.

Yet two days later, Churchill withdrew his strident objections to the plan, endorsing its substance, possibly because he was aware of the chasm in British-American relations which had suddenly opened up at so crucial a stage in the war. He had made his point, and on 15 September, he signed a continuation of the Lend-Lease agreement that guaranteed the British $6.5 billion. This was of vital importance to the British economy, which had been devastated by the war. Remaining emotional, Churchill turned to Roosevelt and told him how grateful he was, thanking him most effusively, according to Morgenthau’s notes. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was astonished by Churchill’s ‘volte-face’ and remained adamantly opposed to the Morgenthau Plan, especially its plans for the de-industrialisation of the Ruhr and the Saar Basin, Germany’s twin industrial powerhouses. He wrote:

It was as if one were to take the Black Country and turn it into Devonshire. I did not like the plan, nor was I convinced that it was to our national advantage. I said so…

The Americans, including Roosevelt, looked on as Churchill and Eden had a public row about the plan in front of them in which the former tried to convince the latter of the advantages to British exports if the plan was implemented and Germany would no longer be an industrial competitor. However, it is scarcely credible that he changed his mind because of a sudden realisation of the plan’s benefits to British industry; much more likely is the straightforward explanation that Churchill went along with what the Americans wanted in order to ensure their signing of the Lend-Lease agreement.

While the Allied leaders squabbled among themselves over the fate of a still undefeated Germany, the Nazi’s argument that they had to fight on to prevent Soviet barbarity being unleashed on their wives and daughters was true as far as it went, but this was mainly in the consciousness of the German troops fighting to hold back the Red Army’s advance in the east.

In attempting to explain why the High Command nonetheless kept on fighting so hard on both fronts after Overlord, Max Hastings argues that whether they were SS officers, Prussian aristocrats, career soldiers or mere functionaries, the German generals …

… abandoned coherent thought about the future and merely performed the immediate military functions that were so familiar to them.

The failed July Bomb Plot had brought suspicion on them all and had also seemed to seal the Führer’s indestructibility. They also knew how heavily they were implicated in the crimes of the Third Reich. The files of the British Secret Intelligence Service explode the post-war claim of senior Wehrmacht officers that they did not know what was happening to the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, mentally disabled and other so-called Untermenschen, crimes which they exclusively blamed on the SS.

‘Fake’ Forces & ‘False’ Hopes:

On 14 September, Stalin had reluctantly allowed several patrols from the 1st Polish Army, serving with the Red Army and commanded by General Zygmunt Berling, to land on the western bank of the Vistula in the suburbs of Warsaw, making contact with Home Army soldiers. Several more landings were attempted on successive nights until around three thousand ‘Polish’ soldiers were in contact with their compatriots fighting in the capital. However, fewer than one in three of them were to make it back across the river. In reality, a number of the officers of this ‘Polish’ Army were, in fact, Russian. They were dressed up as Polish officers but didn’t even speak Polish. More importantly, perhaps, they were ill-disciplined and were unable to hold the bridgehead, and by the last week of September, those who were still able to do so retreated across the river. This was the only attempt ‘staged’ on the ground to help those fighting the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising, and it was a costly failure. It made clear that only a massive and coordinated assault by the Red Army could shake the Germans, something that Stalin would clearly not sanction. That autumn Marshal Rokossovsky, commanding the Red Army outside Warsaw, didn’t even bother to reply to the increasingly desperate requests for help from the Polish insurgents inside the capital.

The troops of the 1st Polish Army, fighting with the advancing Red Army, were themselves devastated by the fate of Warsaw. They watched all autumn as the Germans bombed and set fire to buildings. Jan Karniewicz, a young soldier in Berling’s army, later recalled how there was…

… an aura over Warsaw in the evening – a red aura, a pink aura… I felt like like the capital is burning. If the capital is not liberated, it will be burnt down any minute. … Warsaw is dying. National culture – Polish culture – is dying. You feel all this will be lost and destroyed and won’t be regained.

Yet when, in early September, the Red Cross had arranged an evacuation, only ten per cent of the remaining population of one million elected to leave the city. Although they had had only seven days’ supply of ammunition, to begin with, the Home Army fought for more than nine weeks. On 2 October, General Tadeusz Bór, commander of the Home Army, signed an instrument of surrender with General von dem Bach-Zelewski, and the Warsaw Uprising was over. In order to end the bloody house-to-house fighting, the Germans had been forced to concede that any Home Army prisoners they took would be regarded as captured combatants, rather than simply ‘bandits’, and that they would treat civilians with humanity, a promise which was ‘honoured’ more by its breach than its observance. In all 15,200 insurgents were killed and seven thousand wounded before Bór-Komorowski was forced to surrender. In all, the decision to try to take the Polish capital had had immense human consequences, involving the death of 220,000 Poles, 200,000 of whom were civilians. German military losses were also high: some claimed that as many as seventeen thousand soldiers died. Himmler’s revenge was to send 153,610 Polish men, women and children to the concentration camps, from where only a handful emerged alive.

The Germans then proceeded to destroy Warsaw, brick by brick, until in January 1945, on entering the city, Jan Karniewicz found that it was no more than a heap of rubble. By then, 83% of the city’s buildings had been destroyed by the Waffen-SS. Only after the Uprising had been completely crushed in early October did the SS withdraw from Warsaw, and it was not until mid-January that the Red Army finally crossed the Vistula and took over the smoking ruins of the city. It had been an epic struggle, sometimes skated over in Anglo-American histories of the Second World War. As a historian of Poland, Norman Davies, has pointed out, however, the Warsaw Uprising involved…

… twice as many soldiers as did the attack on Arnhem; it lasted ten times longer; and it caused five times as many casualties. What is more, the fate of an Allied capital was at stake. And three times as many civilians were killed as in the entire London Blitz.

‘Doomed’ Diplomacy:

above: Lieutenant General Wladyslaw Anders, commander of the Polish II Corps in the British Army. He had successfully negotiated the release of thousands of his fellow Polish soldiers from the Soviet Union.

Without the support of the Red Army, the Warsaw Uprising was always doomed. Yet, despite all his equivocation for the purposes of propaganda, it was clear that Stalin had decided by mid-August that he would stand back and let the Home Army be destroyed by the Nazis. Churchill described the Soviet behaviour at the time as ‘strange and sinister’, but it was purely pragmatic. Stalin simply seized the opportunity to have one enemy, the Nazis, eliminate the other, the powerful and independent Polish partisan force. This cynical political decision was confirmed when, towards the end of August, the Red Army under Marshal Tolbukhin was directed to attack Romania rather than Warsaw. Militarily, it was obvious that the Soviets had decided to leave the Polish capital for another day when both the Germans and the Poles inside it had fought each other to a standstill. The decision to launch the uprising without first obtaining a commitment from the Soviet Union to coordinate an attack had turned out to be a terrible, if understandable, mistake. But even had the uprising not occurred, the Home Army would almost certainly have been subsequently eliminated by the NKVD. In a letter written in the autumn of 1944, General Anders concluded:

It didn’t have the slightest chance of success, and exposed all parts of the country still under German occupation to new and appalling repressions. No one who is not dishonest or blind could have had the least illusion that everything which had happened was always going to happen: i.e. not only that the Soviets will refuse to help our beloved heroic Warsaw but also that they will watch with the greatest pleasure as our nation’s blood is drained to the last drop.

The Liberation of Europe, January 1944 – March 1945.

In mid-September 1944 Malinovski’s 2nd Ukrainian and Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front regrouped, swinging north for an offensive into Hungary and north-eastern Yugoslavia respectively. Marshal Tito had already conferred with Stalin, who for once found himself almost nonplussed at encountering a truly independent resistance movement:
the relationship between the two was far from easy, with Tito insisting on a role for his own men in operations to complete the liberation of Yugoslavia. Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front marched on Belgrade, aided by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, taking it on 20 October to be greeted as liberators by a populace which had also been subjected to Nazi barbarity. Hitler had insisted on Army Group F remaining in Greece for as long as possible, which meant that it could not help much in the defence of Yugoslavia where, in order to avoid being cut off, Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, the German Supreme Commander in south-east Europe, was forced westwards via Sarajevo. Malinovskii meanwhile was bent on clearing northern Transylvania and eastern Hungary. The threat of imminent Soviet invasion threw the Hungarian leaders into a turmoil, but the Germans had learned from both the Romanian defection and the
Bulgarian debacle, moving to install their own puppet in Hungary and stiffen the occupation. This did not prevent the Hungarians from sending out peace feelers, hoping against hope for an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ protectorate to Hungary, but the western Allies told them that only road led to Moscow.

Within days of the Quebec meeting, there had been a storm of protest about the Morgenthau Plan. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hunt, was appalled that not only had Morgenthau been able to trespass so blatantly on an area of policy that did not belong to him, but that a plan had been proposed which, in his judgement,  so clearly result in Germany resisting more fiercely. By early October, the plan had been quietly dropped in the radical form that had originally been proposed at the Quebec meeting, although the punitive philosophy it was based on later found expression  in the Joint Chief of Staff directive 1067, which stated that  occupation forces should take no steps looking the economic rehabilitation of Germany (or) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy. Meanwhile, and in the face of all these difficulties, Churchill resorted to the tactic he had first used in August 1942 during the row over the ‘Second Front’ – he got on a plane and went to Moscow. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Churchill showed no signs of anger with Stalin over his failure to come to the aid of Warsaw and his shunning of the Polish government in exile. In these talks, it was as if the row over the Warsaw Uprising had never happened.

In the Kremlin, at ten o’clock in the evening of 9 October, the two leaders met once again. The British PM suggested beginning with the most tiresome question – Poland. Churchill then claimed that the question of the post-war frontier of Poland was ‘settled’, despite the fact that the Polish government in exile in London still vehemently disagreed with the Soviet claim over eastern Poland. Churchill added that if at some future peace conference there were to be Polish objections, it ‘would not matter’ because the Americans and British thought the new border ‘right and fair’. He asked Stalin if he thought it was ‘worthwhile’ to get the London Poles to fly to Moscow, saying that ‘with British and Russian agreement’ they would be ‘forced to settle’. Stalin stuck to the line he had used with the Poles a few weeks before, adding that Mikolajczyk would have to make contact with the Lublin Poles who now had an army at their disposal and therefore ‘represented a force’ to be dealt with.

However, Stalin did not mention the nature of this armed forces, because at the same time as Churchill was meeting with the Soviet leader, a forward unit in the Soviet 6th air force in eastern Poland was being transformed overnight into a squadron in a new Polish air force. However, none of this new force’s pilots spoke Polish, so they could not be allowed to fly in case they were shot down until they had learnt enough to pass themselves off as Poles. This, along with Berling’s units within the Red Army (see above) comprised the ‘force’ that would be at the ‘disposal’ of the Soviet-backed government of ‘liberated’ Poland. Churchill was swift to point out that the London Poles had an army as well, part of which had ‘held out in Warsaw’, but…

… they also had a brave army corps in Italy where they lost seven or eight thousand men. Then there was the armoured division, one brigade of which was in France. … They were good and brave men. The difficulty about the Poles was that they had unwise political leaders. Where there were two Poles there was one quarrel!

Stalin retorted with a quip of his own, that where there was one Pole he would begin to quarrel with himself through sheer boredom! The two leaders then moved on to discuss the future shape of much of the rest of Europe. It was during this discussion that Churchill produced what he referred to as a ‘naughty’ document. This has become an infamous moment in the history of the war. As he took the paper out, Churchill said to Stalin that the Americans would be shocked if they saw how crudely he had put it. The handwritten document contained a series of percentages, outlining how much influence ‘Russia’ and other countries should have over specific European territory. The list was as follows:

Romania: Russia, 90%, the others 10%

Greece: Britain (in accord with USA), 90%, Russia 10%.

Yugoslavia: 50/50%

Hungary: 50/50%

Bulgaria: Russia 75%, the others 25%.

Stalin made one change to the document. He crossed out the percentages for Bulgaria and changed them to Russia 90 per cent; ‘the others’ 10 per cent. This was an extraordinary moment, in which one of the leading statesmen of the democratic world was effectively ‘carving up’ eastern Europe with a man who was recognised, the world over, as a tyrant. This apparently callous way of trading other people’s destinies continued in discussions between Eden and Molotov the next day. The two foreign ministers swapped percentage figures as if they could not now agree to Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, 75/25% each. Eden replied that such figures would be worse than the previous day. Molotov later bargained that if Hungary was 75/25%, then Bulgaria should be 75/25 and Yugoslavia 60/40. This, he said, was the limit to which he would go. Of course, Churchill and Eden could not be sure how matters would turn out over the next forty-five years.

As Churchill talked with Stalin in the Kremlin, and Eden talked with Molotov, we now know that Molotov was also meeting a Hungarian Delegation in a room nearby to agree on the terms of an Armistice. In September 1944, with the Red Army reaching the edge of the ‘Carpathian Basin’, the Hungarian Regent, Miklós Horthy, kept on by Hitler as nominal head of state after the occupation in March, tried once again to broker a new peace deal with the western powers. They told him that they could not reach an agreement which excluded the Soviet Union, so that Horthy finally agreed to swallow his anti-Bolshevik pride and ask Stalin for an armistice, sending Géza Teleki, the son of former PM Pál Teleki, to Moscow, to negotiate the terms. On 28 September, the Hungarian Armistice Delegation under General Faragho (pictured below) left Budapest for Moscow.

The terms of the armistice were agreed quite rapidly and successfully, but the other part of the final ’breakaway’ plan, to launch a showdown with Germany ahead of the advancing Red Army, was thwarted by Horthy’s stubborn refusal to leave the capital for the Hungarian military headquarters at Huszt in sub-Carpathia. Domokos Szent-Iványi, acting as State Minister to the Hungarian Delegation, later recorded their ‘close encounter’ with the British PM and Foreign Secretary during a break in the negotiations to allow the delegation to contact the Regency in Budapest:

Molotov seemed to mull over the problem. Then all of a sudden, he turned to me and, in a very warm voice asked me: ‘Would you be able to conduct negotiations in English as well as in French, Mr Minister? It might happen that the negotiations would be continued in English.’ I answered with a short ‘Yes’, upon which Molotov rose and declared the conference suspended for about ten minutes. He went into the adjoining room, and while he was passing the door, we could glimpse the people in that room. Due to my poor eyesight I could not make out the faces, but Faragho later insisted on his having seen Churchill and Eden there. 

Molotov returned after ten minutes, at around 4.00 a.m. on the 11th,  having consulted Churchill, and apparently gained approval to finalise the terms of the Armistice with the Hungarian Delegation and to prepare the Treaty for signing. The draft treaty simply proposed that Hungary should immediately…

… withdraw from all the territories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania occupied by her behind the frontiers that existed before 31 December 1937, including all Hungarian troops and functionaries. 

Coup d’état in Budapest:

Of course, these terms did not include any reference to the notion that the USSR would hold a ‘majority stake’ in what would happen to Hungary after the war, though it did set out the requirement for an ‘Allied United Mission’ to supervise Hungary’s implementation of its withdrawal, with representatives from all three governments, under the chairmanship of the Soviet representative. It also provided for ‘armed assistance’ from the Soviet Union. Given the ‘hard reality’ that Soviet forces were about to ‘liberate’ and then occupy Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, Churchill and Eden must have thought that they had to try to salvage something from the Red Army’s rush into Europe. As the meetings in Moscow progressed, Russian forces were at a distance of just over a hundred kilometres from the Hungarian capital, and Szent-Iványi reported that this had a ‘positive’ effect on the atmosphere of their negotiations with Molotov. In this context, Churchill’s gaining an immediate recognition of Western influence over these countries at least represented an advance in the current situation. Just before 8 p.m. in the evening of 11 October, the three Hungarian delegates signed the Armistice Treaty in the Kremlin, but later that night, the news arriving in Moscow from Budapest was wholly negative, as the Regent was refusing to leave Budapest to join the Hungarian forces at the front. Szent-Iványi wrote:

This was a great blow; such a decision would would place the success of the our mission in great jeopardy … In the meantime, our Delegation increased in number with the addition of Major Nemes and Secretary of Legation István Tarnay, the former bringing the Regent’s authorisation for signing both the preliminary and final armistice treaties.

The next day, the 12th, however, matters in the Hungarian capital deteriorated dramatically when the SS launched a coup d’état to replace Horthy with Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross. On 15 October, in a radio broadcast, Horthy declared a ceasefire for which he was unprepared militarily. It was also frustrated by the officer corps, a considerable number of whom were secret members or sympathisers of the Arrow Cross Party who, rather than turning against the Nazis, joined the fascist ‘putsch’. The ‘pull-out’ collapsed within hours. The Nazis had already captured some of the generals involved and were lying in wait. Young Miklós Horthy was taken hostage. In the picture below,, pictured below entering Buda Castle on 16 October, is shown surrounded by Hungarian officers who had joined the Arrow Cross insurgents, in the foreground, together with German Storm Troopers observing from the tank in the background.

The Regent and his family left Hungary on 17 October for internment in Berlin and later exile in Lisbon, where Horthy died in 1957. Discussing the dramatically changed situation with the Russians in Moscow, Szent-Iványi argued at first that the Regent’s disappearance should not stop their cooperation since the Regent had appointed General L Veress, the Commander of the 2nd Hungarian Army, to replace him should he be killed or arrested by the Germans. Unfortunately, as the Soviets discovered, General Veress had also been arrested by the SS and so all their plans were frustrated and the Armistice could not be implemented. The Nazi coup effectively annulled it and Szálasi, confirmed by Horthy as his successor as President and Head of State as almost the last ‘act’ of his regency, was installed as a puppet leader of a fascist government in Budapest.

Meanwhile, from 10 October, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were liberated from Hitler’s yoke only to fall beneath that of the USSR for the next forty-five years. Guderian attempted to get the twenty veteran divisions of Army Group North, a powerful and manoeuvrable striking force, out of western Latvia so that it could reinforce the hard-pressed units defending East Prussia, but he was prevented from doing so by Hitler. So when the Russian 1st Baltic Front reached the Baltic Sea and took Memel, Army Group North was trapped, with no route back to East Prussia. Hitler had effectively created a ‘fortified locality’ out of the whole western part of Latvia. Between September and November 1944 the German Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies were forced to retreat into Baltic enclaves at Memel and Kurland, but Hitler refused to evacuate them because he needed the Baltic coastline to continue to import Swedish iron ore and to develop a new generation of U-boats to outrun the Atlantic convoys. This was part of his final strategy to win the war by marooning the Anglo-American armies on the continent without supplies.

Carving up Poland:

Against this military backdrop, at five o’clock in the afternoon of 13 October, the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, walked into the Spridonovka Palace in the Kremlin to begin discussions with Stalin and Churchill, a meeting instigated following pressure from the British PM. It isn’t hard to imagine Mikolajczyk’s emotions as he sat down with Stalin once again, especially as any assurances he had received from the Soviet leader little more than two months before about the Warsaw Uprising had come to nothing. But however bad he felt at the start of the meeting, worse was yet to come. To begin with, Stalin reiterated his demands made in August, stating that… one could not shut one’s eyes to the facts. The Lublin Poles were overseeing ‘much work’ in Poland and had ‘a large army’ and therefore had to be involved in any discussions about the future of Poland. In addition, the London Poles must recognise the ‘Curzon Line’ and relinquish eastern Poland; otherwise, ‘there could be no good relations’. Mikolajczyk made the understandable point that Polish soldiers abroad who were fighting against the Germans thought that they were fighting in the hope of returning to that territory. Stalin retorted that Ukrainians and White Russians were also fighting for this land but Mr Mikolajczyk perhaps did not know of it. They had suffered much more than all the Poles put together. 

Churchill did his best to mediate between the two men, saying that they all knew of Poland’s sufferings. He then made a long, emotional statement in which he argued that all of them, including Marshal Stalin, wanted Poland to be a free, sovereign and independent state, with the power to lead its own life provided that it remained ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union. On the crucial question of the eastern borders, Britain supported the Soviet proposal, because they felt it their duty. Not because Russia was strong but because Russia was right in the matter. Mikolajczyk retorted that he did not know that they now had to divide Poland before dealing with other questions. Then came a devastating moment for the Polish Prime Minister. After Churchill had appealed to him once again to make a grand gesture and give up eastern Poland, Molotov intervened, clearly having had enough of Churchill’s emotive speeches and wanting to return to hard realities. He reminded everyone of what had been said in Tehran on the Polish Question when Roosevelt had agreed to the Curzon Line but did not wish it published at the moment. From this, he argued, they could all conclude that the points of view of the Soviet Union, Britain and America were the same. Although Mikolajczyk had known that Churchill wanted him to agree to the Curzon Line, he had not known that the matter had been discussed, and seemingly agreed, at the Tehran Conference, without the Poles present: Nor had he realised that Roosevelt had also been a party to this agreement. When Churchill tried to appease him over this, Mikolajczyk kept his cool, simply saying:

I have already heard so many unpleasant things in the course of this war that one more will not let me lose my balance.

But the next day, at the dacha where the British were based, Churchill returned to the issue at stake with the Polish PM, telling him angrily that:

Unless you accept the frontier you are out of business for ever. The Russians will sweep through your country and you people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation.

Mikolajczyk still would not accept the loss of eastern Poland and the meeting ended with the Poles withdrawing in order to consider what they should do. But this was a foregone conclusion since they were being asked to give up eastern Poland to the Soviets at a time when Polish soldiers in the Allied armies were fighting to liberate Europe from the tyranny of fascism. Yet Churchill’s comment sits oddly with the view he had expressed at Tehran that Stalin should be allowed various territorial gains because the ‘character’ of the Soviet government had ‘changed’.  The Poles returned to the British dacha at three in the afternoon to give their verdict. Not surprisingly, Mikolajczyk said that they could not consent to the Curzon Line. Churchill exploded with an outburst of invective, threatening the London Poles with derecognition and suggesting that they might like to withdraw their divisions from the Allied armies. Mikolajczyk was shaken by his visit to Moscow, both by the vehemence of Churchill’s attack and the news that all the Allied leaders, including Roosevelt, had agreed on the borders of his country behind his back at Tehran.

The US President had expressed his concern at that conference that the several million American visitors of Polish descent would be upset if the Soviets gained eastern Poland and might express their displeasure directly at the election in November 1944. He also considered the European border questions so impossible to resolve that he wanted to stay out of them as far and as long as he could, except perhaps for the problems of Germany. At a final dinner on 18 October, Churchill and Stalin chatted like old friends. Despite his failure to force through an agreement on Poland, Churchill ended his visit to Moscow in an optimistic mood. Although by his own admission, Stalin seemed willing to ‘liquidate’ Poland in the near future, he remained convinced that the Soviet leader was someone he could work with as an ally. He returned to London in an optimistic and upbeat mood, as revealed in his letter to his wife, Clementine:

I have had very nice talks with the Old Bear, … I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us and I am sure they wish to work with us.

Political Necessities & ‘Spheres of Influence’:

The Nazis, having prevented Hungary from leaving the Axis, soon strengthened their grip on the country, and Stalin ordered an immediate attack on Budapest, insisting to his commander on the Ukrainian Front that the Hungarian capital must be taken ‘in the next few days’. When Malinovsky replied that he needed five days for the task, Stalin countered:

There is no point in being so stubborn. You obviously don’t understand the political necessity of an immediate strike against Budapest.

That ‘political necessity’ was probably the forthcoming summit of the ‘Big Three’ at Yalta, which eventually took place in January 1945, at which the post-war future of much of Europe would be discussed and agreed. Before the end of 1944, Stalin needed the Red Army to advance as rapidly and as far as it could into central Europe in order to secure the ‘spheres of influence’ he had tentatively agreed with Churchill in Moscow, ahead of the Conference. But the Red Army did not take Budapest even within five days in mid-October and, given the fierceness of German and Hungarian resistance, it was ludicrous of Stalin even to expect this of them. In reality, it took until Christmas Eve before the Soviets could launch what they hoped would be their final assault on the city. The Hungarian capital held out bravely, though in vain, through terrible privations. There was very strong resistance on the outskirts of Pest and very powerful counter-attacks. As head of the reconnaissance department of his tank corps, Boris Likhachev was in the heat of the action, and he still remembers the intensity of the battle for Budapest:

The sound of artillery fire! When a shell explodes you smell burning, and it irritates your eyes. And it affects your breathing. What is even worse is when a bomb explodes – your breathing system is affected. It’s smothering you. There is no fresh air to breathe and all this smoke fills your lungs … Several times I experienced this. To be inside the tank with the hatches closed – even though the tanks have a ventilation system, it doesn’t help; it’s poor and ineffective – a person cannot be inside a tank for long when there are explosions around … With the tanks, especially tanks with heavy armour, on the one hand you feel safe, on the other … you suffocate.

Just as he had done with Stalingrad, Hitler ordered a fight to the last. Budapest was declared a Festung – a fortified place that must not be surrendered. A total of seventy thousand soldiers – roughly equal numbers of German and Hungarian soldiers – prepared to defend the capital. The Battle for/ of Budapest is much less well-known in popular history than other iconic events of the war, like Stalingrad or the battle for Berlin; yet it was of real significance in terms of both scale and timing, besides illustrating how Soviet forces were capable of behaving as they advanced into central Europe. The frustrations of the Red Army besiegers were taken out on the women of Budapest, with mass rapine in scenes that were to be repeated across central-eastern Europe, especially in Germany. With the Red Army close, the citizens of Budapest were in a state of fear. A medical student who had just been conscripted into a Hungarian military unit later spoke of how refugees who had fled from the northern area of Hungary already occupied by the Soviets…

… were telling terrible things. Watches were taken away from everybody, and women – they did not care if they were young or old – they were taking them and they were raping them. So this was the news that was spreading around. 

Many of the capital’s citizens thought that this was ‘fake news’, however, just one more piece of anti-Soviet propaganda put about by the Germans and the Hungarian fascists. While they were prepared to believe that the Soviet soldiers did not respect women at all, they did not believe that the Red Army was so ill-disciplined that it would commit mass rape. The Hungarian capital now became the new focal point in what was to become a ferocious defence of southern-central Europe by the Germans, together with the remaining Hungarian troops. Efforts were made to have regular Hungarian troops take part against the forces of the Third Reich, with the formation of a Hungarian Legion, but they were not given the opportunity to enact their plan. Neither did the new democratically-controlled Hungarian Army recruited in the liberated part of the country by the Provisional Government in Debrecen become battle-ready in time. Only one rallied outfit, the Buda Voluntary Regiment could be observed fighting the Germans in the forthcoming battles.

But before the Red Army could ‘liberate’ the capital, Ferenc Szálasi and his followers were enabled to enact a genocide against the Jews of Budapest which was unparalleled in the course of the war. Szalási had come to power on 15 October not through their own efforts, but through the armed intervention of the German military. The remnant of the Hungarian state had been wrested from Miklós Horthy and put into the hands of the Arrow Cross Party, the Hungarian fascists for whom terror became their instrument of dictatorship.  On 27th the National Council united the functions of the head of state and of government, which was then endorsed by Parliament on 4 November. Szálasi became head of the ‘Hungarista’ Workers’ State. A former officer of the general staff, he was even more muddle-headed than Horthy and soon created an idiotic reign of terror in the capital. He had promised Hitler to throw the nation into total war, but the resulting turmoil merely caused a breakdown in the army, the police and public administration. This left the Arrow Cross Party and its paramilitaries free to operate at will, proclaiming itself as the will of the nation. Many joined it as the only legal party, offering its members armed authority and protection. Its ranks were swollen by elements of the criminal underworld who recognised the chance for unrestrained daylight robbery and gangsterism. In the early morning of 28 October, Archdeacon Ferenc Kálló was one of the first prominent church leaders to be murdered in the streets by the Arrow Cross. The Lutheran minister Mátyás Varsányi of Buda, who gave much help to evicted Jews and occupants of starred houses, was also shot in the street. These murders signalled the beginning of the reign of terror which formed the second chapter of the ‘Shoah’ in Hungary.

Sources:

Andrew Roberts (2010), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books (Ebury Publishing).

István Lázár (1989), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Atlas of the Third Reich. London: Penguin Books.

 

 

 

Surviving Auschwitz and the Budapest Ghettos:

Susan (Zsuzsa) Pollock was deported as a child of fourteen to Auschwitz from the Hungarian countryside in 1944. Her story is available to read and download at https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/susan-pollack/. Apart from those who survived Auschwitz, there were many children who escaped the death marches and Arrow Cross terror in Budapest, and survived, scarred by the experience of loss of family and friends. Here, I quote published and unpublished testimony from these children remembering that dreadful summer of 1944.

Tom’s Tale – Air Raids on Budapest:

The German occupation and the collaboration of the Hungarian state in it meant that the previous agreement with the Allies not to bomb the country was negated. The bombardment of Hungary began in the summer of 1944. The warm summer of 1944 was a summer of allied (mainly RAF) airstrikes. Two-year-old Tom Leimdorfer (whom I first met in the UK in 1987) often played outside in their small but secluded front garden on the Pest side of Budapest. They had a radio and were generally the first to hear the air raid warnings. The bombers normally came from the south and the direction given over the airwaves was: ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest’.

These were amongst Tom’s first words, acting as an air raid warning to people in the flats above us as he ran around naked in the garden shouting ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest!’ They would then all go down to the cellar, which served as a very inadequate air raid shelter.

The RAF was bombing them and their lives were under threat from them, but they were not ‘the enemy’ as far as Tom’s family was concerned. Tom’s father was ‘missing’ on the Russian front (pictured above with his unit) and Russian troops were advancing towards Hungary with all the uncertainties and horrors of a siege of Budapest approaching, but they were not their ‘enemy’ either, but their hoped-for liberators. Yet Tom’s maternal grandparents were taken by Hungarian special forces on the orders of the Gestapo with no objection or resistance from their neighbours. Looking back, Tom wrote that the ‘enemy’ was war and inhumanity, hatred and anti-Semitism.

Tom’s ‘official’ baby picture.

Tom Leimdorfer’s grandfather Aladár spent much of his time on his allotment just outside the small town of Szécsény, where he also kept bees, enjoying the simple life in retirement. Tom’s mother later told him that they last visited the elderly couple in early May 1944 (as shown in the picture of her with her mother, right), when Tom was 18 months old, just a few weeks before they were deported to Auschwitz. Tom is in no doubt that his grandparents would have been taken straight to the gas chambers on arrival. The story of the lively Jewish community in Szécsény was later told by the photographer Irén Ács in a moving account and photos of her friends and family. She also survived in Budapest, but nearly all her friends and family perished.

The Long Shadow of Auschwitz from Szécsény to Pest:

Early in May, the Jews of Szécsény were ordered to leave their homes and belongings apart from a small case with a change of clothes and essentials. They were restricted to a ghetto of a few houses near the school. On the 10 June 1944, they were taken under special forces’ escort to the county town of Balassagyarmat, some 20 km away. There were no Germans in Szécsény, the whole operation being carried out by Hungarian special forces. In Balassagyarmat, the Germans supervised the loading of the wagons from the whole region with ruthless efficiency. By nightfall, the long train of cattle wagons carrying over 2,500 men, women and children were on their way to Auschwitz. The memorial in the Jewish cemetery of Szécsény has 303 names of those killed in the Holocaust from that town of around 6,000 people. A similar fate befell villages across Hungary, where there was no time for any reaction, let alone organised resistance, by the Jewish families or their Christian neighbours.

Another ‘Jewish’ child in Budapest in 1944 was Marianna (‘Daisy’) Birnbaum (née László), who wrote up her family and friends’ stories in her 2016 volume, 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. In her introduction to this, she wrote:

1944 was the most important year of my life. My childhood ended in 1944 and what I experienced during that time determined the decades that were to follow. Ever since the age of ten, I see the world as I then saw it. In the battle between God and Satan. Satan won, but we have not been told. By now, I know that the perpetrator can be a victim at the same time. However, this awareness does not help me to give up that hopelessly ‘Manichaean’ view of the world that the year 1944 had created in me.

Due to luck and the bravery of my father, my parents… survived, but many of my relatives became the victims of German and Hungarian Nazism. … I also want to report on those who by some miracle had survived those terrible times, because their lives too had irrevocably changed.

In the summer of 1944, she and her mother rushed to her Uncle Lajos Benke (formerly Blau, pictured below) for advice when her father was taken by the Gestapo. For a while, having an ‘Aryan’ spouse exempted Jews from racial legislation. Although her Aunt Juliska was non-Jewish, Uncle Lajos was registered as a Jew. They lived in an elegant apartment in Buda. He could give them no advice, but would not allow his sister and niece to return to Pest due to the allied bombing. They spent three days there, but Daisy’s mother grew nervous and worried that they would cause trouble for their hosts. In order to take up residence, even temporarily, they should have registered with the local police, but Jews were not permitted to change residence and so it was safer for them to leave. Daisy became six that summer, so she had to wear a yellow star. By then, her father, who had paid a large bribe to a Gestapo officer, was temporarily free.

He also arranged Swiss protection for Uncle Lajos, who came to live with them in the apartment they shared with about twenty other people. In order to be with her husband, Aunt Juliska appeared daily in the house, despite exposing herself to the constant danger of air raids through these visits to the Jewish neighbourhood. Martial law was put into effect: Jews could only leave their so-called ‘protected houses’ for only two hours per day. In any case, she was never allowed to leave the house alone, though she sometimes rushed out in secret when she could no longer bear such a large number of people packed into the house, the permanent loud yelling and various other noises. Once outside, she walked down one of the main streets until stopping in front of the local patisserie. What happened next was one of those peculiar small acts of human compassion which randomly punctuated life during wartime:

… swallowing hard, I watched the children inside, sitting in the booths, licking their ice creams. Jews were banned from there, too, and I had not had ice cream since the summer before, because … by the time spring came, I was no longer permitted to enter such places.

Suddenly a shadow was cast upon the shop window and when I turned around, I saw a German soldier standing next to me. He must have been an officer because there were stars on his uniform. “Was magst du? Willst du ein buntes?” he asked. … Frightened, my response was barely audible. He took my hand and walked me with the yellow star on my dress into the patisserie and ordered two scoops of mixed ice cream for me. Of course, it was he who was being served but I believe that the people sitting inside understood what had happened.

The officer pressed the cone in my hand, paid and moved toward the exit. I followed him, the ice cream in one hand, the other that the soldier no longer held, hanging awkwardly, as if next me. I murmured my thanks as he hurried away without a backward glance. He was the one and only German soldier I had met during the war. Should I draw from this meeting a conclusion regarding the relationship between the German Nazi army and the Jews? 

The map shows the ghettos and zones set out in the deportation schedule. Places referred to in the text: Szécsény, Balassagyarmat, Szolnok, Komárom, Cinkota, Csepel, Kispest.

