Quarrel with the King (29 page)

Communal payment for communal goods was the customary expectation of the manor, but war meant that neighborliness itself was
under threat. Villages became even less tolerant of difference than they had been before. Vicars such Thomas Lawrence at Bemerton had clearly drifted into unpuritan churchmanship and it was reported by his neighbors “That he do & did usually ducke and make obaysance to the communion table at the entering in to the church and at the goinge for the and did always bowe at the name of Jesus.” Anyone who stepped outside the norm, who was said “to have conveyed armour into Scotland, who had spoken treason or done felonie,” was reported to the authorities. Edward Williams of Marborough was presented in 1641 for saying “there was base rogery in that book,” when talking about the Book of Common Prayer. Increasingly confident puritan ministers campaigned against dancing, music, games, and drink. John Newman, minister of Upavon, on the north side of the plain, addressed the justices as though he were their moral physician, giving them a sermon on the good and healthy life:

People were beginning to pursue their private ends and neglect the needs of the community. The inhabitants of Tippett found their sheep dying of foot rot after “Henry White gent” neglected the water channels on his own land and allowed their common meadow to remain flooded. The royalist Lord Seymour was presented “for flotting his meadowe called long Meadowe for destrowing the Kings high way.” Susan Long of Warminster “delivered to one Henry Garratt, blacksmith, a fire pan to have the same mended, but the said Garratt deteyneth it and telleth
yor peticoner she shall come by her pan as she can for (saith hee) there is noe law.”
There is noe law
: that might have been the motto inscribed over 1640s Wiltshire. War had dissolved the bonds of custom.

The ground was slipping under old meanings and structures. An intriguing petition came in to the justices in 1646 from the villagers of West Knoyle, on the very edge of the chalk, about sixteen miles west of Wilton. It was against “William Willoughby Esq, Lord of the said Mannour of Westknoyle concerning Rates and payments for the service of the king & Parliament.” Willoughby was a royalist who would be implicated in a futile royalist Wiltshire rebellion in 1655 led by the Penruddocks against the Commonwealth, and this petition is a moment of revolution against him. In a small Wiltshire village, the ordinary copyholders make a requirement that the future should be fair, that the lord of manor should not ride in on the deference of his tenants but that he, too, should pay his way and should be no burden on the common man. Before the war, Willoughby had paid only a third of the parish rates or taxes, although his demesne lands represented far more than a third of the productive land in the parish. Previously, the parishioners had submitted to this unfairness, “hee being their landlord, and these payments then but small in respect of the tymes now.” But times had changed; the amount that the villages had to contribute to war expenses on both sides, “daiely and weekly,” was so great that the men and women of West Knoyle felt this was no longer fair.

Willoughby refused to budge: “hee will pay but according to his former rate, which comes but to 26 shillings 7 pence a weeke and some of his said Tennaunts doe pay 9 shillings 10 pence halfpenny which is verie unreasonable and unconscionable that hee should soe free himself and lay the burthen upon his country who pay more payments as fines [on entering a copyhold], heriots [on the death of a copyholder] and yearly rents.”

There is even a suggestion that, at the most internalized of levels, the power of authority had evaporated. In 1647, Grace Stokes, the wife of Henry Stokes, a glazier from Fisherton Anger, just on the edge of Salisbury, came to the justices to complain about a girl called Susanna Candby who was the daughter-in-law of William Locke, the husbandman from Wylye. Grace had taken Susanna on as her apprentice for three years. Susanna had, at least in the past, suffered from scrofula, a disease of the lymph nodes in the neck, which was severely debilitating and erupted in rough, raw pustules. Since the early Middle Ages, it had been known as the king's evil and was thought to be curable by the touch of the monarch. When Susanna first came into Grace's employment, she was

Grace took her on, but in the circumstances of the war the magic no longer worked. Grace found herself with a girl so sick she was useless as an apprentice and she wanted to be rid of her. Susanna, it turned out,

As usual, the records have nothing to say about the outcome of the case, nor whether it was thought reasonable that a sick girl could be dispensed with in this way, nor any reason why the king's cure no longer worked.

Alongside this erosion of old meanings was a longing for peace and for a return to the conditions before the war. As early as October 1642, the leading Wiltshire gentry petitioned the king for peace, as did the burgers of Salisbury. For the first time in the world of seventeenth-century politics, women began to make their voices heard in these petitions for peace, but as the damage, taxation, violence, and—increasingly—disease and hunger took its toll, a fiercer and more directed reaction emerged from these villages. Each side was taking more than £700 a week out of Wiltshire at the height of the war. From the spring of 1645 onward, the men of Wiltshire, combining with their counterparts from Somerset and Gloucestershire, gathered themselves into the bands known as the Clubmen, opposed to all armies, all incursions, and all taxations, whether for the king or for the Parliament. The Clubmen were attempting, in fact, to restore locally the peace that national politics had denied them.

