Category Archives: History

English slavery: the legal history

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This post comes to you from the Department of Contradictions. It’s a big department, so don’t wander off on your own, please. We may never see you again.

The most familiar parts of England’s relationship with slavery–at least to me, so I’ll quietly assume it’s true for you too, since I’m clearly the pattern for all humanity–are the slave-based economy of its colonies and its involvement in the slave trade. And right behind that comes the work of its abolitionists. But if we stick to those, we’ll miss a couple of messy and interesting parts of the story. So let’s look at whether slavery was legal under English law. It’ll be heavy on top-down history, but in a later post I hope I’ll be able to get into what English slaves did to free themselves. It’ll be useful to know the legal stuff when we get to that.

Ready? Good. Stick together please. I did warn you.

Irrelevant photo: Fields showing the medieval divisions–long strips, because those plows were hard to turn.

Early history

I’m American originally and make a lot of standardized (not to mention silly) American assumptions, so first let me remind you (we’re identical, remember, so your mind will be as silly as mine) that slavery hasn’t always been based on color differences, or even on national or ethnic differences.

You already knew that? So did I, but the image in my mind appears in black and white anyway, so it’s worth repeating. 

When William the Conqueror seized England’s throne and everything that went with it, he sent his minions to count up what he’d conquered, and in 1068 they reported that, among other things, 10% of the population was enslaved. At least some of these would’ve been Anglo-Saxon slaves held by Anglo-Saxon slaveholders. 

A bit later, in 1102, England abolished slavery. Take a minute to notice that, please: slavery was outlawed. 

The country kept serfdom, though, and although serfdom wasn’t slavery, it was a close and unpleasant relative, the kind who drinks too much, doesn’t wash often, and starts fights at family parties. It wasn’t until the 17th century that the last form of serfdom, villeinage, was abolished.

But even in the middle ages, some people (for which you can read some people who were powerful enough to have left a record of their opinions) found it abhorrent. Henry II (1154 to 1189; you’re welcome) freed some of his villeins “because in the beginning nature made all men free, and afterwards the law of nations reduced some under the yoke of servitude.”

Just after you think, Wow, you ask yourself, Why didn’t he free them all, right? It’s a fair question. The answer is that I haven’t a clue, but if you’re constructing an argument that England’s law, culture, and history don’t accept slavery and its various cousins, make a note of that quote. It’ll be useful. 

Be careful to ignore all the evidence that runs counter to your argument. You’ll find plenty of it and it’ll only confuse the picture.

Now let’s zip forward to 1569, when someone named Cartwright was seen whipping a man and the courts got involved, because it looked like assault–or technically, battery.

Wait, though, Cartwright said. He’s my slave, so I have the right.

The court disagreed and ordered the man freed, saying that  “England was too pure an air for slaves to breath in.” 

No, the spelling isn’t mine. The letter E was rationed back then. They weren’t going to waste one just to mark the difference between breath and breathe. They knew we’d figure it out.

As far as is known, the slave was  from Russia. He was white and Christian.

Important as the ruling was, exactly what it meant in terms slavery’s legality remained hazy, but it would’ve been clear enough for the Russian. He was free. 

History’s an ironic s.o.b., though, because at about this same time England first got involved in the international slave trade, and from here on the picture is black and white, not white and white, because the slaves they were transporting came from Africa. 

Slave trading was small-scale stuff at first, but by 1660 the Royal African Company was incorporated and it went into the trade on an industrial scale, transporting 212,000 slaves, almost all of them branded on their chests with either the name of the company or DY, for Duke of York. Out of those, 44,000 died on the slave ships. I trust I don’t need to tell you about the conditions on the slave ships. If I do, ask Lord Google about the Middle Passage. The conditions were brutal, degrading, and–look at the numbers–often lethal. 

That 212,000 isn’t the total number of slaves transported by English ships, only by that one company. The total would be something along the lines of 3.1 million, and only 2.7 million of those survived the trip.

If you want a historical landmark for the start of industrial-scale slave trade, we’re talking about Charles II’s reign, and yes, I had to look that up, so don’t feel bad. 

And with that, we’re ready to introduce a new subhead, because this one’s wearing out.

 

Contradictory rulings

In 1677, an English court heard a case involving a group of slaves who were “wrongfully detained.” (The quote’s from Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, so no link. If you want to go deeper into the topic, the book’s a good place to start.) The case involved a squabble between two white men, a plantation owner in Barbados and a naval officer who argued that “as there could be no possession of people as property, therefore his action in detaining the enslaved persons was more akin to the feudal practice of villeinage, which tied people to land, thereby making them immovable as simple property.”

So we won’t find heroes on either side of this case. It was two charmers fighting over human property. One wanted them as slaves and the other as serfs. The court ruled that “since black people were bought and sold and as they were infidels, they ranked as merchandise and therefore could be treated as property for the purposes of the claim.” (We’ve gone back to Josh Hitchens for that quote. See the first link if you want to go deeper.)

Two things stand out in this ruling: one, people could be considered property; and two, this could be justified by checking their religion against England’s own. If they didn’t match, the people could become property. 

The people involved were not set free.

A second ruling at the end of the century repeated the role of religion in deciding whether a person could be property: “heathens” could be; Christians couldn’t.

Logically enough, this led to a widespread belief that becoming a Christian would free a person, and English slaveholders went to some lengths to make sure their slaves got no chance to convert, and ditto the communities where they–the slavers–kidnapped people to enslave them.

On the other hand, not long after that ruling we find one that says, “The common law took no notice of blacks being different from other people,” and another saying “That as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free. . . . One may be a Villein in England, but not a Slave.”

Neither ruling touched on the slave trade or slavery in English colonies. They applied only to within the borders of England.

 

Except…

Except that they didn’t exactly apply within the borders of England, because slavery did exist within its borders, unchallenged. They were about slaves coming into England. 

Why should the law consider them different from the slaves already there? Beats me, but it did. 

Still, slaveholders continued to bring their slaves into England, and they were worried enough about the risk that they asked the attorney general for an opinion on the subject, which he dutifully issued in 1729. A slave, he said, remained a slave while in England, baptism didn’t free a slave, and a slave could be compelled to leave England and return to the colonies. He didn’t cite case law or precedent–the altars English law worships at–but the opinion was taken seriously and used in court by lawyers who managed to keep a straight face while doing so.

 

A bit more case law

Legal rulings wobbled backwards and forwards on the issue for a good–or not so good–long time. In a 1749 ruling, slaves remained slaves. In a 1763 ruling, they not only became free, they could charge their former masters with ill treatment. 

Then we get to the case of Jonathan Strong, who was brought to England as a slave, beaten so badly that the slaveholder threw him out on the street when Strong was no more use to him, and later tried to reclaim him when he saw that he’d recovered. Strong was held in jail before he could be put on a ship, and he managed to contact the men who’d help him recover from his beating. 

It all ended up in court and Strong was set free, after which one of the men who’d helped him, Granville Sharp, was sued for £200–a shitload of money at the time–for interfering with the slaveholder’s property. The slaveholder also challenged him to a duel, an invitation Sharp was sharp enough to decline.

He was also sharp enough to defend himself in courts, since he couldn’t find a lawyer who thought he had any defense, and he did a good enough job that the plaintiff’s lawyers dropped the case and the plaintiff had to pay the costs.

Actually, three times the costs. So we get to do a victory dance, but we’ll have to cut it short because the ruling avoided setting a precedent. What’s more, five years after he was beaten and thrown out on the street, Jonathan Strong died as a result of his injuries. He was 25.

By now, Sharp had become a campaigner, and he was involved in a few more cases that rescued individuals but didn’t yield a decisive ruling on slavery’s legality. 

That sets the scene for the 1772 Somersett case. James Somersett had been enslaved in Massachusetts, was brought to England as a slave, and after two years escaped. He was recaptured and held on a ship bound for Jamaica but rescued by legal intervention.

When the case went to court–we’ll skip over the legal arguments–at last a judge came back with a decisive ruling: slavery was so “odious” that it could only exist if authorized by law–and no English law had ever authorized it.

But, despite appearances, the Somersett ruling didn’t abolish slavery in England, it only prevented slaves from being forced to leave the country against their will. This was no small thing, because the slaves in England tended to be servants. (I’ve read of one group who worked in a quarry, but they seem to be the exception.) Without minimizing the horrors of slavery, the threat of being deported to, say, a sugar plantation in Jamaica if they tried to run away was a powerful one. 

So slavery itself continued on English soil, and English newspapers continued to advertise the sale of slaves and searches for runaways. 

 

The abolition of slavery

England’s involvement in the slave trade became illegal in 1807, but slavery within England wasn’t abolished until 1838, when it was abolished in the colonies as well. Except, ahem, for the parts of the world ruled by the British East India Company, which were ruled by the company, not its government.   

