CHAPTER NINE

Courage above her Sex

At the beginning of the wars, which lasted on English soil from August 1642 until September 1651, when Cromwell finally routed the young Charles II at Worcester, it was taken for granted that woman, the weaker vessel, lacked not only the martial spirit but also courage itself.

After the wars the theory of woman’s timidity continued to be preached: in 1653 Margaret Duchess of Newcastle’s first published work contained An Epistle to Souldiers, preface to a long poem describing the battle between Courage and Prudence before the Fortress of Hope. The Duchess was careful to explain that ‘these Armies I mention, were rais’d in my brain, fought in my fancy, and registered in my closet’. Anything else – from a woman – would be ludicrous. ‘Great Heroicks!’ she addressed the male sex, ‘you may justly laugh at me, if I went about to censure, instruct or advise in the valiant Art, and Discipline of War … according to the constitution of my Sex, I am as fearful as a Hare, for I shall start at the noise of a Potgun, and shut my eyes at the sight of a Bloody Sword, and run away at the least Alarm.’¹

Reality in the previous decade had been very different. The Civil Wars threw up a considerable number of ‘Great Heroicks’ of the theoretically weaker sex: women of the calibre of the Countess of Portland who at Carisbrooke Castle ‘behaved like a Roman matron’ and rather than surrender ‘declared she herself would fire the first cannon’. Or there was the lioness Lady Mary Winter, wife of the Royalist commander Sir John, who declined to give up Lidney House, near Gloucester, to the Parliamentary commander Colonel Massey with some well-turned words on the subject of her absent husband’s ‘unalterable allegiance to his king and sovereign’. Thus Massey’s ‘hopes were disappointed by the resolution of a female’.²

Of these the most celebrated were the valiant ladies on both sides who in the absence of their husbands found themselves withstanding the enemy’s siege. Less celebrated, but in quite as much danger, were the ordinary women also involved in the siege, maidservants and so forth; these too threw themselves into the fray. So that far from being fearful as hares, women showed themselves capable, on many different levels, of gallantry at least equal to that of their menfolk; and if they were indeed inherently timorous, then it could be argued that their courage was correspondingly even greater.

This seemingly contradictory heroism of the weaker vessel was easily explained on the surface: an individual woman such as Brilliana Lady Harley was said to have exhibited ‘a Masculine Bravery’ or displayed that ‘constancy and courage above her sex’ which her memorial tablet ascribed to the valiant Lady Bankes of Corfe Castle.³

Elizabeth Twysden, Lady Cholmley, married Sir Hugh Cholmley of Yorkshire, later Royalist Governor of Scarborough Castle. Throughout the siege of the Castle, following the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor, she stayed resolutely at her husband’s side; as he wrote later, she ‘would not forsake me for any danger’, although her daughters sailed for Holland and her sons were away in London. When the besieging commander Sir John Meldrum threatened total massacre, Lady Cholmley begged her husband not to consider her own safety; throughout the defence Lady Cholmley led the nursing of the wounded and numerous sick (scurvy soon broke out) with the aid of her maids. Sir Hugh Cholmley’s tribute to his wife’s gallantry stands for many: ‘My dear wife endured much hardship, and yet with little show of trouble; and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but showed a courage even above her sex.’⁴

Yet the conventional refusal to impute courage to the female sex as a whole (while granting it tenderly to individual members) did not survive the wars quite unaltered despite Margaret Newcastle’s ostentatiously modest words. Indeed, one can detect a certain masculine desperation in the repeated claims that the heroines of the wars acted out their martial role with the greatest reluctance. As we shall see, not a few of the ‘Great [female] Heroicks’ accepted their unusual destiny with zest; nor did this enthusiasm escape notice at the time, especially when it reflected derogatorily on the lady’s husband.

‘Three women ruined the Kingdom: Eve, the Queen and the Countess of Derby’: this comment from a Parliamentary source, by associating Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby with Grandmother Eve and the hated Catholic Henrietta Maria, paid tribute to her pre-eminence as a Royalist heroine. But there were also sneers at her husband, James Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby: it was said that of the two she had proved herself the better soldier, or more crudely, that she had stolen ‘the Earl’s breeches’.⁵

Certainly the Countess was bred to be a heroine: in an age when royal women were among the few allowed to revel in public attention, she was by birth close to being a princess. A French Huguenot, daughter of the Due de Thouars, she was a granddaughter of William the Silent (of Orange) by his Bourbon wife. Through her marriage to the Earl of Derby, himself connected to the English royal line, she had enjoyed the full richness of English court life before the war; and since the Earl of Derby was the greatest magnate of the north-west, there she found herself a queen by his side: mighty Lathom House being generally considered ‘the only Court’ in the north.⁶ The habit of command then came naturally to her. (And it may also be noted that she was seven years her husband’s senior.)

Early in 1643 the fall of the Royalist stronghold of Warrington in Lancashire brought neighbouring Lathom House to the attention of Parliament. At this point the Earl of Derby was in the Isle of Man (also part of his estates) at the request of the Queen, while the Countess, a woman in her early forties, remained at Lathom House with two of her seven children, the Ladies Mary and Katherine Stanley. The aim of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary General, was to secure the surrender of Lathom House without bloodshed; to this end on 28 February he sent an official summons to the Countess by the hand of a Captain Markland.

At this point the formal rules governing a seventeenth-century siege become relevant (and indeed remain so through all the sieges, major or minor, which will be discussed in the ensuing chapter). These rules, which could have barbarous consequences for civilians plunged involuntarily into a siege, were nevertheless framed for the preservation rather than the destruction of life.

