The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (33 page)

It may be asked what justification there could be for this ritual; the answer lies in the nature of siege warfare at that time. Without such a proviso it was greatly to the advantage of the defenders, if they had sufficient food and water, to hold out as long as possible, or at least until these supplies had been used up; after all they were warmly sheltered, and the possibility of rescue from outside remained. Meanwhile the besiegers were leading a far less agreeable existence, enduring the rigours of exposure, which led quickly to disease; the prospect of attack from the rear, in the shape of rescuing forces, only increased as time passed. Under these circumstances, some grim inducement had to be offered to the defenders to obey the summons: hence the harsh rules of siege war. Given these conditions the ‘Welsh howlings’ of the women who wanted to urge surrender upon their husbands at the siege of Oswestry (a walled town about to be blown up) were perfectly comprehensible.
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Lathom House in the 1640s was a massive and ancient fortress. The walls were six feet thick; a moat, eight yards across and six feet deep, surrounded them; after that came a strong palisade. Nine towers dominated the walls, each containing six pieces of ordnance or mounted guns; mightiest of all was the Eagle Tower, over which flew the proud motto
Sans Changer
.
There was an excellent water supply. Even the terrain favoured the defence, for the ground rose up round Lathom House like another natural fortification.

The Countess of Derby’s answer to Captain Markland’s summons was not outright defiance. Instead she played for time, while subtly reminding both the Captain and his superior of her own renowned social status. It was after all only six months since the outbreak of this ‘war without an enemy’, as the Parliamentarian Sir William Waller called it in a letter to a Royalist friend: the pre-war standards of courtesy and respect towards a great lady still prevailed. Not only did the Countess request further time to consider the summons, but she firmly declined to emerge from her fortress in order to ‘treat’ with the enemy; in the first of a series of magnificent communications she observed that ‘notwithstanding her present condition, she remembered both her Lord’s honour and her own birth, conceiving it more knightly that Sir Thomas Fairfax should wait upon her, than she upon him’.
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Various other summonses were equally rebuffed in the same high style. The Countess’s final answer was as follows: ‘That though a woman and a stranger divorced from her friends, and robbed of her state, she was ready to receive their utmost violence, trusting in God both for her protection and deliverance.’
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Apart from the protection of God, the Countess also had a considerable garrison of soldiers, under a Captain Farmer, and the men from the Derby estate, the keepers, fowlers and suchlike who, being by profession skilled marksmen, manned the towers. Nevertheless the bombardment which ensued, including ‘flaming granadoes’ (grenades) as well as the pounding of a great mortar, was severe and left its impact on the besieged: several women had their hands scorched. A contemporary diary of the siege pays tribute to the courage of Mary and Katherine Stanley, ‘for piety and sweetness truly the children of so princely a mother’. Having inherited the Countess’s spirit as well, ‘the little ladies had stomack to digest canon’, although ‘the stoutest soldiers had no hearts for granadoes’.
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The Countess remained staunch. The pinnacles and turrets of
Lathom House began to crumble to the pounding of the mortar, a culverin and a demi-culverin, but still she continued to refuse in ringing terms that safe-conduct for herself and her daughters which would have implied surrender. It was, she declared, ‘more noble to preserve her liberty by arms than to buy peace with slavery’. As for negotiations: ‘’tis dangerous treating when the sword is in the enemy’s hand’. Although the diary of the siege refers to the indignities the Countess and her daughters had to suffer, listening to the language and affronts of the besieging soldiery, the cowardice of her neighbours presented a more practical problem. One petition suggested that the Countess would do well to surrender – for the future of the surrounding countryside. The Countess of Derby made short work of it. There is no evidence that the more forceful comments of the Parliamentary preachers on her character, couched in biblical terms – the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon and so forth – made any impact on her spirit either.

The besiegers attempted to drain off the castle water supply, where the spring rose on the hill. But the real danger was presented by the great mortar loaded with stones thirteen inches across, eighty pounds in weight, daily, relentlessly pounding them to pieces. The successful sally of the defenders out of the gates to capture the mortar and drag it inside was therefore a triumph of the desperate – except that the Countess would not admit to being desperate. Instead she commanded a public thanksgiving.

