STUARTS AND CIVIL WAR
While monarchs, nobles and Parliament fought for supremacy, ordinary rural people shouldered the burden of war, says Mark Stoyle
A period of turbulence between monarch and Parliament in which the countryside served as the battleground, says Mark Stoyle
In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor monarchs, died. She left no heirs and was therefore succeeded by distant relative James Stuart, King of Scotland, who was now proclaimed King of England and Ireland as well: thus becoming the first person to rule over the entire British Isles.
James was a stout Protestant and in 1605 a group of Catholic conspirators planned to blow him and his English Parliament sky-high in the ‘Gunpowder Plot’. The conspiracy was discovered in the nick of time, however, leading to the swift execution of the plotters. In 1625 James was succeeded by his son, Charles I, whose reign would see the three kingdoms riven by a catastrophic series of civil wars. The trouble began when Charles attempted to impose a new form of prayer book on the Scots, prompting his northern subjects to rise up against him. The king now called on the English Parliament for financial aid, but many MPs had their own grievances against the royal regime and sought to exploit the crisis in order to limit Charles’s political powers.
In 1642, a bloody civil war broke out in England between the supporters of the king and the supporters of Parliament. The conflict quickly spread to Scotland – Ireland was already in flames – and over the following years hundreds of thousands of people were killed, wounded or bereaved. The Parliamentarians eventually emerged victorious and in 1649 Charles was executed, leading to the establishment of a Republican government in England that would soon go on to overawe the rest of Britain, too. Following the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, however, the Republican regime began to crumble and in 1660 the Stuart monarchy was restored in the person of Charles I’s son, Charles II.
Charles II reigned for the next quarter of a century, but his successor, James II, proved singularly inept and was ousted by William of Orange – Charles I’s grandson – in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Thereafter, England, Scotland and Ireland were ruled first by William and his wife Mary, as joint sovereigns; then, after Mary’s death, by William alone; and finally, after William’s death, by Mary’s sister, Anne.
In 1707, the two kingdoms of England and Scotland were united as a single sovereign state known as Great Britain, and Anne continued to reign over them as ‘Queen of Great Britain’ until her death in 1714. Anne was the last of the Stuart monarchs, so, with her passing, one of the most remarkable periods in British history may be said to have finally drawn to a close.
COMMON LAND
The three kingdoms over which James I ruled were overwhelmingly rural ones. London – by far the largest urban centre in Britain – had a population of around 200,000 in 1603, while Edinburgh and Dublin lagged far behind with populations of perhaps 20,000 apiece. Most ordinary people still worked on the land, and lived in primitive and uncomfortable dwellings. In southern England, for example, labouring families typically occupied small, often singleroomed houses built from the most basic materials. Life was hard, and diets usually poor and monotonous, with many rural families subsisting largely on bread, cheese and pulses.
As one might expect, the Stuart countryside was often a turbulent place. During the Midland Rising of 1607, for example, hundreds rose up to pull down enclosures that had been built to extinguish common rights to land. Food
“The three kingdoms over which James I ruled were overwhelmingly rural ones”
riots also occurred in times of scarcity and in 1629 a group of women stormed aboard a ship loading grain for export at Maldon, in Essex, and forced the frightened crew to fill their aprons with grain. One of the participants, a woman named Ann Carter, is said to have incited the townsfolk to rise by crying: “Come, my brave lads of Maldon, I will be your leader, for we will not starve!” Carter was hanged at Chelmsford soon afterwards.
Further disorder occurred in the English countryside during the civil wars, when thousands of people took up arms to resist the depredations of the soldiers during the so- called Clubman risings. “If you offer to plunder, or take our cattle,” ran one of the insurgents’ banners, “be assured we will bid you battle!”
At the start of the conflict, the soldiers targeted the deer-parks of the gentry, killing the deer and gorging themselves upon venison. Hunting, of course, was the country pursuit par excellence of the Stuart gentry and was passionately engaged in by both sexes. During the early 1600s, several ‘ladies’ from Bury St Edmunds are said to have been so addicted to hunting that they swore that they’d pull on breeches in order to pursue their sport more energetically – a breach of sartorial convention that would have been regarded as deeply shocking at the time.
In short, the British countryside was sometimes a battleground during the Stuart era and sometimes a playground. But it was always common-ground – the place in which the vast majority of British men and women lived out their lives between 1603 and 1714 and in which the vast majority of them were buried at the end. In many respects, it connects us with them still.