Category Archives: History

Archbishop Laud, religious conformity, and the English Civil Wars

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For the last couple of weeks, we–or more accurately, I along with as many of you as I could hijack–have been looking at the ingredients that went into England’s Civil Wars, but so far I’ve left out religion, which is sort of like making chicken soup without the chicken. 

And this at a time when people took their religion (which is to say, their chicken) seriously, when ideas that today might find a different form were poured into the molds religion offered.

Sorry. Metaphor overdose alert. Molds. Chicken. Let’s move on before this gets any worse.

Irrelevant photo: The north Cornish coast, although by now I can’t remember which part exactly.

Archbishop Laud

Nah, let’s not. I’ve got one more metaphor that I just have to throw into the soup. It’ll keep us from noticing the absence of chicken: If this period was a boxing match, in one corner we’d have William Laud, the Archbishop of Canturbury–it doesn’t get any higher than that in the Church of England unless you get to be god himself–and a powerful advisor the Charles I. 

In the other corner we’d have the Puritans, and we’ll get to them in a minute or three. So that’s the structure of the conflict. It’s useful.

Before we get to the Puritans, let’s talk about Laud, since he got the subhead here. And Charles. Remember him? For Pete’s sake, he was in the last paragraph. Pay attention. Charles was the king who got beheaded in the Civil Wars. I was tempted to say he got himself beheaded, but it sounded like blaming the victim. So I settled for “got beheaded,” making it sound like something that just kind of happened to him, the way it could happen to anyone.

We should pick up the story a bit earlier, though, when William Laud was a mere bishop and Charles became king. He spotted Laud, liked what he saw, and made him archbishop. Laud was bright and he was ambitious, but for Charles his appeal, at least in part, was that he argued for the Divine Right of Kings. 

Why does “Divine Right of Kings” get all those capital letters? 

Dunno. They used so many back then that it’s a wonder we haven’t run out, but we haven’t and there they sit, still clinging to the phrase. I was going to go with a lower case format  but the caps turned snappish and I lost my nerve.

Laud’s theory is pretty much self-explanatory, but let’s explain it anyway: He argued that the people who got to be kings got to be kings because god had chosen them to be kings. Ergo (which is Latin for don’t bother me with questions) Charles had been chosen by god and everybody should do what he said because that was the next best thing to god speaking. The corollary of that was that Parliament, which was being pesky, should vote Charles the money he needed–or at least wanted–and not ask for anything in return. 

No, the argument didn’t convince Parliament either, so Charles folded Parliament up, put it back in its box, and returned it, claiming it was defective, the wrong size, and not at all what he’d ordered. Amazon accepted it (Divine Right and all that) and he ruled without a Parliament for the next eleven years. That should’ve made him happy but he–have I said this before?–needed money, and raising money without a Parliament was problematic.

But that particular aspect of the conflict isn’t on today’s menu. (At last: We’re back in the vicinity of that soup metaphor. Sorry, it’s been a rough week.) We’re supposed to be talking about Laud, who having become the Archbishop of Canterbury set out to reform the Church of England, restoring it to what he held to be the most perfect form of Christianity.

 

Puritanism and the C. of E.

None of this makes sense unless you notice the growing number of Puritans scattered across the country. 

The Puritans had been around since the 16th century and their goal was to cleanse the Church of England of even the faintest remaining traces of Catholicism. They were intense, they were earnest, and they were certain god had chosen them to set a pattern for the world and its people. They have a reputation for being a pretty grim lot.

That said, the various strands of Puritans disagreed with each other and I can’t find a neat definition to steal. What they did agree on was that the Church of England’s hierarchy and ritual were wrong, ungodly, and in immediate need of replacement. Some wanted to do that from inside the church and some from outside. 

One of their arguments with the Church of England was over the question of whether people were saved by good works or by predestination, but that’s best explained by someone who takes it all seriously. I can manage that for minutes at a time, but then my real self takes over and I’m overwhelmed by a need to clean the kitchen, sort out my filing system, or repair the stone wall I built so badly 15 years ago, and before you know it there goes the day. What I will say about predestination is that I’ve never understood how the Puritans could tell people that living a good life wouldn’t help them get into heaven and then expect them to live a good life anyway. Especially if the good life was no fun. If you won the game by getting into heaven and good works didn’t help–

You see my problem here. But then, see above. I’m not your best guide through this. 

Whatever problems their publicity department had with all that, the Puritans were a powerful and growing political force, possibly because the alternative–Charles and Archbishop Laud–were so unappealing. I doubt it’ll take you long to come up with a contemporary political parallel. Or an easy half dozen.

At any rate, either the Puritans or someone else–if it’s clear to historians, it’s not to me–pulled off an amazing organizational feat by presenting Parliament with what’s called the Root and Branch petition, which was against the bishops’ involvement in government (and a great deal more). That was an incredibly radical step. An MP who spoke against it summed it up neatly: “I do not think a King can put down Bishops totally with Safety to the Monarchy.” Church and state, bishops and king, were all hitched together. They all floated together or they all sank.

The petition was originally circulated in London and gathered 15,000 signatures (give or take; the counts vary). Then it spread to other cities. Given that you couldn’t sign online with a single click and that circulating it meant carrying copies from person to person, it was a hefty number of signatures. And it speaks to an impressive organization driving it. So no, Laud wasn’t hallucinating enemies. The forces that worried him were real.

Just as the Puritans believed the Church was riddled with the woodworms of Catholicism, Laud was convinced the Church was infested with Puritanism, so when he became archbishop he rolled up his voluminous sleeves and set about fixing it. Kind of like me with that stone wall, only my sleeves are less impressive and more practical. 

What Laud wanted were ritual, hierarchy, aesthetics not far removed from Catholic ones, and he wanted everyone to do them all the same way. He was against the wooden communion table and in favor of a high altar made of stone, thank you, which had to be set at the east end of the church and surrounded by railing to keep the riffraff at arm’s length. 

Yeah, kind of a micro-manager. We’ll let that stand in for everything else he wanted done. He visited parish churches to make sure they’d implemented his changes. He must’ve been as welcome as the king’s tax collectors.

In 1637, he had two Puritan writers branded and imprisoned and for good measure had their ears cut off because they’d published works that criticized him. He succeeded in turning them into earless martyrs.

He redrafted the Book of Common Prayer, and since he and Charles agreed that religious conformity was a necessity, they imposed the new draft on the whole kingdom. And on Scotland, which had the same king but was a separate kingdom.

Sorry, make that “tried to impose” his new draft. It led to war with Scotland, which led to Charles calling Parliament back into session so he could demand money, which led to Parliament dumping a heap of complaints in his lap, which led to him dissolving it, which led to a good part of northern England being occupied by Scotland, which led to Charles recalling Parliament, which led to Laud being tried for treason. 

Did you follow that? It’s a slight oversimplification.

It also led–or helped lead–to the Civil Wars.

Laud was beheaded in 1645. 

Didn’t manage to memorize that? Don’t worry. If you’re reading about the Civil Wars and Laud’s name comes up, you can now nod gravely and almost understand what they’re talking about.

*

Isn’t it interesting that I’m drawn to write about the overthrow of a king just at a time when the US is flirting with monarchy? I will say in defense of Charles I that unlike Donald Trump he didn’t demand to have New York’s Penn Station and Virginia’s Dulles Airport named after himself. Of course they hadn’t been built yet, but still–

A friend with a practical turn of  mind suggests that everything should be named after Trump. Penn Station, Dulles Airport, every other airport and train station, New York’s Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, and Seventh Avenues. Denver; International Falls, Minnesota. Everything. Then people can call ICE to report a sighting of illegal immigrants at the corner of Trump Street and Trump Avenue in Trumpistan and wait while they go looking.

A bit more prelude to the English Civil Wars

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We’re picking up on last week’s post about the years–and the rebellions–that led up to the English Civil Wars. By way of reminder, we’re in the 17th century, complete with inflation and displaced and hungry peasants. Riots are breaking out around the country.

Now it’s time to add dissatisfied soldiers, sailors, merchants, and townspeople to the picture. 

 

The care and feeding of a military

Between 1627 and 1629, England was at war with France, in part because that was what England and France did–think of them as two kids kicking each other in the back seat of the car–and in part because England was supporting the Huguenots, French Protestants who weren’t have a good time in Catholic France. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s a side issue so don’t lose sleep over it. What matters for us is that England felt the need to build up its armed forces. And if there’s one thing we know about any military it’s that they need to eat.

Irrelevant photo: Daffodils in bloom as I type. In February. I can’t believe what I’m getting away with living here.

Ah, but Charles (and probably many a monarch before and after him) had a nifty way to feed his soldiers on the cheap: billet them on the local populace. In other words, house them with locals, who then have to feed and put up with them.

Did the locals get paid for this? The hell they did. That would’ve cost money. 

Wars are like monarchs: they always cost money, but better it should be local people paying than the treasury, right?

As a justice of the peace outlined the situation, “Will His Majesty make war without provision of treasure or must our country bear the charge of all England? It is not enough that we undergo the trouble of insolent soldiers in our houses, their robbery and other misdemeanours but that we must maintain them at our own cost.” (I’m quoting here and elsewhere from Fiery Spirits, by John Rees.)

For all its problems, billeting works well enough when you’re talking about soldiers, but sailors are more useful on ships than on shore, so the government had no choice but to feed them itself, and when supplies that were meant for Plymouth’s sailors were diverted to another purpose, the sailors’ complaints broke into the open. 

As Sir Fernando Gorges, commander of the fort at Plymouth, wrote, “They . . . say they are not suffered to come ashore. They have no means to put clothes on their backs much less to relieve their wives and children. When sick, they have no allowance of fresh victuals. The sick when put ashore are suffered to perish for want of  being looked to. Some of their provisions are neither fit nor wholesome.” 

