With musket on her shoulder, her part she acted then,
And everyone supposed that she had been a man;
Her bandeliers about her neck and sword hang’d by her side,
In many brave adventures her valour has been tried
The Gallant She-Soldier (1655)
In the past the role of women in the English Civil Wars, as with most history, has been severely overlooked. The assumption that men did the bulk of work while their wives and daughters were confined to the drudgery of domestic chores is known to be false while the recent controversy over the ‘Viking warrior woman’ burial discovered in Birka, Sweden has shown how evidence can upend our traditional view of the past as being binary and highly gendered.
All too often, our expectations of early modern women conform to the portrayals of the time, when the passive suffering of women was – as Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel points out – ‘colourfully, even gleefully, described by both sides in the usual propagandist style’ and yet ‘the women who lived through the period of the Civil Wars were far from passive’.
Yet over the past few decades, our understanding of the way women were involved in, shaped the direction of, and were affected by the wars of the 1640s and ‘50s has changed considerably. Even though historians are limited by records and accounts from the time, which are often either produced and/or aimed at men, understanding of the breadth and depth of women’s experiences and voices during the conflict is undergoing a revolution of its own.
This International Women’s Day, it’s important that we look at how – contrary to popular notions of their meek passivity – women played many roles in the English Civil Wars…
They were strident petitioners: Elizabeth Lilburne, the wife of polemicist and pamphleteer John Lilburne, not only petitioned Parliament into threatening retaliatory executions if her captive husband was executed by the Royalists, but she carried the news from London to the Royalist court in exile in Oxford while pregnant. And the Civil War Petitions project has already done considerable work on the records left by widows seeking compensation or pensions from both Parliament and the restored monarchy of Charles II.
They took part in fighting: there were countless women who played an enormous role in the defence of their homes and communities, from the strident Dissenter Dorothy Hazard who lead a group of women to barricade breaches in the walls of Bristol during the Royalist assault in 1643, to Lady Brilliana Harley’s defence of Brampton Bryan Castle during a three-month siege by Royalist troops and Lady Mary Bankes’ defiance of Parliamentarians besieging Corfe Castle. And even when they didn’t fight, the mere suggestion of taking on a martial role could be beyond the pale – much to the horror of supporter and opponent alike, in letters to her husband Queen Henrietta Maria styled herself the ‘She-Generalissimo’ during her march from Bridlington with reinforcements and supplies for King Charles at Oxford. While she did not take part in any battles on the way, the very idea of a woman leading a military unit was dangerously radical.
They were spies: Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents details how women did more than merely infiltrate the allegedly-male world of the spy, it appears they dominated it. They worked as intelligencers, spies, and couriers, from the publisher and nurse Elizabeth Alkin – nicknamed ‘Parliament Joan’ – to Susan Hyde, the sister of the Earl of Clarendon.
And in the rush to correct assumptions, the vital importance of women to keeping families together during the chaos of the wars must not be forgotten. As detailed in Lucy Moore’s Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book, the wife of a Royalist diplomat, Ann Fanshaw, played a crucial role seeking preferment and passage for her husband, visiting him in prison, nursing him when he fell sick, and raising the money needed to fill the gap left by the loss of their income and estates.
Yet despite their superhuman efforts in the face of terrible adversity and depredations, strong women or those who took on men’s roles were often perceived as a fundamental threat to the social order.
In his analysis of how widows of prominent Parliamentarian officers used language and a burgeoning press to drum up support for their cause, in ‘To condole with me on the Commonwealth’s loss’: the widows and orphans of Parliament’s military commanders Andrew Hopper describes how one can easily gauge their success by the furious response it provoked from the enemy: ‘Royalist pamphleteers pointed to a threat to the gender order, depicting the wives of parliamentarian commanders as domineering, adulterous and conspiratorial, a set of hypocritical puritans on the make, who were unnatural and unwomanly in their political assertiveness’.
As we’ve covered before, when women attempted to intervene in the political process they were often mocked and even attacked. When Leveller leaders John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and Thomas Prince were sent to prison in 1649, hundreds of the movement’s female adherents descended on Westminster to petition for their release – but not even being driven off by pistol-wielding troops could stop them and they returned several times. Women’s activism produced an almost-inevitable backlash with pamphlets such as the anonymously authored ‘The Parliament of Women’ in 1646 and 1647’s ‘The Parliament of Ladies’ lampooning what many saw as women’s unearned and unwanted entry into the political sphere.
Probably one of the most striking expressions of the fear of role reversal were the stories of the ‘female soldier’.