In short: after the besieging commander had issued an official summons to the defenders of a stronghold to surrender, a choice had to be made. If the defenders promptly surrendered, then the civilians – mainly women and children – within the stronghold were generally allowed to depart peacefully, leaving the soldiers within the stronghold to negotiate the details of the surrender, including the surrender of their arms. Before he captured Bridgwater, in July 1645, Sir Thomas Fairfax was said to have shown particular ‘pity and commiseration’ for these non-combatants by sending them a free offer of quarter before his troops began to fire. ‘Upon which there came out a whole regiment of women and children.’⁷

If, on the other hand, there was no surrender, then according to the rules of war, the besieged civilians were equally at risk with the military when and if the stronghold was taken by force; there need be no quarter given. (It was under these rules, incidentally, complying with contemporary procedure, if outraging the instincts of humanity, that Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 permitted the slaughter of civilians as well as soldiers, because neither fortified town, after repeated summonses, agreed to surrender.) At Sherborne, shortly after the successful siege of Bridgwater, Fairfax ‘according to his wonted nobleness’ sent a messenger to the commander, Sir Lewis Dyve, that ‘if he pleased to send out his lady, or any other women, he would give way to it’. Sir Lewis, while expressing himself grateful for the favour, gave no very positive answer, and Lady Dyve remained within the stronghold. It was not until the ‘storm’ of Sherborne had begun that a white flag was hung out; this was too late to stop the sack, in the course of which the soldiers acquired a great deal of booty and everyone (except Lady Dyve) was ‘stripped’. Lady Dyve was lucky since by this point there was no theoretical guarantee of her safety. At Grafton House, near Stony Stratford, on Christmas Eve 1643, all the women of the house were ‘stripped to their naked skins’ by the troops of Major-General Skippon, after the fortress surrendered.⁸

It may be asked what justification there could be for this ritual; the answer lies in the nature of siege warfare at that time. Without such a proviso it was greatly to the advantage of the defenders, if they had sufficient food and water, to hold out as long as possible, or at least until these supplies had been used up; after all they were warmly sheltered, and the possibility of rescue from outside remained. Meanwhile the besiegers were leading a far less agreeable existence, enduring the rigours of exposure, which led quickly to disease; the prospect of attack from the rear, in the shape of rescuing forces, only increased as time passed. Under these circumstances, some grim inducement had to be offered to the defenders to obey the summons: hence the harsh rules of siege war. Given these conditions the ‘Welsh howlings’ of the women who wanted to urge surrender upon their husbands at the siege of Oswestry (a walled town about to be blown up) were perfectly comprehensible.⁹

Lathom House in the 1640s was a massive and ancient fortress. The walls were six feet thick; a moat, eight yards across and six feet deep, surrounded them; after that came a strong palisade. Nine towers dominated the walls, each containing six pieces of ordnance or mounted guns; mightiest of all was the Eagle Tower, over which flew the proud motto Sans Changer. There was an excellent water supply. Even the terrain favoured the defence, for the ground rose up round Lathom House like another natural fortification.

The Countess of Derby’s answer to Captain Markland’s summons was not outright defiance. Instead she played for time, while subtly reminding both the Captain and his superior of her own renowned social status. It was after all only six months since the outbreak of this ‘war without an enemy’, as the Parliamentarian Sir William Waller called it in a letter to a Royalist friend: the pre-war standards of courtesy and respect towards a great lady still prevailed. Not only did the Countess request further time to consider the summons, but she firmly declined to emerge from her fortress in order to ‘treat’ with the enemy; in the first of a series of magnificent communications she observed that ‘notwithstanding her present condition, she remembered both her Lord’s honour and her own birth, conceiving it more knightly that Sir Thomas Fairfax should wait upon her, than she upon him’.¹⁰

Various other summonses were equally rebuffed in the same high style. The Countess’s final answer was as follows: ‘That though a woman and a stranger divorced from her friends, and robbed of her state, she was ready to receive their utmost violence, trusting in God both for her protection and deliverance.’¹¹

Apart from the protection of God, the Countess also had a considerable garrison of soldiers, under a Captain Farmer, and the men from the Derby estate, the keepers, fowlers and suchlike who, being by profession skilled marksmen, manned the towers. Nevertheless the bombardment which ensued, including ‘flaming granadoes’ (grenades) as well as the pounding of a great mortar, was severe and left its impact on the besieged: several women had their hands scorched. A contemporary diary of the siege pays tribute to the courage of Mary and Katherine Stanley, ‘for piety and sweetness truly the children of so princely a mother’. Having inherited the Countess’s spirit as well, ‘the little ladies had stomack to digest canon’, although ‘the stoutest soldiers had no hearts for granadoes’.¹²

The Countess remained staunch. The pinnacles and turrets of Lathom House began to crumble to the pounding of the mortar, a culverin and a demi-culverin, but still she continued to refuse in ringing terms that safe-conduct for herself and her daughters which would have implied surrender. It was, she declared, ‘more noble to preserve her liberty by arms than to buy peace with slavery’. As for negotiations: ‘’tis dangerous treating when the sword is in the enemy’s hand’. Although the diary of the siege refers to the indignities the Countess and her daughters had to suffer, listening to the language and affronts of the besieging soldiery, the cowardice of her neighbours presented a more practical problem. One petition suggested that the Countess would do well to surrender – for the future of the surrounding countryside. The Countess of Derby made short work of it. There is no evidence that the more forceful comments of the Parliamentary preachers on her character, couched in biblical terms – the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon and so forth – made any impact on her spirit either.

The besiegers attempted to drain off the castle water supply, where the spring rose on the hill. But the real danger was presented by the great mortar loaded with stones thirteen inches across, eighty pounds in weight, daily, relentlessly pounding them to pieces. The successful sally of the defenders out of the gates to capture the mortar and drag it inside was therefore a triumph of the desperate – except that the Countess would not admit to being desperate. Instead she commanded a public thanksgiving.

It was not the least of her pleasures to discover that the commanding officer of the besiegers, Colonel Rigby, had summoned his neighbours to watch Lathom House either yield or be burnt. They were thus present to witness his humiliation. Lady Derby gave him instead ‘a very scurvy satisfying answer, so that his friends came opportunely to comfort him’ (instead of rejoicing with him). Her enemy was ‘sick of Shame and dishonour, to be routed by a lady and a handful of men’.

