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The Ballad of the Backwoods Cavalier by Lovehearts & Redwine (voice and harp)
Lynn News advance feature here
The features below were first published in 2013. On Saturday September 3 2016, at Marriott's Warehouse Upstairs doors open 7 pm, The English Civil War In Lynn and Other Stories takes the story further.
Lynn historian Dr Paul Richards and local bard Gareth Calway are once again teaming up to deliver a fascinating insight into the history of King's Lynn. Dr Richards will speak about Lynn in the 1620s-1660s and the impact of Puritanism and the Revolution on the town. Gareth's ballads will provide a fresh interpretation of some of the characters involved in the Civil War, as well as other figures linked to King's Lynn, from King John to Fanny Burney. Gareth will be joined by harpist Vanessa Wood Davies and musician Tim Chipping (of Longshoredrift) - who have composed music for many of the ballads and will be peforming alongside him.
Gareth will also be presenting the Marriott's Warehouse Trust with a cannonball from the 1643 siege of Lynn, which was fired from West Lynn during a terrifying three week bombardment!
Tickets are £5 each and are available from True's Yard Fisherfolk Museum (10am-3:30pm Tues-Sat). Contact the Museum on 01553 770479 or info@truesyard.co.uk.
The Siege of Lynn. (EDP feature January 2013)
Less Puritan than Yarmouth or Norwich, and with more active Cavaliers in its backwoods, King’s Lynn was the only place in Norfolk where Civil War blood was shed or gunfire heard. And if the Earl of Newcastle’s Royalist force had relieved the town, war and country may well have turned king-wards and changed the course of English history.
Both of Lynn’s MPs supported Parliament. Yet ‘Lynn Regis’ bears the (temporary) distinction – or stigma - of being the only Royalist town in Eastern England.
We need to keep these terms in perspective. Lynn was a port, living by corn, wine, timber, salt; a place of merchants and fishermen not political activists or holy warriors. Her two MPs were elected by only 300 people and the general populace was more interested in trade. War was bad for business. In addition, many of Lynn’s more radical Puritans had given up on building the new Protestant Jerusalem in England in the 1630s and sailed from Lynn to New England. (Cromwell had nearly done the same in the middle of his mental breakdown/spiritual crisis in 1630.)
Charles I needed a strong fleet: the Civil War was partly triggered by his levies of Ship Money on a reluctant population. So after first losing London and then the East-based navy to Parliament, Charles – the divinely righted but not very bright national leader who had declared war on both sides of Europe’s Thirty Years War at once and had to pay damaging reparations to both - desperately needed Lynn. It was the chief exporter of the region’s corn; favoured port of entry to the eastern counties and import-supplier to ten counties (and of course London).
Parliament grasped this vital strategic importance of Lynn as a gateway between the Royalist stronghold of the North and the Parliamentary stronghold of East and South, the most thickly populated and advanced section of the country. It instructed the town to keep armed men on its walls and by January 1642 gunpowder had been stored at Market Cross, St Anne’s Fort, Trinity Hall and Red Mount.
The Parliament-tending corporation prepared defences and sent out for an engineer to repair those walls. Drawbridges were set up at the east and south gates. Ironically, all of this Parliamentary prep would be seized by Royalists and used against the Parliamentary army in 1643.
The Royalist gentry of west Norfolk put pressure on Charles I sympathisers in the corporation. In spring 1643, Cromwell rushed from subduing mild Royalist unrest at Lowestoft to order the Mayor of Lynn to arrest ‘13 local gentlemen’ regarded as threats, orders duly carried out in May. They managed to escape – or were allowed to while sympathisers within the corporation, including the covertly Royalist Mayor, looked the other way. This happens more than once in this story.
(drama) Enter the dashing Hamon L’Estrange of Hunstanton Hall, a sexagenarian Cavalier living in the grand style with expensive tastes; expensive sons running up debts; eighteen servants (including a falconer and a fool) and a black marble floor in his stables. Supported by Sir Richard Hovell of Hillington and the Morduants of Massingham - encouraged by the Yelvertons of Rougham and the Pastons at Appleton - he now led a Town Hall coup, declaring himself, on 13 August – without any mandate whatsoever - ‘governor of Lynn for the king’.
The borough’s two MPs, John Percival and Thomas Toll, were put under house arrest.