Daisy’s Relatives & Friends in Szolnok & Komárom:

Daisy’s father’s family lived in Szolnok, and her mother’s relatives were in Komárom, which was returned to Hungary through its Axis alliance. Of these two families, sixty-four perished in the various extermination camps, comprising men, women and children. Her father’s brother, her Uncle Bálint (above), was arrested on the German occupation of Szolnok, together with several of the wealthier Jews. They were beaten and tortured, first in the jail in the town and later in Budapest. Meanwhile, their families were deported from the town. Trains, made up of cattle cars, were already in the station when the gendarmes took Aunt Ilonka back to their home leaving Pista, aged twelve, on his own with a rucksack on his back, waiting for her in front of the wagons. She returned to the platform just as the huge doors were about to be slammed shut and locked. The gendarmes had been searching her home for hidden money and jewellery and had she not handed everything over, she would quite possibly have been beaten to death then and there. In the best case, she and Pista would have been put on the next train.

They did not know it at the time, but the first train was directed via Austria whereas the following one went directly to Auschwitz. Their catching the first meant the difference between possible survival and immediate death. They were eventually reunited with Bálint on an Austrian farm he had been deported to but found themselves separated again when taken to work at the Anker bakery in Vienna. They then survived an air raid and by the time they were transferred to Terezin concentration camp, there were no longer any trains being directed to Auschwitz. When they eventually all returned to Szolnok, they were able to begin a new life with the help of other jewels which Bálint had hidden in a different spot that he had shown only to Pista.

Bálint and Ilonka also had an elder son, who was twenty-three in 1944. He was known as ‘Sanyika’ (pictured above). Barred from university because he was Jewish, he was put to work in the extended family’s iron and metal plant, though at heart he was a poet. Drafted into the forced labour corps in the army in 1940-41, he was dispatched to the Carpathians. After his parents were deported, his poems (stored in the attic of the Szolnok house) were thrown about by neighbours who ransacked the place, searching for anything of value. Many years later, Pista met one of Sanyika’s friends in Budapest and two others in Israel. They told him that Sanyika had become desperate after he had learned of the deportations of his parents. He stopped caring about his own fate, clashed with the guards who beat him severely. When his three friends tried to escape, he refused to join them. It was a cruel twist of fate that those whom he believed to have died survived, whereas he disappeared without a trace and was thought to have perished.

Daisy’s mother’s family lived in Komárom and the neighbouring settlements. In early June 1944, Hungarian gendarmes put her grandparents into a freight train and sent them off to Auschwitz. Two letters from them have survived. The first was written to her around Christmas 1938, and the second came into her hands in 1995 when she found it among her mother’s papers. Her grandparents wrote it together, a day before they were deported from the Komáron ghetto. She realised that her mother must have carried the devastating message in her own clothing until after the liberation of Hungary and then when they escaped Hungary in 1956 and went to live in California. She reflected on how, when …

… soon after the war’s end I saw my parents – who were then in their thirties – having a good time (they even danced!), I was very angry at them for “forgetting so fast.” It took a long time of maturing until I understood that they forgot nothing: Just here and there they searched for a moment of joy in order to survive what had been barely survivable.

Her mother’s younger brother, József Blau, sent two postcards to family members in July 1944, one of which encouraged his cousin to send a postcard to deported relatives, which was limited to thirty words in German, placed in an envelope and given to the Jewish Council in Budapest from where it would be forwarded. We know now that, in order to avoid panic among the newly-arrived deportees at Auschwitz, the Nazis made them send postcards to their families from Waldsee. The cards could be picked up in the office of the Jewish Council at Budapest, Sip utca 12 on the basis of published lists. Characteristic of the Nazis’ infinite cynicism, there was no need to put stamps on the cards sent in response, because the cards were destroyed, either in the Council or at the next step, since the addressees were no longer alive. Daisy’s mother also had a cousin in Komárom, Aunt Manci, whose daughter, ‘Évike’, was of a similar age to Daisy so that they became inseparable friends (pictured below). Uncle Miki, Aunt Manci’s husband, had been called up to serve in a forced labour camp at the beginning of the war and after a short time he was declared ‘missing’. They never found out what had happened to him. Aunt Manci and Évike remained alone until, in the early summer of 1944, together with Marianna’s grandparents, Aunt Manci’s family was deported and Évike was also taken to Auschwitz. Daisy wrote that she often wondered: Who held her hand on the ramp as they stood in front of Mengele?

Another little friend in Komárom was Ági. She was also deported to Auschwitz with her mother where they were immediately gassed. Her father was in a labour camp at the time, but somehow survived and returned to Komárom in 1945. Jenő found no-one alive from his family and lived alone for months in their old house until he met Rózsi, a former acquaintance. She too had been sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her own daughter. The child clung to her grandmother which resulted in the two of them being sent immediately to the gas chamber. Rózsi, therefore, found herself in the other line of those who had survived the first selection. She was transferred from Auschwitz and worked in an ammunition factory. Broken, the lone survivor from her family, she also returned to Komárom and after a short time, she and Jenő decided to marry. However, soon after four or five young women who had spent some time recuperating after surviving the camps, also returned to Komárom. They recognised Rózsi as the “dreaded capo”, a prisoner assigned by the Nazis to supervise the rest of the prisoners in the camps. They visited Jenő and claimed that she had beaten and tortured them both in Auschwitz and later in the ammunition factory where they too had been transferred. Allegedly, he then pounced on her and almost strangled her. With a great effort, the neighbours succeeded in pulling him off Rózsi, taking her onto the grass outside to revive her. He then went into the house, left with a bag and disappeared from Komárom, reportedly for Palestine.

It was, again, a twist of fate which meant that Daisy was not sent to Auschwitz with her grandparents. When the Germans occupied Budapest in March 1944, her grandfather had demanded that her parents should send her to Komárom right away, accompanied by her friend Mariska, and they both set out for the Western Station soon after. However, when they arrived at the station, there were police and soldiers everywhere, demanding to see documents. When Mariska admitted that whereas she was a Christian, her companion was Jewish, they were barred from boarding the train. However, had she been allowed to board, she would almost certainly have been deported with her grandparents, ending her life in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In early June, her grandparents, along with the rest of the Jewish community of Komárom, were first moved to the ghetto and then, a few days later, they were all herded into cattle cars to be deported. Gazsi, their shop assistant and factotum, helped the Bau family, although the gendarmes threatened to put him on the train too. Daisy’s dog, Foxy, who had been cared for by Gazsi for the previous few weeks, began barking at this struggle, and one of the gendarmes shot him dead. Gazsi then ran to the post office from where he mailed the Bau’s last letter, adding the last details about Foxy. The letter arrived on 13 June, Daisy’s mother’s birthday, the letter which eventually came into their granddaughter’s possession over fifty years later. Daisy recalled its immediate effects:

Neither before, nor after, have I seen anything like this. With the letter in her hand, my mother ran through the apartment in circles, screaming and tearing out her hair (literally). I was merely told that my grandparents, in the company of many relatives, were ‘taken away’; no-one knew where. … I was around fifteen when I found out that (Foxy) had been shot… Since then, I have been mourning him as another Holocaust victim from my family.

Scarred Schoolfriends from Budapest:

In the capital itself, rumours had been circulating claiming that those who converted would not be deported so that many Jewish families tried to save themselves by seeking Protestant pastors who would help them by providing certificates of baptism without studying or preparation. In one of Uncle Józsi’s postcards, sent just before he was shot dead while being deported to Austria, he mentioned that some members of their larger family were visiting a parish priest. Tom Leimdorfer’s mother had already converted to Calvinism. Daisy’s father gained the assistance of the pastor of the Fóti út Evangelical Congregation and decided that both she and her mother should convert. Her mother, however, refused, and would not let her daughter attend either. Her father, therefore, got his ex-secretary to stand in for his wife, but he could not get a Christian child to stand in for Daisy, so she remained Jewish.

A number of Daisy’s friends and classmates also survived the year 1944 as children and grew up to be wounded people. Instead of losing their relatives to illness or old age, to traffic accidents or even random bombing, their family members were victims of a well-prepared genocide. ‘Tomi’ was born in Budapest in 1931. His father owned a large factory that produced light fixtures; his mother was a concert pianist. The entirely assimilated family, living on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa, decided to take the final step and converted to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions on Jews. Nonetheless, in June 1944, they had to leave their home, as Tomi, his mother and his older sister Edit were moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By then, his father was also in a forced labour camp. In October, all three of them had to report to the brick factory of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto. There, Tomi shared a room with six children but he succeeded in smuggling them all out because he had two copies of the document proving that he was a Roman Catholic. Following his plan, two boys left the ghetto (one at each exit) with the documents, met outside, one returning with both copies so that the exeat could be repeated until all seven of them were outside the walls.

Ágnes, born in Budapest in December 1933, lived with her parents in an apartment which became crowded when her mother’s sister Irén, her husband Retső and their two sons moved in with them from the small town of Cinkota, near the capital, during the spring of 1944. Her father was soon drafted into the army, but as he was forty-six years old, he narrowly avoided being sent to the Russian front. Instead, he was directed into forced labour from where he was allowed to send a postcard to his family each week so that they were not too worried about him. Teaching at Ági’s elementary school was discontinued after 30 April and she had to wear a yellow star, a humiliating sign that had to be sewn on to each and every piece of outside clothing. The family was also forced to move to a house marked with a yellow star. Ági slept with her mother on a couch in the hallway. Jews were allowed to shop only after 10 a.m. by which time everything had gone from the shelves. Ági went to the local bakery and queued for bread, so at least they had fresh bread to eat. She did not remember whether they had ration cards, which were legally valid for Christians only. She did remember her Aunt Irén poking the worms out of a piece of meat and cooked it, but Ági refused to eat it. During the warm summer, the children played out on the flat roof, or on the staircase, as they were no longer permitted to go to the park. On 3 July, Ági’s Uncle Ernő and his sixteen-year-old son Péter went out to Csepel, the industrial island in the Danube, to look for work in order to avoid deportation. They were never seen again. The family later heard that they had been rounded up in a raid and later perished in Auschwitz, the father committing suicide by running into the electrified fence.

Before the spring of 1944, Marianna’s Jewish friends in Budapest led a very active outdoor life, getting ‘Brownie’ cameras and bicycles for their birthdays. As late as the winter of 1943-44, they went skying at Normafa, a popular skiing slope in the Buda Hills. However, outdoor life soon came to an abrupt end as Jewish families no longer dared to show themselves at places of leisure, even if not yet officially banned. They feared to call attention to themselves during the frequently conducted parasite roundups aimed primarily at Jews by Hungarian fascists. Following the Nazi occupation, they suddenly found themselves excluded from most public places and during the worst times the families lost contact with each other because they were ordered to live in different ‘Protected houses’. They didn’t meet again until 1945 when Marianna learnt that her best friend in Budapest, Marika, hidden in a nunnery, remained the sole survivor of her family. Her parents and her brother Andris were taken from their ‘protected house’ by the Arrow Cross paramilitaries and were shot into the Danube. Andris, Marianna’s first boyfriend, was just thirteen.

Ágota, or ‘Ágika’, was a silent little girl who loved her father more than she loved anyone. Whenever her father was at home from his forced labour service, Ágika always sat very close to him, but during the spring of 1944, she was at home alone with her mother, Ilus. When her husband was away, Ilus found it difficult to cope with the new world that seemed ready to destroy her and her family at any moment. She continually expected to be arrested by the Gestapo, a fear not quite unreasonable since Ágika’s father owned a rubber and tire factory which was now under the control of the Hungarian state, but could have been too useful a source for the Germans to allow to remain in the hands of the state. There were still a number of similarly wealthy Jewish families living in the same building. Once a green Mercedes stopped at the park entrance of the house, and a few minutes later, when the soldiers left, they took one of the tenants along. A few days later, when Ilus saw the distinctive Mercedes again from the window of the fifth-floor apartment, she assumed the worst when three soldiers got out and started towards the gate. As she heard the elevator approaching the upper floors, she grabbed her daughter and dragged her towards the balcony door, with the aim of throwing themselves off the balcony. Ágika struggled with her mother, preventing her from opening the door by biting her wrist before screaming at her:

You are not going to kill me, you murderer, I am going to wait for my Daddy!

While they continued to fight quite bitterly, the noise from the elevator shaft stopped, and the sound of boots could be heard from the floor below. Mother and daughter sat on the floor for some minutes, gasping for air, before bursting into tears. They were later hidden by a Christian family who, though well remunerated for doing so, were  risking their lives, as the ubiquitous posters chillingly proclaimed:

Whosoever hides Jews will be hacked to pieces.

Thanks to Ágika, the three of them survived the horrors of 1944. So did Gyuri, Ágika’s cousin, who moved in with them. His mother was the elder sister of Aunt Ilus and one of the many ‘who did not return’. His parents had divorced when Gyuri was little, so he lived with his mother, brother and maternal grandmother. His father was ‘reported missing’ earlier in the war, so Gyuri became a ‘half-orphan’ at the age of ten. In 1944, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’ waiting to be deported. He later recalled the hostility of their ‘Christian’ neighbours:

We were gathering in the courtyard when the passers-by stopped in the street, cursing us and spitting at us over the iron fence. Watched by, and at the pleasure of the bastille crowd, we were taken in a long procession along Rákóczi út to the synagogue in Dohány utca.

Apparently, a German soldier filmed the entire action by the Hungarian gendarmes which can be viewed in the permanent collection of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The plan was to move the several hundred Jews to the railway station, but the manoeuvre was suddenly halted and all were marched back to the ‘Jewish house’, after being forced to hand over their watches, jewellery and the cash they had on them. With the help of relatives, Gyuri’s family then received Swedish protective papers and, together with twenty others, they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus, which had become a Swedish ‘protected house’.

Kati was also born in Budapest in 1934. Her father owned a paper factory that he managed with his father and the family lived on the Pest side of the capital, in a house where one of the apartments on the upper floor belonged to them, while her grandparents’ apartment and the shop were on the ground floor. Although Kati’s father was conscripted to forced labour even before the war, they lived comfortably, without worries… until, at age nine and a half, the world changed around them. One of Kati’s most painful memories was that she had to go to school each day with the yellow star on her dress. Because their house was declared a ‘Jewish house’, they did not have to move. Instead, dozens of people were forcibly moved in with them. Kati took care of the younger children, among whom some were under six. She took them down to the air-raid shelter and played with them to distract them during the raids. One time, bombs were dropped very close by, but only shattered the windows and damaged a few pieces of furniture.

Then one day, while on his way to join his company, Hungarian soldiers removed Kati’s father from a train at Nagyvárad and, suddenly, he went missing without a trace. Kati’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives and one of her father’s employees got hold of false papers for her, with a new name, Aranka Sztinnyán. Although she was with relatives, she felt terribly alone. Although I looked Aryan, I was not permitted out on the street, she recalled. A few weeks later, Kati’s mother, who had escaped from the Óbuda brick factory, came to fetch her. Together with ten other relatives, Kati and her mother hid in the coal cellar of an apartment block where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Kati does not remember being hungry, neither was she scared, except for the bombs. Her mother saved her from sensing the daily danger that surrounded them. When they returned to their home following the ‘liberation’, they discovered that, except for her father, everybody had survived. Eventually, he too returned from Terezin at the end of the war, having survived ten different concentration camps.

Misi ‘Gyarmat’ was born into a ‘Jewish gentry’ family in Balassagyarmat, which had been the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His maternal grandfather, Ármin, was a well-to-do, well-respected local landowner. Although Misi’s parents lived in Budapest, ‘Gyarmat’ was the paradise where he, his mother and his younger sister Jutka spent their summers, immersing themselves in the pleasures of country life which offered unlimited freedom. His father, Dr László Gy. held the rank of lieutenant, working as a physician among the mountain rangers during World War I. In Apatin in Serbia, which was awarded to Hungary in 1941, László took over the medical practice of a young Christian doctor who was drafted to serve with the Second Hungarian Army on the Russian Front. He lived there between 1942 and 1944 when he went to live with his family in the ghetto in Budapest. When Misi’s maternal grandfather died in 1943, the family council decided that since both uncles were serving in forced labour camps, Misi’s mother would take over the management of the estate, and she and the children would not return to Budapest and Misi transferred to the Balassgyarmat Jewish school. Following the German occupation, the estate was immediately confiscated, and the family’s mobility was increasingly curtailed. The local Jews were moved into a hastily assembled ghetto and all those deemed ‘temporary lodgers’ were ordered to return immediately to their permanent places of residence. For Misi and his mother, this meant a return to Budapest, so his mother pleaded to be allowed to stay in Balassagyarmat in order to take care of her recently widowed mother. Her brother, home on leave, went to see the local police chief, but the captain denied the request, saying:

I am doing this in the interest of your sister, her children and for the memory of your father.

The meaning of this sentence became clear later, making it clear that the police chief knew exactly what would happen with the deportees. As in other villages throughout rural Hungary, he did nothing to rescue any of the local Jews but instead rendered fast and effective police work to accomplish their deportation. Next day, Misi, his sister and his mother left for Budapest. Two weeks later, those of their family who remained at Gyarmat, together with the rest of the Jewish community, were all crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. One survivor later told them that, in the wagons, they had to travel standing, all packed in like sardines. One of the gendarmes stabbed the leg of an old woman who, due to her varicose veins, could not walk fast enough. Blood was spurting from her leg as she was pushed into the car. A dying man was shoved into another wagon and his body was not removed until six hours after his death, though the train did not leave until after those hours. Misi lost his grandmother in Auschwitz and all his childhood friends from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid deportation later that summer, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches stood up openly for the persecuted, during the worst period, both children were saved by members of the Catholic orders. Misi found refuge in the Collegium Josephinum on Andrássy Boulevard. Zsuzsa Van, the Prioress of the nunnery was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, on the memorial honouring those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns in Kőbánya. Their paternal grandmother remained in the family apartment in Budapest, never sewed the yellow star on her own garments, yet somehow survived, along with both their paternal uncles. Thirty-five years later, Misi returned to his once-beloved Balassgyarmat for his first visit since those awful events.

Most of the children of Budapest of 1944 were just one generation away from country life and many, like Ágnes had been born in the countryside and still had relatives there. She had been born in Endrőd, a town in eastern Hungary, but by the time she was in the first form, her family had moved to Budapest and she became another of Daisy’s classmates at the Jewish elementary school on Hollán Street. Until 1944, Ágnes’s happiest moments were spent at her grandmother’s house at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Her father, György, was a journalist and newspaper editor, politically aware and active. He took his little girl seriously, talking to her about politics and other grown-up topics. His sudden disappearance, therefore, created a void that has accompanied her throughout her life. In November 1943, unable to bear their confinement any longer, he left his hiding place, a loft, said goodbye as if he were just leaving for the forced labour camp, and was never seen again. She also lost her maternal grandmother that same year, from blood poisoning, Her only son died of starvation at Kőszeg. Her paternal grandparents were deported together with their daughter, György’s sister. They were sent to a farm in Austria where Ágnes’s grandfather, a rabbi in Hungary, drove a tractor. All three of them survived, saddened and scarred by their son’s disappearance. Ágnes always remembers the gigantic capital Zs (for ‘Zsidó’, ‘Jew’ in Hungarian) in her father’s military record book. Her poem to him stands for the unfathomable sense of loss many of these children have grown up with:

...

I feel, you are off. Stepping out,

a well-dressed vagrant,

you never really leave; you are just stepping out,

looking back, laughing, at age thirty-eight,

I’ll soon be back, you nod and wave.

Your birthday would have been the following day.

The Last Days of the War in the East:

It is a remarkable testimony to the dedication of the Nazis to complete their ‘final solution’ to ‘the Jewish Problem’ that their programme of deportations continued well into July. The huge Russian summer ground offensive, timed for the moment when attention in the Reich would be most concentrated on events in Normandy, was launched on 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. The counter-offensive, Operation Bagration (codenamed by Stalin after the great Georgian Marshal of the 1812 campaign). The attack was supported by four hundred guns per mile along a 350-mile front connecting Smolensk, Minsk and Warsaw. Bagration was intended to destroy the German Army Group Centre, opening the way to Berlin itself. The Red Army had almost total air cover, much of the Luftwaffe having been flown off westwards to try to deal with the Normandy offensive and the Combined Bomber Offensive. Much of the Third Panzer Army was destroyed in a few days and the hole created in the wildly overstretched German line was soon no less than 250 miles wide and a hundred miles deep, allowing major cities such as Vitebsk and Minsk to be recaptured on 25 June and 3 July respectively. By the latter date, the Russians had moved forward two hundred miles from their original lines. They encircled and captured 300,000 Germans at Minsk. Army Group Centre had effectively ceased to exist, leaving a vast gap between Army Group South and Army Group North. Bagration has been described by historians as being, from a German perspective, …

… one of the most sudden and complete military disasters in history. … even in the months following the Allied invasion of Normandy, German casualties in Russia continued to average four times the number in the West.

I have written about the tactical errors made by the German High Command, including Hitler himself, in my previous article. The movement of senior personnel on both the Eastern Front and, to a lesser extent, on Western Front, resembled a merry-go-round. Having been appointed commander-in-chief west in 1942, General Rundstedt was removed from command on 6 July 1944 after trying to persuade Hitler to adopt a more mobile defence strategy rather than fighting for every town and village in France. He was reappointed to his old post on the Eastern Front in command of Army Group South. By 10 July, twenty-five of the thirty-three divisions of Army Group Centre were trapped, with only a small number of troops able to extricate themselves. In the course of the sixty-eight days of this vast Kesselschladt (cauldron battle), the Red Army regained Belorussia and opened the way to attack East Prussia and the Baltic States. The year 1944 is thus seen as an annus mirabilis in today’s Russia. For all that is made of the British-American victory in the Falaise pocket, the successful Bagration offensive was ten times the size, yet it is hardly known of in the West.

On 14 July 1944, the Russians attacked south of the Pripet Marshes, capturing Lwow on the 27th. As a result, the Germans had been forced back to their Barbarossa start lines of three years earlier. Further south, Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front prepared to march on Belgrade, aided by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. It was extraordinary, therefore, considering that the war’s outcome was in no doubt by the end of July 1944, that the Wehrmacht continued to operate as an efficient, disciplined fighting force well into the spring of 1945. The ‘Battle of Budapest’ played a major role in this. On 20 August, Marshal Vasilevsky began his drive to clear the Germans out of the Balkans, which saw spectacular successes as the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts crossed the River Prut and attacked Army Group South in Romania. With Hitler desperate to retain control of the Romanian oilfields, without which his planes and tanks would be forced to rely on failing synthetic fuel production within the Reich, he could not withdraw the Sixth Army, twenty divisions of which were therefore trapped between the Dnieper and the Prut by 23 August. On that same day, Romania surrendered, and soon afterwards changed sides and declared war on Germany: a hundred thousand German prisoners and much matérial were taken.

At the end of August, after the success of the D-day landings in Normandy had been secured, Horthy recovered his mental strength and replaced Sztójáy with one of his loyal Generals, Géza Lakatos. By then the war aims of the Horthy régime, the restoration of Hungary to its pre-Trianon status, were in tatters. The First and Second Awards and the acquisitions by force of arms would mean nothing after the defeat which now seemed inevitable. The fate of Transylvania was still in the balance in the summer of 1944, with everything depending on who would liberate the contested territories from the Germans. When Royal Romania succeeded in pulling out, the Soviet and Romanian forces combined forces began a joint attack and the weakened Hungarian Army was unable to contain them. By 31 August, the Red Army was in Bucharest, but despite having advanced 250 miles in ten days, it then actually speeded up, crossing two hundred miles to the Yugoslav border in the following six days.

Sources:

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Zsolt Zágoni (ed.)(2012), From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. Published by the editor.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Andrew Roberts (2010), Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two: Behind Closed Doors; Stalin, the Nazis, and the West. London: BBC Books.

Documenting D-Day:

This Thursday, 6th June, many of the world’s leaders will be gathering on the beaches in Normandy to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. Those veterans who survived the landings and the rest of the war are now well into their nineties, but many will make the crossing of the English Channel once more to commemorate their fallen comrades and recall the events of June 1944. But what exactly was ‘Operation Overlord’, what happened along the coast of Normandy seventy-five years ago, and what was the significance of those events in the war itself and over the following period? To gain a true understanding, we should not simply rely on Hollywood films or even documentaries. We also need to consult the documents and other primary, eye-witness testimonies from the time, with the help of serious historians. Otherwise, there is a danger that the sacrifice of those who took part, whether they died or survived, will be trivialised and turned into a military comic-book.

One of the joint commanders of the Operation, Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, wrote an account as a Supplement to the London Gazette in September 1946:

I arrived in England on 2nd January, 1944, after handing over command of the Eighth Army, and immediately started a detailed study of the plans for the assault of the Continent – Operation OVERLORD. …

The intention was to assault, simultaneously, beaches on the Normandy coast. … The Normandy beaches were selected because they offered a better shelter for shipping and were less heavily defended than other possible beach areas along the Channel coast. …

The absence of major ports was overcome by the gigantic engineering feat of constructing two artificial ports in the United Kingdom; these were towed across the Channel in sections and erected, one in the United States sector and one in the British sector. …

My plan of assault, as approved by the Supreme Commander, provided for simultaneous landings by eight equivalent brigades – of which three were British and two were Canadian brigades, and three were American combat teams. … The total initial lift in the assault and follow-up naval forces was of the order of 130,000 personnel and 20,000 vehicles, all of which were to be landed on the first three tides. …

The Assault:

At 02.00 hours 6 June (1944) a ‘coup de main’ party of 6 Airborne Division was dropped near Benouville, to seize the bridges over the Canal de Caen and the River Orne. Surprise was complete, both bridges were captured intact and a close bridgehead was established. …

Meanwhile, the Allied sea armada drew in towards the coast of France, preceded by its flotillas of minesweepers. Not until the leading ships had reached their lowering positions, some seven to eleven miles offshore, and the naval bombardment squadrons had opened fire on the shore defences, was there any appreciable enemy activity. …

The Airborne and Seaborne Assault:

The Ninety men from D Company of the 2nd Battalion, the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry who, under the command of Major John Howard, had debouched from the gliders and captured Pegasus Bridge without difficulty earlier that morning, held it until they were relieved by Lord Lovat’s Commandos at 13.00 hours. Lovat’s had marched from the beach up to the canal towpath to the sound of bagpipes played by piper Bill Millin (pictured disembarking below), blowing away for all he was worth. The Americans were less accurate in finding their landing zones, some units landing as much as thirty-five miles off target. But this added to the practice of dropping dummy parachutists, so confusing German intelligence that it estimated a hundred thousand Allied troops had landed by air, more than four times the actual number. The majority of the paratroopers landed in the correct drop-zones, however, and were to play an invaluable part in attacking the beaches from the rear and holding back the inevitable German counter-attack.

The French Resistance had been ordered to ready itself for the invasion by the BBC broadcast on 1 June of the first line of the poem Autumn Song by Paul Verlaine, which went Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automme (‘The long sobs of the autumn violins’). The Abwehr had tortured a ‘Maquis’ leader and learnt that when the second line – Blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone (‘wound my heart with monotonous languour’) – was broadcast, it meant that the invasion was imminent. So when it was duly broadcast on 5 June at 23.15, the commander of the German Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais put his troops on alert, but no one warned the Seventh Army in Normandy. At Army Group B’s chateau headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, it was assumed that it must be more disinformation, as they could not believe that the Allies would have announced the invasion over the BBC. Certainly, the Germans were not expecting the offensive when it came. Shortly before 05.00, the Seventh Army’s chief of staff warned Army Group B that the attack was indeed taking place, Rommel was unavailable as he was in Germany celebrating his wife’s birthday. He only made it back to La Roche-Guyon at six o’clock that evening. His chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, ordered the Twelfth SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division to counter-attack at Caen at first light, but some of the 4,500 bombers that the Allies fielded that day severely blunted this attack. As Rommel later pointed out:

Even the movement of the most minor formations on the battlefield – artillery going into position, tanks forming up, etc. – is instantly attacked from the air with devastating effect. During the day fighting troops and headquarters alike are forced to seek cover in wooded and close country in order to escape the constant pounding of the air. Up to 640 (naval) guns have been used. The effect is so immense that no operation of any kind is possible in the area commanded by this rapid fire artillery, either by infantry or tanks.

The German Reactions to the Assault:

Interrogated after the war, Speidel quoted Rommel as having said, very perceptively:

Elements which are not in contact with the enemy at the moment of invasion will never get into action, because of the enormous air superiority of the enemy … If we do not succeed in carrying out our combat mission of warding off the Allies or hurling them from the mainland in the first forty-eight hours, the invasion has succeeded and the war is lost for lack of strategic reserves and lack of Luftwaffe in the west.

Although Hitler was not woken at Berchtesgaden with the news of the Normandy landings – he had been up with Goebbels until three o’clock the previous night, exchanging reminiscences, taking pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together, as Goebbels recorded. Even by the lunchtime conference, the High Command was unsure that this was a true attack rather than a diversion. By the time the two Panzer divisions were sent against the beaches a hundred miles away, much valuable time had been lost. Rommel felt that the Allies had to be stopped from getting ashore, telling his Staff that the first twenty-four hours will be decisive. In all, there were fifty-nine German divisions in the west at the time of D-day, of which eight were in Holland and Belgium. More than half the overall totals were mere coastal-defence or training divisions, and of the twenty-seven field divisions only ten were armoured, with three of these in the south and one near Antwerp. Six divisions, four of them coastal defence were stationed along the two hundred miles of Normandy coast west of the Seine where the Allies attacked. The commanders later admitted that all of these divisions were better described as coastal protection forces rather than as true defence.

The Beaches – Utah & Omaha:

It was 05.50 that a massive naval bombardment opened up on the German beach fortifications and the villages along the Normandy coast. The troop crossings had taken several hours in some cases and, as it had been feared that the Germans would use gas on the beaches, the anti-gas chemical with which uniforms were sprinkled smelt so disgusting that, once added to the landing crafts’ tossing about on the waves, it induced vomiting in the many troops who had not already been seasick. At H-hour, 06.30, the main American landings took place on Utah beach, followed by those on Omaha beach, with the British and Canadians arriving on their three beaches an hour later, as Montgomery himself later recorded:

On Utah beach, VII United States Corps assaulted on a front of one regimental combat team. … On Omaha beach, H Hour for the assault had been fixed for 06.45 hours. V United States Corps assaulted on a broad front. … By nightfall V United States Corps had secured a beach head about a mile in depth.

At Utah, 23,000 men got ashore with only 210 killed or wounded, partly because the current had swept the US Fourth Division’s landing craft some two thousand yards south of the original area designated for the attack, on to a relatively lightly defended part of the coastline, and twenty-eight of the thirty-two amphibious Duplex Drive (DD)  Sherman tanks got ashore. The one regiment facing them from the German 709th Division surrendered in large numbers once the 101st Airborne had secured at least four exits from the beaches.

On Omaha beach, however, where two-thirds of the American effort that day was to land, it was a very different state of affairs. The veteran US 1st Division (known as the Big Red One from its shoulder flash) and the 29th Division, which had never seen combat before, were to suffer tenfold the losses as did the 4th Division at Utah. Despite all the meticulous preparation, the ground had been ill-chosen for the attack. However, once the decision had been taken to expand the area to be secured by Overlord from which further operations could be conducted to take in Utah beach to the west, Omaha was the only feasible landing area between Utah and the British and Canadian beaches. The cliffs and bluffs at Omaha were, in some places, more than a hundred and fifty feet above the sea wall at the end of the dunes and the inward curvature of the bay at that stretch helped the German fields of fire to overlap.  Underwater sand bars and ridges snagged the landing craft, and the well-placed fortifications, which can still be seen today, were not silenced by the naval shelling; the anti-personnel mines, barbed wire and huge steel anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’ proved murderous obstacles; accurate German artillery fire and crack infantry troops caused havoc. Rather than the four battalions of defenders that had been planned for, there were eight, but by the time this was discovered it was too late to alter the plan of attack. These battalions provided, according to the military historian Max Hastings, by far the greatest concentration of German fire on the entire invasion front.

After a truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic. The opening scenes of the movie, Saving Private Ryan (pictured right) give the best cinematographic representation of those first monstrous minutes of the Omaha landings, but even that cannot begin to show the extent of the chaos and carnage on the beaches. It would have been even worse had Rommel been right about the Allies arriving at high tide, as every gun had been fixed for this eventuality. As it was they chose low tide in order to make the obstacles more visible. The six thousand yards of Omaha beach along which the Americans landed was soon a scene of utter destruction and confusion. The American soldiers, who aged on average twenty and a half, far younger than the British, at twenty-four, and the Canadians, at twenty-nine, had to leap out of their landing craft into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire loaded down with sixty-eight pounds of equipment, including a gas-mask, grenades, TNT blocks, two bandoliers of ammunition, rations, water-bottles and related kit. Many simply drowned when the water proved deeper than they had expected.

Although the ‘British’ beaches were in part cleared of German killing apparatus by a series of specialized tank-based gadgets, Generals Bradley and Gerow preferred a massive frontal assault. Because of heavy seas and being transferred to their landing vessels eleven and a half miles out, ten landing craft and twenty-six artillery pieces sank on their way to the beaches. The British transferred at six and a half miles out and suffered fewer sinkings as a result of less turbulent water. The loss of twenty-seven of the twenty-nine DD ‘floating tanks’, launched six thousand yards from the Omaha shore, denied the Americans the necessary firepower to get off the beach early. The RAF support planes observed a shambles … on the beach … burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire. The official account of what happened to Able Company of 116th Infantry, 29th Division, after its landing craft hit Omaha beach at 06.36 gives a sense of the horror of those next few minutes:

Ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man’s head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine gun fire from both ends of the beach. … The first men out … are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning , doomed by the water-logging of of their overloaded packs. … Already the sea runs red. … A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upwards, so that their nostrils are out of the water, they creep towards the land  at the same rate as the tide. This is how most of the survivors make it. … Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless.

It was not until 13.30, after seven hours being pinned down on the beaches, that Gerow could signal to Omar Bradley, who was on board a ship trying to make out what was going on through binoculars, that troops were finally advancing up heights behind beaches. Although there were two thousand Americans killed on Omaha beach, by nightfall a total of 34,000 men had made it ashore, including two Ranger battalions that had silenced the German coastal battery at Pointe du Hoc to the west after scaling cliffs with rope ladders. At one point the 5th Rangers had to don gas masks in order to charge through the dense smoke coming from the undergrowth of a hillside that suddenly caught fire. In Saving Private Ryan, after its truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic. Eight US rangers under the command of a captain, having survived the initial D-day bloodbath, are detailed to seek out and save a single man, Private Ryan. Although continually voted the best war movie ever, in a recent article for The Guardian, the historian Antony Beevor has repeated his balanced criticism of Spielberg’s claims for the movie:  

Steven Spielberg’s storyline rightly dramatises the clash between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival. Those mutually contradictory values are, in many ways, the essence of war. Spielberg said at the time that he sees the second world war as the “defining moment” in history. One also suspects that he wanted this film to be seen as the defining movie of the war. If so, it is a uniquely American definition of history, with no reference to the British let alone the Soviet role.