So far, we have two unhappy groups of people. Let’s add some more.

 

Pressing and mutiny

Before you have to feed a military, you need to create one. And what’s the cheapest way to do that? You press them.

No, not press as in get rid of wrinkles but as in force young men into the military. It’s like a draft but more random, and it didn’t make the impressed men (or their families) happy. When somewhere between 80 and 100 impressed men were marched to Plymouth, headed for the naval ships that were gathered there, they were locked in the Guildhall–think of it as a city hall–overnight. In a room that also held 40 pikes and some swords. On account of that, their officers didn’t get that year’s Nobel Prize for Foresight. Eventually someone opened the door and the men broke out, armed with those pikes and swords, and got into a battle with the town watch. Three died; sixty escaped. 

The group was eventually disarmed and the leader, Robert Kerby, condemned to be hanged, but sailors broke down the gallows that had been erected for him and threw it into the sea.  Then they tried to release him and two sailors were killed in the fighting.

Kerby was reprieved until after the fleet sailed, then discharged. 

It wasn’t happening just in Plymouth. Mutiny was having a moment. An Irish regiment marched to Bristol and sailed home. After a mutiny in Harwich, the leaders were imprisoned and the soldiers tore down the prison. Some of them reached Gravesend and were rescued by “divers women” who “come down to the ships and will not suffer them to be taken from them.”

I’m not sure who Rees is quoting there but never mind: they make their point.

In Exeter the mayor closed the city gates to keep a couple of hundred rioting soldiers out. One hacked his way through, threatening to behead the mayor. 

Companies of sailors rampaged through London in gangs and one gang attacked the Duke of Buckingham’s coach, demanding their pay. They were given a bit of money, which settled things down for the time being but didn’t solve the underlying problem.

Will you forgive me if I offer a life lesson here? It’s free, if that helps. In case you’re ever in a position where you’ve built up a fighting force (it could happen to anyone), complete with arms and all that, for fuck’s sake, keep them paid. And fed. Failing to do that is right up there with locking your prisoners in a room full of pikes and swords, then opening the door and expecting to find them singing hymns. 

I know. It’s always easier to see these things in retrospect.

 

Parliament

All this mattered to Parliament in a way that the uprisings by a bunch of peasants (that’s last week’s post) didn’t. 

For one thing, not just individual households but towns began complaining against the billeting system. Respectable people were complaining; people with money and power and voices that could be heard all the way to the halls of Parliament. 

For another, the country couldn’t do without its army and navy. Parliament and the king might be (and were) in conflict over who held what power, but this much they agreed on. So in 1628, four sailors were allowed to address the House of Lords, and they told their delicate lordships that they’d asked for their pay before and were now more than 15 months in arrears. 

Buckingham–the king’s favorite; you’ll find him center stage throughout this mess, at least until he gets killed, at which point he ceases to matter–promised they’d be paid within the week, which of course they weren’t. But it wasn’t his fault, he told them and the world at large once the week had passed:

“I have done more for you than ever my predecessors did. . . . I procured an increase of your pay.” 

He detailed the amount but it’s in old money–shillings and dingbats and who knows what–so we’ll skip it. The sailors might’ve been more impressed if the theoretical money had found its way into their pockets.

 

Merchants

One more thread of rebellion was weaving itself into the pre-war tapestry: wealthy merchants were refusing to pay import and export taxes. Charles had raised them and Parliament (and the merchants) argued that it and only it had the right to do that. The conflict escalated to involve confiscated cargoes; merchants breaking into the warehouse to reclaim their cargoes; basic smuggling techniques to avoid customs officers; and imprisoned merchants. 

The question of who had the right to fiddle with which taxes sat at the heart of Parliament’s conflict with the king. The king needed money–kings always do, somehow–and Parliament’s goal was to make him come to them for it so he’d have to meet their demands. Charles, of course, was always on the lookout for work-arounds so he wouldn’t have to.

I suppose I should mention here that the East India company and the Levant Company had turned down his request for a loan. You’d almost think we were following the formula for writing a thriller, building the tension with every new scene.

It all led to the overthrow of the king.

*

Speaking of kings, as of February 12 the US government said it would be ending the ICE occupation in Minnesota. In response, the people I follow there said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It may happen, though, because the announcement dropped just as funding for ICE was coming up for a vote. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.  

The question is, if the occupation does end, what does that mean? My best guess is that ICE won’t do anything quite as visible again, at least until its funding’s secure, and that the lesson it learned is not to shoot white people in public and not to piss off entire communities. There’s been no change to the plan to build a network of mega-detention centers across the country. (Yes, that’s real.) Illegal detention and harassment of Black and brown people and of observers and demonstrators may be more discreet, though.

Local officials in Minnesota are quoted as saying the damage the surge has done to families, local businesses, and schools will be difficult to repair, and costly. People still need help and if you want to donate, a source I trust shared a link to a set of organizations helping people in hiding with everything from diapers to pet care, from food to rent. “These funds are administered by neighbors helping their neighbors,” the site writes, “not large organizations. This is one of the most direct ways to help and to get cash and resources into people’s hands quickly.”

Apologies for printing appeals for donations, but they’re needed. I trust that if you can’t or don’t want to donate, you won’t but will understand why I ask.

A prelude to the English Civil Wars

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History’s headline events tend to grab our attention, blocking out the background, but let’s talk about what England looked like before the Civil Wars broke out. You won’t find many links here. I’m drawing heavily on an actual book (remember books? they’re made of paper), The Fiery Spirits, by John Rees.

Screamingly irrelevant and out of season photo: a lily of some sort. We weren’t introduced, so it doesn’t know my name either.

The economy

We’re talking about the early 17th century. Prices had gone up between 75% and 100% in the century before the Civil War started (which was in 1642; you’re welcome). That put pressure on a system that was already in flux, and flux is never easy to live with. Not only does it turn people’s lives upside down, it sounds like an unpleasant disease. 

What was fluxing? Feudalism was officially over (ask any historian) but the remnants were still breaking apart, leaving sharp edges. A few former peasants got rich. More, though, couldn’t support their families any longer. 

Landlords were changing the rules that governed rural life. One of those ways was to change what was called copy-hold tenancies into leasehold tenancies. We’ll skip the intricacies–they make my hair itch–but copy-hold, whatever its disadvantages to the holder, was stable. With leasehold, the peasant held the land for a fixed term, but after that the landlord could demand a higher payment.

Guess who that favored.

Many of the plots that peasants farmed had been subdivided beyond the point where they could sustain a family, making the family more dependant than before on common land. Common land was an inheritance from feudal law that had given generations of peasants the right to graze their animals, gather wood, fish, or do whatever local agreement allowed on a defined piece of land. But landlords were enclosing the common land–fencing it off so the tenants couldn’t use it and the landlord could. If we’d been around to ask, I’m sure some landlord or landlord’s representative would’ve told us they were using it more efficiently than the peasants ever had.

Some landlords pushed their tenants off the land entirely–the plots they’d farmed as well as the common land. 

And that, my friends, is a reasonably accurate miniaturization of the enclosure movement. You can still see its traces in the English countryside: all those beautiful hedged fields are a testament to a time of hunger and desperation.

By the time the Civil War started (and we won’t get that far here), the country was showing signs of strain. Uprisings were rising up around the country.

 

Disaforestation

The country’s biggest landlord was the king, who owned, among other things, what was then called forest. In a weird twist of the king’s English, though, forest didn’t necessarily mean land with trees. It was a legal thing meaning a certain category of land the king owned. Don’t expect it to make sense in the normal sort of way. 

Well, in that forest land lived people–furless bipeds; you may be familiar with them–who under the strange bit of law that made land into forest, regardless of whether it had trees, had some rights to common land. That gave them a bit of protection ordinary tenants didn’t have. In other words, from the king’s point of view, all that common land was going to waste when it could be growing money, and the king always needed money. It’s to be an affliction monarchs are genetically prone to.

So we can add the king to the list of landowners who wanted to enclose land. But to do that in his very own forest, he had to move it out from under the law governing forest land, and that was called disaforestation. It’s different than deforestation because it’s a bit of legal hooha and doesn’t necessarily involve chopping down trees.

Did I mention that business about feudalism’s remnants breaking down and something we’d recognize as the beginnings of capitalism are rising out of the ground like thistles? 

Between 1627 and 1630, the Crown raised £300,000 by selling disafforested land. That’d be something like £70,000,000 today, give or take a few pence.

 

The Western Rising

Enough with the background. Let’s talk about the Western Rising of 1626 to 1632. This isn’t a single revolt but a series of anti-enclosure and anti-disaforestation riots in the southwest that were serious enough to border on insurrection.

In 1626, in Gillingham Forest, peasants threatened to tear down enclosures erected by courtiers who were renting Crown land. Renting the king’s land was the sort of perk you got for hanging around the court and making yourself likeable. Courtiers also got titles that they and no doubt everyone else took seriously: groom of the stole; groom of the bedchamber. You can’t make this stuff up. 

It’s not clear, at least from my reading, what happened between the peasants threatening to tear down enclosures and the response, but something must’ve because 14 men and 12 women were hauled before the Court of the Star Chamber, and 6 men and 1 woman were tried for riot, with 4 of the men convicted.

In 1628, more rioting broke out. Messengers were sent from London to put a stop to it, and they were tied to a post and whipped. The documents they’d brought from the Lords and Star Chamber were burnt. 

What happened next is where it gets interesting: the soldiers billeted nearby not only refused to stop the riot but rescued rioters who’d been detained. The king sent orders for the sheriff of Dorset to sort the mess out and he reported that the rioters were “too strong and resolute to meddle with.” They were well armed and faced down his troops, and their rallying cry, according to a contemporary source, was that of people being displaced: “Here we were born and here we will die.”

