Investigations of a Dog

Previously I wrote about how Henry Marten criticized the Earl of Essex for keeping his army in winter quarters at Windsor in December 1642. It took a whole post just to establish what Marten (probably) said. But did he know what he was talking about, and was the criticism fair?

Henry Marten had no military experience before the outbreak of the First Civil War. That didn’t automatically mean that he was going to be inept. Oliver Cromwell had no previous experience of war either, and he turned out to be very good at it (as I pointed out here, not a super-special genius, but he could hold his own against professional soldiers of similar rank). Marten seems to have been strongly opposed to the monarchy and the House of Lords from very early in his political career, and in 1642 he was a very active supporter of the parliamentary war effort. He used his inherited wealth to pay spies, which along with his extravagant personal spending eventually bankrupted him (Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 4-5, 36, 39-40). His first military command was as governor of Reading but he abandoned the town without fighting when the King’s army approached in November 1642 (Waters, Henry Marten, 17). This fact alone makes it look a bit hypocritical of him to complain about Essex not fighting, but that wouldn’t undermine the point if it was a good argument.

Marten’s basic facts were correct: there was action in Yorkshire and Devon while Essex’s army was inactive at Windsor. But he wasn’t comparing like with like. Most of the forces which were fighting in the north and west were very new. Cornwall wasn’t secured for the King until the Cornish rising in early October, and Hopton’s first (failed) attempt to invade Devon was only made in November (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 40, 43). Lord Fairfax, Parliament’s commander in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had agreed to a neutrality pact in September and didn’t start raising his army until October. Newcastle’s ‘popish’ army didn’t invade Yorkshire until 1 December (Hopper, Black Tom, 26-8, 36). These forces were only just starting their first campaigns when Essex had finished his. Parliament had started raising its main army in June 1642 and appointed Essex as general in July. He set out with the army in September, advancing to Worcester and fighting a cavalry skirmish at Powicke Bridge. On 23 October Essex’s army fought the King’s main army at Edgehill in the first major battle of the First Civil War. After a few days of rest at Northampton, Essex rushed his army south to block the King’s approach to London. He arrived just in time, and although some of his infantry were wiped out by Prince Rupert at Brentford, the main body of the army linked up with the London Trained Bands at Turnham Green. The King decided not to fight when the weight of numbers was against him and retreated to Oxford. It was only after this that Essex settled at Windsor. His army had been on campaign for three months, fighting battles before the northern and western forces had done anything, or even before they existed. A period of rest and recovery in a safe place was probably necessary.

Even when they were completed, the armies fighting in Yorkshire and Devon were significantly smaller than the main armies in the Thames Valley. The best recent calculations put both armies at Edgehill at similar strengths with about 10,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry each (Graham, ‘Earl of Essex‘, 282, 288-9). They also had large artillery trains. Newcastle’s army was the most comparable, but at 8,000 men in total was still only 2/3 the size. The remaining forces were even weaker. Hopton’s Cornish army was only 3,000 strong, and Lord Fairfax had only 2,000 men (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 43; Hopper, Black Tom, 36). Moving and quartering were much easier with a small army than with a big one, especially when rain made the roads muddy and cold made it more necessary for soldiers to sleep indoors. Transporting heavy artillery was a particular problem if there was too much mud. So why not leave it behind? Essex and the King had both made their winter quarters in strong defensive positions. Essex’s headquarters were at Windsor castle, and the King was at Oxford, safely situated between two rivers. If either army advanced it would need heavy artillery if the other wouldn’t come out and fight in the open. Since advancing, especially with an artillery train, was very difficult it made sense for both armies to stay in their winter quarters and prepare for the next year, which is what they did. It’s also possible that Essex’s army was suffering from desertion and shortages of money and horses (although the jury is still out on Parliament’s financial situation after Edgehill), but even without that there was no good reason to expect the army to advance in the middle of winter.