Gold, Juno and Sword Beaches:

The conditions faced by British and Canadian forces prior to reaching the beaches were no less harsh than those which the US soldiers had to contend with, but they met with far less resistance in their sectors and, as Montgomery later recorded, were able to establish control far more quickly, though still sustaining significant casualties:

… Second British Army assaulted on the right in the Gold sector. … H Hour for 3 British Division was fixed for 07.25 hours and the assault waves reached the beaches well on time. The leading brigade was soon a mile inland … by nightfall the Division was well-established. … 

John Watney’s eye-witness account in The Enemy Within (1946), describes in more detail the ‘order from chaos’ which was made on the ‘British’ beaches, due to the closer range of the fleet to the shore and the steady progress made by the soldiers under the cover provided by the Royal Navy’s assault:

On the beaches themselves all was feverish activity. Invasion craft of every kind and description lay at all angles in the sand; most had gone in head foremost and now lay a little off keel, half way up the beach or just in the water; others had been swung sideways and lay like rowing boats flung up by the breakers; others were still afloat, moored in the shallow waters that rippled over the grey sands, while dark splotches, which turned at close sight into tanks, carriers, guns and trucks, poured out of all these ships and crawled away in long queues across the sands, to disappear against the green of the fields. …

All around us lay the immense fleet that had brought us to this Normandy bay. There were ships of every kind, from the clear outlines of cruisers to the tubby fussiness of tugs. … Away to our left a cruiser was firing in spaced, steady salvos; to our right a second cruiser accompanied her, while behind me, out at sea, through the mist could be seen the orange flashes from what appeared to be a battleship. …

The tide left us dry at last and on the glassy stretches of the sands the ships lay in line, their bows open, spilling their cargoes on to the grey sands, in the grey light. The air was full of the roar of vehicles, the decks shook as the tanks clanked over them and nosed on to the ramps; then, rushing down the steep slopes, grasped the water-logged sand in their tracks and, with a jerking roar, heaved themselves inland. Clouds of steam accompanied these exertions, and, as I watched the tanks crawl out of the bellies of the line of the waiting ships, I was reminded of some fearsome tale of interplanetary warfare. …

Into this colourless nightmare arena of sands and tanks there came at last a touch of humanity; the first marching troops were landing now; like pony gladiators, weighed down with kit, they scrambled down the ramps and on to the wet sands; then, hunching up their packs and tightening their blankets (rolled Spanish-ways across their shoulders), they straggled off in the resisting sand, towards the land that now looked strong and real; their voices floated back, high and thin, against the din, like the muttering of a radio set tuned low in a room full of chattering people. 

There were no high cliffs at Gold, Juno and Sword beaches, and more time for the naval bombardment to soften up the German defences; however, by late afternoon part of the 21st Panzer Division attacked in the gap between Juno and Sword beaches and almost made it to the Channel before being turned back by naval fire. The British suffered over three thousand casualties, but by the end of the day, the Canadians who suffered over a thousand themselves, got the furthest inland, with their 9th Brigade advancing to within three miles of the outskirts of Caen. Montgomery concluded:

As a result of our D-Day operations a foothold had been gained on the Continent of Europe.

Surprise had been achieved, the troops had fought magnificently, and our losses had been much lower than had ever seemed possible.

Successes, Errors & Sacrifices:

At 16.00 hour Hitler, who had dithered about the best way to react to what he still suspected was a diversionary attack, finally agreed to his Chief of Staff’s request to send two Panzer Divisions into the battle in addition to the 12th SS and 21st Panzer Divisions already committed. But as the German historian Gerhard Weinberg has pointed out,

The reinforcements dribbled into the invasion front were never enough, and the Allied air forces as well as the sabotage effort of the French resistance and Allied special teams slowed down whatever was sent. The German armoured divisions, therefore, arrived one at a time and quite slowly, were never able to punch through, and ended up being mired in positional warfare because they continued to be needed at the front in the absence of infantry divisions.

Allied aerial supremacy over the battlefield made it impossible for the German tanks to be better deployed than in piecemeal fashion in daylight. Yet five armoured divisions of the reserve in France, and no fewer than nineteen divisions of the Fifteenth Army a hundred and twenty miles to the south, simply stayed in place waiting for the ‘real’ attack in the Pas de Calais. Meanwhile, Runstedt and Rommel became more and more convinced that Normandy was indeed the true Schwerpunkt, whereas the Führer continued to doubt it. The German troops were critically under-reinforced in Normandy, partly because of the success of the Allies’ elaborate though never conspicuously uniform deception plans. A determined German ground counter-offensive had once again been staved off by Allied air power. The 7th Army had thrown into battle every available unit in the Coastal defence forces, and bringing units from Brittany would take time. That was a commodity of which they had very little since they had failed in their initial objective of flinging the invasion forces back into the English Channel immediately. Both the capacity and willingness of the Wehrmacht to push the Allies back into the sea were still there, but they were overwhelmed by the ability of the RAF and the USAAF to attack the unprotected armour from above, where it was weakest. The bombing campaigns against the Luftwaffe factories and the attritional war against the German fighters once they had been built had paid off spectacularly. Such were the forces alighting from the Arromanches Mulberry Harbour, even though the second harbour off Omaha was rendered inoperable by a storm on 19 June, that by 1 July they exceeded a million men, 150,000 vehicles and 500,000 tons of supplies.

In total, D-Day itself saw around nine thousand Allied casualties, of whom more than half were killed, a high proportion for combat in the Second World War. The Allied dead comprised 2,500 Americans, and 2,000 British and Canadians. In addition, fifteen ANZAC soldiers and fifty-seven Norwegians, Free French and Belgian soldiers were killed, making 4,572 Allied troops in total. Although expected to lose eighty per cent of their numbers, the actual figure was fifteen per cent. The American cemetery at Collesville-sur-Mer above Omaha beach bears testimony to the sacrifice of the US servicemen. The news of D-day gave sudden, soaring hope to Occupied Europe. Ann Frank, the German-Jewish author who was about to celebrate her fourteenth birthday in hiding in the hidden attic of her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam, wrote poignantly in her now well-known Diary, of her excitement at the news and of her renewed hopes for her future:

The invasion has begun! Great commotion in the Secret Annexe! Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much but still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy-tale, ever come true? Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.

A Fallen Poet:

One of those who did not survive the Normandy campaign was Keith Castellain Douglas (24 January 1920 – 9 June 1944, pictured below right), an English poet noted for his war poetry during the Second World War and his wry memoir of the Western Desert campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. Like so many others who fell in Normandy, Douglas had lived a short life but fought a long war. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the son of Capt. Keith Sholto Douglas, MC (retired) and Marie Josephine Castellain. Marie Douglas faced persistent ill-health, the collapse of her marriage and extreme financial distress, so much so that only the generosity of the Edgeborough Prep School headmaster Mr James permitted Douglas to attend school in 1930–1931, his last year there. Douglas sat in 1931 for the entrance examination to Christ’s Hospital, where education was free and there was monetary assistance to cover all other costs. He was accepted, and joined Christ’s Hospital, near Horsham, in September 1931, studying there till 1938. It was at this school that his considerable poetic talent and artistic ability were recognised.

After a bruising brush with authority in 1935, Douglas settled down to a less troubled and more productive period at school, during which he excelled both at studies and games, and at the end of which he won an open exhibition to Merton College, Oxford in 1938 to read History and English. The First World War-veteran and well-known poet Edmund Blunden was his tutor at Merton and regarded his poetic talent highly. Blunden sent his poems to T. S. Eliot, the doyen of English poetry, who found Douglas’s verses ‘impressive’.

Within days of the declaration of war he reported to an army recruiting centre with the intention of joining a cavalry regiment, but like many others keen to serve he had to wait, and it was not until July 1940 that he started his training. After attending the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he was commissioned on 1 February 1941 into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry at Ripon. He was posted to the Middle East in July 1941 and transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry. Posted initially at Cairo and Palestine, he found himself stuck at headquarters twenty miles behind El Alamein as a camouflage officer as the Second Battle of El Alamein began.

At dawn on 24 October 1942, the Regiment advanced, and suffered numerous casualties from enemy anti-tank guns. Chafing at inactivity, Douglas took off against orders on 27 October, drove to the Regimental HQ in a truck, and reported to the C.O., Colonel E. O. Kellett, lying that he had been instructed to go to the front. Luckily this escapade did not land him in serious trouble and he got off with an apology. Desperately needing officer replacements, the Colonel posted him to A Squadron and gave him the opportunity to take part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army’s victorious sweep through North Africa vividly recounted in his memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, illustrated with his own drawings.

Captain Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. He survived the Allied landings but was killed by enemy mortar fire on 9 June, while his regiment was advancing from Bayeux. The regimental chaplain Captain Leslie Skinner buried him by a hedge, close to where he had died on forward slopes point 102. Shortly after the war, his remains were reburied at Tilly-Sur-Seulles War Cemetery (14 km south of Bayeux).

Douglas described his poetic style as “extrospective”; that is, he focused on external impressions rather than inner emotions. The result is poetry which, according to his detractors, can be callous in the midst of war’s atrocities. For others, Douglas’s work is powerful and unsettling because its exact descriptions eschew egotism and shift the burden of emotion from the poet to the reader. His best poetry is generally considered to rank alongside the 20th century’s finest soldier-poetry.

Douglas’ poems were published in The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas by Faber & Faber (1978). Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has written that while Douglas’ north-African poems may take a seemingly insouciant attitude towards battles, they leave us in no doubt about war’s misery and waste. In Vergissmeinnicht, he juxtaposes the roles of lover and killer in the rotting corpse of a German soldier:

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone

returning over the nightmare ground

we found the place again, and found

the soldier sprawling in the sun.

 

The frowning barrel of his gun

overshadowing. As we came on

that day, he hit my tank with one

like the entry of a demon.

 

Look. Here in the same gun-pit spoil

the dishonoured picture of his girl

who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht

in a copybook gothic script.

 

We see him almost with content,

abased, and seeming to have paid

and mocked at by his own equipment

that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

 

But she would weep to see today

how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

 

For here the lover and the killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled

has done the lover mortal hurt. 

Sources:

Andrew Roberts (2010), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

The Guardian History of the Second World War (2009).

Andrew Motion (ed.) (2003), 101 Poems Against War. Faber & Faber.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (eds.) (1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hitchinson Educational.

Above: An illustration by Henry Courtney Selous for Charles Kingsley’s 1865 novel, depicting his attack upon Normans on discovering the loss of his family and lands.

The comic-strip, super-hero and ‘super-villain’ version of the events of the Norman Conquest is an important part of British mythology, but it does not match much of the written record, let alone the architectural and archaeological evidence spanning the early middle ages, from the reign of William I to that of Edward I. The legendary story begins with the Norman’s tireless, heroic and ultimately cataclysmic cavalry charges on the Saxon shield wall at Senlac Hill, near Hastings, followed by their terrorising, or harrying of the north with fire and sword. The Saxons and Danes had captured York, pulling down the castle and seizing all the treasure in it. According to a contemporary chronicle, they killed hundreds of Normans and took many of them to their ships. William’s vengeance was swift and merciless, as recorded in his own words:

I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravaging lion. I ordered that all their homes, tools, goods and corn be burnt. Large herds of cattle and pack-animals were butchered wherever found. I took revenge on many of the English by making them die cruelly of hunger.

The narrative continues with the Norman’s ruthless mopping up the resistance by Hereward the Wake in the soggy Fens of East Anglia, and It ends with the conquest of Wales two hundred years later. But history is usually written by the victors, and it is all too easily to underestimate the precarious hold which William and his few thousand men held over the combined Danish and Saxon insurgents during the first five years of their rule. It was their accompanying land-grab and their tight system of feudal dues, later mythologised by the conquered Anglo-Saxons as ‘the Norman Yoke’, which enabled them to impose control, though this too was resisted by the thanes, among them Hereward in East Anglia.

A King’s Thegn was one of the nobles who served King Edward the Confessor, carrying out his orders and seeing to it that others obeyed the King. Had it not been for the Conquest, Hereward would have become a King’s Thegn after his father Asketil’s death. One of his uncles was Abbot Brand of Peterborough, and all five uncles were all sons of a rich merchant, Toki of Lincoln. In 1063, Abbot Osketil of Crowland had begun the building of a new Abbey Church, for which he needed to raise plenty of money. One way of doing so was to rent out the Abbey lands to local lords who would pay an annual sum to the monastery, and one of those who agreed to do so was a young man of eighteen named Hereward Askeltison. As the son of a wealthy local Thegn in the service of King Edward, the Abbot thought that he would be a reliable tenant. Hereward agreed to rent a farm at Rippingale near Bourne in Lincolnshire for an annual rent to be agreed with the Abbot at the beginning of each year. At the end of the first year, Hereward and the Abbot quarrelled over the rent. The Abbot also complained to his father, who mentioned the matter to the King. Hereward had already upset many of the local people of South Lincolnshire, causing disturbances and earning himself a reputation as a trouble-maker.

Hereward the Exile:

King Edward gave the young man five days in which to leave the Kingdom or face worse penalties. Thus Hereward was already a disgraced ‘outlaw’ before the Conquest, forced into exile by his own father and king. It was said that he escaped to Northumbria, as far away from Winchester, then still Edward’s capital, as he could get. Whichever route he took, at some point he boarded a ship to Flanders and was shipwrecked on the coast of Guines, between Boulogne and Calais. In order to earn a living, he began a career as a mercenary soldier. After winning a duel with a Breton knight, he married a noble lady from St. Omer, Turfrida. At this time, an early form of Tournament was becoming popular in France and Flanders, in which groups of men, sometimes on foot and increasingly on horseback, fought each other in front of large crowds. Hereward fought at Poitiers and Bruges, winning a reputation as a tough and skilled competitor. This was how he met and fell in love with Turfrida.

Hearing that Lietberg, Bishop and Count of Cambrai needed soldiers, Hereward joined his army and became one of the twelve knights who formed his bodyguard. He took part in small wars in the area between lords such as Baldwin II of Hainault, a grandson of the Count of Flanders, and Arnulf the Viscount of Picquigny. Hereward was noticed by Baldwin II’s uncle, Robert the Frisian. Robert was planning a campaign on behalf of his father, Count Baldwin V, who had decided to capture the area then called Scaldemariland, comprising the islands at the mouth of the River Scheldt. He took forty ships with an army under his personal command, with Hereward as commander of the mercenary soldiers. Hereward also had to train the younger, newly knighted men. Fierce fighting followed the attack and at the first the islanders resisted so stubbornly that Robert had to fall back and call for reinforcements.

The islanders boasted later that they had captured their enemy’s battle standard or ‘Colours’, which was considered a great achievement. The Count’s son then launched a stronger attack against the islands because the whole area had risen up against him. He was attacked from all sides, from the islands and from the sea. The invaders on the island of Walcheren, attacking its defences, and Hereward, in what became his trademark in war, suggested setting fire to the enemy wagons. He led a force of three hundred men ahead of the main army and they killed many hundreds of men. He then took a great the high ground with a force of a thousand knights and six hundred foot-soldiers, following this by attacking the enemy in the rear, killing the rearguard. That was too much for the islanders who sued for peace, being forced to pay double what the Count had originally demanded in tribute. Hereward and his men were allowed to keep all the plunder they had seized during the fighting. He used part of his share to buy two fine horses, calling his favourite one ‘Swallow’.

Return to England:

Just as his success was being celebrated, Count Baldwin V died and was succeeded by his elder son, also called Baldwin, much to the displeasure of the younger brother, Robert the Frisian. That brought an end to Robert’s Scaldermariland campaign, and of Hereward’s role as a mercenary commander, but his successes had made him quite rich by that time. This was when he heard that England had been conquered by the Normans and, leaving his wife in the care of his two cousins, Siward the Red and Siward the Blond, he decided to return to England to find out what had become of his family. Once there, he found out that both his father, Asketil, and his grandfather Toki had been killed in the fighting, in addition to his younger brother, Toli, so he decided to join those Saxons known by the Normans as ‘Wildmen of the Woods’ who were resisting the invasion. Although the English had at first been prepared to accept William’s rule, they had become increasingly rebellious due to the behaviour of the ‘robber’ barons and their knights. There had been widespread looting and the lands of the thanes who had been killed in the three battles of 1066 had been simply handed over to the Norman barons without any compensation to their Saxon holders. Those left in charge of the kingdom when William returned to Normandy after his coronation as King did nothing to control their men.

The rebels had taken refuge in woods, marshes and river valleys and Hereward, who had been born in South Lincolnshire, now returned to the area he knew best, the Fens. He first visited his uncle, Brand the Monk, who had succeeded Leofric as Abbot of Peterborough. The Abbot had returned ‘sick at heart’ from the Battle of Hastings and died of his wounds. Brand had angered King William by paying homage to the boy Prince of Wessex, Edgar Aetheling (the Saxon heir latterly recognised by Edward the Confessor), who was proclaimed king by the Witenagemot following Harold’s death and before William reached London and was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. William made him pay a fine of forty marks for this, a huge sum of money in those days, perhaps equivalent to a thousand pounds in today’s money. Hereward had held some of his lands as protector of Peterborough and now renewed his promise to protect the Abbey. But he also found that all his lands, together with those of his father and grandfather, stretching across more than seven shires, had been expropriated. His own lands had been given to a Breton knight called Ogier and several great Norman lords had shared out his family lands, including Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, who had moved his ‘seat’ to Lincoln, where he was building a new Cathedral on land that had once belonged to Hereward’s grandfather, Toki. Others who had helped themselves to his family’s land included Ivo Taillebois, the Sheriff of Lincolnshire, William de Warenne, later Earl of Surrey and a Flanders knight, brother-in-law of de Warenne, Frederick Oosterzele-Scheldewineke, whom Hereward waylaid and killed in Flanders, signalling a start to his rebellion.

The Norman land-grab – Domesday evidence:

The rebellion in East Anglia and Northumbria took place against the backcloth of the Norman land-grab as evidenced in the Domesday Survey of 1086. In Suffolk, Coppinger’s 1905 book chronicling the manorial records helps us to piece together something of the history of each manor, including those that belonged to Hereward’s kinsmen before the Conquest. We find that in pre-Conquest times, the village of Aspall in the west of the county had two small manors, one held by Brictmar in the time of Edward the Confessor, a freeman under commendation to Edric. He held thirty acres, which at Domesday was held by Robert Malet as the tenant of his mother. She was the widow of William Malet, a baronial tenant-in-chief, who accompanied the Conqueror from Normandy and was one of the few Norman barons proven to be present at Hastings, taking care of Harold’s body after the battle, on William’s command. Legend has it that his William Malet’s mother was English and that he was the uncle of King Harold’s wife Edith, the claim being that he had a sister Aelgifu who married Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia, the father of Edith. Despite his obviously divided loyalties, William of Normandy rewarded Malet’s faithfulness. He was soon appointed High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, and given the great honour of Eye (Priory), with lands in Suffolk and several other shires. It was, in fact, the largest lordship in East Anglia. He built a motte and bailey at Eye and started a market there. He died in 1071, probably in trying to crush the rebellion of Hereward the Wake, and on his death was one of the twelve greatest landholders in England. His son Robert later became a close advisor to Henry I, and at the time of The Domesday Survey, held 221 manors in Suffolk alone.

William de Goulafriere, who had also accompanied the Conqueror from Normandy, also held three acres in Aspall, valued at fifteen shillings. The nearby large village of Debenham consisted of three Saxon manors, the first held by Edric, a Saxon freeman under commendation to William Malet, with sixteen bordars, twelve ploughteams in demesne and three belonging to the freemen, four acres of meadow, wood enough to support sixty hogs, a rouncy (a cart-horse), four beasts, forty hogs, thirty sheep and forty goats. At the time of Domesday, the manor was held by William de Goulafriere, as sub-tenant to Robert Malet. There were one and a half ploughteams belonging to the freemen, woodland for forty hogs, of which there were twenty, together with six ‘beasts’ (oxen), forty-five sheep and twenty-eight goats. The value of the whole estate had declined from sixty shillings to fifty shillings at the time of Domesday, which shows that the Conquest could well have had a negative effect on the wealthier Saxon manors, possibly due to the amount of woodland which was cut down for building castles. William de Goulafriere also held over the freemen on Malet’s other holding of thirty-six acres, the value of which had declined from ten shillings to six by Domesday. This suggested that he managed the Saxon freemen for Malet, perhaps as an intermediary who understood them better and who respected him as a farmer. He also held Malet’s sixth estate of ten acres, which had half a ploughteam and was valued at two shillings. Winston, an outlying manor of Debenham appears, like the other, larger neighbouring Malet estates, to have had a very independent status as a manor, because it was held in the time of the Confessor by the Abbot of Ely, in demesne.

Like Stigand, Abbot Thurstan was a Saxon, appointed by Harold but, unlike Stigand, he was also honest and hard-working, so William did not replace him, even when he (famously) gave Hereward the Wake sanctuary from William’s soldiers in 1071, helping him to establish his hideout in the Fens. From this base, Hereward began harassing the Normans, killing and robbing them, so that King William himself was forced to offer him a truce after the outlaw thane had almost captured and killed another of his tenants-in-chief, William de Warenne. Hereward then decided to return to Flanders for Turfrida, to bring her back to England with him and also to recruit some of the mercenaries who had fought with him in Scaldemariland. While there he received messages from Abbot Thurstan telling him that his uncle, Brand, was dead and that the sons of Swein Esthrison, King of Denmark, had arrived in the Fens with a raiding army and might be persuaded to support a rising against the Normans. He was also told that King William had appointed a ‘strict French Abbot’ as Abbot of Peterborough, Thurold of Malmesbury, who was on his way to the abbey with an army of Normans from Stamford in Lincolnshire. William was said to have chosen him for his warlike disposition with the clear intention of setting him on Hereward.

Hereward’s ‘Attack’ on Peterborough:

Hereward quickly mustered his men and returned to England, arranging a meeting with the Danes at which he talked them into helping him to upset the Conqueror’s plan by seizing all the treasures of Peterborough to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Normans. Assembling his combined forces of English, Danish and former mercenaries, Hereward advanced to take control of Peterborough, crossing the Fens in large, flat-bottomed boats, using the Wellstream near Outwell, and seeking to gain entry by way of the Bolhythe Gate south of the Abbey. At first, they were resisted by the townsfolk and the monks, who had heard that Hereward and his band of outlaws, including Danes, intended to rob the monastery of its treasures, rather than saving them from the Normans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written at Peterborough, records how…

… in the morning all the outlaws came with many boats and attacked the monastery. The monks fought to keep them out.

They therefore failed to gain entry, but when his men set fire to the gate and the buildings outside the walls, he and his men, including the Danes, were able to break in. Once inside, they set about collecting everything movable of value they could lay their hands on. They tried to remove the Great Crucifix, laden with gold and precious stones, hanging at the entrance to the High Altar, but they could only take the crown from the head of Christ’s figure. Elsewhere they were more successful, taking eleven decorated boxes containing the relics of saints, encrusted with gold, silver and precious stones, twelve jewelled crosses and many other objects of gold and silver, books with jewelled covers, and the huge altar hanging, also embroidered in precious metals and jewels. They stripped the abbey of most of its precious possessions, including an ancient ‘relic’, the arm of St Oswald. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claimed that the outlaws then burnt down the monastery:

Then the rebels set fire to it, and burnt down all the monks’ houses except one, and the whole town… they took so much gold and so many treasures – money, clothes and books – that no one could add them up. They said they did it out of support for the monastery.

They left the area around the monastery, devastated by fire, on hearing that Abbot Thurold and his men were on their way from Stamford. Several senior monks went with them, and none were harmed. Despite the fire, no serious damage was done, and Thurold was able to resume church services within a week of his arrival. However, the Danes held on to the greater portion of the ‘booty’ and refused to assist in further resistance to the Normans. King Swein ordered them to return to Denmark, leaving Hereward and his men to face King William’s wrath. On the journey home, however, they ran into a storm which wrecked most of their ships with the loss of both men and treasure. Hereward and his men returned to their refuge at Ely and held out for several months against all the efforts of the Norman barons, aided by Abbot Thurold, to dislodge them. Hereward’s forces continued to harry the Normans at every opportunity, eve, on one occasion, surrounding Thurold and a company of men, only releasing them on payment of hundreds of pounds ransom, equivalent to thousands in today’s money.

Ely – Iconic Isle & Impregnable English Stronghold:

At Ely, Hereward became a magnet for rebel Englishmen and Danes, since he himself was of Danish descent. Following his initial disappointment with the Danes who helped him to ‘sack’ Peterborough, he made all those who joined him swear on the tomb of Etheldreda (see the picture below from the Cathedral nave) that they would stick together against the Normans. The Abbey, sixteen miles north of Cambridge, had been founded as a monastery in 673 by St Etheldreda. Destroyed by the Danes in 870, part of it was still standing in King Edward’s reign, though the present building was begun in 1083, after the events described here. Many of Hereward’s supporters who gathered there were his relatives from Lincolnshire, but he was also joined by another Dane, called Thorkell of Harringworth, who had lost his lands in Northamptonshire. Others included the rich landowner Siward of Maldon in Essex, Rahere ‘the Heron’ from Wroxham on the Bure in the Norfolk Broads, Brother Siward of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds and Reginald, Hereward’s standard-bearer. They carried out a series of raids against the Normans, pillaging far and wide and sometimes suffering heavy losses themselves. They reassured many people that all was not yet lost. For a time, William did nothing, leaving the task of dealing with Hereward to the local barons such as William de Warenne from Castle Acre, William Malet from Eye in Suffolk and Richard fitzGilbert from Clare. But following the rising in the North in 1069 in support of Edgar Aetheling, the last Saxon heir to the thrones of Wessex and England, the Conqueror changed his mind.

Many of the commoners followed their thanes, often in open rebellion, and even to the point of civil war. William responded by resorting to terror tactics in his well-known ‘harrying of the North’. Two of the last surviving Saxon Earls from King Edward’s time, the brothers Edwin, Earl of Mercia and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria, soon lost all faith in the new Norman king. They feared that as part of his revenge for the rising, which caused William to burn and destroy large tracts of Yorkshire and Durham, they too would be imprisoned. They escaped from their ‘house arrest’ at the King’s court and hid out for six months in the woods and fields, evading recapture. Hoping to find a ship to flee to Flanders, they arrived at Ely, accompanied by other Saxon nobles and their household troops. These included Bishop Athelwine of Durham and two of Edwin and Morcar’s relatives, Godric of Corby and Tostig of Daventry. They all met up in the Fens near Wisbech and persuaded Hereward to allow them to spend the winter at Ely. They had returned south after the rising when Prince Eadgar and Maerleswein, the English sheriff of Lincolnshire and their supporters, had sought refuge with King Malcolm Canmore of Scotland, who had married Eadgar’s sister, Margaret of Wessex, following the family’s flight from the Norman court and their shipwreck at the mouth of the Forth.

So the remnant of the rebellion against William was now gathered in one place and William could not resist the opportunity to destroy it once and for all. But it was not going to be easy to deal with them since Ely was an island surrounded by the Fens and almost impregnable. The rivers and the deep, almost bottomless meres combined with the marshes surrounding the Isle made it a tremendous obstacle to any army, especially one like the Norman army, whose strength was in its heavy cavalry. Any attempt at the waterborne assault could be easily repelled. The available ways onto the Isle from Earith, Soham or Downham were well known, difficult and easily defended. The rebel defenders had built ramparts of peat surmounted by strong fences from which javelins and other missiles could be launched. King William also realised that a large fighting force within these defences, well stocked with food and water, could hold out almost indefinitely and, commanded by Hereward, a soldier of proven ability, a headlong ground attack was unlikely to succeed without heavy losses.

William’s Attempts to Lay Siege to the Isle:

Hence, the King decided to mobilise both ground and naval forces on a large scale. The chronicles of the time record how he set his ships to blockade the Isle from the ‘seaward’ or northern side and set a siege on the landward side. The various accounts of the attack are confused, but what took place is clear enough. King William gathered his élite troops and commanders together at the castle in Cambridge and planned an assault which meant crossing the fen at its narrowest point by strengthening the existing causeway. This was a very old track called the Mare’s Way, running from Willingham to an Iron Age earthwork called Belsar’s Hill. There he quickly set up camp, building a palisade along the rampart of the old fort. He then forced all the local people to provide him with materials with which he continued to reinforce the causeway, building a bridge which would enable his army to cross the Old West River onto the Isle.

William also set up an advance post at ‘Devil’s Dyke’, near Reach, and some of his men attempted to cross the West River below where it was joined by the River Cam. In the meantime, Hereward carried out scouting forays, building up stocks of food and weapons, killing or wounding any parties of Normans found away from their base. He fortified the weak spots on the dykes with walls of peat and easily repulsed the Normans, counter-attacking at Reach. He led a small raiding party of seven men against the outpost and killed all the guards there, except for one Richard, son of Osbert, who was the last man standing, while none of the seven attackers was killed. Richard later reported on the action to the King’s War Council, and of how Hereward had gone on to burn down the nearby village of Burwell before retreating as reinforcements were brought up. William moved his troops to a point on the West River not far from the modern hamlet of Aldreth, some way to the east, where the fen was narrower than elsewhere. There he set about building a floating structure loosely described as a bridge supported by sheepskins filled with air, which may have been sabotaged by its local peasant builders. There was a suggestion that the bags were partly filled with sand so that they would gradually sink.

As soon as it appeared to be ready, and before the defenders could react, a large number of knights and men-at-arms rushed onto the bridge, eager to be the first on the Isle with its promise of rich plunder. The whole construction was so unstable that it collapsed, throwing all the men on it into the river and the surrounding swamp so that they all, save one, drowned. Some hundreds, at least, perished, and William retreated in despair to the former royal manor of Brampton, near Huntingdon, while Hereward, entertaining the sole survivor of the disaster, Deda the knight. He was well looked after and invited to dine in the refectory of Ely monastery, along with Abbot Thurstan, his monks and the various noblemen supporting Hereward. They feasted at great wooden trestle tables in the hall with their arms and armour stacked against the walls, ready for use in action. Their shields hung on the walls behind their seats, marking their places. Deda was therefore allowed to believe that the defenders were well supplied with food from the abbey lands, including its famous eels, as well as fresh water from its wells, and wine from its vineyards. He was then set free so that he could report all this to King William. Deda did exactly that at a meeting of the King’s council, in which he told William all about the Isle of Ely:

Around it are great meres and fens, like a strong wall. In this isle there are many tame cattle, and huge numbers of wild animals; stags, roes, foats and hares… But what am I to say of the kinds of fishes and fowls, both those that fly and those that swim? … I have seen a hundred – no, even three hundred – taken at once – sometimes by bird-lime, sometimes in nets or snares.

Deda’s information almost persuaded William to give up his attack on Ely. But Ivo Taillebois, in a dramatic speech, persuaded the king that he would never live down such an ignominious retreat. This argument won the day, and work began on a new portable bridge guarded by two tall wooden siege towers. These were mounted on huge platforms on wheels and could be used to fire missiles at the opposite bank of the river to drive back the defenders. Hereward, however, had had Deda followed, enabling him to locate the king’s camp at Brampton. Hereward hid his horse Swallow nearby, disguised himself as a seller of pots and oil lamps and infiltrated the camp. He listened carefully to all that was said about the king’s plans, including one to employ a witch to curse the Islanders using a giant eel from the swamp to cast her spells. But then he was identified as the ‘notorious’ outlaw by one of the King’s men and was forced to make a dramatic escape into the marshes where he found his horse and rode back to Ely via Sutton and Witchford, leaving one Norman dead and several others wounded back at the camp.

Meanwhile, the king’s orders were being quickly carried out. He commandeered all the available boats from Cottingham and the surrounding areas so that more men and materials and men could be brought in over the flooded landscape. Great tree trunks were laid down and covered with sticks and stones to form a platform over the marsh on which the siege towers could be erected, and catapults for hurling stones were placed on the towers. But Hereward’s men had disguised themselves as labourers and mingled with the Saxon workmen. When they threw off their disguises to reveal their armour and weapons, their enemies were thrown into confusion and they were able to set fire reeds and willows of the fen as well as to the piles of wood around the siege towers, calling upon God, in English, to come to their aid. The whole structure and towers caught fire and the Normans fled in terror from the roaring flames and choking smoke. The fire spread across the fens for half a kilometre into the swamp of reeds, whipped up by the wind, with the peat below the water level also burning. The soldiers fled headlong into this in order to escape the raging flames, the noise of the crackling willows and the billowing smoke driving them mad with fear. The peat fires would have been almost impossible to extinguish, travelling underground and even underwater and erupting in explosions of steam clouds. Men trying to cross the swamp fell waist deep into burning peat. Hereward and his men, familiar with the perils of the marsh, pursued the fleeing Normans, killing many trapped by the flames, then retreating once more to the Isle.

King William Raises the Stakes:

King William, enraged by his defeat and horror-stricken with his losses, sought his immediate revenge by seizing all the lands of the abbey of Ely, distributed over a wide area, that he could lay his hands on and distributing them among his barons. News of this was carefully leaked to Abbot Thurstan and his monks, who began to have second thoughts about continuing to resist in case they lost everything. William also let it be known that Earl Morcar and other thanes would be treated leniently if they surrendered, but mercilessly if they continued their resistance. Earl Edwin decided to leave his brother and make his way to Scotland to join the Wessex resistance there. On the way, he was betrayed by three of his own men to a squadron of Norman knights. Caught in the open between a river and the sea, he was slaughtered. His betrayers took his head to King William, expecting a reward, but were themselves executed.

Abbot Thurstan then contacted the King and offered to reveal how he could gain safe passage onto the Isle from another direction. William accepted his offer and made his way across Avering Mere by boat to a spot near the village of Little Thetford, a short distance from the town of Ely, where the river was placid and easily crossed. William took the Abbot’s advice, but it wasn’t an easy journey. His army had to take a winding march through the marshes to the mere, along a path revealed to the King by the monks. The men lost sight of each other in the eerie silence of the marsh and sometimes found themselves walking over the bodies of men and horses that had perished in the fire in the swamp. They also had to cross the many tributaries and streams running through the fens, wading through deep waters almost up to the level of their helmets and all the time harassed by attacks from the Fenlanders. King William commandeered all available flat-bottomed fenland boats, ancestors of the modern punt, to transport horses and catapults as well as materials to build yet another bridge. He had given up the idea of crossing near Aldreth because of the fires still raging in the marshes there.