The story’s patchy. All the stories are patchy but we have to work with what’s been passed down to us. The next year, enough order had been restored that 80 people were dragged before the Star Chamber, although not the leader, “Colonel” Henry Hoskins, who surfaced again in 1631, urging people to pull down “all the hedges and Fences made in the Forest.”

After that we run out of information and head to Selwood Forest in Wiltshire, where a court case between two landowners included a dispute about rights to common land. When the court gave landowner the other one’s hilltop farm as payment for a debt, the sheriff who was sent to claim it found it protected by “a multitude of base and desperate persons” with “arms and muskets.” 

The government ordered the local Trained Bands–think of them as militias–to take the farm, but a member of the local gentry who was called on to supply musketeers and pikemen said “he would willingly give the Sherriffe a meeting att some other time, butt he did nott much fancy that service.”

He was arrested himself. 

Eventually 20 musketeers and pikemen were mobilized instead of the 50 who’d been sent for in the mail, and a cannon was brought from Bristol. They called on the defenders to surrender, and when they didn’t it turned out that all the sheriff’s men had either powder or shot but only four of them had both. 

The sheriff knew when to retreat. 

They tried again, with a bigger cannon, which again had to be brought from Bristol. The gunner said, “The voice of the country was against the business” and refused his orders. 

They tried a third time and this time the gunners demanded promises that they wouldn’t be charged with murder if they killed anyone.

The Privy Council appointed a new sheriff and demanded that the lieutenants of the country turn out the Trained Bands. And then, sadly, the power went out, the computers lost all the data that hadn’t been saved, and we don’t know how the standoff ended. What did get saved, though, is the striking alliance of local gentry and the “lewd and desperate persons” in defiance of central government.

 

Lady Skimmington

That leads us to talk about central government. 

In 1631, King Charles (it doesn’t get more central than that) enclosed a royal forest and then rented it to a jeweler to pay off a $10,000 debt he’d run up. (Have you ever wondered why kings always seemed to be short on money?) This time, the commoners’ rebellion took the form of a skimmington, a traditional local way of shaming people who broke the accepted codes, usually around things like like adultery, remarrying too soon if you were a widow, exceeding the “acceptable amount of spousal abuse” (that apparently applied to either men or women.) 

In this revolt, the leaders dressed in women’s clothes and called themselves Lady Skimmington, threatening to pull down the “Greate Lodge and to kill me,” according to landlord’s representative who could be found, predictably, in the Greate Lodge. 

Again the Trained Banks were called out, and again the person whose job it was to call them refused. 

The protestors pulled down houses, shot at the under-sheriff and the royal messenger whose job was to squash everyone back into the box they’d come in. A second royal messenger was arrested, jailed, and beaten before being released. 

In the end, 126 skimmingtons, as the rebels (or rioters, or whatever you want to call them) came to be known, were arrested. They included what Rees calls “popular masses,” artisans, and substantial gentry. Special notice goes to a rector, gentleman landowners, some Puritans, and some women. 

The punishments handed out were harsh but they did wring some concessions from the king, who returned “substantial” amounts of land to the commoners.

The final piece of the Western Rising was in the Forest of Dean in 1631, and it was set off when a landowner started digging for coal on enclosed land. Five hundred people gathered, with drums, guns, and pikes, destroying ditching. In a second riot, another 500 people, armed the same way, threw down miles of ditching and threatened the landowner’s agent. On the same day, a “great company of rude people” did “great spoil,” although I’m damned if I know the exact nature of that spoil. 

All that was in March. By April, some thousands of rioters gathered. A preacher was later accused of taking part in a “rebellious tumult” and speaking “in maintenance of the doctrine of the equality of all mankind.” I mention that because a lot of that was going around at the time. The doctrine of equality wore religious clothes and I don’t have to share the religion to think it looked quite grand in them. 

To my eye, this looks like a specific local grievance sharing its precious bodily fluids with an overarching theory about politics, economics, religion, and hierarchy. 

Again the Trained Bands were called on, and this time they did manage to arrest the leader–or a leader anyway: “the most Principal Offender and Ringleader”–and hustled him to Newgate, far enough away from the uproar that he couldn’t be broken loose. 

 

Meanwhile, in other parts of the country

A series of riots took place near the Humber, where the issue was about draining the fens–marshy land where people had been making a living for generations. Again women played a visible part. We tend to get written out of history, so its interesting how visible women were in this tumult. They approached the drainage workers from one direction while the men stoned them from the other. (I know. The drainage workers would’ve been a bunch of poor schmucks trying to make a living. It was Charles I who stood to profit from the drainage. Still, Charles wasn’t around to throw stones at. You understand how that kind of thing happens.) In one outbreak, some 300 people, mainly “women boys servants and poor people whose names cannot be learned” took part.

That line “whose names cannot be learned” has a resonance. These were people who acted but in historical terms have lost their individuality. Women boys servants and poor people. A moment’s respect for the nameless, please.

Again, some of the local gentry took the side of the commoners against the monarchy and the assorted people positioned to make money from the drainage. We can pretty safely assume that their interests lay with the economic arrangements that were being erased. 

Women became briefly visible again in Essex, around Maldon, in 1629, where the issue was grain, not enclosure. The harvest had been bad and the cloth trade–a major source of employment–had fallen on hard times. Protesters armed with pikestaves and pitchforks stopped grain from being exported, took what they needed and sold the rest at what they considered a fair price. 

In another incident, some 100 to 140 women and children boarded a ship and forced the crew to fill their bonnets and aprons. Most were struggling artisans, not the poorest of the poor, but hard times left them face to face with hunger. 

The protests spread and were led by “Captain” Ann Carter, who was eventually executed, along with three men.

So there’s the run-up to the Civil War: an economy going through painful changes;  widespread uprisings by the people who’d been kicked aside by progress. The government put down rising after another, but even so it was playing Whack-a-Mole: it put down one riot and another popped up. Where people were dispossessed and hungry, what would you expect?

If that doesn’t sound unsettled enough, merchants were staging a tax strike and soldiers and sailors were getting riotously restless. And a segment of Parliament was demanding more power from the Crown. They’re the ones who’ll take center stage before long.

If all those strands of discontent sound like they were braiding neatly together, they weren’t. For all that the commoners’ rebellions got sympathy from some of the local gentry, those restless parliamentarians didn’t take up their cause the way they took up the merchants’ and the sailors’ and soldiers’. Their interests didn’t align. Take John Pym, a leader of the Parliamentarians challenging the king, as an example. He was an agent of enclosure. His interests, like those of his fellow MPs, lay on the opposite side. 

Why the past won’t stand still

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As if the present wasn’t messy enough, the past has been changing shape lately.

Admittedly, it does that a lot. The minute you turn your back, some historian or archeologist, rearranges the historical (or prehistoric) furniture. Still, it does seem like they’ve been especially busy lately. Here’s the relocated furniture I’ve stubbed my toe on lately.

 

How long humans have been in charge of fire

Back when I was a kid, humans had been making fire for 50,000 years. Now it’s been 400,000 years. 

No, that does not speak to how old I am. I’m not coy about my age:I’m 103 and have been for decades. It speaks to the discovery of a place in Suffolk where hominids were making fire 350,000 years earlier than anyone told them to.

Whether or not the fire-makers in question were your early ancestors depends where your more recent ancestors came from. The fire-makers were probably early Neanderthals, and the DNA of non-Africans carries something along the lines of 2% Neanderthal inheritance. The DNA of Africans carries something along the lines of 0%.

That’s not a recent rearrangement of the prehistoric furniture. When I was a kid, DNA hadn’t been invented yet, so we had to manage without it and we were free to think Neanderthals were a low-brow and basically irrelevant relative who got out of the way when our own more perfect species came along. You know, an experiment that got abandoned in favor of our glowing and glorious selves.

Now that some of us turn out to be the descendants of that failed experiment–well, first there was an awkward moment or two, then somehow their pictures changed so that Neanderthals now look smarter than they used to. It’s nothing short of miraculous how much a person’s looks can change after they’ve not only died but gone extinct.

But we were talking about fire: the theory has been and still is that humans first used fire by taking advantage of ones that happened naturally–a lightning strike, say, or a Game of Thrones dragon swooping over. People would have learned how to keep it going, but they were nomadic, and fire’s hard to carry. When they had to choose between moving to a new place where food was to be found or staying behind with the fire, where they could cook, they would’ve had to choose the food. So would we.

The find at Suffolk doesn’t destroy that theory, but it does show that the humans there–or hominids, if you want to be starchy about it–were using flint and iron pyrite to strike a spark and start a fire. Over and over again. In the same place. Some 350,000 years before they were expected at the party. 

Irrelevant photo: a wild primrose blooming at the end of December, which is also earlier than I, at least, expected it at the party.

 

Newly discovered relatives

Back in the 1990s, an Australopithecus skeleton was found in a cave in South Africa, and ever since the experts have been arguing about what kind of Australopithecus it is, prometheus or africanus. Recently, though, someone’s suggested that it’s neither, but an entirely new type of Australopithecus.

“This thing will be part of a lineage of hominins,”according to Jesse Martin, of the University of the Witwatersrand, “so it’s possible that we have not just a point in our human family tree that we hadn’t discovered before, but an entire limb of that tree.” 

The skeleton is somewhere between 2.8 and 3.67 million years old, but Australopithicus as a species goes back 4.2 million years. 

Until someone comes along to move everything around again, that’s still before anyone got control of fire.

 

The mighty Roman soldiers 

Fire, as you may have guessed, didn’t solve all of humanity’s problems. Judging by what’s been found in the sewage drains at Vindolanda, a Roman fort along Hadrian’s Wall, Roman soldiers were hosting a parasite party up on the Roman Empire’s northern border and the guests were roundworms, whipworms, and Giardia duodenalis. Those three could easily have brought salmonella and shigella with them, but they didn’t sign the guest book so we can’t know for sure.