The slaveholders were paid compensation. The slaves not only weren’t compensated, in the colonies they were pushed into what were a thinly disguised form of slavery called apprenticeships. By then, though, slavery had already died out within England, not because of new laws or court rulings but because, Fryer argues, the slaves themselves had become a powerful anti-slavery force and freed themselves.

But that’s another post–or it will be if I can find enough detail to make it work. 

Wards and guardians in medieval England

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As a culture (generalization alert here), we sentimentalize medieval England. At least when we’re not talking about its fleas and flies and plagues and dirt, we do. Still, the sentimentalizing outweighs the fleas-and-flies stuff. We like to think there was a time when nobles were noble, or at least when someone was. Shouldn’t someone be pure of heart in this mess of a world?

Of course they should, and it must’ve happened a long time ago, because we don’t have a lot of purity on show right now. Therefore–this is so obvious I hardly need to say it–it must’ve happened in the middle ages. After all, they did leave us some beautiful pictures, and some yarns we can swallow whole if we work at it. 

But medieval England was nothing if not upfront about making a profit, including from that thing we sentimentalize most, childhood. 

Okay, if childhood isn’t what we sentimentalize most, it comes right after kittens and puppies.

Irrelevant photo: Not some knight’s horse but a pony living wild on Dartmoor.

Wardship

Let’s say you’re the heir to one of medieval England’s aristocrats but, oops, your father dies while you’re still a minor–less than 21 if you’re male, less than 16 if you’re female. You’re going to become somebody’s ward and they’re going to be your guardian.

Why am I talking about only your father? Because your mother gets shoved off the chess board as soon as your father dies. 

I should squeeze an extra fact in here: If you’re male, you get to be the one and only heir, but if you’re female and no male is in line ahead of you, you and any sisters you happen to find will divide the inheritance among you. 

Why? 

‘Cause that’s how it works. 

We have most of the pieces in place now. There you are, heir to a big chunk of land–and land is wealth in medieval England–but too young to control it. You might think your mother could be your guardian but no, sorry, your mother’s good enough to take care of whatever children won’t inherit the land, but not of you, kiddo. That right–and we’ll come to why it’s a right more than a responsibility–goes to your late father’s feudal lord. Who’s likely to have their own best interests at heart, not yours. Having a ward is lucrative and wardships are bought and sold like any commodity. If it’s to their advantage, your guardian may hold onto your wardship. If it’s not, or if they need the money, they’re likely to sell it. 

Hold on, though. We shouldn’t talk about wardship as if it’s a single thing. It can be split up, with one person guardianing you, the actual child, and another guardianing–and, entirely legally, profiting from–the land you’ll inherit. And this is right and proper and necessary because as a child you can’t provide military service, and military service is the most important thing feudal lords owe as payment for their land. Whenever the king WhatsApps them, they’re expected to fight, and to bring some set number of armed men with them. 

And since too young to be trusted with a smartphone, the adult controlling your land will take responsibility for all that warrior stuff. And, again, since all the gear soldiers need–horses, weapons, armor, food, alcohol–doesn’t come cheap, profiting from your future estate makes sense, right? 

Well, it does if you can immerse your mind in the assumptions of a feudal world. 

So that’s the land. If the elements of your wardship are divided, though, somebody else will get to decide who raises you. They’ll have the right to arrange your marriage, and since marriage is about connections and land and power, and since you’re a rich heir, the right to arrange your marriage is a game piece worth having. Your guardian might marry you and your riches into their own family. They might marry you into a family they want to build an alliance with. They might sell your marriage.

If all this sounds cold, we haven’t even started. Your custody may not get settled permanently. Your child-self can be taken from one home by armed men and deposited in another. That’s called ravishment. You can then be deposited in some third household because the person who’s taken you isn’t interested in your charming company but in having control of you. You could then be ravished back to the first household, or to a third. 

“No provision for feudal heirs was final,” according to Sue Sheridan Walker, in “Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England.”

All the people involved can also go to court, and often do. What little is known about how this worked (and the tales are hair-raising) comes from court records–which, frustratingly, often end halfway through the story, so we never get to find out what happened. What we can pretty well guess is that they don’t end, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Happiness doesn’t seem to have been an expectation, although to be fair when you can only trace a bit of history only through court records you inherit a built-in bias toward the ugliest stories. When it all works smoothly, no one goes to court.

 

Let’s go back to the mother, though

Mothers get to raise their younger children–who cares about them?–although if the heir dies, the next in line will have to replace him. And an aristocrat’s widow will have the income from her dower lands to support what’s left of her family.

Her what?

Dower lands are generally a third of her husband’s estate, and a widow has a lifetime right to them. When she dies, they revert to the estate–presumably to her son. Since we’re talking about a group of people with a high death rate, both through illness and warfare, a woman might be widowed multiple times, acquiring dower lands as she goes and becoming quite wealthy. So even though she might not have the right to act as her own child’s guardian, as a feudal landlord she might become the guardian of some tenant’s heir, and she might either act as guardian herself or sell the wardship.

When a child’s orphaned, the question people ask isn’t, Who’s the best person to raise this child? It’s, What rules govern the land the child will inherit?  

 

Yes, but…

As an heir, you just might live with your mother if your guardian approves or if your mother buys your wardship, but we can’t assume she’ll think her home is the best place for you. Aristocratic childhoods are short. Children–orphaned or not–are commonly sent to other households at 6 or 7, generally a household that’s a step up the feudal food chain, where they’ll make important connections and get an education. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of who’s literate and who isn’t. The answer will depend on what part of the medieval period we’re talking about anyway. But whatever book learning he acquires, the most important things an aristocratic boy can learn are warfare and what it takes to be an adult in this stratified society–or as one article put it, he needs to “learn breeding.” So even if you stay with your mother, you can’t expect to stay with her for long, and the household you grow up in might turn out to be your in-laws’. Marriages are arranged early and it isn’t uncommon for a very (very) young betrothed couple to grow up together.

Which leads us to ask why, if she’s going to send you away anyhow, your mother might want to buy your wardship, and one possible answer is, for profit: a child can be sold into marriage. Or she might want to marry you off to fulfill an arrangement the family made before your father’s death, which would strengthen or confirm an alliance. 

She might also want to control whose home you’re raised in. Marriage and fostering were highly charged political moves.

If she’s one of those mothers who ravish their children–that’s stealing them from their guardians, remember–she might not be doing it because she misses your charming companionship and the crayon artwork you left on the castle walls. A marriage made against your legal guardian’s wishes will still be valid.

And as Walker points out, medieval mothers aren’t necessarily involved deeply with their children. As infants, the kids are in the care of wet nurses. They’re sent away while they’re still young. Books on deportment are singularly silent on what a mother’s duties to a child are. 

 

And finally, there’s another form of guardianship

Medieval England has another way an aristocrat might hold land, though: socage. It doesn’t have the prestige of holding land that you pay for in military service. In fact, it moves us closer to the peasant level. You pay for your land either agricultural service (this isn’t for the aristocracy) or in money. But even though there’s less cachet in holding land this way, you can hold one bit of land in socage and another bit by knight-service, so your socage parcel doesn’t move you down the food chain. 

Don’t look for a simple picture.  

If you’re the heir to land held under socage tenure, then guardianship goes not to the feudal lord but to your nearest male relative who isn’t entitled to inherit the land. If you’re female, you can contract a marriage without the lord sticking his long feudal nose into the arrangement. (Yes, the source I’m stealing this from said you could contract a marriage by your very own self. You don’t have to depend on someone else doing it for you.) If you’re male, you may find that being the oldest male doesn’t entitle you to inherit the whole parcel of land; it may be divided. It’ll depend on all sorts of complexity that’s above my pay grade. As far as the topic of wardship goes, though, it sounds like you’re less of a pawn than if you’d inherited high-prestige land.

After 1660, knight-service tenure was wiped out and it all became socage.   

Parliament, the British crown, and the tug-of-war over money

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It wouldn’t be irrational to track English, and then British, history by following the financial wrestling match between the monarch of the moment and the parliament of the moment. 

We won’t do that any kind of justice here, we’ll just ice skate over the top, mostly following the mechanism through which the monarchy’s funded. 

 

The Sovereign Grant

As of 2012, Britain’s ruling king, queen, or what have you–along with what are called the minor royals and what Winnie the Pooh would call all Rabbit’s friends and relations–are funded by the Sovereign Grant. This rolls together three earlier grants and presumably makes everything simpler. For all I know, it may actually do that, although I can’t help remembering that every time the US made income taxes simpler, the forms got harder to fill out. 

Never mind. Different country, so let’s go backward, to the Civil List.

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

The Civil List

The Civil List dates back to 1689 (or 1698, but let’s not quibble; if one of those is a typo, it’s not mine) and to the joint monarchy of William and Mary. Parliament voted them £600,000 to cover civil and royal expenses. 

