A History of Britain, Volume 2 (18 page)

Although none of Lord Falkland's Great Tew friends had any trouble with the act of attainder (one suspects none of them much liked the bleak, brusque Wentworth), they parted company, first over the attack on the bishops and then again over parliament's Militia Ordinance. Hyde and Falkland saw the Ordinance as a demonstrably unlawful usurpation of the sovereign's legitimate prerogative; indeed, a test case of whether the king
was to be granted any sort of prerogative at all. But their legalistic friend and MP John Selden truly believed that it had been the king who had acted illegitimately, not being entitled to impress any of his subjects except when the realm was plainly threatened by
foreign
invasion. Selden thus remained loyal to parliament. Conversely, there were those like Lord Montagu, who were at pains to be understood as supporting the most parliamentary monarchy there could possibly be, short of conferring on the institution some sort of exclusive and transcendent sovereignty. To his son William, Montagu wrote that:

For Sir Edmund Verney the choice was simpler, yet so very much harder. For he found himself governed by an unforgiving and unequivocal obligation of duty, even while his moral sense and his intellect told him the cause was worthless. Edward Hyde discovered his friend Verney's melancholy predicament at York, when he asked him to put on a face of public cheerfulness, the better to raise the spirits of the fearful royalist soldiers. Verney replied smilingly to Hyde that:

The Verneys, who had been the model of a companionable, loving gentry
household, were now torn apart. Ralph, who had sat next to his father in the parliaments of 1640, had not just expressed his support for their cause but had taken the solemn oath of loyalty required of all members after the passing of the Militia Ordinance. Oaths were no light matter in the seventeenth century, especially to a Puritan. The act sharply separated him not just from his father but also from his younger brother, Edmund, who could not understand Ralph's failure to perceive his duty to his king as well as to his father. They were still, somehow, a family. In the early summer the steward at Claydon was getting letters from Sir Edmund at York asking him to prepare the defence of the house with carbines, powder and shot, ‘for I feare a time maye come when Roags maye looke for booty in such houses; therefore bee not unprovided; but saye noething of it, for that maye invite more to mischeefe that thinek not of it yet . . . gett in all such monnys as are owing you with all speede, for wee shall certainly have a great warr. Have a care of harvest, and God send uss well to receave the blessing of and returne thancks for it. I can saye no more – Your loving master.' But the steward was also getting letters from Ralph in London asking him to search for his father's best pistols and carbines to be sent on to his father at York! For a time in the late spring of 1642, when tentative feelers were being put out between king and parliament, the Verneys and their friends clung to the hope that there might yet be peace. But on 1 June both houses of parliament passed the Nineteen Propositions for the future of England.

Not surprisingly, hopes of accommodation dwindled away to nothing. By late August it seemed certain that the Verneys, father and eldest son, would end up as enemies. Eleanor, Lady Sussex, an old friend of the family, parliamentarian by sympathy and conviction, but socially very much in both worlds, wrote to Ralph on 9 September that she had had a letter from his father. ‘It was a very sade one and his worde was this of you: “Madam he hath ever lane near my hart and truly he is ther still”, that he hade many afflictyon uppon him, and that you hade usede him unkandly.' Sir Edmund had, she said, become ‘passynate, and much trublede I belive that you declarede yourselfe for the parlyment: a littil time will digest all I am confident'. And she asked Ralph in return to humour his father as much as he could: ‘lett me intrete you as a frende that loves you most hartily, not to right passynatly to your father, but ovour com him with kandnes; good man I see he is infinitely malincoly, for many other thinges I belive besides the difference betwixt you.'

All over England, in the summer of 1642, disengagements and separations, often described as ‘unnatural', like the prospect of civil war itself, were taking place in communities that for so long had shared customs,
territory and beliefs. Very few counties or even towns were so politically homogeneous as to make the decision of allegiance a matter of course or obvious self-interest. Essex was overwhelmingly parliamentarian and much of Wales deeply royalist, but even in shires such as Warwickshire, where there were strong partisan presences – like the Grevilles – parts of those counties, in this instance in the north, were far more mixed in their loyalties. And there were a few regions – Cumberland and Westmorland – that tried to be studiously neutral and avoided organizing either parliamentary or royalist musters. The actual event of the musters – and the response they received in county and market towns – was a warning to those on the wrong side of the fence that they should either move to safer territory or prepare to defend their houses and farms as best they could.

Lady Brilliana Harley was one of those who decided against moving, being unafraid, as she later said, to die in defence of the family estates and godly religion. Her husband, Sir Robert, away in Westminster, very much a moving spirit in the committees of parliament, advised her to stay put: he could not quite believe that much harm could come to her in remote northwest Herefordshire, especially since there were friendly ties between the Harleys and fellow-gentry in the county, even when they parted company on religious beliefs. But in the summer and autumn of 1642 it quickly became plain to Brilliana that her household was an island of parliamentary puritanism in an ocean of royalism and that the old, dependable bonds of gentility might not survive the coming conflict. She was already the butt of popular abuse, some of it genuinely menacing. At Ludlow, she wrote to their son Edward, she had heard that a maypole had been set up ‘and a thinge like a head upon it . . . and gathered a greate many about it, and shot at it in derision of roundheads'. And their old friend Sir William Croft had made it no secret that, while in private he still respected Lady Brilliana, this could have no effect whatsoever on his public conduct as a loyal servant of the king. Before long Brilliana and her household were enduring abuse while in the grounds of Brampton Bryan, from ‘exceeding rude' country people on their way to market at Ludlow who shouted from the roadway that they wished ‘all the Puritans and roundheads at Brampton hanged'. When, later that year, royalist soldiers took two of her servants away to prison, she asked Viscount Scudamore to intercede, appealing, anachronistically, to ‘the many bonds by which most of the gentlemen in this country are tied to Sir Robert Harley, that of blood and some with alliance and all with his long professed and real friendship and for myself that of common courtesy, as to a stranger brought into their country, I know not how all those I believed to be so good should break all these obligations'. But, little
by little, Brampton Bryan was becoming a godly stockade, with frightened preachers and schoolmasters and Puritan friends coming to the house for shelter. How long it would remain safe was anyone's guess, but with royalism strong not only in Herefordshire but also in Shropshire to the north and in Wales to the south and west, Brilliana must have put in extra prayer-time for the help of the Almighty.

