ABSTRACT
For William Blundell of course it mattered. The war mattered for every minute of each day from the second on 18 March 1643 when ‘my thigh was broken with a shot in the king’s service’, until the moment of his death forty-five years later. For the rest of his life, the royalist captain recalled, ‘I was lying in great pain of my broken leg’, which made walking agony. Sometimes the anguish became unbearable. ‘I may beg to God to assist my soul when my body lies in torment, and by the extreme anguish thereof hath stupefied or perverted my reason.’ At other times he tried to handle the distress, depression and disillusion with a mocking sense of humour. In 1651 he wrote to Margaret Haggerston, his sister-in-law, a bitterly whimsical letter recalling how he used to be able to walk dressed in his soldier’s uniform to see her in the halcyon days before being wounded, and wondered if he would ever do so again:
For you will remember what a pretty straight young thing, all dashing in scarlet I came into Haggerston [Hall] when you saw me last. But now, if you chance to hear a thing come-ThumpThump-up your stairs like a knocker, God bless us, at midnight, look out confidently: a gross full body of an ell [45 inches] or more
in the waist…. The thing is no goblin, but the very party that we talk on. ‘By my truly,’ you will say, ‘and that was a great pity.’ And by my troth, sister, it is so.
