‘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 more to their liking, many Quakers re-enlisted in the Army. As late as 1685, Quakers are said to have turned out with their ‘pitchforks’ in the west country to join Monmouth’s rebellion.

The Growth of Quakerism in Wales & the West of England – The Strange Case of Dorcas Erbery:

The coral growth of Quakerism, especially in Wales and the Western Counties of England, from Cumberland to Cornwall, was largely the product of the nurturing of lay-preaching in the radical regiments of the New Model Army. These soldier-preachers, like Nayler, took it for granted that fellow Quakers had supported and, in most cases, fought for Parliament in the civil wars. George Fox made similar assumptions, though by the mid-1650s he was resisting James Nayler’s ‘simple teaching’ and writing to Nayler that his style of mechanic preaching had made him a shelter for the unclean spirits, the beasts of the field; they made thee their refuge. The controversy led to disunity, as elsewhere, while Nayler himself remained silent. Nayler was born in the Yorkshire village of West Ardsley, near Wakefield in 1618, where he followed his father’s occupation of a ‘husbandman’ before moving into the nearby town. In 1643 he had joined the Parliamentary Army and served seven years in a foot regiment before becoming quartermaster in Lambert’s Regiment of Horse, taking part in the third civil war, including the battles of Dunbar and Worcester.

In the summer of 1656, along with a number of other Quakers, Nayler was imprisoned in Exeter Jail. Amongst these were a number of women, including Dorcas Erbery, the daughter of an “honest minister” in Wales, probably William Erbery. One of the women died, and when Dorcas, some days later, fell into a prolonged faint, the excited women about her declared that she was also dead. Nayler was called to see the lifeless body and laid his hands upon it, and at his touch, the girl revived and stood up. That was sufficient to prove to his followers that he was Christ, though he himself never claimed this, contrary to the charges made against him later that year. When the Bristol magistrates quoted from the letters found in his pockets, one of which referred to him, from John’s Gospel, as the Lamb of God, in whom the hope of Israel stands, and asked him whether he was himself that Lamb, he responded:

If I were not his Lamb, I should not be thus sought for to be devoured. The hope of Israel stands in the righteousness of the Father in whomsoever it is.

Such a reply scarcely seemed to merit imprisonment, and it may be that if Nayler’s followers had not shown such an uncompromising spirit in their hero-worship he would have been allowed to go free. Martha Simmonds and Dorcas Erbery both stoutly maintained that he was indeed Jesus. No cross-examination could shake Dorcas from her belief that Nayler had raised her to life after she had been dead two days. Under these circumstances, a seventeenth-century Bench had no alternative but to send them back to jail. The two male Quakers who had played a modest part in the demonstration in the courthouse, which had included continual shouting of ‘hosanna’, were sent home without charge and attended the Friends’ meeting later that day. Nayler and his companions were not completely disowned by the Bristol Quakers, and a local Quaker apothecary brought them supplies and “comforts” before Nayler was sent to Westminster to answer the charge of ‘blasphemy’ before Parliament. But a note from Thomas Simmonds, the printer, to his wife Martha, one of the women involved, concludes with an affectionate but somewhat bantering strain:

Dear heart, my love is to thee and to J.N. and to J.S. and H.S. But this I could not but write to warn you that you stand single to the Lord and not believe every sprit. Your work is soon to come to an end: part of the army that fell at Burford was your figure.

The reference to Burford is to Cromwell’s suppression of the Leveller mutiny in the Army of 1649 when the mutineers were locked in Burford Church and a number of them were shot. This ‘turning point’ in the Revolution was clearly still fresh in many minds, and the reference to it may also point to the quarrel between Nayler and Fox, whose ‘authority’ over the movement he continued to dispute. When one of Fox’s letters to him was used in evidence against Nayler in court, the latter had called his erstwhile leader a liar and firebrand of hell, which must have alarmed the local Quakers who were present and given them a measure of his alienation from Fox’s leadership. Nayler’s ‘excitable women followers’ were also bitterly critical of Fox, but Nayler had refused to restrain them at Fox’s request, made in a letter of September 1656, possibly the letter produced in court. Nayler later justified his refusal by saying that he did not wish to quench whatever was ‘of God’ in what they said and did. The modern-day Quaker writer, John Lampen, has stated (1981) that:

It has been generally assumed that at the time he did not have the emotional strength to withstand their influence, and this is borne out by contemporary descriptions of his passive, exhausted demeanor. However he was still justifying his behaviour by appealing to divine guidance, and so implicitly challenging Fox’s spiritual insight.

Other friends expected Fox to settle the issue by his personal authority. In the unity so often felt at the start of a great venture, they had not yet needed to discover ways of reconciling different perceptions of the Truth, and Nayler was considered by many contemporaries to be their most notable preacher, even if Fox was the chief pastor of their flock. The over-enthusiastic atmosphere which developed around Nayler was created by men as well as women. When one man wrote to him, Thy name shall be no more James Nayler, but Jesus, he put it straight in his pocket, overcome by fear, intending no-one to see it, as he could not own its contents, but he did not, as far as we know, reprove the sender. Fox was not without fault in their quarrel. When the two men eventually met, Nayler went to kiss Fox on the head, but Fox recoiled, instead offering him his foot to kiss. However, Fox refused to publish a statement condemning Nayler, but he did repudiate some of his ‘followers’ including Martha Simmonds, for their lies and slanders. Beneath the inter-personal conflict lay a fundamental issue as to whether the ‘Guidance within’ which was claimed by individual Quakers could be viewed as an infallible spirit. Fox could see in Nayler the possibility of unchecked individualism diverging from the divine illumination in which he believed. Following Nayler’s release from prison, the two were finally reconciled in 1659 shortly before his death. Early Friends believed that one of the ‘offices’ of Christ was judgment and Fox could assert that he did not judge Nayler himself but ‘set the Power of God over him’, while Nayler could claim that he felt this ‘inward judgment’ while in prison and it saved him.

In this context, it is quite clear that whatever interpretation Nayler’s followers might have placed upon their actions, he regarded himself simply as a symbol of the Christ whom they all worshipped, and that the ‘triumphal’ entry into the city on 24 October 1656 was simply a sign of his second coming. Viewed in this light, the episode falls into line with the frequent going naked for a sign and the other revivals of symbolism from the Bible practised by primitive Quakers, Baptists and other sects. The rift between the supporters of George Fox and those of James Nayler that had extended throughout the movement, and far into Wales, was eventually healed, and it showed that it was not as vulnerable as its enemies had hoped. But treachery lurked in the ‘inner light’. In a time of defeat, when the wave of revolution was ebbing, the inner voice became quietest and pacifist. This voice only was recognised by others as God’s. God was no longer served by the extravagant gesture, whether Nayler’s entry into Bristol or the blasphemy of the Ranters. Once the group decided this way, all the pressures were in the direction of accepting modes of expression not too shocking to the society in which men had to live and earn their living. In 1656, John Lewis urged the religious radicals in Wales not to go too fast or too far in inveighing against old customs and against the superstitious Welsh regard for church buildings.

When Nayler was pilloried for his ‘blasphemy’ in London at Christmas (pictured above), the three women prisoners, including Dorcas Erbery, were also present, and in what was (no doubt) intended as another ‘acted parable’, took their seat at the foot of the pillory in imitation of the women at the crucifixion of Christ. Dorcas and the others who had been imprisoned with Nayler in Exeter and Bristol remained in prison until the following May. In February, they attended a service at Westminster Abbey, which was presumably part of their punishment. The following is from a contemporary account in Mercurius Politicus:

This day being the Lord’s day, the persons called Quakers who were brought from Bristol with James Nayler, remaining yet undischarged under the custody of the Sergeant at Arms, but now somewhat altered in their carriage, went to the Abbey morning and afternoon, where they gave ear civilly and attentively to the sermons of Mr. John Rowe, an eminent preacher; whose spritual doctrine so far wrought upon them that they intend to hear him again – which gives hopes that they may be rectified in their judgment.

However, it does not appear that Dorcas Erbery’s judgment was so completely rectified as was supposed, for in two years from this date she was again in prison in Bristol, …

… with many others … for preaching and declaring the truth to the people in the public places of resort and Concourse, a Duty which they esteemed themselves under an indispensable necessity of performing.

The Welsh Prophet, ‘Arise’ Evans:

‘Arise’ (Rhys) Evans spoke of his own humble origins with reference to the apostles:

I am as the Paul of this time. … he was a mechanic, a tent maker. Acts 18:3. I am a tailor.

Evans was born about 1607 in Llangelynnin parish  (near Barmouth) and was apprenticed to a tailor at Wrexham. While living in Wales he had seen visions and prophetic dreams which were accentuated when he went to London in 1629. In London, he made vain efforts to warn Charles I of perceived dangers but succeeded in telling the Earl of Essex to his face of his future promotions. Evans also seems to have suffered from mental illness. He hung around Charles I’s court for days on end, in order to deliver his message from God to the King announcing that he and his kingdom were to be destroyed. Meanwhile, bishops ran away at the sight of him, and the royal Secretary of State asked for the prayers of ‘God’s secretary’. In the 1640s, Evans got a brief spell in the Bridewell for telling the City’s Deputy Recorder that he, Arise Evans, was the Lord his God. Later, he called upon Oliver Cromwell and stayed to midnight: he pestered the Council of State to restore the son of the King whom they had executed, and republican officers defended him in long arguments at Whitehall.

But the Commonwealth did not even imprison him as Charles and the Deputy Recorder had done. As long as the ‘imbecile’ had no disciples, he or she was allowed a great deal of latitude. Prophets were often tolerated because they could be used to further the political purposes of powerful men, as Arise Evans may have been. In 1653, indeed, he gave a forecast of the course of events in England following Cromwell’s death that came remarkably near the truth. His Narrations, Voices from Heaven, and Echoes of those Voices contain weird and impossible extravagances, but there are passing references of great interest, notably to John Jones (1597 – 1660) the regicide’s acquaintance with the lake of Tal-y-Llyn, to Christopher Love speaking to him in Welsh, to the Welsh connections of Oliver Cromwell. In the freer circumstances of the 1640s and ’50s, most so-called ‘mad’ people appear to have been political radicals. A mental breakdown could be seen as a form of social protest or at least a reaction to intolerable social conditions: those who break down, like Arise Evans, may, in reality, be truly sane. This is certainly an explanation to bear in mind when considering those radicals often dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe’.