Three months later it was the arrival of Prince Rupert at the head of a considerable force which relieved Lathom House. The Prince conveyed twenty-two of the enemy’s colours to the great lady who had held fast. Although the actual military manoeuvres were conducted by Captain Farmer, it is evident that without a woman of the lofty courage – one might add the aristocratic arrogance – of the Countess of Derby, Lathom House would have fallen to the enemy almost immediately. As it was, when it did surrender in December 1645, the Countess was far away on the Isle of Man. After the Restoration, her daughter Katherine, who retained vivid childish memories of the siege, would take to task a historian who suggested that the Countess had been present at, and thus connected with, this final débâcle. Thomas Dugdale, in his widely read 1660 Continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s 1637 Chronicle, perpetuated this error, based on two false Parliamentary reports. Katherine, now Marchioness of Dorchester, joined with Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her son (anxious to refute the rather more substantiated charge that Lady Eleanor Davies had foretold the death of Buckingham). As a result, Dugdale, while retaining the error, inserted a slightly equivocal compliment to the Countess in the 1665 edition: ‘in her defending of that place’ (Lathom House) the Countess ‘had manifested a more than Feminine Magnanimity’ – that is, greatness of spirit. It was not until 1674 that the error concerning the 1645 surrender was eliminated and the Countess’s role in the original victory enlarged.¹³

The ‘Heroick Countess’ herself lived until 1664, surviving not only the wars but the tragedy of her husband’s execution at the orders of Parliament for his part in the Worcester campaign (she tried, despite the objections of the inhabitants, to surrender the Isle of Man in return for his life). As an old lady she would tell stories of the wars to her Lancashire neighbour William Blundell, which he found difficult to understand on account of her French accent: ‘a defect’ in ‘my lady’s English’. To the end she was something of a tartar: where the Quakers were concerned, for example, ‘she shut out all pity and tenderness’ when they were imprisoned for non-payment of tithes.¹⁴

The Countess, so confident in her birth, and the utter rightness of all her opinions, would have appreciated Dugdale’s equivocal compliment to her ‘more than Feminine Magnanimity’. From the point of view of the enemy, a high-born heroine in charge of a siege represented a double hazard. Most obviously, her combination of gallantry and authority would fuel the chivalrous defenders to greater efforts; secondly, the hoped-for effect of an official summons upon the defenders’ nerves might be largely nullified by the presence of such a feminine figurehead, No one had any particular desire to kill, maim or wound her or her family: hence the constant pleading requests to the Countess of Derby to accept a safe-conduct. When the husband himself conducted the defence, his wife’s presence at the siege was still embarrassing to the attackers, as in the case of the Marchioness of Winchester, another brave woman whose refusal to quit inhibited her opponents.

The siege of Basing House, magnificent dwelling of the great Catholic magnate John, fifth Marquess of Winchester, which lasted from August 1643 until October 1645, was one of the most famous and protracted of the war.¹⁵ When finally captured, Basing House was found to number amongst its contents not only riches and pictures and art works and furnishing – but also the engraver Wenceslaus Hollar and Inigo Jones himself (who was carried out naked, wrapped in a blanket). A passionate supporter of the King’s cause, Lord Winchester was said to have ‘Aimez Loyauté’ engraved on every window of Basing House.

Honora Marchioness of Winchester was, as Clarendon wrote later, ‘a lady of great honour and alliance’, being the daughter of the Earl of St Albans and Clanricarde, and the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Machiavellian statesman, Sir Francis Walsingham.¹⁶ From the point of view of Parliament, however, it was more important that she was half-sister to their own general, the Earl of Essex (to whom one of the besiegers, Colonel Hammond, was also related). Here was the problem of a civil war in a nutshell. The Parliamentary besiegers were understandably anxious to have such a lady safely removed from Basing House.

So Sir William Waller duly invited the Marchioness to lead out her own children (she was the mother of seven), and all the other women and children in the house, during a parley. He used exceptionally courteous terms, ‘excusing the rudeness of his disorderly guns’. The Marchioness’s answer was, like that of the Countess of Derby to Sir Thomas Fairfax, superbly scornful: ‘she thanked God that she was not in that condition to accept of fair quarter at Sir William Waller’s hands, being resolved to run the same fortune as her Lord, knowing that there was a just and all-seeing Judge above, who she hoped would have an especial hand in this business’. From this august judge, she added, Sir William Waller could ‘pretend no commission’.

Then the Marchioness and her ladies set to with a will, casting bullets from lead hastily stripped from the roofs and turrets of the house. During a lull in the siege she also visited Oxford (where the King was) and solicited diligently for help for her husband.

By the autumn of 1645 time had run out for Basing House, and its courageous defenders of both sexes. It was now the one remaining Royalist garrison guarding the south-west, and as such received the attentions of Oliver Cromwell himself, since the victory of Naseby that summer the hero of the Parliamentary forces. During the final bombardment, one of Cromwell’s shells ‘brake in’ to the Marchioness’s lodgings, killing a waiting-woman and a chambermaid (demonstrating how perilous might be the fate of such innocent anonymous females caught up in these great events).

What happened to the Marchioness? Accounts vary. Either she escaped from Basing House before the final stage of the siege on 8 October, or she was captured and subsequently exchanged for another prominent (male) prisoner. Either way her name was specifically mentioned in the Articles of Surrender, as were those of other chatelaines. (At the surrender of Bletchingdon House to Cromwell in April 1645, the eighth Article read; ‘That the lady of the House [Mrs Windebank] shall enjoy her goods as before …’)¹⁷ Thus was war in its own strange way bringing the names of women to the fore. While the Marchioness of Winchester survived to bring comforts to her sick husband imprisoned in the Tower of London, Basing House was ‘slighted’, or razed to the ground, at the orders of Parliament and its gorgeous contents looted.

Where the Countess of Derby and the Marchioness of Winchester were already illustrious figures before the war, through the panoply of their high lineage, ‘prudent and valiant’ Lady Bankes, defender of Corfe Castle, made her own name by the sheer courageous obstinacy of her resistance; and like Lady Derby, she gave every impression of enjoying her role, for all its perils. Mary Bankes came of a good if not a brilliant family, being the daughter of Ralph Hawtrey of Ruislip; her husband Sir John Bankes, described as ‘a grave and learned man in the profession of law’,¹⁸ had prosecuted John Hampden as Attorney-General, and later became Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas.