The Final Norman Attack along Akeman Street:

Eventually, William reached the area which Thurstan had described to him, near Little Thetford, bringing up the boats carrying the catapults and setting them up on the river bank. From there he began to bombard the defenders. At first, this caused the unstable ground to shake, threatening the attackers with drowning. But the Conqueror’s ‘engineers’ constructed a pontoon bridge over a number of the flat-bottomed boats lashed together and covered in willow branches, reeds and rushes. His bombardment had succeeded in softening up the Resistance and he was able to lead his men across the rapidly improvised pontoon bridge onto the Isle, driving back the remaining defenders with his horsemen. He then swept forward in a ‘pincer’ movement, one wing advancing directly towards Ely along the old Roman road, Akeman Street, while the other swept round through Witchford, where he accepted the surrender of Morcar and the nobles. However, they had left this too late and Morcar, Siward Barn and Bishop Aethelwine were imprisoned. The bishop died shortly afterwards, Morcar remained a prisoner for life and Siward Barn was only released after William’s death. He went int exile in Constantinople where he was said to have joined the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. The other leaders of the Resistance were severely dealt with; some were blinded, others lost hands or feet. The ordinary rank and file were released unharmed.

Hereward had been absent from Ely during the final Norman attack, leading another raiding party with his closest allies. On returning from this, he found that Morcar and the other nobles had surrendered and the King was already at Witchford. In his rage and despair, he threatened to burn down the town but was persuaded by Alwin, son of Sheriff Ordgar, that it was too late to recover the Isle and the Abbey. He and his allies then escaped through the Fens to take refuge in the Bruneswald, the great forest along the Fen edge in Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire. There, for some months, he carried on his guerrilla campaign against the Norman King. Nothing very definite is known about his ultimate fate. There are two conflicting narratives, one of which was that he was captured by William’s forces of the seven shires in the Bruneswald, only for him to escape in the company of his gaoler, Robert of Harpole, who then persuaded the King to pardon him in exchange for him entering his king’s service. In that narrative, Hereward agreed and was given back some of his lands. He then lived out his life in retirement and was buried at Crowland next to his first wife, Turfrida, who had become a nun there. However, this narrative rests on two false clues. According to the Domesday Book, there was another thane named Hereward, the son of Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva, who held lands in Warwickshire in the service of the Bishop of Worcester and the Count of Mortain. Later chroniclers confused this Hereward with the Fenland outlaw. In addition, a later English rebel, Earl Waltheof of Northumbria, beheaded in 1075 for taking part in a revolt against King William, was also buried at Crowland. So some details of this narrative may be based on cases of mistaken identity.

The alternative narrative, written up in the twelfth century by the poet Geoffrey Gaimar also claims that Hereward was reconciled with William and went with him to the war in Maine where he made another fortune out of booty captured in the war. On his way home, he was ambushed by two dozen Norman knights seeking revenge against him, and died fighting single-handedly against overwhelming odds, killing about half of his assailants. Here, the poet is probably giving his hero a hero’s death within the literary conventions of the time. Peter Rex has argued that the most likely ‘denouement’ is that, after seeing out the winter of 1071 in the Bruneswald, Hereward decided that it was too dangerous for him to remain in England, so that he and his close allies and men slipped away by sea to the Continent. Once there, he probably became a mercenary once more, and either died in battle or lived to return to England in the reign of William Rufus, perhaps living quietly in Norfolk into old age and being buried in Crowland. The evidence for this comes from two East Anglian families, at Terrington near Kings Lynn and Great Barton near Bury St Edmunds, who both claim descent from him.

The Primary Sources – The Abbey, the Man & the Myth:

The authentic primary evidence we have for the real Hereward comes mainly from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Liber Eliensis. His exile and his lands are also documented in the Domesday Book of 1086. His raid on Peterborough is related by Hugh Candidus in his History of Peterborough Abbey, written in the mid-twelfth century and in the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, copied there in circa 1120. His other adventures are narrated in the Gesta Herewardi; the Book of the Exploits of Hereward, written partly by Leofric the deacon, who claimed to be Hereward’s chaplain, and partly by the monk Richard of Ely, who wrote Book Two of the Liber Eliensis. Both this latter text and the Gesta are based on earlier texts written before 1109 when the Abbacy became a Bishopric, drawing on the first-hand accounts of both the monks of Ely and the Norman soldiers. The epithet ‘the Wake’ which some linguists have claimed to be a synonym of ‘the Alert’ or ‘the Watchful’  was the result of a dubious claim of descent by a lesser Norman noble family named ‘Wake’, who were concerned to enhance their reputation after being given lands in Lincolnshire under King Henry I, whose own legitimacy as king was enhanced by his marriage into the Wessex Royal family.  But neither the Wakes nor the fitzGilberts, the family into which they married, had any connection with Hereward’s family.  In fact, Richard fitzGibbon was one of the Norman knights who fought Hereward’s men at the siege of Ely.

Ely Cathedral today, with the Abbey’s Great Hall at the end of the North Transept (left).

Although the Abbey was fined heavily for its role in the resistance, and its lands were confiscated, it was only after Thurstan’s death that William appointed a Norman monk in his place. Perhaps William was also mindful of the powerful symbolism of Ely to the Saxons. Then, following the return of its manors in 1081, Simeon was made Abbot, an old but very wise and able churchman, who was related both to William and to Stigand’s successor as Bishop of Winchester. The Abbey’s land in Winston in Suffolk, referred to above, consisted of forty acres, six villeins, four bordars, two ploughteams in demesne and three belonging to freemen, as well as six acres of meadow and woodland for a hundred hogs. There was a church with eight acres, two rouncies, four beasts, twenty hogs and fifty sheep. It was valued at four pounds. At Domesday, the manor of Winston was still held by Abbot Simeon, but with only one ploughteam in demesne and woodland for sixty hogs. Its value had increased to four pounds, ten shillings, and was the only manor showing evidence of becoming wealthier. This prosperity, we are told, had come from additional freemen working the thirty acres of the Abbot’s land. On the elderly abbot’s reinstatement to Ely, William de Goulafriere (who had held the confiscated lands in the meantime) helped the elderly abbot, who was taken up with restoring the Abbey and its treasures, by recruiting and managing the additional freemen from other manors where he had an interest, such as Debenham. It may also be that the unbroken and consolidated tenure of these forty acres in the hands of the Abbots of Ely, together with de Goulafriere, was a major factor in their continued productivity and value, despite a reduction in woodland similar to that in other villages.

From a ‘See Britain by train’ poster in the National Railway Museum captioned  ‘Where Hereward the Wake made his last stand, Ely Cathedral, rises in majesty.’

Hereward Asketilson, as he should properly be known, became an iconic figure for all those Anglo-Saxons and Danes who resisted the tyranny of the Conqueror, his barons and their ‘Norman Yoke’. As an ‘outlaw’, he no doubt inspired the later legends of outlaws throughout the English countryside in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Gradually, a powerful myth of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ took hold, to be revived at various points of conflict in national and regional history. The initial conquest of England did not end at the Battle of Hastings, but took more than five years to accomplish. The Plantagenet’s attempts to extend the conquest into the other countries and territories of the British Isles over the course of the following two centuries also met with considerable resistance, and were only partially successful. However, in England, by the end of the twelfth century, there was a mixing and melding of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures in which ‘Englishness’ predominated, and not just in the continued use of Saxon tongues. The author of one of the earliest school textbooks, written in Latin in about 1180, made the observation that:

… now that the English and Normans have lived so long together, and have become so mixed together (I speak of freemen only) that we can hardly these days tell apart an Englishman and Norman. 

The monk William of Malmesbury also commented on the extent to which the powerful Norman élite was assimilated by the general Saxon population:

The English at that time (before 1066) wore short clothes reaching to the mid-knee; they had their hair cut very short, their beards shaven off, their arms laden with gold bracelets, their skins covered with punctuated designs (tattoos); they tended to eat until they were stuffed full and drink until they were sick. These last habits they gave to their conquerors; the rest they shared with them.

Secondary Sources:

 

Published by the Ely Society, 2012.

The cover picture was supplied by Grantanbrycg, the Cambridge branch of

Regia Angolorum, http://www.regia.org

 

Catherine Hills (1986), Blood of the British. London: Guild Publishing.

William Anderson (1983), Holy Places of the British Isles. London: Ebury Press.

 

President Gorbachev had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, but gave his acceptance speech in Oslo on 5 June 1991, twenty-five years ago. In it he warned that, if perestroika fails, the prospect of entering a new peaceful period of history will vanish, at least for the foreseeable future. The message was received, but not acted upon. Gorbachev had embarked on perestroika; it was up to him and his ministers to see that it did not fail. Outside the Soviet Union, his Peace Prize was acclaimed, and the consequences of his constructive actions were apparent everywhere. In June 1991 Soviet troops completed their withdrawal from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Czechs and Hungarians cheered as the last Soviet tanks left. At the same time, both Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact were formally dissolved.

Two sets of arms negotiations remained as unfinished business between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev: START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) and CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe). The CFE agreement set limits to the number of conventional arms – tanks, artillery, aircraft – allowed between the Atlantic and the Urals. It effectively ended the military division of the continent. It had been signed in Paris the previous November, 1990, but the following summer some CFE points of interpretation were still giving trouble. The Soviets sought to exclude naval units from the count, insisting that they might need them for internal purposes in the Baltic and Black seas. The United States argued that everything should be counted, and it was not until June 1991 in Vienna that the final text was installed, the culmination of two years of negotiation. Below are some of the thousands of tanks which were put up for sale as the CFE agreement came into force. These armaments had helped keep the peace, but in the end only the junkyard awaited them.

START’s broad objective was also quite clear: the reduction of long-range strategic weapons. Achieving this was complicated. Should the two sides reduce the number of warheads or the number of missile types carrying the warheads? The Soviets had two new missile types in development, so they wanted to download warheads instead. The US was against this, and the Soviets were negotiating against a clock that was ticking away the continued existence of the USSR. Eventually, just minutes before Bush and Gorbachev were due to meet in London, on 17 July, minor concessions  produced a text acceptable to both sides of the table. A fortnight later, on 31 July, the two presidents signed START 1 in Moscow. The two superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear warheads and bombs to below nine thousand, including 1,500 delivery vehicles. Thus began a new sequence of strategic arms reduction agreements.

Meanwhile, within the new Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin had become its President on 12 June, elected by a landslide. He received 57% of the eighty million voted cast, becoming Russia’s first ever democratically elected leader. However, the Soviet Union, including Russia, was desperate to receive American economic aid; it was no longer its strength as a nuclear superpower which posed a threat to world peace, but its economic weakness. Gorbachev calculated that the US would recognise this and, in a ‘Grand Bargain’ offer massive dollar aid – say, twenty billion a year over five years – to do for the Soviet Union what the Marshall Plan had done for Western Europe after the Second World War. A group of Soviet and American academics tried to sell this plan to the two governments. Some of Gorbachev’s colleagues denounced this ‘Grand Bargain’ as a Western conspiracy, but, in any case the US was not interested – the USSR was a poor credit risk and President Bush had no backing in Washington for bailing out the rival system.

The climax of Gorbachev’s attempts to get American aid in propping up the ruble and in stocking Soviet shelves with consumer goods came in London on 17 July at the Group of Seven (G7) meeting, the world’s financial top table. His problem remained that of convincing the US that he was serious about moving directly to a free market economy, as Boris Yeltsin had sought to do when he had proclaimed himself a free marketeer on a visit to Washington. At the G7 meeting, Gorbachev was unconvincing, and left empty-handed.

After the START 1 summit in Moscow on 31 July, George Bush kept his promise to visit Ukraine, and went on to Kiev. The Ukrainians were looking for US support in their attempt to break away from Moscow and declare independence. Bush perceived how perilous Gorbachev’s position really was. In June the ‘old guard’ Communists had been foiled in their attempt to oust him by passing resolutions in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the so-called ‘constitutional coup’. The CIA was now warning of a hard-line coup to dislodge him from power, this time using force. The warning was passed on to Gorbachev, who ignored it. Bush didn’t want to do anything to make matters worse. In Kiev he denounced the grim consequences of “suicidal nationalism.” Croatia and Slovenia, having left the Yugoslav federation, were already at war. The Ukrainians were disappointed. Bush’s speech went down even less well in the United States, where the president’s own right-wing critics picked up a journalist’s verdict and damned it as Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech.

Andrew James

Source: Jeremy Isaacs & Taylor Downing (1998), The Cold War. London: Bantham Press.

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Nick Baines's Blog

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball.

This has been a great last month for me with a new album by Imelda May and Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday (which doesn’t seem to have cheered him up at all). Then, this week one of my best bands, Crowded House, released ‘Dreamers are Waiting’. The problem with this album is that it makes me want to listen to the whole back catalogue stretching into the mid-1980s.

The title itself is evocative. Every generation needs dreamers – people who can see beyond the immediate challenges and imagine a different world in the future; people who don’t agree that we just have to accept the way the world is now, but envisages something better. And, as the album title suggests, dreamers have to have the patience to wait and work for that…

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Calamity hits the Kingdom:

In the Spring of 1665, Samuel Pepys made the following entry in his diary:

30 April. Lord’s Day … Great fears of the sickness here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.

The sickness he referred to was the bubonic plague, which Pepys had never known before, the last outbreak in London having occurred in 1625. The disease was not a new one but, like the more modern occurrence of influenza, it came at intervals, though not so often, and it was much more deadly, especially in the crowded parts of the cities. This was the worst attack in modern times, though not so widespread and catastrophic as the Black Death of 1348-49. In London, it lasted until the summer of 1666 and carried off some hundred thousand victims. In early 1666, it spread to other towns, mostly in southern England, but by the end of the year, it was over. We now know that the bacillus of the disease, which was endemic in the Near East and parts of North Africa was carried by fleas on the rats which infested the ships trading with those areas. No cure was known and the disease was almost always fatal. Pepys regularly reports the fatality statistics which were given in the weekly ‘bills of mortality’ published by the Parish Clerk’s Company of London. The Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, also kept a ‘Journal’ in which he reflected on the horror of that year:

It is scarce possible for people that live in a time of health and security to understand the dreadfulness of that “pestilence”. How fearful people were, thirty or forty, if not a hundred miles from London, of any goods that were brought to them from there, or of any person that came to their houses. How they would shut their door against their friends and if a man passed another in the field how one would avoid the other as we did in time of war; and how every man was a terror to another. Oh, how unthankful we are for our quiet societies, homes and health!

When calamity hit the kingdom, as it did in a series of hammer-blows between 1665 and 1667, the instinctive response of both kings and subjects was not to invoke the illumination of science and rational argument but to call for divine intervention through penance, fasting and prayer. Daniel Defoe’s heart-rending account of the harvest of bodies in 1665, A Journey of the Plague Year, was written more than half a century after the event but was based on reliable memories of contemporaries, including one of Samuel Pepys’ amanuenses, Paul Lorrain.

What Defoe described was a culture divided into the mad and the methodical. The puritan ‘prophets’ seemed vindicated in their prophecies that God’s hand would be laid across the back of the ‘sin-steeped’ kingdom. Unhinged prophets walked naked in the streets roaring for repentance before the race was consumed altogether. In his ‘historical writings’, Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, described how the Plague followed the first ‘hammer-blow’ inflicted by the Dutch Navy in 1665:

There begun now to appear another enemy, much more formidable than the Dutch, and more difficult to be struggled with;

… which was the plague, that brake out in winter, and made such an early progress in the spring, that though the weekly numbers did not rise high, and it appeared to be only in the outskirts of the town (i.e. London), and in the most obscure alleys, amongst the poorest people; yet the ancient men, who well remembered in what manner the last great plague (which had been near forty years before) first brake out, and the progress it afterwards made, foretold a terrible summer. And many of them removed their families out of the city to country habitations; when their neighbours laughed at their providence, and thought they might have stayed without danger: but they found shortly that they had done wisely.

Fleeing the Plague & ‘Fighting’ it:

But while the King, the Court, the professions (including physicians) and the Gentry all fled London as fast as they could, they left behind the common citizens to be locked up by the watch in their own houses, prisoners of the contagion, left to succumb, starve or survive. Doctors could not help much because they did not know how to cure the plague. Understanding of the generation and transmission of the disease was scarcely more advanced than when it first struck in 1348. Richard Baxter saw that one good thing came out of the plague, that the most useful people in these circumstances were the brave, unselfish men and women who stayed with the dying to give them courage and to help their families. Of course, it was the duty of the clergymen to do this, but many of them had also fled into the country so that for a time the silenced non-conforming ministers were needed too badly for anyone to try to stop them from helping the ill and the dying. They said that, …

… no obedience to any laws could justify them from neglecting men’s souls and bodies in such want and that it would be a poor excuse to say to God, ‘how I was forbidden by law’.

In March, Clarendon wrote, the plague had spread so much that parliament was willingly dissolved, a necessary measure considering that so many of its members were the House of Commons were assigned to many offices relating to the Anglo-Dutch War which required their attendance at Westminster and in Whitehall. Meanwhile, platoons of watchmen patrolled the streets enforcing the requirement that households become hermetically sealed at the first sign of infection. The regulations may have been designed to seal off the country from the plague, but inevitably the infection always outran the ability to contain it, and in the meantime, they condemned Londoners to be deprived of any hope of work or sustenance except what came their way by charity. The desperate who attempted to escape the net risked arrest and prosecution. From Alderman Hooker, Pepys heard of …

 … a saddler who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague: and himself and wife now being shut up, and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this (their surviving) little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich.  

For once, Pepys and his colleagues were moved enough to allow the child to stay there in safety. Because it was thought that cats and dogs spread the plague, the Lord Mayor of London ordered a general slaughter of them; by Pepys’ reckoning, forty thousand dogs and as many as two hundred thousand cats were duly massacred. That they were so swiftly rounded up and dispatched testified to the fact that what had modernised since the medieval epidemics was the policing of mortality. By the summer, the plague carts were carrying thousands to the burial pits every week. On a hot, sweaty day in early June, Pepys wrote:

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill-conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy someroll-tobacco to smell and to chaw – which took away the apprehension.  

Above: “Bring out your Dead” was the mournful cry heard at night as carts coursed their way through the city’s streets collecting corpses. As coffins could not be built fast enough, bodies were tossed into grisly pits on the outskirts.

Staying put & ‘socialising’:

Following that, Pepys ‘posted’ regular records and comments about the spread of the plague in his diary:

10 June: Lay long in bed; and then up and at the office all the morning. … In the evening home to supper, and there to my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City (though it hath these three or four weeks since its beginning been wholly out of the City); but where should it begin but in my good friend and neighbour’s, Dr Burnett in Fanchurch Street – which in both points troubles me mightily. To the office to finish my letters, and then home to bed – being troubled at the sickness, … and particularly how to put my things and estate in order, in case it should please God to call me away – which God dispose of to his own glory. 

11 June. Lord’s Day: I out of doors a little to show forsooth my new suit, and back again; and in going, saw poor Dr Burnet’s door shut. But he hath, I hear, gained great goodwill among his neighbours; for he discovered itself first, and caused himself to be shut up of his own accord – which was very handsome. In the evening comes Mr Andrews and his wife and Mr Hill, and stayed and played and sung and supped -most excellent pretty company; … They gone, we to bed – my mind in great present ease.

In this comment, it’s interesting to note the willingness of some to ‘self-isolate’, despite the low survival rate which must have been apparent by this stage. Also noteworthy, from our current perspective, is how much (wealthy) people continued to socialise during the plague and the benefit it brought to their mental states. But less than a week later, Pepys was severely affected by what happened during his hackney-coach journey from the Lord Treasurer of the Navy’s house in Holborn. The coach gradually slowed down and the coachman climbed down, hardly able to stand, telling Pepys that he had been suddenly taken sick and was almost blind. Pepys alighted and went to another coach, saddened for the poor man but also troubled for himself since he had been picked up at the end of town where the plague was most concentrated. However, by the end of June, it seemed to some that the peak of infection had passed:

… I informed myself that there died four or five at Westminster of the plague, in one alley in several houses upon Sunday last – Bell Alley, over against the Palace Gate. Yet people do think that the number will be fewer in the town than it was last week. 

A weekly ‘bill of mortality’ for the week of 15-22 August 1665.

It is obvious from his entries that, by this time Pepys was becoming increasingly anxious for his own health, trying to limit his visits to his workplace and to ‘isolate’ himself as much as possible. The plague was beginning to affect him more personally, as friends, as well as neighbours, were succumbing to it:

3 July: Late at the office about letters; and so home, resolving from this night forward to close all my letters if possible and end all my business at the office by daylight, and I shall go near to do it and put all my affairs in the world in good order, the season growing so sickly that it is much to be feared how a man can (e)scape having a share with others in it – for which the good Lord God bless me or to be fitted to receive it. So after supper to bed, and mightily troubled in my sleep all night with dreams of Jacke Cole my old schoolfellow, lately dead, who was born at the same time with me, and we reckoned our fortunes pretty equal. God fit me for his condition.

Above: West side of the City

Below: East side of the City

Yet he was still able to go out and about, ordering wine on 7 July, of which he was pleased to have an ample supply in his cellar. He sent some of this to his wife, who two days earlier had moved out of plague-stricken London to lodge with William Sheldon, Clerk of the Cheque at Woolwich yard. Pepys was also helping to arrange a ‘marriage alliance’ between the families of the Earl of Sandwich and Sir George Carteret. Pepys took Philip Carteret, due to marry Sandwich’s daughter, Jemima, to ‘Dagnams’, the Essex home of Lady Wright, the Earl’s sister-in-law, where the young people were due to meet for the first time. Both were said to be ‘excessively shy’. On their way from Greenwich to Dagenham on 15 July, which included two ferry crossings with their coach and horses, Carteret and Pepys had a silly discourse … as to … love matters, he being the most awkward man I ever met withal in my life as to that business. His awkwardness continued well into their evening visit to ‘Dagnams’ and during his ‘courtship’ of Lady ‘Jem’, which included an afternoon visit to church. She later agreed to ‘readily obey what her father and mother had done’ but the wedding ‘breakfast’ two weeks later, according to Pepys (who missed the service with the bridegroom’s parents due to the tide at Deptford), was very merry … but yet in such a sober way as never almost any wedding was in so great families. Pepys did not mention the plague in his entries for these four days, which suggests that he could still be ‘distracted’ by such amusing ‘episodes’ of a more ‘normal life’.

Fears, favours & funerals:

As August began, however, Pepys found the Exchequer being moved out of the City to Nonsuch Palace near Cheam in Surrey by royal proclamation. He then returned home to his ‘papers’ and began putting his books into storage, ‘settling’ his ‘house … and all things in the best and speediest order’ he could, lest it should please God to take me away or force me to leave my house. That the number of deaths was still growing can be surmised from his entry for 12 August, in which he reported the imposition of a ‘curfew’ by the Lord Mayor:

The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.

Having just visited his wife at Woolwich yard, on 15 August he got up at 4 a.m. and walked to Greenwich, where he called on Captain Cockes, who was still in bed. While there,

… something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best I ever was dreamed – which was, that I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamed that this could not be awake but that it was only a dream. But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it), we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this – that then we should not need to be fearful of death as we are in this plague-time. 

Lady Castlemaine, studio of Lely: ‘But strange it is, how for her beauty I … pity her … though I know well enough she is a whore.’ (16 July 1662).

On 21 August, the Navy Office was moved to Greenwich Palace. For the rest of the year, Pepys moved into lodgings nearby, paying occasional visits to his wife at Woolwich and to his office building in London. The Principal Officers attended a Sunday service at St Alphege’s, the parish church on 3 September. Pepys felt inhibited from wearing his fine new periwig for fear that it was maid of hair cut from infected bodies:

Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fie, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but darst not wear it, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will buy any haire for fear of the infection – that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague. Church being done, my Lord Brouncker, Sir J. Mennes and I up to the vestry at the desire of the the Justices of the Peace, Sir Th. Bidolph and Sir W. Boreman and Alderman Hooker – in order to the doing something for the keeping of the plague from growing; but Lord, consider the madness of people of the town, who will (because they are forebid) come in crowds along with the dead corps to see them buried. But we agreed on some orders for the prevention thereof.

There was not much that science could do about the death rate, other than count London’s dead with ‘modern’ devotion to the seriousness of statistics and the mapping of the epidemic. In the first week of September, there were 8,252 deaths in the capital, of which 6,978 were from the plague. One in six Londoners died in the plague of the summer of 1665, and despite the onset of cooler weather as September went on, the trepidation hung around. On Sunday 24 September, Pepys caught up with his diary for the last seven days, he was contented that:

… it having pleased God that in this sad time of the plague everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more for these last three months then in all my life before in so little time. God long preserve it, and make me thankful for it. 

But on 16 October, he returned to London, if only for a day. The scenes and sounds that greeted him immediately threw him back into a low mood:

But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician, and but one apothecary left, all being dead – but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week: God send it.

‘Home by water … the river beginning to be very fell of ice, so I was a little frightened.’      (18 December 1665). 

The Frozen Thames, by A. Hondius, 1667, detail. Before the river was embanked in the nineteenth century, it was liable to freeze in the most severe winters, especially to the near London Bridge (as shown). In 1676-77 and 1684 ice fairs were held on the Thames.

On 22 November, Pepys recorded that the plague had, that week, ‘come very low’, six hundred or so, the news bringing ‘great hopes’ of a further decrease. These were at least partly predicated on there being ‘a very exceeding hard frost’, continuing the next day, conditions which were apparently ‘a perfect cure of the plague’. It’s interesting to note how then, as now, people believed that the onset of colder or warmer weather could provide at least a partial ‘cure’, though there has never been any significant evidence for this. In fact, the persistence of the plague through the winter months throughout the winter of 1665-56 and its spread to other cities, towns and villages the next year is suggestive of nothing but the sense of desperation that Londoners must have felt as the year neared its close. However, by 24 November, when Pepys visited the City again, it remaining or returning citizens had begun to observe or enquire of each other as to who that they knew before the plague was still alive. There were other signs of life returning, and Pepys was ‘mightily glad to see the Change so full’. He had bought two barrels of oysters from his old shop in ‘Gracious Street’, so pleased was he to find ‘my fine woman of the shop’ still alive, but was then concerned to discover that they had come from Colchester ‘where the plague hath been so much’. On Christmas Day he attended church in the morning and then saw a wedding which he had not seen in many a day, presumably since the one he had helped to arrange in July. This time, the young people were ‘so merry with one another’.

Premature Predictions:

Early in the New Year of 1666, on 5 January, Pepys went by coach with Lord Brouncker to ‘my Lord’s house in Covent Garden’. There was great interest in the arrival of a nobleman’s coach in town once again, and everywhere porters were bowing to them, and beggars were begging. Pepys went on to describe a much more lively scene than on his previous visits to the City:

… a delightful thing it is to see the town full of people again, as now it is, and shops begin to open, though in many places, seven or eight together, and more, all shut; but yet the town is full compared  with what it used to be – I mean the City end, for Covent Guarden and Westminster are yet very empty of people, no Court nor gentry being there.

However, Pepys’ optimism proved premature for, in the week after Christmas, as Clarendon later wrote, although …

… the rage and fury of the pestilence began in some degree to be mitigated, but so little, that nobody who had left the town had yet the courage to return thither: nor had they reason; for though it was a considerable abatement from the height it had been at, yet there died still between three and four thousand in the week, and of those, some men of better condition than had fallen before.  

Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor, by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1662.

The Return of the King:

General Abermale, who was responsible for the conduct the Dutch War from London in the King’s absence, wrote to him in Oxford…

… that there still arose new difficulties in providing for the setting out of the fleet, and some of such a nature, that he could not easily remove them without communication with his majesty, and receiving his more positive directions; and how to bring that to pass he knew not, for as he could by no means advise his majesty to leave Oxford, so he found many objections against his own being absent from London.

Charles II, as a patron of the Royal Society (of Sciences).

Windsor was thought to be a place where the King could reside safely since there had not yet been any infection there, but as the Court began to move there, taking up all the available accommodation, he became apprehensive about the outbreak of plague in one house in the town. In the end, towards the end of February, the king decided that the Queen, the Duchess of Richmond and all their families should remain in Oxford, while he and his brother, together with his cousin Prince Rupert, would meet the general at Hampton Court, staying there for two or three days a week, with the general returning to London down the Thames each night, …

… for no man did believe it counsellable that his majesty should reside longer there than the despatch of the most important business required.

Meanwhile, on 7 January, the Pepyses had returned to their home in Seething Lane, and on the 9th the Navy Board resumed its sittings there. But when he visited the ‘Change’ again on the 10th, they heard there, to their grief, how the plague had increased in the previous week from seventy to eighty-nine. Nevertheless, even some of the doctors and scientists began to return to the City as January went on and the number of deaths began to fall again. On 22 January, Pepys recorded details of his visit to the Crowne Tavern behind the Exchange, where the Gresham College met for the first time since the Plague:

Dr Goddard did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time; saying that their particular patients were most gone out of town, and they left at liberty – and a great deal more, &c. But what, among other fine discourse, pleased me most, was Sir G. Ent about respiration; that is not to this day known or concluded on among physicians, nor to be done either, how that action is managed by nature or for what use it is.

The following day, the ‘good news, beyond all expectation’ was that the number of cases had dropped to seventy-nine. On the first Sunday of February, the Pepyses went to church together for the first time since the outbreak of the Plague. They only returned on this occasion …

… because of Mr Mills coming home to preach his first sermon, expecting a great excuse for his leaving the parish before anybody went, and now staying until all are come home; but he made a very poor excuse and a bad sermon. It was a frost, and had snowed last night, which covered the graves in the churchyard, so I was the less afeared for going through.

Three days later, 7 February, was a fast day for the Plague victims and Pepys spent it returning his chamber to the way it had been before the outbreak, taking all his books out of storage. This was the last direct, contemporary reference to the plague in London in Pepys’s ‘Journal’, so we might assume that by this date there were no more deaths in the capital. However, for at least a week at the end of February, Charles continued to keep his families in Oxford and to use Hampton Court for War meetings. The next week, Clarendon tells us, the number of those who had died from the plague in the City decreased by a thousand;

… and there was a strange universal joy there for the king’s being so near. The weather was as it could be wished, deep snow and terrible frost, which very probably stopped the spreading of the infection, though it might put an end to those who were already infected, as it did, for in a week or two the number of the dead was very little diminished. The general came and went as was intended: but the business every day increased; and his majesty’s remove to a further distance was thought inconvenient, since there appeared no danger in remaining where he was.

In the third week, he decided to return to Whitehall and was preparing to do so when the news came through that there had been a further fifteen hundred deaths in that one week. As the King’s train rode into the City, the Courtiers found the streets otherwise empty of coaches;

… so much all men were terrified from returning to a place of so much mortality. Yet it can hardfly be imagined what nuimbers flocked hither and thither from all parts on the fame of the king’s being at Whitehall, all men being ashamed of their fears for their own safety, when the king ventured his person. The judges at Windsor adjourned the last return of the term to Westminster Hall, and the town every day filled marvellously; and which was more wonderful, the plague every day decreased. Upon which the king the king changed his purpose, and, instead of returning to Oxford, sent for the queen and all the family to come to Whitehall: so that before the end of March the streets were as full, the exchange as much crowded and the people in all places as numerous as they had ever been seen, few persons missing any of their acquaintance, though by the weekly bills there appeared to have died above one hundred and three score thousand persons: and many, who could compute very well, concluded that there were in truth double that number who died: and that in one week, when the bill mentioned only six thousand, there had in truth fourteen thousand died. 

Above: A Plague Broadsheet, 1665.

Counting the Cost:

The frequent deaths of parish clerks and sections of parishes hindered the exact week-by-week counting of the dead, but what made it most difficult was the vast number of those who were buried in fields without any account being kept. Clarendon also claimed that many of ‘the anabaptists and sectaries who abounded in the city’, very few left their homes, ‘multitudes’ of them dying without the knowledge of the churchwardens or other parochial officers. They held their own burials in small gardens or neighbouring fields. The greatest number of deaths were of women and children, and also of ‘the lowest and poorest sort of people’, whereas few (rich) men missed their male acquaintances when they returned, ‘not many of wealth or quality or of much conversation being dead’. Due to the plague at Westminster, Parliament met at Oxford in 1666. It was prorogued to a day in April: but, as Clarendon recorded,

… the king had reason to believe that they would not so soon be in good humour enough to give more money, which was the principal end of calling them together. And the dregs of the plague still remaining and venting its malignity in many burials every week, his majesty thought fit to dispense with their attendance at that time by a proclamation: and he caused it at that day to be prorogued to the twentieth of September following. In the meantime, the court abounded in all its excesses. 

Financially, the plague and the war had so ‘routed’ the revenues and receipts of the Exchequer, that those who collected these had not received enough to discharge the constant burden of their offices. Consequently, very little income was making its way into the national treasury, and neither was any interest being made on the ‘principal sums’. Moreover, as the great financial offices were located in the City of London, their destruction in the Great Fire in September meant that the very stocks which were consumed which would lead to a revival of trade.

The Spread of the Plague in the Country & the Clergy:

Richard Baxter and his family all escaped the plague, probably because they were not living in London, having already been driven away by the Act of Uniformity which restored the old Anglican Church lock, stock and barrel, leading to the ejection of one in five of the clergy by 1662. Perhaps because of their popularity through their courage and devotion to duty during the plague, another law, the Five Mile Act, prevented them from coming within five miles of any important town or of any place at all where they had once been ministers. Some of these ministers went to small, out-of-the-way villages, while some went into hiding near their old homes and visited their wives and children secretly, on dark nights. They had to live in Acton, then six miles from the City; the Plague followed them there for seven months, but none of them caught it, although, at the end of their time there, the churchyard was like a ploughed field with graves. 

But it was not only the Puritans and their non-conforming clergy who were brave and charitable during the Plague, as the story of a young clergyman called William Mompesson (pictured above), who lived near Chatsworth in Derbyshire’s Peak District, reveals. After a period of service as chaplain to Sir George Saville, later Lord Halifax, he came as Rector to Eyam in 1664, with his wife Catherine accompanying him.

