Ian Atherton

Royalist Finances in the English Civil War: The Case of Lichfield Garrison, 1643–5

Abstract Military histories of the first civil war in England have tended to concentrate on battles to the exclusion of the role of garrison warfare, even though the typical action of the war was not a set-piece battle but an assault on a fortified strongpoint. This article seeks to redress that imbalance, by examining one medium-sized royalist garrison, that of Lichfield Close. The survival of two sets of garrison accounts allows an examination of the finances of the garrison as part of a wider investigation of the Royalist war effort in the north midlands. The accepted trajectory of the Royalist war effort across the first civil war, from order to chaos, from regular systems of taxation to plunder, from co-operation with local communities to antagonism and hostility, are questioned. Royalist military administration is shown to have been more resilient and adaptable than hitherto believed. Lichfield garrison survived on lunder and raiding for most of 1643 before regular and reliable systems of local taxation were established at the end of that year, and those structures were still functioning remarkably efficiently at the end of 1645, long after many historians have already consigned Royalism to collapse and defeat.

Ambition and failure in Stuart England : the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore

The rhetorics of honour and advancement an inheritance of honour the intellectual and religious world of Viscount Scudamore Scudamore as a local governor the search for preferment Scudamore as Ambassdor, 1635-39 Scudamore as a Royalist Leader. Conclusion - honour, politics, ambition and Scudamore. Appendix - the image of the Scudamore.

CATHEDRALS, LAUDIANISM, AND THE BRITISH CHURCHES

Recent research has argued that English cathedrals, particularly but not exclusively Westminster Abbey, formed a ‘liturgical fifth column’ in the church and were the Trojan horse by which Laudianism – the ceremonial, clericalist, anti-Calvinist policies associated with Charles I and William Laud in the 1620s and 1630s – was introduced into the English church. This article re-examines links between cathedrals and Laudianism, not just in England, but also in the associated Protestant state churches of Charless other realms: Ireland and Scotland. Laudian divines emphasized cathedrals as liturgical showcases, ‘mother churches’ which their ‘daughters’, the parish churches, should follow in the policy of the ‘beauty of holiness’, particularly the placing, railing of, and reverence to the Laudian altar. However, cathedrals are shown to be more diverse than historians have generally allowed, and Laudian policies are shown to have been grafted on to cathedrals, rather than emerging from them. Caroline cathedrals were more the victims of Laudianism than its midwives.

Griffith Higgs's Account of the Sieges of and Iconoclasm at Lichfield Cathedral in 1643

Abstract While all cathedrals endured bouts of iconoclasm in the English civil wars, and many endured military attack, Lichfield suffered more than others, besieged twice in 1643 and for a third time in 1646. An eyewitness account of the first two sieges, in March and April 1643, written by the dean, Griffith Higgs, has been overlooked by historians because it is written in Latin. Translated for the first time here, it allows more detailed analysis not only of the 1643 the sieges, but also of the iconoclasm that the cathedral endured at the hands of the Parliaments troops after the first siege. Like other eyewitness accounts of attacks on cathedrals in 1642–3, it provides an insight into Royalist attitudes at the beginning of the war, as well as a means of assessing post-Restoration claims about the extent of damage and desecration at the hands of rebellious Parliamentarians.

Commemorating Conflict and the Ancient British Past in Augustan Britain

This article locates the roots of much current memorialising practice in the early eighteenth century, when medieval traditions of commemorating conflict through erecting memorials on battlefields were revived. Through an examination of two cases, a memorial to the fifth-century Alleluia Victory erected in 1736 by Nehemiah Griffith (which can be compared with his poems) and Sanderson Millers mid-eighteenth-century designed landscape to commemorate the battle of Edgehill (1642), the article also examines the use in such memorials of figures and languages from the ancient British and Saxon pasts to celebrate ideas of British and Protestant liberty and identity.

The battlefield war memorial: Commemoration and the battlefield site from the Middle Ages to the modern era

Abstract A battlefield memorial is designed to preserve a memory of the act of conquest or, in the rare cases of memorials erected by the defeated, a memory of resistance, as well as the more straightforward commemoration of the dead. Where the memory of the landscapes of war persists there must be a commitment to preservation and a continuing, if not necessarily continuous, ritual. Thus each battlefield is not only commemorated or forgotten by contemporaries; it also has an evolving life history. Medieval battlefields were often commemorated by the erection of chapels and other permanent memorials, but after the Reformation they were seen as accidental landscapes which remained unmarked and were gradually reabsorbed into the agrarian pattern. From the eighteenth century battlefields were rediscovered, first by antiquarians, who revived the practice of memorialization, and then by contemporaries who began again to preserve and memorialize the battlefields of the modern world.