As William Dell of ‘the Apostles’ claimed, Poor, illiterate, mechanic men, turned the world upside down. The effort to grasp new truths, truths which would turn the world upside down, may have been too much for men like Arise Evans. The Bible was the accepted source of all true knowledge. Men as different as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Gerard Winstanley, the ‘Digger’ from Wigan, both illustrated from the Bible conclusions at which they had arrived by rational means. Simpler men like Arise Evans believed the Bible to be divinely inspired and applied its texts directly to problems of their own world and time, with no idea of the difficulties of translation, nor of the historical understanding required to do so. So Evans thought that Revelation 8 and 11 gave an account of the civil war, that chapters 8 and 9 of Amos set down all that came to pass since the beginning of the Long Parliament, and that in Amos 9:1, the lintel of the door, which is to be smitten that the posts may shake, must refer to Speaker Lenthall. As Christopher Hill pointed out, unlike the Puritan divines who had cited the Bible against bishops and tithes, …

The Evanses studied it very carefully, if less skilfully, in order to understand and so be able to control what was going to happen.

Evans became interested in the multifarious sects that flourished under the relatively liberty of the late 1640s, opposing most of them, especially the tenets of the Fifth Monarchists. In 1649, he had a vision in which he went through France to Rome, where a voice came to me saying, “So far as thou art come, so far shall Cromwell come”. But Evans made a distinction between the ‘history’ and the ‘mystery’ of the Bible, as did William Erbery, who in his Testimony recalled that a chief one of the Army would … usually say that the flesh of Christ and the letter of scripture were the two great idols of Antichrist.

Propagating the Gospel & Protecting the State – Vavasour Powell & Oliver Cromwell:

According to Welsh historian, A. H. Dodd (1957), the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel became ‘the real government of Wales’. Those who administered Wales could not afford to alienate Baptist or Quaker missionaries, many of whom were ex-New Model Army soldiers and chaplains, who still, in the years 1651-53, continued to support the Parliamentary cause. J.P.s protected the preachers as a lesser evil than papists or pagans. The Committee’s ‘Approvers’, dominated by republican intransigents, created the first state schools, fifty-nine of them, open to both sexes and offering Latin and Greek, but trying to preach regeneration to the Welsh in English, although most sermons had been delivered in Welsh since the publication of Bishop Morgan’s Welsh Bible in 1588, which may help to explain why many Independent English preachers failed to ‘connect’ with their Welsh congregations. They had even more trouble finding replacements for the ministers. In came the itinerants and in came men from the hitherto invisible classes, to battle forward, often in the gales of hostility. Vavasour Powell, travelled a hundred miles a week, preaching in two or three places a day. He was probably the outstanding Welshman of his time, a brilliant and fearless man not afraid to address A Word for God … against Wickedness in High Places to Cromwell himself. Converts sprouted wherever he spoke, especially in the uplands of the south and the border. In north Wales, Morgan Llwyd, a writer of powerful Welsh classics and a man of mystical temper, sent John ap John of Ruabon to contact George Fox to gain his help in starting an often anarchic movement of Welsh Quakers, which may be from where Dorcas Erbery, Nayler’s ‘prophetess’ sprang. George Fox, on his own mission, found God raising up a people around Cader Idris in mid-Wales in 1657. Cromwell himself said that ‘God had kindled a seed’ in Wales. As Presbyterians penetrated Flintshire, Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers multiplied along the eastern border and also began to plant in the west.

As Protector, Cromwell sought to act as the guarantor of an accepted constitution while elected assemblies came and went, to check the evident tendency of an all-powerful single-chamber parliament to veer towards elective dictatorship and to secure for the executive a degree of independence and separation from the legislature. As Protector, he became a strong believer in the separation of powers. But he didn’t find it easy to pursue a moderating course. It brought him into conflict with the influential millenarian preachers in London, including Christopher Feake, Walter Cradock, Vavasour Powell and John Goodwin, who all had a considerable following in the Army. The open hostility of many Rumpers towards army officers did not help the situation. Skippon, clearly a moderate, was dropped from the Council of State at the same time as Harrison, leaving the army almost insultingly under-represented.

The Power & the Glory:

In the Interregnum, the Councils of in the North and in Wales, created by the Tudors, were abolished, the local power of the feudal aristocracy curtailed, and the authority of Whitehall and ‘London’ extended over the whole of the two countries. It seemed obvious to historians like Christopher Hill that the Revolution established a much greater unity among the regions of England, and indeed of the three kingdoms and the principality. But contemporaries worried about centrifugal tendencies. They were no doubt influenced by the examples of the Netherlands, where the republic’s unity derived mainly from the dominance of Holland, while the other provinces clung onto their independence, often with paralysing effects on policy. They were also disturbed by the case of Switzerland, where protestant and Catholic cantons were at war, which Cromwell himself insisted was brought on by external papist intervention. In the early 1650s, England had nearly intervened in the French wars of religion, an intervention which might have created a breakaway republic in the south-west. There were also revolts from Spanish sovereignty of Portugal, Catalonia and Naples, and Cossack risings in Russia and Poland.

John Lilburne (pictured above) became a Quaker after retiring from the Army in the 1650s. The radical ‘Levellers’ proposed a great deal of decentralisation for England, including local courts at York, and greater county autonomy. William Walwyn, one of their leaders, said that the Swiss cantons were nearest to his ideal. In 1647, Cromwell had argued against such constitutional projects:

Would it not make England like Switzerland, one canton of the Swiss against another, and one county against another? And what would that produce but an absolute desolation in the nation?

By the time the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales Act lapsed in 1653, the enterprise had spilt out to produce a myriad of sects and creeds, many like the ranters or Anabaptists, often called ‘Quakers’. Such men, rivalling even the most radical Baptists, offered a serious threat to tithes and all established order. They were appearing in many places, from Dolgellau to the Vale of Glamorgan. As Cromwell made himself Lord Protector, the Welsh Republicans moved into opposition. Vavasour Powell tried to organise insurrection in Wales and Ireland. The Blackfriars’ fulminators were also blasting the parliament, the council, the army, and everyone in power in scurrilous terms, and by late November 1653, they too were concentrating their shafts upon Cromwell himself, calling him the man of sin, the old dragon, and many other scripture ill names. Harrison was reportedly railing against him every day and the Anglo-Dutch peace negotiations, and there were allegations that he and his party were planning to take over the command of the army. He was certainly capable of seriously dividing it, and his favourite preachers were, according to Woolrych, …

… aspersing the loyal majority of its officers as janissaries and pensioners of Babylon, corrupted by wealth and power.

Vavasour Powell, in particular, told the generals that:

… that the Spirit of God had departed from them; that heretofore they had been precious and excellent men, but that their parks, and new houses, and gallant wives had choked them up.

At Sunday service on 18 December, he denounced the ‘Lord Protector’ from the pulpit, calling him a perjured villain, leading to his imprisonment, but the Fifth Monarchist’s excesses were losing them such public sympathy as they still commanded, and they ceased to be a serious danger when they lost their seats of power, both at Westminster and in the Army. Harrison was quietly cashiered when he refused to give any assurance that he would support the Protectorate, but only two or three other officers followed him in resigning their commissions. Not so long ago it was customary to account for this by portraying the Protectorate over-simply as a conservative reaction, but this was at best a half-truth. At least in its earlier years, it showed a stronger impulse to reform than the Rump had done. Although Cromwell was at heart a constitutionalist, with a strong respect for parliament as an institution, he still believed that he had a higher duty to promote what he called the interest of the people of God than to bow to the wishes of an unregenerate majority. And while he was conservative to the extent of preserving a national church and respecting the rights of tithe-holders, he upheld broader religious liberty than any elected parliament did in his lifetime. During the early weeks of the Protectorate, the first concern was to secure it against those, mainly the Fifth Monarchists, who were publicly denying its legality, prophesying its early fall and inciting their flocks to disobey it. Feake and Powell were against it again immediately after their early release and were consequently rearrested, though Powell escaped to Wales.

Restoration, Revolution & Toleration:

As the system started to come apart, there was a revival of the old alliance of royalist moderates and Presbyterians to engineer the restoration of Charles II. Independents and Baptists, far more numerous in Wales than the Presbyterians, caught the first full blast of repression. Nearly a hundred and twenty ministers were thrown out of their livings and subjected to harsh controls. In December 1656, the Fifth Monarchists in south Wales seemed to have followed Morgan Llwyd and Vavasour Powell in renouncing militancy and from current plans for a rising. The Quakers were pursued like mad dogs and Vavasour Powell died in jail. Whole communities braved the horrible Atlantic crossings to create pioneer settlements in ‘the New World’. In the 1670s, as Charles ‘flirted’ with the Dissenters in order to secure toleration for Catholics, moderates in Wales tended to drift back towards the old Parliamentarians and away from the radical puritans. The Welsh Trust, an educational enterprise of Puritan temper which allied moderate Dissenters and Anglicans in 1672 when Charles issued his Indulgence, came to serve as an opposition to the court. When the indulgence ended within a year, to be replaced by the Test Act excluding non-Anglicans from office. At the time of the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678-79, there was a violent incident in southern Wales when the Catholic seminary Cwm was raided and sacked, priests were thrown into jail and there was heavy confiscation. Four Welsh priests, two of whom were Jesuits, were hanged in savage persecution.

In 1679, eleven of the twenty-seven Welsh MPs voted for the Exclusion of James II. In these circumstances, many of the old Roundheads came bubbling back to the surface and there was a return of the Quakers and Vavasour Powell’s radicals. In consequence, there was a sharp reaction in the 1680s, a massive renewal of persecution of Dissenters, and major further emigrations to Holland and America. In ‘matters of religion’, therefore, the monopoly of the national church had been broken, and while the House of Commons remained hostile to the idea of religious toleration, nonconformity shook off its revolutionary political associations and, despite continuing persecution, proved that it had come to stay. Those who remained survived through the indulgences offered by Charles II and James II until at the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they won a limited but essential measure of toleration in the Toleration Act of 1689 recognised these facts. Presbyterianism and Congregationalism were not included in the Anglican church, but that church was subjected to Parliament and government. The Puritan Revolution within the state church may have been defeated by 1660, but the Great Britain of the succeeding two centuries was unique among the great powers of Europe for the strength of its evangelical tradition and its toleration of diverse traditions.

Not until 1685 was some degree of calm restored to Welsh politics with a restoration of Toryism among the gentry classes. It was only after 1688 that governments came to assume that ‘trade must be the principal interest of England’, and that warfare should be confined to supporting this objective through its Navy. Even Charles II in 1680 could not be persuaded of this. By then, Parliament controlled foreign policy, and used the newly mobilised financial resources of the country, through aggressive use of sea power, to protect and expand the trade of a unified empire. The anti-Dutch policy which had continued to be pursued by the pro-Hapsburg Stuart Kings was replaced by the policy of colonial expansion into the western hemisphere, first against Spain and then against the French. It enjoyed more support among the gentry and gradually won over a majority in the House of Commons as Dutch power declined and French power increased.