This week the UK National Archives announced that they will be closing the Your Archives wiki in September 2012. Existing content will be preserved as HTML snapshots and kept available on the government web archive, but it won’t be running on MediaWiki so search, edit and export won’t work. Along with TNA’s other online resources, Your Archives will be replaced by the new Discovery service (now in beta), which will integrate the Catalogue, DocumentsOnline and user-created content, along with a powerful search engine and an API so that third parties can query the data (so no more need for Python scripts to scrape data out of the HTML). It’s not yet clear exactly what kind of content they will and won’t let us add, and I suspect that the scope will be narrower than Your Archives, but better integration should make up for that. One of the biggest problems with Your Archives was that getting incoming links from the Catalogue was very clunky and getting incoming links from DocumentsOnline was impossible (so people browsing DocumentsOnline had no easy way of knowing if a transcript of the document was available). This was a limitation of the Catalogue and DocumentsOnline as much as a limitation of MediaWiki, but in any case it’s good that they’ve solved it.

The announcement claims that ‘online technologies have changed rapidly in that time, and the expectations of our users have also changed’ but I’d say it’s more that TNA’s attitude to user-created content has changed. Back in 2007 they still seemed to be suspicious of it and had to keep it quarantined away from their official website. Now they want to bring it into the catalogue so that everyone can find it more easily. I think Your Archives must have played a part in bringing about that change of policy by showing that user-created content is nothing to be scared of, and that closer integration of all TNA online resources is absolutely necessary. If that’s the case then Your Archives has been a successful experiment. TNA also seem to be getting better at open access and re-usability. In 2007 I complained that the terms of use were too restrictive because they didn’t allow re-use of content, but now they seem to be moving towards putting material under the Open Government Licence, which is pretty much the same as a Creative Commons attribution licence (see draft terms of use for the new service).

I’ve been contributing to Your Archives on and off for over four years. According to the log of my contributions, the first page I created was a transcript of a prisoner of war report on 27 October 2007. Up to now I’ve made 3,410 edits, including creating the third most popular page (which has had over 80,000 views – my ‘proper’ academic publications will never be that widely read). Now as a community moderator I’ll be helping to manage the transition by tidying up existing content and ensuring that it will be as accessible as possible in the archived snapshot version. I’ll also be exploring the possibilities of MediaWiki outside Your Archives. It’s still an immensely powerful and useful piece of software. I used it to draft my book and it worked really well for that, which shows that wiki doesn’t have to mean letting just anyone edit, or even any kind of collaboration at all. I really want to find out how to use Semantic MediaWiki and what it can do. It is kind of sad that Your Archives is coming to an end, but that’s just sentimentality. If things don’t change they’ll stay as they are, and who’d want that?

On 5 December 1642 Henry Marten (MP for Berkshire and a well-known radical extremist) made a speech in the House of Commons which criticized the Earl of Essex, commander of Parliament’s main army, which was in winter quarters at Windsor. But what did he say? Several books in my collection mention the incident but they don’t always say the same thing.

Here are the references and quotes. References in square brackets are the sources cited by the author:

J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA, 1941), p. 110 [British Library, Harleian manuscript 164, f. 243]:

The cry without the walls found echoes in the House of Commons, as some of the fiery spirits began to cry down the Lord General. Martin attacked him openly, contrasting the military successes in the north and west with the Earl’s immobility near London in December. “It is summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and only winter at Windsor,” where the general was in quarters. Hoyle seconded Martin hinting that Essex’s slowness and carelessness would ruin the kingdom. Suspicions of the Earl’s integrity, groundless as they were, “had already taken birth”…

Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel: the Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex 1591-1646 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970), p. 349 [Hexter, King Pym, p. 110]:

The war party in the Lower House and London disapproved of Essex’s reluctance to take the initiative and give battle. Radical Henry Marten disparaged Essex when he asserted, “It is summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and cold winter in Windsor.”