Don’t you wish you’d been there?

All three are spread by fecal-oral transmission–in other words, letting the upper half of your body get too well acquainted with the lower half. The ways the two halves become acquainted involve water, food, and hands, and once the bugs were in place they could’ve caused diarrhea and malnutrition.

According to Dr. Marissa Ledger, who led the Cambridge component of the study, “While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen. These chronic infections likely weakened soldiers, reducing fitness for duty.” 

To be fair to Vindolanda, the find is a good match for what’s been found in other Roman forts, although the parties at other forts had a longer guest list. Whatever else it teaches us, it means Rome’s famous plumbing didn’t protect them from contaminated water.

 

Medieval warfare

Enough pre- and early history. The middle ages have been moving around too. The medieval British army has had the reputation of being basically a bunch of amateurs, scraped up from the fields and sent off to do battle with whoever the king had lost his temper with lately, which was generally the French. (That last sentence may contain a certain element of exaggeration, an absence of fact checking, and both nuts and dairy products. If you have allergies–sorry, I really need to put these warnings at the beginning. I’ll try to do better.) 

With that out of the way, though, let’s do the serious stuff: a group of historians have created the Medieval Soldier Database, a record of all the soldiers paid by the English crown from the 1350s to 1453. The original idea was to “challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like.”

A lot of the information came from muster rolls–lists of every war-related person the crown was paying. The crown wanted to know what its money was buying and that everyone showed up when and where they were expected. For many of the people on them, the muster rolls are the only surviving record of their passage through life. 

By following individual soldiers, the database’s creators have been able to trace some careers for 20 years and more. Soldiers can also be seen moving up in rank. All of that argues for the presence of at least some professionals. Other people show up as both soldiers and participants in the Peasants Revolt, confirming longstanding assumptions that some of the revolt’s participants had military experience.

For example: Thomas Crowe of Snodland, in Kent, may have fought in France in 1369 and had knowledge of trebuchets. During the Peasants Revolt (1381; you’re welcome) he was accused of “taking up position and throwing great stones” to demolish someone’s house. 

Guess where he (probably) learned that.

He shows up back in the military in 1385 and 1387. I’d love to fill in the intriguing gaps there but that’s the annoying thing about history: you’re limited to the facts. 

The leader of the Peasants Revolt was Wat Tyler, and not much is known about him, but historians have assumed he had military experience, and intriguingly the database lists a Walter Tyler, who was (yes) a tiler. Was it the same guy? Hard to say but harder to think it wasn’t.

The rolls also give a sense of what it took to keep an army working. It includes payments to masons, locksmiths, fletchers (they made arrows), bowyers (they made bows), plumbers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers (they made barrels), ditch diggers (they made ditches), boatmen, carters, and carters’ boys (they made mischief)–not all of them in multiples but it makes a neater list if we don’t keep shifting from plural to singular and back.

 

A volcanic eruption & the black death

This isn’t a change in the way history’s pieces have been put in place but an expansion–a puzzle piece that fits where there used to be a gap. We were taught–those of us who studied European history and managed to stay awake–that the black death was spread by fleas carried by rats carried, initially, by ships carrying the ordinary goods that Europe traded with those exotic countries to the east.

So far, so good, but there seems to be more to the story. We can now add a volcano in 1345, and following from that a massive dust cloud and a famine. All that follows from the tree rings some clever devil found.

According to this theory, a volcano spewed out ash and gases, which blocked sunlight and caused the temperatures around the Mediterranean to drop for several years and the harvests to be poor. So the Italian city states did the sensible thing: to head off a famine, they bought grain from around the Black Sea, and that’s when the rats and the fleas made their entrance. And with that grain came the rats, the fleas, and the plague.

Some days, you just can’t do anything right. But if we tell the story that way, it does bring us back to the place we expected to land: plague sweeps through Europe, killing something like a third to a half of the population. 

Isn’t history uplifting and fun?

*

You might’ve noticed that the volcano should, chronologically speaking, come before the Peasants Revolt. What can I tell you? Numbers don’t have much to say to me and by the time I noticed the earlier event had given me an ending I didn’t want to throw away.

Writing people out of history, in real time

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You’ve heard complaints that some group of people have been written out of history, and maybe you thought, Okay, they haven’t been mentioned, but the process couldn’t have possibly been so deliberate, could it? These things just happen.

It’s true (and I, of course, am in a position to sort the true from the untrue) that once a group’s been erased, it doesn’t take much effort to keep them invisible. Inertia takes over. But at the start? As it happens, we have a ringside seat just now, and we can watch the process play out in real time. And guess what: those first steps look pretty deliberate. 

The story we’re following is happening in the Netherlands, at the American Cemetery in Margraten, the burial ground of some 8,000 US soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. Of those, 174 are African-American. Unless they were African-American. I can’t figure out if a person’s ethnicity dies with them and slips into the past tense or if it outlives them. 

The cemetery also memorializes another 1,700 soldiers who were listed as missing. That’s probably irrelevant and as far as I know they have no ethnicity. It got lost too.

Irrelevant photo: a fougou–a Cornish, Iron Age tunnel, open at both ends, with dry stone walls. No idea what the purpose was and the explanations I’ve read–to store things or to use as a refuge–make no sense at all, given that they’re open at both ends. All I know is that they took one hell of a lot of work.

 

The disappearance

The site’s run by a US government agency, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and its visitor center recently took down two panels commemorating African-American soldiers. One memorialized George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old telephone engineer who died trying to rescue a fellow soldier. The second was about the US military’s policy of segregation, which continued until 1948–and for anyone who’s young enough that the 20th century all looks the same, that was several hands of poker after the war ended. 

You’re welcome.

What happened to the panels? Pruitt’s, the commission says, is “currently off display, though not out of rotation.” In other words, it might come back. No promises as to which century it’ll be when that happens. And the other one? It’s on the naughty step until it apologizes to President Trump, stops insisting on all the diversity and inclusion nonsense, and proves that it took the approved position on releasing the Epstein files, whichever that is this week.

The commission says 4 of its 15 panels “currently feature African American service members buried at the cemetery,” but a journalist who visited the site couldn’t find them. 

 

Local involvement

Generations of local people have adopted individual graves in the cemetery, tending them, leaving flowers, telling their adopted soldier’s story, saying a prayer if they’re the praying sort, building a relationship with the soldier’s surviving family. It’s been a way to keep alive the history of the Nazi occupation and to express gratitude to the country’s liberators. And those people aren’t happy with the way their history’s being edited just now. Local politicians, historians, and plain old people are calling for the panels to be put back. The mayor’s written the commission, asking it to “reconsider the removal of the displays” and give the stories of Black American soldiers “permanent attention in the visitor center.”

Last I heard (and of course I’d be the first person they’d tell), there’s been no response. 

To be fair, the commission hasn’t started selling Nazi-flavored bubble gum and probably won’t, but shoving an ethnic group out of the public sphere has a slight flavor of the Nazis’ early moves against the Jews. If you chew on it for a while, it leaves a nasty aftertaste.

 

Does it matter?

Well, for starters, segregation within the military is woven into a central strand of US history that reaches from slavery through the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement, with pieces left out along the way for the sake of brevity. 

But more than that, Black soldiers aren’t being disappeared because they played such a small part that they had no effect. The act of disappearing them speaks to how much they matter: they get in the way of history being all white, just as the disappearance of women’s history and the accomplishments of individual women speak to how much they interfere with history being all male. They mess with a comfortable narrative. Take them away and you make the human story less complex, less contradictory, less honest, and more comfortable for people who used to complain that all this diversity and equality stuff took away their freedom to shut other people up and push them off the world stage.

This is about who’s going to be allowed into the picture.

At the back of my head, I hear someone reminding me that I was all for taking down the statues of slave traders and Confederate generals. How, that voice asks, is this different? 

It’s different because those were monuments honoring deeply dishonorable people.  Want to put up a panel discussing their legacy? As long as it’s honest, I have no problem with it. But I’m not much for monuments anyway, even the ones that honor people who did honorable things. The process of turning them into heroes falsifies them and asks us to accept a lie. Leave it up to me and I’ll skip the statues altogether.

 

Hang on, though: isn’t this blog supposed to be about England?

It is, but sometimes I cheat. Last week’s blog was about the Black British soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, people who’d been invisible and are only recently being reclaimed for history, so the process of writing people out of history is on my mind. And I’m American, at least originally. I’ve lived in Britain for almost 20 years, but the U.S. formed my thinking, my assumptions, my accent, and you may have noticed, my spelling. And since the US has invested heavily in the business of erasing history lately– Yeah, I can’t pass up a chance to write about this. It’ll piss off all the right people in the unlikely event that they happen to read it. 

 

The English connection

I can connect this to England, though, by way of statues: 

In Glasgow, a statue of the Duke of Wellington (looking heroic, of course) traditionally wears a traffic cone on his head. In fact, if this particular link doesn’t just have a picture of the statue and the traffic cone but also one where he’s wearing two traffic cones and his horse has a couple of its own.  

The traffic cone isn’t traditional the way wearing a kilt is traditional, but traditional in the sense that since the 1980s members of the public have replaced the traffic cone every time some representative of sensible governance has it taken expensively down. Over the years, cones have worn a Covid mask, the European Union flag; and the Scottish flag, and so forth. The tradition calls to the creative spark in us all the way a school desk calls to a wad of used chewing gum. 

Now, the cone has been replaced by a statue of a pigeon wearing its own, smaller traffic cone. And reading a newspaper. It’s believed to be the work of Rebel Bear, a street artist known as the Scottish Banksy. He–assuming he is a he; I haven’t a clue but it’s what the newspaper said–posted a picture of the pigeon on social media, saying: 

“The dignified and undignified of beasts. Located: well, youse know where.”