The law had proved lucrative. It will be recalled that in 1617, at the time of the disastrous marriage of Frances Coke to Buckingham’s brother, Corfe Castle was part of the rich settlement Frances was expected to receive from her mother Lady Hatton; the failure of Lady Hatton to part with it resulted in the King creating the bridegroom Viscount Purbeck as a consolation (see p. 19). So Corfe Castle remained in the possession of Lady Hatton. About 1634, Sir John Bankes bought it from her.

Mercurius Rusticus, the Royalist newspaper, would call Corfe Castle ‘one of the impregnable forts of the kingdom’. Its peculiar site close by the Dorset coast, on top of a steep hill which lay in ‘the fracture’ of another hill, guarding the only route inland, had ensured ‘Corph’ a place in history since Saxon times; it possessed its own kind of grim female tradition, for hereabouts had been the domus of Queen Elfrida and here her step-son King Edward the Martyr had been murdered, according to later allegations, at her instigation, that her own son Ethelred might succeed. The present massive structure, with its walls ten feet thick, was complete by the reign of Henry II. Later Henry VII had repaired Corfe Castle for his own mother, the Countess of Richmond.¹⁹

Lady Bankes retired to Corfe Castle on the eve of the Civil War, leaving her husband to follow the political fortunes of the King, first in London, later at Oxford. We have some picture of how she lived there.²⁰ There were suites of gilded green leather, and blue damask hangings, a silk quilted carpet for the withdrawing-room, a rich ebony cabinet with gilded fixtures, fine tapestries in the gallery and another tapestry in ‘my lady’s bedroom’ with a white dimity bed and hangings. In the large windows were embroidered satin cushions, and other cushions of crimson velvet. Everywhere there was crimson velvet – chairs and stools as well as cushions were covered in it – together with rich carpets from Turkey and Persia.

For all the splendour of Lady Bankes’s circumstances, supported by her husband’s earnings as a lawyer, it was perhaps a pity that the previous owner, Lady Hatton, being, as a contemporary account put it, ‘one (you may imagine) rather of Venus than Mars his company’, had sold the ‘chiefest guns’ out of the castle. When it became obvious that a Parliamentary siege was imminent, Lady Bankes found herself armed with maidservants a-plenty, but as a garrison had a mere five soldiers. She was however not only ‘a virtuous’ but ‘a prudent lady’; in her portrait she shows an extremely determined face to the world, with her strong long chin, her well-chiselled nose, firm lips and fine brave eyes – and she clutches the keys of Corfe Castle in her hand. Lady Bankes had no intention of having these keys snatched from her, not by stealth and not by surprise.²¹

Lady Bankes’s prudence was displayed in a number of ways: for example in acquiring a great store of provisions. Aware of the Parliamentary sympathies of the town, she also kept the castle gates securely locked: for example on May Day when the Mayor and ‘barons’ of Corfe had the right to course a stag on her domains. When some troops of horse from Dorchester thought of surprising her, Lady Bankes ‘very wisely and like herself’ called in a guard, although the commanders of the troops denied that any harm was intended. She bore the foul language used by the common soldiers outside the castle with stoicism – as the Countess of Derby endured the indignities and affronts of her own besiegers.

When the local Parliamentary Committee at Poole demanded the four small pieces of ordnance left inside the castle, Lady Bankes’s prudence led her, like Lady Derby, to play for time, instead of indulging in the outright defiance for which she was not yet prepared. There was a great deal of questioning of the seamen’s warrants, and finally when the guns were placed on their carriages, Lady Bankes had them taken off; the seamen were beaten off by the five men of the garrison assisted by the ‘maidservants at their Lady’s command’ to ‘the small thunder’ of guns. Lady Bankes secured an additional and far more substantial garrison of over fifty men from the Royalist commander Prince Maurice, brother of Prince Rupert. This was headed by a Captain Lawrence.

Despite the installation of these soldiers, her neighbours (like those of Lady Derby) did not match Lady Bankes in their stomach for a fight: ‘presently their wives came to the castle, there they weep and wring their hands and with clamorous oratory persuade their husbands to come home and not by saving others to expose their own houses to spoil and ruin’. In the end Lady Bankes did let the great guns go – and that was prudent too, because it gave her a respite in which she could revictual the castle; it also gave Parliament the false impression that the prizing of Corfe would present no problem.

In fact Lady Bankes absolutely refused to surrender the castle at her enemies’ summons; and when she was informed that no quarter could now be expected for the women and children inside the castle, according to the rules of war, took that threat with equanimity too.

The first siege of Corfe began on 23 June 1643. The castle had to stand an assault of 500 or 600 men, armed with a demicannon, a culverin and two sakers (small forms of cannon). In order to approach the walls in safety, the besiegers constructed two engines, known as the Sow and the Boar: however the marksmen found their legs entangled in these structures and abandoned them. The besiegers, headed by Sir Walter Erle, were also able to fire at Corfe with great impunity from the neighbouring church. According to the Royalists, Sir Walter conducted the entire siege wearing a bearskin coat for fear of musket-shot, and since it was summer and since he additionally crept about on all fours to avoid stray bullets he must have presented a bizarre spectacle.

As with the siege of Lathom House, there were sallies; food, not a mortar, was the object here – in the course of one of them, the defenders captured eight cows and a bull. The final assault came on a misty morning and the besiegers divided themselves into two parts to attack the upper and lower wards of the castle. By this time their numbers had been swelled by a rabble of sailors, dispatched by the Parliamentary Admiral the Earl of Warwick (Mary Rich’s father-in-law) who brought with them the dreaded fiery granadoes and also scaling ladders. These bellicose fellows were fortified with alcohol to make them ‘pot-valiant’ (£1 12s od features in the accounts for ‘a firkin of hot waters’ )²² and assured that Corfe Castle would provide rich booty. Among their number were former felons, released from the prisons (the brands on their limbs were visible), but the courage of these ‘silly wretches’ gradually diminished in view of the fierce nature of the defence. The watchword for the attack was to be ‘Old Wat’, an allusion to their commander Sir Walter Erle; but ‘Old Wat’ was also the hunter’s traditional nickname for a timorous hare which would not leave the cover of the bushes, a coincidence which the defenders at least thought highly appropriate.