In 1665, the plague had reached his village through some cloth which had been sent north from London to the village tailor. The consignment of cloth bound brought with it the infectious fleas which spread the disease. After an initial flurry of deaths in the autumn of that year, it died down during the winter only to come back even more virulently in the spring of 1666. As its rector, Mompesson was determined not to let the plague spread, so that in conjunction with another clergyman, the ejected Puritan, Thomas Stanley, he took the courageous decision to isolate the village. He sent a letter to the (3rd) Earl of Devonshire at Chatsworth Hall to ask him to arrange for food and medicine to be placed at regular times on a great stone outside the village. This was done for seven weeks, during which time the Rector asked that no-one should leave the village and no-one did, though all were frightened that they might catch the plague by staying. The Rector made them see that it was their duty to other people not to risk spreading it around the country. All through the seven weeks of self-imposed quarantine until the plague died out, the Rector and his wife went about among the plague-stricken people, nursing them day and night. Mompesson did many other things to help the village during the plague including preventing the spread of it by filling a well full of vinegar for trading. This helped stop the spread of the plague by sterilising any coins that came in or out of Eyam.

In spite of these measures and the continuous care of the Mompessons, 259 of the parishioners died, including the Rector’s wife, but the infection did not spread to any other village in Derbyshire and the neighbouring counties. The plague claimed its last Eyam victim in December 1666. Mompesson became so associated with the plague that he was not universally welcomed at his next parish, Eakring, Nottinghamshire, where his memorial can be found. In 1670 he remarried, his second wife being a widow, Elizabeth Newby. She was a relative of his patron, Sir George Saville, and through his patronage, Mompesson eventually became Prebendary of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, although he declined the opportunity to be Dean of Lincoln Cathedral. He died in 1709.

This historic episode, commemorated each year in the village, has been the subject of many books and plays, notably The Roses of Eyam by Don Taylor (1970). Recently academics have begun to examine the factual basis of the story’s key ingredients: in particular, the extent to which wealthier residents were able to circumvent the ban. For example, despite insisting all villagers should remain in Eyam, Mompesson had his own children sent away to Sheffield in June 1666, just before the quarantine was agreed. At this time he also determined to send his wife Catherine with them but she refused to leave him, later succumbing to the plague.

The Comet, the Coronation & the Condition of the English People after the Fire:

The appearance of a comet in the summer of 1664 had been greeted with the same dismay that this phenomenon had always inspired as a presage of disaster. As Simon Schama has commented eloquently:

Following astrology, as the almanacs reminded their preternaturally anxious readers, was numerology; the tail of the comet heralded the sign of the Beast, his number being, as everyone knew: 666. Sure enough, in the first week of September 1666, up from the bituminous regions of hell, came the diabolical fire. Prophets had long been warning that the new Sodom, steeped in lechery and luxury, would be consumed by the fiery wrath of an indignant Jehovah.   

The longer-term significance of the events of the Great Plague and the Fire of London, forever linked in the psychology of the English people as coupled catastrophes, was that they revealed the 1660s as years of complacency and drift in which the early euphoria of the Restoration gave way to mild political depression. The ravages of the plague, the humiliating Dutch incursions up the Medway during the Second Dutch War (1665-7) and the Great Fire sapped the confidence of 1660-61 that God would bless a land that had come to its senses after the Civil Wars of the previous decades.

Sources:

Robert Latham (ed.) (1978), The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary. London: Bell & Hyman (Book Club Associates).

G. Huehns (ed.) (1953), Clarendon: Selections from ‘The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars’ & ‘The Life by Himself’. London: Oxford University Press.

Simon Schama (2001), A History of Britain: The British Wars, 1603-1776. London: BBC Worldwide.

Katharine Moore (1961), Richard Baxter: Toleration and Tyranny (1615-1691). London: Longmans.

Rival Visionaries – James Nayler and George Fox:

In 1659, the Quaker James Nayler, cruelly punished by parliament for leading a procession into Bristol which sought to emulate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem two years earlier, was released from prison and went to see George Fox, seen by many at the time and since as the ‘founding father’ of Quakerism. Fox was lying ill at Reading, in the grip of a mysterious illness caused by mental suffering. Though he took little or no interest in politics, he had shared the hopes of every Nonconformist in the coming of a Puritan government. The deposition of the Church of England and the abolition of the monarchy seemed to promise an era of religious liberty and equality of worship. But Cromwell’s Government had proved itself little by little to be as intolerant as its predecessor, and the internecine strife which had raged among the sects had only intensified since the common enemies, the Episcopalians and Presbyterians had been removed from the field.

At the time of Cromwell’s death towards the end of 1658, 115 Quakers were in prison for expressing their beliefs in public, and nine had died in gaol. Added to this disappointment was a sense of impending disaster in store for the government and people of England and Wales which Fox and his followers had never ceased to warn them over the preceding months by letters, signs and messengers. But such was Fox’s condition that when Nayler, soon after his release from Bridewell, rode out to Reading to see him, he found the door to his room closed against him. It was clear that Fox had never forgiven Nayler both for his personal disloyalty in denouncing him and for the perceived injury which his followers had worked in Quaker ranks. Nayler now disclaimed the ‘Divine Leading’ which he had earlier justified himself by: I reasoned against God’s tender reproof … and he gave me up, and his Light he withdrew and his Judgement took away. This undermined any opposition which might be using his name within the Quaker movement, reaffirming the unity of the Spirit by which Quakers claimed to be guided. It also helped to answer the propaganda of their enemies, such as:

J.N. and G.F. at daggers drawn discover their cheat of both being led by an infallible Spirit.

Fox (pictured in the 1650s above) was suffering from mental illness at the time of Nayler’s release, so Nayler was told that he could not see him, as he described in the letter he sent to Magaret Fell in the Summer of 1659. Yet whatever excuses might be made for his own disordered spirit, it is hard to fathom the unrelenting harshness Fox showed to Nayler in this crisis in his fortunes. Three years had passed since their last meeting, during which Nayler had suffered insult out of all proportion with his offences; whilst in his confession to Parliament and his penitent letters to Friends he had done all in his power to atone for his fault. Now that he was free to take up his broken life and move once more among his fellows, it was necessary above all things to be assured of Fox’s forgiveness. The continued refusal of Fox’s hand of fellowship placed him in the anomalous position of a ‘disowned’ Friend and discounted the welcome home given him by his brother ministers. Yet this rebuff only served to bring him back out most clearly the best in his nature in what he wrote to Margaret Fell:

But my spirit was quieted, in that simplicity in which I went, in that to return; and he gave me his peace therein as though I had had my desire … Still, his presence is with me in what he moves me to, which is my comfort and refreshment – and so his will is my peace.

As Nayler had supposed, Margaret Fell had already heard of his abortive visit, from her daughter. In the same letter, she learnt that he had attended a meeting of Friends in London on the following day, a Sunday, but did not speak. This silence, however, was soon broken, even in the face of Fox’s discouragement. By the end of October, a month after his release from Bridewell, Nayler was addressing great meetings in London, and strangers who flocked to hear him went away convinced of the truth of his message. While still under the cloud of Fox’s censure, he seems to have recovered his position of the Friends’ spokesman, and through the autumn and winter, his pen was busy on public matters. Of the letters which he then wrote, perhaps the most important was an answer to two manifestos sent from New England in defence of the governers’ defence of the persecution of the Quakers. The following year, 1660, William Dewsbury succeeded in bringing the two men together, only a few months before Nayler’s death. Beside’s Dewsbury’s celebration of their reconciliation, it is notable how the vigour and power of Fox’s Journal revive after the date of his meeting with his old ‘comrade’, though it is disappointing that he gave no account of the reconciliation. It appears to have taken place at a public meeting at which Dewsbury recalled:

Mighty was the Lord’s Majesty amongst his people in the day he healed up the breach which had been for so long to the sadness of many. The Lord clothed my dear brethren G.F., E.B., F.H., with a precious wisdom. A healing spirit did abound within them with the rest of the Lord’s people there that day … and dear J.N., the Lord was with him.

‘J.N.’ wrote his own ‘song of joy’, a poetic piece which swept before it all the archaisms of his theology and the mannerisms of his usually more deliberate style:

It is in my heart to praise thee O God; let me never forget thee, what thou has been to me in the night … Then didst thou lift me out of the Pit, and set me forth in the Sight of mine enemies, thou proclaimd’st Liberty to the Captive, and called’st mine Acquaintance near me, they to whom I had been a Wonder, looked upon me, and in thy love I obtained favour in those who had forsook me, then did gladness swallow up sorrow and I forsook all my troubles; and I said, How good is it that Man be proved in the Night, that he may know his Folly, that every Mouth may become silent in thy Hand, until thou makest Man known to himself …

It was, no doubt, his general anxiety for the fragile community of Friends which led to Fox’s mental breakdown and precipitated his negative response to Nayler’s request to meet him, as well as his later rejection of John Perrot. Quaker scholars have concluded that in his anxiety for his ‘flock’, Fox did not trust enough in the power of the Spirit to preserve it, so that he unwittingly revealed a rejecting, authoritarian side to his personality. But some of the early editors of the letters and works of both Fox and Nayler sometimes felt obliged to suppress their accounts of miracles, denunciations, controversies, dreams and nightmares, thus contributing, from well-meaning motives to the provision of incomplete accounts of their experiences. This was an injustice to both men, who in their differing ways endured terrifying struggles with the evil in themselves and in the world; it also deprives historians and others of reaching a holistic view of their conflict and its resolution. From a practical point of view, Fox deserved the support which the great majority of Friends had offered him. But in condemning his friend for ‘running out into imaginations’. Fox may have allowed the authoritarian and practical side of his own natural instincts to suppress the more libertarian and visionary aspects which were so strong in Nayler.

But the whole episode deserves to be treated as representing an important transition from a serious breach in the movement to a way of resolving internal conflict. It also reveals that the movement was not as vulnerable as its enemies had hoped. Soon afterwards Nayler, who had already written a penitent letter to the Magistrates who had tried him, travelled to Bristol, where he made a public confession on the spot where his offence had first been committed. Those who had retained the clearest memory of his errors were melted into forgiveness. It is small wonder that Nayler’s popularity returned, but now no success could woo him from his attitude of willing submission to Fox’s leadership. He preached once more at the Meeting in the Strand in London. Then he set out on foot from London to see his wife and children in Wakefield in the summer of 1660. There was a prevalent ‘low fever’ in the city and the country, and it found easy prey in Nayler whose body had already been tried beyond endurance, and it succumbed very swiftly. He reached Huntingdonshire, where he was apparently attacked by robbers and left bound in a field, from where he was taken to a Friend’s house at Holm, near King’s Rippon, where he soon died. He was buried on 21 October, in the village of King’s Repton in the little graveyard of Thomas Parnell, his last friend and physician. His last words, which have come down to us preserved by friends who stood around his deathbed, seem to sum up the central message of the Inner Light at the end of the first ‘stage’ of Quakerism:

There is a Spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end: Its Hope is to outlive all Wrath and Contention, and to weary out all Exaltation and Cruelty or whatever is of a Nature contrary to itself. It sees to the End of all Temptations: As it bears no Evil in itself so it conceives none in Thoughts to any other: If it be betrayed it bears it; for its Ground and Spring is the Mercies and Forgiveness of God. Its Crown is Meekness, its Life is Everlasting Life unfeigned, and takes its Kingdom with Intreaty and not with Contention, and keeps it by Lowliness of Mind. … nor doth it murmur at Grief and Oppression. It never rejoyceth, except through Sufferings … I found it alone being forsaken; I have Fellowship therein, with them … who through Death obtained this Resurrection and Eternal Holy Life.

Fox and The Second Generation of Quaker ‘Leaders’:

It is from Thomas Ellwood, Milton’s Quaker friend and amanuensis, that we get the clearest picture of Nayler in his closing days. In December 1659 he was a lad of twenty, living at home with his father at Crowell in Oxfordshire, attracted to Quakerism through his admiration of Guli Springett, who later married William Penn. Her stepfather and mother, the Penningtons, were old friends of the Ellwood family, and it was in their company that he attended the Quaker meeting at Chalfont together with his family, held at a farmhouse called The Grove, close to the quiet haven of Jordans, which became a centre for Quaker pilgrims. James Nayler attended the meeting with his old friend and co-worker, Edward Burrough, who was the only Friend to speak at the meeting. We have no record of what he said, but we do have the following statement which he made in his Preface to The Cause of Stumbling Removed by Richard Hubberthorne in 1657 on the ‘contention surrounding James Nayler’:

And as concerning this thing, which was looked upon as a breech among us by many, yet it’s over, and Truth stands a-top of it, and the beauty of Truth appears through it all, and Truth is more lovely when it is proved and purged.

We might assume that Burrough gave a similar message at the meeting he attended the following year at ‘Jordans’. Ellwood’s autobiography also contains the following sketch of their witness:

As for Edward Burrough, he was a brisk young man of a ready tongue (and might have been, for aught I then knew, a Scholar), which made me the less to admire his Way of Reasoning. But what drop’d from James Nayler had the greater Force upon me, because he look’d but like a plain, simple Country-man, having the appearance of a Husbandman or Shepherd.

But though he died in early middle-life, those contemporary friends who were best able to secure his legacy survived him only by a few years. Hubberthorne, Nayler’s faithful friend, was one of the first to die, aged just thirty-four. Edward Burrough died in 1662, after eight months’ imprisonment in the Old Bailey, leaving behind him widespread consternation among Friends, together with a sense of irreparable bereavement. Francis Howgill died six years later in Appleby gaol, where he had shared Nayler’s first imprisonment. Farnsworth, who had been ‘convinced’ at the same time as Nayler, and had followed his fortunes with paternal interest ever since died in a London gaol in 1666. Only Dewsbury, who had brought about the reconciliation of Fox and Nayler, lived to any great age, dying in London in 1688, having spent nearly half a lifetime in gaol. Other close associates of Nayler went into self-imposed ‘exile’, like Robert Rich, the London merchant, who went to Barbados in 1659. He frequented Quaker meetings there and supported those in prison back in Britain. But his relations with the Society were anything but cordial, and he never forgave Fox for what he regarded as his persecution of an innocent man. The London Friends responded to his repeated attacks by disowning Rich, refusing even to accept his donation for the relief of the poor after the Great Fire. He returned to London in 1679 and became once more a familiar figure in Friends’ meetings before his death later that year.

Death of Cromwell & Commonwealth:

But this was twenty years after Nayler’s death, by which time his name had gone down in a sea of infamy with most Friends. His offence and punishment had been of so spectacular a nature that they threatened to survive in the collective memory of the Society long after the recollection had vanished of his repentance and recovery. Moreover, the whole episode of his breach with Fox had brought an atmosphere into it which was not easy to disperse. A church founded on democratic principles, which acknowledged no superiors in its ministry was hard to reconcile with Fox’s stiff and autocratic attitude. Many of Nayler’s followers never returned to their allegiance but remained a source of disorder in numerous districts of England and Wales.

The Death-Mask of Oliver Cromwell, 1658.

In the year between Oliver Cromwell’s death and the restoration of Charles II, Quakers refused the positions they were offered by the Committee of Safety to help in ensuring public order, partly for political reasons, but also because violence might be involved. Friends’ attitude to the secular authority was that they should respect the law in so far as it did not conflict with their direct apprehension of the law of Christ, and if they had to break it, they willingly accepted the consequences, refusing to pay a fine or accept a pardon, in witness to the fact that they were doing what they knew to be right. They fearlessly sought out those in authority and spoke to them frankly, as equals. George Fox had met Cromwell several times before the Protector’s death and harangued him about the responsibilities of government as well as the sufferings of persecuted Friends. It is a tribute to Fox’s personality that both Cromwell and Charles II showed respect for him as well as curiosity. And when the opportunity arose in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to set up governments based on Quaker principles, the challenge was taken up and boldly carried through by William Penn and others.

The Embleme of England’s Distractions, As also of her attained, and further expected Freedom & Happiness, 1658.

The Rump of the Long Parliament was in charge after Richard Cromwell had been deposed by the Army in April 1659 and was responsible for Nayler’s release. Although it was sent packing by the army officers under Major-General Lambert (right) in October, as Lambert’s support melted away, it reassembled on Boxing Day. A Paper signed by 164 Friends offering to replace their fellows in gaol was sent to Parliament petitioning about the renewed persecution of their brethren that …

… lie in prisons and houses of correction and dungeons, and many in fetters and irons, and have been cruelly beat by the cruel gaolers, and many have been persecuted to death, and have died in prison, and many lie sick and weak in prison and on straw, so we, in love to our brethren, do offer up our bodies and selves to you, for to put us as lambs into the same dungeons … and nasty holes and prisons … that they may not die in prison … For we are willing to lay down our lives for our brethren, and to take their sufferings upon us that you would inflict upon them. … Christ saith it is he that suffereth and was not visited …

In his General Epistle to them who are of the Royal Priesthood (1659), Fox also attacked those who wished to restore the Mass for the Papists, Common Prayer for the Episcopal men and the Directory for Presbyterians. He even attacked the Church-made and framed faith for the Independents and Mixed Baptists. He contrasted all these ‘Church-made faiths’ with the Quaker faith, the unity and fellowship of which would stand when all the others were ended. He also drew attention to the hypocrisy of churches which had once called for toleration of their practices, but were now persecuting others, including the Quakers, foreshadowing what was to come:

‘Forgive us, as we forgive them’, cry Papists, cry Episopals. These cry the Lord’s Prayer, and then like a company of senseless men fall a-fighting with one another about their trespasses and debts, and never mind what they prayed, as though they never looked for forgiveness, and to receive the things they prayed for, that fall a-persecuting and imprisoning  one another, and taking their brethren and fellow-servants by the throat about religion, (who) in their prayers said ‘Father, forgive us, as we forgive them’, and will not forgive.

Return of the King – Restoring ‘Order’?:

As the year neared it end, Admiral Lawson, in command of the fleet anchored in the Thames, declared for Parliament, and General Monck (depicted in the contemporary porcelain figure, right) at the head of an army in Scotland, who had made it known for some months that he was in support of the civil authority, was about to march on London. He crossed the border on New Year’s Day, to be greeted with proclamations from all parts of the country in favour of a ‘free parliament’. Lambert offered no resistance and in early February, and backed by the civic authorities in London, Monck insisted that the Rump should admit the moderate members excluded in 1648 so that it could arrange for free elections. Everyone knew that this would mean the return of the King.

In his diary, Samuel Pepys (pictured below) describes how, on 6 February 1660, Monck entered the capital with his army to be warmly welcomed by Parliament, though the Common Council and the city apprentices hesitated to rally to his banner.

George Fox came up from Reading in time to see the destruction of the city gates and portcullises by the troops, recommended by Parliament to Monck as the quickest means of bringing the City Council to heel. Fox saw this act of vandalism as a prophecy of the ruin which he had foretold would come upon the city. The following day, the Quakers were already suffering a foretaste of their treatment under a Royalist Government, and Pepys witnessed their rough handling by Monck’s soldiers at Whitehall.

Above: Whitehall from St. James’ Park, by Peter Tillemans (detail). The Coldstream Guards drill in front of the Horse Guards building, while Charles II strolls through the park with members of his court.

The accession of Charles II, in defiance of Fox’s prophecies, gave the signal for an orgy of persecution which lasted with a few short intermissions for the rest of his reign. The Quakers showed themselves the most uncompromising of all the sects, and upon them, the storm broke with peculiar violence. The authorities simply did not know what to do with them, they showed so little fear and so much firmness. They crammed them into prisons but they still held their meetings there. They told their gaolers that …

… they might as well think to stop the sun from shining, or the tide from flowing whilst but two of them were left together. 

Heterodoxy and schism became commonplace among Quakers during the rest of Fox’s lifetime and into the next century. The next serious breach was made by John Perrot, a returned missionary, whose sufferings at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome had turned a brain already weakened by hysterical mysticism. Perrot had attempted to preach in Rome and had suffered three years’ imprisonment in a madhouse by order of the Inquisition. On his return to Britain, he raised the question of whether ‘customary, traditional ways of worship’ were already creeping in among Friends. The practices complained of were slight: most prominent in the controversy was that of taking off one’s hat while praying in a Quaker meeting. At the time of Nayler’s release from Bridewell, Perrot was convulsing the Society with his campaign against ‘hat-honour’, which he argued should be refused to the Deity, no less than to earthly dignitaries. It was a mad effort for the glorification of the Divine in man, surely the most perverse offshoot of the doctrine of the Inner Light.

To Fox, this was a matter of turning Friends from unity in the power of God into vain and useless disputes. Yet backed by the sympathy and respect aroused by Perrot’s sufferings for the Truth, the ‘heresy’ made great headway, the more that Fox, imprisoned in Scarborough Castle, was unable to oppose it in person with the weight of his influence and common sense. He wrote a letter of disownment and condemnation which was read to Perrot on board the ship which was about to set sail for Barbados. In this way, Fox exercised the authority which many friends expected of him; but feelings were running strongly enough on both sides for this to risk the danger of splitting the movement in two. It was not Fox, but Dewsbury who sent a letter to Perrot which he also published, of the need for reconciliation, and of God’s power to preserve his own truth:

And as to my particular self, it is not my nature to be found striving with thee or any upon the earth; but, having declared the Truth to thee, I will return to my rest in the Lord, and let every birth live the length of its day; and let the time manifest what is born of God, for that spirit that stands up in self-striving will weary and die, and end in the earth.

During this potential schism, from 1664 to 1666, Fox was enduring harrowing imprisonment at Lancaster and Scarborough. His body was numbed with cold and his fingers swelled so that one was grown as big as two. During this time, the question of authority was still an urgent one; and in his absence, a specially convened meeting issued a letter committing a power of decision and judgement to such good ancient Friends as have been and are sound in the Faith, and agreeable to the witness of God in his people. The reaction to the dangers of individual guidance was creating the beginnings of a hierarchy, of which Fox could have expected to be at the pinnacle.

When he was released, he had a new vision, of a structure for Friends without human leadership, where balance could be achieved between the insight of the individual and the corporate wisdom of his own group of Friends. The step which Fox took to enforce discipline by the revival of ‘Monthly Meetings’, which had existed in some places during the Commonwealth but had often disappeared during the more recent persecutions. Ill as he was, he rode around the country establishing a complete system of these meetings.

Any or all of the members of ordinary local meetings which comprised it could attend these county-wide meetings. In its business affairs, as in all other matters, the decider was ‘the Spirit of God’, made known in the hearts of those present. No decision would be made until each and every one of them was convinced of this. Matters of concern were referred to Monthly Meeting from the constituent meetings, and each Monthly Meeting could refer them to the Yearly Meeting which could take action on behalf of the whole Society of Friends throughout Britain. Fox’s further travels were in support of this autonomous system which he felt justified in calling ‘gospel order’. His presence and his ‘epistles’ must have carried great weight, yet we sometimes read of him leaving most of the speaking to his companions in meetings and playing a minimal active part. He wrote that the least member in the Church hath an office and is serviceable, and every member hath need one of another. The extent to which he surrendered his leading position was one of the most remarkable things in his life. Though he was seldom explicit about the struggles with his own conscience, this may be seen as the outcome of a long process of self-examination and readjustment, in the light of the schisms, persecutions and spiritual promptings of the years between 1656 and 1666.

Yet while this was devised to heal one schism, it gave rise to another yet more dangerous and more widespread one, the ‘Wilkinson-Story Separation’. In the eyes of these two influential Quakers, this new departure in Church government was a betrayal of the Inner Light. Fox, they thought, had ‘delegated’ the task of ‘spiritual direction’, which was the prerogative of each member, to the ‘Meeting’. Henceforth, every individual member would have to bow to a corporate ruling rather than follow the leading of their own conscience. This controversy lasted over many years, with both parties being unwilling to give way to reach a compromise. Its consequences were lamentable not just within the Society but also outside since it revealed Quakerism as being a ‘unity rent by disunion’. The validity of its cardinal doctrine was called into question; for while the two opposing sides laid claim to the guidance of the Spirit, it was obvious to all that one side must be decided and therefore deceiving others. Fox’s natural authority, both by temperament and as founder, was liable to take the course already charted in the case of Perrot. This was probably reinforced by the anxieties and loyalties of a great many Quakers, and by the deaths, at about this time, of quite many ‘the first publishers of Truth’, Fox’s original co-workers. Even when the storm had subsided, it left its traces in a new diffidence in trusting to untested inspiration or striking out into fresh paths, and on the part of outsiders in a sceptical atmosphere which made doubly difficult their evangelistic work.

Although Fox did not regard the Bible as the fountain of Truth, he believed that its writings flowed from this fountain, as did the inspired actions and words of Friends, so it was natural that they should draw from it. Charles II asked one of them, How did you come to believe the Scripture were true? The answer was:

I have believed the Scriptures from a child to be a declaration of truth, when I had but a literal knowledge, education and tradition; but now I know the Scriptures to be true by the manifestations and operation of God fulfilling them in me.

It was not only the grown-ups but the children who showed great courage in the face of persecution. At Bristol, Reading and Cambridge, when all the men and women were in prison, the children continued to meet. A letter to George Fox from Reading dated 15 November 1664 says:

Our little children kept the meeting up when we were all in prison, notwithstanding the wicked justice, when he came and found them there, beat them with a staff he had with a spear in it.

In Bristol, too, the children met and were savagely beaten for doing so but they bore it patiently and cheerfully. Boys and girls of ten and twelve years were threatened with prison and beaten unless they promised not to meet together for the worship of God any more but the children in that respect were unmoveable. By contrast, the Ranters were never ‘natural’ martyrs. Like Lollards and Familists before them, they usually recanted when called upon to do so. Since most of them did not believe in immortality, the satisfactions of martyrdom were less obvious: resistance to death would require a deeper and more worked out faith than that possessed by most of them but this was that the sort of faith that the Quakers had come to own. In 1672, Fox wrote, in his ‘Second Epistle’, of their ‘passive resistance’ in the following eloquent terms:

Friends never feared their Acts, nor prisons, nor gaols, nor houses of correction, nor banishments, nor spoilings of goods; nay, nor life itself. And there was never any persecution that came, but we saw it was for good; and we looked upon it to be good, as from God; and there never were any prisons that I was in, or sufferings, but still it was for the bringing multitudes more out of prison. For they that imprisoned the Truth and quenched the Sprit in themselves, would prison it and quench it without them. So that there was a time when there were so many in prison that it became a by-word, “Truth was scarcely to be found but in gaols.”

Friends, unlike Ranters, often suffered at the hands of these same ‘magistrates’, and a number of them died in prison. These experiences brought them close to prisoners and outcasts, and also tested their Christian love and forbearance towards their judges, guards and gaolers. On many occasions, these people were won over from enmity and ridicule to respect and trust. For a belief of ‘that of God in everyone’ asserted that acting towards oppressors in the Spirit of Christ, believers would reach and awaken the same spirit within their ‘enemies’. Despite his doctrinal differences, Baxter admired the stoutness of the Quakers under persecution, one of the most important reasons for their survival into the eighteenth century and beyond:

… they were so resolute and gloried in their constancy and suffering, that they met openly and were dragged away to the common jail, and yet resisted not and the rest came the next day, so that the jail at Newgate was filled with them. Many of them died in prison, and yet they continued to meet.

Promptings of ‘the Spirit’, Prophesying & Persecution:

When James II succeeded his brother, there were 1,383 Friends in prison, of whom about two hundred were women. Though the records are imperfect, it has been estimated that at least four hundred and fifty Quakers had died in gaol since the Restoration, so terrible were the conditions of imprisonment. Bishop Barnet, who wrote a history of his own times, gave a description of the persecution of the Quakers:

When they were seized, none of them would get out of the way. They went all together to prison; they stayed there till they were dismissed, for they were dismissed, for they would not petition to be set at liberty, nor would they pay their fines … and as soon as they were let out, they went to their meeting-houses again; and when they found these were shut up by order, they held their meetings, in the streets, before the doors of those houses. They said they would not be ashamed of their meeting … but would do it the more publicly, because they were forbidden to do it.

Not just during persecutions, but at all times Quakers had to witness to the Spirit of God within them, knowing that their words and actions might be God’s means of awakening this Spirit in a fellow man or woman. If they kept shops, they knew they must shoe equal honesty to all; customers discovered that they could even send a child to buy from it without being cheated through the unfair adjustment of prices, weights and measures. If a craftsman, the Quaker’s work must be sound but simple, not encouraging worldly vanity. If he was a labourer, he must give his employer full and honest service, yet show him the respect due to an equal, not a superior. In some local registers of craftsmen, the term ‘Quaker’ was applied as if it were a ‘trade’.

Like the ‘prophets of old’, the Quakers might be called to apparently irrational actions. They lived in an era when the traditional structures and beliefs in religion and politics (largely undifferentiated at the time) were being challenged by Levellers and Diggers, Familists and Ranters. Some of these groups developed an extreme emotional fervour and moral individualism which acknowledged no formal commandments. Many also anticipated the ending of the world throughout the period. Friends had to discover where they stood concerning these beliefs, all the more because they attracted adherents from these groups. In the 1670s, Fox responded to this influx and the criticism it led to by tightening the church government in the Society of Friends, and this, in turn, led to further splits in the movement. The ‘dissidents’ opposed subordination of the individual light within the ‘sense of the meeting’ and objected to the imposition of a more hierarchical structure in the form of a ‘national church’ with monthly, quarterly and annual meetings, as well as separate women’s meetings. They compared these structures with those of other churches, rejecting on principle the condemnation of individual Quakers by any church meeting. For them, the re-organisation was ‘an infringement upon individual liberty’, denying the continuing presence of Christ within all believers. Penn, on the other hand, argued that these were ‘libertine spirits’ who tread down your hedge under their specious pretence of being left to the light within.

Two significant nonconformist figures among critics of the movement, John Bunyan and Richard Baxter both conflated and confused Quaker beliefs and practices with those of the Ranters, though Bunyan emphasised that only the Ranters had made the doctrines threadbare at the alehouse, and the Quakers have set a new gloss on them by … outward legal holiness. But Bunyan also lumped Ranters and Quakers together in condemnation because both permitted women ministers. The Ranter leader Lawrence Clarkson, looking back from 1660, had no doubt that the early Quakers shared his beliefs about God, the devil and the resurrection, only they had a righteousness of the law which I had not.  The same sense of God which had earlier led George Fox to walk barefoot through Lichfield crying ‘Woe to the bloody city!’ or to climb Pendle Hill to ‘sound the day of the Lord’ was present in more considered actions, such as Penn’s inner ‘calling’ to found the State of Pennsylvania and set up its constitution on principles which included no army or militia, no death penalty, and respect for the rights of Amerindians as equals.

The spread of Quakerism, emptying the ‘steeple-houses’ of Anabaptists and Dissenters, witnessed both to the defeat of the political Levellers and to the continued existence and even the extension of radical ideas. The multitude was still ‘much inclined’ to a ‘popular parity, a levelling anarchy’ in 1650. Even after the Restoration, Samuel Fisher was defending Quakerism against accusations of ‘this rude and levelling humour’. As late as 1678, Thomas Comber was suggesting that the Quakers derived from Gerrard Winstanley, the ‘True Leveller’.

Heterodoxy & Nonconformity:

The enormous problem of disciplining this amorphous and heterodox movement fell principally to George Fox. For all independent protestant churches, the appeal to conscience, to the inner voice, conflicted with the necessity of organisation and discipline, if the church was to survive. If, as it seems, the early Quakers drew their support mainly from Ranter and Seeker groupings, then their serious challenge was to impose such a common order on the most individualist of all nonconformists. It cost Fox much heart-searching and enmity before he convinced the movement, as his pastoral letters reveal. But gradually, the need to draw lines between themselves and the Ranters, and to eliminate Ranters within their own ill-defined ranks, led Quakers to place more emphasis on human sinfulness, even among Friends. In 1659, Lawrence Clarkson, the Ranter ‘leader’ turned Quaker rebuked ‘ranting devils’ who continued to say that God was the author of evil and that ‘for them, sin was no sin’. The absolute individualism of the appeal to Christ within everyone had to be curbed. It seems to have been the approach of the restoration that decided Fox in favour of pacifism and non-participation in politics. He accepted as the reality that the Kingdom of God was not coming soon. So long as that had appeared to be on the agenda, political attitudes had necessarily to remain fluid. After its disappearance, the problem was one of the relationship of the Society of Friends as a sect to the world in which it had to continue to exist.

Speech, as well as action, had to be open to the Sprit’s inspiration. It was of paramount importance to say what one knew to be true. Friends refused to speak on oath because this would have implied that their everyday utterances were untrustworthy. Incidentally, this gave magistrates an almost certain way of committing them to prison, for if a Friend was asked to take ‘the Oath of Allegiance’, which could be administered to anyone to prove he was a true subject of the realm, the answer was ‘No’. As with so many of their insights, there were two paths to this conclusion: by following in action the logic of their principles; and by taking seriously the New Testament (‘Swear not at all’, and ‘Let your Yea be Yea and your Nay, Nay’). In one of his Journal entries for 1664, George Fox recorded one Courtroom exchange:

Judge:  Sirrah, will you take the oath?

G.F.:     I am none of thy sirrahs, I am no sirrah, I am a Christian.      Art thou a judge, and sits here and gives ill names to prisoners? It does not become either thy grey hairs or thy office. Thou ought not to give names to prisoners.

Judge:  I am a Christian too.

G.F.:     Then do Christian works.

Judge:  Sirrah, thou thinkest to frighten me with thy words …

G.F.:     I speak in love to thee. 

Judge:  George Fox, I speak in love to thee too.

G.F.:     Love gives no names.

Judge:  Wilt thou swear? Wilt thou take the oath.  Yeah or nay?

G.F.:     As I said before, whether must I obey God or man, judge thee. Christ commands not to swear; and if thee, or you, or any minister or priest here will prove that Christ or the apostles, after they had forbidden swearing, commanded that (we) should swear, then I will swear. (And several priests being there, never one appeared or offered to speak.)

Judge:  George Fox, will you swear or not?

G.F.:      It’s in obedience to Christ’s command I do not swear, and for his sake we suffer. And you are sensible enough of swearers how they first swear one way and then another. And if I could take any oath at all upon any occasion, I should take that; but it is not denying oaths upon occasions, but all oaths according to Christ’s doctrine.

Judge:  Then you will not swear. Take him away, gaoler.

G.F.:     It is for Christ’s sake I cannot swear, and in obedience to his commands I suffer, and so the Lord forgive you all. 

Anthony Pearson, a young judge whose conversion on the Bench was one of the most dramatic incidents in Nayler’s early ministry, had since the Restoration ceased to be numbered amongst the Quakers. For many years he had done fine service for Friends, pleading for them with the government and making his home a place of refuge and hospitality. His continued interest in politics, however, acted as a widening wedge between him and Friends, and his appearance at Nayler’s hearing before the Committee of Parliament seems to have been his last act of comradeship. In 1660, he made his peace with the Royalist authorities by abjuring the chimerical notions of those giddy times. He became Under Sheriff of Durham and died in ‘ecclesiastical sanctity’ in about 1665.