The idea of a woman dressing up as a man in order to participate in warfare was not a new one in the English Civil War, but for those who lived during it, the idea both outraged and titillated in equal measure. For some it was symbolic of ‘the world turned upside down’; an example of the apparent reordering of society in the chaos of conflict and the confusion of new ideas that accompanied this prolonged civil war.
There is a sense in some of the ballads and pamphlets that these stories should serve as a warning of just how radically the wars upset societal and gender roles, and women who displayed ‘manly’ qualities such as Mary Firth – also known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’ – fired the popular imagination. Cross-dressing as a man was key to Firth’s infamy and, as several of the plays of William Shakespeare attest, the idea of assuming another gender fascinated people in 17th Century England. But just how widespread was it?
It’s difficult to differentiate between fact and fiction, particularly when dealing with the scurrilous and often wholly invented pamphlets and newsbooks of the time, but historian Mark Stoyle has found a handful of definite cases of cross-dressing female soldiers: wives, unmarried partners, would-be female soldiers and even prostitutes motivated by a desire to fight or to remain close to their partners.
All too often, historians have to rely on contemporary ballads such as ‘The Gallant She-Souldier’ of 1655, which claimed to commemorate one Private Clarke, who apparently served in the same regiment as her husband for nine years, until the birth of a son unmasked her:
With musket on her shoulder, her part she acted then, And every one supposed that she had been a man; Her bandeleers about her neck, and sword hang’d by her side, In many brave adventures her valour have been tried.
For other manly practices she gain’d the love of all, For leaping and for running or wrestling for a fall, For cudgels or for cuffing, if that occasion were, There’s hardly any one of ten men that might with her compare.
Yet civil in her carriage and modest still was she, But with her fellow souldiers she oft would merry be; She would drink and take tobacco, and spend her money too, When as occasion served that she had nothing else to do.
One 1645 pamphlet described a young female soldier who spent a year in the Parliamentary garrison of Gloucester while a report from July 1642 detailed a young girl disguising herself to be near her lover, and Major-General Poyntz of the New Model Army reported capturing a female corporal among Royalist prisoners in November 1645
An anonymous letter from 1642 describes a woman named Nan Ball who served in the King’s army near York so she could be close to her beloved, a similar ploy to that of Anne Dymocke from Lincolnshire who, in 1655, disguised herself as a man in order to remain with her lover, John Evison. And, intriguingly, on a draft 1643 proclamation setting out the required standards of behaviour for the Royalist army, King Charles made a note that “lett no woman presume to counterfeit her sex by wearing mans apparall under payne of the severest punishment”, though no mention of this was contained in the final publication. Professor Stoyle says Charles’ words suggest the king at least believed that female cross-dressing was quite widespread in his army.
While these are just a small number of examples, as Stoyle suggests they may point to a much bigger, and undiscovered, culture of women becoming soldiers. In The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol show that women crossdressing as men in order to become soldiers and sailors may have been far more widespread than was supposed, with 22 cases of female soldiers in the Netherlands alone, and asserts that in the early modern era ‘passing oneself off as a man was a real and viable option for women who had fallen into hard times and were struggling to overcome their difficult circumstances’ and that it was a tradition that was strongest by far in the Netherlands, England andGermany.
Nor are reports of crossdressing female soldiers restricted to the English Civil War. The late 17th Century was another period of tension and civil strife in the British Isles, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and taking of the English crown by the Dutch Prince of Orange and, possibly drawing on popular memories of stories from earlier in the century, a ballad entitled ‘The Female Warrior’ and set to the tune of ‘I Am A Jovial Batchelor’ related how a woman donned men’s clothing and became an ensign (a junior officer who held a company or regiment’s flag) and was only discovered when she was unable to hide her pregnancy. The Bodleian Library’s ballads database suggests it comes from around 1695, just a couple of years after the end of the first Jacobite Rebellion. Interestingly, rather than portraying her crossdressing as described in the text, the artist of the woodcut decided to show her in a long flowing dress – if only for modesty’s sake…
While stories of warrior women donning men’s clothing to charge into battle spark the imagination, the central role women played in 1640s and ‘50s should not be overlooked or underestimated. Whether in disguise or in the open, female bravery was a force to be reckoned with during the chaos of the civil wars.
Michael Molcher
Want to be a warrior woman in a 17th Century army? Don a redcoat and march into battle with us – the modern Earl of Manchester’s Regiment is Foote is a gender blind reenactment group with female soldiers in all roles, from officers to civilians, and both on and off the battlefield. It’s an ideal hobby for individuals, couples and families, and you can join up now or give it a go for as little as £10 – plus all your kit is provided!