Lady Bankes herself – ‘to her eternal honour be it spoken’²³ – defended the upper ward of the castle, with her daughters, her women and five soldiers. This motley but determined force heaved stones and hot embers over the battlements so successfully that the soldiers were prevented from scaling their ladders.

Finally the strength of the assault wavered and gave way: hearing a report that the King’s forces were coming, the besiegers ‘ran away crying’. Corfe had been saved, as Mercurius Rusticus reported, by a combination of ‘the fears of Old Sir Wat’ and ‘the loyalty and resolution of this honourable Lady’.

For some time after that Lady Bankes lived unmolested. Sir John Bankes (still absent from her side) died in December 1644. It was not until 1645, in the collapse of the Royalist side following Naseby, when other isolated centres of resistance such as Basing House and Lathom House were also captured, that Lady Bankes found herself once again besieged. In December Sir Thomas Fairfax sent a regiment of horse and two of foot to take Corfe. Even so, Lady Bankes was still stoutly holding out in February of the following year. It also seems that the final surrender of the castle was in fact due to treachery, although the long blockade must have contributed to it.²⁴

One of her officers, a Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman who had served in Ireland under the Earl of Inchiquin, was by now ‘weary of the king’s service’. Proposing to fetch reinforcements from Somerset, he left the castle and contacted the enemy’s commander on the pretext of arranging an exchange for his brother, then a Parliamentary prisoner. ‘Under this colour’ between 50 and 100 men were introduced into the castle disguised as supporters, many of whom knew its lay-out extremely well. So Corfe Castle fell at last, the prey to Colonel Pitman’s Trojan horse.

Lady Bankes and her children were allowed to depart in safety. The gallant lady lived on until 1661; her son Sir Ralph Bankes enjoyed a long political career as well as enriching Dorset by building the noble house of Kingston Lacey. It was typical of Lady Bankes’s resolve that her son actually got married on the day of her death – because she had concealed her pangs so successfully. She was buried at her native Ruislip where a tablet in the church still records that she ‘had the honour to have borne with a constancy and courage above her sex, a noble proportion of the late Calamities’.

Corfe Castle, and its luxurious contents, fared less well than Lady Bankes and her reputation. Like Basing House, it was ‘slighted’.¹ As for the trunkfuls of Bankes belongings carted away so joyfully by the besiegers during the sack of the castle, those would take Lady Bankes’s descendants many years to recover after the Restoration. A broker named Stone in the Barbican in the City of London seems to have bought £1,000 worth of goods, including some tapestry hangings which he sold ‘to a fine lord’. As for Sir Walter Erle – ‘Old Wat’, that timorous hare – in 1661 he was to be found writing to Ralph Bankes in the following terms concerning the missing building materials of Corfe, in which injured innocence and innocent surprise were oddly mixed: ‘And when the spoil was made, and the materials were carried away, I never gave any direction by letter or otherwise for bringing any part of it to my house, nor knew any such thing done more than the child unborn, until a good while after, coming down into the country, I found some part thereof among other things remaining of the ruine of my own house, laid by for future use.’²⁶

Compared to such an iron character as Lady Bankes, Brilliana Lady Harley, who conducted the defence of Brampton Bryan Castle near Hereford, presents an altogether gentler image. Indeed, with her touching modesty of character combined with her strong sense of duty towards her absent husband’s interests and property (which inspired her to a defiant course she would not otherwise have contemplated), Brilliana Lady Harley is really the seventeenth-century masculine ideal of a wartime heroine. She played her martial role with genuine reluctance but play it she did, most honourably, and to the death. And then there was that other aspect of her militarism, which might be termed the chivalry factor. Brilliana Lady Harley, whose husband Sir Robert supported Parliament, had Royalist relations herself, and as we shall see, her very sex made King Charles I notably reluctant to press against her, where he would have moved mercilessly against a male commander. At the same time, Parliamentarian propaganda waxed indignant against the Royalist besiegers: ‘those capon-faced cowards who have unmanned themselves in offering violence to so noble a lady’.²⁷

Brilliana Conway was born in 1600; her unusual Christian name reflected the fact that her father was Lieutenant-Governor of the Netherlands town of Brill at the time of her birth. In 1623 she married, as his third wife, Sir Robert Harley; a marriage, as has been mentioned (see p. 6 5), which was characterized by tenderness from its inception. Thereafter her life appeared to be punctuated by childbirth, for she bore her husband seven children between 1624 and 1634 (her predecessor, Sir Robert’s second wife, had borne nine). However, Brilliana’s letters which have survived show her to have been a woman of education as well as piety: she knew not only French but also Latin.²⁸

Brilliana’s maternal affections were concentrated on her son Ned, to whom, when at Oxford University, she directed a stream of rather touching advice. She sent Ned liquorice for his cold, ‘eye water’ for sore eyes, recommended beer ‘boiled with liquorice’ first thing in the morning for the kidneys. She would also have sent him a cold pie, except for two things: first, his father had assured her that Ned did not want it and second, and more cogently, Mrs Pierson (wife of the rector at Brampton) told Brilliana that when her son was at Oxford, she too sent him such things, until ‘he prayed her that she would not’. A little purse of money – ‘if only so he will think of her’– was presumably a more welcome present.²⁹

An occasional flash of spirit does however remind one that Brilliana, for all her douce maternal femininity, had another side to her nature. Ned’s letters have not survived, but we can imagine the one which provoked this retort, in a postscript: ‘Dear Ned, My age is no secret; tho my brother Bray is something mistaken in it.’³⁰

