Blanche Arundell

C.1584-1649 Old Wardour Castle, Wiltshire

The tumult of England’s Civil War between Charles I and Parliament gravely affected women as well as men, and some aristocratic women also took up arms to defend their own. At the age of 61 Blanche Arundell ordered her men into action when the Roundheads came knocking at Old Wardour Castle, which was thinly defended while her husband Lord Arundell raised a regiment of horses for the king.

Blanche didn’t have the comfort of an army’s protection. Instead, her company consisted of her daughter-in-law, three grandsons, and a couple of dozen men of the household. These plucky, unlikely defenders, with the women of the house loading the men’s muskets, held out against an army of 1,300 Roundheads between 2-8 May 1643 – as told by a Royalist account – after Blanche refused terms of surrender: “She had a command from her Lord to keep it, and she would obey his command.” But, eventually, “so distracted between hunger and want of rest, that when the hand endeavoured to administer food, surprised with sleep it forgot its employment, the morsels falling from their hands”, the defenders surrendered and the castle was ransacked. Lady Blanche was separated from her children and taken prisoner before being released and offered sanctuary in Salisbury, where she learned her husband had been killed in battle. The castle’s ownership changed hands a few times – jumping between the family and Parliament – but its condition had deteriorated since the siege. The Arundells estimated the pillaging of the estate was a loss of £100,000 – a sum equivalent to approximately 1.4 million days of wages for a skilled tradesman of the time.