I would dearly love to show you a photo but, you know, copyright and all that. Follow the link. 

That takes us to Scotland, though, which you may notice isn’t England, but with Wellington I can move us south of the border. He was born in Ireland–still not England but bear with me; I’ll get there–and he fought in the Napoleonic Wars, came home a hero, and most significantly of all had a boot named after him. His Wellington boots did touch Scottish soil, which is probably what justifies the Glasgow statute. More to the point, though, he became the Duke of Wellington, which gave him a connection to Somerset, England. 

You know I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?

Black soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars

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Let’s start with numbers. We can get them out of the way so quickly that I can’t resist.

How many Black soldiers fought for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars? 

Dunno. Record keeping was– Should we be kind and call it inconsistent? 

More than I thought isn’t a number that’ll make a statistician happy, but if I’m a fair sample of the English-speaking population (I seldom am but I might be for this) it will tell us something about the history we’re taught. It never crossed my mind that any Black soldiers fought for Britain, for France, or for the Republic of Never Happened.

The history I was taught was (a) boring, (b) often inaccurate, and (3) except for a quick digression into the slave trade, white. And just when I think I’ve cleared its last sticky residue out of my head, I find a few more bits. So, Napoleonic Wars? Of course my mind showed me white soldiers. And my mind was wrong. Although we can’t have solid numbers, we’re talking about a significant block of people. In the British armed forces, they would’ve come from the West Indies, from Africa, from the US, from Canada, from the East Indies, from Britain itself, and from Ireland. 

I don’t suppose I need to remind you that Britain was an imperial power by then.

Irrelevant photo: November sunset

 

Historian Carole Divall says, “It’s often forgotten how many black soldiers were employed by both the British Army and Navy during the period. There were many in the Northamptonshire Regiment, a fair number in the 73rd and probably also the 69th regiments who had both been in the West Indies. No doubt some of the other regiments of the British Army also had black drummers, as did the 1/30th India.”

You can find a website about Black soldiers who served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiments. I’m sure you can find others, but I stopped there.

 

The West India Regiments

The majority of Britain’s Black soldiers seem to have been in the West India Regiments, so let’s focus on them. 

The regiments were formed in the 1790s to fight the French in the Caribbean. The British started out thinking British recruits could handle the fighting, but enough of them died of tropical diseases that the government was left with a problem, which it decided to solve by recruiting Black soldiers, who it was sure were better suited to the climate. 

When I say “recruit,” though, what I really mean is buy. The Caribbean islands were slave economies. And what would seem more natural to a slave-owning power than to buy itself some slaves, both off the plantations and from newly arrived slave ships, and turn them into soldiers? In 12 years, they bought some 13,400 men to serve as soldiers.

The soldiers’ legal status wasn’t clear–were they slaves? weren’t they slaves?–but once they were discharged they became free and some were awarded pensions. Which implies that some weren’t awarded pensions. That, unfortunately, is all I know about that.

The regiments might’ve been formed to fight in the Caribbean, but they ended up fighting wherever they were needed, which included the Battle of Waterloo. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

In 1807, Britain did two things that matter to the story: it abolished the slave trade, although not yet slavery, and it passed the Mutiny Act, which made it clear that the soldiers of the West India Regiments were free and should be treated like any other soldiers. Military discipline wasn’t anything you’d think of as fun, but it wasn’t slavery.

After 1807, the regiments incorporated men the navy had liberated from slave ships (the trade was now illegal, remember) as well as Black soldiers captured from French and Dutch colonies.

Unlike colonial subjects from India and from other parts of the empire, soldiers in the West India Regiments were recognised as part of the British Army. Increasingly, formerly enslaved soldiers got the same enlistment bounty, pay, and allowances as white soldiers, and soldiers of equal rank were equal, which seems, at the same time, stupidly obvious and also amazing.

Compared to the other choices on offer for Black men (working as servants; cobbling together whatever casual work they could) the army would have been an improvement. The work and the pay were steady, and it was a place where Black men in an overwhelmingly white society could find a small community, although that business of people shooting at you and being expected to shoot at them might’ve been off-putting. 

Black soldiers had a high re-enlistment rate.

 

Consider one soldier, Private Thomas James

Thomas James, from the West India Regiments, has been in the news recently because the National Army Museum identified him as–very probably, although not 600% certainly–the subject of an 1821 portrait by a painter whose more usual subjects were, say, the Duke of Wellington or Lord Byron, not lowly privates. The way painters made their money wasn’t by looking around for interesting faces but by charging their subjects. If you wanted to see yourself looking handsome in oils, you paid for the privilege, which is why we find the ordinary riffraff underrepresented and the aristocratic riffraff overrepresented.

In spite of which history has handed us the handsome portrait of a Black private in a bandsman’s white uniform, and it’s said, “You figure it out.” 

The National Army Museum speculates that James’s officers would’ve commissioned the portrait to honor his courage. That’s not impossible and I don’t have a better story to offer, but before we give it our tentative acceptance let’s sprinkle a little salt on top.

Not much is known about James’s background, but that’s typical of enlisted men of the era. He may well have been enslaved. He was illiterate. He breaks into history as one of 9 Black soldiers who received the Waterloo Medal–the first British medal awarded regardless of rank; 38,500 were issued. 

James was wounded by Prussian deserters who were trying to loot the belongings of British officers during the battle of Waterloo. (That’s 1815; you’re welcome. I won’t remember it ten minutes from now either.) It’s an odd little sidelight to the battle: we–or I, at least–imagine everyone out there on the battlefield hacking the hell out of each other after their flintlocks misfired (health and sanity warning: military history isn’t one of my strengths), but here were 20 soldiers assigned to guard the officers’ money, jewelry, silver dishes, and whatever else they considered necessary to the rough and tumble of a military life. And clearly it did need guarding. This wasn’t a safe neighborhood.

We–or at least I–don’t know what happened to the other 19 defenders, but James was seriously wounded. And got a medal. And a portrait, for whatever either of those might’ve meant to him. The portrait shows him holding a cymbal, and along with his white uniform it indicates that he was part of the regimental band.

 

Music and warfare

Musicians were an essential part of warfare. They kept morale up; they communicated with–

C’mon, people. Use your own imaginations here. Whoever. Their own guys on the other side of the battlefield, or hidden in the trees. The system wasn’t good enough to carry letters home but it worked.

But bands weren’t only about the music. Band members flipped their cymbals into the air, swung them under their legs. Military music was full of athletics and show-offery. And Black soldiers were–

Okay, the story goes kind of queasy here. European armies had adopted the idea of military music from the Ottomans, and for a while it was the thing to have Turkish musicians in their bands. Gradually, they replaced them with men of African backgrounds. They weren’t Turkish but they were, you know, exotic. They brought a prestige addition to any military band. And I have no doubt some officer was sitting in a tent somewhere telling another officer, “They have natural rhythm, don’t they?”

I know. You get a little progress on one side of the equation and on the other you lay the foundation for a racist stereotype the next generations will build on. If you’re serious about your history, don’t expect purity. The water’s so murky it’s hard to tell it from the land.

 

So is this a feel-good story?

Depends what you’re wired to feel good about. Historians–or some of them, anyway–argue that the Napoleonic Wars opened up ways for marginalized groups to move half a rung up the social ladder. 

No, I know that’s not physically possible. My best guess is it would’ve been precarious, so half a rung? Yeah, I’ll stand by that, in all its absurdity.

What marginalized groups are we talking about? Jews from Central Europe, who fought in the Austrian and Prussian armies. Catholics from Ireland who fought in the British army. And the people we’ve been talking about: enslaved men of African heritage. 

How far up the ladder did they get? Far enough that a lot of Black soldiers re-enlisted. It doesn’t sound like a great deal from where I sit, but that’s not where they were sitting. It was worth it to them. 

If you want your history smoothly stitched out of feel-good stories, stick to kids’ books. 

Gay sex, treason, and passionate friendships in Tudor England

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Ask about the legality of same-sex sex in Tudor England and you’ll find your Sat Nav–or your GPS if you use American English–no longer knows the difference between a road, a river, and a red brick wall. Or mine doesn’t anyway. I’m posting this report in the hope that someone will find it useful. If I’m not back in time for next week’s post, send sniffer dogs. 

Thanks. 

I’ve lived in Britain long enough to say thanks for everything. Even things that haven’t happened yet.

Utterly irrelevant photo: Castell Cricieth

The problems

The first problem we run into here is figuring out what we’re talking about. Should be simple enough, right? But as Bill Clinton so famously said when he was pushed to say whether he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, “It depends on what your definition of is is.” 

Even at the time, the definition of sex struck me as more relevant than the definition of is. But forget Bill Clinton. He had been neither born nor imagined during the Tudor period, and no doubt it was better that way. Sex is, um, that thing two people do that’s kind of awkward to talk about around a third person. And sometimes between the two people as well.

Although of course it might involve that third person. Or a person who likes to talk about sex, which generally weirds out other people.

But even with all its amendments and althoughs, that definition wouldn’t hold up in court. So let’s try this, even though it’s guesswork: the men–and they were all men–who wrote the relevant laws seem to have thought of sex as something that could be done with a penis. Tudor women, generally speaking, didn’t have those. That means that people thought of same-sex sex as having to do with men. 

Women? Wrong equipment therefore not part of the discussion.

I’m not sure everyone will agree with me on this, but I’m filing that under Make Male Chauvinism Work for You.