All this while Sir Robert Harley, who was one of the MPS for Herefordshire, was busy with parliamentary affairs in London. In his absence his business became somewhat neglected; it is noteworthy that Brilliana made no attempt to gather the reins into her own hands at this juncture. She contented herself with sending him veal pies and pairs of shoes from the country. Sharing her husband’s Puritan sympathies, in many respects Brilliana found the year 1642 highly exciting: ‘It is the Lords great work that is now a-framing,’ she wrote to Ned in May. Yet she agonized over her growing responsibilities: ‘what is done in your father’s estate pleased him not, so that I wish myself with all my heart, at London, and then your father might be a witness of what is spent’. The plumbers who were mending the house, for example, were charging 5s a day! (although Brilliana thought the cost worth it). In July Brilliana the good housewife sent off the Harley silver plate to London for safe keeping in a trunk marked as containing cake. On 19 July, barely a month before the outbreak of the war, Brilliana also wrote off desperately for instructions as to how to guard Brampton Bryan; she was particularly concerned about treachery within and without since so many of her neighbours in Royalist Herefordshire favoured the King’s cause. One ‘roguish boy’ working at the castle was sent up to London with a letter to get rid of him, lest he join the other side and betray them.³¹

Still Brilliana did not want Ned to come down and protect her; that would endanger him. And still she refused to budge from the castle. ‘If I go away,’ she told her son, ‘I shall leave all that your father has, to the prey of our enemies; which they would be glad of.’ As for the danger of her present position, defending Brampton Bryan: ‘I cannot make a better use of my life.’³²

In December 1642 came the expected stern demand from the Royalist Governor of Hereford that Lady Harley should hand over Brampton Bryan to the King’s cause. As the Royalist gentry all about her assembled their levies, confident that with Sir Robert Harley at Westminster the stronghold would soon be theirs, Lady Harley told Ned: ‘They [her neighbours] are in a mighty violence against me.’³³

Yet Lady Harley’s public defiance, as her letters to Ned reveal, covered an inner turmoil. Was she really right to hold out? What was Sir Robert’s desire? ‘I will be willing to do what he would have me do,’ confided poor Brilliana to Ned. ‘I never was in such sorrows.’ Her tenants now found an excellent excuse for not paying their rents; money and food were short. By January 1643 the fowlers were forbidden to bring her game, her young horses had been commandeered and her servants dared not go into the town. ‘Now they say they will starve me out of my house,’ she wrote in February, when her cattle were driven away. The alternative was to dismiss her garrison, but that would be to invite plunder by all the local rogues: ‘If I leave Brampton, all will be ruined.’³⁴

In March Lady Harley received a summons but declined to hand over the castle. In June, still not yet officially beset, she burst out in a letter: ‘O! my dear Ned – that I could but see you … you are both a Joseph and a Benjamin to me.’ On 26 July 1643 the siege began in earnest, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, with the arrival of two or three troops of horse, who proceeded to stop all passage between the castle and the outside world. Then 200 or 300 foot arrived; a total of 700 faced the beleaguered garrison. In the evening a trumpeter, according to custom, officially summoned the ‘honourable and valiant Lady Harley’ to surrender the castle, in the name of the High Sheriff of the City of Hereford, and others. The summons was politely worded: the Royalist troops and their commander Sir William Vavasour wished to prevent ‘further inconvenience’ to her.³⁵

Lady Harley’s reply was more dramatic. ‘I dare not, I cannot, I must not believe’, she exclaimed at the sight of Sir William drawing up his forces before the house. What of the King’s many solemn promises on the subject of liberty? ‘I have the law of nature, of reason, and of the land on my side.’ At this, Sir William, although still polite, showed himself more menacing. He referred to his wish to keep from Lady Harley ‘all insolencies that the liberty of soldiers, provoked to it by your obstinacies, may throw you upon’. However, he went on: ‘if you remain still wilful, what you may suffer is brought upon you by yourself, I having by this timely notice discharged those respects due to your sex and honour’. It was left to Brilliana to conclude this fruitless exchange with the protest that there was no ‘drop of disloyal blood’ in her body.³⁶

The next day, 27 July, some small shot was exchanged; the Royalists plundered Lady Harley’s sheep and cattle, and more dangerously invested the town and church – from the latter they were well placed to bombard Brampton Bryan. How much Lady Harley’s bold words to Sir William belied her own fears is demonstrated by her letter of 30 July: she believed her state of misery was without parallel. That ‘One of my condition, who have my husband from me and so wanting comfort should be besieged, and so my life, and the lives of my little children, sought after!’ Yet, the next day, when Sir William offered her a protective guard for the house, and the guarantee of safety for herself and her family if they would lay down their arms, Brilliana firmly declined on the grounds that this would be betraying her trust to her dear husband who had confided his home and children to her care. Lady Harley ended pointedly: ‘I do not know that it is his pleasure that I should entertain soldiers in his house.’³⁷

So the ordnance began to play upon the walls of the house; ‘their loud music’ was heard daily, including on the Sabbath, which further shocked Lady Harley. The fact that no one within this ‘close house’ became sick during these ‘dog-days’ of August was regarded by her as the workings of providence. However, a few days later Lady Coleburn lost an eye as a result of the bombardment and another woman, Mrs Wright, wife of the doctor, was injured. Fortunately news of a Parliamentary victory by Sir William Brereton was smuggled into the castle; this made up for the fact that shots fired from the church steeple had broken some precious Venetian glasses. It is interesting to note that the language of the soldiery – abuse shouted up at the castle inhabitants for being ‘Essex bastards, Waller’s bastards, Harleys bastards, besides rogues and thieves’ – was, as at the Royalist strongholds Lathom House and Corfe Castle, regarded as being a major part of the ordeal. Great earthworks had been thrown up by the besiegers in the gardens and walks of the castle, which ‘lay so near us that their [the Royalist troops’] rotten language infected the air; they were so completely inhuman, that out of their own mouths, and the mouths of their guns, came nothing else but poisoned words and poisoned bullets’.³⁸

For all this, for all Sir William Vavasour’s original announcement that nothing more was due to Lady Harley’s ‘sex and honour’, the siege of Brampton Bryan had by the third week of August reached a stalemate; just because its defence was being conducted by one of the weaker vessels – and a respected one at that. The Royalists hesitated to press. The lady refused to surrender. On 24 August Sir John Scudamore was allowed into the castle by means of a rope ladder, a drum having announced a parley; he presented a letter from King Charles I to Brilliana Lady Harley.

