Showing posts with label Charles I. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles I. Show all posts
August 05, 2022
August 05, 2021
The English Civil Wars and Other Nursery Crimes coming this Sunday!!
The video premieres Sunday August 22, 11 am. (date the Civil War started in 1642)
A musical film of the Phezant Tail’s new album “The English Civil Wars and Other Nursery Crimes” which premieres on August 22, the date the English Civil War began in 1642. Both album and film tell the story of an England at war with itself in the Roundhead v Cavalier conflict of 1642-1651 (and the origins of that conflict in the English Reformation of a century before) revealing the hidden meanings of familiar nursery rhymes associated with those conflicts. This soundtrack is linked here to still images of the folk and storytelling duo in Royalist and Puritan costume against the historical interior (stained glass, plain glass, wall paintings, whitewashed wall paintings, altar rails etc) and exterior of a small local parish church in Norfolk, which preserve the story of those conflicts. It also features two colour plates central to the story of that Radical 17C attempt to build a visionary new England by the artist William Blake from his mixed media works ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem.’
Photography by Bhas Allan. (Additional photography by the Phezant's Tail)
The costumes are Cromwell's Preachy/New Jerusalem (Maz) and Whore of Babylon/Old Gloriana (Gaz) depending on your point of view!
Digital download of album with full notes, lyrics and credits https://phezants-tail.bandcamp.com/al... (this link also goes live on Aug 22)
January 30, 2021
January 30, Humpty Dumpty and The Siege of Lynn
The nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" is said to be a concise folk account of the English Civil War. In some interpretations Humpty Dumpty is that fallen would-be Absolute Monarch (Charles I) himself, whom all his cavalry and men couldn't restore. In others it is a piece of fallen royalist artillery on the walls of Colchester during the siege of 1648. We wonder if the rhyme immortalised the moment when the Humpy Dumpty of Absolute Monarchy was forever broken in these islands as not even the Restoration of 1660 could put Humpty together again or prevent him developing back into the Parliamentary model.
January 30 1649 was the day Englishmen took the rather un-English step of chopping off a Head of State ("Chop off his head with the crown upon it," as Cromwell put it) and January 30 1661 was the day the only English republic was symbolically beheaded in the posthumous exhumation and beheading of Cromwell's corpse, until then honourably buried in Henry VII's tomb. (Cromwell's head now resides secretly in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the college he himself attended but had to leave on his father's death.) So it seems a fitting day to release our gothic musical comedy about a decisive early action in the Civil War, the Siege of Lynn of 1643.
It makes a nice tourist-story to suggest Lynn was a valiant Royalist town holding back the tide but in fact the backwoods Cavaliers who stormed and held it for a month had as much legitimacy as the thugs who stormed the Capitol in the last days of Trump. The royalist coup, against the two legitimately elected Parliamentarian MPs and a Parliamentary mayor, was led by a Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton Hall (a large painting of him still has pride of place in the elegant Town Hall) anxious for his large but precarious personal fortune if the Parliamentarians won the war and started to address corruption. He was right to be anxious. His, and his son Roger's, passionate Royalism was indistinguishable from their financial self-interest and the deaths, destruction and terror their month-long coup brought down upon the strategically vital port were ultimately in that very cavalier and not very noble cause.
It's also important to remember that the King was not the constitutional monarchy of today, which most of the Parliamentarians would have fought for themselves, but a deluded tyrant. It would be a much better heritage story to explain that in 1643 a key victory for the future progression of Britain was fought and won across the great Ouse between West Lynn and Lynn. Parliament would never have won the War without its naval supremacy and the port of Lynn, along with its supply route into London and ten counties, was essential to retaining this at the start. Once Lynn was re-secured, the War could be fought on other frontiers. But if Lynn had remained in the hands of unelected cavaliers long enough for the royalist Duke of Newcastle to relieve the town, the whole course of the war might have been different.
Credits:
A Phezant's Tail-John Charlton composition.
(Words and bridge: The Phezant's Tail
Melody on the verses and chorus: John Charlton)
Produced by The Phezant's Tail
We are indebted to John Charlton for his work on this track, the first in a two way collaboration between us. His melody helped us marry those mutual exclusives: poetry sung and poetry acted (a long ambition of ours). He also sang with us and played acoustic and bass on the chorus and verse. And a very good time was had by all.