What’s the difference civil expenses and royal ones? No idea. I’m just parroting what the Britannica says but it covers all those minor royals, staff, palace upkeep, and–I don’t know, maybe polishing the jewelry and the sivlerare.

Before the Civil List, the monarchy relied on its own income (it owned stuff–lots of income-generating stuff and still does) and whatever taxes Parliament approved for its use. When that wasn’t enough (it never was for long, especially when a special occasion came up and someone wanted to throw a war), the monarch had to go back to Parliament and say, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Parliament could, and sometimes did, keep a monarch underfunded so–

Well, for this to make sense you have to understand that the king or queen could send Parliament to bed without supper, or more to the point, send them home, where they had no power to recall themselves; they had to wait for the monarch to call them back into session. And since Parliament could be a pain in the royal backside, a king or queen might not call them back for a long stretch of time.

Unless they needed money, so we’ve come full circle: it suited Parliament to keep the crown underfunded.

After William and Mary took their her-and-his thrones, power shifted decisively to Parliament. The monarch was now bound to summon Parliament regularly. That was the cost they paid for becoming the kingsy and the queensy, but even so, as one MP said, “when princes have not needed money, they have not needed us.”

So, yeah, keep that monarch short of money and Parliament had a job for life.  

In 1690, Parliament set up the Commission of Public Accounts, which tracked the crown’s spending. It could then earmark money for certain expenses but not for others. So we’re watching Parliament’s control increase.

That says the Civil List didn’t exactly give the crown the keys to the candy store, but it did give them a lot of candy. What did they do with it? The Georges (I, II, and III) were known for using it to buy friends. Here was a sum of money the crown had under its control. 

George III gets a particular mention here for handing some money to supporters in Parliament in the form of secret pensions and assorted other bribes. Parliament struck back in 1762 by supervising the account and in 1780 by banning secret pensions. 

The fun was over. Victoria was allowed to grant pensions to people in the arts and sciences, or who’d served the crown one way or another but only on the advice of her ministers.

Religious oaths in British history, or how to keep groups you don’t like out of Parliament

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The British state is as tangled in arcane rules as a kitten in a ball of yarn, but it’s not above issuing itself a scissors when either necessity or the political mood of the moment demands, and that’s what it did in 1833, when a Quaker, Joseph Pease, was elected as a Member of Parliament. 

The strand of yarn that needed to be cut was the requirement that MPs swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment. Who’s not called the monarch-of-the-moment but the king or the queen, with a capital letter I can’t be bothered to hand out, and it’s all taken very seriously, thank you.  

Irrelevant photo: This is what cats do on a rainy day. But hey, I did mention kittens…

 

Quakers and oaths

The problem in 1833 was that Quakers didn’t swear oaths, and I assume they still don’t. It’s against their religion, and you don’t have to read very far into Quaker history to find that when something’s against their religion, serious Quakers will go to no end of trouble not to do it. Their founder was well acquainted with prison. He was jailed for blasphemy, for refusing to take an oath, for having long hair, for assorted other things. That long-hair charge was ruled not proven (i’m not sure how–you’d think the evidence would be on hand, or on head), but he and several others weren’t released. Instead they were fined for refusing to take their hats off in court. They refused to pay the fine, which they considered unjust, and were returned to prison. 

They’re a stubborn lot, the Quakers. I admire them. 

So, no oath for Joseph Pease, who wasn’t the first Quaker elected to Parliament. One was elected in 1698 but never got to take his seat. Three years earlier, Quakers’ affirmations had been accepted in place of oaths in most situations. The exceptions were giving evidence in court, serving on a jury, and holding a paid crown office. (in 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence. (In 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence.)

MPs weren’t paid until 1911–they were assumed to be independently wealthy and the setup pretty much restricted the post to people who were–so it wasn’t irrational to think the new MP might be able to take his seat. He wrote to the speaker saying he hoped “my declarations of fidelity . . . might in this case, as in others where the law requires an oath, be accepted.”

The hell it would be. No oath, no seat in the Commons. A by-election was ordered and someone else was elected. 

 

Which brings us back to Joseph Pease

That explains why when Pease was elected he expected trouble. He told his constituents that he was prepared to “go through much persecution in your cause” and wouldn’t “be surprised if the [Commons’] Serjeant-at-Arms be ordered to take me into custody.” 

But it was now 1833–practically modern times, right? Two seventeenth-century laws that kept anyone but Anglicans out of public office had been repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed in 1829.  

So Pease showed up, announced that he wouldn’t take the oath, surprising no one, and was asked–or possibly told–to step outside while the Commons discussed its response. 

What the Commons did was set up a committee to look at laws and precedents, because what Britain has instead of a written constitution is an endless collection of precedents. How anyone who enters that maze finds their way back is beyond me, but find a way back they did, and in what must be record time they recommended that Commons accept his affirmation. The house agreed and he got to take his seat.

That same session of Parliament passed a law accepting affirmations for jury duty and public office from Quakers and Moravians.

Moravians? They’re a Protestant group founded in Bohemia by Jan Hus and predating Martin Luther. (Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t know about that pre-dating business.)

 

Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?

Um no. Because although Catholics had been admitted to Parliament in 1829, Jews had to wait until 1858. And voting was still restricted to people with money. 

Did I say “people”? I meant men. The idea of women either voting or running for office was too absurd to spend time on. So let’s focus on the next category of people to wriggle through the eye of the political needle.

Jews weren’t specifically excluded from Parliament, but to take a seat they had to swear an oath that included the words, “Upon my true Faith as a Christian,” and you can see what that’s a problem if you take this stuff seriously. Or even if you don’t. That would be a step too far, even for my own irreligiously Jewish self.

Disraeli, who’s known as Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, was born Jewish but converted as a child, when his parents did, so he had no problem a Christian oath. Interesting that he’s still considered a Jewish prime minister, don’t you think?

We can also unearth an MP and a Lord or two who had Jewish ancestors somewhere in the background but who was Christian enough to feel comfortable about the oath. Were they Jewish? Weren’t they Jewish? I’m sure it depended on who you asked, and quite possibly still does. 

In 1850, a clearly Jewish Jew was elected to represent Greenwich, and instead of disappearing politely as a previous Jewish would-be MP had, he took his seat and refused to leave, causing an uproar. The house voted on whether to adjourn and he cast a vote. He also spoke on a motion that he be asked to withdraw.

The whole thing went to the courts and he was fined £500 for every vote he cast.

Over time, the Commons passed more than one bill that would have allowed Jews to take a different oath, but the Lords kept blocking it. Eventually, a compromise allowed each house to modify their oaths by a special resolution for each Jewish member elected. 

None of this applied to people from other religions, or to atheists, although I haven’t seen evidence that any either ran for office or got elected at this point.

It’s hard to say when dissenting Protestants were allowed to take seats in Commons. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, according to Parliament’s website, some dissenters attended Church of England services occasionally to be sure they wouldn’t be excluded. That makes them hard or impossible to count. 

So basically, I can’t offer any information on them.

 

But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again

Once he took his seat, he had one last problem to contend with: In this period, men took off their hats as a sign of deference to their superiors, and Quakers refused to recognize either superiors or inferiors, so they kept their hats on their heads. That’s one of the things George Fox was jailed for. So as Pease came in, the Commons doorkeeper would sweep his hat off for him and leave it in the Commons library. 

Problem solved. 

Breaking with tradition, he didn’t address the Speaker of the House as sir, and where other MPs referred to each other in speeches as the honorable member, he settled for the member. The roof did not fall in.

 

What oath do MPs take these days?

It’s all loosened up considerably. If they’re going to swear, they use a wording settled on in 1868. They get to choose their sacred book and say, “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to [his or her] Majesty [fill in the appropriate name], [his or her] heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” 

I’d recommend inserting an and before “heirs and successors,” but no one’s asked me. 

Having a choice of sacred books reminds me that, to date, no Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster member has been elected as an MP, which is a shame because they’d have to appear with a colander on their head and hold a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

May I live long enough to see that happen.

But we’re not done with the choices now available. They can take the oath in Welsh, in Cornish, or in Scottish Gaelic. They can hold the book up. They can raise a hand but not hold the book. They can kiss the book. They can dance the hula and leave everyone speechless.

No, you can’t trust everything I say.

On the other hand, if they’re going to affirm, they say, “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to” etc. 

I don’t know why they have to both declare and affirm, but it’s okay because it comes with a side of fries and a fizzy drink, but they don’t get to dance the hula.

What happens if you’re an anti-monarchist? You have a problem. Would-be MPS who don’t either swear or affirm their loyalty to the crown can’t take their seats, speak in debates, vote, or receive a salary. They can’t pass Go. And they can be fined £500 if they try to do any of that. And if that isn’t enough, their seat sill be declared vacant “as if they were dead.”