The leading Friends of the first generation were great pamphleteers, and when they died it was customary to publish a ‘Collected Works’. In James Nayler’s case, this did not appear until nearly fifty years after his death. In its pages, he qualified the Quaker doctrine of human perfectability in the Light by his sharp awareness of the ebb and flow of spiritual strength, the possibility of self-deception and the believers’ need to understand the ‘darker’ side of their personalities. He wrote of how he experienced judgement and mercy as one, how he was able to lay aside all resentments and find peace, love and strength in the utter loss of himself. It was not long before the sober, respectable Quaker image began to replace that of the wandering enthusiast with his revelations from God and revolutionary zeal. Men such as William Penn, son of an admiral and friend of James II, Isaac Penington, son of the Lord Mayor of London, and Robert Barclay, son of a Scottish laird and trained in theology, joined or came to prominence. Barclay wrote, in particular, about the importance of silent ministry in worship, as a form of ‘unspoken love’:

Such is the evident certainly of that divine strength that it is communicated by thus meeting together, and waiting in silence upon God, that sometimes when one hath come in, … this Power being in good measure raised in the whole meeting will suddenly lay hold upon his spirit, and wonderfully help to raise up the good in him and beget him into the sense of the same Power, to the melting and warming of his heart; even as the warmth would take hold upon a man that is cold coming to a stove, or as a flame will lay hold upon some little combustible matter being near unto it. 

Above: ‘The valley thick with corn’  (1825) by Samuel Palmer, from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. John Lampen writes: ‘the picture (while not a likeness of George Fox) expresses many things I feel about Fox: his early experiences in the countryside, his naive and visionary qualities, his insistence that the Garden of Eden can be recovered, and his imagery so often drawn from rural life.

‘True Light’ – Psychology & Theology in Early Quakerism:

For the early Friends, what John Lampen has defined, in psychological terms, as the ‘decisive impulse of the unconscious’ confirmed the ethical guidance of what they understood by Christ, the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This quotation from John’s gospel has sometimes been called the ‘Quaker’s text’ because they asserted more strongly than most other Christians that this illumination was a general and identifiable experience. By ‘general’, Lampen means that they believed it came to Muslims and Amerindians as well as to Christians, humanists and agnostics. By ‘identifiable’, he means that they gave definite criteria to distinguish it from ‘the disguised gratification of our unconscious will’.  Quakers saw  Christ in four aspects, he argues. He is the eternal Word of John’s gospel, preceding all history. Secondly, he gives substance and meaning to all the prophecies, symbols and leadings towards the ‘One God’ of the Jewish religion and other later religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam. Thirdly, he is the historical Jesus who, Fox said, wholly embodied these ‘foreshadowings’. Fourthly, as James Nayler had set out, there was ‘the Christ I witness in me now’. This is the aspect of Christ which other early leaders witnessed to, Christ as the Light, Spirit or Seed within. Fox identified this Sprit in man with Jesus Christ, rather than just ‘God’ because of his initial revelation and Jesus’ own promise to be with his followers even to the end of the world. He had read in the Bible that Christ would be known to his people as king and lawgiver, prophet and teacher, shepherd and healer, priest and saviour – the ‘offices’ or functions of the Light which he too had personally experienced.

But this is not to claim that every believer has a total private illumination. Jesus set up a community and told them to love one another as they had loved him. Fox used the concept of the indwelling Christ not to make unique claims for himself or anyone else, but to emphasise that anyone in the worshipping group might be prompted to say the word which that group (or individual Friends within it) needed to hear. This was what he called the ‘prophetic’ word of Christ, a word which was an objective reality rather than a psychological one. George Fox’s sanity and humanity are as apparent as his mysticism and sense of mission, in his life and writings.  There is no doubt of his religious experience; not a sudden flash, but gradually evolving from his first insight as a troubled young man. He possessed from the beginning a keen sensitivity to the evil in the world, both in private lives and political circumstances; his spiritual participation in what early Friends suffered for their witness brought him at times to a state of collapse. John Lampen believes this awareness of external malice was coupled to a sense of danger from within, from the bad part of his nature which had led him to contemplate suicide and with which he had to come to terms. Fox’s position was logical, once he had accepted the concepts of the ‘world’ and ‘sin’.  By the ‘World’, Fox and his contemporaries meant, as Cecil W Sharman has summarised:

… outward interests and activities of this life alone; people who give their attention only to these, and  who look down on any who give priority to religious or ethical considerations.

The early Quaker attitude towards sin and perfection had its dangers. Was the vision of the individual paramount? Was there to be no external authority? In that case, as its enemies pointed out, there was no fundamental difference between them and the Ranters, who were not an organised group but a loose movement for radical thinkers. As far as the concept of ‘original sin’ was concerned, Fox believed that the responsibility for this was to be laid at man’s door, not God’s. In his 1659 book, The Great Mistery, he wrote:

As for the soul, that is immortal, for God breathed into man the breath of life and made man a living soul, and sin came by disobedience – and that separates between man and God who is pure and hath all souls in his hand; but as for you are in a cave of darkness, the mystery of the soul is from you hidden, but you confess it is by your means that sin is conveyed to your children. Yea, take it to yourselves, it is your work and the Lord hath no hand in it, not in sin nor in making sinners.

In the same volume, Fox quarrelled with Richard Baxter’s saying that Christ’s kingdom is a hospital, and has no subjects but diseased ones. To this, he replied:

We read of no such thing in scripture … But they who follow the Lamb, in their mouth is no guile, nor spot, nor fault before the throne of God …; and they are the faithful, and called, and chosen that overcome the world, and his kingdom stands in power and in righteousness and joy in the Holy Ghost, and is not a ‘hospital’, nor his subjects diseased ones, for he heals them, and coverts them, and washes them. The diseased, or such as come to Christ to be healed, them who come to him he heals them of what infirmity soever it be, and cures them, and clothes them in the right mind.

Since part of the strength of the Inner Light, of conscience, is its ability to change with a changing intellectual climate, it is not surprising that in the England of Charles II the Quaker consensus came down on the side of discipline, organisation and common sense. They had spread their ideas by becoming wandering speakers, and the torrent of pamphlets on religious matters which poured from the presses during the Commonwealth had owed much to them. Some of them were deeply exercised about the paradoxes of good and evil, God and nature; others simply enjoyed the advantages of a philosophy which devalued all ethical codes. Christopher Hill suggested in his 1972 work on the sects in the Civil War that …

The Quaker movement up to 1659, was far closer to the Ranters in spirit than its leaders later liked to recall after they had spent many weary hours differentiating themselves from Ranters and ex-Ranters. 

But, after the Restoration, the Inner Light had to adapt itself to the standards of the commercial world where ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ helped one to prosper. It was as pointless to condemn this as a sell-out as to praise its realism; it was simply the consequence of the organised survival of a group which had turned the world upside down only to see it turned the ‘right’ way up again. By the 1680s, Fox’s inner voice was telling him something quite different from what it had been telling both him and James Nayler thirty years earlier. Nayler had already become a dark shadow lying across the communal memory of the Society.

From ‘Anarchy’ to ‘Progress’ – Penn, Baxter & Bunyan:

In his Preface to Fox’s Journal, looking back from 1692, the year following George Fox’s death, William Penn identified many Quakers in the earlier days of the Ranter wing, who:

… would have every man independent, that as he had the principle in himself, he should only stand and fall to that, and nobody else; and though the measure of Light and Grace might differ, yet the nature of it was the same, and being so, they struck at the spiritual unity which a people guided by the same Principal are naturally led into …

Some weakly mistook good order in the government of church affairs for discipline in worship, and that it was so pressed or recommended by him and other brethren.

The potential tension between this independent principle and spiritual unity convulsed the Quaker movement three times during Fox’s lifetime. In the first of these, the controversy surrounding James Nayler, the doctrine of the Inward Light had been severely tested. It may have been the case that the church could only survive by establishing itself as an institution, albeit quite different from other churches, even nonconformist ones, in its doctrines and practices. But some Friends, even today, feel that their Society never recaptured the qualities which were symbolically ‘cast out’ with James Nayler. Although still persecuted until 1689, the long-term development of the Society, through a period of withdrawal from the world, commercial success, enlightened social witness, the evangelical movement, to the humanism of today, Quakerism may seem to have more to do with the rationalism of John Locke than the mysticism and prophetic fire of the younger George Fox and James Nayler.

In 1673, Penn also wrote that it was a Ranter error to suppose that Christ’s fulfilling of the law discharged believers from all obligation and duty required by the law as well as to suppose that all things a man did were good simply because he had convinced himself they were. The later seventeenth-century Quaker conundrum was how to win agreement on objective standards of good and bad, lawful and sinful. This, Penn argued, necessitated church ‘authority’ of some kind. Otherwise, Friends would have to wish…

… farewell to all Christian church order and discipline (which would then provide) an inlet to Ranterism and so to atheism. 

That stated the clear dilemma of a highly individualistic church which had grown up from being a millenarian sect and was at first organisationally influenced mainly by a desire to remove hindrances to spiritual freedom. In the post-Commonwealth era, it had to face the problem of continuing to exist in, what for Friends was undoubtedly an uncongenial world that was being re-established. That necessitated discipline and organisation and a more regular form of teaching ministry. No longer, in Penn’s words, could men afford…

… to wait for a motion of the spirit for everything.

Penn had won fame as a soldier and had been a great favourite at the Court of Charles II, but he no longer wore a sword as the Quakers,  whom he had joined, thought that all fighting was wrong. Instead of the ‘French garbe’ (right), armour and sword that he had worn when Samuel Pepys met him in 1664, he dressed in the same dark cloth jackets and breeches that were worn by other Quakers, with short-crowned felt hats. Of course, he later went to America to be able to worship and serve God freely, founding the colony of Pennsylvania.

Following the restoration of the monarchy, Charles II was persuaded by his restored bishops to agree to ‘The Act of Uniformity’ which required ministers to promise to use the Prayer Book and to obey the bishops. If they did not do this by St. Bartholemew’s Day in August 1662 they were turned out of their churches and livings. Richard Baxter believed that it was wrong to force people to do anything against their consciences and so he would not agree to the Act. Baxter said:

And now hundreds of good ministers with their wives and children had neither home nor bread.

Many congregations followed their popular ministers out of the churches, travelling about to go on listening to their teaching and preaching in private houses. The government responded by passing The Conventicle Act, forbidding such meetings and sending everyone who attended them to prison. As a result, the prisons were soon full of those who defied the Act, especially the Quakers. The justices were so busy with the Quakers and the prisons so full of them that they had less time and room for other Nonconformists. A further Act was passed against them called the ‘Five Mile Act’ which said that they must not come within five miles of any important town or of any place at all where they had once been ministers. This prevented them from receiving charitable funds from their home parishes, thus cutting off their incomes completely. Left to himself, the ‘merry monarch’ would have probably allowed both Catholics and Nonconformists to worship in freedom. Parliament would not allow this, however, but the magistrates knew that they could allow nonconformist preaching to continue in private houses. In 1672 the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence, doing away with some of the fierce laws against Nonconformists and granting licenses for certain preachers. Richard Baxter was one of the ministers to get a licence and he returned to London, settling in Bloomsbury.

Baxter reveals how many ministers thought t it was better for them to go on teaching and preaching openly even if they were sent to prison than to starve or, worse still, see their children starve. Baxter went on preaching in his own house to his family and friends, first in London and then in Acton. As more and more people from neighbouring parishes were coming to hear him preach, he was careful not to preach during the time of ‘divine worship’ at the parish churches. As his house was close to the church, he used to preach before the service and then take all the people over to the church with him afterwards to hear the vicar. But the vicar betrayed him to the magistrates and he was sent to Clerkenwell jail since Newgate was already too full of Quakers. He was allowed a room of his own and his wife to stay with him, so they kept house as comfortably and contentedly as at home, though in a narrower space. 

While staying with friends at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, Baxter met William Penn, and the two of them held a meeting in which they discussed and debated before an audience. It lasted from ten in the morning until five without even a break for refreshments. William Penn was a man with a large private income, the son of an admiral who had been a close personal friend of James, Duke of York, who had been in charge of the Navy during Charles II’s reign. We have no record of his disputation with Baxter, but it may well have had a significant effect in the shift in Quaker doctrine which has been characterised as ‘the Quakers’ return to sin’. The man who above all made this ‘adjustment’ was Robert Barclay, son of an old Scottish landed family related to the Stuarts, who was also to be seen at James II’s court. In addition to his famous Apology (1678), Barclay had also published an attack on The Anarchy of the Ranters and other Libertines as late as 1676.

Baxter continued to teach thousands of people in London who, after the Great Fire and the Acts against the Nonconformists, were without churches and ministers. In February 1685, Charles II died and his brother James, Duke of York, became King. Although, as a Roman Catholic, he could have continued his brother’s tacit toleration in the interests of making common cause with the Dissenters, James hated them because so many of them had opposed him acceding to the throne. Almost as soon as he did so, he authorised the active persecution of them to resume. Baxter was their most famous preacher and writer and, though worn out by age and illness, James thought that the Nonconformists could best be punished by making an example of him through a public trial. His ‘judge’ was the Lord Chief Justice of England, Judge Jeffreys, a man who would do anything the King required. He was the last in a long line of Welsh recruits to the world of Tudor and Stuart political careerists, a clever but cruel man, who is notorious for having hanged more people than any judge before, including the poor West country farmers who rose up in support of the Monmouth rebellion later the same year.

Baxter was duly brought to trial before him at the Guildhall on 30 May 1685, apparently on a charge of sedition, based on twisted interpretations of his Bible commentaries. According to a letter in the collection of a contemporary minister, Rev. Daniel Williams (1643-1716), written by an eye-witness to an ‘honoured old friend’, Baxter told the ‘mad’ Judge who was ‘ablaze with anger and brandy’:

“One day, all these things will surely be understood and it will be seen what a sad and foolish thing it is that one set of Protestant Christians are made to persecute another set. … I am not concerned to answer such stuff (as I am accused of) but am ready to produce my writings, and my life and conversation is known to many in this nation.”

That was all Baxter was allowed to say in his own defence, since Jeffreys pointed out to him that he had “written books enough to load a cart, everyone full of sedition, I might say treason, as an egg is full of meat.” Baxter was imprisoned at Southwark since he was unwilling to pay the fine of five hundred marks. He remained in prison for eighteen months. The correspondent commented sarcastically:

We have fine judges and juries in England you see! This viper, I am told, proposed a whipping through the city, but I hear some of his brethren abhorred the notion and stamped on it. So amongst them out of their great clemency, they have set the above fine. …

John Bunyan was also one of those ‘mechanic preachers’ who lived out much of his life in prison, spending seven years in Bedford gaol where he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, which became, next to the Bible, the most popular and sometimes the only other book in homes all over England. When Bunyan was brought before a judge in 1670, he was told that if he did not stop preaching he must be hanged. Bunyan replied, “If I were out of prison today, I would preach the Gospel again tomorrow, by the help of God.” He remained in prison for twelve years, during which time he wrote many books, including his famous allegory.

Justice Hotham’s famous remark to Fox in 1652, that Quakers had prevented the nation being overrun by Ranters, looks rather different in the context of 1685 and Fox’s Journal, written in that decade than it did when it was first uttered. Without the Quakers, he had gone on:

… all the justices in the nation could not have stopped it with all their laws, because (said he) they would have said as we said and done as we commanded, and yet have kept their own principle still. But this principle of truth, said he, overthrows their principle, and the root and ground thereof.

Assuming it was correctly reported by Fox himself, perhaps a rather large assumption, this is not a simple statement like ‘Methodism saved England from a French Revolution’. JPs could never have destroyed Ranterism because Ranters would compromise, recant, and yet remain of the same opinion; but the Quakers’ principle led them to bear witness in public, and so to be far less dangerous. If they were to survive, their public witness forced on them the organisation which destroyed the Ranter element in their faith. One of the Ranter characteristics, by contrast, was their readiness to flee from persecution.

George Fox witnessed to the lifelong character of his spiritual struggle in his words as he came out of his last Quaker meeting, a few days before his death in 1691: “I am glad I was here, … now I am fully clear.” The nature of this struggle can be seen during the periods of mental stress which he went through in the years up to 1649, in the summer of 1658 and the winter of 1670-71. His descriptions speak of insecurity and uncertainty, a sense of actual danger, threatening visions and an almost telepathic identification with the sufferings of others. These spells brought physical prostration, sometimes alternating with short bursts of hyperactivity. In each case, the period ended with one or more visions which spoke to him of wholeness and integration, and which left him ready to face new problems and demands with deeper spiritual resources. For instance, his almost fatal illness in the winter of 1670-71 was immediately followed by his strenuous visit to America. The people of Baycliff said of Fox that “He is such a man as never was, he knows people’s thoughts.” He interpreted dreams and was credited with healing powers. It is not surprising that legends grew up around him, such as that he could be in different parts of the country at the same time. But there is no doubt, from both his own Journal and contemporary accounts that he understood the needs of his fellows, their strengths and weaknesses, and that the practical and mystical went hand in hand with him.

Fox did not use his gift of discernment primarily to judge others but to try to arouse in them the ‘witness of God’ which would convert or ‘convince’ them from the heart; it was not his own words, but that which answered them within the hearer which was meaningful. A priest with whom he had been disputing said, “Neighbours, this is the business: George Fox is come to the light of the sun, and now he thinks to put out my starlight.” Fox told him he would not quench the least measure of God in any, much less put out his starlight if it was true starlight – light from the Morning Star. But sometimes Fox felt the need to match his kindliness with sternness. When one man came and told Fox that he had had a vision of him: … I was sitting in a great chair … he was to come and put off his hat and bow down to the ground before me, Fox told him, “Repent, thou beast.” When an individual experienced the teaching, healing and judging power of the Light in him, he could find confirmation of the fact that this was no delusion or personal fantasy by turning to accounts of the historical Jesus and finding them consistent with their own personal experiences. For this presence which believers encountered in the depths of their being, Fox used an abundance of metaphors: Light, Rock, Ensign, Seed, Anchor, Voice, Hammer, Word, Truth, Life, Lamb, Heavenly Man, Captain, Foundation, and many more. All these were used almost interchangeably with ‘Christ Jesus’ and ‘the Spirit of God’. Fox was never in doubt that what Friends would find in those ‘depths’ was Christ, teaching and ministering to them in a way which was consonant with what they could read of him in the Gospels.

Paradise Regained? True Simplicity & Uniform ‘Grey’:

In his interpretation of the historical Jesus, George Fox went back to the traditions of Jesus’ teaching and ministry preserved in the synoptic gospels. His theme was eschatological, that the Kingdom of Heaven had now come. However it presented itself, it must be grasped and held fast; everything else would be added to it. This teaching characterised the early Quaker experience and emphasised the seeking of the Kingdom over the doctrine of the atonement found especially in John’s Gospel and the epistles. Fox suggested that the events of Jesus’ earthly life were in some real sense re-enacted within Friends.

In this way, he supported the claim of Milton (pictured right), that Paradise could be regained, restoring the right relationship between God and man and the whole of creation. We owe the theme of Paradise Regained to another Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, to whom Milton lent the manuscript of Paradise Lost. Apparently, he returned it with the comment, Thou hast said much of paradise lost, but what of paradise found? Fox himself demanded that believers must come out of the state that Adam is in, in the Fall, to know the state that he was in before he fell.

He took seriously the claims of the New Testament that salvation has already come, that our bodies are temples of God, and that if we abide in the Light there is no occasion of stumbling in us. For most of his life, Fox seems to have had a rare ‘full assurance’ of God’s grace, but he was not alone in this among early Quakers.

Neither was the Quaker ’cause’ limited to a small number of enthusiasts. By the time of George Fox’s death in 1691, one Englishman in every hundred was a Quaker, worshipping in a way which had almost no point of contact with the other churches’ tradition. traditions. They were the largest of the dissenting sects. Their movement was equally remarkable for its courage, its toleration, its discipline and its democracy. In ‘steeple-houses, law courts, shops and streets, in and out of prison, in prosperity and under threat of death, among the humble and before the powerful, they witnessed to a direct experience of God which changed the way they lived their lives. Experience of this Divine Light bore out the truth of Scripture, and they expected to find that the insight given to one could not contradict that given to another; nor could it disagree with the teaching of Jesus. As Fox wrote, All they that are in the Light are in unity; for the Light is but one. Any disagreement, whether over a course of action or a matter of belief, could only indicate that one or more parties to the discussion had not yet clearly perceived the truth. The desire to harmonise the individual vision with the corporate wisdom of the meeting was not easy. Painful experience played a part in drawing a line. One early Quaker writer described their experience of the meetings s/he attended:

When I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people, I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart; and as I gave way unto it I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up; and so I became thus knit and united to them, hungering more and more after the increase of this power and life whereby I might feel myself perfectly redeemed; and indeed this is the surest way to become a Christian. …

In the days of the Commonwealth, Friends were not conspicuous for asceticism, though they tried (and most were obliged) to live simply. Within the much more permissive Restoration culture, they were led to a strong witness for moderation and simplicity in dress, eating, drinking, and every use of the gifts of creation. Since every word one spoke should be as sacred as an oath, every meal a sacrament, every day a holy-day, it was natural that they should condemn licentious painting, music and theatre of the 1660s, the elaborate and artificial manners of the gentry, the love of rich dishes, jewels and expensive clothes, the luxuries of madmen who destroy the creation.

This was not, at first, a set of rules, but gradually, after Fox died in 1691, Quakers began to conform to the stereotypical image of uniform grey clothes, ‘plain speech’ and an aversion to art, music and ‘sociable living’, which Fox would have castigated, as Margaret Fell did at the end of her life, as ‘running into forms’. But George Fox was not a ‘modern’ born out of his time, as some have suggested. He was very much a seventeenth-century man, nor did he set himself up to give answers, though he was sure where they could be found. His deeper insights are capable of interpretation, development and rediscovery, perhaps infinitely, for they touch the centre of all men’s religious experience.

To every quotation, modern, Quaker or biblical, his rejoinder would be the personal challenge he first issued to Margaret Fell in 1652 on his first visit to her home at Swarthmore Hall: Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?

 

 

Sources:

Christopher Hill (1972), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Christopher Hill (1973), Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Austin Woolrych (2002), Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robert Latham (ed.) (1978), The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary. London: Bell & Hyman (Book Club Associates).

Mabel R Brailsford (1927), A Quaker From Cromwell’s Army: James Nayler. London: The Swarthmore Press.

Cecil W Sharman (ed.) ( 1980), No More but my Love: Letters of George Fox, 1624-91. London: Quaker Home Service.

John Lampen (ed.) (1981), Wait in the Light: The Spirituality of George Fox. London: Quaker Home Service.

Katharine Moore (1961), Richard Baxter – Toleration and Tyranny, 1615-1691). London: Longmans.

Norman Cohn (1957), The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. St Albans: Granada Publishing.

 

 

With a special Coronavirus edition, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Imperial & Global Forum

Flu victims in an emergency hospital at Fort Riley, in Kansas, in 1918. Photograph: Associated Press

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
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Prophesying the Millennium:

Until 1957, historians had maintained that we could know very little of the real beliefs of the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit’ or ‘Spiritual Libertines’, since the information we did have came from their enemies. They were accused as regarding themselves as divine beings and of holding that they could, therefore, commit murder, robbery and fornication without sin. But, as Norman Cohn pointed out in the appendix to his iconic book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, published that year, the ‘scandalous tales told of them’ were ‘merely conscious or unconscious slanders’. These were accusations which were made against mystical groups of the later middle ages, but they could not be checked in any detail against their own writings. To do that, Cohn looked into the brief but hectic revival of the ‘Free Spirit’ which took place in England during and after the Civil War. 

Like the writings of their predecessors, those of the ‘Ranters’ of the later period were ordered to be burnt. But it was much harder to destroy a whole production of a work than a few manuscripts, and stray copies of Ranter tracts survived. Viewed as historical documents, these tracts have established that the ‘Free Spirit’ really was exactly what it was said to be: a system of self-exaltation amounting to self-deification; a pursuit to of total emancipation which in practice could result in an anarchic eroticism; often also a revolutionary social doctrine which denounced the institution of private property and aimed at its abolition. But the interest of the Ranter literature is not only historical. If the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Abiezer Coppe were sufficiently vigorous and colourful to earn him an honourable place in the gallery of literary eccentrics, Joseph Salmon deserves recognition as a writer of real poetic power.

Thanks to the work which has been done on the radical religious ideas of Cromwell’s England, not least by Christopher Hill, in his 1972 book, The World Turned Upside Down, there is now no lack of information concerning the social milieu in which the Ranters flourished. Indeed, this author was counselled by his tutors not to pursue research for his PhD on this period on the basis that he would probably have to limit himself to the study of an obscure sect. It was only some years later that I returned it to investigate the Independent puritan enthusiasm which ran high among the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army and among civilians, and that neither the Episcopalian establishment nor the Presbyterian puritans were able to channel the flood of lay religiosity. Many felt that the time had come when God had when God was pouring out his Spirit on all flesh. Ecstasies were everyday occurrences, prophecies were uttered in many quarters, and millennial hopes were rife throughout the population. Cromwell himself, especially before he came to power as Lord General and then Lord Protector, was also moved by such hopes. Thousands of artisans in London and elsewhere lived in daily expectation that through the violence of the civil war the Kingdom of the Saints would be established on English soil and that Christ would return to rule over it.

In the late 1640s, the Quakers were often referred to as ‘Roundhead rogues’, and in May 1648 the ‘Digger’ pamphleteer Gerrard Winstanley made it clear that the word ‘Roundhead’ was used especially as a slur on the political radicals in the New Model. Edward Burrough was mocked as a Roundhead even in his pre-Quaker days. But it appears to have been used mainly in reference to political radicalism, and it was only during the intense period of political instability and uncertainty which followed the execution of the King and ended with the establishment of the Protectorate in 1653. In 1649-50, Winstanley was moved by supernatural illumination to found the ‘Digger’ community near Cobham in Surrey. Convinced that the old world was ‘running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away’, Winstanley attempted to restore mankind to its ‘Virgin-state’, a primitivist utopian commune in which private property, class distinction and human authority would have no place. At the same time, groups of religious enthusiasts multiplied rapidly. As one pamphleteer remarked in 1651,

… it is no new work of Satan to sow Heresies, and breed Heretickes, but they never came up so thick as in these latter times: They were wont to peep up one and one, but now they sprout out by huddles and clusters (like locusts out of the bottomlesse pit). They now come thronging upon us in swarmes, as the Caterpillars of Aegypt.

‘High Professors’ & Heretics:

The heresy which this writer had particularly in mind was that of the Ranters. These people, who were also known as ‘high attainers’ and ‘high professors’, became very numerous about 1650. Some were to be found in the Army, where there were cases of officers being cashiered and publicly whipped, and of a soldier being whipped through the City of London ‘for ranting’. There were also groups of Ranters scattered throughout the country. Above all, they abounded in London, where they numbered many thousands. The first Quakers – George Fox (above), James Nayler and their followers – often came into contact with the Ranters. Hostile observers such as Episcopalians or Presbyterians, often deliberately conflated Quakerism with the Ranters; for both alike discarded the outward forms of religion and saw true religion only in the ‘indwelling spirit’ in the individual soul. The Quakers themselves, however, regarded the Ranters as erring souls to be converted. George Fox has a curious passage about his first meeting with Ranters, in prison in Coventry in 1649. He later wrote:

When I came into the jail, where these prisoners were, a great power of darkness struck at me, and I sat still, having my spirit gathered into the love of God. At last these prisoners began to rant, and vapour, and blaspheme, at which my soul was greatly grieved. They said they were God; but that we could not bear such things. … Then seeing they said they were God, I asked them, if they knew whether it would rain tomorrow? They said they could not tell. I told them, God could tell. … After I had reproved them for their blasphemous expressions, I went away; for I perceived they were Ranters.

Amongst the Ranters whom George Fox found in the prison at Coventry was Joseph Salmon who had recently left the Army.  Not long after his encounter with Fox, Salmon put forth a paper or book of recantation; upon which they were set at liberty. From 1650, Salmon was for some years a minister in Kent, preaching frequently in Rochester Cathedral. One of his works was a Ranter tract, Divinity Anatomised, which has been lost, but others, including the Recantation, survive to reveal a very considerable poetic talent. The first time we know of George Fox coming to the notice of authority was earlier in the same year of his Ranter encounter when he was imprisoned at Nottingham. This was, of course, a crucial year in the history of the English Civil Wars, the year in which King Charles was tried by Parliament and executed, and the beginning of the Presbyterian attempt to impose its rigid Calvinist discipline and morality by legislation on the English people, as it had succeeded in Scotland.

There were radical political movements among the ordinary people, such as the Levellers, led by John Lilburne (pictured below), who later joined the Quaker movement, and the True Levellers, or ‘Diggers’, for whom GerrFenny Drayton

ard Winstanley was chief pamphleteer. The scientific revolution of ideas had not yet spread, but the revolution in religious thought which had produced the Continental Protestant Reformation had led to the establishment of a Commonwealth in Britain which was a place and time of extreme and independent views, bitter controversy, and uncertainty about the nature of religious authority. Many groups of people had been expelled from, or abandoned by, the established Anglican churches, or had withdrawn themselves from them; they were generally known as ‘Seekers’ because they waited for a new revelation of God’s truth. The religious persecutions of the previous century, in particular, the Marian burnings were still strong in the memories of such people, and if they need to be reminded of those sufferings, they had Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to remind them, with its graphic illustrations of the martyrdoms.

George Fox stood out as a striking and unexpected figure. He was twenty-five, long-haired (unlike the ‘Roundheads’), peasant-featured and astute. He hailed from the village of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, in the corner of the East Midlands and East Anglia which formed the stronghold of radical religious independents. There he had been working as an apprentice to a dealer in fleeces and hides and worked as a shepherd. He was semi-literate, most of his later letters being dictated to others. Leaving home at the age of nineteen to become an itinerate seeker, he found no teacher who could assure him of the truth until, in 1647, as he wrote in his Journal, he heard a voice saying to him, There is One, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition. At this time, William Dell and many other ‘Familists’ believed that academic education was no help in understanding the Scriptures. From 1646 onwards books by Henry Niclaes and man other Familist and Antinomian writers were being published. There were also tendencies even among orthodox Puritans which pointed in the same direction. William Erbery, the Welsh Baptist was one of those who wrote of the ‘free grace’ which came through the preaching of Preston and Sibbes. John Preston taught that the ‘elect’ knew by their own experience that the Bible was true and that God was:

 … as he is described in the Scripture such have they found him to be to themselves. …

Richard Sibbes declared that If God be a father, then we are brethren, it is a levelling word. Tobias Crisp held that sin is finished  and that:

If you be freemen in Christ, you may esteem all the curses of the law as no more concerning you than the laws of of England concern Spain. … To be called a libertine is the most glorious title under heaven.

Allegorical writing of this sort was harmless enough in time of social peace, though the ecclesiastical authorities were never happy about it. It became dangerous in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1640s Kiddermindstewhen some of the lower classes began to take it literally. The doctrines were also harmless in the period following the Restoration when taught by Thomas Traherne. But in between times, the Revolution seemed to stir up infinite possibilities and inflamed the passions of the poor. If the majority in a congregation should excommunicate their pastor, no synod could do anything about it. From this time onwards we get plentiful evidence of the emergence of a whole number of opinions which later became associated with the Ranters. Thomas Edwards reported many sectaries who said Christ died for all and a bricklayer from Hackney who said that Christ was not God, or at least that he was as much God as Christ was. A Rochester man who associated with Baptists said that Jesus Christ was a bastard; so did Jane Stratton of Southwark. Some sectaries held that God his children as well sinning as praying; others held that they cannot sin, but if they sin, Christ sins in them. Other ‘errors’ recorded by Edwards were that God is in our flesh as much as in Christ’s flesh and that all shall be saved at last. A pamphlet of 1648 argued that if a man were strongly moved to sin, after praying repeatedly, he should do it.

Anthony Pearson reported that many apprentices and young people joined the Ranters in the late 1640s, and Richard Baxter, the Kidderminster pastor claimed that Quakers emptied the churches of Anabaptists and separatists of ‘the young, unsettled’. We think of refusal of ‘hat honour’ and the use of ‘thou’ by Quakers as gestures of social protest, but they also marked a growing refusal of deference from the young to the old, from sons to fathers. Fierce battles were fought in the home, between generations. The preachers of free grace, including William Erbery and William Dell, aimed to liberate men and women simpler and less theologically sophisticated, especially in this time of revolutionary crisis, their teachings were easily pushed over into Antinomianism, a sense of liberation from all bonds and restraints of law and morality. When Thomas Collier told the Army at the end of September 1647 that God as truly manifests Himself in the flesh of all his saints as he did in Christ, he must have known that many of the rank and file listening to him would believe themselves to be saints.

Again and again, in spiritual autobiographies of the time, we read of men who passed through Presbyterianism, Independency and Anabaptism before ending as Seekers, Ranters or Quakers. Controversies over church government or over baptism split congregations, producing conscientious scruples and endless bickerings. Since they believed that the end of the world was probably near anyway, a resigned withdrawal from sectarian controversies was one solution, a rejection of all sects, and of all organised worship. Such men were called Seekers and included William Walwyn, John Saltmarsh, John Milton (right) and possibly Oliver Cromwell himself.

Radical Independents – The ‘Seekers’:

Many of these men had connections with the radicals and were bitterly disappointed with the failure of the Army to bring about a democratic society in and after 1647. Whatever their disillusionment, the generation of the 1640s was carried along by millenarian enthusiasm. But by the 1650s, Richard Baxter felt that:

When people saw diversity of sects in any place … it greatly hindered their conversion. (Many) would be of no religion at all.

William Erbery was described in 1646 as the champion of the Seekers. He had been ejected from his living in Cardiff in 1638 for refusing to implement Laudian liturgy. He was a convinced supporter of Parliament during the civil war, becoming a chaplain in the New Model Army. As such, Erbery led other ranks in criticism of Presbyterian ministers, tithes and persecution. He preached universal redemption and, according to Edwards, denied the divinity of Christ, as well as declaring that any layman may preach. Erbery modestly saw himself …

… bewildered as a wayfaring man, seeing no way of man on earth, nor beaten path to lead him. Let him look upward and within at once, and a highway, the way is found in Christ in us, God in our flesh. … God comes reigning and riding on an ass, that is revealing himself in the basest of men.