In the third week of August 1642 Charles I decided to raise his standard. He was, as yet, in no position to do more than wage the heraldic equivalent of war rather than the real thing. Far fewer counties had produced men, money and plate for him than for parliament. The navy had come out for parliament, and the king had suffered the indignity of being locked out of Hull by its governor, Sir John Hotham. An attempt by Lord Strange to seize an arms depot in the little Lancashire town of Manchester had ended with his troop of horse being chased out of the town by indignant, armed fustian weavers. But the king had been promised troops and horse in thousands from Wales and Shrewsbury, and he evidently felt confident that the quality of his officers and the rapid training that his professional soldiers, not least the young Prince Rupert, were giving the cavalry would prevail over the superior numbers of the parliamentary army, commanded by the dour veteran of the Dutch wars, the Earl of Essex – the first husband of the notorious Frances Howard. So the standard was to go up, the Rubicon to be crossed, and the man to whom this honour fell was the Knight Marshal, newly appointed standard-bearer, the fifty-two-year-old Sir Edmund Verney. It was a heavy duty, literally, for the thing needed twenty men to get it upright in the field just outside Nottingham castle. ‘Much of the fashion of the City Streamers used at the Lord Mayor's Show,' one antiquarian remembered, several flags were mounted on a huge pole, the top one being the king's personal arms, with a hand pointing towards the crown and beneath it the imperious, optimistic motto ‘Give Caesar His Due'. The flag was paraded around by three troops of horse and 600 infantrymen. Just as the trumpets were about to sound and the herald to read the royal proclamation, Charles suddenly asked for the paper, a quill and some ink and, still on horseback, started to make some last-minute revisions. When he was done and the herald nervously attempted to read the document, corrections and all, the flag went up, along with the army's hats, high in the air. The standard was carried back to the castle and hoisted to be seen for miles about. But that night a powerful storm got up and the flag was blown down. It was two days before the winds and rain abated enough for it to be raised once more. Those (and there were plenty) in the habit of searching for omens were not encouraged. For Sir Edmund Verney, though, the die was very
definitely cast. His charge read ‘that by the grace of God they that would wrest that standard from his hand must first wrest his soul from his body'.

By the time the royalist army assembled at Edgehill in Warwickshire, its prospects had been transformed. Charles's forces were now more than 20,000 strong, of whom about 14,000 mustered on the ridge in the early morning of 23 October. At the top of the hill, with his sons, Charles, the Prince of Wales, and James, the nine-year-old Duke of York (under the watchful eye of Hyde), as well as Prince Rupert carrying his toy poodle Boy, the king took his ‘prospective glass' and looked down at the parliamentary troops drawn up in the vale of the Red Horse below. Not only did the king have the immense advantage of the sharply sloping terrain, with no trees and only a few hedges offering cover, he also knew that the Earl of Essex's army was exhausted even before a shot had been fired. Moving quickly from Shrewsbury, Charles had managed to slip between the parliamentary strongholds of Warwick and Coventry. Essex had had to play belated catch-up, attempting unsuccessfully to place his army across the route to London before it was too late. The first contact between the two armies had not been encouraging for Essex. A skirmish at Powick Bridge near Worcester the previous month, on 23 September, had ended in an embarrassing rout when Essex's Life Guard had evidently been incapable of understanding, much less performing, a ‘wheel about' in the face of Prince Rupert's cavalry charge and had given themselves their own orders to flee.

Close to the king, surrounded by the royal Life Guard in their red coats and holding the standard (much reduced in size to make it portable) was Sir Edmund Verney. His family would have been horrified if they had known he was wearing no armour other than a helmet, being convinced that a full cuirass was more likely to kill a man by impeding his movement than to protect him. Some of his closest friends were there, too; Hyde with the king, Falkland somewhere amid the cavalry. There were drums, the unfurling of regimental flags, coloured scarves tied like sashes over their armour to identify friends in the heat of battle. Already there had been serious trouble over the dispositions. The Earl of Forth and the commander of the infantry, the Earl of Lindsey, had got into an angry row over whether musketeers should be interspersed within the pikemen in the Swedish manner or whether, as Lindsey wished, in the older ‘Dutch' style, in separate units – better fitted, he thought, for untried soldiers. Tactlessly, the king and Prince Rupert had voted Swedish, at which point the affronted Lindsey had thrown down his baton and marched off in a pout to head his own regiment. Cavaliers were like that. Still, there was much obvious affection for the king, who rode down the line dressed in
a black velvet coat trimmed with ermine, the only flash of brightness the silvery starburst of his Garter badge. ‘Your King is your cause, your quarrel and your captain,' he told the troops and promised them his grateful remembrance for their service. He spoke too quietly, as was his custom. But there were huzzahs anyway.