England itself had by then had been united under the dominance of the London market; separate courts no longer governed Wales and the North. Therefore, ‘cantonisation’ was no longer a danger. William III’s political and economic subjugation of Ireland was thoroughly Cromwellian and complete: the Union with Scotland in 1707 was on the same lines as that of 1652-60. A union of crowns became a union of peoples, a significant punctuation point in the process which made the new and far more real Great Britain into the greatest merchant empire in the world. England, Wales and Scotland emerged from the seventeenth-century crisis geared to the new world of mercantilism and colonialism. Bristol, pictured above in the early eighteenth century, quickly grew as Britain’s most important port, with its ‘Welsh Backs’ for traders from across the Severn estuary. The Atlantic trade was becoming more important than the trade of the East Anglian ports with the continent and Wales, though still controlled by squires, was becoming an important sector of an Atlantic empire and a British nation.

Sources:

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

Gwyn A. Williams (1985), When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Christopher Hill (1970), God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.

Christopher Hill (1984), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books.

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

Gunpowder: viewers shocked by violent scenes in BBC drama

Above: Kit Harington, Liv Tyler and Sian Webber in Gunpowder. ‘This was a century of fierce religious conflict which was defined by conflict wrought by the competing powers of state battling for supremacy.’ Photograph: Robert Viglaski/BBC / Kudos.

The following article appeared in The Guardian last week, and it not only got me thinking about my favourite period in British and European history, one which had me dressing up as a Roundhead army chaplain in the Sealed Knot, but also researching into both my own ancestors from that period and those of ‘Kit Harington’. Just as it’s quite likely that my own ancestors were on both sides of the Gunpowder Rebellion, as it should more properly be called, it is certain that this was the case with those of the now famous actor. As a historical event, it is not unsurprising that the ‘Plot’ should be seen as a precursor to the full-scale civil wars which were to dominate the middle years of the century both in Britain and on the continent, but the nature of the actual and potential violence involved was more reminiscent of the previous century than it was of the battles, sieges and skirmishes which provided the context for the fratricide of the new one. Life in the 1600s remained as ‘nasty, brutal and short’ as it had done in the 1500s, but for most of the population this was due to the virulence of pestilences in Britain, whereas in Tudor times many had lived in terror of the violence of the state towards the adherents of the Catholic cause on the one hand, or Protestantism on the other. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had given both sides the right to impose their faith on the other through the rulers of the cities and states in which they lived. Civilian Catholics were massacred in the North of England, the Huguenots were massacred on St Bartholemew’s Day 1572 in France and thereafter ‘harried out of the land’ by Louis XIV, and the Dutch fought a guerilla war against the Spanish Empire’s Counter-Reforming zeal. In all of this, torture and the torch were the main weapons of oppression of both individuals and whole communities. Against this backcloth, plots and counter-plots became the order of the day in Elizabeth’s reign. Admittedly, had the 1605 Plot succeeded in blowing up the entire Establishment at Westminster, it would have dwarfed even the Spanish Armada in the scale of its attempt to restore Britain to Catholic Christendom, but in its abject failure it mirrored the Earl of Essex’s ‘Rebellion’ against Queen Elizabeth of four years earlier.

When battles and skirmishes are re-enacted, the attempt to portray the nature and extent of the violence on TV is often shielded from the viewer by the rapid repetition with which it occurs, together with the sheer scale of the events depicted. Massacres of baggage trains are beginning to be shown, but generally the violence is seen as occurring between armed forces roughly equal in their power of arms. Despite this, I was recently reminded of the importance of the unsentimental portrayal of violence in children’s literature from this period, in reading Captain Maryat’s Children of the New Forest to my eleven-year-old son. Maryat made no attempt to shield his young readers from the results of violent acts on the individual.  To depict the more personal and individual violence inflicted by powerful states in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in massacres and executions, it is the inequality of power which needs to be depicted. That is one reason why I find the reaction to violent ‘re-enactments’ and representations of historical realities so surprising, especially when they come from historians.

Unnecessarily gruesome and brutal”, “sickening” and “gore-filled” are just some of the ways Kit Harington’s new BBC series, Gunpowder, has been described by viewers and critics.

The series follows the events of the plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605 and, during the first episode, we saw a Catholic woman crushed to death as punishment for her faith, and a Jesuit priest hanged, drawn and quartered. We saw the blood. We saw the guts. We saw the pain. Unsurprisingly, some viewers were shocked, and have argued that the explicit violence was gratuitous and too much for a Saturday night TV show.

But when it comes to history on television, too often the brutal reality of everyday life is brushed under the sumptuous carpets of romantic period dramas… Dramas such as Gunpowder (and, indeed, ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Harlots’) provide a crucial insight into a violent past that modern Brits need to confront.

What’s more, it is only by understanding this past that we can begin to fully understand the religious persecutions of our history and the country we live in today. That Gunpowder is shockingly violent is undeniable, but what is also undeniable is that it provides an authentic glimpse into the real, raw world that 17th-century people had to endure.

Actually, another reason for my surprise at the way some critics have reacted, is that ‘it’s all been done before’. There was an excellent historical drama on the Plot in 2005 (with Robert Carlyle as James I) which also contained graphic violence, including the gruesome execution of Jesuit priests. What was most interesting, however, was the way in which James I’s change of policy in reviving the more barbaric forms of execution was justified with reference to the Jesuit belief that martyrdom would result in them going straight to heaven, without passing through purgatory. In the film, both James and his wife, Anne of Denmark, agree that only a slow and agonising death would act as a deterrence. Although the violent solution may be very much of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, there is little doubt that the failure of deterrence used by powerful but democratic states today leaves them vulnerable to terrorism on a small-scale, as well as on a larger one. Yet we are critical when counter-terrorist forces use even discriminatory violence to ‘take out’ suspect terrorists ‘in theatre’ in order to prevent them from mounting further attacks and to deter others from joining the ‘jihadis’.

Arguably, the gruesome death of my own ancestors, the Wintour brothers, made them more central to the Plot as it occurred than even Catesby, whom they recruited as a ‘celebrity’ leader, though he himself was a recent convert to Catholicism. In the end, it was the brothers, from a long line of noble and gentlemen recusants, degraded through persecution, who paid for their choice and his mistakes by facing the Scaffold, since both ‘financiers’, Catesby and Percy, were killed (allegedly by the same musket-ball) at the siege at Holbeach. It was the gruesome death of two brothers with the right to wear Plantagenet coats of arms, which finally terrorised the Catholic gentry of the Midlands into submission and put an end to the Plantaganet plotting which had continued since their defeat at Stoke Field in 1487. Elizabeth’s policy of fines and imprisonment had failed, hence the reintroduction of more barbaric methods of torture and execution. I shall be interested to see how well this dilemma is portrayed in this series, or whether it simply succeeds in substituting one ‘celebrity’, Guy Fawkes, for another, Robert Catesby.

Perhaps Kit Harington might have made his drama less violent, and at the same time more interesting, by paying homage to the other side of his family, who were just as involved in the events of 1603-5 as the Catesbys and the Wintours. In addition to being a direct descendant of Robert Catesby through his mother, from whose maiden name he acquired his middle name, Catesby, Christopher  (or ‘Kit’ from Shakespeare’s contemporary playwright, Christopher Marlowe) Harington is directly descended through his paternal grandfather,  Sir Richard Harington, 14th baronet, to the sixteenth century Haringtons, to Sir James Harington of Exton, Rutland and his sons. Sir John Harington, created 1st baronet Exton at the coronation of James I, was a close member of the courts of both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Sir James Harington, the third son, became 1st baronet of Ridlington, from whom Kit Harington’s father is directly descended.

Sir John Harington became guardian and tutor to the King’s daughter, Elizabeth, on whom the Midland Rebellion centred, and who was spirited away to the walled city of Coventry from Harington’s home at nearby Coombe Abbey on the night the plot in London was ‘discovered’ by the King and Cecil. This followed their receipt of the anonymous warning letter,  which both Catesby and Percy claimed to have been written to Lord Monteagle by Francis Tresham, the thirteenth plotter. But Tresham pleaded his innocence, and recent evidence suggests that the letter have been written by Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, Thomas Percy’s own cousin and patron. He was also the man most likely to become Elizabeth’s Protector, had the Plot succeeded. Both Thomas and Henry had been frequent guests at Coombe Abbey, so both would have known the young princess well. In an extraordinary act of bravado Catesby had planned to go hunting with James just before the opening of Parliament, but was warned of the ‘betrayal’ by Monteagle’s servant.

Harington accompanied the Earl of Warwick, Fulke Greville, in his pursuit and besieging of the rebels at Holbeach House. He had himself been made High Sheriff of Rutland under Elizabeth and was Greville’s Deputy Lieutenant in Warwickshire. Sir John had acquired Coombe Abbey on his marriage to Anne Kelway. Though the Haringtons were a Rutland family, they claimed descent from the Scottish Bruces, hence their closeness to the royal family. Harington had accompanied Mary Queen of Scots on her progress from Staffordshire to Fotheringay in Northamptonshire, and his wife attended on Anne of Denmark, James’ Queen consort, during her stay in Edinburgh, as well as on the couple’s progress to London in the spring of 1603. The Princess Elizabeth broke her journey to attend the coronation two months later, and had been just seven years of age when her new governor brought her to live at Coombe Abbey in October. It remained her chief place of residence between 1603 and 1608. There she formed a close friendship with Harington’s niece, Ann Dudley. It is said that they could often be seen going off for walks in the nearby woods, or sitting together in the beautiful formal gardens that immediately surrounded the house.

The second baronet Exton, John Harington, born at Coombe in 1592, was a close friend and companion of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, on 5 January 1604 he was created, along with The Duke of York and others, a Knight of the Bath. In September he went a foreign tour with John Tovey, a master of the free school at Guildford, who later became Elizabeth’s Tutor and Chaplain during her time at Coombe, when he was master of the Free School in Coventry. While abroad, young John corresponded in French and Latin with Prince Henry. After seven weeks in the Low Countries, where he visited the universities, courts of three princes, and military fortifications, he went to Italy in 1608. He wrote from Venice (28 May 1609) announcing his intention of returning through France to spend the rest of his life with his royal friend. Henry’s death (6 November 1612) greatly grieved him, as it did his sister (I have written about their sibling relationship elsewhere on this site). The following year, Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine and Lord Harington accompanied her to the Electoral Palatinate, but died at Worms, Germany on his way home in 1613. After his death his estate at Exton was sold to pay his creditors, so the young Lord Harington had only the Coombe estate to fall back on. Aged 21, he never recovered from the debts his father had incurred in providing royal hospitality, and continued to grieve deeply for Prince Henry. He died in 1614 and was buried at Exton with an eulogy from John Donne.

