Then did this butcher cut his belly on both sides, and turn the flap upon his breast, which the holy man feeling put his left hand upon his bowels, and looking on his bloody hand laid it down by his side, and lifting up his right hand he crossed himself, saying three times, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu Mercy! The which, although unworthy, I am a witness of, for my hand was on his forehead … all the Catholics were pressed away from him by the unruly multitude except myself … Whilst he was thus calling upon Jesus, the butcher did pull a piece of his liver out instead of his heart, and tumbling his guts out every way to see if his heart were not among them; then with his knife he raked in the body … Methought my heart was pulled out of my body to see him in such cruel pains, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and not yet dead. Then I could no longer hold, but cried, Out upon them that did so torment him. His forehead was bathed in sweat, and blood and water flowed from his eyes and nose. And when on account of the gushing streams of blood his tongue could no longer pronounce the saving name of Jesus, his lips moved, and the frequent groans which he uttered from his inmost heart were proof of the most bitter pain and torture which he suffered.
Hugh Green lingered in the hands of the local barber for half an hour or more. When another Catholic woman pleaded with the sheriff, he was finally put out of his agony. After he had died at last, his heart was cut out and held up on a spear point, then flung into the fire where a minute before, his genitals had been burned. Some Catholic bystanders, including Elizabeth, tried to take the torn body away for burial, but the crowd stopped them, angrily, and it was all Elizabeth could do to get home without being torn to pieces herself.
Then Green’s head was cut off, too, and the crowd kicked it about like a football. As a football, in fact; they went on playing till four o’clock – which proved that the man had no power – but since they believed Catholics were in league with the powers of darkness, they put sticks in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and buried the head near the scaffold. They had thought of putting it on one of Dorchester’s gates as a trophy and a warning, but they had been put off, Elizabeth said, because a previous priest had been so displayed and God had punished the town with the onset of plague.
Others suffered the same fate. In July 1641, a Douai priest named William Ward who had spent twenty years in prison was suddenly dragged off to be hanged at Tyburn. In December, Parliament wanted to hang another seven priests. Charles refused the petition – courageously, if rashly, given that half the nation was by now wondering if he was not a papist himself – but two more priests were nonetheless executed in January 1642, and another seven in 1642 alone. Parliament, when ruling alone, went on to put to death twenty-four priests between 1641 and the end of the First Civil War, simply because they were priests. Eager claims for Parliamentarian tolerance and enthusiasm for liberty were liable to skate over the horrible deaths of these men, victims of a holy crusade and a paranoid terror that had little to do with liberal values. Rather, the English Civil War would not have occurred without the hysterical dread of popery which provoked the kind of violence Lady Rivers and Hugh Green experienced. Liberty was what had to be defended from papists like them, by truly godly people. In this way, a nation came to define itself against some of its own citizens. Civil war was bound to follow.
The king had set up his standard before London had begun to gather troops. It was 22 August 1642, as a newsbook reported:
His Majesty came weary out of Warwickshire to Nottingham, and after half an hour’s repose, commanded the Standard to be brought forth, which was carried by a Lord, His Majesty the Prince, the Duke of York, and diverse Lords and Gentlemen accompanying the same, as soon as it was set up, his Majesty called for the printed Proclamation, mended with pen and ink some words misprinted, or not approved of, and caused the Herald to read the Proclamation three times, and so departed.
The same newsbook went on to say, ‘They plunder all men’s houses whom they please to call roundheads, and bring in cartloads of household stuff and sell them before the court-gate.’
The contrast between the king’s standard-raising and the murky behaviour of his troops is clear. What the newsbook writer didn’t know was that even the standard-raising was something of a public relations disaster. For one thing, it was pouring. For another, the standard had to be planted in a hole scraped out of the mud with knives and bare hands. Finally, not many had as yet rallied to the king, and the standard was unfurled before a meagre assortment of three cavalry troops and one infantry battalion. Worst of all, the wind blew the standard down into the mud during the night. For a people saturated in Biblical portents, it was a sign of doom. For a man like Charles, to whom ceremony was the vessel bearing the precious liquor of authority, it was ominous. But he was committed, now, to war. Charles longed for military settlement, for a simple battle where he could beat his foes and show them to be traitors, treat them as the rebels they were. ‘I am going to fight’, he said, ‘for my crown and dignity.’
And blood had already been shed. When William Brereton tried to raise troops for Parliament in Chester, he and his men were set upon by an angry mob. The Earl of Bath got a similar reception in Exeter. When Ralph Hopton rode into the small town of Shepton Mallet, he was hoping to recruit more men for the king. It was 1 August. But a thousand or so men turned out to stop any recruitment. Both Hopton and his foes withdrew to gather their forces. Three days later, the two troops met at Marshall’s Elm. It was a Royalist victory, and twenty-seven Parliament-men lay dead. Only a skirmish, it was nevertheless the first real fighting of the war.
‘Are you for the king, or Parliament?’ schoolboys used to cry. In the war years, soldiers stopped all comers and asked them, ‘King or Parliament?’ But when conflict first began, it did not begin with the choice of sides, but with their formation from much more inchoate and various positions.
Before Charles raised his standard at Nottingham in August, it only became obvious as the months of late summer slid by that there were any sides to take, and even then it was not at once apparent that there were only two; at first there was room for many sides. Caught up in the unfolding events and in the hot tide of feelings running through the three kingdoms, the people did not know that they were about to fight an ‘English Civil War’. Some thought that they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought that they were fighting against a vast conspiracy of Catholics who were plotting to subvert Church and state, others that they were fighting to protect Church and state against a vast rebellion against just and legitimate authority. Still others thought the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour, which required that obligations to those higher in the hierarchy be observed at the price of blood. Still others thought they were witnessing a kind of rebalancing, where Parliament was about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king and his counsellors of late. Others thought that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the processes of government to make their voices heard. Some people thought it an ideal chance to make war on neighbours that they had always disliked. Others thought it a chance to get rich quickly, with plenty of plunder available. A few – not many – thought that England would do better as a republic like Rome or Venice. A very few thought the end of the world was coming.
Because men and women thought in these diverse ways, the ‘English Civil War’ was not one war, but many; within each ‘side’, there were ancillary struggles to define that ‘side’s’ purpose. Labels like ‘Royalist’ and ‘Parliamentarian’ describe coalitions of difference, coalitions that sometimes broke under pressure. These same pressures would break many men