Lucy Hay, England’s civil war, and history looking the other way

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Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle–not to be confused with Ann Hay, Countess of Something Irrelevant–played a small, double-edged part in England’s Civil Wars, and you might not want to get too close to those edges, because they were sharp. She was the daughter of an earl but, what with being a woman and all, couldn’t inherit a title of her own. You know how it is. I didn’t inherit a title either, and I’m willing to bet you didn’t. 

So Lucy married a man who soon became an earl, although he was a lowly baron when she married him.

Irrelevant photo: Cornwall’s foggy cliffs–or one of them anyway.

 

A digression

English being the wild-eyed, confusing thing it is, the wife of an earl is a countess. This almost makes sense if you think back to the Norman invasion of England. 

No, I know you weren’t alive then. None of us were. Imagine yourself back to the Norman invasion. The Normans brought the word count with them from the Continent, only since they were coming from France the word was counte. You’ll want to be careful how you pronounce that. However you spell it, though, the word never made the transition to English. It was defeated in hand-to-hand combat by the Anglo-Saxon word eorl (now earl), which applied to roughly the same small group of men. 

And so it is that in English you only get to be a count if you bought your title abroad. Buy it in Britain and you’re an earl. And if you want to know why the wife of an earl isn’t an earless–

Damn. I was going to refer you to the overstuffed Mysteries of the English Language file for an explanation, but then I typed the word and saw that the imaginary wife in question would probably be ear-less instead of an earl-ess. I doubt that explains the discrepancy, but it is a satisfying absurdity. Let’s quit while that’s fresh in our minds.

 

But we were talking about Lucy Hay

Lucy–I repeat, for no good reason–had to marry to get herself a title, and James Hay, the soon-to-be earl she married was a major player in first James’ and then in Charles I’s court. He was knight of the Bath, master of the wardrobe, keeper of the warm fuzzy towel, groom of the stool, and gentleman of the bedchamber, although not all at the same time.* The titles are ridiculous–you have to travel in very select circles to even say them with a straight face–but they mark his political influence.

The kings poured money and possessions over him, but let’s skip the details. He’s not our focus. For our story, what matters is that he brought Lucy to court, where she made an impact in her own right. She was beautiful–probably the quality that was most valued–witty, charming, and smart. Or at least she had a reputation for all of the above. I wasn’t there either, so I can only take other people’s word. She was celebrated by assorted poets and rumored to have affairs with a range of men. I wouldn’t put too much weight on the rumors, because (a) we don’t seem to have anything to back them up, and (b) it’s what was (and still is) said about any woman who accomplished anything, because surely it’s the only way a woman could get anywhere.

From here on, we’ll find that respectable sources don’t say much about ol’ Lucy, so I have to rely partially on the less official ones. They may be correct–they’re at least fairly consistent–but as historical citations they’re not much more impressive than, ahem, I am. So, for what it’s worth:

Lucy became lady of the bedchamber to Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, and went on to be a close confidant. Then in 1636, Lucy’s husband died. By some accounts he left her a wealthy widow. By others, he left nothing but debts. Either way, she chose not to remarry and became close to Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Stafford and the king’s main advisor, sparking a rumor that they were sleeping together, because what else could a man and a woman do when they’re together?

How influential was she? It’s hard to know. For the most part, women had to operate in the political shadows, so we’re not going to find a lot of documentation. That’s great if you’re writing novels–no one will prove you wrong, so you’re free to have a good time–but not so great if you’re writing history.

 

But why do we care about Lucy?

Because Charles I is the guy who got his head cut off. You know: English Civil Wars. Conflict between Protestants, Very-very Protestants, Catholics, and Possible Catholics, not to mention between king and Parliament.

Parliament was pushing for more power. Charles was pushing for more power. But there was only so much power to go around. Non-Church of England Protestants were pushing for religious freedom, at least for themselves if not for anyone else. Everybody was maneuvering for something. And Stafford–remember him? C’mon, it’s only been a few paragraphs. King’s adviser. Lucy’s good buddy. Parliament noticed that Stafford was vulnerable and had him executed–and Charles (that’s the king; remember him?) put his seal to the order. His political position was already shaky and he either couldn’t or wouldn’t risk his royal neck for a mere favorite advisor.

In some tellings, that’s why Lucy turned against Charles and toward the more moderate of the Presbyterian groupings in Parliament. (They were the relative moderates; the radicals were the Puritans.) But that’s guesswork. All we know is that she became close to John Pym, the most visible advocate for Parliament’s power, and when Charles decided to arrest Pym and four other MPs who were getting on his royal nerves, she tipped them off, so that when the king marched into Parliament with armed men, they were nowhere to be found.

Would history have played out differently if he’d gotten his hands on them? We’ll never know. He didn’t. A civil war broke out, and Lucy sided with Parliament until the Puritans came to dominate it, when she switched back to the Royalist side, pawning a necklace to raise £1,500, which she gave to the cause. That was a big honkin’ sum of money at the time and it’s not to be sneezed at today. She generally kept communication open with, in no particular order, Charles (that’s Charles, Jr., who later became Charles II), the queen, and scattered bands of Royalists. Parliament had her arrested and held in the tower for 18 months, and from there she stayed in communication with Charles, Jr., by cipher.  

Also by email.

In spite of all that, when Charles II got to the side of the board where they put an extra checker on his head, kinging him, she didn’t regain her old influence. 

Why not? History doesn’t say. Maybe because she wasn’t of use anymore. Maybe she was no longer young and beautiful enough to get the (male, remember) poets cranked up. Maybe her contacts in the new court weren’t strong enough. That’s all speculation, though. The court–the one she’d held restore–had moved on, leaving her behind.

She died of apoplexy not long after Charles II became king. 

Apoplexy? It’s a dated word for a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke. In a more general way, though, it means to be really, truly furious. Which she might well have been by then, although I have nothing more than a hunch to back that up. If she’d known history was going to pretty well ignore her, she’d have had all the more reason to be apoplectic.

 

* Note: I only made up one of those titles. The rest, I swear to you, are real.

A quick history of British lifeboats

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The thing about being an island is that you have coasts, and the thing about having coasts is that ships wreck on them. In the early 19th century, Britain and Ireland racked up an average of 1,800 shipwrecks a year. And–you will have figured this out already–the thing about shipwrecks is that people die. 

For most of Britain’s history, rescuing people from shipwrecks was a hit-or-miss business. People in ports did what they could, but seas stormy enough to wreck a ship are stormy enough to wreck the small boats they’d put out in, and there was a limit to what they could do. 

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

 

The organizational stuff

Mostly, people put out in whatever little boats they had, but in 1730 Liverpool introduced a boat dedicated to nothing but lifesaving, and in 1785 Bamburgh launched the first one specifically designed for it. Four years later, businessmen from Tyne and Wear ran a design competition for a lifeboat. Let’s toss in a name or two here, because they’re wonderful. The winning boat was designed by William Wouldhave, and it could right itself if it capsized. 

After that, the boatbuilder Henry Greathead was asked to combine the best features of the new boat and the earlier design, and in 20 years he’d built 30 hybrids. But lifesaving was still a local effort, dependent on local initiative, money, and energy. 

The first national effort started in 1824, when the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was formed. The founder (whose name is boring so we’ll skip it) was well connected–you could’ve called him Sir Boring Name and no one would’ve thought you were being weird–so he was able to approach the navy, the government, and assorted “eminent characters” for backing. They were generous with their moral support but didn’t cough up much in the way of cash.

It was an MP (whose name is also boring) who suggested tapping the wealthy but less eminent, and that shook loose the money he needed. There was prestige to be had in philanthropizing, and some of them probably even cared about the causes they donated to. Sir Boring Name raised £10,000 from them. That would be in the neighborhood of £1,000,000 today. In other words, it was more than enough to buy lunch, never mind launch a few boats and an organization. 

By 1825 the newly formed organization had 15 lifeboats and thirteen lifeboat stations to its name, which it changed to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1854. Neither name flows off the tongue happily, but since it’s now known as the RNLI, no one notices.

By 1886, when 27 lifeboat crew members died responding to the wreck of the Mexico, donations from the rich had stagnated. Maybe they’d gotten bored with the same old, same old and some other cause had eclipsed the RNLI. Causes go in and out of fashion, even when the needs they respond to stay around. It was local people who donated money to support the bereaved families, as I’m sure they had from time immemorial–that had never been the RNLI’s role–but the disaster also led to a couple deciding that RNLI funding needed to be dependent not on a wealthy few but on the nation as a whole. They democratized the effort, going for many small donations, and they raised £10,000 in two weeks. Since then, the RNLI has turned to the public for support and gotten it. 