Not only did Coombe host Prince Henry on an occasional basis, in addition to the Princess, but the Harington’s second home also provided lodging to several Scottish and English noblemen, including two Percies, a Devereux, a Hume and a Bruce. The combined households of the Prince and Princess numbered 141 above and 85 below stairs. At one point, Lord Harington was entertaining no fewer than 426 guests at the Abbey, of whom 207 were in receipt of salaries and a further 97 were employed by the architect Inigo Jones, who had been hired to carry out renovations at this time.

Above: Elizabeth Stuart, aged 7 (1603, at Coombe?)

 

Right: Elizabeth, aged 10 (1606)

 

It may have been Thomas Percy’s frequent visits to Coombe which led to the plot to capture the royal princess. The rebels may have hoped that Prince Henry would have been there too. He was only two years older than Elizabeth in 1605, aged 11. If he was in the House of Lords with his father, as Prince of Wales, he would lose his life. Thomas Percy, as a member of the royal household, was trying to find out what the plans were, but seems not to have succeeded in doing so before the fuse was about be lit. He visited his cousin on 4th November, to find out how much Northumberland, and perhaps others, knew about the plot. The younger of James’ sons, Prince Charles, was quite a sickly child, and was not expected to long outlive his brother, although he was second in line before Elizabeth. Percy had visited him on 1 November to try to ascertain his whereabouts on 5th.

It therefore seemed to be a lower-risk strategy to kidnap Elizabeth from her country residence than to attempt to smuggle Charles out of his rooms in Whitehall, where he would have been surrounded by guards. In any case, the people would surely warm to a talented young woman as Queen who, even at the age of seven, was displaying all the skills of her illustrious aunt and namesake, and James had probably not yet fixed the succession in any case.

At Allhallowtide on 31 October, 1603, Catesby had sent for his cousin Thomas Wintour, who was at Huddington Court in Worcestershire with his brother Robert. As descendents of both the Golafre and Huddington families, they were entitled to wear the baronial coats of arms of both families. Thomas was educated as a lawyer and had fought for England in the Low Countries, but in 1600 had converted to Catholicism. Following the Earl of Essex’s failed rebellion, he had travelled to Spain to raise support for English Catholics, a mission which the authorities would later describe as comprising part of a ‘Spanish Treason’. Although Thomas declined his invitation, Catesby again invited him in February the next year. They were related through the wealthy recusant Throckmorton family of Coughton Court in Warwickshire, which was to feature in the plot. When Wintour responded to the summons he found his cousin with the swordsman John Wright. Catesby told him of his plan to kill the king and his government by blowing up “the Parliament howse with Gunpowder … in that place have they done us all the mischiefe, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.” Wintour at first objected to his cousin’s scheme, but Catesby, who said that “the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy”, won him over.

Despite Catholic Spain’s moves toward diplomacy with England, Catesby still harboured hopes of foreign support and a peaceful solution. Wintour therefore returned to the continent, where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the affable Constable of Castille to press for good terms for English Catholics in forthcoming peace negotiations. He then turned to Sir William Stanley, an English Catholic and veteran commander who had switched sides from England to Spain, and the exiled Welsh spy Hugh Owen; both cast doubt on the plotters’ chances of receiving Spanish support. Owen did, however, introduce Wintour to Guy Fawkes, whose name Catesby had already supplied as “a confidant gentleman” who might enter their ranks. Fawkes was a devout English Catholic who had travelled to the continent to fight for Spain in the Dutch War of Independence. Wintour told him of their plan to “doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott”, and thus in April 1604 the two men returned home. Wintour told Catesby that despite positive noises from the Spanish, he feared that they “the deeds would nott answere”. This was a response that in Nicholls’s opinion came as no surprise to Catesby, who wanted and expected nothing less.

A contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators, by Crispijn van de Passe; Catesby is second from the right.

Early in June 1605, Catesby met the principal Jesuit in England, Father Henry Garnet, on Thames Street in London. While discussing the war in Flanders, Catesby asked about the morality of “killing innocents”, in other words, the royal children who would be at the state opening of Parliament. This continued to prick the consciences of the plotters right up until 4th November, which is why they sought opportunities to kidnap all three of the children. It is also notable that this is what sets them apart from more recent terrorists, who have no such moral qualms in sacrificing children to their cause. Garnet said that such actions could often be excused, but according to his own account during a second meeting in July he showed Catesby a letter from the pope which forbade rebellion anyway. Catesby replied, “Whatever I mean to do, if the Pope knew, he would not hinder for the general good of our country.” Father Garnet’s protestations prompted Catesby’s next reply, “I am not bound to take knowledge by you of the Pope’s will.”Soon after, Father Tesimond told Father Garnet that, while taking Catesby’s confession, he had learned of the plot. Father Garnet met with Catesby a third time on 24 July at White Webbs in Enfield Chase, the home of Catesby’s wealthy relative Anne Vaux, and a house long suspected by the government of harbouring Jesuit priests. Without acknowledging that he was aware of the precise nature of the plot, the priest tried in vain to dissuade Catesby from his course.

At the beginning of November, as Fawkes made a final check on the gunpowder, other conspirators took up their positions in the Midlands. Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, already aware of certain stirrings before he received the letter, did not yet know the exact nature of the plot or who exactly was involved. He elected to wait, to see how events unfolded. On 3 November, Catesby met with Wintour and Percy in London. Although the nature of their discussion is unknown, Antonia Fraser theorises that some adjustment of their plan to abduct Princess Elizabeth may have occurred, as later accounts told how Percy had been seen at Charles, Duke of York’s lodgings, also enquiring as to the movements of the king’s daughter. A week earlier—on the same day that Monteagle received his letter—Catesby had been at White Webbs with Fawkes, to discuss kidnapping Prince Henry rather than Princess Elizabeth. As already conjectured, he may have received information from Percy that both the Prince and Princess would be at Coombe during the state opening, though Fawkes’ possible involvement may also suggest that he would kidnap the Prince from Whitehall, perhaps with the help of Percy. Certainly, it seems to have been part of the plan for Henry Percy to become Elizabeth’s Protector had the Plot in London succeeded. Both Thomas and Henry were probably well-known to both Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, from the time they spent together at Coombe Abbey. 

The events of the night of 4th-5th November are well-known. Catesby and Percy met up with other gentry under the guise of a hunting match on Dunsmore near Coombe Abbey. When the news from London reached the ears of those assembled at Dunchurch, most refused to join Catesby’s rebellion. Those who did rode off in the direction of Warwick, seemingly abandoning their plan to kidnap the Princess Elizabeth. On 6 November the rebels raided Warwick Castle for supplies, before continuing to Norbrook to collect stored weapons. From there they continued their journey to Huddington in Worcestershire. Catesby gave his servant Bates a letter to deliver to Father Garnet and the other priests gathered at Coughton Court, informing them of what had transpired, and asking for their help in raising an army in Wales, where Catholic support was believed to be strong. The priest begged Catesby and his followers to stop their “wicked actions”, and to listen to the Pope’s preachings. Father Garnet fled, and managed to evade capture for several weeks. Catesby and the others arrived at Huddington at about 2:00 pm, and were met by Thomas Wintour. Terrified of being associated with the fugitives, family members and former friends showed them no sympathy.

Meanwhile, it  was also on the morning of 6th November that Lord Harington received a letter from Mr Benock, the Horse Trainer at Warwick Castle, informing him that John Grant of Norbrook had stolen some of the war horses and, judging from the manner in which these circumstances occurred, he feared that insurrection was at hand in the country. Harington wrote immediately to Salisbury, enclosing Benock’s letter and asking for an immediate reply as to what was to be done if there was indeed a rebellion taking place. He then arranged for the Princess Elizabeth to be taken into the walled City of Coventry, where she was lodged in the Palace Yard, remaining there until the apparent danger had passed. The citizens of Coventry, loyal protestants all, rallied to her defence and armed themselves in readiness. Harington himself rode to Warwick Castle to lend Sir Fulke Greville, as County Sheriff, his assistance in the pursuit of the rebels, who by this time were already at Huddington.

Back in London, under pain of torture, Fawkes had started to reveal what he knew, and on 7 November the government named Catesby as a wanted man. Early that morning at Huddington, the remaining outlaws went to confession, before taking the sacrament — in Fraser’s opinion, a sign that none of them thought they had long to live. The party of fugitives, which included those at the centre of the plot, their supporters and Digby’s hunting party, by now had dwindled to only thirty-six in number. From there, they struck out for Staffordshire and Holbeche House, perhaps still with the intention of trying to raise a Welsh army. The House was home to Stephen Lyttleton, one of their party. The following day, 8th November, while the fugitives were recovering from injuries sustained in an accident while trying to dry the gunpowder, the sheriffs of Staffordshire and Worcestershire had joined Fulke Greville’s posse from Warwickshire.

Percy and Catesby slain in attempting their escape from Holbeach, unknown artist.

Again, the main events are relatively well-known. Richard Walsh, Sheriff of Worcester, and his company of 200 men besieged Holbeche House at about 11:00 a.m. While crossing the courtyard Thomas Wintour was hit in the shoulder. John Wright was shot, followed by his brother, and then Rookwood. Catesby and Percy were reportedly both dropped by a single lucky shot, while standing near the door, and not, as depicted above, in the sword-fight in which Catesby had vowed to die defending his faith. He managed to crawl inside the house, where his body was later found, clutching a picture of the Virgin Mary. The survivors were taken into custody and the dead buried near Holbeche. On the orders of the Earl of Northampton however, the bodies of Catesby and Percy were later exhumed and decapitated, their heads taken to London to be placed on spikes to look upon the parliament buildings they had failed to destroy.

With Thomas Percy dead, there was nobody who could either implicate or clear his cousin, Henry Percy of any involvement in the plot. Some have speculated that this was why Catesby and Thomas Percy were not captured alive at Holbeach, along with most of the other conspirators, and why they were mysteriously killed by the same musket ball. Was someone under orders to make sure they did not survive to tell the tale, or, as seems more likely, were they determined to die then and there rather than implicating others under torture? Certainly, it seems strange that they were the only principle plotters to meet their end under musket fire, when the group as a whole, about thirty in number at most, could easily have been wiped out by a force of two hundred trained musketeers. As it was, Henry’s failure to ensure that Thomas took the Oath of Supremacy upon his appointment as a Gentleman Pensioner, and their meeting on 4 November, constituted damning evidence. The Privy Council also suspected that had the plot succeeded, he would have been Princess Elizabeth’s Lord Protector. With insufficient evidence to convict him, however, he was charged with contempt, fined £30,000 and stripped of all public offices. He remained in the Tower until 1621.