Parliament’s Eastern Association appointed the Earl of Manchester to retake the town and was scorned by the royalist press as having ‘as much hope of Heaven’s gate as to enter Lynn.’ The Puritans, as always, took this rebuke at its Biblical Word. That’s exactly where they believed they were going, via Lynn, trusting in God and keeping their powder dry. Cromwell and Manchester lambasted the committees of the Eastern Association for ‘more arms, more troops, more supplies.’ With all the eloquent directness of the Fen farmer he was, young Colonel Cromwell warts and all chastised his superiors: ‘If I could speak words to pierce your hearts with the sense of our and your condition, I would… If somewhat be not done …you will see Newcastle’s army march up into your bowels.’
Under August skies, a siege was brewing. The 8000 strong Eastern Association army blockaded Lynn on land. Warwick’s Roundhead warships patrolled the Wash: only one Royalist ship carrying vital supplies sneaked through to the town, using fake signals and being fired on by blank rounds as part of a well-worked deception. That’s def. one for the children’s novel.
Ironically, the strong fortifications and well-equipped garrison established by Parliament now stood firm against it, ordnance turned towards land rather than sea by ‘strangers’ from west Norfolk. Were they loyalists or traitors?
To one besieging Roundhead captain they were a ‘wicked crew… enemies to God and Parliament …malignants and recusants…’ bankrolled by L’Estrange. Significantly, L’Estrange had a very real economic motive for his cavalier coup: he faced possible financial ruin if his enemies controlled Norfolk. In Puritan terms it was God versus Mammon: L’Estrange had invested ‘a thousand pounds out of his own purse’ in the coup and (his supporters’) ungodly strength... (‘1200 muskets, 500 barrels of gunpowder with bullet unanswerable, and three or four troops of horse…’) was only beatable because they were ‘cowardly Cavaliers’ without ‘the strength of the Lord.’
Cromwell ordered a new battery of cannon to move into position at West Lynn, his last local action before galloping north with a (siege-weakening) detachment of horse and dragoons for a pre-emptive strike at Newcastle.
The hope was to bombard the town – or rather a west Norfolk gentry who had seized leadership of its citizens - into submission, without the need of an assault.
One ‘eighteen pound’ cannonball notoriously smashed through the west window of St Margaret’s on Sunday September 3, ‘took the middle pillar a great part of, and broke it in a hundred pieces, dispersing them all over the church.’ ‘The people departed in a most confused manner….some leaving their hats, some their books, and some their scarves.’
Shot and granados flew daily into Tuesday Market Place, inflicting damage on persons, houses and property but most enormously on minds: homes and businesses were abandoned and the shrieks of women and children carried well beyond the town walls. It was a war of terror.
Death counts vary. One contemporary account suggests ‘above eighty … on both sides’ though parish registers record just two soldiers buried at St Margaret’s during the weeks of the siege and one at St Nicholas’s.
Routes south and east and fresh water supplies from the Gaywood River to the north were cut off. Manchester and his Parliamentarian army was within musket shot by September 7th.
The garrison dug in and waited for Newcastle. He never came. It made cavalier sallies out: attempting to capture ‘3-400 beefs’ bound for Setchey Market; burning an almshouse known as the Hospital in the nearby village of Gaywood to prevent besiegers taking up quarters there, and meeting every summons to surrender with bravado.
Meanwhile the local economy choked and the town feared ruin and destruction. Boats for a river assault, ladders for scaling the walls and a force of 8000 men were all in place. Despite the derring do-and-die-hard-ism among some Royalists, when Manchester sent word that women and children should be sent out of the town - prior to a general assault on 16 September - an honourable surrender was agreed ‘not as fearing the taking of the town but to avoid the effusion of blood.’ The gun barrage over the sluggish Ouse CEASED, sudden silence informing villages and farms to east and west the siege was over.
Or almost. A grumbling appendix of garrison offence required one further show of force– along with a farcical (though to Manchester’s rustic soldiery, alarming) ‘two hour wrangle at the gate, in the darkness of the summer night’ amid harrowing cries of ‘Give fire!’ Men died in the confusion.
Next day, Manchester’s troops marched into Tuesday Market Place through streets lined only with women – that’s an interesting story to research and tell on another occasion - and established his HQ at the house of deposed MP Thomas Toll (who had escaped house-arrest several days earlier though a window. The usual story.) The Earl ordered a thanksgiving service for the peaceful end of the siege, and sermons for the townspeople each morning.
Royalist arms were seized; leaders arrested. After a parley lasting many hours, and a pause for dinner, Hamon L’Estrange was held liable for all damages caused and his estates and property in west Norfolk sequestrated. His gamble on the fortunes of war had miscarried, though not that disastrously, as he was still able to divide a considerable estate between his sons on his death in the Cromwellian England of 1653. The ‘gentlemen strangers’ were told to leave town, though keeping their horses, swords and pistols. A general amnesty was agreed and Lynn’s Parliament-tending, make-trade-not-war townspeople got their desired end.