You may have figured out by now that the organization isn’t part of the government and never has been. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know. Probably a bit of both. 

 

Launching the boats

Let’s focus for a moment on one lifeboat station, in Selsey, which is–um, hang on. 

It’s in West Sussex. I knew that.

Selsey built its first lifeboat station in 1861, and until 1913, when they built a slipway, it launched its lifeboats by hauling them over wooden skids laid on the beach. That’s for each launch, I believe, since the skids would’ve been either washed away or  buried by the tides if they’d been left in place. It was heavy work and it was slow. 

I can’t swear that this is true of the Selsey boat, but lifeboats were often launched and hauled out of the water by women, helped by horses if they were available. The men would already be onboard. 

In 1899, a lifeboat (not from Selsey; do pay attention; we left there sentences ago) was hauled ten miles overland for a rescue during a storm, either because it was safer than risking it in open water or they needed a more protected place to launch. Some 50 to 60 people dragged it across Exmoor with the help of 18 horses. They knocked down walls (that would’ve been stone walls, so no light job) and anything else that was in their way and occasionally had to lift the boat off its carriage to get it through gates. It took them ten hours. Everyone on board the ship was saved.

It would make a hell of a movie. Toss in a few lifelong enmities having to work together, gale-force winds, beards, and some of those long, heavy skirts (probably not on the same people as the beards, since this was a while ago and they could be stiff-necked about that stuff in public). 

Plus, of course, the horses. Never forget the horses. And a member of the local gentry giving orders to people who know their work better than him.

 

Rescue

The lifejacket was introduced to lifesaving crews in 1854. It was made from strips of cork sewn onto canvas and it was bulky. It didn’t catch on until 1861, when the only survivor of a lifeboat that went down was the only crew member wearing one. From there, people went on to improve on the design, gradually making it more buoyant and more comfortable.

In 1808, the breeches buoy was introduced. This was basically a pair of shorts attached to a life preserver and a line. The rescuers could shoot the line to the ship, secure it on both ends, and use it like a zip wire, sliding people one by one from the wreck to safety, then hauling the thing back. Even if the line broke, dumping the passenger in the drink, the life preserver would keep them afloat.

Sounds clunky? It was effective enough that it was used until helicopter rescue edged it out.

 

And today?

Life’s not all perfect. The RNLI’s national organization has come into conflict with some of its local branches–the ones that raise money to support the RNLI and whose members jump in the boats and risk their lives to save others.

They’re all volunteers. I haven’t mentioned that yet. The system may be organized nationally but it still depends on the passion and goodwill of local volunteers,

As far as I can see, a lot of the conflict is about which lifeboat stations get which boats and about local groups feeling disrespected by the national leadership. In one Scottish station, most of the crew signed a letter saying, “They’re putting an all-weather lifeboat in an in-shore position and an in-shore lifeboat in an open sea position.” 

To which the national organization says, Yeah, but look, we did a Lifesaving Effect Review, where we considered effectiveness and speed and size and modeling and numbers and which stations are big enough to hold which kind of boats and all sorts of other impressive stuff.

Which of course it not an actual quote. That’s what italics are for: cheating.

I’m sure paid good money for the review, but it doesn’t sound like it’s swayed the volunteers. One of them–sorry, another boring name–said, “I’m not going to be responsible for putting a boat like that into the open water in the North Sea. . . . It’s putting lives at risk.”

Another (I don’t know about their name–they asked to be anonymous) reminded the world at large, in the person an Observer reporter, who exactly keeps the organization on its feet: “The population of small coastal towns with lifeboat stations are the ones who keep it going. They do jumble sales, quizzes, Christmas cards, charity events.” 

If you’re running an organization, you alienate those people at your peril.

But as our previous Mr. Boring Name said, “We’ve been around for hundreds of years and these guys will be gone in three. We’ll still be here to pick up the pieces.”

Cornwall’s Prayerbook Rebellion

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It’s 1549, we’re in Cornwall, and (I’m taking a gamble here) none of us speak the language, because it isn’t English, it’s Cornish. Enough people speak English that we can probably buy a loaf of bread and a pint of beer (we’ll want to stay away from the water), but it’s embarrassing to depend on other people being better at languages than we are.

 

The inevitable background

What else do we need to know? Edward the Kid is on the English throne. That makes him sound more like a wild west gunslinger than a monarch, though, so let’s be conventional enough to call him Edward VI. He won’t last long–he becomes king at 9 and dies of TB at 15–but right now he’s sitting in the fancy chair, and he’s seriously, Protestantly Protestant, and more to the point, so are the people around him who, since he really is a kid, are powerful forces. 

This is when (and why) crucifixes and saints’ images are stripped out of the churches. Stained glass is destroyed. Masses for the dead are banned, and so are rosaries and church processions. The clergy’s gotten permission to marry.

But in Cornwall it’s gone further than that. Churches can’t ring bells for the dead. Church ales–fundraising banquets that are one of the important ways local churches raise money–have been banned. Priests’ vestments have to meet strict guidelines, and parishioners have to pay for that. 

Irrelevant photo: A magnolia blossom. For some reasons, it decided to bloom a second time this summer

These West Country rules come from William Body, who (I’m quoting David Horspool’s The English Rebel here) “got his hands on the archdeaconry of Cornwall against local opposition,” and then managed to line his pockets once he did.

In Penryn two years ago (that was 1547), there was a demonstration against him and the changes he’d introduced. It came off peacefully, and so did the government’s response. 

But the next year, the foundations that sang masses for the dead were suppressed, and in Helston Body was attacked and murdered by a mob led by a priest. 

Do I need to point out that this wasn’t peaceful? The priest and eleven other people were executed. This wasn’t a peaceful response.

Aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you these things?

Still, Edward, his advisors, or a combination thereof, didn’t think the opposition meant much. It happened in Cornwall, for fuck’s sake–the outer edges of beyond. They were convinced that people were thirsty for their reforms, but even if they’d believed the opposite, they might have acted the same way. Because they were right. It said so in their holy book, or it did once someone put the correct interpretation on it. So they moved ahead and introduced a major change in church services: they’d now be in English instead of Latin, and they’d follow the Book of Common Prayer. 

The Latin mass was now an endangered species, and if you insisted on saying it you’d be endangered yourself.

And since we’ve caught up with our timeline, we’ll shift back to the present tense. It almost makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.

Conducting church services in a language people understand is a very Protestant move, and the English church has been edging in this direction for a while, first including snippets of English, then tolerating–maybe even encouraging–English-only masses in a few churches. Now, though, every last church has to use the Book of Common Prayer, and nope, they’re not negotiating this.

This sets off a massive flap. Catholics cling to Latin, and they’re horrified. But people who are further along the Protestant spectrum are equally offended because the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t break as sharply as they’d like with Catholicism. 

And–we’re finally getting to the point here–it offends the Cornish, because say what you like about how a service in the language people actually speak brings religion closer to the people, English isn’t their damn language and their priests can’t say services in Cornish because that’s not how it’s being done this week.

I’m not sure anyone wanted to say the service in Cornish, mind you. I’m just pointing out that the compromise wasn’t on the table. The Act of Uniformity bans every language except English from church services.

 

Cue the rebellion, please 

We’ll start in Bodmin, which is more or less the geographical center of Cornwall. It’s the first day the new services are scheduled to be heard. So people gather. People protest. They convince a local member of the gentry, Humphrey Arundell, to lead them.

Yes, I do notice the strangeness of people having to convince someone to lead them. It speaks, I think, to how deeply ingrained the hierarchy is. Without a gentleman to lead them, how could they possibly know what to do, even if they had to set him up there and tell him to do it?

Instead of going home at the end of the event, the protesters set up camp.

On the same day and for the same reasons, a protest breaks out in Sampford Courtenay, in Devon, the next county up from Cornwall, and nine days later the two groups set up camp a few miles outside Exeter and prepare to lay siege to the city. Figure there are some 2,000 rebels out there. Or some 4,000. Let’s not bog down over the details. A lot of people. More than you’d want at your birthday party.

The rebels put together several versions of their demands, and most of what they want is about religion. The center of religious reformation is in London. In the West Country, they hold to the beliefs and traditions that have been part of daily life for centuries. Still, they don’t call for a full return to the Catholic Church but to a return to the way things were under Henry VIII. And like so many rebels in monarchical countries, they don’t see themselves as challenging the king but the bad counselors around him. 

Yes, everybody’s drunk the monarchical KoolAid. It won’t be until the Civil War that they turn to other drinks.

The siege of Exeter lasts five or six weeks, and Exeter is left to defend itself until John Russell, who just happens to be the Lord Privy Seal (and people take these titles entirely seriously, remember) arrives with soldiers and defeats the rebels.

Estimates of the number of rebel dead are roughly the same as the estimates of the rebels themselves: 3,000 to 4,000. 

