26

The women of war

The reader may grow tired of the deeds of arms and men. If women were not exactly invisible in the period of civil war, they were still at a notable disadvantage in the affairs of the world. Yet exceptions can be found. In the summer of 1638 Lucy Apsley married John Hutchinson, who at the opening of the war enlisted in the parliamentary army. He was an Independent, like Cromwell, and was therefore acceptable to the army command; in 1643 he was appointed to be governor of Nottingham Castle. He was one of those who eventually signed the king’s death warrant. Some years after the war was over Lucy Hutchinson wrote for her eldest son an account of this unhappy time. It was eventually published under the title of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.

The book is not a history of the war in the style of Clarendon, but rather a vivid and intimate account of its proceedings from the point of view of a committed participant. Although Lucy Hutchinson is ostensibly writing an encomium on the life and career of her husband, her own character and beliefs continually break through. She even provides a brief sketch of her early years that emphasizes how unusual she was among her contemporaries. She disliked plying the obligatory needle and thread, and had a horror of playing with other children. When she was forced to mingle with her young contemporaries she delivered lectures to them and made it quite plain that she detested their company. She abhorred their ‘babies’, better known now as dolls. She infinitely preferred the ‘serious discourses’ of the adults which she memorized and repeated. In the time allowed for play she preferred to apply herself to her books.

So the account of the war itself springs from the pen of a spirited and remarkable character. It is not a record of battles and sieges, but in large part a collection of character portraits and of first-hand accounts of life in the field of conflict. She describes these portraits as ‘digressions’ but in fact they convey the human face of the war, with all its threats and suspicions, hypocrisies and lies. She rejects the name of ‘roundhead’ for her husband, for example, on the grounds that he had a full head of hair. Since it was not cropped short, however, his puritan comrades distrusted him.

Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir is in fact most revealing for its account of the internecine suspicion and conflict between the members of the puritan party; John Hutchinson was at odds with his army council in Nottingham, for example, while the members of parliament and the army were always in conflict. Even the leaders of the various parliamentary contingents were themselves ‘so emulous of one another, and so refractory to commands, and so peeking in all punctilios of superiority’ that it was surprising they could ride together on the same field.

A command came from Westminster for John Hutchinson to gather together all the horse he could spare for the relief of Montgomery Castle; as a consequence, he proceeded to consult with the political committee of the local members of parliament that had oversight of Nottingham. Lucy Hutchinson reports that her husband asked that a number of soldiers be requisitioned, to which request they replied ‘None’. Hutchinson, falling into a rage, reminded the committee that a direct order from parliament had to be obeyed. She describes the members as ‘factious little people’ who fomented squabbles, divisions, delays and scandals. Their behaviour only added to the chaos of war.

She herself was courageous at times of crisis. A few months before her husband took charge of Nottingham he was run to ground in Leicester, where a royal warrant was issued for his arrest. A sudden trumpet alerted her family to the presence of the king’s troops but Hutchinson ‘stayed not to see them, but went out at the other end as they came in’; he may have escaped through one of the city gates, or perhaps through a ‘geat’ or opening. Lucy Hutchinson, then heavily pregnant, remained to confront the officers.

Captain: ‘It is a pity you should have a husband so unworthy of you that he has entered some faction and dare not be seen with you.’

Lucy Hutchinson: ‘You are mistaken sir. My husband would not hide himself from you, or not dare to show his face.’

Then Lucy told a lie. She called down her brother-in-law, George Hutchinson, and announced to the captain that this man was in truth her husband. The subterfuge worked; John Hutchinson got clean away while George eventually obtained his liberty. It was a close-run thing, however, and is testimony to the dreadful risks that Lucy Hutchinson was willing to run.

She recounts in some detail the siege of Nottingham by the king’s army, marked by no great strategic initiative but by endless bickering and argument among those who were besieged. ‘What is the cause to me,’ one doctor asked John Hutchinson, ‘if my goods be lost?’

‘You might prevent that hazard by securing them in the castle.’

‘It pities me to spoil them. I had rather have the enemy have them than that they should be spoiled in the removal.’ The doctor then rebuked Hutchinson ‘for countenancing the godly townsmen’ to whom he referred as ‘puritanical prick-eared rascals’. He infinitely preferred the ‘malignants’ or royalists.

When John Hutchinson was eventually charged with colluding in the execution of the king, after the war was over, Lucy Hutchinson forged a letter in his name to the Speaker of the House of Commons with the request that he should not be taken into custody but called to account when he was needed. Her forgery was accepted. She was a formidable woman. Her husband, however, eventually died in prison for complicity in another plot. He gives the impression of being an impulsive and contentious man who was supported by a strong-minded and strong-principled woman; it is impossible to estimate how many other such relationships flourished in the Civil War. The evidence suggests, however, from the exploits of Lucy Hutchinson to the female crowds who often assembled at Westminster, that there was a tradition of adventurous women who helped to fuel the conflict. In the ballad literature of the time it is suggested that some women dressed as men in order to join the armies of either side.

