Americans and the English Civil War

A note on terminology: as one of the issues at stake was the ability of the Stuarts to unite their crowns under one polity, modern historians refer to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the dislike of this idea by all three of the countries they ruled (England & Wales being legislatively one country). The fiction however is, until very recently, concerned overwhelmingly with the ‘English’ Civil War, as are all of the books discussed below.

Also useful to know are the respective sides: Royalists were the supporters of the King, and their soldiers were known as Cavaliers: Royalists tended to be what we would now call Episcopalians, allied with Catholics and some Puritans. Parliamentarians were supporters of Parliament against the King, but were a much wider group of people with a range of motivations: in religious terms they included Anglican Puritans, Presbyterians (Calvinist and Lutheran) and Independents (who would later develop into Quakers and then Methodists). Their soldiers were known as Roundheads, after the clipped hair of the London apprentices who fought in the London trained bands at the start of the war (and before the formation of the professionalised New Model Army in February 1645). Cromwell was an Independent and by the end of the war, Independents dominated the army, but Presbyterians dominated the Parliament.

Creating Memory: fiction and the English Civil War was very much supposed to be both a study of the way historical fiction changed as the historiography changed, and to think about how children and teens are presented in historical fiction. My examination included what the expectations of historical fiction writers for children and teens tell us about their understanding of the child-teen reader and the demands they make of the reader. Historical fiction is supposed to be didactic (i.e., to teach) and what I was interested in was what was being taught, how and why. Some of this slipped as—and this is interesting in itself—it was very hard to separate out the fiction intended for adults. Historical fiction, it seems, doesn’t have much truck with the standards of ‘adult’ and ‘literary’ fiction: it likes a good plot, a growth arc (often career oriented), and to focus on the external rather than internal worlds. Even its titles stick to the tradition of fiction for the young in that they should actually indicate what the book is about: The Draytons and the Davenants by Elizabeth Rundle Charles; Friends, Tho’ Divided by G. A. Henty; For the King by Ronald Welch; and Alice in Love and War by Ann Turnbull.

When I began my book on the fiction of the English Civil War, I hadn’t bargained on how few American colleagues would know anything about the war. (“You had a civil war, too?” was a not uncommon response). This shaped the contents of the book so if after this you do think of picking it up, be reassured that there is plenty of information about what the war was about, why it was being fought, who the sides were and why it’s carried on mattering.

As is ever the case there were many areas of interest that could not be included in the book, and one of them was the handful of novels written by Americans. As I noted at the start, knowledge of the English Civil Wars is not that widespread in the USA. As it happens the war isn’t on the curriculum in English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh schools either (heaven forbid children are taught that their ancestral countrymen once killed a king) but its presence is there in our museums, memorials, and pub names.[1] Thanks to the re-enactment companies that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, there is a decent chance most people have seen a Roundhead and a Cavalier. But, I wondered, why are nineteenth century American authors writing about the English Civil War? The answer is in a narrative of ‘common origins’ among the Boston Puritans. While the English and Scottish authors tended to portray Americans as uninterested in the war ‘back home’, the few American authors who wrote about it, knew this was incorrect (colonists went back to England to fight, two of the Regicides hid out in Manchester, New England, and one American President is descended from a Regicide).[2]

Two of the American authors discussed below appear to be using the war to discuss religious differences and Puritanism: not the kind of Puritanism that is so disparaged in The Scarlett Letter or used as a stale slogan for those who wish to refer to imposed moral strictures, but Puritanism as a faith position. That is interesting because that side of the war is absent from all but two UK writers—Elizabeth Rundle Charles who was on the Puritan side and Charlotte M. Yonge who was a high Church Anglican and thus Royalist.

Beulah Marie Dix is fascinating: a Massachusetts screen writer and novelist, a convinced pacifist, and self-defined tom-boy. Dix wrote across periods and set several of her novels in the seventeenth century. These were all written at the end of the nineteenth century at the height of Cromwell mania when statues of him were going up around England (but not, naturally, in Scotland or Ireland). Each book sends a character ‘across the barricades’. In Hugh Gwyeth, A Roundhead Cavalier (1899), Hugh runs from his parliamentary family to join his father on the other side, but retains his own loyalties to parliament. In Merry-Lips (1906), the little girl disguises herself as a boy again to run away from her Parliamentarian family and join her Royalist brother: here, though, she is a Royalist and when she lands with her godmother she discovers her godmother is a Royalist spy.[3] In The Making of Christopher Ferringham (1905), a scapegrace cavalier is hauled out of prison by his Puritan uncle and sent to Boston. Christopher hates it there and drifts to Carolina. There, however, he comes to despise the Royalist settlers and returns to the North, redeemed for Parliament and Puritanism.

