Oliver Cromwell's Ely by Katherine Clements

Writing historical fiction involves a lot of research and time spent in libraries, museums and archives. It’s part of the job that I love. But when I’m working on a book, creating a sense of place is an important part of the process. Readers often ask how I research locations, how I find out what real places would have been like at a specific point in history.

My first novel, The Crimson Ribbon, is set mostly in London and Abingdon, but it begins in Ely, in the home of one of the town’s most famous residents, Oliver Cromwell. It was during my first research trip there that I learned the importance of visiting real settings, wherever possible.

The book is set during the years of the English Civil Wars when Cromwell was a man of influence in the town. He moved there in 1636, became Governor in 1643 and relocated his family to London towards the end of 1646.

Oliver Cromwell's House

Luckily, the family house still stands and is now a museum. I’d spent a lot of time learning about the man himself and walking around the house was quite emotive. On a practical level, it allowed me to understand the layout of the rooms and the positioning of the house both geographically and socially. Some of the interiors still have their original paneling and the inclusion of seventeenth century furniture gives it atmosphere, despite this somewhat creepy addition of an Oliver waxwork!

As soon as I decided to open the book in Ely, I knew the cathedral would feature in some way. It’s a spectacular building, made more so by the surrounding landscape. Ely isn’t a built up town even today, so it’s easy to imagine how impressive the cathedral would have been when Ely was just a village, and what a presence it must have been in people’s lives.

By the seventeenth century, many of the old medieval cathedrals had fallen into disuse and were beginning to crumble to ruin. They were used as meeting places, or markets and in some cases, such as St Paul’s in London, became hotbeds of sedition and debauchery. But Ely remained partly in use throughout. The structure overshadows Cromwell’s house and St Mary’s church where the Cromwell family worshipped; as a strict Puritan, Cromwell would not have welcomed this ever-present symbol of the old faith and all its associations.

The reputation of Cromwell as an iconoclast is well known but there’s no evidence that he was personally responsible for any damage to Ely Cathedral. It’s been claimed that he oversaw the demolition of the fallen tower and transept but in fact, this fell in the fourteenth century and most of the damage we see today was a result of Reformation zeal a hundred years before. A later Parliamentary campaign to demolish such buildings, never came to fruition.

Climbing the cathedral tower is a memorable experience. The fenland landscape falls away and a huge cloud-filled sky stretches out above. It gives a real sense of scale, quite different from on the ground. I couldn’t help wonder about the atmosphere of awe and superstition that might have surrounded these buildings and what it would have meant to the ordinary people that lived in the cathedral’s shadow during those tumultuous years.

The landscape surrounding Ely would have been quite different then too. By the mid-seventeenth century the Fens were being drained but the Isle of Ely was still surrounded by floodwaters at certain times of year. These days, there’s virtually nothing of the old fenland landscape left, but a visit to Wicken Fen gave me a good idea of how it might have looked. This National Trust nature reserve is doing great conservation work and is very evocative.

And what of the town itself? I began by studying old maps and images, plotting seventeenth century streets onto modern plans, to get a sense of layout and distances. Google maps can be a great help here, but nothing beats an actual visit. Ely is packed with history and walking the streets it’s not difficult to trace the old town seen in this 1610 map.

John Speed's map of Ely, 1610

I’ve also found that local museums, visitor centres and tourist information offices can house a wealth of information. I’ve discovered pamphlets and books written by local historians that give the kind of detail you can’t find elsewhere and lend a bit of colour – great for things like local myths and legends (and, significantly, the names of seventeenth century taverns!).

Turns out Oliver Cromwell’s Ely can still be found, just beneath the modern veneer. All that’s missing is the stink and clamour of seventeenth century England, and for that, we have imagination.


For more about Ely and its history, see these posts by fellow History Girls Adele Geras and Karen Maitland.


