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‘There Very Children were Soe Full of Hatred’: Royalist Clerical Families and the Politics of Everyday Conflict in Civil War and Interregnum England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Michelle Wolfe
Michelle Wolfe*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

In Ugborough, Devonshire, in the mid-1640s, the young son of Emmanuel Sharp, the former Royalist rector of Bathealston, Somerset, joined a group of children at a bonfire. As people gathered to hear news of another battle won by Parliament, a local tailor spotted one child and denounced him as a ‘priest’s bastard’. Mrs Sharp flew to the defence of her son’s legitimacy and her own marital honour. Heavily pregnant, Mrs Sharp miscarried as a result of the commotion. The involuntary abortion was allegedly acclaimed by local Puritans, who purportedly celebrated ‘[t]hat ye calf was dead, & if ye cow had died also they would have made a Bonfire… [up] to Heaven’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 194 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Thanks are due to Margaret Spufford for pointing me to the Manby family, and to W. J. Sheils and Carla Pestana for their incisive comments.

2 Oxford, Bodleian Library [hereafter Bodl.], MS J. Walker c.3, fols 304–305; Matthews, A. G., Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–1660 (Oxford, 1948), 336 Google Scholar.

3 The Walker MSS comprise a diverse set of sources, from official papers to reports of parish hearsay regarding the ejections of past parsons. I am using here official papers and the signed accounts from clerical wives, children and grandchildren. See Laurence, Anne, “This Sad and Deplorable Condition”: an Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Sufferings of Northern Clergy Families in the 1640s and 1650s’, in Wood, Diana, ed., Life and Thought in the Northern Church c.1100-c.1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, SCH.S 12 (Woodbridge, 1999), 465–88, 465–9 Google Scholar, for the problems of family ‘mythology’.

4 Donegan, Barbara, ‘Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War’, AHR 99 (1994), 1137–66 Google Scholar; idem, ‘Did Ministers Matter? War and Religion in England, 1642–1649’, JBS 33 (1994), 119–56; Laurence, , ‘“Sad and Deplorable”’, 465–88 Google Scholar.

5 Thomas, Keith, ‘Women in the Civil War Sects’, in Aston, Trevor, ed., Crisis in Europe 1550–1650: Essays from Past and Present (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar; Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993), 119–84 Google Scholar and idem, ‘Historians, Women and the Civil War Sects, 1640–1660’, Parergon 6 (1988), 19–32.

6 See Hughes, Ann, ‘Gender and Politics in the Leveller Literature’, in Amussen, Susan D. and Kishlansky, Mark A., eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), 162–88 Google Scholar.

7 Eales, Jacqueline, ‘Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639)’, in Swanson, R. N., ed., Gender and the Christian Religion, SCH 34 (Woodbridge, 1998), 163–74 Google Scholar; Gregory, Jeremy, ‘Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660–1850’, in ibid., 235–71 Google Scholar.

8 Mendelson, Sara and Crawford, Patricia, Women in Early Modern England, 1150–1720 (Oxford, 1998), 341 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Foyster, Elizabeth, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

10 Hill, J. W. F., ‘The Royalist Clergy of Lincolnshire’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological Society Reports and Papers 2 (1938), 36–40 Google Scholar; The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers, 1644–1646, ed. Clive Holmes, Suffolk Records Society 13 (Ipswich, 1970), 9–14; Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. S. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols (Holmes Beach, FL, 1969) [hereafter AGO], I: 371–2; II: 968–90.

11 Minute Book of the Committee for Plundered Ministers [hereafter CPM] 1644–1647, British Library, Additional Manuscripts [hereafter BL, MS Addit.] 15669–15670, passim.

12 Cambridge University Library [hereafter CUL], MS William M. Palmer B. 5 8, passim; Holmes, Suffolk Committee, 28–91.

13 A&OJ: 371, II: 986; BL, MS Addit. 15669, passim; BL, MS Addit. 15670, passim.

14 Amussen, Ordered Society, 34–66.

15 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 105–19.

16 A. J. Shcpard, ‘Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, with Special Refer ence to Cambridge, c.1560–1640’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998, Ch. 3.

17 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.2, fol. 458r; c.3, fol. 2Hr; c.4, fol. 87r; c.8, fols 83–84.

18 Bodl, MS J. Walker c.1, fol. 397r; Matthews, Walker Revised, 336.

19 See [Bedell, William Jr.], A true relation of the life and death of the Right Rev. Father in God William Bedell, Lord Bishop of Kilmore in Ireland, ed. Jones, Thomas Wharton, Camden Society Publications, NS 4 (London, 1872), 18 and 20 Google Scholar, from the manuscript c. 1670 or 1682.

20 CUL, MS William M. Palmer B. 58, fol. 3r.

21 Ibid., fols 3r-4r.

22 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.3, fol. 97a recto.

23 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.2, fol, 415r.

24 CPM minutes, Teversham: 18 April 1646 and 4 September 1646, BL, Addit 15670, fols 143 and 207.

25 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.1, fol. 78r; see also Bodl, MS J. Walker c.3, fol. 214r.

26 Scott, James, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT and London, 1990), 1–16; 183–201 Google Scholar; my thanks to Jennifer Anderson for the reference.

27 Children could also petition and did: BL, MS Addit. 15670, fol. 235. See also Hudson, Geoffrey L., ‘Negotiating for Blood Money: War Widows and the Courts in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kermode, Jenny and Walker, Garthine, eds, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1994), 146–69 Google Scholar.

28 Bodl., MS Bodley 324, fol. 2r.

29 BL, MS Addit. 15671, fols 188v and 200v.

30 BL, MS Addit 15669, fol. 236V.

31 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.4, fol. 315r.

32 Scott, Domination, 183–201.

33 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.4, fol. 163r.

34 BL, MS Addit. 15669, fol. 78V.

35 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.4, fol. 33r.

36 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.2, fol. 458r.

37 On the gendered and family meanings of the clerical library see my paper, ‘“Sacred Imployments”: Gendering Spiritual Space and Labour in the Clerical Household’, presented at the Religion and Society in Early Modern England Conference, St. Mary’s College, Surrey, UK, 22 April 2001.

38 See CUL, MS William M. Palmer B. 58, fol. iv; Bodl., MS J. Walker c.1, fols 264r, 78r and 57r; c.2, fols 211r and 458r; c.3, fol. 263r.

39 BL, MS Addit. 15671, fol. 180r; see Morrill, John, ‘The Church in England, 1642–1649’, in idem, ed., Reactions to the English Civil Wan 1642–1649 (London, 1982), 89–114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.3, fol. 329r.

41 Bodl., MS J. Walker c.3, fols 304r-305r.