Pic of Lynn from West Lynn by Bhas Allan, taken in January 2019. Cromwell's Parliamentary artillery bombarded Lynn from this side while its navy blockaded from the Wash. The stained glass (west) window 'shot all to hell' was in the double towered church pictured (St Margaret's, Lynn Minster) and happened on September 3, a spookily recurring date in Cromwell's career. (The date of his three decisive victories in Ireland, Scotland and England 1649-1651 and the day he died in 1658.)
December 21, 2015
The Puritans' Christmas Party
(published in the EDP 19 Dec 2015)
And here I am talking baubles on Dec 23 2015 on BBC Radio Berkshire, 24 minutes in-
What would a Christmas Party at Oliver Cromwell’s house be like? It sounds like one of those oxymorons the great Puritan epic poet John Milton (Cromwell’s Latin Secretary) favoured – the ‘darkness visible’ of hell for instance. Oliver Cromwell’s House in Ely is inviting visitors to find out.
There would be poetry and music – Cromwell was a generous patron of the arts. There would even be minced pies and mulled wine – Cromwell, contrary to popular misconception, banned neither. But this is not really the issue. The issue is what would Cromwell celebrate.
Milton’s famous Ode ‘ On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity tells us.
In it Nature is represented as an Eve figure, a fallen woman. At Christ Tide, the dead of winter, she is nervous about meeting her Maker. Though naked of her ‘gawdy trim' – her flowers and foliage - her ‘guilty front’ is shameful.
Nature needs a December covering of virgin snow. In such wise, eyes downward, she is able to meet Christ’s gaze.
So far so anti-festive and anti-fun. The party-pooping killjoy Puritan, fearing life and the female, which some less spartan strands of Christianity, embellished with millenniums of solstice festival imported from pagan traditions - comparatively - embrace.
But hold you hard there. Milton’s poem is called ‘ON the morning of Christ’s Nativity.’ Eternity has entered Time; there is a deeper magic afoot. Every Christmas day is still the first. And on it, all evil and all pagan gods are banished.
Milton describes himself at the Nativity running ahead to offer his gift – the poem - ahead of the three ‘wisards’ bringing the newborn Christ their pagan gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It is this Eternity that the Puritans sought to enter at ‘Christ Tide’ behind closed doors and in quiet reflection with their families.
And though Cromwell never sought personally to impose such peace on the wassailing revellers whom Puritans would see as worshipping Mammon, his fundamentalist government did and it has rankled ever since.
There is nothing in the Bible telling Christians to celebrate Christ’s birth on 25 December (Mithras’s birthday and the Roman Saturnalia) nor to observe our chilly season of gifts, ghost stories, gluwein, or even the robin – a bird sacred to Thor. Pagans worshipping the sunrise at Stonehenge would recognise our 'Christ'mas before Jesus of Nazareth would.
But English Protestants defending the Reformation from what they saw as a sneaky Stuart slide back towards the excesses of Rome felt the same about the Stuart ‘Mass'. So even the mild Anglican Midnight service we attend as a concession to a half-forgotten faith in the midst of a month of shopping, feasting and boozing would have offended Cromwell let alone some of his more extreme supporters.
Cromwell bitterly divides opinion. As a board in Oliver Cromwell House asks, is he hero or villain?
His hero status is as a pioneer of Parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy. Modern Britons might admire his combination of strong progressive leadership with ‘warts and all' lack of vanity and personal ambition; the way a humble inspired Fen farmer rose to lead cavalry charges, then a new model army he founded with Sir Thomas Fairfax and finally the Greater England which conquered and constitutionally modernised (in Ireland, alas, brutally though no more brutally than the Tudors and Stuarts) the home nations.
AUDIO. The Ballad of Cromwell's Head, sung live in the Civil War Room at Oliver Cromwell's House, Ely.
Much – not all - of the Cromwellian project was reversed at the Restoration. But The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and subsequent progressive legislation restored it and revealed a man centuries ahead of his time. We admire too his Protestant non-sectarianism, his principles, the lack of corruption in his regime.