A few months later, when Princess Elizabeth was safely back at Coombe Abbey, Lord Harington wrote a letter to his cousin, James Harington of Ridlington, describing the events of 5-8 November. In it, he suggests that the rebellion was not finally put down until 10th November, with the three sheriffs and himself remaining on active duty and alert until then (we know that at least four of the major protagonists had left Holbeach before the siege):

Our great care and honourable charge entrusted to us by the King’s majesty hath been a matter of so much concern that it almost effaced the attentions of kin or friend. With God’s assistance we hope to do our lady Elizabeth such service as is due to her princely endowments and natural abilities, both which appear the sweet dawning of future comfort to her Royal Father. The late devilish conspiracy did much to disturb this part. I went with Sir Fulke Greville to alarm the neighbourhood and surprise the villains who came to Holbeche and was out five days in peril of death, in fear for the great charge I had left at home. Her highness doth often say, “What a Queen I should have been by this means. I had rather have been with my Royal Father in the Parliament House, than wear his crown on such condition.” This poor Lady hath not yet recovered the surprise and is very ill and troubled.

The princess  remained at Coombe for another three years, until at Christmas 1608 she moved to her own establishment at Kew, though Lord Harington still controlled her movements and expenditure. This was the source of many of Harington’s troubles, since the two thousand pounds a year pension promised by the King was never paid, but, in any case, would have come nowhere near meeting the princess’ expenditure, which in 1612-13 alone was in the region of 3,500 pounds (she was unaware of these debts, unpaid by her father, until after her wedding). She was married to Frederick, Elector Palatine, on Valentine’s Day in 1613, despite her mother’s disapproval, and Lord Harington rode at the head of the wedding procession to Whitehall. He also bore the costs of the wedding, later disclosing that it had cost him in the region of thirty thousand pounds to take care of her. Lord and Lady Harington accompanied the Royal couple to Heidelberg after the wedding, as did Elizabeth’s friend, Ann Dudley. Frederick was so besotted by his new bride that he had a whole new wing of the castle built for her and her servants. Harington stayed at Heidelberg for a further four months, arbitrating in various disputes within her household in his role as Royal Ambassador.  Worn out by these cares and concerns, he decided to return to England, but died of a fever at Worms, only fifty miles from the castle. His body was returned to Exton for burial, after which Lady Harington was invited to rejoin Elizabeth’s household. Finally, James granted her a stipend of five thousand pounds.

Young John Harington, who became the 2nd baron of Exton, a teenager at the time of the plot, later remembered making an opportune study of the heads of Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy while en route to London, and later reflected: “more terrible countenances were never looked upon”. The second baronet, described by one of his companions as the most complete young gentleman of his age that this kingdom could afford for religion, learning and courteous behaviour, tragically died of smallpox in February 1614, aged just 22, having sold his family home at Exton just a week before. The Coombe estates passed to his sister Lucy, by then the Countess of Bedford, though she was forced to sell it to cover her gambling debts, to Elizabeth Craven, the widow of William Craven, in 1622. By a strange twist of fate, their eldest son, also William Craven, entered the service of Maurice, Prince of Orange, in the fight to restore the Bohemian Crown to Frederick and Elizabeth, the couple now known as ‘the winter King and Queen’ of Bohemia, having been deposed by the Hapsburgs after just one winter in Prague. These were the events which marked the beginning the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, which laid waste to much of Europe.

Coat of Arms of the Harington baronets, ancestors of Kit Harington

In 1632, Frederick and Elizabeth were refugees at the court of the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands. Lord Craven was among the first to respond to the call to reinstate the exiles to the throne of Bohemia, and was appointed one of the commanders of the English army in Germany. He accompanied Frederick when he left the Hague to begin his campaign. He led his British volunteers on a seemingly hopeless attack on the Fortress at Creuznach, himself planting the Bohemian standard in victory on the Citadel walls. He was knighted by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden as he lay wounded among the ruins. King Gustavus was killed during the victorious Battle of Lutzen. This demoralised Frederick so much that he gave up the fight, falling into a fit of melancholy which, together with illness, brought about his death in November 1632. The following year, Craven returned to England, where he received a hero’s welcome and Charles I granted him permission to enclose six hundred acres around Coombe Abbey to form a park. He became the principal benefactor for the widowed Elizabeth and in 1637 was back on the continent fighting for Prince Rupert, her eldest son, in his attempt to regain his father’s throne. They were both captured at the Battle of Limgea but, having secured his own release on ransom of twenty thousand pounds, Craven remained in Germany to secure Prince Rupert’s release on the condition that he ceased hostilities against the Emperor.

Shortly after Craven returned to England, but in 1640 he moved permanently to Elizabeth’s Court at the Hague. Although supporting Charles I on the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he remained abroad and aided the Royalist cause with financial contributions. When Parliament eventually won the war, the majority of his estates were confiscated. However, his prospective heir had married into the Fairfax family, leading Parliamentarians, so the Cravens were allowed to keep Coombe Abbey. When, following his restoration in 1660, King Charles II turned his back on his aunt, making no palace or house available to her, Craven, who had continued to support her in the Hague, offered her his own house in Drury Lane. She continued to live there until 1662, when she leased her own dwelling at Leicester House. There she died a fortnight after moving in, on 26 February, aged 66. There were rumours of a romantic relationship between Craven and Elizabeth, and some suggested that a private marriage existed between them. However, she was twelve years his senior, he having been born in 1608. Perhaps he was simply the perfect, gallant and chivalrous knight who had sworn to serve Elizabeth and considered it a great honour to do so. Certainly, he continued to spend vast amounts on her. When she died, he was having a country house built for her, Ashdown House, near his own house at Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire, which, along with Coombe Abbey, was also being rebuilt. The latter was leased to his godson, Isaac Gibson, and in 1667-1669 a new wing was added to the original Harington building.

Ashdown House

Lord Craven regained control of Coombe in the 1670s, putting his son and heir in charged of the planned alterations to the House. He had planned for some time to create an appropriate setting for collection of Stuart portraits left to him by the Queen of Bohemia. He may also have decided to house the few possessions she held at her death to a place where, as a child, she had spent her happiest hours. The idea to transform Hamstead Marshall into a “miniature Heidelberg” had never materialised and the sentimental links with Coombe Abbey may have persuaded Lord Craven to make Coombe Abbey their permanent home, as well as the principal family seat of the Cravens, following the death of the Earl himself. He eventually died on 9 April 1697 at Drury Lane, aged 89.

We should not assume that people at that time were any more inured to the violence than we are to the use of torture and execution in the twentieth century (in recent memory). Neither was the state violence of the seventeenth century primarily anti-Catholic or religiously motivated. The executions, viewed in the context and the standards of the time, were punishments for treason, not heresy, as the Marian burnings had been. Nevertheless, the Jacobite policy was a radical return to methods not used since that time, an admission that Elizabeth I’s ‘via media’ had not worked in bringing about the Tudor dynasty’s hoped for security from foreign-sponsored plots and insurrections. This has also to be seen in the broader geographical context of a successful counter-reformation in Europe led, violently, by the Hapsburgs, as evident in the Spanish Inquisition. Anti-Catholic feeling in Britain was certainly at a high water mark in 1601-5, manipulated by a vulnerable establishment. In this context, the Jesuits were seen as the ‘Jihadi’ apologists of a terrorist network stretching through the Spanish Netherlands to Wales and Ireland. In fact, their role in the Gunpowder Plot indicates that they were extremely reluctant to justify acts of violence by lay Catholics. As for the rest of the century, although it was one of continual conflict throughout Europe, it was not one of continuous violence in Britain and Ireland. Even the attack on Drogheda of 1649, although often described as a ‘massacre’ by Cromwell’s troops was, at the time, viewed as an act of war. Although an atrocity worthy of the title ‘war crime’, it should not be compared with the massacre of Protestant settlers which took place decades earlier. Again, the intention of the war in Ireland was to provide security for the newly established British Republic, not to terrorise the native population. Besides this, a fuller exploration of the lives of those associated with the events of 1605 would also suggest that, in British terms, that we need also to consider their constructive contribution in art, architecture and chivalry, not to mention their advocacy and practice of religious toleration and the refusal of many to take up arms in any cause. Life for many may have continued nasty, brutish and short in Burke’s well-known phrase, but it was not just about the enactment of sickening violence. Neither should it be re-enacted as such from an unearned sense of post-millenial, secular superiority.

Henry Tudor reigned for twenty-four years, established the power of the monarchy over the nobility, kept England out of foreign conflicts and passed on a full treasury to his son. He also left a Suffolk churchman close to the throne, a man who was to dominate affairs of state for most of the next reign.

Thomas Wolsey was the son of a grazier, a supplier of wool and meat to the clothiers and townsfolk of Ipswich, where a half-timbered house in Silent Street is still claimed as his birthplace. He entered the Church and used it as a pathway to royal service. He so impressed Henry VIII with his capacity for hard work and his grasp of state matters that the young King was soon happy to leave these matters in Wolsey’s hands. The rise and fall of the great Cardinal are part of national history, but Wolsey never forgot his origins, and the town never forgot him. There is even a stained glass panel of him in the County Library. He himself built a college at Ipswich which, had it survived his downfall, might have established Ipswich as England’s third university city, completing a neat triangle with Oxford and Cambridge.

At these universities, emancipated scholars with Renaissance ideas were challenging the accepted beliefs and traditions of the Church. Like the Lollards before them, they found allies in a growing number of less educated people who shared their disillusionment with contemporary society, though they were not always clear about what they wanted to put in its place. Most of this disenchantment and discontent expressed itself in attacks on the religious establishment. This was strongly represented throughout East Anglia, particularly through the great abbeys which, through the trade in pilgrimage and its control of land, dominated both town and countryside, from Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk to Walsingham in Norfolk. In previous centuries, the simmering resentment of peasants and citizens alike could suddenly blaze up out of control, into white-hot rage, and anti-clericalism was by no means restricted to small urban areas, as the Peasant’s Revolt and the growth of Lollardy had demonstrated.