It was not the least of her pleasures to discover that the commanding officer of the besiegers, Colonel Rigby, had summoned his neighbours to watch Lathom House either yield or be burnt. They were thus present to witness his humiliation. Lady Derby gave him instead ‘a very scurvy satisfying answer, so that his friends came opportunely to comfort him’ (instead of rejoicing with him). Her enemy was ‘sick of Shame and dishonour, to be routed by a lady and a handful of men’.

Three months later it was the arrival of Prince Rupert at the head of a considerable force which relieved Lathom House. The Prince conveyed twenty-two of the enemy’s colours to the great lady who had held fast. Although the actual military manoeuvres
were conducted by Captain Farmer, it is evident that without a woman of the lofty courage – one might add the aristocratic arrogance
–
of the Countess of Derby, Lathom House would have fallen to the enemy almost immediately. As it was, when it did surrender in December 1645, the Countess was far away on the Isle of Man. After the Restoration, her daughter Katherine, who retained vivid childish memories of the siege, would take to task a historian who suggested that the Countess had been present at, and thus connected with, this final débâcle. Thomas Dugdale, in his widely read 1660
Continuation
of Sir Richard Baker’s 1637
Chronicle
, perpetuated this error, based on two false Parliamentary reports. Katherine, now Marchioness of Dorchester, joined with Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her son (anxious to refute the rather more substantiated charge that Lady Eleanor Davies had foretold the death of Buckingham). As a result, Dugdale, while retaining the error, inserted a slightly equivocal compliment to the Countess in the 1665 edition: ‘in her defending of that place’ (Lathom House) the Countess ‘had manifested a more than Feminine Magnanimity’ – that is, greatness of spirit. It was not until 1674 that the error concerning the 1645 surrender was eliminated and the Countess’s role in the original victory enlarged.
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The ‘Heroick Countess’ herself lived until 1664, surviving not only the wars but the tragedy of her husband’s execution at the orders of Parliament for his part in the Worcester campaign (she tried, despite the objections of the inhabitants, to surrender the Isle of Man in return for his life). As an old lady she would tell stories of the wars to her Lancashire neighbour William Blundell, which he found difficult to understand on account of her French accent: ‘a defect’ in ‘my lady’s English’. To the end she was something of a tartar: where the Quakers were concerned, for example, ‘she shut out all pity and tenderness’ when they were imprisoned for non-payment of tithes.
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The Countess, so confident in her birth, and the utter rightness of all her opinions, would have appreciated Dugdale’s equivocal compliment to her ‘more than Feminine Magnanimity’.
From the point of view of the enemy, a high-born heroine in charge of a siege represented a double hazard. Most obviously, her combination of gallantry and authority would fuel the chivalrous defenders to greater efforts; secondly, the hoped-for effect of an official summons upon the defenders’ nerves might be largely nullified by the presence of such a feminine figurehead, No one had any particular desire to kill, maim or wound her or her family: hence the constant pleading requests to the Countess of Derby to accept a safe-conduct. When the husband himself conducted the defence, his wife’s presence at the siege was still embarrassing to the attackers, as in the case of the Marchioness of Winchester, another brave woman whose refusal to quit inhibited her opponents.

The siege of Basing House, magnificent dwelling of the great Catholic magnate John, fifth Marquess of Winchester, which lasted from August 1643 until October 1645, was one of the most famous and protracted of the war.
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When finally captured, Basing House was found to number amongst its contents not only riches and pictures and art works and furnishing – but also the engraver Wenceslaus Hollar and Inigo Jones himself (who was carried out naked, wrapped in a blanket). A passionate supporter of the King’s cause, Lord Winchester was said to have ‘
Aimez Loyauté
’ engraved on every window of Basing House.