We don’t like him very much though. And much of that comes out in the popular myth that he cancelled Christmas.
I blame The Good King Charles interpretation of history which starts in the children’s fairy tales about the period: Charles I a martyred Christ figure, as painted by Van Dyke, rather than the tyrant and ‘Man of blood’ who broke treaties and perpetuated civil wars that wiped out one in four of the English population (more than both world wars put together). Paint is where the resemblance ends – there is a Miltonic cosmos between Charles’ absolutism and the Sermon on the Mount.
And but for the grace of Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar, Charles’ son, the “Merry Monarch,’ would have handed over Britain to Covenant-bashing Scottish Calvinists – they’d have cancelled a lot more than Christmas. This is forgotten. Instead, children hear about Charles II’s attractively indulgent (and self-centred) lifestyle and the romance of his royal escape to France from ‘Cromwell’s preachies.’
Neither Charles was a Good King Wencelas. All those fun-loving Cavalier Christmases in stately homes were of little use to the poor and homeless Christ inconveniently emphasises.
To me, the real folk song romantics of the English Civil War are not wealthy cavaliers hiding up trees, in drag, or down the priest holes of stately homes but the levelling redcoats who fought for a new England they could believe in. An England challenging the ‘divine right of kings’ to reverse the Reformation by stealth and to rule without Parliament.
Unlike fellow East Anglian people’s champion Robert Kett, Cromwell had the misfortune not to die for the cause – he lived to implement it. How does the romantic reputation of ‘God’s Englishman’ (Cromwell) endure success? How did he use the power he won?
Cromwell believed in oligarchy, not democracy, though for the first time in English history, one not based on class. The Rule of the Saints meant any Protestant man with a stake in the country, not just by owning property in it (Cromwell was himself never a great landowner) but by fighting for it. The Parliamentary army was drawn from a much wider and more democratic franchise than Parliament.
To Cromwell, Protestantism meant the individual conscience guided by God. (‘God not Man is King’ was the epitaph on his tomb.) And God could speak through anybody.
This made him (contrary to propaganda) unusually tolerant as (against the Puritan stereotype) he claimed no special divination over other Protestants. And Catholic historians agree that even Catholics, except (alas) in Ireland, were better treated under his regime than was the norm under the Stuarts and Tudors.
‘Puritans’ did not see themselves through our modern eyes as killjoys but as mainstream Protestants defending the Reformation and the Protestant England of Good Queen Bess. Cromwell is popularly misrepresented as smashing all the stained glass out of the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral (that was Thomas Cromwell) and as draining all the colour and cheer out of Christmas.
But Oliver was defending the deep magic of Christ Tide. Of Eternity entering Time. Not just from the heathen paganism of pre-Christian times but from the ‘Roman’ festival the Stuart Church would make of it, the country and Christianity.
The Christmas trail at Oliver Cromwell House in Ely visitely.eastcambs.gov.uk runs until twelfth night. It guides visitors around Cromwell’s house and asks them to identify objects alien to genuine Christmas tradition.
Gareth Calway has just published ‘Doin different – new ballads from the East of England’ - on sale in bookshops throughout East Anglia or from www.poppyland.co.uk . 'Doin different' includes ballads on Cromwell, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Robert Kett and the proto-Protestant martyr William Sawtrey of Lynn.
Anto Morra’s new CD ‘Boudicca’s Country’ (12 ballads from ‘Doin different) includes ‘A Lynn Carol’ inspired by Margery Kempe - you can hear it live tomorrow at Fring Church Carol Service or on www.poppyland.co.uk - and ‘The Ballad of Cromwell’s Head’.
Read Gareth's EDP feature on The Meaning of Christmas: Santa and Saturnalia at the Solstice
For an opposing view see ‘William Winstanley- The Man Who Saved Christmas’ by Alison Barnes (www.poppyland.co.uk)
And here I am talking baubles on Dec 23 2015 on BBC Radio Berkshire, 24 minutes in-
What would a Christmas Party at Oliver Cromwell’s house be like? It sounds like one of those oxymorons the great Puritan epic poet John Milton (Cromwell’s Latin Secretary) favoured – the ‘darkness visible’ of hell for instance. Oliver Cromwell’s House in Ely is inviting visitors to find out.