The King declared himself ‘very desirous’ to believe that what had happened at Brampton had been due rather to Lady Harley’s being seduced by evil counsel, than ‘out of your ill-affection to us’. He was still willing to avoid ‘effusion of blood’ and he was ‘unwilling that our forces – in respect of your sex and condition – should take such course for forcing or firing of the same as they must otherwise take’. Lady Harley read the letter, but refused to receive Sir John personally. Perhaps it was just as well, for Sir John observed later that he would have told her squarely not only of the King’s victories (which made her defiance absurd) but also of other members of her sex in London, crying out in multitudes against the House of Commons: women ‘who cry out for their slain and imprisoned husbands; divers women killed by the soldiers in this tumult, yet unappeased’.³⁹ The implication concerning Lady Harley’s own unfeminine conduct was clear.

Brilliana replied to the King in comparatively humble terms: she reminded him that the castle was hers ‘by the law of the land’, but if he did require it of her, at least let him permit her, with her family, to pass somewhere where they would not perish. According to Lord Falkland (husband of Lettice) the King was much moved by this, ‘so far [as] to reflect with pity upon the sex and condition of the petitioner’; he suggested that Brilliana should stay at Brampton Bryan, under the protection of a Royalist garrison, until she found new accommodation. However, the only answer Brilliana actually received was a letter from Sir William Vavasour, offering once again a free pass, and a convoy for the lady and her servants to march safely away. At this stage of a siege this offer was in theory a concession. Brilliana was not appeased; especially as Sir William’s letter was followed in the evening by a sharp letter from Sir John Scudamore demanding the instant surrender of castle and arms.⁴⁰

Buoyed up by secret intelligence that the Parliamentary forces were approaching, Brilliana prevaricated. She also protested when the Royalists moved their gun carriages during this period of cessation of arms, and shot at them to teach them a lesson; when the Cavaliers stole her bells; ‘we sent some of his Majesty’s good subjects to old Nick for their sacrilege’.

And relief was in sight. When Fairfax reached Gloucester, ‘these bloody villains’ were obliged to depart, leaving Brilliana to instigate a service of public thanksgiving for the deliverance of ‘our poor family’ from the ‘malignants of seven counties’. There were public tributes also to the courage of her who ‘commanded in chief, I may truly say, with such a masculine bravery, both for religion, resolution, wisdom and warlike policy, that her equal I never saw’.

So the fame of Brilliana Lady Harley spread throughout the kingdom; even her enemies greeted her story ‘with admiration and applause’. And it was said that those who had proceeded against her – a mere woman, albeit a brave one – were jeered at in the opposing King’s Army.⁴¹

What should she do now? Should she leave Brampton Bryan or remain? Brilliana confided her worries to Ned on 24 September, being already confident that Ned – by now in the Army himself – would thoroughly disapprove of ‘all plundering unmercifulness’. By October the forces of the King were once again menacing the safety of Brampton Bryan. And there was another ominous development. Brilliana had never been strong; throughout the previous siege her health had been progressively weakening. In a letter of 9 October, Brilliana revealed that she had taken ‘a great cold’. It was ‘an ill time to be sick in’ she told Ned ruefully, adding that her last wish was to see him: ‘for you are the comfort of your B.H., yr. most affect. mother’.⁴²

Her wish was not granted. Later the same month Brilliana had ‘an apoplexy and defluxion of the lungs’ and lay for three days in extremity. Still her temper remained resolute: she ‘looked death in the face without dread’. On the fourth day she died, leaving behind ‘the saddest garrison in the three kingdoms, having lost their head and governess’. Once her commands had ‘carried us into the cannon’s mouth’, as a grief-stricken eye-witness, Captain Priamus Davies, wrote; now her death was saluted not with the thunder of guns but with ‘volleys of sighs and tears’.⁴³

Brampton Bryan did not long survive the loss of its ‘head and governess’: hideous tales of the fate of the defenders of Hopton Castle nearby scarcely encouraged the civilians left within Brampton Bryan, under Dr Wright, to proceed with their defiance now that the chivalrous protection due to Brilliana’s ‘sex and honour’ could no longer be expected from the King’s Army. So Brampton Bryan, early in 1644, surrendered.

Prince Rupert – a legend to his opponents for his savagery – was said to have ordered its inhabitants to be put to the sword, but Sir William Vavasour, more of a gentleman, refused. In the event, as the Puritan defenders of Brampton Bryan were carried away to captivity at Ludlow they ‘baited us like bears’, wrote Captain Davies, ‘and demanded where our God was’.⁴⁴ But worse did not befall. And Brilliana’s bereft children, baby Tom, and Ned’s ‘sweet little sisters’ Dorothy and Margaret, aged eleven and thirteen respectively, were well treated by the Governor of Ludlow Castle and also by the Royalist Sir John Scudamore – who was, incidentally, their kinsman.²

The castle itself was of course ‘utterly ruined’. Sir Robert Harley estimated that he had lost nearly £13,000 worth of goods, for all his wife’s frenzied wish to protect his property. At least the legend of Brilliana’s heroism survived: ‘That noble Lady and Phoenix of Women died in peace,’ declared the minister at her husband’s funeral, ‘though surrounded with drums and noise of war, yet she took her leave in peace. The sword had no force against her.’⁴⁵

From time to time, relating the exploits of the ‘Great Heroick’ ladies, contemporaries commended in passing the activities of their female acolytes: Lady Cholmley’s maids who nursed the sick at Scarborough, Lady Bankes’s chambermaids defending the upper ward of Corfe Castle, the Marchioness of Winchester’s maidservants who turned lead into bullets at Basing House … Where the women of the people were concerned, their Amazonian deeds in their own defence, if they attracted public notice, were certainly officially applauded.