John and Patricia Beatty published two pro-Royalist novels at the end of the 1960s. Campion Towers (1965) is a very odd novel as it’s not clear that the Beattys really understood the nuances of Parliamentarian politics, but that is far from unique. Their heroine is Penitence, who is sent from Puritan Boston to her pro-Royalist mother’s family in England. Some Parliamentarians she meets set her up to spy on the family. She confuses high Anglicanism with Catholicism (which horrifies her), but she gets caught up in royalism and ends up assisting in Charles II’s escape from Worcester. Parliamentarians are portrayed as cold and hard (even Cromwell who is a hero in this book), and iconoclasts, and Cavaliers are apparently ‘gentlefolk’ who ‘do not make war on maids’ (p. 50) which is rather contrary to the reality, as the Cavaliers had a bad reputation for rape and destruction. In the end she is shown as having divided loyalties: her fight leans her to Cromwell, her romantic soul to Charles Stuart. This only makes sense if you understand it in the context of the popularity of Confederate Civil War Romance (i.e., Gone with the Wind) with Unionist readers. It’s an extension of the depoliticization of the American Civil War that Tony Horwitz talks about in Confederates in the Attic (1998).

My final title is one you will be unable to find, and if by any chance you do find it, please please let me know. Bernard Marshall was a runner up for the Newbery Medal in 1922 for Cedric the Forester and was in his day compared to Walter Scott. Cedric the Forester is truly awful. It actually uses the word Gadzooks! But The Torch Bearers (1923) is an unexpected find. A relatively conventional friends divided story, it is the very first novel in my collection to include the Putney debates (27-28 October 1647): this was when junior and senior officers of the army assembled together to hammer out what they were fighting for. The radicals lost, but the words of one of them, Thomas Rainsborough, ring down the ages as the very first argument for a universal franchise.

The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.[4]

This may sound rather familiar to American audiences--it’s perhaps the first iteration of the slogan, No Taxation Without Representation! So it is perhaps not a surprise that Marshall wrote two sequels, Redcoat and Minuteman, (1924) set in the Revolutionary War, and Old Hickory's Prisoner: A Tale of the Second War for Independence (1925) set in the war of 1812, explaining by demonstration to Americans why they, too, should connect to the arguments and passions of the English Civil War.

NOTES

[1] The Royal Oak is the third most popular pub name in England. It commemorates the oak tree at Boscobel in which Charles II hid after losing the battle of Worcester in 1651. The tree was wrecked by early 19th century sightseers, and its grandson is now in situ, and it’s quite common for villages that have a Royal Oak pub to have a second, other pub. One I know of, the ‘other pub’ is next door.

[2] For the story of the escaped regicides, see Jenkinson, Matthew. Charles I’s Killers in America. Oxford: OUP, 2019.

[3] If you are interested in the reality of women spies in the war, Nadine Akkerman has written a superb monograph and Pete Langman a very good novel.

[4] https://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/col-thomas-rainborowe-the-poorest-he-that-is-in-england-hath-a-right-to-live-as-the-greatest-he/

REFERENCES

Beatty, John, and Patricia Beatty. Campion Towers. New York: Macmillan company, 1965. Print.

---. Witch Dog. New York: William Morrow, 1968. Print.

Charles, Elizabeth Rundle. The Draytons and the Davenants: A Story of the Civil Wars. London: Eilbron Classics facsimile of T. Nelson and Sons, 1867 (facsimile in 2006). Print.

---. On Both Sides of the Sea: A Story of the Commonwealth and Restoration. London: T. Nelson, 1868. Print.

Dix, Beulah Marie. Hugh Gwyeth: A Round-Head Cavalier. New York: MacMillan Company, 1899. Print.

---. The Making of Christopher Ferringham. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1905. Print.

---. Merrylips. New York, USA: Macmillan, 1906. Print.

Henty, G. A. Friends, Tho Divided. London: Henry Frowde, Hodder & Stoughtin, 1883. Print.

Marshall, Bernard. Cedric the Forester. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1921. Print.

---. The Torch Bearers: A Tale of Cavalier Days. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1923. Print.

Turnbull, Ann. Alice in Love and War. Walker Books Ltd, 2009. Print.

Welch, Ronald. For the King. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Print.

Yonge, Charlotte M. Under the Storm. Hamburg: Tredition Classics (from Gutenberg), 1887 Print.

Two good general overviews of the wars:

Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People's History. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.

Royle, Trevor. Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660. London: Abacus, 2005. Print.

Full list of books considered (by date): https://farahmendlesohn.com/re-creating-memory-fiction-and-the-english-civil-war/

Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil War, is published by Palgrave Macmillan in hardback, softcover, and kindle.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Farah Mendlesohn is Associate Fellow of The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, UK. Mendlesohn has a PhD in History, focusing on the Spanish Civil War. Mendlesohn was Professor and Head of Department of English and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, from 2012-2017. Mendlesohn’s acclaimed work includes Creating Memory Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (Palgrave Macmillan), The Inter-galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (McFarland), and Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature (Routledge).