There would be poetry and music – Cromwell was a generous patron of the arts. There would even be minced pies and mulled wine – Cromwell, contrary to popular misconception, banned neither. But this is not really the issue. The issue is what would Cromwell celebrate.
Milton’s famous Ode ‘ On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity tells us.
In it Nature is represented as an Eve figure, a fallen woman. At Christ Tide, the dead of winter, she is nervous about meeting her Maker. Though naked of her ‘gawdy trim' – her flowers and foliage - her ‘guilty front’ is shameful.
Nature needs a December covering of virgin snow. In such wise, eyes downward, she is able to meet Christ’s gaze.
So far so anti-festive and anti-fun. The party-pooping killjoy Puritan, fearing life and the female, which some less spartan strands of Christianity, embellished with millenniums of solstice festival imported from pagan traditions - comparatively - embrace.
But hold you hard there. Milton’s poem is called ‘ON the morning of Christ’s Nativity.’ Eternity has entered Time; there is a deeper magic afoot. Every Christmas day is still the first. And on it, all evil and all pagan gods are banished.
Milton describes himself at the Nativity running ahead to offer his gift – the poem - ahead of the three ‘wisards’ bringing the newborn Christ their pagan gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It is this Eternity that the Puritans sought to enter at ‘Christ Tide’ behind closed doors and in quiet reflection with their families.
And though Cromwell never sought personally to impose such peace on the wassailing revellers whom Puritans would see as worshipping Mammon, his fundamentalist government did and it has rankled ever since.
There is nothing in the Bible telling Christians to celebrate Christ’s birth on 25 December (Mithras’s birthday and the Roman Saturnalia) nor to observe our chilly season of gifts, ghost stories, gluwein, or even the robin – a bird sacred to Thor. Pagans worshipping the sunrise at Stonehenge would recognise our 'Christ'mas before Jesus of Nazareth would.
But English Protestants defending the Reformation from what they saw as a sneaky Stuart slide back towards the excesses of Rome felt the same about the Stuart ‘Mass'. So even the mild Anglican Midnight service we attend as a concession to a half-forgotten faith in the midst of a month of shopping, feasting and boozing would have offended Cromwell let alone some of his more extreme supporters.
Cromwell bitterly divides opinion. As a board in Oliver Cromwell House asks, is he hero or villain?
His hero status is as a pioneer of Parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy. Modern Britons might admire his combination of strong progressive leadership with ‘warts and all' lack of vanity and personal ambition; the way a humble inspired Fen farmer rose to lead cavalry charges, then a new model army he founded with Sir Thomas Fairfax and finally the Greater England which conquered and constitutionally modernised (in Ireland, alas, brutally though no more brutally than the Tudors and Stuarts) the home nations.
AUDIO. The Ballad of Cromwell's Head, sung live in the Civil War Room at Oliver Cromwell's House, Ely.
Much – not all - of the Cromwellian project was reversed at the Restoration. But The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and subsequent progressive legislation restored it and revealed a man centuries ahead of his time. We admire too his Protestant non-sectarianism, his principles, the lack of corruption in his regime.
We don’t like him very much though. And much of that comes out in the popular myth that he cancelled Christmas.
I blame The Good King Charles interpretation of history which starts in the children’s fairy tales about the period: Charles I a martyred Christ figure, as painted by Van Dyke, rather than the tyrant and ‘Man of blood’ who broke treaties and perpetuated civil wars that wiped out one in four of the English population (more than both world wars put together). Paint is where the resemblance ends – there is a Miltonic cosmos between Charles’ absolutism and the Sermon on the Mount.
And but for the grace of Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar, Charles’ son, the “Merry Monarch,’ would have handed over Britain to Covenant-bashing Scottish Calvinists – they’d have cancelled a lot more than Christmas. This is forgotten. Instead, children hear about Charles II’s attractively indulgent (and self-centred) lifestyle and the romance of his royal escape to France from ‘Cromwell’s preachies.’
