“Every County had more or lesse the civill warre within it selfe”1: the realities of war in Lucy Hutchinson’s Midland shires

Abstract

IntroductionAs a historian of her own times, Lucy Hutchinson was shrewd enough to acknowledge that the warfare which comprises a major part of the memoir of her husband Colonel John Hutchinson was not simply an English Civil War. When she dealt with the first reverberations of the conflict which was then about engulf her family, she wrote:about the yeare 1639 the thunder was heard afarre of ratling in the troubled ayre, and even the most obscured woods were penetrated with some flashes, the forerunners of the dreadfull storme which the next yeare was more apparent.In writing this Lucy dated the beginning of the fall of the Stuart monarchy to 1639 - the year of the first Bishop's War.2 No doubt she and John, who seem, according to her account of the period some two years later, to have read newsbooks and discussed contemporary affairs together, were well aware that the trouble had begun two tumultuous years preceding the almost farcical first war in the four nations. The warning signs had been there even earlier when Charles I stage-managed his belated Scottish coronation in a way which symbolically turned the clock back to before the early-fourteenth-century Declaration of Arbroath by openly giving precedence to officials of the Church of England over the men of the Kirk. Serious trouble had begun in 1637 when the attempt to introduce a new prayer book, based upon the English Book of Common Prayer, into Scotland had provoked violence. This policy had firstly caused riots, and then secondly inspired the drafting of, and even more importantly, the mass subscription to a National Covenant creating a bond between the Scottish people and God in defence of the Kirk against the king's aggression. The king's provocative reaction in not seeking a compromise and being openly aggressive had pushed the Scots further. By the summer of 1639 the storm Lucy had alluded to had actually been underway for some time: by then Scotland had formed a new political structure and an executive which had not only circumvented the king in church and state but was able to manage a war effort to challenge him militarily. Mutual aggression led to the first war in the British Isles since the Nine Years' War and was later named by the victors after the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud and his fellow Episcopalians both sides of the border: as the Bishops' War.Lucy's broad vision was not limited to her understanding that the war which broke out in England in 1642 had origins which lay beyond England's border; like her contemporary fellow historian, the royalist politician Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, she acknowledged that the war was an affair which absorbed the entirety of the British Isles. In her background narrative, Hutchinson spent some space in her text dealing with the three initial conflicts within the archipelagic-wide war which preceded the direct involvement of her husband and herself. The First Bishops' War of 1639 was brief and involved the English forces being chased ignominiously out of Scotland and a more serious fight between Scottish covenanters and anti-covenanters outside Aberdeen at the Bridge of Dee, which ironically occurred during the peace negotiations being held at Berwick upon Tweed. A second Bishops' War in 1640 was a more deadly and involved the Scottish Army of the Covenant invading England, defeating the king's forces and occupying northeast England for a year. The third war in the sequence sprang from the rebellion in Ireland which began on the night of 22 October 1641 and involved a rapidly developing crisis for the Dublin administration. An alternative national Irish government was established in Kilkenny which managed a structured war-effort that challenged armies sent from England, Wales and Scotland. It was this latter war which more than any other formed the backdrop to the Lucy and John's decision to throw themselves into the coming war against their king. The war in Ireland created an atmosphere of fear in Britain where the newly invigorated press and rapidly spreading rumours inspired a genuine fear that there was an imminent threat of an invasion by Roman Catholic forces from Ireland. …