For the next year, until the war moved west and south on the growing Parliamentary tide, Lynn became the front line garrison-town of the Eastern Association and major munitions store of Parliament forces. London ships landed military cargoes for distribution inland up the Ouse and some Lynn merchants grew rich on the gun-running.
But by January 1645, Alderman Toll was travelling to Norwich to complain. The cost of billeting the garrison was unpopular and debts were incurred by tradesmen for supplies to the army. Enlisted Lynn men needed compensation for their dependents and impressed sailors’ families grew rancorous. Such grievances took years to settle: 2000 oaks were sent from London to repair buildings in 1648 – 5 years - and tradesmen’s garrison debts were not settled until 1649. Just what trade didn’t need, as feared.
Hamon’s youngest son Roger, after fighting at his father’s side at the Siege of Lynn, joined the King at Oxford. He was ‘an enthusiastic, hot-headed, plausible young man… perpetually evolving ambitious schemes and failing to bring them to fruition.’ There is a word for people like him – it is ‘cavalier.’ He convinced the King, against all the evidence, that a spirit of Royalist resistance remained at Lynn and that he was the man to lead it.’
The King supplied him with a commission and a letter, dated November 1644, promising him ‘a considerable power’ to consolidate the uprising. Roger went straight to Appleton Hall, owned by the Royalist William Paston of Oxnead, and enlisted a Lynn sea captain named Leaman in his hare-brained scheme, who promptly shopped him to the authorities in Lynn. They sent their agents, disguised as beggar sailors, to rush up the stairs and arrest the Cavalier spy, costing his father deep in the purse and in deeply personal embarrassment. Roger was imprisoned for four years in Newgate under sentence of execution. He escaped ‘with the privy of his keeper’ – there you go again - in the relaxed conditions at the end of the First Civil War - then promptly engaged in a madcap rising in the Second!
Sources: RW Ketton-Cremer ‘Norfolk In The Civil War’; P. Richards ‘King’s Lynn’; Susan Yaxley ‘The Siege of King’s Lynn’.
The Lecture: Cavalier and Puritan
In September 1643, along the Lynn waterfront, huge cannon balls and shot took the place of peaceful trade. When we last gave this talk in Lynn on Sep 3, we did so in the very firing line of that siege. To the combatants in 1643, it was a matter of life and death, fought over the banks of the Ouse. Why? What was at stake?
The Lecture: Cavalier and Puritan
In September 1643, along the Lynn waterfront, huge cannon balls and shot took the place of peaceful trade. When we last gave this talk in Lynn on Sep 3, we did so in the very firing line of that siege. To the combatants in 1643, it was a matter of life and death, fought over the banks of the Ouse. Why? What was at stake?
We might call it the advance of history. The advance of Parliamentary government – victorious at Lynn and subsequently in the War of which it was a microcosm, reversed by the Restoration; then confirmed again by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and completed by all the subsequent Reform Acts. The cavalry charge of the parliamentary future. Against the besieged castle of the royalist past.
We might also call it the Puritan Revolution but all these terms are loaded - by hindsight, and by the memory of radical army activists who briefly flourished in the ferment of civil war, like prophets of the future. The ‘Anglican’ Revolution might be a more accurate term. Mainstream ‘Puritans’ would have seen themselves as conservative defenders of the Elizabethan settlement against an all too ‘cavalier’ Stuartship (stewardship) of it. In their own hearts and minds ‘Puritans’ were resisting a counter-Reformation being sneaked back in through the vestry door by Catholic-leaning Stuart kings and Archbishops, all of them suspected of holding a candle at both ends for the Pope.
These ‘Puritans’ were preserving the Reformation of Oliver Cromwell’s great great grandfather once removed Thomas Cromwell, whose statue-bashing and stained glass-smashing is often blamed (like much else) on Oliver.
So when I use the term ‘Puritan’ don’t Quaker in your boots too much: think Church of England, albeit a Church of England fighting for its very life and for the soul of the country in a war that killed one in four Englishmen. That’s per capita more than both World Wars out together. The bloodiest war in our history, in fact. Almost too horrible for the national memory to recover. Yet still shaping us and our ‘liberal’ constitution: one in which Catholics and nonconformists were not fully citizens until the 19C; in which the last king to rule as a Catholic is still Henry VIII; the last to die as one is Charles II (he converted on his death bed;) where a Catholic Tony Blair still has to leave office before his ‘conversion;’ where the ‘Puritan’ remains a bogey man. Where ‘Cavalier’ is a both glamorously positive noun and a negative adjective (a caddish – flaky - gallant.)