The Presbyterian ministers sent to investigate the Army said that Erbery was a ‘Socinian’, preaching damnable doctrine and blasphemous errors. He stirred up ‘the multitude of soldiers’, they claimed, against the Presbyterian ministers. In January 1648, Erbery called upon the Army to destroy the power of the King and rectify popular grievances. He objected to the officers’ version of the Agreement of the People because it established a state church and did not extend toleration to the Jews, though he approved of most of it. King and Parliament, he thought, …

… were the two powers who kept the people of the Lord and the people of the land from their expected and promised freedoms. (The Army) had the call of the kingdom, petitioning by several counties and the common cry of all the oppressed in the land (acting) in the immediate power of God … for all saints, yea for all men also. God in the saints shall appear as the saviour of all men. No oppressor shall pass through them any more. The day of God has begun, though the saints have been and are still in confusion. For a few days we cannot bear with the want of kings and rulers, …

The saints drew back when they should have gone forward since the Army was at its best when it acted. Erbery still wanted to see God in the army of saints, wasting all oppressing powers in the land. In July 1652, Erbery wrote urging Oliver Cromwell to relieve the poor, as well as attacking tithes and lawyers’ fees. He advocated steeper taxation of rich citizens, racking landlords … and mighty moneyed men … to form a treasury for the poor. He wrote that the burden of tithes on them in England at that time was greater than under popery or in popish countries. There were no longer any ‘true ministers’ and God, in the last days, would not appear in ministers at all, but in magistrates, both civil and martial. The apostasy of the churches had prevailed for centuries. When kingdoms had first become Christian, he claimed, they had become churches, and national churches began. But then also Antichrist came to be great and Popery, prelacy, presbytery were ‘the three beasts’. The state Church of the Commonwealth in England was no better than the Episcopal Church. It was the last ‘Beast’ or church-state. In the depth of his disillusion, Erbery declared that:

The mystery of Anti-Christ … is manifested in every saint, in every particular church …  The greatest work that God hath to do with you this day, is to make you see you are dead. God is going out and departing from all the preaching of men, that men may give themselves wholly to public acts of love to one another, and to all mankind; therefore all religious forms shall fall, that the power of righteousness may rise and appear in all.

But once in power, the ‘seeming saints’ would inevitably be corrupted. In civil government, they were far superior to their predecessors,

But as for spiritual graces, how soon have they withered in the wisest? Good men in Parliament, when come to power how weak were they? … The people of God turn wicked men, that wicked men may turn to be the people of God. The lords and nobles of old could do better with it (power), because gentlemen born; but when so much money comes into the hands of poor saints, oh how they hold it and hug it and hunger after it, as dogs do after dry bones!

But Erbery managed to avoid the trap of self-righteousness. He gave up the stipend he got from tithes. He wrote that:

The life of the people of God, and mine also, is so unlike Christ that I have often wished … to go away from myself and from my people. … they are mine and I am theirs.

By 1654 he had decided, unlike the Fifth Monarchists, that the people of God should not meddle at all in matters of state since Christ’s kingdom was not of this world. This attitude of resignation after the failure of the Barebones Parliament in December 1653 made John Webster feel he had to defend Erbery against the charge of ‘falling off’ and ‘compliance’.  But to shake off the yoke before the season came was to rebel against the Lord. Erbery seems, in fact, to have been prepared to accept Cromwell as a king and was, according to Webster, rather a presser forward than an apostate, but he seems to have abandoned hope of a political solution in his lifetime:

It may be other generations may see the glory talked to be in the last time, … our children may possess it, but for our parts we have no hopes to enjoy it, or in this life to be raised out of our graves. … all the scattered saints this day do dwell, and I also with them waiting for deliverance.

Erbery was often accused of being ‘a loose person or a Ranter’, of having a ranting spirit; he was also alleged, like the Ranters, to be devious, covering himself by double meanings. Erbery denied the accusation of Ranterism, but not always wholeheartedly. He spoke of the holiness and righteousness in truth flowing from the power of God in us, which by the world hath been nicknamed with Puritanism, and in some now Ranting, though he refused to justify those profane people called Ranters, who blasphemed, cursed, whored, openly rejoicing in their wickedness. He admitted that he was commonly judged by good men as one of those owning this principle and practising their ways, but denied saying that the Ranters were the best saints: his point had been that the self-styled saints were worse than the Ranters, lusting after the wisdom, power, glory and honour of this present world. At least Ranters were honest about it:

These, it may be, lie with a woman once a month, but those men, having their eyes full of adultery, … do lie with twenty women between Paul’s and Westminster.

John Webster, noting that ‘by some weaker spirits’ Erbery’s doctrine concerning the restitution of all things, the liberty of the creation, … the saints’ oneness in Christ with God was misunderstood or led to practices which Erbery regretted. Even in print, Erbery was often very rude and coarsely jocular about what others might regard as sacred subjects. He thought that holy communion should be a full meal, with lots of drink, and was clearly not averse to a pipe of tobacco after prayers. In these practises, of course, he was far from alone, but the fact that he referred to them in print naturally drew comments from his critics. It is clear that he was very much at home in the world of taverns and tobacco in which many of the sects used to meet. William Erbery died in 1654, and his epitaph was not unfittingly written by one of his friends:

Some are dead that seem alive,

But Erbery’s worth shall still survive. 

‘Bridges’ across turbulent waters:

As early as 1641, ‘divines’ were complaining that religion had become the common discourse and table-talk in every tavern and ale-house. One preacher told the House of Commons in July 1646 that ale-houses generally are … the meeting places of malignants and sectaries.  In London, the Ranters met at a victualling house kept by one of their number in the Minories, and at the David and Harp in Moor Lane, in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, kept by the husband of Mary Middleton, one of Lawrence Clarkson’s mistresses. According to George Fox, the Ranters had:

… some kind of meetings … but they took tobacco and drank ale in their meetings, and were grown light and loose. … (They) sung and whistled and danced.

John Bunyan (right) thought the Ranters talked too much, one contemporary meaning of the verb ‘to rant’. This may be one reason why the Quakers began their meetings in silence. Yet Fox understood their point. When ‘a forward, bold lad’ offered him a pipe, saying ‘Come, all is ours,’ Fox, who was no smoker, took his pipe and put it to my mouth, and gave it to him again to stop him, lest his rude tongue should say I had not unity with the creation. The last phrase of Fox’s tells us that we should never fail to look for symbolism in what appear the extravagant gestures of seventeenth-century radicals. Ranter advocacy of blasphemy, it has been suggested, was a symbolic expression of freedom from moral restraints. Abiezer Coppe was alleged to have sworn, uninterrupted, for a full hour in the pulpit: a pox of God take all your prayers. 

An obsessive desire to swear had possessed Coppe in early life, but he resisted it for twenty-seven years, before making up for his abstinence. He would rather, he declared, hear a mighty angel (in man) swearing a full-mouthed oath than hear an orthodox minister preach. He made a distinction between swearing ignorantly, i’th dark, and… swearing i’th light, gloriously. Even those on the more mystical and quietist wing of the Ranters were also in the habit of using ‘many desperate oaths’. Bunyan reveals the tensions which lay behind Coppe’s 1646 ‘indulgence’ in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Swearing was an act of defiance, both of God but also of ‘middle-class society’, and of the puritan ethics endemic in it.  As Bunyan remarked, ‘Many think to swear is gentleman-like’ and certainly, many courtiers and members of the aristocracy and gentry classes could get away with it: royalists in the civil wars were known as ‘Dammees’. For the lower orders, however, swearing could prove expensive: one ‘debauched seaman, after being fined at the rate of 6d. for an oath, placed 2s. 6d. on the table in order to have his money’s worth. Lower-order use of oaths was a proclamation of their equality with the greatest, just as Puritan opposition to vain swearing was a criticism of aristocratic and plebian irreligion. But it also expressed a revolt against the imposition of middle-class Puritan mores, interfering with the simple pleasures of the poor for ideological reasons. Bibliolatry led to a phobia about swearing; rejection of the Bible as the sole authority in Christian life made it possible again and with it a release of the repressions which gave the Puritan middle class their moral energy.

Abiezer Coppe (1619-72) was the most celebrated of the Ranters. He had grown up in Warwick. In his adolescence, he was obsessed by a conviction of his sinfulness. A prey to neurotic anxiety, he kept a daily register of his sins, fasting and imposing vigils and humiliations on himself. In 1636 he went up to Oxford as a ‘poor scholar’, at first a Servitor at All Saints and then as a Postmaster at Merton. By this time his morals were less strict and he would often ‘entertain a wanton Housewife in his Chamber’ overnight. The outbreak of the Civil War interrupted his career at Oxford and he left the University without taking a degree. He was a Presbyterian for some time, like Lawrence Clarkson, and later became an Anabaptist minister. In this capacity, he was very active in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, ‘dipping’ some seven thousand persons, and officiating as a preacher to a garrison. For these activities, he was imprisoned in Coventry in 1646. Other misfortunes were brought upon Coppe by the growing eccentricities in his religious life. He says that his father and mother forsook him and his wife turned from him in loathing, that his reputation was ruined and his house was set on fire. These events, in turn, prepared the way for his conversion to Ranterism, which took place in 1649. Besides adopting the usual pantheism of the Free Spirit, he seems to have adopted Adamitic ways. According to Wood in Athenae Oxonienses:

‘Twas usual with him to preach stark naked many blasphemies and unheard Villanies in the Daytime, and in the Night to drink and lye with a Wenche, that had been also his hearer, stark naked.

It was no doubt for such behaviour that he was imprisoned for fourteen weeks at Warwick. Clarkson recorded that he later belonged to the group of Ranters who called themselves ‘My One Flesh’. Coppe was commonly listed together with Clarkson as a leader of the orgiastic Ranters. Coppe was among the drinking, smoking Ranters who appeared in George Fox’s prison at Charing Cross.  He seems to have been an alcoholic, but above all, he indulged his long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. Richard Baxter asked with horror how it came to pass that, as followers of this man, …

… men and women professing the zealous fear of God, should … be brought to place their Religion in revelling, roaring, drinking, whoring, open full-mouthed swearing ordinarily by the Wounds and Blood of God, and the fearfullest cursing that hath been heard.

Besides his swearing from the pulpit, mentioned above, Coppe swore at the hostess of a tavern so fearsomely that she trembled and quaked for some hours after. Some of his ‘disciples’ were put in the stocks at Stratford-upon-Avon for their swearing. It was as a Ranter in 1649 that Coppe produced his only noteworthy writings, including his two Fiery Flying Rolls which resulted in his arrest in January 1650. He was imprisoned at Coventry for a second time, and then at Newgate. Parliament issued an order that the Rolls, as containing many horrid blasphemies, and damnable and detestable Opinions, be seized by mayors, sheriff and justices of the peace throughout the Commonwealth and burnt by the public hangman. Copies were to be publicly burnt at Westminster and Southwark. The Act of August 1650 was largely directed against Coppe’s works. Finally, the committee of Parliament which examined Clarkson in September 1650 also examined Coppe shortly afterwards. During the interrogation, the prisoner feigned madness, throwing nut-shells and other things about the room. In Newgate, Coppe received many visitors, and by ‘smooth arguments’ converted not a few to Ranterism. In the end, however, the strain of imprisonment began to tell. At the beginning of 1651, he issued from prison a Remonstrance of the sincere and zealous Protestation of Abiezer Croppe against the Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions recited in the Act of Aug. 1650. This was followed five months later by a full recantation, Copps Return to the wayes of Truth… In this Coppe attributed his imprisonment to some strange actions and carriages … some difficult, dark, hard, strange, harsh and almost unheard-of words, and expressions. Of his Ranting, he said:

The terrible, notable day of the Lord stole upon me unawares, like a thiefe in the night. … And the cup of the Lords right hand, was put into mine hand. And it was filled brim full of intoxicating wine, and I drank it off, even the dregs thereof. Whereupon being mad drunk, I so strangely spake, and acted I knew not what. To the amazement of some. To the sore perplexity of others. And to the great grief of others. And till that cup passed from me, I knew not what I spake or did.

Now that his understanding had returned to him, he begged that the Fiery Flying Rolls be thrown into the fire. As a result of this Petition to Parliament and Council of State Coppe was released, after a year and a half in prison. Baxter, who had spoken with Coppe, was certain that he was no madman; and in September he preached a recantation sermon at Burford, and thereafter his life was unadventurous. After the restoration, he practised as a ‘physic’ at Barnes under the name of Dr Higham, through to his death. Coppe’s writings give the impression of eccentricity rather than of any kind of psychotic state. For understanding the religion of the Free Spirit they are of great value. They also throw a good deal of light on the ‘social doctrine’ of the Free Spirit. Coppe affirmed that all things belong, or ought to belong, to the Lord alone, and utterly condemned the institution of private property. The urge to apostolic poverty and public self-abasement, normally regarded as characteristically medieval, can be seen here in the seventeenth-century England. We can also observe in these writings how easily such a rejection of private property can merge with a hatred of the rich, as happened on the Continent in earlier centuries, giving rise to an intransigent and potentially violent form of revolutionary millenarianism.

A. L. Morton, the historian of the Ranters, suggested that migratory craftsmen, freed by the breakdown in the economic system during the Revolution, men who were unattached and prepared to break with tradition, provided much of the support for the movement. We should bear in mind that the mobile itinerant population, evicted cottagers, whether peasants or craftsmen, slowly gravitating to the big towns and there finding themselves outsiders, sometimes forming themselves into religious groups which rapidly became more and more radical. It is very difficult to define what the Ranters believed, as opposed to individuals who were called Ranters. The same is true to a lesser extent of the Levellers or early Quakers, but the Levellers did issue programmatic statements, and the pamphlets of Fox and Nayler can be accepted as authoritative for the Quakers. There was no recognised leader or theoretician of the Ranters, and it is extremely doubtful as to whether there was ever a Ranter organisation. As so often in the history of radical movements, the name came into existence as a term of abuse.

The Regicide & the Rump:

Following the execution of Charles I at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, the Rump Parliament followed up the regicide with acts abolishing the office of the monarch and the House of Lords. It called them acts, not ordinances, because they required no other ascent now but that of the Commons. But behind the Rump stood the army, to whose force it owed its power, and the army might not sustain it for long since its first intention had been to dissolve the parliament rather than purge it. The Rumpers themselves promised, in their act of 17 March that abolished the monarchy, that they would dissolve the ‘Long Parliament’ themselves so soon as may possibly stand with the safety of the people that hath betrusted them.  The army had seemingly committed itself to support a programme of radical reform, embodied in the revised Agreement of the People that it had presented to the Rump, a programme that would have transformed the constitution and regulated the frequency and duration of parliamentary sittings, brought significant alterations to the law of the land and changed the whole relationship between church and state. The army and its supporters hoped and expected that the ‘caretaker’ régime, as they saw it, would soon make way for a reformed and reforming parliament, elected on a far broader franchise than ever in the past.

Through the share they had taken in drafting the new ‘Agreement’, the Levellers had reached the peak of their influence. From the early months of 1649 onwards, there was a burgeoning of various groups even more radical than the Levellers: the Fifth Monarchists, who felt a divine call to set up the exclusive rule of their fellow ‘saints’ in preparation for Christ’s prophesied kingdom on earth; the ‘Diggers’, who called themselves ‘True Levellers’, and preached and practised the community of property; and the ‘Ranters’ who believed that those who had discovered the godhead within them were liberated from all conventional morality. Of these groups, only the Fifth Monarchists had any considerable following in the army, but there was an understandable fear in conservative hearts that with dissolution threatening the ancient constitution, the established church, and the known laws of the land, a dark and revolutionary future lay ahead. No-one could have foreseen that the Rump would go on wielding sovereign authority over England and Wales for four and a quarter years after Charles I’s execution, longer than the whole duration of the first Civil War, and almost as long as Cromwell’s whole rule as Lord Protector.

The Rump’s temper became more conservative over that period, as the mood became more revolutionary outside parliament. The majority of the remaining MPs were deeply unsympathetic, if not intolerant towards the aspirations of Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Ranters and extremist sects of all kinds. Its concessions to religious liberty were to be limited and grudging, its record in social reform miserably meagre, and the professional interests of its influential lawyer-members made it deeply suspicious of any changes in the substance and operation of the law, where reform was overdue. The period from 1649-53 was one in which the Commons, not Cromwell, was in charge of government policy. He was immensely influential, but as Lord General of the Army, he was away from Westminster and on campaign in Scotland and Ireland for much of the period, and when these commitments did allow him to be in the Commons, he by no means got his own way. Even after 1653, when he became Lord Protector, the case of James Nayler, the Quaker leader, three years later, demonstrates the limited power Cromwell had to protect religious liberty.

The Rump was as hesitant in grasping the nettle of religious settlement as it was in placing the Commonwealth on firm constitutional foundations. By the early 1650s, the old dividing line between Presbyterians and Independents was no longer so sharply drawn, since by then many doctrinally orthodox Calvinists persuasions were prepared to put their differences aside in order to resist the rising tide of radical sectarianism and popular heresy, of which the writings of the so-called Ranters were an extreme example. There was a small party of sectarian enthusiasts within the Rump, including the army Colonels Harrison, Rich, Fleetwood and John Jones, who managed to secure the establishment of a Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, with a similar one being established for England’s northern counties. But the majority of MPs were suspicious of religious enthusiasm and did not want to incur greater unpopularity by seeming to encourage it. They were aware of the strong preference in the country at large for retaining a national church with a publicly maintained parochial ministry, and many of them shared it. An established church was already in being when the Rump came to power, with its faith, worship and government defined by the Westminster Assembly and given statutory authority by the unpurged parliament. But parliament was divided on whether to continue implementing the Presbyterian system, and the motion to confirm it was lost on the vote of the Speaker. In practice, a wide variety of worship and church organisation prevailed in the provinces and parishes.

While the Rump shied aware from the contentious business of providing for the propagation of the gospel on a national scale in England, it continued to demonstrate those things that it was against, like sin and blasphemy. Between April and June 1650 it passed acts against non-observance of the sabbath and against swearing and cursing, as well as the notorious one which punished adultery, incest, and fornication with death, even on a first offence. Mercifully, it was very little enforced. A Blasphemy Act followed in August, less savage than the Long Parliament’s Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 and aimed mainly at the Ranters, though both George Fox and John Bunyan fell foul of its provisions. It was specifically targeted at the Ranters’ denial of the necessity of the civil and moral righteousness among men (which) tended to the dissolution of all human society. It denounced anyone who maintained himself or herself as God, or equal with God; or that acts of adultery, drunkenness, swearing, theft, etc. were not in themselves sinful, or that there is no such thing as sin but as a man or woman judgeth thereof. The penalty for the first offence was six months in jail, banishment for the second and death if the offender refused to depart or returned. However, judges interpreting the Act refused to allow JPs, clergy and juries to extend its provisions to the sincere if unorthodox religious opinions of a ‘Ranter’ like Richard Coppin, or a Quaker like Wiliam Dewsbury.

Above: Cromwell’s Dissolution of the Rump of the Long Parliament, 1653.

The House took longer to confront the issue of toleration, but in September 1650 it finally repealed the recusancy laws to the extent of repealing the penalties for non-attendance of parish Sunday services, provided that those who absented themselves attended some other form of public worship. Outside the broad national church, the separatist congregations which chose and supported their own pastors enjoyed considerable liberty under Cromwell’s Protectorate, between 1653 and 1658, though it was not unlimited. It did not extend to those whose teachings or actions were considered blasphemous, such as the Unitarian John Biddle or the Quaker James Nayler. Cromwell was reluctant, however, to see these men punished as severely as his parliament desired, and he was more indulgent towards Quakers than most gentry magistrates. But he gave no countenance to those who tried to break up the services conducted by the parish churches in what they called ‘steeple-houses’, and he was even more firmly against so-called Ranters who preached and practised the belief that the spirit had liberated them from the moral code enjoined by Holy Scripture. He was not in favour of ‘toleration’ in the late-modern sense who regards an individual’s religious convictions as an entirely private matter, so long as they do not impinge on the rights or liberties of others. Neither was his ideal a kind of religious pluralism involving a variety of sects, tolerated out of indifference, but a community of all who had ‘the root of the matter’ in them, in a manner transcending differences over outward forms and rites.

Cromwell’s Commonwealth & its Critics:

On 3 September 1654, Cromwell opened the first real Parliament of his Protectorate. He made a speech on the duty of ‘healing and settling’ in which he contrasted the state of the nation just before the Protectorate was established with what it was at that date. Then, the strife within it had grown so high as to threaten not only ordered government but the very fabric of society, the ranks and orders of men, whereby England hath been known for hundreds of years: a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman. This, of course, was an exaggeration, as even more was his allegation that ‘men of Levelling principles’ had been undermining property itself and bidding to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. Turning to religion, he said it had been in an even worse condition than the civil state, what with the unchecked preaching of ‘prodigious blasphemies’ and the invocation of so-called faith to justify the breaking of ‘all rules of law and nature’. He referred to the Ranters, although he did not name them as such. Such horrors, he said, had brought to mind the iniquities prophesied for ‘the last times’, for Christ returned to earth in judgement. The power to check them had been undermined by a ‘second sort of men’, who while not justifying such evils denied the civil magistrate any authority to intervene, on the ground that matters of conscience and belief lay outside his sphere.

Cromwell, pictured on the right on the ‘Dunbar medal’, given to those like the Quaker James Nayler who had fought in the Third Civil War, reaffirmed his own commitment to liberty of conscience but defended the claim of the civil power to a role in promoting true religion and punishing manifest wickedness. He upheld the right of godly and gifted laymen to preach, but he repudiated the sectarian extremists who denounced the whole concept of an ordained ministry as antichristian. He adopted a gentler tone when he went on to condemn  ‘the mistaken notion of the Fifth Monarchy’, acknowledging that many honest, God-fearing men adhered to it.

It was one thing, however, to expect that Jesus Christ will have a time to set up his reign in our hearts, but quite another for men upon their own conviction of God’s presence with them to claim a sole right to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people. But he drew a strict line between belief and practice in this regard:

If these were but notions, they were to be let alone. Notions will hurt none but them that have them. But when they come to practices, as to tell us that liberty and property are not the badges of the kingdom of Christ, and to tell us that instead of regulating laws, laws are to be abrogated, indeed subverted, and perhaps would bring in the Judicial law instead of our known laws settled amongst us, – this is worthy of every magistrate’s consideration, especially where every stone is turned to bring confusion.

Such people, he said, not only threatened anarchy at home but obstructed the work of settlement in Scotland and Ireland and hindered the negotiation of peace with Holland, Portugal and France. The next year, however, Cromwell reaffirmed his message of the need for broad liberty of conscience, and for a charitable attitude within the nation, in a declaration issued on 20 March 1654, at a time of a long drought:

Is brotherly love, and a healing spirit of that force and value amongst us that it ought? … Do we first search for the kingdom of Christ within us,  before we seek one without us?

… Do we not more contend for saints having rule in the world, than over their own hearts? … Do not some of us affirm ourselves to be the only true ministry, and true churches of Christ, and only to have the ordinances in purity, excluding our brethren, though of equal gifts? … Do we remember old puritan, or rather primitive simplicity, self-denial, mercy to the poor, uprightness and justice?

Of course, this ecumenical concept of religious liberty did not extend to Roman Catholics, although they were no longer persecuted for practising their faith. Most Episcopalians and many Presbyterians, like Richard Baxter (right), still blamed Cromwell for the King’s execution, believing also that the King could have saved his own life if he had agreed to give up the Prayer Book and the Bishops in the Church of England.

Baxter thought, simply enough, that many of the things that Christians quarrelled over could be resolved if they were prepared to give way a little. Although Baxter had become Chaplain to Cromwell’s cavalry after the Battle of Naseby, the two men did not get on well with each other, though they respected one another. Both may have been fonder of talking than of listening. Cromwell sent to Baxter to come to listen to him, speaking for an hour about the great things God had done for England through him. Baxter got tired of listening to him without a turn. When it finally came, he told the Lord Protector that he thought the proper way of governing was by King and Parliament. Although not the only preacher to tell him this (Rhys ‘Arise’ Evans had also told him that he should restore the monarchy under Charles Stuart), Cromwell lost his temper with Baxter and they went on arguing for a further four hours, at the end of which, Baxter reported:

” … I saw that what he learned must be from himself, being more disposed to speak many hours than to hear one and little heeding what another said when he had spoken himself”.

Baxter had liked Cromwell best when he was still his Lord General. He had believed him to be honest and truly religious, but he thought that power had corrupted him as Lord Protector. He himself pointed out, however, that it was very difficult to know what to believe about Cromwell the man, for … “no man was better and worse spoken than he, … as men’s interests led their judgements”. On his side, Cromwell thought highly enough of Baxter to wish to talk to him in a bid to gain his approval and blessing, though in this he failed.

Quakers v Ranters:

Quakerism had been the ‘legitimate’ offshoot of the ‘Seekers’, a religious movement which, as we have seen, was powerful long before the time of Fox. The Ranters were like its illegitimate and wayward offspring whose unpleasant label only faintly foreshadowed their practises, as reported by admittedly antagonistic scribes. The Quaker doctrine of the ‘Inner Light’, which formed the core of Fox’s message and had first attracted Nayler to Quakerism, became with the Ranters a belief in their absolute oneness with God. This belief carried with it by implication the assertion of personal infallibility, together with an all-embracing licence. Fox’s judgement of, as many saw them, this pernicious ‘sect’ did not err on the side of charity, and when one of its ‘members’ sought to ingratiate himself with the Quaker leader he repelled him with the exhortation: “Repent thou swine and beast!” He followed this up with a reference to “the old Ranters in Sodom”. Nayler himself, in the early months of his ministry, records their presence at his meetings in no uncertain tones:

Their filthy hearts was plainly manifest to the view of all the people, and the terrour of the lord was upon them all the while they was amongst us, not being long, so that they fled away.

Ranterism, though closely akin to Quakerism in its doctrines, was sharply distinguished by its disregard of authority and lack of moral restraint. Yet since their doctrines were so closely aligned, there was constant merger and migration between one and the other, something which Episcopalian and Presbyterian propagandists were not slow to play up in their literature. Contemporary commentators long tended to lump together the early Quakers with the Ranters. There was an unreasoning hostility of conservative critics, who believed that both Ranter and Quaker ideas must lead to licentiousness and therefore assumed that they did; there was also the likelihood that many early rank-and-file Quakers had in fact not entirely shaken themselves free from Ranter ideas and practices.  We hear of Ranters, as of Fifth Monarchists, after the execution of Charles I and the defeat of the Leveller Uprising at Burford. The latter event no doubt relates to the origins of the two groups, as it does to the emergence of the ‘True Levellers’ or ‘Diggers’. As one pamphleteer wrote in 1651, All the world now is in the Ranting humour. A Southwark physician in 1652 defended the Ranters against ‘time-serving saints’ because of their charitable attitude towards the poor. But John Reeve ascribed to them a pretended universal love to the whole creation. At first, he was attracted by their

… imagination of the eternal salvation of all mankind, though they lived and died under the power of all manner of unrighteousness.

In the early fifties, Bunyan found some Ranter books held highly in esteem by several old professors and one of his close companions turned a most devilish Ranter and gave himself up to all manner of filthiness. He denied the existence of God or angels and laughed at exhortations to sobriety. Other persons, formerly strict in religion, were swept away by Ranters: they would condemn Bunyan as legal and dark, pretending that they only had attained to perfection that could do what they would and not sin, a doctrine which Bunyan himself found very seductive, I being but a young man. He was especially tempted to believe that there was no judgement or resurrection, and therefore that sin was no such grievous thing, turning the grace of God into wantonness. Bunyan’s answer to Ranters became the orthodox one: they lacked a conviction of sin. Samuel Fisher, the Baptist, said that they despised the ordinances of Christ and …

… run beyond the bounds of modesty and all good manners. The rabble of the ruder sort of Ranters. … are willingly ignorant, because of the tediousness of that thought to them, that there is any more coming of Christ at all. Some deny the existence of Christ: others claim to be Christ or God.

In 1649, when George Fox first met the Ranters in Coventry jail, they had shocked him by claiming to be God, some of them stating that there is no creator God but that everything comes by nature. Richard Baxter declared that Ranters set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in man. With the spiritual pride of ungrounded novices in religion, they believed that God regards not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart: that to the pure all things were pure, which they took as licensing blasphemy and continuous whoredom. Fortunately, he went on, the ‘horrid villainies’ of this sect speedily extinguished it, but reflected discredit on all other sects. John Holand, a hostile but not unfair witness, said that Ranters called God ‘Reason’, as Gerrard Winstanley had also done. For Ranters, ‘Christ in us’ was far more important than the historical figure who died in Jerusalem, …

… and all the commandments of God, both in the Old and New Testaments, are the fruits of the curse. Since all men are now freed of the curse, they are also free from the commandments; our will is God’s will.

The existence of evil was a subject to which Ranters paid a good deal of attention: simple believers found their arguments difficult to answer, such as the age-old one: If God is omnipotent, why does he permit evil? Others denied that there was any such thing as sin; if there was, it must be part of God’s plan. The day of judgement is either an invented thing … a bugbear to keep men in awe. Lawrence Clarkson believed that, in any case, there was no life after death:

… even as a stream from the ocean was distinct in itself while it was a stream, but when returned to the ocean was therein swallowed and became one with the ocean: so the spirit of man whilst in the body was distinct from God, but when death came it returned to God, and so became one with God, yea God itself.

Clarkson added that he would know nothing after this my being was dissolved. An extreme form of this doctrine attributed to Ranters was that those are most perfect … which do commit the greatest sins with the least remorse. Clarkson came very near to espousing this himself in his writing:

… till I acted that so-called sin I could not predominate over sin. (But now) whatsoever I act is … in relation to … that Eternity in me … So long as the act was in God … it was as holy as God. 

This included, he insisted, those acts by thee called swearing, drunkenness, adultery and theft, etc. Clarkson  (1615-67) was a native of Preston. Brought up in the Church of England, in youth he showed Puritan leanings; he regarded dancing on the Sabbath with particular horror. He became a Presbyterian and then an Independent, an Antinomian in theology. He became a ‘parish priest’ in Norfolk, but then led a wandering life. In 1644, he became an Anabaptist and the following year was imprisoned for ‘dipping’. Up to the end of 1648, he followed another of the major religious tendencies of the time, that of the Seekers. During this period he was an itinerant preacher in Kent before becoming a minister in two more parishes, in Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire. He also began to write religious tracts, but not being a University man, he was very often turned out of employment and was therefore constantly in financial straits. Taking a commission as a chaplain in an Army regiment, he tried to find a parish in London on leaving it in 1649, having been cashiered for blasphemy. He held a living at Pulham for a short time until he was turned out for preaching universal salvation. He then became Baptist and, under Erbery’s influence, a Seeker, preaching for monies in each faith.

Clarkson developed Familist ideas of Luther’s reformation in his preaching but carried them considerably further. He also began to practice what he preached, escaping from one ‘maid of pretty knowledge, who with my doctrine was affected’ giving his body to other women whilst being ‘careful for moneys for my wife’, travelling the country with Mrs Star, and resisting the opportunity when ‘Dr Paget’s maid stripped herself naked and skipped’ at a Ranters’ meeting. Early in 1650, Clarkson became a Ranter and was soon the notorious leader of the particularly licentious group, ‘My One Flesh’ to which Abiezer Coppe also belonged. He was arrested and examined. As on a previous occasion, he stood on his rights as a ‘freeborn subject’ and refused to answer incriminating questions. On 27 September 1650, the House sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment for his ‘blasphemous’ book, A Single Eye, to be followed by banishment. This latter sentence was never carried out, however, and on his release, he resumed his wandering life before joining the ‘Muggletonians’ in 1658, a sect of extreme ascetics, writing several tracts on their behalf.

Quakers first entered the ‘arena’ of the Commonwealth as a wing of the government party in the years 1651-53, enjoying the protection of the military authorities., and of local gentlemen of radical inclinations. They also had sometimes the more enthusiastic support of the Army rank-and-file. Those who administered the North of England or Wales could not afford to alienate Quaker missionaries, many of whom were ex-New Model Army soldiers. George Fox had been in prison for nearly a year at Derby in 1650, but in the North, as we can see from his own Journal, he enjoyed a good deal of protection in 1651-52. Even hostile JPs, of whom there were many, had to proceed cautiously against him. Persecution began again, spasmodically, from the end of 1652, when the dissolution of the Rump appeared imminent, and again after 1653 when the gentry felt they had been given a free hand. Fox was imprisoned at Carlisle, but then the relatively radical Barebones Parliament met: a letter from it got Fox released and his jailor put in his place in the dungeon. In Wales, JPs also protected Quakers as a lesser evil than ‘papists’ or ‘pagans’. It was the Quakers themselves who alienated the clergy through indiscriminate attacks on the sanctity of ecclesiastical buildings made it for any priest to support them and continue to hold his living.

In 1654, Fox was arrested on suspicion of plotting against the government, but he was well received by Oliver Cromwell. Those who wished ill towards the Quakers were those who resented Army rule; their views were strongly represented in the Parliament of 1656, as was demonstrated from the debates over James Nayler. Dark hints were dropped that the spread of the Quakers had been due to official encouragement, indeed that Quakers were to be found in the government itself.  Major General Philip Skippon, Nayler’s main Army opponent, had been regarded as ‘Parliament’s man in the Army’ in 1647. The rapid expansion of Quakerism both in the Army by 1649 and more broadly in the South and East of England in the early 1650s had made the ‘men of property’ apprehensive of ‘some Levelling design’ underlying the well-organised movement. The fact that Quakers were said to have reclaimed ‘such as neither magistrate nor minister ever speak to’ might seem reassuring after Quaker pacifism was firmly established and known to be accepted by all members of the sect. But that was to come later in the decade, and after the Restoration. In the mid-fifties, it was still far from being the case.

Baptists & Quakers – Bunyan v Fox:

Ranterism was better at destruction than it was at construction. In 1650, it was by listening to the ‘errors’ of Diggers, Levellers and Ranters that Baptist churches in Cromwell’s Huntingdonshire and elsewhere were ‘shaken’ and ‘broken up’. In Cleveland, in 1651 it was meetings that had been ‘shattered’ under Ranter influence that turned to Quakerism. At that time, both Quakers and their critics mainly defined their beliefs by negatives, in terms of what they were against. Unlike many of the Ranters, however, they did not deny the existence of God or a historical Christ, or of heaven and hell. Neither did they believe that all could attain perfection in their earthly life. Most importantly, in terms of social and political attitudes, they did not challenge the authority of parents or magistrates. In the early 1650s, John Bunyan listed Quaker beliefs, which can be summarised as follows:

(1) The Bible is not the Word of God;

(2) Every man in the world has the Spirit of Christ;

(3) The Jesus Christ who was crucified 1600 years ago did not satisfy divine justice for the sins of the people;

(4) Christ’s flesh and blood is within the saints;

(5) There will be no resurrection of the body;

(6) The resurrection has already taken place within good men;

(7) The crucified Jesus did not ascend above the starry heavens and shall not come again on the last day as a man to judge all nations.