Oliver Cromwell's House

Ely Cathedral

Toppings Bookshop (for local history books and much more)


www.katherineclements.co.uk

Roundheads and Cavaliers - Celia Rees

When I was a child, as a change from playing Cowboys and Indians, we would charge about the woods and fields being Roundheads and Cavaliers. I was always a Cavalier, a choice based entirely on feathered hats,  swashbuckling outfits and Captain Marryat's The Children of the New Forest. A book I absolutely loved. I couldn't imagine a more wonderful life: living in the forest, hunting deer, feasting off venison and hiding from pesky Roundheads who were obviously The Enemy.

As I grew older and wiser, I changed my allegiance. I became a Roundhead. I first encountered the Putney Debates when I was studying history at university. I was struck most forcibly by the radical nature of the ideas being discussed and that they were being debated openly by men from all walks of life, from gentlemen landowners to labourers, button sellers and shoemakers, all with a voice that would be heard.

Sir Thomas Fairfax and the General Council of the Army

The debates took place in St Mary's Church, Putney in the Autumn of 1647. This was at the end of the first Civil War period. The forces of the King had been defeated. The New Model Army had triumphed. So much so, that when parliament voted for the army to be disbanded, they refused to go. Instead, the rank and file elected their own representatives, 'agitators', to resist any moves to send them home or to Ireland. A General Council of the Army was established which was made up of not just senior officers but also the agitators, elected by the rank and file, and junior officers from each regiment, so that ordinary soldiers would be heard, their opinions, respected,  alongside 'grandees likeSir Thomas Fairfax and Cromwell.

The General Council of the Army met at Putney to agree terms with the King which they set out in The Case of the Army Truly Stated but discussion of this submission led to a much more radical paper: An Agreement of the People.

The radical ideas in the Agreement were the subject of the Debates that subsequently took place at St Mary's Church. Ordinary soldiers, sent as the delegates from their regiments, sat alongside junior and senior officers. Even civilians, Levellers, were allowed to participate in open and free debate. No army has ever behaved like this, before or since, and the ideas that emerged from the debates were quite extraordinary for their time, or any time. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough expressed the core of the matter most memorably.

Really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under...

These words call to us down the years, sounding modern to our ears, as simple and clear as on that day in October 1647 when they were first expressed.

The voices that argued so fiercely for freedom and equality on those Autumn days in Putney were soon stifled and repressed. The Debates fell out of history, the transcripts only discovered 250 years later in the archives of Worcester College, Oxford. Not long, ironically, after the franchise demanded so fiercely and eloquently all those years before was finally granted with the Representation of the Pepole Act 1884, and still not every 'he' was included and certainly not every 'she'. Universal adult suffrage was not achieved until 1928.   .  

Those voices might have been stifled, but they were not silenced. They joined a chorus of radical dissent that ran beneath the surface of British history like an underground river, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always there, deep and strong, reaching back to the Lollards and on to the Known Men of Tudor England, the Dissenters and Puritans of Elizabethan England, the Levellers and Diggers, the Quakers who would bow their heads to no man and on to the American Revolution, to the Corresponding Societies in London at the time of the French Revolution, given open expression by Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecroft, running on to the Luddites and Dark Lantern Men, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists and finally emerging with the ILP when Keir Hardie took his place in the Parliament that had denied the demands of the New Model Army all those years before. The work was not finished, the cry was taken up by the Pankhursts and the Suffragettes until every she was given her representation.

Standing in the quiet of St Mary's in Putney, surrounded by the passion of the past,  I thought it ironic  that, after the most recent exercise in democracy, we should find ourselves governed by a small clique from a wealth and privileged elite, most of them closely linked to the aristocracy. Roundhead or Cavalier? Do we have to even ask? You get what you vote for, I suppose.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Poodles, Pooches and Political Propaganda

George Osbourne has a dog, named Lola (which is, most annoyingly, the name of my own dog). This fact was Tweeted recently along with a photo of the unthreateningly fluffy Bichon Frisse who has taken up residence with the Chancellor and family. I wonder if the hope is that some of that cute cuddliness will migrate by association from dog to owner. Bo, the White House dog (a suitably adorable Portuguese Waterdog), seems constantly available for photo opportunities, should Obama need to remind the world what a good guy he is. But wind back the clock several hundred years to the English Civil War and we have an entirely different picture of the role a dog played in the political arena.

