Investigations of a Dog

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.

1. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., The English Civil War (London, 1997).
2. Ian Gentles, Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011).
3. Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974).
4. Clive Holmes, Why was Charles I executed?, (London, 2006).
5. Mary Leys, Catholics in England, 1559-1829: A social history, (London, 1961).
6. J. S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).
7. Diane Purkiss, Literature, gender and politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2005).

I’m so looking forward to being able to buy and read a book that has absolutely nothing to do with the book I’m writing. Will it ever happen? I’m also trying to write as little as possible about Cromwell because there’s way too much literature to deal with.

Anyway, no more blogging for me until at least September as the book deadline is coming up and I’m getting too busy for anything else.

Back in July I posted a “review” of the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History. One of the strange, interesting, and almost certainly untrue stories in it was that Cromwell and Charles I had a fight when they were small boys:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

As I mentioned, one of the suspicious things about this story is the complete absence of Henry Prince of Wales, Charles’s older, more militaristic, and more Calvinist brother. That led me to believe that the story must have originated after Henry (who died as a teenager leaving Charles as heir to the throne) had faded from popular memory.

Now I’ve found a new lead. I’ve been reading Vernon Snow’s Essex the Rebel, a biography of the third Earl of Essex. During my PhD I read the bits about the civil war but skipped the rest. Now I’m going through the whole thing because I’m interested in all of Essex’s life. Page 43 mentions that at some time from 1609 to 1611 (dates are surprisingly vague in this book) Essex had an argument with Prince Henry while they were playing tennis. Henry called him “the son of a traitor”, and he responded by hitting the prince on the head with a tennis racket! James I seems to have Stoically accepted the assault on his son, telling him that “He who did strike him then, would be sure, with more violent blows, to strike his enemy in times to come”. This prophecy didn’t quite come true, as Essex became the military leader of the armed rebellion against Charles I in 1642. Like Prince Henry, Essex the Lord General has largely faded from popular memory. Just as Henry was overshadowed by Charles, Essex was overshadowed by Cromwell. If the tennis court incident is one of the influences on the story of Charles and Oliver fighting each other, this could be yet another case of Cromwell stealing Essex’s thunder.

Whatever you do don’t ever get yourself a reputation for writing snarky blog posts about dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell. If you do, people will start giving you other dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell in the hope that you’ll write something funny about them. Which is how I acquired the novelization of the film Cromwell (while searching for that link I found that there’s also a 2008 film called Cromwell that’s about a serial killer and a stripper!). If you’re at all interested in the English Civil War you’ve probably seen the film. I haven’t seen it for a long time but I assume that the structure of the book is quite close to the film (ie bears very little relation to anything historians have ever written, but doesn’t make much sense as a film plot either). Dipping into it at random throws up all kinds of weird things, like John Hampden and Thomas Hammond seem to have been conflated into the same character for no reason other than having some of the same letters in their surnames. But there are some things that are unique to the book. First of all, you’ve got to love the cover:

Is this a historical novel or a heavy metal album? Why hasn’t the image of a fist defiantly holding up a lobster helmet been more widely used on the covers of history books? It’s much more exciting than some of the usual clichés.

Then there’s the style of writing. In the opening scene, Arthur Bates has tried very hard to avoid the usual novelization trap of just tacking “he said” onto every line of the script:

A pair of horsemen made their way slowly across the bleak, lifeless fens of Cambridgeshire, their heads bent against the biting wind that was piling masses of dark clouds in the sky above them. Nothing else in that wintry landscape moved; it was as though the world had paused to gird itself against the onslaught of the bitter season, and even the old Norman church that loomed in the distance seemed to be hunching its shoulders against the wind.

Bates also has the kind of obsession with people’s ages that you normally only find in local newspapers: “Henry Ireton, a lean, keen-eyed young man of 29”; “His [John Pym] 56-year old eyes were blurred and made watery by the relentless wind”; “A pretty, dark-haired girl of 16 [Bridgett Cromwell] looked up from across the room”. He’d probably be very bad at telling the 28-years-old joke: “A 28 year old man strode across the desolate fens, vigorously doing something you would never expect a 28 year old man to do on the desolate fens…”.

Overall this is probably a bit more sensible than the Ladybird book – Arthur Bates at least knows that women have names and that Cromwell didn’t live in Lincolnshire – but somehow I miss the monkey, and the sheer insanity of L. du Garde Peach. It was said that his “only virtue was speed”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if speed was also his main inspiration. I can imagine him knocking out a Ladybird book in one long, frantic night, fuelled by purple hearts and a bottle of gin.

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish. (more…)

The 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell is coming up soon (even if you’re pedantic enough to commemorate it on 3rd September Old Style it’s not that far off!) so Ted Vallance is organizing a one-off Cromwell themed blog carnival. It’s probably no surprise that I’ve decided to look at Cromwell’s early career as a cavalry officer in the First Civil War. Cromwell is more famous for becoming commander of the New Model Army, and then Lord Protector. Although these things didn’t happen until much later they have seriously skewed perceptions of Cromwell’s military career from 1642-46. For a long time there was a strong Whiggish tendency to look for signs of future greatness in his earlier actions (much as I love C. H. Firth he was one of the major offenders here). This hasn’t been helped by Cromwell’s own self-mythologizing or parliamentarian/Independent propaganda in the Thomason Tracts. I’m going to try to disregard all that and compare Cromwell as a cavalry commander with one of his contemporaries, Sir William Balfour. By 1644 Cromwell and Balfour had similar rank and responsibilities, but Balfour didn’t go on to be Lord Protector and so has been largely forgotten.

[I wrote this off the top of my head and never got round to checking all the facts or putting in references. It doesn’t matter too much because it’s mostly just about my personal opinion, but be aware that some of it might be wrong. The best source for Balfour is Edward Furgol’s article in the DNB]

(more…)

The word “Ironsides” is variously associated with Oliver Cromwell, his cavalry regiment, and even English Civil War cavalry in general. The consensus now seems to be that “Old Ironsides” was originally a nickname of Cromwell himself (I’m not sure why he was called that or when it started). It seems likely that “Ironsides” later spread to his regiment, then to all the cavalry under his command as Lieutenant-General of horse, then to parliamentarian cavalry in general, then to civil war cavalry in general. For example, “Ironsides” was used as the title of John Tincey’s book about civil war cavalry.

There was another folk etymology which suggested that Cromwell’s cavalry were known as “Ironsides” because they wore heavy armour. In the classic Cromwell’s Army, C. H. Firth took down T. S. Baldock for repeating the myth that Cromwell’s cavalry were heavily armoured cuirassiers in contrast to Prince Rupert’s supposedly unarmoured light cavalry. As Firth says, the vast majority of cavalry on both sides during the First Civil War were equipped as arquebusiers, and no new research in the last hundred years or so has changed that. I had assumed that the myth belonged to the 19th century but today I discovered that it was much older.

(more…)

And now a post about the English Civil War (you know, the thing that I’m actually qualified to write about). I’ve just read a really good article by Malcolm Wanklyn in the new issue of War In History, reassessing the Earl of Manchester’s generalship. In previous posts I’ve been quite critical of some aspects of A Military History of the English Civil War by Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, but I haven’t said enough about that book’s good aspects, so I hope this post will redress the balance to some extent. I had my doubts about whether there was a coherent “determinist” school dominating civil war historiography, but in this article Wanklyn successfully attacks something much more definite. Until now there has been almost total consensus among historians that the Earl of Manchester, commander of the Eastern Association army, was slow to react and unwilling to fight in the autumn of 1644, and did not want a decisive victory.

(more…)