Again, don’t try too hard to make the numbers work. The leaders are hauled to London to be ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. 

 

The aftermath

As a BBC historical article puts it, “The insurrection was eventually crushed with hideous slaughter – some three to four thousand West Country men were killed – and in its wake the ruling classes may well have come to associate the Cornish tongue with rebellion and sedition, as well as with poverty and ‘backwardness’. This in turn may help to explain why the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, as it was later to be translated into Welsh. What is certain is that the failure to provide a liturgy in the Cornish tongue did much to hasten the subsequent decline of the language.”

The decline is more or less geographical, with English leaking across the Devon border and pouring south and west. By 1640, Cornish has retreated into the toe of Cornwall’s sock, and as the language dies out, the process of assimilation into England gathers force. By 1700, only 5,000 people speak Cornish.

The last native speaker of Cornish is Dolly Pentreath, who’s born in 1685 and dies in 1777. 

But. The sense of separation stays strong and plays a role in Cornwall taking the royalist side in the Civil Wars–partly (or so the BBC article speculates) because they saw Charles as  British and the Parliamentarians as English. With his defeat, the Cornish identity took another hit.

The An Gof Rebellion, with an extra bit of Cornish history thrown in

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Welcome to Cornwall, 1497. Henry VII is on the English throne and Cornwall is part of England but also not part of England. The way that works is that the Cornish are a separate nation, which is about culture, but not a separate country, which is about law, power, and who’s in charge. So, like the Welsh, they’re a nation inside the country of England.

 

The culture

Most people’s mother tongue is Cornish, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh. And to a few other languages, but never mind that. I know a rabbit hole when I see one. The Cornish language is strongest in the west of the county and among ordinary people. Go east (which is actually northeast, but that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole) or spend time with the gentry and you’ll find English taking a stronger hold–probably alongside Cornish but in spite of what I said in the first paragraph we’re not actually there so we can’t walk down to the market and find out.

 

Irrelevant photo: what could be more Cornish than a Japanese anemone?

English is spoken among the gentry because not long after the Normans conquered England (and with it, Cornwall), the English king started handing Cornish lands to English (or Norman, or–rabbit hole, damn it) lords. That’s given English some upper-class cachet. Either for that reason or of necessity, a fair number of people speak it as a second language. 

But there’s another reason English is gaining a foothold. Cornwall’s surrounded by water, which means ships dock at its ports, bringing people in from other parts of the world, including from that closest of nations, England. People who live in ports tend to pick up at least bits of other languages.

Still, Cornish is the primary language, and the Cornish also have their own way of dressing, their own folklore, their own customs and games and ways of farming. The place is called–at least by the Cornish–Kernow, not Cornwall.

 

What outsiders say about the place

In 1538, the French ambassador to London, Gaspard de Coligny Chatillon, writes that the kingdom of England “contains Wales and Cornwall, natural enemies of the rest of England, and speaking a [different] language.” 

How much should we trust that business about “natural enemies”? Hard to say. An equally authoritative Italian diplomat reports, “The Welshman is sturdy, poor, adapted to war and sociable,” while “the Cornishman is poor, rough and boorish; and the Englishman mercantile, rich, affable and generous.” So yes, a grain or six of salt might not be a bad idea here. These guys aren’t just outsiders, they make themselves into authorities no matter how little they know. 

Still, that idea of enmity might (emphasis on might) be useful background to the rebellion that I still haven’t told you about.

 

But before that, let’s talk about tin mining

Cornwall doesn’t have great agricultural land unless you have your heart set on farming slate, but it does have tin, and it’s been trading it with the world for centuries. Tin’s useful stuff. Mix it with lead and you get pewter. Mix it with copper and you get bronze. Mix it with trade and you get money.  

In 1201, Cornish tinners got their own legal framework, which exempted them from normal laws and taxes but replaced them with a whole different set. This framework divided the county into stannaries, complete with stannary courts. (Stannary? It comes from the word for tin.) The framework changed over the centuries, and starting in the fourteenth century, Cornwall was governed by a combination of the Duchy of Cornwall and a stannary parliament.

But Henry VII is still the king, remember, and his son, Arthur–the one who died and left the next Henry in charge–is the Duke of Cornwall. When he tries to make some changes in the stannary arrangements, the tinners don’t accept them. So what does Daddy do? He suspends the Stannary Parliament and the privileges that go with it. Talk about helicopter parenting.

Henry’s big on centralizing the government anyway, so this works for him.

You can–and at least one writer does–cast this as a conflict between self-rule and centralization, but how relevant the stannary parliament is to the average person I don’t know. It would’ve been run by a thin top layer of Cornish society. Did your average miner or peasant have more in common with them than with an English lord? Possibly, but not necessarily.

One writer also–sorry, by now I’ve lost track of whether it’s the same one or six other people–lists suppression of the Cornish language as a reason for the revolt that–I know, I know–we still haven’t gotten to. No one else mentions that, and he gives no specifics, so I’m inclined to put the language issue on the shelf for a later revolt, which I’ll write about soon.

Really, I will. 

What does matter to everyone is the new tax that goes along with this change in Cornish government. It’s to fund Henry’s war with Scotland. Without question, that affects everyone’s lives. Most people are somewhere between poor and very poor. They don’t have a lot of slack in their budgets.

 

Why a war with Scotland? 

We have to back up another step, avoiding another conveniently placed rabbit hole. It all has to do with Perkin Warbeck, who’s running around up north, claiming to be one of those famous princes in the tower: the ones who are lost to history and presumed to have been killed by Richard the Evil Uncle but miraculously making himself known just now to the world at large. 

But if Warbeck is one of the princes, that means he should be the king, not Henry. Which is awkward for both of them.

The Scots figure Warbeck’s a nice piece of sand to throw into the English governmental machinery and they back his claim. The Cornish, on the other hand, say, “What’s all that to us?” and (as one source puts it) refuse to pay the tax.

All of them say that? Probably not, but enough that a rebellion breaks out, led by the blacksmith Michael Joseph (he’s known as An Gof, which is Cornish for the blacksmith) from St Keverne, and the lawyer Thomas Flamank, from Bodmin, who’s the son of an estate owner. In several places, An Gof is described as powerful and a natural leader. Flamank is described as a plausible lawyer, which doesn’t quite sound like a compliment. 

If you’re not from Cornwall, the place names won’t mean much to you, but so little seems to be known about them that I’m tossing in the few scraps of information I do have. 

 

And at long last, the rebellion

The rebellion starts in the west, in an area called the Lizard (nope, you won’t find more lizards there than anywhere else in Cornwall) and the rebels head up through Bodmin and on toward London. When they leave Cornwall, they’re a force of 3,000 men. (I’m assuming they were all men, but I don’t really know that.) By the time they reach London they’re a guesstimated total of 15,000. 

Those numbers speak to the Cornish rebellion striking a chord among the English, and the Cornish historian Brian Webb says it spoke to both yeomen and peasants. A river of grievance is flowing through the country. So even though I just spent a lot of time talking about Cornwall as a nation, nationalism can’t be the only force driving this. There’s an interesting essay to be written about the ways class and nationalism intertwine and then conflict with each other, but preferably by someone who isn’t me.

At Flamank’s urging, the march is peaceful. The rebels are armed (according to some sources) with bows and arrows and agricultural tools, which have doubled as weapons in many a war, but from what I’ve read they attack no one on the way to London.

What do they plan to do once they get there? I wish I knew. I’m reasonably sure it isn’t get rid of the king. If monarchy strikes you as a natural arrangement, the accepted way to get rid of one king is to pull an alternate out of the oven, then get rid of the one someone else baked. And it helps if yours has a marginally believable hereditary claim. 

These rebels weren’t in the business of baking or un-baking kings. So maybe we should think of the rebellion as a sort of armed demonstration. Cardboard and felt-tip pens haven’t been invented, so you’d pick up a weapon. It said, “Look how serious we are,” not to mention, “We’re not taking any shit, by the way.” But I’m speculating. Let’s not take me too seriously. What I’m reasonably sure of is that the decision to march on London speaks to how much they considered Cornwall a part of England. Contrast that with centuries of Irish rebels, who fight in Ireland to get the English out, and to hell with London.

So the An Gof rebels march to London, and they’re enough of a threat that Henry forgets the Scots and marches an army south to join the forces he’s already assembled, so that 25,000 men meet the rebels outside London, at Blackheath.

 

The defeat

The rebel army is defeated at the battle of (take your pick) Deptford Bridge or Blackheath–same place, two names. In some tellings, in addition to being lightly armed, the rebels aren’t well trained. In another, their weakness is simply that they don’t have horses or artillery, although their archers are good.