In July 1645, the parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Fairfax told his masters in London what he had heard about the Clubmen. “They pretended only the Defence of themselves from Plunderers, but not to side either with the king's Forces or the Parliament's, but to give Free Quarter to both: They list themselves under several Officers daily, and meet in great Bodies at their Rendezvous, and boast they can have Twenty Thousand Men at Four and Twenty Hours Warning for assembling them together.” It was Wiltshire gathering its own power. The Clubmen were, at least apparently, well organized, sending mes
sages throughout the valleys and summoning the men from the fields by ringing the church bells.

Salisbury itself provided seven hundred clubmen, “some with Pikes and Muskets, and others with Carbines and Pistols,” and in mid-July they and others from all over the Pembroke estates and from farther afield—four thousand in all—gathered at a rendezvous in the great Saxon forest of Grovely, on the ridge above Wilton where Philip Sidney had loved to ride. There they heard “certain Articles read and proposed to them, which they all assented to by giving a Shout.”

It must have been a moment of self-reassurance, the reassertion of self-defense against the inroads of anarchy and alien ideas. The leaders of the Wiltshire Clubmen included two Pembroke tenants: Thomas Bennett of Broad Chalke and William Gould of Alvediston. Both of them signed petitions sent by the Clubmen to both king and Parliament, “for procuring a Peace,” telling both of their woes.

They had given up hope of a negotiated peace and had been forced to take the future into their own hands. All they wanted was “the true Reformed Protestant Religion; and next, as free-born
English
, not degenerating from the Virtues of their Fathers, by all possible and lawful Means to preserve and uphold the native Inheritance of their Laws, their Liberties, and Properties, which they equally hold in Esteem even with Life itself.” They were asking for a restoration of the custom of the manor. The very instinct that had led Englishmen to war in 1642—a defense of the ancient—now led them in their desire for peace. “Immesurable Taxes, continual Free Quarter, and uncessant Plunderings,” they told the king, “have scarcely left Your poor Suppliants sufficient for the Support of Life. Our purses have bin exhausted, corn eaten up, cattell plundered, persons frighted from our habitacons and by reason of the violence of the soldiers our lives are not safe.”

The simple desire for certainty, for structures by which they could pay their rents, have their debts honored, make their living, and maintain their wives and families “from utter ruin and decay,” was all that drove them. They wanted “peaceably [to] return to their wonted habitations and to the obedience of the established laws.”

But it was a fantasy. The reality of the Clubmen's impotence and posturing was made apparent on August 4, 1645, when Cromwell, at the head of the New Model Army, brushed them aside. The brief engagement was at the Iron Age fort on Hambledon Hill, just over the county border in Dorset, where the Clubmen had gathered, shouting taunts at Cromwell's disciplined ironsides. “I believe we killed not twelve of them,” Cromwell wrote to Fairfax that evening, “but cut very many and put them all to flight. We have taken about three hundred; many of which are poor silly creatures, whom if you please to let send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time to come, and will be hanged before they come out again.”

It was a 1640s version of the long story this book has described: the meeting of a retrospective idealism with the overwhelming facts of power.

This is the background to Philip Pembroke's own involvement in the war. He behaved in a way that was little different from the thousands of Wiltshiremen who were first uncertain which way to turn, felt perplexed at the catastrophic outcome of events, wavered one way and then another, and felt deeply attached both to the ancient constitution and to the king who had betrayed it. But the 1640s was not a time for understanding, and Pembroke was ridiculed and despised for his flickering and uncertain behavior. Clarendon claimed that Pembroke became a parliamentarian because he wanted to protect Wilton and thought Parliament the stronger side. Others thought his rivalry with the Seymours, the great family from the north of the county with whom the Herberts had sparred since the 1540s and who had become ardent royalists, explained what Pembroke had done. Neither was right; the explanation is simpler. The tradition of which Pembroke was a part, and which this book has described, could only have led him toward Parliament. The “life of loyalty,” which one satire attributed to him, was loyalty to what? Perhaps to himself, to Wilton, to his family's culture, to a true reformed church, to the Covenanting Scots, to the hunting he had loved since he was a boy, and to a world that was lost, destroyed from both ends, by an increasingly authoritarian crown and an increasingly radical Parliament and army.

He became something of a joke to his contemporaries. The royalist Earl of Dorset, in a letter to his son-in-law, a parliamentarian, wrote sarcastically that “You cannott suffer, while you have soe sure and constant a man amongst you as the earl of Pembroke…Paraselsus himselfe [the great sixteenth-century alchemist and pharmacologist] cowld never have fixed the mercuriall spirit thatt predominates in his breast: if hee weere alive to practise on him.”

The brilliant satirist Samuel Butler published the definitive verdict:

Parliament sent him out to gather the militia on their behalf. In 1642 he was appointed “Generall for the Western part of the Kingdom” and Lord Lieutenant in Wiltshire, Somerset, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, and the Isle of Wight. If it looked for a moment as if his grandfather's Tudor fiefdom had somehow reappeared a century later, that was mere illusion. Pembroke had no military expertise and, at nearly sixty, was too old to be an active soldier. He soon withdrew to the comfort of his rooms in the Cockpit at Whitehall, taking part in the increasingly unreal debates in the House of Lords, where at times in the 1640s Pembroke and two or three other peers were the only figures on the empty benches under Inigo Jones's vaulted ceiling.