In 1654, Fox himself witnessed that Ranters had a pure convincement, but that they had fled the cross and turned the grace of God into wantonness. He emphasised especially drunkenness, swearing, and ‘sporting yourselves in the day-time’. He had a short way with them, because, in his opinion, they bowed and scraped too much and were too complimentary. In his Journal, Fox records many Ranter groups which ultimately became Quaker, in Cleveland, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Sussex and Reading, for example. In the same year, Anthony Pearson said that “some that are joined to the Ranters are pretty people,” but that they “contained so many rude savage apprentices and young people … that nothing but the power of the Lord can chain them.”  But in 1655, the Quaker James Parnell admitted that the Quakers were accused of ‘being one’ with the Ranters:

Some of them have tasted the love of God and grace of God, and have had appearances of God, but they have turned the grace of God into wantonness, and have deceived so many with their alluring speeches. Their lascivious ways bring discredit on the truth of God.

In the same year, a diarist in Cheshire wrote that Quakers also denied the Trinity; … denied the Scriptures to be the Word of God; they said that they had no sin. From this doctrinal perspective, therefore, it is also possible to see how they might have attracted former Ranters, suggesting that contemporary judges and magistrates were correct in their famous assertions that had not the Quakers come, the Ranters had over-run the nation. In part, no doubt, enemies of the Quakers were anxious to discredit them, claiming that Quakerism had become ‘the common sink of them all’, including Anabaptists, Antinomians, Socinians, Familists, Libertines and Ranters. But there does seem to have been genuine doctrinal confusion as well as ideological fluidity between the memberships of the movements and sects. In Dorset and Wiltshire, former Levellers were alleged to have become Ranters. The Quakers seemed to absorb many ex-Levellers, including John Lilburne. His acceptance of Quakerism in 1655 was a very different act for the former revolutionary than if he had been convinced after 1660. As late as August 1655, the Grand Jury of Gloucestershire petitioned against Ranters, Levellers and atheists, under the name of Quakers. Christopher Atkinson was accepted as a Quaker until in 1655 he fell …

… into too much familiarity and conversation with some women kind, especially such as (it seemed) were somewhat inclined to a spirit of Ranterism. He grew loose and … committed lewdness with a servant-maid.

Mary Todd, a London lady who at a meeting pulled up all her clothes above her middle, exposing her nakedness to all in the room was disowned by the Quakers, who claimed she was a Ranter: but the act of disavowal suggests that they felt some measure of responsibility for her. In the 1650s there were ‘Proud Quakers’, who showed clear ranting tendencies. They used profane language, were lax in conduct; some of them were football players and wrestlers. Their leader, Rice Jones of Nottingham, set up an ale-house. After the restoration, John Perrot claimed a direct command from God that hats should be worn during prayer, a significant Ranter practice which James Nayler had also followed during his time in the West Country. But Perrot went on to deny all human arrangements for worship, even meeting at stated times and places. Fox said that Perrot preached the rotten principles of the Old Ranters, and associated him with Nayler, many of whose former partisans supported Perrot. Long after the restoration, Fox was insisting that some people claiming to be Quakers were really Ranters. Richard Baxter, who had no reason to love the ‘Friends’, paid them a deserved compliment when he wrote:

The Quakers were but the Ranters turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme austerity.

But the Quakers could hardly have prevented the Ranters from over-running the country unless their doctrines had been, at least initially, near enough to Ranterism to absorb many Ranters. Edward Burrough had straddled this doctrinal gap between Ranters and Quakers. He may originally have had Ranter sympathies; at one time he worked closely with Perrot and retained confidence in him longer than any other Quaker leader. In addition, as John Lampden has commented, by his preaching in London, Nayler had attracted, amongst other more reputable followers, a clique of married women all more or less tainted with Ranterism. They sought to exalt him by depreciating the work of his predecessors and pursued him with that undiscerning worship which was the chief trial and temptation of the popular preacher. Nevertheless, without naming the Ranters, Nayler himself had spoken disapprovingly that:

The greatest profession now set up by many is to make the redemption of Christ a cover for all liscentious and fleshly liberty, and say they are to that end redeemed.

Nayler’s Mission in the West; Trial & Torture by Parliament:

That was in 1656, a year after Nayler took up his work in London and prior to his ministry in the West. From the first, the doctrine of the indwelling of God in the heart of man had been the central focus of Nayler’s preaching. This point – exaggerated and distorted by his followers – was to become the rock on which his life was wrecked. It was this doctrine which had first attracted the London merchant Robert Rich to Quakerism, who had become his most faithful friend and advocate, becoming caught up into the current of Nayler’s tragedy. He seems to have responded to the call to missionary service which was heard by every primitive Friend, and in 1655 he was in prison in Banbury, together with Nayler’s Yorkshire ‘patron’ with whom he had worked in the North, and two women preachers. There is no record of Nayler’s first meeting with Rich but it is clear that, in the early months of Nayler’s ministry in the capital, he had won the merchant’s heart. This was due in part, no doubt, to his extraordinary charm of manner, but chiefly to the stress that Nayler laid on the doctrine of the Inner Light.

In October 1656, Nayler staged a triumphal entry into Bristol, shown above, which was blatantly modelled on Christ’s acted parable at Jerusalem. He rode an ass, accompanied by two of his many women disciples, while others spread their garments in his path or walked behind him singing “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel. With his long hair, unusual for puritan preachers, he bore a natural resemblance to popular images of Jesus, and he emphasised it by the way he cut and combed his hair and beard. Parliament was outraged; it appointed a committee of no fewer than fifty-five members to examine him and his followers, and they took five weeks before they reported to the House on 5 December. Called to the bar the next day, Nayler protested that as a mere creature he claimed no special glory, but shared the common Quaker conviction that Christ dwells in all believers. He was convinced that he had a revelation from God, commanding him to do what he did as a sign of Christ’s coming. There is no evidence that Robert Rich took any part in their extravagances in the West, and he indignantly repelled the charge of Ranterism which was later brought against him. At the crisis of Nayler’s trial for blasphemy, he determined that whatever might be the errors of the preacher’s followers he himself had offended in nothing save, as he said, …

” … in confessing to Christ in the saints, and my love to that testimony made me willing to stand by him in his sufferings and to bear his cross.” 

Rich took up the unpopular role of Nayler’s champion and flung himself into his defence with the generosity which was the most striking trait of his character. Day by day through that dreary November of 1656, while Parliament debated the guilt of Nayler and the punishment meet for it, Rich, ‘the mad merchant’ as he began to be called, haunted the door of the House with petitions and letters, or lay in wait to make a personal appeal to any member whom he judged to have some tinge of pity in him. He even offered to prove to the Parliament out of Scripture that the prisoner had uttered no blasphemy, nor done anything worthy of death or ‘of bonds’. The House spent nine days in hot debate as to what to do with Nayler since under the 1650 Blasphemy Act he could be given no more than six months’ imprisonment for a first offence, and for the bloodthirsty majority in the Commons that was not enough. He escaped the death penalty by only ninety-six votes to eighty-two, due largely to the support of Cromwell’s supporters on the council of state, like Sir Gilbert Pickering. But the Commons sentenced him to a series of corporal punishments, to be carried out in London and Bristol, to be followed by indefinite solitary confinement and hard labour.

Flogged all the way from Westminster to the City on 18 December, 310 stripes left Nayler so weakened that the next stage of his ‘torture’ had to be postponed. Before it was executed, many petitioners, by no means all Quakers, pleaded for the remission of the rest of the sentence, first (in vain) with parliament and then with Cromwell. He immediately wrote to the Speaker, expressing abhorrence of the ‘crimes’ imputed to Nayler, but asking the House to let him know the grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded. This challenge to the constitutionality of its actions, which Whitelocke and others had also expressed, caused both further consternation on all sides in addition to further appeals for mercy, but the Commons voted by two to one to carry out the rest of the sentence, so that Nayler was duly branded on the forehead with the letter ‘B’ and bored through the tongue with a red hot iron. Parliament never replied to Cromwell’s letter, but the episode helped to convince its wiser heads that the constitution needed further amendment. In particular, when anything deserving the label ‘torture’ was inflicted during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, it was by order of parliament, not the executive or the judiciary, as was the case, for example, in the reign of James I. The abolition of both the monarchy and the House of Lords had destroyed the essential separation of powers inherent in the British Constitution.

A New Constitution & continuing confusion:

The Humble Petition and Advice, as the draft of a new constitution came to be called in 1657, began by asking Cromwell to assume the title of king, though not on a hereditary basis. The most striking proposed change, however, was that parliament was to consist of two houses, with the new one approximating more to a senate than to the hereditary House of Lords, but one which could also operate as a ‘High Court’. Regarding religion, the new constitution was slightly more restrictive than the Instrument of Government which had established the Protectorate, but in practice, this change made little difference. There was to be a confession of faith, agreed between the Protector and parliament, to which clergy who received public maintenance had to conform, but no such document was ever promulgated. For those who dissented from it, toleration was limited to those who accepted the basic doctrine of the trinity and acknowledged both the New and Old Testaments to be the revealed word of God; it was explicitly denied to ‘papists’, prelatists and all ‘blasphemers’ and licentious practitioners, including those who disturbed the public peace. These last exceptions were aimed mainly at Ranters and Quakers, but the authors of the ‘Petition and Advice’ had to steer a course between displeasing intolerant magistrates and offending Cromwell’s breadth of sympathy since their whole enterprise was dependent on his acceptance of their proposals.

Clearly, critics of both sects, even sympathetic ones, continued to conflate both movements on doctrinal grounds, if not on the basis of their demeanour, conduct and practices. Thomas Collier in 1657 asserted that any that know the principles of the Ranters would easily recognise that Quaker doctrines were identical. Both would have…

… no Christ but within; no Scripture to be a rule; no ordinances, no law but their lusts, no heaven nor glory but here, no sin but what men fancied to be so, no condemnation for sin but in the consciences of ignorant ones.

Collier wrote that only Quakers smooth it over with an outward austere carriage before men, but within are full of filthiness, and he gave Nayler as an example of this.

(to be continued…)

‘Williams alias Cromwell’ – God’s Welshman?:

Writing recently on the 375th anniversary of the founding of the New Model Army, I was reminded of the fact that its cavalry commander, Oliver Cromwell, given the epithet ‘God’s Englishman’ as the title of his biography, by Christopher Hill (right), was of ‘good Welsh stock’. Indeed, his ancestors’ story is very much synonymous with the union of England and Wales under the Tudors. Oliver himself was born in 1599, one of ten children, in Huntingdon, towards the end of the reign of the last Welsh-speaking monarch of Britain, Elizabeth I.

Oliver Cromwell’s father, Robert Cromwell (alias Williams), was the younger son of Sir Henry Cromwell (alias Williams), the ‘Golden Knight of Hinchingbrooke’. Henry’s father was born Richard Williams, grandson of a Welshman said to have accompanied Henry Tudor when he seized the throne of England from the Plantagenets at the Battle of Bosworth and became Henry VII in 1485. So the family’s estate derived from Oliver’s great-great-grandfather Morgan ap William, the son of William ap Ieuan of Wales. William was a great archer and a kinsman of Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. Morgan was a brewer from Glamorgan who settled at Putney near London and married Katherine Cromwell (born 1482), the daughter of the local blacksmith, Walter Cromwell. She was also the sister of Thomas Cromwell, the famous chief minister to Henry VIII. The Cromwell family acquired great wealth as occasional beneficiaries of Thomas’s administration of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Of course, he was known as the ‘hammer of the monks’ and was the architect of the English Reformation. The story of his fall and execution in 1540 has just been re-chronicled by historical novelist Hilary Mantel in the final part of her hugely popular ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy, something else that prompted me to write about Oliver Cromwell’s Welsh connections.

Henry VIII believed that the Welsh should adopt surnames in the English style rather than taking their fathers’ names (patronyms) as Morgan ap William and his male ancestors had done. Henry suggested to Sir Richard Williams, one of the king’s most favoured knights, who was the first to use a surname in his family, that he might adopt the surname of his uncle Thomas Cromwell. For several generations, the Williamses added the surname of Cromwell to their own, styling themselves “Williams alias Cromwell” in legal documents (Noble 1784, pp. 11–13). Richard Williams took the name of his famous uncle and acted as his agent in the suppression of the monasteries. He had his reward: three abbeys, two priories and the nunnery of Hinchinbrooke, worth perhaps two-and-a-half thousand pounds a year, came into his possession; and he married the daughter of a Lord Mayor of London. His son, Sir Henry, built the magnificent mansion out of the ruins of Hinchinbrooke, fit to entertain royalty, on the site of Ramsey Abbey. In the year of the Armada, 1588, he ordered all his copyhold tenants in the manor of Ramsey to be ready to attend him at an hour’s notice. He too married the daughter of a Lord Mayor of London, represented his county in the House of Commons and was for times sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. He was one of the two wealthiest landowners in Huntingdonshire.

An integrated Britain becomes visible first in the major migration of the Welsh to the centre of power in the sixteenth century. Dafydd Seisyllt from the Welsh-speaking ‘enclave’ of Ergyng in Herefordshire went up to London as a sergeant of Henry VII’s guard. He bought land and installed his son as a court page. His grandson was William Cecil, Elizabeth’s potent statesman and spy-master. William’s son, Robert Cecil, became chief minister of James I, and in 1605 ‘uncovered’ the Gunpowder Plot. As we have seen above, the family of Morgan ap-William, the brewer who married Thomas Cromwell’s sister, changed its name and its base from Glamorganshire to Huntingdonshire during this time, producing Oliver Cromwell three generations later. A horde of less well-known Welsh people colonised some of the London professional classes, the armed forces and some branches of commerce which in a few sectors became historically significant. The law and education are major examples of this. They also helped to establish Bristol as Britain’s major Atlantic port as trade routes switched from the eastern English coasts to the west. The Welsh moved resolutely into every conceivable avenue of advancement, from the Court, the Great Sessions, the Council of Wales, JP patronage and the academic world, through minerals, commerce and politics, to smuggling and piracy.

Under Elizabeth I, Welsh intellectuals concentrated in force behind the first thrust for naval growth, American colonisation and empire. For the first time in centuries, the Welsh Church ceased to serve as the provider of sinecures for English clerics; thirteen of the sixteen bishops appointed to Wales were crusading Protestant Welshmen. Elizabeth’s coronation oath referred back through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histories of the Kings of Britain to claim her right to call herself Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church independently of the ‘Bishop of Rome’, tracing the origins of the churches in Britain to the Celtic missionaries. When these claims came under attack from the ‘Italian School’, most Tudor Renaissance humanists came to the defence of what had become official ‘doctrine’.

Among the new scholars were Sir John Price of Brecon and Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh. In 1571, Jesus College, Oxford was created specifically as a Welsh college. Central to this burst of British imperial energy was the seminal figure of the European Renaissance, Dr John Dee, the London-Welshman, originally from Radnorshire, who is credited with the coinage of the term ‘British Empire’. He was a brilliant mathematician and foundation fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1580s, from the twin Calvinist bases of Bohemia and the Palatinate, he launched a scientific and mystical movement which cultivated a new world view. In 1614, Elizabeth Stuart, James I’s daughter, married Frederick, Elector Palatine, and in 1618 they became the ‘Winter’ King and Queen of Bohemia, an event which led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.

Court & Country in Stuart Times:

Henry’s son, Sir Oliver, also a knight of the shire and high sheriff, was the uncle of Oliver Cromwell. Despite prudent marriages, Sir Oliver, living to almost a hundred, managed to dissipate the family fortunes. He entertained James I at Hinchinbrooke (above) in the most lavish way when the King was on progress from Scotland in 1603 and on many later occasions. Like other country gentlemen who entertained the impecunious monarch, Sir Oliver got little in return. Like Sir John Harington of Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, tutor and guardian of James’ daughter Elizabeth, Sir Oliver is a classical example of a man ruined by ‘courtesy’. He had to sell his great house to the Montague family, who were to play a major part in the civil wars.

This may have been the root cause of the family feud which was the background to Oliver’s own quarrel with Sir Edward Montague, the Earl of Manchester, pictured right, which led to the ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’ removing Manchester and his fellow peers from command of the Parliamentary Army, and the establishment of the ‘New Model’ Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Cromwell. The immediate result of the sale was that Robert, as the younger son, inherited little of the patrimony; but he did retain some of his own former church property. Cromwell’s father Robert was of modest means but still, a member of the landed gentry.

As a younger son with many siblings, Robert inherited only a house at Huntingdon and a small amount of land. This land would have generated an income of up to £300 a year, near the bottom of the range of gentry incomes. Oliver’s mother was Elizabeth Steward, the anglicised surname of ‘Stewart’ or ‘Stuart’. On both sides, the fortunes of the family had been founded by the ‘spoliation’ of the Roman Catholic Church. At the Reformation Elizabeth Steward’s great-uncle, Robert had been the last Prior of Ely and its first protestant Dean. Her father William and after him her only brother Sir Thomas farmed the lands of Ely Cathedral. The connection between the two families went back two generations: for the man who persuaded Prior Robert Steward to throw in his lot with Thomas Cromwell was Sir Richard Cromwell, previously known as Richard Williams.

Above. Ely Cathedral from Cromwell’s House.

Oliver was born in a house which had been part of the hospital of St John in Huntingdon since his father had acquired property which had formerly belonged to the Austin friars: from his maternal uncle Sir Thomas Steward, Oliver was later to inherit extensive leases from the Dean and Chapter of Ely. But he must have grown up conscious of the fact that he was a poor relation. He visited the splendours of Hinchinbrooke from time to time, but his father’s three hundred pounds a year was less than Sir Oliver would have spent on a fleeting visit from King James. Young Oliver had many rich and important relations, but his own upbringing was modest. Cromwell himself in 1654 said,

“I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity”.

Above: Cromwell’s House and parish church, Ely

Along with his brother Henry, Oliver had kept a smallholding of chickens and sheep, selling eggs and wool to support himself, his lifestyle resembling that of a yeoman farmer. In 1636 Cromwell inherited control of various properties in Ely from his uncle on his mother’s side, and his uncle’s job as tithe collector for Ely Cathedral. As a result, his income is likely to have risen to around £300–400 per year.

Cromwell’s House in Ely is a museum today, as shown above, and below.

 

By the end of the 1630s, Cromwell had returned to the ranks of acknowledged gentry. He had become a committed Puritan and had established important family links to leading families in London and Essex. In his seminal book The World Turned Upside Down (below), Christopher Hill argued that the familiar civil war division between the ‘Royalist’ North and West and the ‘Parliamentarian’ South and East, was also a division between the ‘relatively backward’ North and West, and the ‘economically advanced South and East’. Yet, with hindsight, these contemporary stereotypes were already changing as the first civil war got underway and by the second the growth in Atlantic trade was already beginning to transform the fortunes of war in the West. Yet, the North and West were regarded by Parliamentarians as the ‘dark corners of the land’, in which preaching was totally inadequate, despite the early attempts made by many Puritans to propagate the Gospel. In 1641, Lord Brooke (Earl of Warwick) observed that there was…

… scarce any minister in some whole shires, as in Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and especially in Wales.

Eighteen years later, the evangelical minister and Parliamentary chaplain, Richard Baxter, argued that…

 … multitudes in England, and more in Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, the Highlands, are scarce able to talk reason about common things. Are these … fit to have the sovereign power, to rule the Commonwealth?

But the radicals puritans’ vision already included a reformed educational system, which would realise something of Comenius’ ideal: universal education in the vernacular for boys and girls up to the age of eighteen, followed by six years at university for the best pupils. On a visit to England in 1641, he wrote that…

… they are eagerly debating on the reformation in the whole kingdom … that all young people should be instructed, none neglected.

Wales in the Civil Wars – Royalists to Roundheads:

In the first civil war, Wales was seen as solidly in support of the King, but by 1645 the royalist coalition in Wales, bludgeoned by repeated levies of men and money, murky deals with the Irish and an inflow of royalist refugees, began to break up. In Glamorgan, ‘peaceable armies’ demonstrated for compromise and throughout Wales, there was wholesale defection. By 1646 the ‘Pembroke party’ was also working for a compromise peace with the Presbyterians in the face of a radical army. From that army came Independent chaplains such as Vavasour Powell, who became itinerant preachers among the Welsh. In response, moderate royalists, Presbyterians and disgruntled parliamentarians shuffled into an alliance in support of the imprisoned king. This led to a rising focused on south Pembrokeshire in the summer of 1648 when there were also revolts in south-east England, followed by an invasion of Northern England by the Scots. The rising in South Wales was led by former Parliamentarian officers, renegades against whom Cromwell was particularly bitter. After their defeat, one of their leaders was shot. In this second civil war, the New Model Army won a victory against the rebels at St Fagans near Cardiff and Cromwell himself brought about the final reduction of Pembroke Castle, the boyhood home of Henry Tudor. Early in 1649, Charles was executed and Wales was exposed to the full force of ‘the British Republic’.

But the ‘transformation’ of Wales from a Royalist ‘fiefdom’ into a Roundhead republic by no means simply an orgy of expulsions and confiscations. Many of the men who gained control in Wales were ‘crusaders’ for the puritan cause. John Jones, a freeholder from of Maes-y-Garnedd in Merioneth and a convert of Morgan Llwyd’s preaching, married Cromwell’s sister, served the Protector in Ireland and died heroically on the scaffold as an unrepentant regicide. Colonel Philip Jones of Llangyfelach, a distinguished soldier, was close to the visionary Hugh Peter, and it was this circle that the notion evolved of evangelising Wales around a ‘commission’ to propagate the gospel. To them, Wales was a dark corner, ripe for a radical experiment in godly government. It was this abused régime with its army men and preaching cobblers which proved to be the only English administration to date to treat Wales as a separate nation. The Rump Parliament at Westminster had disappointed even moderate reformers by its failure to ensure that the word was preached in every parish, for there were still too many lazy, ignorant and absentee parsons who left their flocks hungry in what was a sermon-hungry age. It did set up two local Commissions for the Propagation of the Gospel early in 1650, one for Wales and the other for the northern counties, but it made no progress at all with a bill intended to do the same for England as a whole.

The Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel in Wales of 1650 gave the country a peculiar form of autonomy under Colonel Thomas Harrison and seventy commissioners. There were a few members of the gentry of Independent temper like Sir Erasmus Philipps of Picton in Pembrokeshire, though most, of necessity, were English military missionaries. Philip Jones and John Jones were prominent, but the core around Harrison were men like Powell, Cradock, Llwyd, John Miles (who had created the first Calvinistic Baptist church in Gower), men whom later generations would see as founding fathers of modern Wales. They threw out nearly three hundred clergymen, but the propagating venture got a bad name when the Welsh commission was powerfully infiltrated by Fifth Monarchist firebrands, most notably Vavasour Powell and Morgan Llwyd, who had strong links with Colonel Harrison and his faction in the Army. They were not only seen as perverting the organisation in order to preach socially subversive ideas about the irrelevance of worldly rank and the imminent rule of the saints, but they were unjustly accused of misappropriating the tithes and other revenues of the church in Wales to their own sectarian ends. This was only one symptom of growing polarization between moderate and extreme puritans. The year 1652 saw a spate of radical pamphlets and petitions, tending to the removal of religion from the state’s authority, as well as the rapid expansion of Quakers and other heterodox sects. But it also saw the emergence of a group of moderate Independents led by John Owen who put a set of proposals before the Rump prefiguring the ecclesiastical régime of the Protectorate. They sought to preserve a broad established church, with generous freedom of worship and association outside it.

As a political and religious ‘Independent’, Lord General Cromwell favoured the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in both England and Wales, though he maintained the need for a national Church, supported through tithes, possibly because he himself was a tithe-collector for Ely. Yet Parliament did nothing to achieve this. It was not until February 1653 that the Rump took up the relatively conservative but nonetheless reforming scheme of Owen and his group. But Parliament and the Army remained suspicious of each other, and the Rump showed particular animosity towards Harrison, whom the hostile MPs blamed for the radical actions taken under the auspices of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales. He had lost his place on the Council of State in November 1651, and there was even a move to expel him from parliament. This was not only unjust but also foolish, for though Cromwell did not share Harrison’s fifth monarchist beliefs, there were still strong ties of friendship and mutual trust between the two seasoned soldiers. According to contemporary sources, Cromwell played up to Army radicalism by saying that the Rump intended to support ‘the corrupt interests of the clergy and the lawyers’. So far from reforming the Anglican Church, Parliament aroused resentment by refusing to renew the Commission for Wales, the Army’s favourite instrument for evangelising what had proved to be a politically unreliable country.

Cromwell and the generals also advocated the disappearance of Parliament and the handing of power to a provisional government, in which they themselves would naturally predominate, to supervise and control elections. How otherwise, he asked, could one know …

… whether the next Parliament were not like to consist of all Presbyterians. … Thus, as we apprehended, would have been thrown away the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for it.

When a meeting between officers and MPs on 19 April 1653 ended in deadlock, the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between them to engage in further discussions was breached the next day by backbench MPs who started to rush through a bill for dissolution without meeting the officers’ demand for an interim authority under their control, revealing that parliament intended to control the election of its successors itself. Cromwell felt that his hand had been forced, and intervened with the army just in time to stop the new bill from becoming law. He flew into a rage, by all accounts, declaring to the Commons:

You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament …

So ended the Long Parliament, which had sat for twelve and a half years. Despite the repeated attempts by many to ‘paint’ this as an act of tyranny in the form orchestrated ‘coup d’état’, it is quite clear that what Cromwell was seeking to do was to end the dictatorship of an undemocratic ‘élite’ which was clinging to power and trying to ensure the continued predominance of presbyterian rule both in Westminster and the country at large. His ‘righteous indignation’ stemmed from the manner in which they sought to dissolve themselves in order to ensure that they could rig the subsequent election to this effect. Their betrayal of the compromise reached with the Army took him by surprise.

The ‘Coral Growth’ of the Welsh Independents:

Above: The British Republic, 1649-60.

During the civil wars, new universities were proposed for Bristol, Shrewsbury, Ludlow and Aberystwyth. There were also proposals for an increase in the number of schools and in Wales a great number of new schools were actually started. Despite the negative stereotypes quoted above, according to Laurence Stone, there was a substantial increase in lower-class literacy throughout the revolutionary decades. One of the paradoxes of the period was that of the most radical sectarian groups, the Quakers started almost exclusively in the North of England and the Baptists were at their strongest in Wales. William Erbery claimed that the new English Independency had already been overthrown by the Welsh and that…

… baptised churches have the greatest fall (harvest) from the northern saints in both in England and Wales … John’s spirit is in the North of England and the spirit of Jesus rising in North Wales is for the fall of all the churches in the South. The whirlwind comes from the North. 

From the early 1650s, there was a rapid expansion of Particular Baptists in Wales and of Quakers all over the North of England. In 1654, one of their enemies, Ephraim Pagitt, said of them in 1654 that they were made up out of the dregs of common people … thickest set in the North Parts. Earlier, in 1649, Hugh Peter and others had noticed that the Welsh border counties, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, were ‘ripe for the gospel’ and emissaries were sent from Glamorgan to London asking for preachers. When the Quakers turned south in 1654 they made great progress among ‘that dark people’ of Cornwall, as well as in Wales, and among weavers generally, notably in Gloucestershire. The paradox was further intensified by the fact that such Puritan ministers as there were in the North had mostly been cleared out in the Laudian persecutions of the 1630s, under Richard Neile, Archbishop of York. Those remaining were further reduced in the North and Wales when they fled from their parishes the civil war to escape the Royalist occupation in those territories. As early as 1646 Thomas Edwards had noted that…

… emissaries out of the sectaries’ churches are sent to infect and poison … Yorkshire and those northern parts, … Bristol and Wales. … Sects begin to grow fast … for want of a settlement in discipline.

Traditional southern middle-class Puritanism of the Presbyterian variety had a hold only in isolated areas of the North, and hardly at all in Wales, except for the area of Harley influence along the borders with Worcestershire and Herefordshire. There, Sir Thomas’ planting of godly ministers … backing them with his authority made religion famous in his little corner of the world. Clarendon testifies to the existence of support for the Parliamentary cause among the common people and popular religious movements in North Wales and in the Forest of Dean at the end of the first civil war. This helps to explain why the New Model Army, …

… having marched up and down the kingdom, to do the work of God and the state … met with many Christians who have much gospel-light … in such places where there hath been no gospel-ministry.

Presbyterian Puritanism took little hold of any depth in Wales. The defeat of the Royalist armies and the bankruptcy of the traditional clergy created an even greater spiritual void than in the more traditional Puritan areas of the South and East. Yet the period was one of much greater prosperity in the pasture farming areas of Wales and the borders. This combined with a growth in ‘cottage’ industries as confirmed by a shift in population to the west midland counties of England and the re-building of peasant houses in stone. Contemporaries explained the ‘whoredoms of the Welsh’ by the mountain air: the modern historian more wisely sees them as the natural product of a society which refused to accept English protestant marriage laws.

In these areas, it was the Particular Baptists who initially filled the spiritual gap, though in some parts they were superseded by Quakers, as in the North of England. The more politically radical Fifth Monarchists had only a superficial influence in Wales, being a mainly urban movement, and they had little connection with the Forest of Dean before the 1670s. It seems to have been mainly in response to this radical challenge that the outlying clergy joined in the movement led by Kidderminster’s Richard Baxter to build up voluntary county associations of ministers, a sort of ‘Presbyterianism from below’. The radical Independents of the Cromwellian period in Wales and along the Welsh border included Vavasour Powell, Morgan Lloyd, Walter Cradock and William Erbery, to which might be added Thomas Harrison and Henry Danvers, the Fifth Monarchists from Staffordshire, and the Leveller William Walwyn of Worcestershire.

There was also a broader cultural impact of Wales and the borders upon the ‘more advanced’ south and east. John Donne, the greatest of the metaphysical poets, is separated by just one generation from the Welsh forbear who sent his younger son to London to be apprenticed, and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan were both Welsh. Thomas Traherne came from the Welsh ‘marches’ and in the second rank of border ‘bards’, we might include Lord Herbert of Cherbury and John Davies of Hereford. Inigo Jones, the great architect who re-built St Paul’s before the Great Fire destroyed it completely, was of Welsh descent. Turning to the field of mathematics and science, Robert Recorde, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Matthew Gwynne, Edmund Gunter, Thomas Vaughan and Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, were all Welsh or, like Cromwell himself, of Welsh descent. The cultural consequences of the union of Great Britain, begun by the Tudors, and extended by James I, were further developed through the creation of the New Model Army and its role in the political and religious matters of the mid-seventeenth century.

The Cromwell Coat of Arms (on Oliver’s ascent to Lord Protector in 1653)

The Bible & Radical Puritanism in the Protectorate:

Late twentieth-century historians re-examined the nature of Cromwell’s faith and of his authoritarian regime. In his extensive 2002 book (see below), Austin Woolrych explored the issue of “dictatorship” in depth, arguing that Cromwell was subject to two conflicting forces: his obligation to the army and his desire to achieve a lasting settlement by winning back the confidence of the nation as a whole. He argued that the dictatorial elements of Cromwell’s rule stemmed less from its military origin or the participation of army officers in civil government than from his constant commitment to the interest of the people of God and his conviction that suppressing vice and encouraging virtue constituted the chief end of government. Historians such as John Morrill, Blair Worden, and J. C. Davis have developed this theme, revealing the extent to which Cromwell’s writing and speeches are suffused with biblical references, and arguing that his radical actions were driven by his zeal for godly reformation.

It is difficult to overemphasise the role of the Bible in the radical Puritanism of the first half of the seventeenth century. By mid-century, eschatological prophecy had become a major part of protestant controversial literature, aided especially by the invention of printing. Scholars, including Newton, approached the Bible authorised by King James in 1612 in a scientific spirit and reached a consensus which indicated the advent of remarkable events in the mid-1650s: the fall of Antichrist, the second coming and the millennium. This underlay the confident energy and utopian enthusiasm of the Puritan preachers of the 1640s and ’50s. In this spirit of optimism, they called upon their fellow commoners to fight the Lord’s battles against the Antichrist. Cromwell was chief among these men to take up that calling.

Ordinary Bible-readers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wanted to democratise the mysteries that lay behind the sacred texts of the Scriptures, previously known only to scholars, for themselves. They believed, on good protestant authority, that anyone could understand God’s word if he studied it carefully enough and if the grace of God was in him. Then the Bible could be made to reveal the significance of the events of his own time. Bibles were no longer expensive as book prices then went, 3s 2d in 1649 and later just two shillings. Soldiers in the New Model Army were issued with The Soldier’s Bible, containing key passages which justified their war with the ‘Antichrist’. The Geneva Bible, on which the Authorised Version was based, was published in pocket-size editions so that men could take it to church or the ale-house, as Henry VIII had observed with alarm, to knock down an argument with a text. Those coming to the Bible with no broad historical sense but with high expectations found in it a message of direct contemporary relevance. A young Welshman delighting in the name of ‘Arise’ Evans (a forename probably derived from ‘Rhys’, ‘ap-Rhys’ or, in its anglicised form, ‘Rice’) who arrived in London in 1629, witnessed as to how his attitude to the Bible changed in the decade before the Revolution:

Afore I looked upon the Scripture as a history of things that passed in other countrie, pertaining to other persons; but now I looked upon it as a mystery to be opened at this time, belonging also to us.

This attitude was, no doubt, shared by many of the victims of economic and political crisis who turned to the Bible for guidance in that perplexing period. The 1640s and ’50s were indeed the great age of ‘mechanic preachers’, laymen like the Quakers George Fox and James Nayler, who led a procession into Bristol in 1656 symbolically riding on an ass, and the ex-soldier and Baptist John Bunyan, interpreting the Bible according to their own untutored ‘inner lights’ with all the excitement and assurance of a new discovery. Many Quaker leaders were also ex-soldiers, like James Nayler, and some had been dismissed from the Army in the 1650s for disciplinary reasons, but others seem not to have found military service compatible with their values. Quakers also continued to serve in the Navy. George Fox was offered a commission in 1651. In his Journal he recorded that he refused it on pacifist grounds, but in 1657 he urged ‘the inferior offices and soldiers’ of the Army on to conquer Rome. After 1658 he was more cautious, but as late as 1660 a leading south Welsh Quaker asked Fox whether Quakers were free to serve in the Army. The first official declaration of absolute pacifism was made by the Society of Friends in January 1661, after a number of Quakers had been arrested in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Fifth Monarchist Revolt. It was intended to protect them against charges of sedition, but also marks the beginning of refusal among them to accept civil or military offices. However, it is more likely that, in the previous decade, the early refusals of Fox and others sprang from political objections to the government of the Commonwealth rather than from pacifist principles. In fact, in 1659, when the political situation was