Neither was anti-clericalism the only cause of discontent at this time. It was closely linked to social and economic causes, especially to the effects of enclosure in increasing poverty and vagrancy in Tudor times. The growing wealth of the trade in wool and woollen cloth was leading both to the growth of the newly enriched ranks of the gentry and to the dispossession of people on their lands in favour of sheep. The monks of Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire enclosed whole manors which came into their possession, in order to convert the huge acreage into grazing for sheep. The Golafres of Gnosall in Staffordshire had also married into the Knightleys of the same county, who by the fifteenth century had moved to Fawsley Hall in Northants, from where they married into the Spencer family of Althorp. The effects of early enclosures by the gentry were being felt at this time. In 1498 an inquest jury recorded that sixty villagers had been evicted from the Althorp estate, and left ’weeping, to wander in idleness’ had ’perished in hunger’. New wealth, with no great affinity for the feudal responsibilities as well as rights of landholders was spreading across the countryside seeking out new property. Tudor government was soon to help them acquire it, by taking it from the monks at Coombe Abbey (above) and giving it to the likes of Sir John Harington.

 Many Suffolkers resented the parish priests to whom they paid burdensome tithes, however marginal their surplus harvest might be. Many of these priests were no more virtuous than themselves and, by contrast with thrifty, hard-working merchants who re-built the churches they said mass in, they were often less so. The standard of education among the parish clergy was often abysmally low, especially in Latin, which was the language of all church services. They mumbled their way through these, hardly understanding a word themselves, yet they were supposedly performing the miracle of transubstantiation at the mass, saying the words which turned the wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. They also had to hear the confessions of their flock, mediating between them and God, and imposing sanctions on them for moral misconduct.

King Hal seemed, at seventeen, a paragon of the Renaissance Prince – handsome, athletic and intelligent, as at home in religious disputation and debate as in jousting and hunting. Yet, even then, something happened to him which made him doubt the efficacy of the rites and rituals associated with his faith. All his children by Catherine of Aragon had died in infancy, except for Mary, and on the birth of yet another infant son he made the pilgrimage to Walsingham himself to pray for the baby. However, the boy died like all the others, and Henry, enraged within his grief, had the monks expelled, and the beautiful buildings of the priory, all except the east end of the Church, and its healing wells, were destroyed, plundered for their stone, and fell into ruins over the centuries.

By the 1520s, heresies like those of John Wycliffe began to reach Suffolk again, this time from northern Europe via Cambridge, which had become the academic centre of the English Reformation. The teachings of Luther had set Germany alight, and rapidly spread through its cities and territories, along its trade routes, so that the international mercantile community became one of the principal agents in this spreading of unorthodox ideas and new doctrines to western Europe and into East Anglia. Books by German Protestants and English heretics in exile were smuggled in bales and barrels and then sent out along the pack-horse routes to wealthy clothiers, patrons among the gentry, yeomen farmers and merchants in the towns. One book in particular, Tyndale’s English New Testament, was to make a revolutionary impact on the towns and villages of East Anglia. One of the most remarkable of the itinerant preachers of   the Word was known as Little Bilney, whose simple and earnest style impressed many, but whose denunciation of idolatry and superstition enraged the local clergy. He was eventually burnt at the stake in Norwich in 1531. Three years later, the chronicler of Butley Priory wrote that

the charity of many people grows cold; no love, not the least devotion remains in the people, but rather many false opinions and schisms against the sacraments of the Church.

Within four years his beloved priory had been stripped of all valuables, its lead roof removed, its coloured glass smashed and its deserted walls left open to the weather and those seeking free building materials. Henry VIII’s attack on the monasteries began in 1535 when royal commissioners made a lightning tour of all religious foundations in order to discover reasons, or excuses, for closure. However, it had been Wolsey himself who had inadvertently added to the vulnerability of the smaller monasteries. In 1527 he had been casting around for funds for his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He had obtained papal bills for the suppression of a number of small religious houses whose numbers had dwindled in size. Many of them were in his native county, including the priories of Snape and Rumburgh, and St Peter and St Paul in Ipswich. The lesson was not lost on the King or on Wolsey’s young secretary, Thomas Cromwell.

The middle years of the sixteenth century were tumultuous times. In the 1380’s, John Wycliffe had been denounced as a heretic for his translation of the Bible from Latin into English, the Angel not the angel speech, as one contemporary commented. He went on, and so the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine. So Wycliffe and his dissident Lollard movement had been rigorously suppressed. The orthodox view was that to make the Bible accessible to the common people would threaten the authority of the Church, and lead the people to question its teaching. Similarly, when William Tyndale published his translation of the New Testament from the original Greek in 1525, he entered into a conflict that eventually brought him to the stake (see inset above). Translating and publishing God’s word in the language of the people was a revolutionary act. However, in 1534, the English Reformation reached its turning point when Henry VIII defied the Pope and broke with the Roman Church. The following year, Coverdale, Tyndale’s disciple, published his vernacular translation of the Bible (see picture above). This was the turning point in the history of the English language. Between 1535 and 1568 five major versions were printed, including Cranmer’s Great Bible, which had Henry’s official seal (on the right is the title page, in which King Henry VIII is pictured giving copies to Archbishop Cranmer and Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, who in turn distribute them to the people, loyally shouting ‘Vivat Rex’.

All were immediate bestsellers, and were the most widely read texts of the sixteenth century in English, with an enormous influence over the spread of the language as well as the egalitarian ideas contained within them. In 1536 all small religious houses were closed down. A few were in a state of decay, but the majority were simply valued at less than two hundred pounds. This was the reason why the nuns of Campsey Ash and Bungay were turned out, as were the Benedictine monks of Eye who had been established there at the time of the Conquest. The dissolution of Leiston Abbey also dates from this time (see the photos of the ruins below). After the suppression the king bestowed the abbey on his brother-in-law Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. A farmhouse was built into the corner of the nave and north transept and the abbey ruins were used as farm buildings, the church itself being used as a barn.

The Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, had his eyes on the lands of the Cistercian Abbey of Sibton, and used his patronage to install William Flatbury as Abbot in 1534. Flatbury then acted as the agent of Cromwell and Howard in persuading his brothers to surrender the Abbey in return for assured pensions. Thus, although Sibton was worth more than two hundred pounds in 1536, it was surrendered to the Duke in 1536.

The Northern Rising, or Pilgrimage of Grace, against the religious changes was quickly and savagely put down in 1536, with Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, playing a major role. He had succeeded to the title in 1524 upon the death of his father the 2nd Duke. One of the last of the old nobility, Howard found an early enemy in Cardinal Wolsey, whose destruction he helped to effect. He was active in battle and diplomacy throughout the whole of the reign of Henry VIII. He was present at Flodden; at the suppression of the `Prentice Riots’ in 1517; in the varying skirmishes against the Scots; in Spain and France; and in Ireland where he was Viceroy for about two years.

Norfolk rebuilt the huge family mansion at Kenninghall, near Norwich, because Framlingham, like other castles had become outdated as a domestic residence. Norfolk’s private life was disturbed by contentions with his second wife, Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of the 3rd and last Duke of Buckingham. He first married Anne, daughter of Edward IV, who died childless in 1512. Howard seems to have been as cruel and uncompromising in his dealings with his relatives as he was with his enemies in and out of Court. Though he promoted two of his nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to be Queens of England for purposes of family advancement, he felt able to abandon them (and indeed pass sentence of death on Anne) in their time of need. His treatment of the Catholics during the Pilgrimage of Grace was the subject of an apology from the King himself.

However, Howard’s cruel crushing of the rebellion enabled Henry and Cromwell to move against the larger monasteries. Early in 1538 the Keeper of the King’s Jewels, Sir John Williams, arrived in Bury with a party of workmen. They marched into the great church and set to work with picks, hammers and chisels on the shrine of St Edmund. Henry and Cromwell had decided that the new religious ideas were right insofar as they complained of the superstitious influences of pilgrimages. With some difficulty, they removed the gold, silver, emeralds and various other precious stones, but left the Abbot very well furnished with plate of silver.By this time the royal strategy for the Dissolution had proved almost total successful in Suffolk. The friaries had all disappeared in 1537-8 and, of all the ancient monastic establishments, Bury St Edmund’s Abbey stood alone. Abbot John Reeve resisted until November 1539. Then, in return for an enormous pension, the highest granted to any abbot, he surrendered his office. From a nearby house, he watched the carts carry away the Abbey’s vestments, silver plate, books, bells, and rolls of lead from the roof, while crowds of townspeople cheered before falling upon the ruined buildings to see what they could scavenge and to cart away loads of stone for their own use. This was too much for the old Abbot, and he died at the end of March 1540, without drawing a penny of his pension. Most of the newly acquired church lands were disposed of through the Court of Augmentations in the form of grants to royal servants and sales to land speculators. By far the largest beneficiary was Charles Brandon, now Duke of Suffolk, after the execution of the last of the de la Pole Duke.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries swept away the active life of many of the holy places of the Middle Ages. The monks and nuns were expelled from their monasteries and convents and pensioned off, apart from those executed for active or suspected resistance to Henry VIII’s designs. The shrines and sites of pilgrimage were largely destroyed, together with venerated images and relics. The lands and buildings of the abbeys passed first into Henry’s possession and then into the hands of established and up-and-coming families. This wholesale expropriation gave rise to the biggest territorial and social upheaval in British history. In a prosperous county like Suffolk, there were many men able and willing to compete for monastic land. Neither was it just church land which came onto the market, but a large number of manors, estates and parcels of arable land, which gave opportunities for men of all degrees from great magnates to yeomen farmers to exchange, buy and sell property in order to consolidate their holdings. Yeomen farmers found it easier to consolidate their holdings in Suffolk than elsewhere where the feudal strip systems continued to complicate the land tenure. By 1536 many small freeholders had built up farms which could be simply and efficiently operated. Now they could add to these holdings by purchase, exchange and marriage.

However, it was the official publication of the English Bible in 1539 which brought religious discord out into the open. In 1545, Henry VIII himself was driven to complain that, that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same. Priests and objects of superstition were attacked. Preachers, licensed and unlicensed, wandered from church to church, market to market, and from one village green to another, planting new conviction in the hearts of some and confusion in the minds of many. The Lady Chapel of Ely is a superb example of the most ornate fourteenth-century church architecture, richly decorated with hundreds of stone carvings of saints and holy figures. In 1539 every face was smashed by religious zealots in one of the earliest acts of desecration done in defiance of the established church.