After the siege of Gloucester in 1644, the town clerk John Dorney collected various pamphlet accounts of its defence. One referred to the ‘cheerful readiness of young and old of both sexes … to labour in the further fortification of our city’ as being admirable to observe. The young women who ventured forth to gather fuel were specifically commended: ‘Nay, our maids and others wrought daily without the [earth] works in the little mead, in fetching in turf, in the very face of our enemy.’ The fortifications of the City of London were thrown up with the assistance of a number of women, not all as socially prominent as the Lady Mayoress armed with her own entrenching tool. This democratic spirit was celebrated by Samuel Butler in Hudibras, describing how women

During the siege of Bristol by Prince Rupert, one Mary Smith valiantly took out provisions to the men on the out-works, and helped construct the fortifications. Joan Batten and Dorothy Hazzard helped to stop up the Frome Gate; and about 200 women were said to have gone to the Parliamentary commander Colonel Fiennes and offered to place themselves in the mouth of the cannon to ward off the shot. Women in Nottingham patrolled the streets, keeping a look-out for fires. During the siege of Nantwich in Cheshire, women were employed to put out the ‘terrible fire’ in the brush-wood ricks in a back-yard and saved Dorfold House.⁴⁷

The most renowned of these group-heroines were the women of Lyme, on the Dorset coast, who in 1643 successfully helped to repel the attacks of the Royalists under Prince Maurice. Their fame was spread in a long poem by a local man named James Strong, the son of a tailor at Chardstock, who after being educated at Wadham College, Oxford, held livings at Bettiscombe and then Ilminster. Joanereidos, printed in 1645, declared its subject to be: ‘Feminine Valour Eminently discovered in Westerne Women’;

Joanereidos was to be much satirized in later years:

Even at the time it was not altogether clear that the masculine pole relished the principle of the female vine’s assistance – even if he enjoyed it in practice. (Never mind the fact that these intrepid women were already well equipped to defend themselves by the lives of physical endeavour they led at home or in the fields – war was different.) An uneasy impression that women were ‘stronger grown’ was one of the many disquieting feelings produced in the masculine breast by the course of the Civil Wars in England.

Camden in Britannia described Lyme as ‘a little town situate upon a steep hill … which scarcely may challenge the name of a Port or Haven town, though it be frequented by fishermen’ being ‘sufficiently defended from the force of winds with rocks and high trees’. And then there was its Cobb, a long spit of stone cutting off the harbour from the open seas. In 1643 Prince Maurice paid his own kind of tribute to the town which managed to frustrate his advance by referring to it as ‘the little vile fishing village of Lyme’.⁴⁹ The fact was that Lyme (the Regis came later, ironically enough for the town’s loyalty in aiding the escape of Charles II after Worcester) held off Prince Maurice against all expectations; and contemporaries were agreed that this was owing to the exceptional enthusiasm of the defence.

On their arrival in the area in April, the Royalists had described the capture of Lyme as ‘breakfast work … they would not dine till they had taken it’.⁵⁰ Thomas Bullen captured Stidecombe House, three miles from Lyme, and on 20 April Prince Maurice took some nearby dwellings. Weeks later ‘little vile … Lyme’ still held off the invader, although cut off from the interior by the Prince’s forces.

The defenders consisted of some 1,100 men on day and night duty; but they were far from being well-equipped – they had not, for example, sufficient shoes and stockings to go round. Nevertheless their ferocity in their own defence was so great, and so many of the besiegers were slaughtered, that at one point their water supply was coloured rusty brown with blood. Some of the more affluent ladies inside Lyme when the blockade began were taken off – ‘to the ease of the town’ – in the Parliamentary ships of Lord Warwick, lying off the coast. It was left to the rest to suffer their casualties with the men. Following the bombardment, fire arrows were shot into the town, setting alight twenty houses. One maid lost her hand while carrying a pail to put out the conflagration, and another lost both her arms. A woman was killed while drying clothes on the strand near the Cobb-gate.⁵¹

This was suffering in the pursuit of ordinary domestic duty. The women of the town also filled the soldiers’ bandoliers as they fought, which meant they shared the dangers equally with the men. They acted as look-outs, especially at night, work commemorated by Strong as follows:

(The satirists later compared these faithful women to the geese who saved the Capitol:

In fact the women of Lyme threw stones with the best of the defenders; and with the best of the defenders it seems they too cursed the besiegers.

Finally, on 14 June the siege was raised and the Royalists departed. Then it was the women of the town, 400 of them, who fell upon Prince Maurice’s earthworks and fortifications, and with spades, shovels and mattocks, levelled them. As a result of their efforts in ‘throwing down ditches’, the fortifications which had threatened them were removed in a week.⁵³

Three years later, Parliament, by now in control, ordered £200 a week to be set aside for the relief of the wounded of Lyme, and of the widows and children. This the Puritan John Vicars, in his history Gods Arke, described as ‘a good piece of State-Charity’. And Vicars gives us too the reaction of that unfortunate maid who lost her hand in the fire. When asked how she would now earn her livelihood, she is said to have replied: ‘Truly, I am glad with all my heart that I had a hand to lose for Jesu Christ, for whose Cause I am as willing and ready to lose not only my other hand but my life also.’⁵⁴

Vicars described this as ‘A sweet and most Saint-like speech indeed’, and perhaps it was. Or perhaps the tone, far from being one of sweet submission, was one of belligerence, new belligerence.

1In 1774 John Hutchins wrote of Corfe Castle in his History of Dorset, ‘The vast fragments of the King’s Tower, the round towers, leaning as if ready to fall, the broken walls and vast pieces of them tumbled down into the vale below, form such a scene of havock and desolation as strike every curious spectator with horror and concern.’²⁵ The curious spectator today will find the scene scarcely changed.

2Ned’s subsequent distinguished career – as Sir Edward Harley – eschewing the extremism of both Roundheads and Royalists, and sitting for Parliament throughout the reign of Charles II. would have heartened his adoring mother. It was his son and Brilliana’s grandson, another Robert Harley, who was that celebrated Tory politician of the reign of Queen Anne.