Honora Marchioness of Winchester was, as Clarendon wrote later, ‘a lady of great honour and alliance’, being the daughter of the Earl of St Albans and Clanricarde, and the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Machiavellian statesman, Sir Francis Walsingham.
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From the point of view of Parliament, however, it was more important that she was half-sister to their own general, the Earl of Essex (to whom one of the besiegers, Colonel Hammond, was also related). Here was the problem of a civil war in a nutshell. The Parliamentary besiegers were understandably anxious to have such a lady safely removed from Basing House.

So Sir William Waller duly invited the Marchioness to lead out her own children (she was the mother of seven), and all the other women and children in the house, during a parley. He used exceptionally courteous terms, ‘excusing the rudeness of his
disorderly guns’. The Marchioness’s answer was, like that of the Countess of Derby to Sir Thomas Fairfax, superbly scornful: ‘she thanked God that she was not in that condition to accept of fair quarter at Sir William Waller’s hands, being resolved to run the same fortune as her Lord, knowing that there was a just and all-seeing Judge above, who she hoped would have an especial hand in this business’. From this august judge, she added, Sir William Waller could ‘pretend no commission’.

Then the Marchioness and her ladies set to with a will, casting bullets from lead hastily stripped from the roofs and turrets of the house. During a lull in the siege she also visited Oxford (where the King was) and solicited diligently for help for her husband.

By the autumn of 1645 time had run out for Basing House, and its courageous defenders of both sexes. It was now the one remaining Royalist garrison guarding the south-west, and as such received the attentions of Oliver Cromwell himself, since the victory of Naseby that summer the hero of the Parliamentary forces. During the final bombardment, one of Cromwell’s shells ‘brake in’ to the Marchioness’s lodgings, killing a waiting-woman and a chambermaid (demonstrating how perilous might be the fate of such innocent anonymous females caught up in these great events).

What happened to the Marchioness? Accounts vary. Either she escaped from Basing House before the final stage of the siege on 8 October, or she was captured and subsequently exchanged for another prominent (male) prisoner. Either way her name was specifically mentioned in the Articles of Surrender, as were those of other chatelaines. (At the surrender of Bletchingdon House to Cromwell in April 1645, the eighth Article read; ‘That the lady of the House [Mrs Windebank] shall enjoy her goods as before …’)
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Thus was war in its own strange way bringing the names of women to the fore. While the Marchioness of Winchester survived to bring comforts to her sick husband imprisoned in the Tower of London, Basing House was ‘slighted’, or razed to the ground, at the orders of Parliament and its gorgeous contents looted.

Where the Countess of Derby and the Marchioness of Winchester were already illustrious figures before the war, through the panoply of their high lineage, ‘prudent and valiant’ Lady Bankes, defender of Corfe Castle, made her own name by the sheer courageous obstinacy of her resistance; and like Lady Derby, she gave every impression of enjoying her role, for all its perils. Mary Bankes came of a good if not a brilliant family, being the daughter of Ralph Hawtrey of Ruislip; her husband Sir John Bankes, described as ‘a grave and learned man in the profession of law’,
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had prosecuted John Hampden as Attorney-General, and later became Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas.

The law had proved lucrative. It will be recalled that in 1617, at the time of the disastrous marriage of Frances Coke to Buckingham’s brother, Corfe Castle was part of the rich settlement Frances was expected to receive from her mother Lady Hatton; the failure of Lady Hatton to part with it resulted in the King creating the bridegroom Viscount Purbeck as a consolation (see p. 19). So Corfe Castle remained in the possession of Lady Hatton. About 1634, Sir John Bankes bought it from her.

Mercurius Rusticus
, the Royalist newspaper, would call Corfe Castle ‘one of the impregnable forts of the kingdom’. Its peculiar site close by the Dorset coast, on top of a steep hill which lay in ‘the fracture’ of another hill, guarding the only route inland, had ensured ‘Corph’ a place in history since Saxon times; it possessed its own kind of grim female tradition, for hereabouts had been the
domus
of Queen Elfrida and here her step-son King Edward the Martyr had been murdered, according to later allegations, at her instigation, that her own son Ethelred might succeed. The present massive structure, with its walls ten feet thick, was complete by the reign of Henry II. Later Henry VII had repaired Corfe Castle for his own mother, the Countess of Richmond.
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