Alice de la Pole (granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer) had retained direct control of the family seat of Ewelme in Oxfordshire until her death in 1475, when the manor passed to her son John (d. 1492), Second Duke of Suffolk and brother-in-law to both Edward IV and Richard III. The last surviving legitimate male Plantagenet claimant to the throne, the Earl of Warwick, had died on the scaffold in 1499. The Second Duke was succeeded by his second son Edmund, who was demoted to the rank of earl by Henry VII and fled abroad in 1501, prompting the seizure of his estates. Formally attainted in 1504, he was imprisoned from 1506 and executed in 1513. However, the Poles did not give up their claim to the throne until 1525, when the younger of the two surviving brothers was killed at the Battle of Pavia. The fact that the Yorkist cause lived on for forty years into the Tudor dynasty shows how fragile the Tudor royal line really was, descended through the illegitimate child of John of Gaunt. Ewelme was one of several manors vested in trustees for the life of Edmund’s widow, but it was controlled by the Crown and granted to the new Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, in 1525. Henry VIII took it back in 1535, when he also obliged Brandon to exchange most of his Suffolk estates for lands in Lincolnshire, so that, after 1536, Grimsthorpe in that county became the principal seat of the Dukes of Suffolk.

Meanwhile, a paranoid Henry VIII carried on a vindictive campaign against the Pole family after the son of Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury’s son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, penned a stinging attack against the King’s divorce, from exile in Italy. This resulted in the execution of one of his brothers in 1539 and the suicide of the other. Margaret, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, was an old woman in 1541, once the governess to Mary Tudor, whose mother’s betrothal to Arthur, Prince of Wales, had caused the execution of her brother, Edward Plantagenet, the rival claimant to the throne. Despite this, she became a loyal Tudor courtier. However, because she was also a Neville, she was accused of complicity in the Northern Rebellion, and sent to the Tower without trial. From there she was executed in May, after ten or eleven blows of the axe. When Mary became Queen, her son became the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, and she herself was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886. Her granddaughter became a close friend of Elizabeth I. Perhaps by coincidence, in 1550 Ewelme was among the estates settled by Edward VI on the Princess Elizabeth. It remained in royal possession until 1628.

At the end of Henry’s reign, when the succession was of doubtful continuance in the light of two daughters having been declared bastards and an only son who was sickly, inter-Court rivalry reached a peak over the protectorate of Edward VI. On the one hand were the Seymour brothers, Edward’s uncles, and on the other, the Duke of Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey. Surrey acted rashly in the matter of armorial bearings and charges of treason were successfully, if unreasonably, pressed. Surrey lost his head and his father would similarly have died had not the King himself died during the night prior to the day fixed for Norfolk’s execution. Howard spent the next six years in the Tower.

In the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, under the guidance of Archbishop Cranmer, an episcopalian Protestantism with an English liturgy was established as the state religion. When, in 1553, the boy king died, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the de facto ruler of England from 1549, tried to exclude his sister, Mary, the Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon, from the succession by setting Lady Jane Grey on the throne. She was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, and Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. The Commons of England were almost unanimous in rejecting Northumberland and his protégé, and the people of Suffolk soon had an opportunity to demonstrate their feelings in a practical way.

Mary was at Hunsdon, near Hertford, when the news of this attempted coup d’etát broke. She moved away northwards towards Cambridge when a messenger from London caught up with her and demanded her urgent return to the capital, advising her that the East Anglian ports had been blocked, rendering escape impossible. Mary sojourned at Sawston Hall, south of Cambridge, and then turned into Suffolk. She attracted support from nobles and commons alike, and received a royal reception at Bury, but Northumberland’s forces were already on the road, so she could not remain there in safety. She made her temporary headquarters at the Duke of Norfolk’s house at Kenninghall near Thetford, where she summoned all the local nobility and gentry to come to her aid with men and arms. She also ordered the release the old noble, also keeper of Framlingham Castle, the Duke of Norfolk, from the Tower of London. He was aged eighty, and died at Kenninghall within the year. His was a momentous life. He has been called a cruel man, but one who lived in cruel times. For over thirty years he had been one of the most powerful and active men in Tudor England, and perhaps his greatest triumph was that he survived in his important offices so close to a despotic King, dying in his bed and not upon the block. His magnificent tomb, and that of two of his wives, is in Framlingham Church (pictured right).

By the time she set out for Framlingham on 14 July, Suffolk had committed itself. A sizeable army encamped around the fortress under the leadership of the Sheriff, Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Sir William Drury and Sir William Waldegrave. Two days later, Northumberland’s men, on reaching Cambridge, heard rumours that Mary commanded thirty thousand men in arms. Their refusal to advance to Framlingham sealed the Duke’s fate. Mary was proclaimed Queen and quickly selected a council from among her supporters, emptied the prisons to swell her army, and secured the support of the main towns and east coast ports.  All opposition to Mary becoming Queen collapsed totally and swiftly.

As she made her way slowly through Suffolk and Essex a few days later it was at the head of a triumphant procession, not a cautious army. Towns and villages greeted the rightful heir to the throne who would, they felt, heed their petitions, and deliver them from self-seeking landlords. Yet this mood of celebration was soon replaced by one of disillusionment and hatred. Queen Mary could do little to re-establish the monasteries whose lands now belonged to families professing Catholicism on whom she depended for support, and the landlords, old and new, remained in power. The clothiers continued to keep as large a gap as possible between wages and prices, and destitution and vagabondage increased. Added to all these ills was a religious persecution of unparalleled savagery. Examinations and imprisonments began in 1554. Parish clergy were expelled from their livings for refusing to reinstate Catholic rituals. Women were encouraged to denounce their neighbours, and houses were searched for Protestant books. Heretics were cajoled, bullied, threatened and bribed into submission and recantation. There were many who would not recant, and so, in February 1555, the burnings started.

Among the first to suffer martyrdom was Dr Rowland Taylor, the incumbent of Hadleigh. Ever since the time of Little Bilney, Hadleigh had remained an important centre of Protestantism. Taylor was appointed rector in 1544, and many of his parishioners became exceedingly well learned in the holy scriptures, so that a man might find among them many who had often read the whole Bible through…so..that… the whole town seemed rather a university of the learned, than a town of cloth-making and labouring people. Taylor was openly hostile to the religious policy of the Marian government, and therefore attracted a great deal of support from the ordinary people of Essex and Suffolk. When the Bishop was sent to say mass in Taylor’s church, he was turned away. Taylor was then called to London, where he was subjected to many trials and repeated examinations. He defended himself cheerfully, and refused to recant, so he was condemned to the stake and degraded from his orders. He was brought back to Hadleigh for his execution, and crowds of parishioners thronged the town to encourage him in his ordeal. So, the first Suffolk martyr perished on Aldham Common on 9 February 1555, where a stone monument marks the spot. A further seventeen men and women from the county died for their faith, and many more suffered ill-treatment, harassment and torture.

He was soon to be followed to the stake by his Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, who was, of course, the architect of the English Protestant Church. He was born at Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, and educated at Cambridge. He was a quiet scholar, but was summoned to Canterbury following the advice he had given on Henry’s divorce. He was well-respected by Henry throughout his turbulent reign, as the picture showing the course of the English Reformation demonstrates, with Henry pointing to his son and successor, with the Archbishop standing beside him as advisor. Cranmer was a godly man, Lutheran in theology, well read in the church Fathers, a gifted liturgist with a superb command of English. He was sensitive and brave, but cautious and slow to decide in a period bedeviled by turbulence and treachery. Cranmer preferred a reformation by gentle persuasion, rather than by force.

Like Luther, he believed in the role of the godly prince, who had a God-given task to uphold a just society, and give free scope to the gospel. He was responsible for the Great Bible and its prefaces; the Litany of 1545 and the two Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552.

The driving force of Cranmer’s life was to bring about a restoration of the Western Protestant Church to the Catholic faith. When the Church of Rome refused to be reformed, Cranmer took it upon himself to reform his own province of Canterbury. He sought an ecumenical council with the Lutherans and Calvinists on the continent. He also sought to restore a living theology based on personal experience and the mission of Christ. From this doctrine came his belief in justification by faith and of Christ’s presence in the sacraments. His third doctrine was that of the Holy Spirit, which lay behind his high view of scripture and tradition, and the meaning of union with Christ. At the end he experienced a long solitary confinement, and was brain-washed into recanting. But at his final trial in 1556 he put up a magnificent defense, and died bravely at the stake. He first thrust into the fire the hand that had once written the recantations. The Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford commemorates his death, together with those of Latimer and Ridley, whose deaths he had witnessed from prison in the previous year.

Bloody Mary died childless in November 1558, but her persecution of Protestants did lasting damage to the Catholic cause, ensuring that, in future, no Catholic monarch would accede to the throne. Her attempt to impose an English Inquisition had failed, and made earthly life intolerable for many English Catholics in successive generations, when even the private practice of their faith was barely tolerated, if at all. The young Queen Elizabeth made her first progress through Suffolk five years later, but the Marian counter-Reformation had left their mark on the people and clergy alike. Although well-received by the nobility, gentry and burgesses of Ipswich, the behaviour of the local clergy made her indignant. The Protestantism which had taken root in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI had been nourished with the blood of the martyrs and had grown into a strident Puritanism. Clergy refused to wear the surplice, were dissatisfied with the remnants of popery in the Anglican services and disliked the Prayer Book. Angrily, Elizabeth ordered them to conform. Some of them did so, at least outwardly, but a royal dictat in matters of religion was no longer going to make either the clergy nor the congregations of Suffolk conform against their consciences.

On the other hand, the new Queen continued to face the threat from resurgent Catholicism on the continent, which encouraged the resistance to conformity among the Catholic gentry at home. The association of the Golafre name with the plots and rebellions of the early Tudor period may have been one reason why the other members of the family were glad to adopt more anglicised and ’gentrified’ versions of the name. Interestingly, the Golafre family were closely related, through the marriage of Beatrix Golafre of Satley, Warwickshire, to the Arden family, through which the writer William Shakespeare was descended. Beatrix’s grandson, Robert Ardern of Park Hall (b. 1413), was the son of a Worcestershire gentleman, who had been one of the claimants to the Fyfield estate, following the death of Sir John Golafre. In 1452, he had been executed for taking part in the uprising of Richard, Duke of York. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Ardens were continually suspected of being first rebels and then recusants throughout the Tudor Period, and one of them, Edward Arden, was executed in 1583 for plotting against Elizabeth I. He was a close relative of Mary Arden, Shakespeare’s mother, who had lived near Stratford at a gentrified farmstead in Wilmcote before moving into the town.