A white poodle called Boy was the constant companion of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a cousin of Charles I, and ruthless commander of the royalist cavalry. Far from being the pampered pooch of today’s politicians, Boy joined Prince Rupert’s famously reckless cavalry charges and was a fixture on the battlefield. He was used for the purposes of propaganda, not to assert the cuddly, human face of Prince Rupert, but to mock the gullibility of the opposition. As the royalist army gained ground in the war, Boy became talismanic of their success. In a culture that widely accepted witchcraft, it was easy for the parliamentarians to cast Boy as the Prince’s familiar, possessed of devlish powers that rendered his master impervious to battle wounds, who was able to catch bullets in his mouth and by association suggesting that the Prince himself was some kind of demon. The royalists used these beliefs to deride their opponents with a satirical poem by Cleveland playing on these fears. Cleveland also claimed that clever Boy would raise his front paws when someone mentioned King Charles and cock his leg on hearing the name of the leader of the Parliamentarian forces (let’s hope Lola doesn’t get any ideas).

Sadly Boy’s supposed demonic powers were not sufficient to save him from his untimely and tragic death in 1644 at the battle of Marston Moor, a brutal routing of the Royalist forces and a turning point in the war.

To what extent the opposition genuinely believed in Boy’s supernatural powers has been a matter for historical speculation, explainedhere by Mark Stoyle, author of The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog.

History lies in the soil by Leslie Wilson

My house and garden sit on a minor Civil War battlefield - it was a skirmish, really, but it went on all day and by evening the field, according to locals, ran red with blood. Presumably some of the chemical components of that blood are still present in the soil, helping my plants and vegetables to grow.


When I dig, I find bits of old blue and white china, but also I once turned up a rusting but recognisable end of an old ploughshare, and when the greenhouse was put up, Stewart the Handyman, who levelled the ground, found an old clay pipe, which now lives in our sitting room. But soil itself is the product of a continued interaction between humans and the earth, and is as much part of our history as battles and politics. Indeed, bad harvests have, in the past, been a potent cause of warfare and the toppling of governments, and we need only consider the catastrophe of the American dustbowl to realise the social importance of soil.

There used to be an old cottage in what is now my front garden, before the current house was built. But the picture doesn't show it as having much garden behind: I think most of the cultivated soil was where the road now is - such a waste. Behind was pastureland, and the soil, when I came here, was largely just a thin layer on top of alternate chalk, clay, and gravel - a typical Chilterns geology, I have been told.

The lost soil at the front would have been manured, cultivated, and carefully looked after for years and years and years. Anyone who is lucky enough to garden old soil knows what a benefit that is. I imagine agricultural labourers, like the ones in Flora Thompson's 'Lark Rise to Candleford,' hoeing away in the evenings, and maybe cursing the 'hemmed twitch', the couch grass that still annoys me in the front garden.

I'm told that adding chemical fertilisers to soil actually kills soil organisms. Soil that hasn't been interfered with is a reserve of precious living creatures - from earthworms to microscopic animalcules - who, like our gut flora, have a lot more to say to our survival than we humans like to think. They take what we put in and spread it among the inert mineral components, making the wonder that we call earth.

Here's my grandson, the inheritor of our earth and soil, enjoying it and the potatoes he's picking out of it.


I feed the soil organisms compost, including peelings of oranges from Spain, peach stones from Italy, and bits of more exotic vegetables, thus depositing into the soil the evidence of our own multi-national trading. Newspaper, supermarket vegetables and my own vegetable peelings and outer leaves join grass clippings and such weeds as can be trusted to rot down and not use the compost for proliferation, as the couch and bindweed do. But a more ancient process of assimilation and conversion happens in parallel, as small animals die, and birds and mammals deposit their droppings.

As Eliot puts it, in the four quartets, much better than I can, too: 'flesh, fur and faeces/ Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.' (TS Eliot: Four Quartets).