Neither Charles was a Good King Wencelas. All those fun-loving Cavalier Christmases in stately homes were of little use to the poor and homeless Christ inconveniently emphasises.
To me, the real folk song romantics of the English Civil War are not wealthy cavaliers hiding up trees, in drag, or down the priest holes of stately homes but the levelling redcoats who fought for a new England they could believe in. An England challenging the ‘divine right of kings’ to reverse the Reformation by stealth and to rule without Parliament.
Unlike fellow East Anglian people’s champion Robert Kett, Cromwell had the misfortune not to die for the cause – he lived to implement it. How does the romantic reputation of ‘God’s Englishman’ (Cromwell) endure success? How did he use the power he won?
Cromwell believed in oligarchy, not democracy, though for the first time in English history, one not based on class. The Rule of the Saints meant any Protestant man with a stake in the country, not just by owning property in it (Cromwell was himself never a great landowner) but by fighting for it. The Parliamentary army was drawn from a much wider and more democratic franchise than Parliament.
To Cromwell, Protestantism meant the individual conscience guided by God. (‘God not Man is King’ was the epitaph on his tomb.) And God could speak through anybody.
This made him (contrary to propaganda) unusually tolerant as (against the Puritan stereotype) he claimed no special divination over other Protestants. And Catholic historians agree that even Catholics, except (alas) in Ireland, were better treated under his regime than was the norm under the Stuarts and Tudors.
‘Puritans’ did not see themselves through our modern eyes as killjoys but as mainstream Protestants defending the Reformation and the Protestant England of Good Queen Bess. Cromwell is popularly misrepresented as smashing all the stained glass out of the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral (that was Thomas Cromwell) and as draining all the colour and cheer out of Christmas.
But Oliver was defending the deep magic of Christ Tide. Of Eternity entering Time. Not just from the heathen paganism of pre-Christian times but from the ‘Roman’ festival the Stuart Church would make of it, the country and Christianity.
The only gift....There it is, in the Jarrolds' Christmas window.
Read Gareth's EDP feature on The Meaning of Christmas: Santa and Saturnalia at the Solstice
For an opposing view see ‘William Winstanley- The Man Who Saved Christmas’ by Alison Barnes (www.poppyland.co.uk)
January 20, 2014
Cromwell's Talking Head and Siege of Lynn winter tour 2014
Cromwell’s Talking Head, a dramatic monologue by Gareth Calway. Lively rehearsed reading in the horrible history genre aimed at the naughty kid in all of us. But it's all true - Cromwell the king-killer really was dug up from his 'royal' grave at the Restoration and his head stuck on a traitor's pole for 25 years. Cromwell’s severed head tells his ghastly story of civil war and regicide to a modern grave robber. You’ll laugh your head off!
TOUR DATES
Cambridgeshire
Cromwell's Talking Head by Norfolk author Gareth Calway Oliver Cromwell’s House, 29 St Mary’s St, Ely CB7 4HF - Thursday, January 30, 2014. Ticket info 01353 662062 www.olivercromwellshouse.co.uk East Cambridgeshire Tourist Office says, "Join us on the anniversary of Cromwell’s grisly exhumation for a guided tour of his former home followed by a lively reading of a dramatic monologue. Hear the real story of what happened to the great man’s beheaded corpse. 2 pm. £7.50 includes glass of Cromwell cider."
Norfolk
Cromwell’s Talking Head plus, a dramatic monologue by Gareth Calway. Cromwell’s horrible history told by his severed head! Includes a bonus talk on the Siege of Lynn, 1643. Two gigs:
The Gin Trap, Ringstead, Norfolk, Friday 31 January. £5. Starts 7.30. Ticket info 01485 571828 www.garethcalway.co.uk
Great Massingham Social Club, Norfolk, Monday 3 February. £5. Members free. Starts 7.30. Ticket info 01485 571828 www.garethcalway.co.uk
Filled the 'Folkpot' room at Great Massingham with the artistic and intellectual flower of West Norfolk (3 pictured of 23 present). Expert questions after the talk - a real debate with real people engaged with the issues - in a fun atmosphere and lots of naughty kid laughter during the monologue. A splendid time had by all and a small party to follow - not bad for a cold Monday night in February!