Women were surely having sex (as we might define it) with other women, but if whatever they did made its way into the historical record I haven’t seen it. If anyone knows a reliable source on this, leave me a comment. I haven’t done anything like a deep dive into the topic. What with writing one post a week, keeping a life going on the side, working on a novel, and trying to find a home for a completed novel my publisher decided wasn’t a good fit– 

Yeah. Shallow dive. Some weeks it’s more like a bellyflop.

But back to the problems I ran into: a second one is defining homosexuality, and for this it makes sense to quote Alan Bray, who argues in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” that “the forms of sexuality are the creation of culture and change with it.” 

So what? Well, for one thing, like Bill Clinton, homosexuality hadn’t been invented yet. (Now there’s a sentence I never imagined myself writing.) I don’t mean the act of sex between men but the concept of homosexuality. The social mind hadn’t conjured up any group of people who were drawn to have sex with people of the same sex, because they didn’t think that impulse came from the nature of an individual person. They saw it as something sinful that anyone might do. As John Rainolds put it, it wasn’t just a “monstrous sin against nature” but a sin that “men’s natural corruption and viciousness is prone” to.

John Rainolds? Key translator of the King James Bible. Among other things, he gave us the word sodomy. Thanks, John. You’ve been no end of help over the yeas.  

So in contrast to more recent efforts to suppress same-sex sex, the Tudors didn’t go looking for people of a particular type. They looked for something anyone might take part in. 

 

But that’s not all that’s changed

So far we’ve had women and the existence of a sexual minority slip away. The next thing to go is a solid definition of the act itself. The charge of sodomy (the word buggery also finds its way into the conversation) covered a range of out-of-bounds sexual acts. Debauchery might be a better match for what they had in mind, and Bray argues that it wasn’t just a sexual crime but also a political and religious one. So when, during Elizabeth’s reign, Edward de Vere was accused of sodomy, he was also pictured as a traitor, an enemy of society, and a man given to lawless (as opposed to lawful) violence. Oh, and a liar, an atheist, and a blasphemer. All that symbolized, Bray argues, by the charge of sodomy.

Is Bray making this up? Am I? 

Not guilty, your honor. The jurist, barrister, and politician Edward Coke wrote about sodomy as “a sin horrible committed against the king: and this is either against the king celestial or terrestrial.”

It was also a handy thing to accuse a political enemy of, and to make sense of this we need to look at the nature of both beds and male friendship during the period–which may slide over a bit into the post-Tudor era, but people don’t throw out their entire culture just becasue the throne changes hands so I’m not cheating too much.

 

Bedfellows

One thing that made sodomy a handy accusation is that sharing beds was common enough to be nearly universal. Beds were also public, as were bedrooms. Rooms–where there was more than one–led one into the next. So finding two people in bed together? No big deal. In fact, no deal at all. Still, in a world with minimal privacy, beds were a place of intimacy, where people not only slept but talked. In other words, bedfellows often became more than physically close. 

And a bed, obviously, was also a place people could and did have sex, licit or illicit. 

Even outside of the bed, though, it was accepted that men were physically demonstrative.

 

Passionate friendships

If sodomy was the forbidden side of male friendship, passionate male friendships were not only acceptable but a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Men kissed each other, touched each other, used the language of love with each other, and left behind letters demonstrating all of that. This happened both between equals and between patron and client. Court networks depended on it.Take a 1625 journal entry from Archbishop Laud: 

“That night in a dream the Duke of Buckingham [his patron] seemed to me to ascend into my bed, where he carried himself with much love towards me, after such rest wherein wearied men are wont exceedingly to rejoice; and likewise many seemed to me to enter the chamber who did see this.” 

I hear the echoes of sex around the edges there, but I’m from the wrong era. What mattered to him wasn’t just the mark of favor but that it was public.

In James I’s court, someone’s described in a journal as leaning on another man’s arm, pinching his cheek, smoothing his “ruffled garment.” This marks an emotional bond but also the rise to power of the man who received those gestures. 

Or go back to 1570 and we find one man writing a jealous letter to his friend about a third man: do you love me best? he asked.

Some of this, inevitably, would have been as conventional and signing a letter “love” and whatever your name is. Some of it would’ve been a way to curry favor. And some of it would’ve been genuine. For any of it to be proper, though, it had to be between gentlemen. 

Did any of this go on between peasants, servants, cobblers, silversmiths? I doubt the evidence is available to us. Let’s give it a solid Maybe, followed by a Maybe Not.

What is known–or seems to be known–is that gay sex could and did occur between servant and master, who often slept in the same room. It also took place in taverns, farms, and alehouses, in the world of the theater and the church, in the army and the navy, at universities and royal courts. I’m sure it took place in the woods and behind hedges as well. 

So we have loving physical contact, passionate friendships that used the language of love, and people sharing beds. It wouldn’t have been easy, if you weren’t one of the two men in question, to know whether or when a relationship crossed the line into the forbidden zone. It would, though, have been easy to accuse someone of crossing the line and to back it up your accusation by presenting evidence of what would otherwise be conventional behavior. 

 

Legality

While England was still Catholic, sex with the wrong person (or the wrong species) was a matter for the Church, which had its own courts and the power to punish. Then came Henry VIII, who was interested in having sex, licitly, with the wrong person, and England left the Catholic Church, tearing down not just the monasteries but also the Church courts. 

New era, more or less the same rules. Parliament passed An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie. (Their idea of what letters to capitalize was as foreign to the modern sensibility as their approach to sex.) 

Buggerie was defined as a man having sex with a man or an animal, and in the spirit of equality, the animal could be of either sex. Not only could a man be hanged for an out-of bounds sexual act, whatever assets he had could be confiscated. That included not only his individual assets but also church or monastic property. 

In a fraught political era, you can see why the charge of buggery (or sodomy, or whatever word you dislike least) would be a nifty charge to add to, say, treason. 

Under Edward–Henry’s short-lived son–the law was amended so that widows and heirs could inherit. 

And after him? Mary took the throne, and presto change-o, the country was Catholic again. She repealed the Acte and for five years no one was in a position to prosecute runaway sexuality. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that was an oversight. Then Elizabeth took the throne and the state stepped back into the role of policing sexuality. 

Prostitution and virtue in Victorian England: Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Acts

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One of the joys of being a woman in Victorian England must’ve been the multitude of people available to police your sex life–or as they’d have put it, your virtue. Let’s come at this by way of the reformers.

Victorian Britain had a glut of reformers and  philanthropists. The most stereotypical were upper class, religiously motivated, and full of zeal for improving the poor–their morality, their health, their smallest daily routines. Surely if the poor learned to manage better, to be better, they’d get over their distressing habit of earning so little money. 

High on the list of the poor they set out to improve were prostitutes, or fallen women if we want to use era-appropriate language.

For all the reformers’ superiority and cluelessness about why the poor were poor, what it took to live on so little, and why women engaged in prostitution, some of the reformers managed to do some good in the world. And occasionally, if you dig deep enough, you stumble over an upper-class reformer who broke through the limits their world imposed. Allow me to introduce you, friends, to Josephine Butler. She didn’t break out entirely, but she makes an interesting tale.

Irrelevant photo: hills in North Wales.

 

The inevitable background

Butler was born in 1828 into an upper-middle class family. Her parents were Church of England–in other words, they belonged to the respectable church–and abolitionists, but the sort of abolitionists who were related to and hobnobbed with lords and prime ministers. 

Okay, make that one prime minister, but how many does it take to impress you people anyway?

If your point of reference is the US–as mine still is, even after 18 years in the UK–I should explain that Britain’s upper-middle class is considerably more upper than the US version. In addition to hobnobbing a prime minister, this was the sort of family whose kids had horses and whose girls were educated at home, learning music and whatever else was suitable for young ladies. At 17 Butler (sorry–I’m using her married name although she was still single; it’s simpler) had a religious conversion, one that didn’t involve packing up and moving to a different religion but becoming more intense about the one she already belonged to. In other words, she drank her religion straight from then on, without ice or mixers, thanks.

She married George Butler, a classical scholar and a believer in women’s equality. Marrying him was an opportunity to get as close to higher education as a woman could, and in one of his letters before they married proposed “a perfectly equal union, with absolute freedom on both sides for personal initiative in thought and action.”

This was as good as it was going to get. This was a world where a woman’s property and earnings–if she had any–belonged to her husband, she had no legal standing apart from him, girls’ education was at best narrow and decorative, a lady was expected to stay at home and ever so genteely lose her mind, and a single woman was an object of pity and likely to be broke or dependent on some male relative or both.

Over the next few years, Butler and her husband had three kids and moved around a bit, landing after a while in Liverpool, where as a way to cope with the death of their only daughter she began a ministry (we’re back to that religious thing) to women imprisoned in the workhouse and to prostitutes working the street. 

You could argue–convincingly, I think–that prostitution was central to any understanding of the condition of women. A man’s sexual drive was thought to be pretty much ungovernable and a woman’s, or at least a lady’s to be nonexistent. Prostitution was seen as a way to keep the pressure cooker from exploding. And prostitution was one of the few ways a woman could earn money if the factories weren’t hiring. So this wasn’t some random choice on her part.

Still, I know: fallen women; Victorian lady healing herself by swooping in to minister to the unfortunates. She hadn’t broken the mold yet, but she did overflow it a bit by taking some of the most desperate women into her house, often to die. 

She also joined campaigns to open higher education to women, questioning the deeply embedded belief that women’s role–their natural and only role–was to be a wife and mother. Where, she asked, did that leave the two and a half million women for whom no husbands were available, since there weren’t enough men to go around? How were they supposed to support themselves?

 

The Contagious Diseases Acts

Let’s take a step to the side here and catch up with the Contagious Diseases Acts. I’ll get back to Butler in a minute. 

