Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire was a relatively small county, with a total population of around 45,000 in the seventeenth century. Around 2,000 of these lived in Bedford itself. The local economy revolved around agriculture (sheep, cattle, and particularly the production of cereal crops, such as barley). Woollen yarn was exported to East Anglia to make worsted cloth. River traffic passing up and down the Ouse generated useful income for local communities, as did the arterial roads which ran through the county from London to the Midlands and North.

A series of bad harvests and the decline of the national cloth trade during the period of Charles I’s personal rule (1629-1640) encouraged widespread criticism of royal government. Bedfordshire taxpayers particularly resented Charles’s attempts to raise money without the consent of Parliament. Sir Oliver Luke, one of the county’s MPs, was imprisoned in 1627 for refusing to contribute to Charles’s Forced Loan. When Charles extended the Ship Money tax to inland counties in 1635, land-locked Bedfordshire was assessed for £3,000 per annum. The county’s sheriff managed to gather almost the entire amount in 1635, but resistance grew in the years thereafter. By 1639 many areas of Bedfordshire defaulted, and several under-sheriffs and high constables refused to cooperate. Consequently, only £10 was collected out of the county’s total assessment of £3,000 that year [Lee (1986), 31].

Very few practising Roman Catholics remained in Bedfordshire by the mid-seventeenth century, in contrast to growing numbers of radical Protestants. The Commissary of the Archdeaconry of Bedford reported high levels of nonconformity among the county’s clergy. Archbishop William Laud commissioned three episcopal visitations during the 1630s, and attempted to repress the town lectureships in Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard which had been founded by local Puritan gentry. Independent Baptist congregations were particularly prevalent in north Bedfordshire from the 1640s onwards, including among their number John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Quakers began to proliferate in towns such as Leighton Buzzard during the 1650s [Bedfordshire Archives, HSA1664/S/1].

Most of the county’s elite declared for Parliament at the outset of the First Civil War in 1642. The St John family, headed by the Earl of Bolingbroke, were particularly energetic activists. In February 1644 Bolingbroke’s son, Oliver St John MP became a founder member of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, following Parliament’s alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. Another prominent parliamentarian, Sir Samuel Luke followed his father Sir Oliver into Parliament, sitting as MP for Bedford in the Short and Long Parliaments. Sir Samuel served as a regimental commander and Scoutmaster-General in the Earl of Essex’s army, before becoming governor of Newport Pagnell in neighbouring Buckinghamshire. John Bunyan is believed to have served as a soldier in Luke’s garrison, along with many other Bedfordshire men.

Among Bolingbroke’s allies in the county aristocracy, John Mordant, Earl of Peterborough served as general of the ordnance in the Earl of Essex’s field army. However, his son and heir deserted Parliament’s cause soon after the Earl’s death in 1643. William Russell, 5th Earl of Bedford initially commanded Lord Essex’s cavalry, only to defect to the King in 1643. Three years later he had second thoughts and attempted (unsuccessfully) to reingratiate himself with Parliament.

The most eminent royalists in Bedfordshire were Henry de Grey, Earl of Kent and Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Cleveland, but the most active Cavalier in the locality was undoubtedly Sir Lewis Dyve. Dyve initially tried to hold his seat at Bromham Hall for the King, but was soon forced to flee. He became a captain in Prince Rupert’s Regiment of Horse. One of his troopers, Rowland Harrison, later petitioned the North Yorkshire bench for a pension. Dyve went on to command his own regiments of horse and foot. At least two of his officers came from Bedfordshire (Quartermaster Thomas Paly and Ensign Richard Gale being listed as such in the 1663 List), but most appear to have come from the West Country, where the Dyve family had extensive interests.

The extent to which the common people of Bedfordshire mirrored the allegiances of their social superiors is difficult to ascertain. Bedfordians proved as reluctant to pay Parliament’s wartime taxes as they had Charles I’s Ship Money. In part, this may have been because in 1642 the St Johns and the Lukes had recruited around 1,200 volunteers for the Earl of Essex’s army [Tibbutt (1973), 6]. The removal of hundreds of parliamentarian supporters from the locality inevitably made it harder for the parliamentary county committee to exact money and resources for Parliament’s war effort.

