Various - Routledge Library Editions: English Civil War

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

Volume 5

FROM ORIGINAL LETTERS

EDITED BY
Sir Charles Petrie

Bt, CBE, FRHist.S, Hon.DPhil (Valladolid), Hon.LittD (National University of Ireland) MA (Oxon), Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy of History, President of the Military History Society of Ireland

by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Broadway House, 6874 Carter Lane,

London EC4V 5EL

Set in Monotype Walbaum and printed in Great Britain by W & J Mackay Limited, Chatham

Sir Charles Petrie 1974

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 7969 9

The genesis of this book is due to the public spirit of Colonel Alan Dower, TD, DL, in whose possession is the bulk of the letters upon which it is based. Those connected with the Royalist party formed a portion of the correspondence of Prince Rupert which was transmitted from generation to generation by his secretary to their descendant Mr Bennetts of Pyt House in Wiltshire, who was at one time MP for South Wilts. By him they were sold in 1847 to Mr Bentley, the publisher, who placed them in the hands of Mr Eliot Warburton, the editor of The Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers.

The history of the Fairfax and other letters connected with the side of the Parliament is more romantic. The Fairfaxes originated at Denton in Yorkshire, and during the eighteenth century one of its members intermarried with the Martins of Leeds Castle, Kent. In 1822 the Martin of the day had occasion to make some alterations to the castle, and he set aside for sale a quantity of furniture for which he had no further use, and among it was an old oak chest filled with Dutch tiles: this was purchased by a shoemaker in the neighbouring village of Lenham for a mere trifle; but under the tiles were found, carefully arranged, the Fairfax correspondence, which the worthy shoemaker regarded as waste paper and consigned to the cellar for destruction as occasion might require. At this point the matter came to the ears of a banker in Maidstone, who took the necessary steps to preserve the documents, but not before some of them had been cut into strips for the shoemakers purposes. In due course Mr Bentley purchased this collection, too, and it figured in The Fairfax Correspondence which was edited by Messrs Robert Bell and George W. Johnson.

Eventually both collections passed into the possession of Lord Overstone, and then into that of Colonel Alan Dower, who bought them at Sothebys, being a keen student of the Civil War.

The letters have now been edited with a view to throwing the maximum amount of light upon the personalities of their writers, and for this reason others from different collections have been included for the purpose of clarification: with the same end in view a certain amount of historical and personal background has been painted in. It is hoped that as a result the Civil War will be seen in its proper perspective through the eyes of those who participated in it.

The letters of King Charles I and King Charles II being Crown Copyright, I have to express my gratitude to Her Majesty the Queen for her gracious permission to publish them. It is also at once a pleasure and a duty to express my grateful thanks to Colonel Dower for his unfailing kindness and assistance on all occasions: he has rendered the writing of this book one of the most delightful of tasks.

CHARLES PETRIE

The character of the Civil War is often misunderstood. Those whose sympathies are with the Parliament not infrequently regard the struggle as one between a faithless and tyrannical monarch, backed by a loose-living aristocracy, on the one hand, and a sober and liberty-loving middle class on the other. On the contrary, those who incline towards the royal cause are apt to see the conflict in the light of a conspiracy by a minority of determined revolutionaries, prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their nefarious purpose. Too often the pen and the brush have depicted the Civil Weir in one or other of these strong lights, and very rarely has it been shown in those half-tones which more nearly approximate to the truth. From the beginning there were certainly many who had no doubt which side they would espouse if and when the sword was drawn, but there must have been far more who hesitated until the last moment. The issue was not at the beginning so clear cut as it became later, or as it appears in retrospect, when much is obvious that was hidden from contemporaries: nor did it remain unchanged from the meeting of the Long Parliament to the Restoration of Charles II. Many thought that enough had been done when the Prerogative Courts were abolished; more were alienated from the Parliamentary cause when the King was beheaded; and only a remnant was satisfied to see the hereditary monarchy replaced by a military dictatorship. So it came about that no inconsiderable proportion of those who had opposed Charles I were quite genuine in welcoming the return of his son.