The first of the acts was passed in 1864 and grew out of public reaction to the British military’s underwhelming performance in the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion. They’d been disorganized, undisciplined, and immoral, the public (or whatever passed for the public) had decided. Their ranks were filled with bachelors, which might (gasp, wheeze) lead them into homosexual activity, and the soldiers and sailors were riddled with venereal disease.  

Something had to be done, even if that something had nothing to do with anything. You’ve been around long enough to see that solution implemented more than once.

The something that got done was to pass a law focused on port and garrison towns and aimed at stopping the spread of venereal disease by forcing women who were suspected of prostitution to accept medical examinations. If a woman showed signs of infection, she could be sent to a lock hospital for three months. Anyone refusing to be examined faced six months in prison, with or without hard labor.

This was, remember, before penicillin. Syphilis was still being treated, ineffectively and toxically, with mercury.  So locking infected women away for three months during which no effective treatment was available?

Yeah.  

What about men with venereal diseases?  The thinking was that they might resist, so the law gave them a free pass. One prostitute who’d chosen to go to prison rather than submit to an examination told Butler that the judge who condemned her had paid her for sex just a few days before.

The law’s definition of a prostitute was vague and the plainclothes police who enforced the law, like ICE in the US today, didn’t have to offer evidence against a woman. If they stopped her, she could choose to go to prison or accept an invasive physical exam and sign a form registering her as a prostitute.

Can’t say she didn’t have a choice.

Later versions of the act extended it to more parts of the country and added that women who’d been registered had to be checked every two weeks for up to a year. The lock hospital detention was extended to six and then nine months. Women working in brothels had to have tickets signed and kept up to date, establishing that they’d been examined.

Predictably enough, it was poor and working class women who were detained. 

 

The campaign for repeal

Multiple organizations were formed to push for repeal. One of them, the National Anti-Contagious Diseases Acts Association (NA), excluded women. 

No, I don’t make this stuff up.

In response, the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA) formed, and this is where Butler breaks out of the nice-lady savior mold. The NLA’s members were mostly upper- and middle-class women, but they collaborated with working-class women, with men, with prostitutes, and they invaded the all-male world of politics. In other words, they challenged the hell out of Victorian gender and class norms. Parliamentarians talked about it as a “revolt of women” and newspapers called them a “shrieking sisterhood.”  

In 1870 Butler became the leader of the NLA, a step that she and her husband both knew risked her respectability and his career. I can’t find anything that says his career did end up being damaged, but she was denounced in Parliament as “a woman who calls herself a lady” and “worse than the prostitutes.”  Philanthropy was one thing, after all, but she was out in the world speaking in public about sex. It just wasn’t done. 

She was a good speaker and seems to have been a speaking machine. In one year, she spoke at more than 100 public meetings and travelled something like 4,000 miles, addressing small groups and large ones, groups of women, groups of working class men. By licensing brothels, she argued, the state was profiting from women’s misery.

By returning detained women to their sinful lives, the government was making itself complicit with prostitution. 

This wasn’t a polite campaign or a safe one.  She spoke in a barn and someone set it on fire. Men smashed the windows of a hotel she was staying in, threatening to set it on fire. At one rally, pimps threw cow dung at her. At some point, a man asked,  “Can you ever reclaim prostitutes?” 

Prostitutes often asked her if men could be reclaimed, she answered.

A byelection came up where one candidate wanted to extend the law so it applied not just to prostitutes but to soldiers’ wives. The LNA seized on it, passing out leaflets, holding prayer meetings, hiding from angry crowds. 

The candidate lost.

But it wasn’t all agitprop and burnt barns. The LNA funded legal representation for women who were locked away and raised money to care for their children.

The repeal campaign ran for sixteen years. The acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886.

 

Hope Cottage

In 1885, Butler set up a non-sectarian house of rest in Winchester’s red light district. It was conceived as a contrast to the secure units churches set up to reform fallen women. 

Throw a few quotation marks into that last sentence, please. I’m using the language of the time, even though it gives me a rash.  

I’ve seen the place described as a faith hospital, as a place for the dying, as a refuge for women who were “friendless, betrayed and ruined, judged for one reason or another not quite suitable for other homes or refuges.” In its first year, it served more than 40 women. Butler’s husband–by this time ordained and a canon, which is a religious position, not something to fire at the enemy–preached there (informally, according to one website) on Sundays. Which means the place may have been non-sectarian but it wasn’t non-Christian. 

Addressing the economic roots of prostitution, women living there could earn money by making envelopes. Given how few ways a woman could earn money– Hell, it was better than nothing, although not by much.

 

A quick break here . . .

. . . to honor how murky life is. Butler wasn’t above making a distinction between prostitutes and, ahem, virtuous women. 

“The degradation of these poor unhappy women is not degradation for them alone,” she wrote; “it is a blow to the dignity of every virtuous woman too, it is dishonour done to me, it is the shaming of every woman in every country of the world.” 

So give her one point for solidarity and take one away for still being tangled in the spiderwebs of Victorian morality. And if we’re surprised, take a point away from us.

 

Enter Rebecca Jarrett and W.T. Stead

Somewhere along in here Butler met a former sex worker named Rebecca Jarrett, who’d kept a brothel dealing in virgins. Or that’s what one source says. What I’ve learned of the world tells me that most people only stay virgins for just so long, after which they mysteriously become not-virgins, so Jarrett’s trade was either a bit less limited or open to being sued for false advertising. 

But that’s neither here nor there. Jarrett had kept a brothel, had been saved by the Salvation Army, and moved into Hope Cottage. I’m tempted to ask for more quotation marks so I can spend them on the word saving, but Jarrett described herself as a “poor broken up drunken woman,” so maybe we should pocket the quotation marks so we can pull them out on some clearer occasion. Either way, Jarrett went on to help set up a second home, similar to Hope Cottage. And here’s where the story’s pace picks up.

W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was running an expose on child sex trafficking and wanted to stage the buying of a child to demonstrate how easy it was. Butler put him in touch with Jarrett and they found a 13-year-old, Eliza Armstrong and paid her mother £2, promising £3 later on. That would be about £760 pounds today.  

Several sites say they took the child someplace safe–I’ll catch up with her story in a minute–and Stead published “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”

The Victorians didn’t do understatement. 

The article led to Jarrett and Stead being arrested but also to sensational headlines in the rest of the press. The trafficking of children was now in the public eye and within weeks Parliament raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. 

Did that mean Jarrett and Stead weren’t prosecuted? The hell it did. Because Eliza’s father hadn’t okayed Eliza’s sale–only her legally irrelevant mother had–Jarrent was imprisoned for six months and Stead for three. Butler defended them, writing to the Hampshire Chronicle, “Rebecca Jarrett, at my own urgent request . . . undertook some of the most difficult tasks connected with the recent exposure.” 

Butler wasn’t charged.

After her release, Jarret continued to work with prostitutes for a while, then spent the rest of her life “in the care” of Butler.

 

Eliza Armstrong

Traumatizing a kid didn’t seem to be a consideration in all this–you know, greater good and all that–but in talking about trauma I may be importing a theory that hadn’t formed yet. Jarrett took Eliza to a midwife/abortionist, who examined her and verified that she was a virgin. She sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform and Jarrett took Eliza to a brothel, where she drugged her lightly. 

Stead then came in, playing the role of a man buying himself a virgin, and he waited for her to come to. When she did, she screamed, which apparently implied that he’d–as they said–had his way with her. Your guess is as good as mine here. 

She was then handed over to Bramwell Booth, a general in the Salvation Army, who took her to France and left her with a Salvation Army family.

After the trial, the prosecutor raised money for Eliza’s family, which paid for her to attend the Princess Louise Home for the Protection of Young Girls, where she was trained to work as a servant. She married twice, had ten children, and maintained a friendly correspondence with Stead. 

If you know a weirder story than that, leave it in the comments. 

 

Purity

In the 1870s, Butler’s speeches to young men began to focus on purity, personal morality, and the dangers of uncontrolled sexuality. It sounds prim and scolding, and–yeah, well, it is prim and scolding, but in a context where men could give almost free reign to their sexual impulses and women not only couldn’t follow theirs but were handed the consequences of and the blame for men’s–. 

Context, people. Context.

Butler wasn’t alone in calling on men to keep it buttoned up. The National Vigilance Association was headed down the same road, but when it began supporting the prosecution of prostitutes and brothel keepers, Butler set up a rival group, the Personal Rights Association, which warned against “Purity Societies,” calling them “stampers on vulnerable people.” 

Her later campaigning also focused on women in colonial India who were being forced into prostitution by the British army. So let’s give her back that point we took away earlier.

Cambridge University and the women suspected of evil

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Let me take you back to the good old days, when men were men, kings were kings, and things weren’t at all the way we imagine. Those manly men of the court? They wore ruffs and earrings. And the king in question was a queen. 

Shall we start over? Back in the days when Elizabeth I was on the throne, she granted a charter to Cambridge University that allowed it to arrest and imprison any woman  “suspected of evil.” I don’t know what happened behind the scenes to bring that about, but if she’d set out to prove that a woman wielding power doesn’t necessarily improve life for all women, she did a pretty fair job of it.

irrelevant photo: Men-an-Tol, in Cornwall.It’s from the Bronze Age and your guess is as good as mine what it was for.

 

What kind of evil did she have in mind?

Do you need to ask? Sexual evil, of course. 

The university was a perfect set-up for out-of-bounds sexuality. Until the 1880s, its dons (translation: the men–and they were all men–who taught there) weren’t allowed to marry. That meant they weren’t allowed to have socially (and university-) approved sex. With anyone–presumably including their own lonely selves. 

Admittedly, there’s always a massive gap between the rules and real life, but Cambridge was an all-encompasing institution whose fellows ate, drank, slept, played, prayed, and taught in one fairly limited space. They wouldn’t have expected or found much privacy. 