Either way, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 rebels die before the group surrenders, and another 1,500 are taken prisoner. An Gof and Flamank are tried and–yeah, they’re going to do that horrible thing to them–they’re sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. An Gof declares that they’ll have “a name perpetual and fame permanent and immortal.” 

In a moment of mercy (Henry’s apparently worried about getting the Cornish any more cranked up than they already are) they’re left to die by hanging before the rest of the theatrical stuff is carried out. A baron who joined them when they marched through Somerset is simply beheaded, because he’s an aristocrat, after all. 

All three heads are displayed on London Bridge. Forgive me, but the Tudors have some really unpleasant habits.

Nobody says what happens to the rank and file rebels who were captured. Nothing good, I’m sure. I also haven’t found anything about the rebels who weren’t captured. I imagine them filtering back home with tales to tell, some true and some good enough for neighbors to buy them a pint or three. And some, inevitably, unwilling to talk about what happened at all.

 

However

In 1508 Henry reinstateds and strengthens the stannary system in return for Cornwall’s payment of a £1,000 fine. The Stannary Parliament now has the power to ignore Westminster’s laws.

That £1,000 would be the equivalent of £666,000 in 2023, but a more useful comparison is to say it’s equal to 709 contemporary horses. Horses, remember, are a luxury, which is why the rebels didn’t have them. In other words, this is a hefty chunk of cash, and I have no idea how it’s raised. Probably from those least able to pay.

According to Historic UK Henry “never imposed such high taxes on the Cornish again.” 

 

Back to 2023

The Stannary Parliament last met in 1753 and the Stannary Court heard its last case in 1896, but the charter that created them has never been revoked, so the Duke of Cornwall still appoints a Lord Warden of the Stannaries. Who, I have to assume, does nothing more than show up here and there in a fancy costume, or at least with a huge metal necklace to show how important he or she is. 

It’s a British thing. If you live here long enough, it almost begins to make sense. 

Who was Trelawny?

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Wander through any Cornish town–or village, for that matter–and you’ll find a house called Trelawny. Or Trelawney. We’re reaching far enough back in history that spelling was still a liquid.

Who was Trelawny? The bishop of Bristol when James II was king, that’s who. It doesn’t sound like he has an obvious connection to Cornwall, but stay with me: it’s a powerful one.

Before we get to that, though, yes, houses here have names. It’s romantic as hell and equally inconvenient. I don’t know how many times my partner and I have been walking the dogs and been stopped by a delivery driver asking where some named house is. We seldom remember, but that’s okay because with our accents (both, after 17 years here, still strongly American) no one believes us anyway. 

Cities and new housing developments have abandoned the for the easier-to-manage system of named streets and house numbers, but nobody’s been brave or crazy enough to reorganize the countryside.

Are we done with that? Good. Onward.

Irrelevant photo: a begonia flower

 

King James and Bishop Trelawny

Jonathan Trelawny was born in Cornwall–in 1650, which I mention so we’ll have some clue as to what century we’re wandering through. He was the younger son of an old Cornish family, although when you think about it, what family isn’t old? We all have ancestors stretching back to the beginning of time, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but old old families are the ones who are impressed with themselves and expect the rest of us to be as well. Ideally, they have substantial amounts of money as well as portraits of their ancestors hanging disapprovingly on the walls.

In this particular old family, Papa Trelawny was a baronet–a commoner, but one with the right to be called “sir.”

Not by me, however. 

A baronet is below a baron but above a knight. Except knights of the Garter and–

Oh, come on, this is just too silly to go into. It’s a title. If they impress you, be impressed, please.

Jonathan became a minister in the Church of England, which is the kind of thing a good younger son would’ve done back then. I haven’t been able to find out what his role was in putting down Monmouth’s Rebellion, but he had one, and in gratitude for it King James (that’s James II, in case you’re counting) made him the bishop of Bristol. 

By this time, Trelawny’s older brother had died and the Trelawny we’re following inherited the title of baronet, and if anyone saw a conflict between being a baronet and a bishop, I haven’t found evidence of it.

We’ll stop here long enough to note that he and his family were royalists, having backed the king not only against Monmouth but (earlier king here but still a king) in the Civil Wars. 

 

And then it all went wrong

A royalist Trelawny may have been, but when, after Monmouth’s Rebellion, James misread the political tea leaves and thought they said “Hey, guess what, the country’s ready for political tolerance,” Trelawney parted ways with him. More specifically, the break came over the Declaration of Indulgence. To modern calorie counters that sounds like an announcement that not only was he going to eat a full English breakfast but that he’d have a slice of triple-layer chocolate cake for afternoon tea. 

Sorry, no such thing. Baking soda–or if you’re in Britain, bicarbonate of soda–and baking powder weren’t invented until the nineteenth century, and chocolate (I think–I haven’t double checked this) was still something to drink. You can, apparently, get a cake to rise using cream of tartar, but that only dates back to the eighteenth century. So no cakes for King Jimmy, and we’re not going to even discuss tea. 

What the Declaration of Indulgence did was suspend laws against religious nonconformists–a category that included those scary Catholics.  

Why were Catholics scary? Because England had spent a good bit of time seesawing back and forth between Protestantism and Catholicism, and every shift in the seesaw involved the two sides performing unspeakable acts on each other. Whichever side you were on, you had good reason to be afraid of the other one. So James granting a measure of religious freedom to Catholics? Especially when he’d appointed some to high offices and sent his Parliament home so they couldn’t stand in his way? If you were living back then, you might at this point let out a heartfelt, Protestant eeek. 

And if you’re living now–as I have to assume you are–you could argue either way about whether James was tippy-toeing (or stumbling) toward a Catholic takeover or toward a more tolerant country. He wasn’t around long enough for anyone to be certain.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. First, James demanded that the Declaration of Indulgence be read out in the churches, and seven bishops, including Trelawney, refused. They were arrested, tried for seditious libel, and (to popular acclaim) acquitted. According to the Cornwall Heritage Trust, the episode didn’t make much of an impact on Cornwall, although the Cornwall SEO Co. site says the acquittal sparked celebrations from Cornwall to London. Take your pick. My money’s on the Heritage Trust, but that’s strictly a hunch. 

 

And then?

And then James was overthrown by the Glorious Revolution, which brought in a pair of Protestants as joint monarchs, which is why we don’t get to know which way James was trying to nudge the country. Trelawny became the bishop of Exeter, which brought him closer to Cornwall but he was still on the wrong side of the Tamar River, and later of Winchester, moving him further away. He died in 1721.

Why, then, is his name on so many houses in Cornwall? As far as I can tell, it’s because in the nineteenth century Reverend Robert Steven Hawker wrote a song about him, “The Song of the Western Men,” better known as “Trelawny.”

 

Rev. Hawker, the mermaid, and the elusive truth

Hawker was nothing if not an eccentric. He built himself a hut on the cliffs, where he smoked opium and wrote poetry. He publicly excommunicated one of his cats (he had ten) for killing a mouse on a Sunday. You can pretty well count on the cat not being impressed.

He also put seaweed on his head, sat on a rock, and impersonated a mermaid. The shorter version runs like this:

“For several moonlit nights, he sat at the end of the long Bude breakwater draped in seaweed, combing his locks and singing mournful dirges, to the consternation of the local inhabitants. Finally a farmer loudly announced his intention of peppering the apparition with buckshot, whereupon it dived into the ocean and was never seen again.”

If you want the longer version, you’ll find it here.

Hawker’s song tells the story of 20,000 Cornishmen marching to London to demand Trelawny’s release. The problem is that they didn’t. One estimate puts the Cornish population in 1760 at around 124,000. Let’s say half of those were women, although I seem to remember that, left to herself, nature produces a slim majority of girl babies. I found some slim and pointless comfort in that back in the Dark Ages, when everything in (and out of) sight was engineered to promote more males than females. Never mind. We’re down to 62,000 people. Let’s say randomly that a third of those were either too young or too old to fight. After rounding out the numbers to make my life easier (have you ever wondered why I’m not a statistician?), we’re in the neighborhood of 40,000 men of fighting age. So that would be half the men of fighting age downing tools and taking off for London to wave their weapons and issue threats. 

No, I don’t think so either. And if you’re inclined to argue with my figures, you’ve got more than enough grounds. Even the original population number is an estimate. Britain’s first census (unless you count the Domesday Book) wasn’t taken until 1801 and it’s not considered a professional-quality census anyway.

But to return to our alleged point: there was no Cornish army marching on London. Cornwall Heritage speculates that Hawker mixed in an earlier rebellion, the An Gof rebellion of 1497. Call it poetic license if you like, or blame the opium. Or the seaweed.

In spite of that minor historical problem, Hawker’s song is still sung and it has great power. It taps into the well of anger you’re likely to find in any formerly independent nation that’s lost its language and been overwhelmed by incomers. A fair number of people count “Trelawny” as the Cornish national anthem. You’d be wise–and so (as an incomer) would I–not to run around debunking the man or the song. 