It has often been strongly suggested that Shakespeare himself was a Catholic, hence his determination to prove his loyalty, first to Elizabeth and then to James, at a time when Midland gentry families fell under suspicion of harbouring Jesuits in priest holes, such as at nearby Baddesley Clinton, and of plotting against the Protestant monarchy and cause. They were seen as ’the enemy within’ and heavily fined for not attending their parish church and for having private masses said in their homes. The Jesuit priests who ministered to them were ’flushed out’ before and after the 1605 Rebellion, but their confessions in the state papers have left historians with detailed descriptions of the Catholic gentry of Northants, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, and of their extensive conspiratorial network across the three counties. The Margaret Golafre, or Gollafor, who had married into the Hodington (Huddington) family was probably from a prominent gentry family herself. There does appear to be a link with the older, aristocratic family, however, in that her descendents, the Huddington heiresses, Joan and Agnes, married Robert Winter and William Strensham. By these marriages, both the Winters of Huddington and the Russells of Strensham were entitled to bear the Golafre arms. The brothers Robert and Thomas Winter (Wintour), were executed (hung, drawn and quartered) in 1606 for their part in the Gunpowder Plot and Midland Rebellion of the previous year. They had both grown up at Huddington Hall.

Religious unrest in Suffolk, as elsewhere in England, continued throughout   Elizabeth’s reign. As her government and bishops pursued its via media (middle way), extremists at both ends of the ecclesiastical spectrum were periodically pressed to conform.   A number of Catholics were fined and imprisoned if they did not attend the parish church, otherwise the government turned something of a blind eye to private masses in manor houses owned by the gentry. A show of unity, or uniformity, in public was what was essential, since the Virgin Queen’s reign was continually beset by plots and planned invasions, even after the defeat of Philip II’s Spanish Armada in 1588. Puritanism was much more of an everyday problem, however, because parish clergy, as well unlicensed preachers could easily stir up their congregations against all religion that was not pure. The Bishop of Norwich’s officers often brought offenders before the magistrates only to find, on many occasions, that the JP himself was sympathetic to puritans, if not to nonconfomists. Many of the leading county families were, by this time, of a Puritan persuasion. They patronised preachers, appointed radical clergy to their parishes, where the livings were in their gift and not that of the bishop, and even opened their houses to separatist meetings.

However, as with the Catholics, it was not, at this stage, the separatists who met in isolated congregations, mostly secretly, who posed the biggest threat to the authorities, but those who were forming themselves, however loosely, into an organised grouping or party, both within the county and at the national level, in Parliament. In 1582 there was a meeting held at Cockfield, of…

three score ministers, appointed out of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk… to confer of the Common Book, what might be tolerated, and what necessarily refused in every point of it; apparel, matter, form, days, fasting, injunctions, etc.

The rector of Cockfield, John Knewstub, was a leading light among the Puritans in West Suffolk, with others in the important centres of Hadleigh, Ipswich and Beccles. Puritanism therefore went from strength to strength in East Anglia and it is no coincidence that the first group of separatist pilgrims intending to settle permanently in the New World, or at least New England, were from Old Anglia, and that the distinctive dialect of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk can still be detected in much of the eastern seaboard they settled, remaining distinct from the Midland English which predominates across most of the United States.

The Reformation may be seen as the triumph of the venacular over the old international Latin culture of Western Catholicism. Religion became a matter of the word rather than the image, of the sermon rather than the sacrament. In England the new liturgy remained much closer to the old forms it replaced and so most churches required few changes to their interiors. Churches and college chapels continued to be built and decorated in the late Perpendicular Tudor style of Gothic. Wealthy London merchants came to live in Suffolk, men like Sir Thomas Kytson at Hengrave, who built a splendid new house for himself. Local clothiers also put their wealth into land, buying themselves into an expanding gentry class. Both men and women established charities as memorials, as well as setting up elaborate tombs and monuments in brass, marble and stone in the parish churches. The history of Woodbridge has been substantially influenced by the life of its greatest benefactor, Thomas Seckford, who crowned a brilliant legal career when he became Master in Ordinary of the Court of Requests. In 1587 he decided to donate a measure of his wealth to Woodbridge by endowing charities which still pay for the hospital, almshouses, dispensary, lending library and grammar school (see photos). He was also a Tudor statesman and in 1550, 1563 and 1572 was elected to parliament by the burgesses of   Ipswich.

At St Mary’s Parish Church in Woodbridge, besides the tomb of Thomas Seckford (d. 1587) on the north wall of the sanctuary, there is the interesting Pitman monument on the south side of the chancel, in fine ornate marble (above far right). It commemorates Jeffrey Pitman, a tanner and haberdasher and Churchwarden in 1596 and 1608. He was also High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1625 and left a considerable amount of money for the repair and maintenance of the church. His monument also contains figures of his two wives and his two lawyer sons. In St. Michael’s Church, Framlingham, besides the magnificent tombs of the Dukes of Norfolk, there is the tomb of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, which was given into the keeping of the Duke of Norfolk by his father (see above right).

Printed Sources:

Derek Wilson (1997), A Short History of Suffolk. London: Batsford

David & Pat Alexander (eds.)(1997), The History of Christianity. Berkhamsted: Lion

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

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Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612) after a portrait by Isaac Oliver (died 1622). See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been confirmed as author died before 1939 according to the official death date listed by the NPG. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There has been much comment about the fact that the Duke and Duchess’ first-born, should she be a she, will succeed to the throne before any brothers. Had this happened in the early stages of the Stuart monarchy, British history might indeed have been very different. For when the then heir to the throne, Henry, died suddenly in 1612, aged eighteen, his sixteen year-old sister, Princess Elizabeth would have been next in line, not her other brother, Charles (I). This winter, on the four hundredth anniversary of his death, an exhibition on this ‘Lost Prince’ is being staged at the National Gallery in London. Little has been published about him, or indeed about his sister, though a book called A Stuart Portrait was published about Elizabeth, Queen of Hearts, in 1934, by Alice Buchan.

Elizabeth Stuart (later Queen of Bohemia), age 7 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Henry frequently scolded his sister Elizabeth for listening to gossip about their grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots. He said she had been a very unhappy and foolish woman. As time went on she came more and more under Henry’s influence and that of her tutor, Lord Harrington, at his home at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, where she was taught the domestic arts as well as receiving the moral education which would one day fit her to be the bride of a Protestant Prince. It was from here that the recusant Catholic gentry planned to kidnap her and smuggle her into hiding so that, once successful in their rebellion against her father, and having killed him and her brother Henry by blowing up Parliament at its state opening on November 5th, 1605, they would place her on the throne as Queen Elizabeth II, gaining the toleration James I had once granted but then brutally revoked. However, both the Gunpowder Plot and the Rebellion came to nothing, failing even to take her captive, since her tutor received warning and swiftly moved her into the nearby walled and gated City of Coventry for safekeeping. The experience merely served to strengthen her in her belief that, like her godmother, the first Elizabeth, she was destined to be the Hope of the Protestant Cause. However, the plotters were right in believing that, also like Elizabeth I, and unlike her father, she did not wish to enslave men to state Protestantism on pain of persecution, but to lead them to God by the shining example of her own goodness.

She wrote religious poetry and did penance, self-inflicted. She saw herself one day reigning with the beauty of her grandmother and the grace of her godmother. All through the endless negotiations for her marriage to the Elector Palatine, Prince Frederick, she had remained the pattern of a dutiful princess. When he arrived to pay his first respects, she had not lifted her eyes from the ground while he bowed over her hand and exchanged compliments with her brother, Prince Henry, but when he knelt before her and she saw how handsome he was, just like the fairy-tale Prince of all her dreams, her heart skipped and she presented not her hand but her cheek in greeting! He was only a year older than Elizabeth, but the Protestant alliance he brought with him would consolidate the goodwill towards the Stuart monarchy of the English and that of the Protestant States of Germany and Holland towards the English. Queen Anne, Elizabeth’s Danish mother, was a secret covert to Rome and wanted a Spanish alliance, but Frederick won her over by presenting her with a diamond coronet.

Before she met Frederick, all her hopes had rested on her brother Henry for the future of her family, as her father was often ill-tempered and argumentative, not least with Parliament, the Commons of which were increasingly critical of his excessive spending at Court. She herself was embarrassed at the lack of funding for her tutelage at Coombe Abbey, where Lord Harrington had to meet most of her expenses out of his own purse. Many hopes were similarly resting on the shoulders of the young Prince of Wales. His brother, Charles, was so small and frail as a child that he was not expected to live long, which was probably why the Gunpowder plotters, on the advice of Sir Thomas Percy, a member of the Royal Household, had decided to kidnap Elizabeth from Coombe Abbey, not risking exposure in London by attempting to seize her sickly younger brother from the royal household. Yet it was Henry who became ill with a contagious disease in 1612, probably the Plague, considering how quickly it killed him and the fact that even his dear sister was forbidden to visit him. She had pleaded many times with the Court physician, Mayerne. Others had shared her helpless misery: Raleigh, pacing the narrow battlement of the Tower, where he had been imprisoned by James, grieved for a hopeful young life which he had watched with keen affection. He believed that the Prince would one day, as King, bring about the reconciliation of Europe, after more than a century of religious conflict and warfare. There were many others like Raleigh who saw in him another Henry of Lancaster, the founder of the Tudor dynasty. He also was stern, courageous, austere, pious and just ruthless enough to enable his ideals to achieve practical success.

Henry’s last words had been for Elizabeth – Where is my dear sister? She had watched from the bedroom of her suite in Whitehall (now backing onto Downing Street) as, with heavy snow-clouds overhead, the funeral procession wound its way through the mourning crowds to Westminster. The following February, on Valentine’s Day, she watched from the same window as the carriages prepared to take her to her wedding. The Prince of Wales’ sudden death still threw a long shadow over the betrothal celebrations. However, it had brought the couple even closer together, since Henry had spoken up on behalf of the match after welcoming the young Elector Palatine, commending him to his sister’s love in the warmest possible terms. Her much-loved elder brother had for so long been her Mentor that she prepared obediently to love the Prince from Germany, the report of whose many virtues had preceded him to England. It was enough for Elizabeth that Henry approved of the marriage. As a young Puritan, he had disapproved of much at Court, forbidding his own  servants to swear and fining them if they did, and checking his sister’s hankering after idle vanities!

Elizabeth’s solemn public engagement to Frederick had taken place soon after Henry’s death; she had appeared in black satin with a white plume in her hair. Some students of the Middle Temple had given a play called The Tempest by a popular playwright named William Shakespeare, now an old man living in distinguished retirement in his native Warwickshire. Some of the lines from the play stuck in her memory, recalled in later years, after she had experienced their truths as the Winter Queen of Bohemia and the exiled Queen of Hearts at the Dutch Court:

Princess Elizabeth Stuart, later Queen of Bohemia, wearing a reticella collar worked with the English royal coat of arms Ribeiro 2005, pp. 31-32 , unknown artist, 1613, National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.  

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