It should be noted of course that Lucy Hutchinson came from a relatively privileged family and was not in that sense necessarily representative of her sex; but older and deeper traditions of female liberty persisted still. Puritanism itself was uniquely susceptible to the authority of women, and actively promoted a partnership of the sexes in religious duties and devotions; many puritan women became part of an informal network of communication, for example, exchanging manuscripts and treatises between neighbouring families. Some of them also took part in forming congregations and nominating ministers. Letters, manuscripts and commonplace books testify to a distinct religious and intellectual female community.

The wives of certain Baptist, and ‘leveller’, leaders shared their husbands’ faith to the extent that they inhabited the same prison cells. Other women were intent upon defending their homes when they were placed under siege. Lady Elizabeth Dowdall defended Kilfenny Castle, in Limerick, on her own initiative even though her husband was himself on the premises. She wrote that on ‘the ninth of January, the High Sheriff of the county, and all the power of the county, came with three thousand men to besiege me. They brought two sows [cannon] and thirty scaling-ladders against me. They wrote many attempting letters to me to yield to them which I answered with contempt and scorn.’

Other royalist women played their own part in the civil struggle. Ann, Lady Fanshawe, was the daughter of Sir John Harrison, a child of superior birth who was educated in the usual fashion with needle, thread, virginals and lute; but above all else she enjoyed riding and ‘was I wild to that degree … I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’. All the clichés and stereotypes of childhood tend to fall apart in the face of direct testimony. Were girls and women really as servile or as domesticated as the courtesy books suggest? Could all the domestic novels, the family portraits and the sentimental poetry have got it wrong? Perhaps only the plays, with their rampant and mischievous women, got it right.

Fanshawe came from a fiercely royalist family and, at the opening of hostilities, her brother joined the king at Nottingham; her father was threatened with transportation to ‘the plantations’ while all of his goods were sequestrated by parliament. He was put under house arrest, but managed to escape and to join the king at Oxford. She fled with him, as she put it, ‘from as good houses as any gentlemen of England … to a baker’s house in an obscure street’. But she coped with the overcrowding, the sickness, the plague, the lack of supplies and the general fear of catastrophe. This was wartime Oxford.

In 1644 she married her second cousin, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was even then a member of the council attached to the prince of Wales with the title of secretary of war. As such he and his family moved in tandem with the prince’s court. Ann Fanshawe rarely writes of the war itself but reserves her comments for the peripatetic life she was obliged to endure. She was not without resource. She procured a pass for her husband through the good offices of ‘a great Parliament man whose wife had formerly been obliged to our family’. She carried £300 of money from London to Paris without being searched. The household travelled to Cork, perhaps to gain money or support, but at the beginning of October 1649, ‘by a fall of a stumbling horse (being with child), broke my left wrist’.

While she lay in bed that night, her wrist bound, she was roused by the news that the Irish were firing the town after it had been taken by Cromwell. Her husband had gone to Kinsale on business; pregnant and in pain she gathered together her husband’s manuscripts for fear of seizure and managed to pack in wooden crates all of their portable belongings, including clothes and linen; she also managed to conceal £1,000 in gold or silver which, to their puritan assailants, would have been a treasure worth killing for. At three o’clock in the morning, attended only by a man and a maid, she walked by the light of a taper into the crowded marketplace where she was confronted by ‘an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands’.

Bravely enough, she demanded to see the commander-in-chief of the Protestant forces. By great good fortune he had once served with Sir Richard Fanshawe, in different circumstances, and under the weight of her entreaties and in light of her evident plight he granted her a safe conduct. Bearing the pass she walked unmolested ‘through thousands of naked swords’ until she reached Red Abbey, a fourteenth-century Augustinian establishment that acted as a meeting place. Here she took out some loose coin and hired a neighbour’s cart, into which she piled all of her belongings, before making her way to her husband in Kinsale. It is a story of bravery to match any told by the soldiers of either side.

On another stage of her adventure she was aboard a Dutch ship with her husband when a Turkish galley, well manned, advanced towards them. She was ordered by the captain to go below, on the grounds that if the Turks saw a woman they would know the ship to be part of a merchant fleet and therefore attack it. If they spied only men, they might believe it to be a man-of-war. Once she had gone below she called for the cabin boy and, giving him half a crown, purchased his cap and coat. Suitably concealed she returned to her husband’s side on deck.

She seems to have been an expert at disguise. On another occasion she dressed herself as a ‘plain’ or ‘lowly’ woman in order to obtain a pass for a journey to Paris. She made her way to the parliamentary military headquarters at Wallingford House in Whitehall.

‘Woman, what is your husband and your name?’

‘Sir, he is a young merchant, and my name is Anne Harrison.’

‘Well, it will cost you a crown.’

‘That is a great sum for me but, pray, put in a man, my maid, and three children.’

‘A malignant would give me five pounds for such a pass.’

Once she had received it she managed by careful penwork to change the name from ‘Harrison’ to ‘Fanshawe’; there was no need for further concealment because she was already known to the ‘searchers’ at Dover, having passed that way before.

‘Madame,’ one of the ‘searchers’ told her, ‘I little thought that they would give pass to so great a malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this.’

Even in times of war certain known opponents could still come and go as they pleased.

Ann Fanshawe wrote her memoirs in the 1670s, after the death of her husband, for the benefit and education of her family. They are a notable addition to the literature of the civil conflict, but they also throw an indirect but welcome light upon the otherwise generally hidden women of the war.