Norwich,
Jurnet's Bar, Wensum Lodge, Wednesday 5 February 9.30 pm. Donation box only. Bar. Info 01485 571828. (as part of regular 8 pm-10.30 pm Storytelling event run by Dave Tong www.theyarnsmithofnorwich.com)
New territory - in the history-burdened bowels of the big city among ye guild of dedicated storytellers and with Cromwell comically at odds with the set theme of the evening - dragon tales (from all cultures, Nordic, Japanese, Beowulf etc) - but you could hear a pun drop in the silence. I sportingly contributed an impassioned Worm to the first half - dramatic verse done as one man theatre is not quite storytelling either. Had some generous feedback though.
http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/what-s-on/lifestyle-and-leisure/gareth-takes-a-horrible-history-look-at-cromwell-at-west-norfolk-venues-1-5835343
News Release from East Cambridgeshire District Council 21 January
What did happen to Oliver Cromwell’s body?
This January, Oliver Cromwell House will be the place to learn about what really happened to the former Lord Protector’s beheaded corpse.
‘Cromwell’s Talking Head’ on Thursday 30 January at 2pm, visitors to the tourist venue will be taken on a guided tour of the House followed by a dramatic monologue from Norfolk author Gareth Calway.
Gareth will explain how the body was buried in the manner of a king only to be exhumed after the Restoaration to be hung, drawn and quartered with the head put on the traitor’s pole over Westminister Hall for 25 years.
The mystery of what happened next is then told in vivd detail as Cromwell’s remains were hidden in various locations, presented at freaks shows and became the source of a terrible curse before finally being laid to rest at Sideny Sussex College in Cambridge.
Tracey Harding, Team Leader Tourism and Town Centre Services at East Cambridgeshire District Council, said: “It is wonderful to have Gareth Calway come back to tell his fascinating monologue of what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s corpse after it was exhumed during the reign of Charles II. What adds to the colour of the talk is knowing it is all based as far as possible on historical fact – it reminds us all that we have much to learn from the behaviour of our ancestors.”
Tickets are priced at £7.50 includes which includes a glass of Cromwell cider. For more information call 01353 662062 or visit www.visitely.org.uk.
ENDS
Notes for editors
For further information contact Tony Taylorson in the Communications Team on 01223 699285.
PRESS RELEASE JANUARY 20 2014.
'Cromwell's Talking Head' is a lively rehearsed reading of 25 minutes, with a bit of Celtic drum. It was the first ever spoken word hosted by Ely Folk Festival last August (picture attached), officially judged as 'wonderful' and went down well in a hot marquee to eighty plus people.
It is in the horrible history genre and aimed at the naughty kid in all of us. But it's all true - Cromwell the king-killer really was dug up from his 'royal' grave at the Restoration, hung, drawn, quartered and his head stuck on a traitor's pole for 25 years. After centuries of adventures in freaks shows and dodgy museums, bits nicked by trophy hunters, and carrying a legendary curse, the head was authenticated by cranial detectives and in 1960 secretly buried at his old college in Cambridge University. Secretly in case drunken royalist students dig him up again! In the monologue, the head tells the ghastly story and the story of the Civil War to a young grave robber who has dug up more than he bargained for. It's funny, informative and not that comfortable for royal ears. You’ll laugh your head off!
PRESS RELEASE Jan 15 2014
CROMWELL’S TALKING HEAD RETURNS TO OLIVER CROMWELL’S HOUSE
As Head of State, Oliver, emulating his Tudor ancestor Thomas, oversaw an English Revolution centuries ahead of his time and raised English prestige abroad to its highest level between Agincourt and Trafalgar (400 years). Yet within three years of ‘royal’ burial, he was disgraced and spat upon. Only in Victorian times was there a national revival of respect/campaign for a statue outside the Parliament he did so much to advance. (Queen Victoria refused assent.) Gareth’s monologue has been described as "A triumph of narration and vocal colour" (Radio drama reviews) and as an "Interesting and lively new take on Cromwell" (Cromwell House) Surprising facts about Oliver – like his tolerance – will emerge. Cromwell’s Talking Head has a twice-yearly residency at Oliver Cromwell’s house marking Oliver’s posthumous execution (Jan 30) and ‘lucky day’ (Sep 3.)
