Memories in Everyday Discourse

This chapter illuminates one of the shadowiest corners of our understanding of early modern memory: the recollections of ordinary citizens. Drawing primarily on legal records, it reconstructs the multiplicity of ways in which men and women from across the social spectrum remembered the British Civil Wars and explores the wider social and cultural significance of these recollections. It argues that memories of the recent past acted, variously, as an articulation and affirmation of identity, expression of defiance, source of solidarity, locus of hope, and as a strategic and descriptive device. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates that while some people’s recollections of the recent past were influenced by attempts to shape public memory, people also had the capacity to subvert, co-opt, and reject these interpretations. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of early modern memory and the creativity and agency of those who deployed it.

Places of Memory

This chapter explores the ways in which place, and particularly places of war and wartime destruction, acted as sites of memory during the English republics. It considers three distinct memorial practices: local commemorations; folkloric and descriptive discourses; and monuments and memorials. These drew on existing traditions; but they also transformed them, producing new and, in some cases, controversial ways of remembering the recent past. It argues that, though no physical memorials were erected on England’s Civil War battlefields, sites of conflict nevertheless possessed considerable mnemonic power. It also emphasizes the important role that place played in the formation of distinct, geographically specific communities of memory. In London, the shared military experience of a large number of inhabitants provided the impetus for England’s first veterans’ commemoration, while in towns and cities that had been ravaged by war local authorities sought to enshrine their own particular, partisan version of the recent past.

Rival Recollections

This chapter explores the ways in which the republics’ opponents sought to propagate their own, alternative interpretations of Britain’s domestic conflicts. The first two sections focus on different facets of Royalist memory, while the third section examines the ways memory was deployed by some of the Parliament’s former allies, with an emphasis on the Levellers and proponents of the ‘good old cause’. It argues that these counter-narratives had significant implications for the political culture of the 1650s, the shape of public memory after 1660, and the Restoration settlement. It also shows that though there were significant recurring themes in opposition memory these groups were broad churches, and suggests that an appreciation of the subtle differences in manifestations of memory reveals some of the fissures which existed within these groups, both ideologically and temporally.

Introduction

This introduction outlines the scope and purpose of the book and presents its key arguments. It engages with the existing historiography on the memory of Britain’s Civil Wars, demonstrating that the rich memorial culture of England’s republican regimes has been almost entirely overlooked. It contends that, by exploring multiple manifestations of memory, this book presents a more complete and nuanced picture of the memory of a catastrophic event in early modern England than has hitherto been articulated. It also situates the study within a wider literature on memory and the experience of post-war states both within and beyond early modernity. It articulates the book’s methodological approach, its wide-ranging and varied source base, and the implications that the study has for our understanding of the politics and society of 1650s England, the nature of early modern memory, and post-civil war states more broadly.

Conclusion

This conclusion offers an account of the main similarities between the experiences of early modern England and those of modern post-civil war states. It argues that many of the challenges that the republican governments faced have continued to confront states into the twenty-first century, and that, though the shape of a particular post-war settlement is historically contingent, the central issues with which its instigators must wrestle are not as temporally or geographically specific as we might expect. Further, it suggests that this is also true of many of the responses, from the use of amnesties and pardons to martyr narratives and the ‘othering’ of opponents. It provides one of the first transtemporal and transnational comparisons of Civil War memory and, in so doing, attempts to initiate further conversation between scholars of civil war memory across time and space.

Republican Recollections

This chapter analyses the attempts that the governments’ officials and supporters made to shape the public memory of the British Civil Wars. The republics owed their very existence to the outcome of these conflicts, and successive regimes made a concerted effort to craft a version of the recent past that would legitimate the new state. It demonstrates that, in achieving this task, three themes were particularly prevalent: the culpability of the King; the providential nature of the Parliament’s victories; and the cruel and treacherous actions of the Scots. These memories were not, however, entirely unproblematic. Remembering the recent past often conflicted with other political goals, not least the desire to engender reconciliation and the peaceful settlement of the state. Torn between these competing impulses of remembrance and reconciliation, the republics faced—and ultimately failed to resolve—a challenge that has continued to trouble post-war states down to the present day.

Narratives of War

This chapter explores the ways in which individuals narrated, structured, and recalled their own wartime experiences, and those of their family. The first section analyses the military memoirs of two Royalist commanders, Sir Hugh Cholmley and Sir Richard Grenville. The second and third sections draw on the war stories contained in the petitions of maimed Parliamentarian soldiers and war widows. It argues that, in all three cases, subjects were principally concerned with curating an account of their wartime experiences that would reconcile the events of the past with their present identity, a task that combined partial, partisan remembering with a healthy dose of selective amnesia. It also considers the extent to which individual accounts were coloured by public memory, and demonstrates that though historians often make a conceptual distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ recollection, the boundary between these two categories was highly porous.