The Ballad of Freeborn John
The English Republican (sung live at Oliver Cromwell's House, Ely)
The English Republican (sung live at Oliver Cromwell's House, Ely)
The Ballad of The Backwoods Cavalier (hear this comic ballad live, performed by Lovehearts and Redwine, at True's Yard on Sep 2 and Marriott's Warehouse on Sep 3 2016.)
Hamon L’Estrange of Hunstanton Hall (was) a sexagenarian Cavalier living in the grand style with expensive tastes; expensive sons running up debts; eighteen servants (including a falconer and a fool) and a black marble floor in his stables. …He… led a Town Hall coup, declaring himself, on 13 August – without any mandate whatsoever - ‘governor of Lynn for the king’. The borough’s two MPs, John Percival and Thomas Toll, were put under house arrest.
Hamon’s youngest son Roger, after fighting at his father’s (losing) side at the Siege of Lynn, joined the King at Oxford. He was ‘an enthusiastic, hot-headed, plausible young man… perpetually evolving ambitious schemes and failing to bring them to fruition.’ He convinced the King, against all the evidence, that a spirit of Royalist resistance remained at Lynn and that he was the man to lead it.’ The King supplied him with a commission and a letter, dated November 1644, promising him ‘a considerable power’ to consolidate the uprising. Roger went straight to Appleton Hall, owned by the Royalist William Paston of Oxnead, and enlisted a Lynn sea captain named Leaman in his hare-brained scheme, who promptly shopped him to the authorities in Lynn
Magazine Cottage, Sedgeford, is believed to have been a powder magazine built in 1640 by Hamon L’Estrange, Lord of the Manor of Sedgeford.
My father leapt upon his high horse
And galloped it hard into Lynn,
“I seize this Parliamentary town,
Declare it for the King!”
“You have no mandate!” cried Mayor and MPs
Laughed Dad, “Arrest those knaves!
Cavalier bravado has come to town
Which you from yourselves I’ll save.”
Though Cromwell’s preachies at the Gate
Of Lynn as at Heaven knock,
Our stained glass windows shoot all to hell,
Our royal passage block,
My dad’s the lord of this manor, say I,
And cavalier farmers are we,
Against the odds and facts and slings
Of cowherd reality.
Say I “Great king, your royal East
And loyal Lynn, I’ll re-seize ’em,
They’re rebels for Your Majesty
And I’m the man to lead ’em!”
The king he writes a broad letter
And thrusts it into my hand,
“Roger L’Estrange shall rule in Lynn
With phantoms I command.”
We live and die a chevalier’s life,
Have it all and spend even more
On a falconer, fool, on a fowl-mouthed fop’s
Black marble stable floor.
My dad’s the lord of this manor, say I,
And cavalier farmers are we,
Against the odds and facts and slings
Of cowherd reality.
.
From Oxford Town to Norfolk woods
The four winds see me ride
And show my fine letter to a Jack
His poor coat to turn or bribe.
‘Captain Leaman’ is that seaman,
Cries he, ‘Er, we’ll talk anon,
I must now to Lynn awhile but will
Return here to Appleton.”
He rides to Colonel Walton and brings
Six redcoats in disguise,
“Show us His Royal Traitor’s hand!’
They pinch me as a spy.
My dad’s the lord of this manor, say I,
And cavalier farmers are we,
Against the odds and facts and slings
Of cowherd reality.
Reviews of the Marriott's Warehouse show
"September 3rd. On the banks of West Lynn stood an army of vengeful Parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell. Cannons fired over the Great Ouse…
Exactly 371 years later, a sell-out crowd gathered at Marriott’s Warehouse. The Siege of Lynn and the Civil War were revived by eminent historian Dr Paul Richards and the writer and raconteur Gareth Calway.
Dr Richards delivered a talk on the Siege, with various fascinating diversions. He set out a compelling case that Lynn’s politics were influenced more by mercantile interests than spiritual convictions.
Part 2, presented by Gareth Calway, starred Cromwell’s decapitated head. In this amusing monologue, fact was stranger, and more macabre, than fiction. We were treated to more puns than we could count (eyes rolled, not unlike the heads!). This consummate performance was a novel way to present the past.
The evening’s entertainment was fit for a King - or a Lord Protector!" Helen Thirkettle
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