An exciting partnership with ex-Mayor of Lynn and now deputy lord lieutenant of Norfolk Dr Paul Richards (author of the documentary history of King’s Lynn) is planned for next September 3 at Marriott’s Warehouse. This partnership will combine Calway’s monologue with some context from Dr Richards about Cromwell’s securing of King’s Lynn for the Parliamentary cause in 1643, against the intrigues of Thomas Gurlyn, Dr Richards’ mayoral predecessor – and a covert royalist - at that time. Meanwhile, at Ringstead and Massingham, Cromwell’s Talking Head is preceded by the author’s own talk on The Siege of Lynn 1643.
http://www.edp24.co.uk/norfolk-life/norfolk-history/17_jurnet_s_house_1_214362 Fascinating history of this house. Owned by Jews until the latter's expulsion from England for 400 years until - yes - Cromwell welcomed them back. Later owned by the famous Pastons. Dripping with history and atmosphere.
The Siege of Lynn 1643. Feature article published in the Eastern Daily Press Friday 24 January
The Siege of Lynn 1643
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, it might have turned war and country king-wards.
The Siege of 1643 is the whole war in microcosm: Cavalier audacity; Parliamentary accountability; a divided populace (tending to Parliament) above all united in devout wish for harvest, trade, peace over plunder, billeting, destruction.
And introducing one Colonel Cromwell, typically chastising his then superiors to greater efforts. ‘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.’
And an explosive September 3, ominous date of all Cromwell’s decisive victories, and his death.
Both of Lynn’s two MPs supported Parliament. Yet ‘Lynn Regis’ bears the (temporary) distinction – or stigma - of being the only Royalist town in Eastern England.
Charles I needed a strong fleet: the Civil War was partly triggered by his levies of Ship Money on a reluctant population. Losing London to Parliament was a blunder; losing the East-based navy began to seem like fecklessness. So he needed Lynn: chief exporter of the region’s corn; favoured port of entry to the eastern counties and import-supplier to ten counties (and London).
Parliament grasped this vital strategic importance of Lynn as a gateway between Royalist North and Parliamentary East and South. 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 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.
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 ‘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 Word. Cromwell and Manchester lambasted the committees of the Eastern Association for ‘more arms, more troops, more supplies.’ Trust in God and keep your powder dry.
A siege brewed. An August entry in the record of the civic authorities notes that ‘a great company of strangers are now come to the Burgh’ and must be resisted. 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.
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 (who faced possible financial ruin if his enemies controlled Norfolk) with ‘a thousand pounds out of his own purse’ and (whose) 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, causing few casualties but much psychological damage. Houses and property were damaged and abandoned and the shrieks of women and children carried well beyond the town walls: 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 was within musket shot by September 7th.
The garrison dug in and waited for Newcastle. He never came. It made gallant 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 Cavalier bravado.
Meanwhile the local economy choked and the town feared ruin, even 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, dismaying) ‘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 and established his HQ at the house of deposed MP Thomas Toll (who had escaped house-arrest several days earlier though a window.) 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 miscarried, though 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 Parliament tide, Lynn became the front line garrison-town of the Eastern Association and major munitions store of Parliament forces.
Sources: RW Ketton-Cremer ‘Norfolk In The Civil War’; P. Richards ‘King’s Lynn’; Susan Yaxley ‘The Siege of King’s Lynn’.
Gareth Calway’s winter tour of ‘Cromwell’s Talking Head’ (a dramatic monologue by Cromwell’s severed head) comes to Oliver Cromwell’s House, Ely, Jan 30 2 pm (info 01353 662062), The Gin Trap Inn, Ringstead,* Jan 31, 7.30 pm; Great Massingham Social Club,* Feb 3, 7.30 pm and Jurnet’s Bar, Norwich, Feb 5, 9.30 pm (info 01485 571828) * = includes a talk on The Siege of Lynn.