 

So how does the song go?

With a good sword and a trusty shield
A faithful heart and true
King James’s men shall understand
What Cornish men can do
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

Chorus
And shall Trelawny live?
Or shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

Out spake the captain brave and bold
A merry wight was he
Though London Tower were Michael’s hold
We’ll set Trelawny free
We’ll cross the Tamar, land to land
The Severn is no stay
Then one and all and hand in hand
And who shall bid us nay.

And when we came to London wall
A pleasant sight to view
Come forth, come forth, ye cowards all
Here are better men than you
Trelawny, he’s in keep in hold
Trelawny he may die
But twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

 

Want to hear it instead of reading it? Catch the Fisherman’s Friends–a Cornish group if there ever was one–singing it. 

I was going to tuck the An Gof rebellion in at the end of this but I’ve got on long enough. Next week if all goes well. Stick around. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a question for people whose British geography is better than mine: what route would take you from Cornwall to London that crosses the Severn?

The Monmouth Rebellion and the king who wasn’t

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If you tied a knot in the thread of English history every time somebody led a rebellion, you’d make a mess of your sewing. So let’s skip the knots–they weren’t my best idea–and talk about the Monmouth Rebellion, which was led by (no points for guessing this one) Monmouth, the Duke of.

Okay, half a point if you got the Duke part right.

Like everything else of its time (1685) and place (England), the rebellion only makes sense when you paint in the background: the wrestling match between Catholics, Protestants, and super-Protestants for the soul–and more importantly, the throne–of England. 

Can a wrestling match have three contestants or does that make it a free-for-all? Does a contest involving three people take place between them or among them? Does anyone care about the answers to these questions?

Probably not. 

Irrelevant photo: mountain ash berries. Fall is coming. Or autumn , if we’re speaking British.

We’ll start our tale in (for no good reason) the present tense at a time when King Nobody (the first and last of that name) wears England’s crown. Cromwell and some of the super-Protestants are in power. The last king’s dead. The country’s kingless. The super-Protestants lack superpowers, though. They get their name (from me; no one else calls them that) because they’re further along the Protestant spectrum than the more moderate Church of England Protestants. 

That lack of superpowers explains why–

But I’m getting ahead of our story. Cromwell’s in power and Charles II, son of the now-beheaded Charles I, is in exile. 

 

What does Charles get up to while he’s in exile?

Some regal hanky-panky, and the fairly predictable result of that is a son, James.

Time rolls on, as time will. Everybody involved gets older. Cromwell dies. The super-Protestants don’t find a way to continue a kingless government. (See above: lack of superpowers.) Charles comes back to England as king, becoming Charles II. If you’ve seen portraits of the Charleses, he’s the one who looks like an aging and particularly dissolute Bob Dylan. The thought of anyone being or ever having been in bed with him–

No, let’s put that out of our minds.

Charles may be the king, but he doesn’t have superpowers either. All around him are forces pushing to lock the Church of England into place and edge both Catholics and nonconforming Protestants to the furthest corners of the national picture.

It’s in this context that he flirts dangerously with both Catholicism and Europe’s Catholic powers, and it’s also in this context that he and his wife fail to produce–forget a son, they don’t have any kids at all. So his brother is next in line for the throne and he’s–gasp, wheeze–a Catholic convert.

It’s easy to think this is all intolerant and silly, but the country has just emerged from a time when people killed each other in the name of religion, and even now, when things have settled down a bit, which religion you’d committed to decides what earthly doors are open or closed to you. So everyone has solid material reasons not to want Those People from the Other Religion(s) in power. 

That’s in addition to whatever religious reasons they have.

 

Yeah, but what about little James?

Well, James gets knocked around a bit. Before he’s ten, he’s kidnapped, jailed, exiled, and kidnapped again, this time by his father’s agents, who dump him into the household of his father’s gentleman of the bedchamber, where he’s barely educated. 

Gentleman of the bedchamber? It’s not a lascivious as it sounds. He dresses the king, waits on him when he eats alone, and generally hangs out with him. 

At some point, Charles wakes up, says, “Didn’t I have a kid around here somewhere?” and brings him to court, where he becomes a favorite and is turned into a Duke and given a bunch of other titles that if you’re not used to British traditions sound like something JK Rowling made up. He also has a variety of income streams arranged for him. When he’s older, he fights for the king here and there and gains quite the reputation as a soldier. He joins the privy council.

So far, he barely justifies a footnote to history, but the thing is, James is a Protestant and a king’s son, even if he wasn’t born with the right paperwork.

But hold on a minute. His mother (who’s now conveniently dead) always claimed that she’d been married to Charles, and since marriage records haven’t been computerized yet, no one can prove she wasn’t, even if, equally, no one can prove she was. That makes it possible to build a case that he should be the next–safely Protestant–king. So schemes to set James on the throne buzz around him like flies around roadkill.

Eventually he gets involved in a conspiracy, the Rye House Plot (it would’ve involved killing the king and his brother). After a bit of back and forth James goes to live in the Netherlands.

 

And doesn’t live happily ever after

Instead, when Charles dies, James–

But let’s call him Monmouth from here on. It’ll help us remember who’s the king (James, Charles’s brother) and who’s the wannabe (also James, Charles’s son a.k.a. Monmouth). 

So Charles dies and Monmoth launches a full-scale rebellion–or invasion if you prefer–that’s coordinated with an anti-Catholic Scottish rebellion in the highlands.

Why the Scots? Well, England and Scotland are two separate countries, but they have a single king, and if you think that’s confusing try to explain the pronunciation of Worcestershire to someone who learned to read English using phonics. 

The Scottish rising fails while Monmouth’s still crossing the Channel, though, leaving him and 82 men to land in Lyme Regis (that’s in Dorset, in the southwest) without anything to distract the government’s attention. 

Why such a small force? Monmouth’s counting on the country to rise in his support, and initially that seems to work. He’s popular in the southwest, and he gathers an army of 3,000, which is a nice number, trailing an appealing collection of zeroes. The problem with them is that none of them come from the gentry–the people with some soldierly training. He has an army of enthusiastic amateurs without much in the way of weaponry. 

By another count, his army is uphill of 1,000.  How far uphill? Will you stop splitting hairs? We’ll never get out of here. 

Monmouth’s not exactly claiming the throne at this point, just saying he has a right to it but will only take it with Parliament’s agreement. Let’s not split hairs, though. A lot of his followers call him King Monmouth, and they have time to defeat a few county militias before the king’s army arrives. Commoners and the poor flock to his banner, and in Taunton he’s proclaimed king. By now, he has some 6,000 soldiers. 

We’ll skip the back and forth. Monmouth’s and the king’s armies meet at Sedgemoor and Monmouth loses badly. After the battle, his soldiers are hunted down and killed on the spot. (They were commoners anyway, and you can do that to commoners and still sleep at night.) Some 200 who are caught later are tried before being killed. Another 2,000 are transported to the West Indies to work–in a weird and little-known footnote to history–to work alongside slaves from Africa.

Or by that other count, 320 executed and 800 transported. By a third, it’s 333 and 860. Let’s treat the numbers as rough guesses. 

Men, women, and children with remote connections to the rebellion are flogged. Monmouth is captured and executed. 

David Horspool, whose book The English Rebel I rely on whenever I write about rebellions (and I’m a sucker for a good rebellion), thinks Monmouth’s failure was a result of rushing into his rebellion instead of waiting for James to discredit himself. 

 

What happens then?

James discredits himself. He interprets Monmouth’s defeat to mean that the country values stability above everything else and overestimates their tolerance for religious tolerance. He appoints Catholics to important positions, most controversially to positions in the military. He grants for all religions more leeway than they’ve had. And when I say “all religions” here, we do seem to be talking about all religions, including Jews, Muslims, and dissenting Christians. As far as I know, that’s the limit of England’s religious population at this point.  He When judges, justices of the peace, and lords lieutenant resist his moves, he fires them and he comes into conflict with Parliament–nothing new for kings, but the whiff of Catholic incense hanging over the conflict supercharges the reaction he gets.  

Is he genuinely trying to build a state that tolerates multiple religions or is he making sneaky moves toward a Catholic state? I don’t know, but a lot of powerful Church of England Protestants think they do. They believe he’s favoring Catholics and setting the building blocks of a Catholic state in place. 

There’s something very contemporary about that fear, don’t you think? Just slot a more modern into place and the rhetoric’s the same. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, whoever. There’s a lot of it going around. I know you’ve heard it.

 

Why does any of this matter?

Because it sets up the Glorious Revolution, which hits the Eject button that’s been quietly installed on James’s throne, replacing him with a Protestant monarchy. 

But that’s a story for another time.