Many Bedfordians never returned from the wars. On 17 June 1643 Prince Rupert discovered that Lord Essex had dispersed his army among the villages of the Buckinghamshire-Oxfordshire border to reduce the risk of overcrowding and disease. Rupert attacked Chinnor at dawn on the 18th, surprising Sir Samuel Luke’s Bedfordshire dragoons who were sleeping there. Some 50 dragoons were ‘wakened but to die’, and around 120 were taken prisoner. Officers and men who had survived the initial onslaught attempted to hold a house at the end of the village. The royalists set fire to the building, shooting the fugitives as they attempted to escape the flames [Stevenson & Carter (1973), 349]. Salacious reporting of bloody episodes such as Chinnor almost certainly discouraged men from coming forward when Parliament demanded even more manpower from the county in the recruiting drives of 1643, 1644, 1645 and 1646.

Bedfordshire’s community leaders complained repeatedly of Parliament’s failure to protect them from royalist incursions. Nevertheless, relatively little fighting took place in the county. The most serious raid was conducted by none other than Sir Lewis Dyve, who led 400 royalist cavalry into his native county in October 1643. He captured Bedfordshire’s parliamentary county committee at Amptill, before forcing his way over the town bridge into Bedford. The royalists initially planned to fortify the old Norman castle outside the town, but they soon abandoned the project and withdrew. A smaller raid on Dunstable in June 1644 resulted in more plundering and bloodshed. The royalist soldiers assaulted a local preacher, before killing a publican who had refused to provide them with horses. Bedford’s town bridge over the River Ouse was the scene of a final skirmish in August 1645, as shattered elements of the King’s army passed through the area in the aftermath of the disastrous royalist defeat at Naseby.

Bedfordshire appears to have been relatively untouched by the Second Civil War of 1648. Dunstable was used as a staging post for the Essex and Suffolk Trained Bands during the Third Civil War of 1651, during their march to reinforce the New Model Army in its pursuit of Charles II and his Scottish army. The Bedfordshire Trained Bands were mobilised at the same time, but only for the purposes of defending the local area against the possibility of royalist insurgency.

Hundreds of Bedfordshire men fought in the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. Two hundred were conscripted for the First Bishops’ War of 1639, and as many as 400 in the second war of 1640. At least 1,200 men soldiered for Parliament in the First Civil War. A New Model Army trooper who delivered a spirited speech in defence of people’s rights at the Putney Debates in 1647 was identified in John Clarke’s minutes as a Bedfordshire man [Clarke (1992), I, 251]. Ross Lee has tentatively suggested that this anonymous agitator might have been Samuel Gibbs, the brother of the radical preacher John Gibbs [Lee (1986), 29].

However, despite the fact that large numbers of men are known to have fought for Parliament – with many killed and maimed – no petitions or certificates relating to Bedfordshire veterans, or their bereaved dependants, appear to have survived. The most fulsome document still extant is a long list of Bedfordshire men who deserted soon after being conscripted for the New Model Army in 1645 [Bedfordshire Archives, TW959]. The absence of parliamentarian petitions and certificates fits a pattern observed in several other parliamentarian-leaning counties – indeed, over the course of the AHRC project the Civil War Petitions team has found that considerably more royalist documents have been preserved than parliamentarian ones. Belying the old adage that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, the total absence of royalist petitions and certificates in Bedfordshire after the Restoration may therefore indicate the low level of popular royalism in the county during the Civil Wars. A survey of the Quarter Sessions bench after 1660 suggests that there were few thorough-going royalists among the Bedfordshire gentry, as the list of Justices includes the names of former parliamentarians such as Sir Samuel Browne, Sir Beauchamp St John, and William Boteler. Even the joint Lord Lieutenant of Bedfordshire in 1660, Lord Robert Bruce had begun the Civil Wars as a parliamentarian. Charles II’s scheme to reward indigent loyal officers with a share in a £60,000 bounty reinforces the impression that royalists were in a minority in this locality. Like every other county Bedfordshire had its own commission for vetting indigent officers’ applications. The ubiquitous Sir Lewis Dyve was a commissioner, as was another former royalist colonel, Sir Ludovic Dyer; but none of their fellow commissioners appear to have served in the King’s army. The head of the Bedfordshire commission was the turncoat Lord Bruce. The 1663 printed list of successful applicants named only 13 former royalist officers residing in Bedfordshire, as opposed to 34 in neighbouring Buckinghamshire.

In 1986 Ross Lee lamented that the ‘sad dearth of evidence’ made it unlikely that the full history of the Civil Wars in Bedfordshire could ever be written [Lee (1986), 45]. Unfortunately, this is still the case.

Recommended reading