ABSTRACT
Cities and Selves under Siege When Innogen, in Cymbeline, rejects Cloten, ‘whose love suit’, she says, ‘hath been to me / As fearful as a siege’ (III, iv, 132-3), or when Donne writes of himself as ‘a usurpt towne’ (Holy Sonnets XIV), these images of siege and battery would, for the vast majority of English readers who were not travelled professional soldiers, have been just that: images. Until the violent eruptions of the Civil War, siege warfare was what happened elsewhere in Europe, at Boulogne, Juliers, Cadiz, or Salé on the Barbary Coast, or at La Rochelle, and no English city or town had experienced a siege in living memory. While the most memorable military encounters of the Great Civil War took place in literal battlefields – Marston Moor, Edgehill, Hopton Heath, or Roundway Down – the most prolonged and destructive operations were carried out in and around cities in the form of siege warfare. Many English cities were besieged – Hull, Newark, York, Chester, Bristol, Plymouth, Gloucester – some – Exeter or Lichfield for instance – changing hands as successful besiegers were themselves besieged. There is a very full literature on the sieges of the Civil War from military historians concentrating more or less exclusively on ordnance and gunners, earthworks and defences, mining and breaching by sappers, supply lines, logistics and so on.1 But our question is directed rather to the effects of the besieging of English towns and cities on the English psyche, both collectively and individually. Here evidence is to be found not in the numerous records of purely operational procedures and ambitions nor in financial accounts of siege defences but in the diaries, journals and narratives of individuals caught up, both as participants and victims, in this peculiarly intimate form of aggression. Pastures, livestock, gardens, public buildings and private homes, were invaded and desecrated, the aggression rendered the more destructive and bewildering in that it was inflicted by the English people (for the most part) upon each other. In the many recent analyses of the defining character of early modern selfhood much emphasis is placed on the identity and delineation of the self in terms of notions of office, social function and position, of collective membership of guild or profession or religious community (as in ‘the body of Christ’ of church or churches), and by marital and family bonds.2 So what happens to the psyche when physical forces threaten to tear such identifiers apart? Identity is also very tellingly constructed by its relationship with the county, city or town of birth and family
residence, especially in relatively static populations of limited mobility – when a town or community is threatened one’s self-identity is critically in a state of disarray or arrest. Richard Helgerson has shown that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of both rural and urban chorography, a mode of writing descriptive of the physical landmarks, fields, streets, public buildings and local histories of particular regions.3 Such chorographical attentiveness to locality and community is associated, Helgerson argues, with forms of national identity that implicitly tie subjects to the land – to place broadly conceived – as much as to the monarch or, indeed, to Parliament. The wholesale fracturing of these markers by which individuals understood their selfhood could only induce traumas beyond and greater than the nominal ‘causes’ (complex though they were) of the Civil Wars. What – to be specific – is the impact on the mentalité of a city’s inhabitants when they and the corporate life that structures and identifies them are attacked, dismembered, and occupied by military and ideological forces that demand their allegiance or submission – or, as in several towns and cities, when they are besieged again and reoccupied by rival forces? One response, as Jonathan Sawday has argued and illustrated, lies in a diagnosis and discourse of madness. During the Parliamentarian army’s occupation of London in August 1647, a pamphlet appeared claiming to represent ‘above 12 millions of well-affected (before so ill-distracted) people of all sorts, Ages, Sexes, and Sises’. Englands Mad Petition (one of many such documents, as Sawday indicates, which have come down to us from this period) is drafted in the form of an address to Parliament, and argues, in Swiftian fashion, for the prompt enlargement of lunatic asylums in ‘the cities of London and Westminster, with other cities, Towns, and Boroughs, throughout the kingdom’, in order to accommodate the national madhouse into which England had been transformed by civil war. Primary examples of individual and national ‘lunacie’ are the denial and dismantling of natural affiliations derived from family relationships, local allegiances and a sense of neighbourhood: the ties of ‘Proximity, Consanguinity, Affinity, Alliance, Christianity, Vicinity, or Naturall Affections’ have all been destroyed, replaced by ‘an (almost) universall lunacie and apostasie’.4 Just as the individual, provoked to divide itself by melancholy or insanity, may in a moment of rebellion against the unified authority of the self, commit self-murder, so the unity and integrity of the nation may be destroyed by dividing itself against itself in ‘intestine war’ – and this latter, intestine war, may crucially affect the former, the unified authority of the self. Nehemiah Wallington, in his handwritten Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles 1, tirelessly compiled reports and eyewitness accounts of royalist atrocities upon entering besieged cities: ‘Exeter, that famous city in the west, having for the space of three months defended themselves against the proud enemy’, finally admit the royalist troops, who are ‘more like tigers, or savage beasts, than humane men’, says Wallington. (The comparison with wild animals is a recurring marker in these texts of a descent from full personhood and autonomy.) As they flagrantly ‘swagger, roar, swear, and
domineer, plundering, pillaging or doing any other kind of wrong’ the townspeople are ‘in such a miserable condition that they are even terrified to the death’.5 Most of the military most of the time are drunk. At Cirencester, taken by royalists, the male inhabitants are either killed or carted to prison in Oxford prior to looting and pillaging. At the siege of Bristol ‘these wild Cavaliering Rebels’ break all their articles of peace and fall ‘to plundering, pillaging, robbing, stealing, cutting, and slashing, as if they never had been brought up to any other practice’ (2. pp. 175-7). The Londoner Wallington is a deeply committed puritan and parliamentarian for whom demonizing royalist armies and commanders was a routine rhetoric, but even he allows for the possibility that the invading troops, controlled by alcohol and avarice, are out of composition with their ordinary selves, ‘as if they had never been brought up to any other practice’. Even royalist diarists like Sir John Oglander and Henry Townshend, describing the war around Worcester, went so far as to acknowledge that parliamentarian soldiers were better regulated than royalists, whose looting invariably seemed to go unpunished. Townshend describes the looting and ravages of the royalist soldiers (especially Irish soldiery) at the siege of Worcester and prays that ‘all good Christians may insert into their Litany. From the plundering of soldiers, their Insolency, Cruelty, Atheism, Blasphemy and Rule over us, Libera nos Domine’ (p. 129).6 Townshend also describes a characteristic Cavalier sortie at the siege of Worcester:
This morn about 5 of the clock Capt. Hodgkins, also called “Wicked Will” for his desperateness and valour, sallyed out with 16 horse in a medley humour of drink into the enemy’s Court of guard at St John’s, shot one, and all came off safe, yet he so loaded with drink and top heavy that he fell twice by the way, and was carried over the Severn in a boat half asleep (p. 126).