Into that claustrophobic container, pour half a gallon of hormonally driven adolescent males, also single. Into a series of separate containers, measure out a full gallon of parents worried that loose women would tempt and corrupt their babes. 

Now stir, being mindful to keep the parents at some distance from their offspring but close enough to press their worries on the dons and the university. 

The resulting mixture was combustible, so while both dons and undergraduates could and did keep mistresses, the university had to make gestures in the direction of protecting the undergraduates from sin, temptation, and anything else that might worry a concerned parent or a church.

In other words, it had to arrest any young woman who might represent the forces of sin and temptation, because it sure as hell wasn’t going to arrest its students. 

 

How Cambridge differed from the rest of the country

Under the ordinary laws of Liz’s time, a woman could only be arrested for prostitution if there was something at least vaguely resembling proof that she was, in fact, engaged in prostitution. Under its shiny new charter, though, Cambridge University didn’t have to bother with proof. Its proctors–senior members of the university–could arrest any young woman who was out of the streets after dark. And they did. 

The woman would then be tried by the vice chancellor in a private court, which required no witnesses and no witness statements. The woman had no right to legal defense and wasn’t allowed to say anything more than her name. The university could then imprison her in the Spinning House, a repurposed workhouse. It was cold and damp and the food was bread and sometimes gruel. In 1846, a 17-year-old, Elizabeth Howe, died after spending a December night on a damp bed in a cell with a broken window. She’d been arrested for walking with a friend–another woman–near a brothel, which was enough to demonstrate that she was up to no good.

A friend–possibly the same one but I’m not sure–described her as gentle and kind. The friend tried to get a doctor for her but was stopped by a proctor and threatened with arrest herself. She went home and Elizabeth died.

Women were held for two and three weeks at a time, and anyone who didn’t go along quietly when she was arrested was given a longer sentence. Once inside, anyone who raised hell was held in solitary confinement. In 1748, the vice chancellor paid the town crier 10 shillings to whip “10 unruly women.”

 There’s no way to know how many of the women held there were in fact prostitutes–surely some; prostitution was one of the few ways desperate women could make a little cash–but also surely not all. At one point, the wife and daughter of a councillor (that would be a local politician) were stopped because they’d walked ahead of him and were on the street un–ahem–chaperoned.

I’m going to assume he was able to get them released. No woman could match the power of a respectable man intervening for her, especially when he was aided by a respectable explanation and a bit of local power. Intervening for herself, though, would only get her into deeper trouble. 

Basically, any woman on the streets at night was fair game. Their crimes were listed in the committal books as “street walking” or “suspected of evil.” Over the course of the 19th century, more than 5,000 women were held there.

All this comes from a book, The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked up Women in Its Private Prison, by Caroline Biggs. 

“The town,” Biggs says, “was run for the benefit of the university, not the townspeople. The women in my book represent the ultimate example of how the University wanted to run things to suit themselves. They were so frightened of the undergraduates being tempted that they treated the townswomen, mainly working-class women, with great cruelty.”

Semi-relevantly, the university also controlled the sale of alcohol, the licensing of pubs, and how much credit students were allowed, although how they managed that last one is beyond me. 

 

Then it all fell apart

In 1825, parliament gave the university the power to maintain its own police force, nicknamed bulldogs, who patrolled the night streets alongside the proctors. They were supposed to go after women found in the company of members of the university but Biggs says they pursued any rumors–”every morsel of tittle-tattle”–about young women in Cambridge.

That situation held until 1891, when a 17-year-old, Jane Elsden, was arrested although she was alone on the street, not with a member of the university, and a few months later another 17-year-old, Daisy Hopkins, was hauled in although a man admitted he had solicited her, not the other way around. 

At this point, it all gets a little hazy–possibly not in Biggs’ book but in the articles I’ve found. Sorry–I’m not even using secondary sources but tertiary ones. Someone brought a case of habeaus corpus involving one or both of the women, which meant a judge got to rule on whether she or they were imprisoned legally and ruled that she/they wasn’t/weren’t. One or both of them was or were released.

When I looked for more information on the first woman, Jane Elsden, I found the blog of a distant relative who tells the story that’s come down through her family. It holds that Elsden and Hopkins were friends and were both prostitutes. They’d been arrested and the students they’d been with were given only a mild rebuke. Somehow Elsden escaped from the Spinning House, breaking windows in the Wesley House Chapel as she went. 

“She aroused such fierce debate that eventually the power of the University was challenged and changed.”  

Take it for what it’s worth. If you pass a story down through enough generations, it will evolve, but it will probably still carry some bits of truth. Somehow or other, the two cases caused a public uproar and after 1891 women arrested by the university were allowed legal representation. Then in 1894, parliament revoked Elizabeth’s charter and with it the vice chancellor’s right to arrest women. The Spinning House was torn down not long after that and in a sour little bit of irony a police station was built on the site.

Anne Wentworth, feminism, and the spirit of prophecy

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When did feminism start in England? If you’re in the mood, you could start with Boudicca–warrior queen who took a hefty bite out of the Roman army and turned Roman towns to cinders–but let’s start with Anne Wentworth instead. She was fiery but not in as literal a way. 

Admittedly, Wentworth’s a random place to start, but so’s Boudicca. The real answer is that feminism doesn’t have any single starting point, so I’m almost playing fair here.

Anne Wentworth was born in 1629. Or 1630. Close enough since we’re too late to send a birthday card. The Romans were long gone by then and she was no warrior, but she fought the good fight. 

Even more irrelevant photo than usual: Madron Holy Well, Cornwall. The strips of cloth (and hair scrunchies, and dog bags) represent– Well, they represent whatever the people who left them there wanted them to represent: prayers, wishes, respect, anything else you can think of. I found them oddly moving.

 

Anne Wentworth steps out of line

Her story starts off conventionally enough: She married William Wentworth–probably a glove dealer–in her early twenties and they had a daughter. They lived in London and were (this gets less conventional) Anabaptists, a small and persecuted religious group that was a forerunner of (improbable list warning here) the Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. 

For eighteen years, the Wentworths lived together unhappily. Or at least Anne was unhappy. She later described herself as suffering “great oppression and sorrow of heart.” I don’t know the details, and I’d be surprised if she published them. They weren’t the point, but she did write about being “grossly abused” mentally and physically and she described William as a “scourge and lash,” so that she “lived in misery.”

That’s not the misery memoir we expect today but it was shocking at a time when women were expected to put up with whatever situation their marriages had landed them in and shut up about it.

In 1670, when their daughter was about ten, Anne had what she considered a visit from god.

As she later described it, she came down with a “hectic fever,” nearly died, and came out of the experience believing god had spared her for a reason. It was time to stop living a lie and to start–yes, folks–prophesying. And prophesy she did, which neither her church nor her husband welcomed.   

The sequence of events may be clear to the experts but they’re not to me, so let’s throw any attempt at a timeline out the window. What I can piece together is this:

  • She and the church parted ways, although it’s not clear whether she walked out or was pushed.  
  • Her husband locked her out of the house and destroyed her writings,
  • in spite of which, she published four accounts of her experience, including: A True Account of Anne Wentworth’s Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt With by Some of Those People Called Anabaptists (1676; no one went in for understatement back then) and A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (1677).
  • Anne and her daughter hid from William for a while. 
  • A year after he pitched her out, with the help of her supporters she got back into the house and changed the locks.

 

Giving the church a right of rebuttal

I’m not sure what document we’re quoting here–that’s a problem when you work with secondary sources–but her church considered her a “proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented, and mad woman,” (you may have figured out by now that proud wasn’t a compliment, especially for a woman). She had “unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of [her] husband” and had “wickedly left him.” They charged her with “rejecting and neglecting their church” and with “dissatisfying” her husband.

 

Gender and timing

If that doesn’t convince you that gender was an issue, I’m not sure what will, but gender doesn’t entirely account for why Wentworth’s prophecies weren’t a smash hit. Her timing was off. The high tide of prophecy had passed. After the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the religious upheaval associated with all of that, a lot of people were nervous about inventive religions. They figured the world had received all the prophesies it needed, thanks, and everybody could just make do with what they had.

Still, if you have a visit from god–or if you’re convinced you do, anyway–you’re probably not going to say, “Couldn’t you have told me this twenty years ago?” Wentworth was sure she was living in the end times and god had chosen her as his “battleaxe,” so she did battle with her pen.

Her timing was also bad in that she predicted the would happen apocalypse before New Year’s Day 1678, even thoughtfully warning Charles II and London’s lord mayor about it. 

Then it didn’t happen, which will lose any prophet a bit of credibility, not to mention popularity, but she kept on writing and continued to have supporters–see above about the people who helped her get back into her house. 

She wouldn’t be the last prophet to get the timing wrong on the apocalypse, and probably not the first either. Let’s not hold it against her.

 

So what makes her a feminist?

The word didn’t exist, so she wouldn’t have considered herself one. The first recorded use is from the 19th century and it was used to mean nothing more than the state of being feminine.  

How the world has changed.

But in the face of opposition from husband and church, she claimed the right to speak and publish the truth as she saw it, and at a time when the idea that a woman shouldn’t be dominated by a man was almost unthinkable, she thought it. And went public with the thought. 

It must’ve scared the hell out of her. She wrote, “Here is a case that cannot possible be brought to an end without coming into the publick view of the World, though it is so contrary unto my nature, that I would rather suffer unto death than be in any publick way; but am constrained now, & thrust out by the mighty power of God, who overpowers me, that I must no longer confer with flesh and blood, and yield to my own reason of my weakness, foolishness, and fearful slavish nature, that am daunted with a look of any terrible, fierce, angry man.”

After that, the passage gets so religious, not to mention so 17th century, that I wandered off to feed the cats, but even if Wentworth and I pour our passion into different molds, I have to respect hers.