Ivor Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow, 1976), p. 17 [nothing]:

Essex delayed in Windsor, and on December 5th. Henry Marten stood up in the House to describe the royalist victories all over England and attack the dilatory Captain-General who, he alleged, “would have it was summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire, and early winter at Windsor”.

Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000): doesn’t mention the incident at all, which is kind of strange for a biography of Henry Marten.

Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (London, 2007), p. 159 [BL Harl. 164, f. 243]:

The almost unrelieved gloom induced by these despatches from the north, south and south-west prompted the hard-line war party member Henry Marten, ‘whose custom it was to bark at everybody’, to voice the first public dissatisfaction with the Earl of Essex’s leadership. Referring to his stationary presence at Windsor Marten declared rhetorically ‘that all these miseries proceeded from his slowness… It was summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and only winter at Windsor; and therefore desired that we might speedily send to the Lord General to move forward.’

Harleian manuscript 164 is the diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, MP for Sudbury in Suffolk. He usually took a moderate conservative position and opposed anything to do with fighting the civil war. This is my transcript of the relevant passage:

Mr Henry Marten stood upp whose custome it was to barke at everie bodie & fell upon the Earle of Essex Lord generall being at windsor: saying, that all these miseries proceeded from his slownes, that wee saw it was summer in Devonshire, summer in yorkeshire & onlie winter at Windsor; & therefore desired that wee might speedelie send to the Lord General to move forward. Alderman Hoile of yorke seconded him; & saied that unless the saied Lord Generall used more care & speed the kingdome would be ruined: but S[i]r Gilbert Gerrard & others excused him that what hee did was by advise of a councell of warre & soe the matter was laied aside for the present

So Ian Gentles wins for quoting D’Ewes most accurately. The way Hexter put the phrase in speech marks and changed the tense of the verb made it look like a direct quote of Marten’s actual words when it wasn’t. Snow followed Hexter but changed ‘only winter’ (which was correct) to ‘cold winter’ for no apparent reason. Waters changed it again to ‘early winter’ (or were these typesetting errors that were missed at the proof stage?). We can correct these errors by comparing with what D’Ewes wrote, but we still don’t have direct access to the words Marten actually used. Other sources don’t help with this.

The incident is also mentioned in the diary of Lawrence Whitaker, MP for Okehampton in Devon (British Library, Add. 31116, f. 14v). After recording reports of atrocities committed by the Cornish army, he wrote:

It was Ordered [tha]t these Relac[i]ons should be sent to [th]e Lo[rd] Gen[er]all, & to desire him to Consider whether it were not high time for [th]e Army to move, w[hi]ch now was, & for a fortnight had beene lying still at Windsor

The Commons Journal never records speeches so there’s no trace there. According to my notes, Walter Yonge’s diary (BL, Add. 18777, f. 81v.) doesn’t add much to the Commons Journal, although his writing is extremely difficult to read (I’m usually good at palaeography, but everyone has their limits).

Every historian I’ve looked at prefers D’Ewes’s account, which is understandable because he gives more detail than Whitaker. But they all omit one part: according to D’Ewes, Essex was defended by his ally Sir Gilbert Gerard. Leaving this out gives the impression that Essex was more unpopular than he actually was. He had friends as well as enemies. Hexter and Snow were generally sympathetic to Essex, and the quote from Hexter above asserts that the aspersions were ‘groundless’, but they both left out some evidence that would have supported their views. As Gentles points out, this was the first time that Essex’s competence had been questioned by someone on the parliamentary side. At this time it was still quite unusual.

Overall this isn’t a very important point but it shows that if something is in quote marks in a peer reviewed publication that doesn’t guarantee that it’s an accurate quote, and if it is an accurate rendition of the quoted text, there might be something interesting next to it in the source that it came from. Footnotes (or other methods of citing sources) don’t automatically give a claim authority, but they make it possible to check. That’s why they’re important.