July 15, 2013
Been There, Done That, Got My Name On The T Shirt: Cromwell's Talking Head at Ely Folk Festival
'Cromwell's Talking Head' is a lively rehearsed reading of 30 minutes. It was the first ever spoken word hosted by Ely Folk Festival in July 2013, where it went down like a real ale in a hot marquee. It has an ongoing residency at Oliver Cromwell's House in Ely, bookings at Marriott's Warehouse Upstairs in King's Lynn and the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon and tours pubs, clubs and storytelling venues.
Cromwell's Talking Head is in the horrible history genre and aimed at the naughty kid in all of us. But it's all true - Cromwell the king-killer really was dug up from his 'royal' grave at the Restoration, hung, drawn, quartered and his head stuck on a traitor's pole for 25 years. After centuries of adventures in freaks shows and dodgy museums, bits nicked by trophy hunters, and carrying a legendary curse, the head was authenticated by cranial detectives and in 1960 secretly buried at his old college in Cambridge University. Secretly in case drunken royalist students dig him up again! In the monologue, the head tells the ghastly story and the story of the Civil War to a young grave robber who has dug up more than he bargained for. It's funny, informative and not that comfortable for royal ears. You’ll laugh your head off!
'A triumph of narration and verbal colouring' (Radio Drama Reviews.)
To hear the Siren FM radio production, go to iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-reading-room/id399470470
SEE ALSO: http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/press-release-jan-15-2014-cromwells.html Cromwell's Talking Head winter tour 2014
At Ely 2013, I enjoyed the support of a youngster in the crowd named Ethan reminding me to hit the triangle at the head of each chapter and got lots of lovely feedback. Cromwell rides again!
CROMWELL'S TALKING HEAD ELY FOLK FESTIVAL
PRESS RELEASE JULY 2013
14 July is a great date for Republicans in France. But the French don’t have the monopoly on setting up republics and chopping off the heads of tyrannical kings. Our very own Oliver Cromwell might appreciate his story being told on Bastille Day at this year’s Ely Folk Festival, twenty minutes walk from his old stomping ground and national memorial at Oliver Cromwell’s House, and in the shadow of Ely Cathedral.
The great patriot – “we are English, that’s one good fact” - might point out that he headed up the English Revolution a ‘big hundred’ century before Robespierre and Bonaparte led the French. The humble gentleman farmer Cromwell, first as soldier and then as statesman, combines the positive qualities of both these French leaders. The English Empire he established in the 1650s held a position in the world higher than any other between Agincourt and Trafalgar – 400 years. English (round)heads were held high.
Until the Stuart Restoration in 1660. At this point, Cromwell’s body, preserved and buried (against his wish) in royal state in the tomb of soldier-king Henry VII, was dug up by vengeful royalists, hanged at Tyburn, drawn, quartered, beheaded, and its tooth-smashed, ear-torn head spiked on the roof of Westminster Hall: the punishment meted out by Charles II for beheading his father Charles I in 1649. Cromwell’s head remained on its spike for 25 years, surveying the Great Fire of London and enduring a quarter of a century of English weather, until finally removed by a thunderbolt .
Fire and smoke damage ensued as it was hidden up a chimney by an old soldier (one of the redcoats he and Sir Thomas Fairfax had formed during the Civil War into the victorious New Model Army) and then spent centuries in freak shows and dodgy museums, bits being broken off as souvenirs. The Curse of Cromwell’s Head was said to follow anyone who held it in his possession and gory tales bear witness to this so-called curse.
But the real story is gothic enough. As is the curse. Cromwell is not a great favourite with the royalist view of history and whenever kings were popular, Cromwell’s head was best kept secret. But when the English grew restless again under unpopular and self-indulgent monarchs - such as James II and even for periods of Victoria’s reign – this relic of our only republic became a focus for demands that Cromwell’s progressive politics be honoured.
The relic was validated ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ as Cromwell’s actual head and buried in his old college at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge in 1960. A nearby plaque commemorates the fact but the actual whereabouts are kept secret for fear royalist students might dig it up again. And what a story the head could tell if it talked!
Well now it is. Gareth’s carefully researched dramatic monologue imagines the conversation when a grave robber exhumes the head at midnight. After two sell out performances at the House last year, it will be staged at this year’s festival in Marquee 3 between 2 pm and 2.50 pm on July 14.
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