Great Tales From English History: Cheddar Man to DNA by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781405513081
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

ROUNDHEADS V. CAVALIERS

1642–8

LADY MARY BANKES WAS A FORMIDABLE WOMAN, THE mother of fourteen children. When the Civil War broke out in August 1642 it fell to her to defend the family home at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Her husband was a senior judge and a privy councillor, so when the King had gone north to raise his standard that summer Sir John Bankes followed. He soon found himself, like all the King’s councillors, denounced by Parliament as a traitor.

Down in Dorset, the local parliamentary commander anticipated little trouble when he arrived at Corfe to take the surrender of the Bankes’s home. But he had not reckoned on the valiant Lady Mary, who shut the gates against him. When his men attempted to scale the walls they found themselves showered with rocks and burning embers thrown by the family’s loyal retainers – cooks and chambermaids included. Even a prize of £20 (£2,240 today) offered to the first man to reach the battlements attracted no takers. Hearing of royalist troops in the nearby town of Dorchester, the parliamentarians slunk away.

It took an act of treachery to capture Corfe three years later. One February night in 1646, an accomplice in the garrison opened the gates to fifty parliamentary troops disguised as royalists, and Lady Bankes, a widow since her husband’s death at Oxford two years previously, was arrested. Parliament confiscated their lands and decided to ‘slight’ Corfe Castle: they stacked the main towers with gunpowder barrels, then exploded them.

The bravery of Lady Mary and the spectacular ruins of her castle that loom over Corfe to this day illustrate the drama of England’s Civil War and the damage it wreaked. Modern estimates suggest that one in every four or five adult males was caught up in the fighting: 150 towns suffered serious destruction; 11,000 houses were burned or demolished and 55,000 people made homeless – these were the years when the German word plündern, to plunder, came into the language, brought over by Charles’s loot-happy cavalry commander, his nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Nearly 4 per cent of England’s population died in the fighting or from war-related disease – a higher proportion, even, than died in World War I. ‘Whose blood stains the walls of our towns and defiles our land?’ lamented Bulstrode Whitelock to the House of Commons in 1643. ‘Is it not all English?’

The Civil War was not like the Wars of the Roses, when everyday life had largely carried on as normal. The clash between King and Parliament involved the most fundamental question – how should the country be ruled? And to this was added the profound differences in religion that bitterly divided families and split friend from friend. Sir William Waller and Sir Ralph Hopton had been comrades-in-arms in the early 1620s, fighting Catholics on the continent. But now they found themselves on opposing sides, Sir William supporting Parliament because of his Puritan beliefs, Sir Ralph feeling that he must stay loyal to his monarch. ‘That great God which

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