Cornwall

Cornwall’s unique history and culture predisposed its inhabitants to favour the royal cause. Popular support for Charles I was strongest in the far West, where the Cornish language was still commonly spoken, while popular support for the Parliament was strongest on the county’s eastern borders, with one contemporary writer describing the north-eastern corner as ‘the only part of Cornwall eminently disaffected to the king’s service’.(1) In late 1642, a huge pro-royalist rising took place in Cornwall, and parliament’s few local adherents were quickly driven out, some of them taking refuge in Plymouth in Devon, just across the river Tamar. A Cornish royalist army was then raised, which, following its victory at the Battle of Stratton, fought on 16 May 1643, went on to conquer much of South West England for the king; this prompted Charles I to write a special letter of thanks to the inhabitants of Cornwall. Throughout the rest of the war, Cornish troops continued to form the backbone of the royalist forces in the South West, but the Cornish people’s loyalty to the Crown came at a ruinous cost to themselves. As early as March 1644, one London pamphleteer gleefully informed his readers of what he described as ‘the lamentable howling of a thousand poore widdowes in Cornewall for their husbands’. There were 5,000 Cornishmen now serving in the king’s armies, he reported, while the local authorities had recently been told that no fewer than 600 Cornish soldiers’ widows were in need of financial assistance, ‘besides the number [of men] wounded and presented also … for relief’.(2)

During the summer of 1644 Cornwall was invaded by Parliament’s main field army, under the command of the Earl of Essex, but royalist forces were in hot pursuit and eventually managed to corner their adversaries following a series of engagements fought in the countryside around Lostwithiel between 21 and 31 August. Fearful of capture, Essex fled by boat, leaving his entire infantry force - some 6,000 men - to lay down their arms. It was the greatest royalist victory of the war, and, in its aftermath, Cornish civilians beat and robbed the defeated parliamentarian soldiers who had ‘vaunted’ over them during their initial advance into Cornwall.  The Parliamentarians vowed to take their revenge, and, when the New Model Army marched into the West Country in late 1645, after the king’s defeat at Naseby, it was reported, and widely believed, that not a single Cornish man, woman or child would be spared once the Parliamentarian troops had re-crossed the Tamar. Fortunately, Sir Thomas Fairfax had his troops well in hand, and, as he advanced through Devon, the parliamentary general went out of his way to conciliate the Cornish and to reassure them that, if they ceased to resist, they would enjoy fair treatment at his hands. Following the defeat of the king’s western army at the Battle of Torrington, fought on 16 February 1646, the Cornish had little option but to make the best peace they could and, in a treaty signed at Millbrook in March, they effectively withdrew from the war. Soon afterwards, the Cornish gentleman Joseph Jane passed his own grim comment on the human cost of the conflict to his native shire, estimating that ‘there have not dyed so few as 100 [Cornish] gentlemen and officers’ in the king’s service, together with ‘the great number of poore soldiers [killed], maymed and hurt’.(3)

Tragically, all of the Cornish quarter sessions records for the period before 1737 have been lost. As a result, we possess just three stray petitions from Cornishmen who were wounded during the Civil War, which happen to have survived in other collections of manuscripts. Of these, two - preserved, curiously enough, among the papers of Samuel Pepys - are draft petitions composed by the same man: the royalist Lieutenant Colonel Henry Manaton, who was wounded in the storming of Exeter in 1643. The third petition, held among the papers of the Tremaine family of Heligan, is that of a former Parliamentarian soldier: Simon Bere of St Eval, who had lost an arm in the siege of Pendennis. These three petitions aside, we also possess a document which notes the payments made by the Cornish County Committee between 1646 and 1648 to sick and wounded Parliamentarian soldiers, and to the widows and orphans of former soldiers who had been killed in the parliament’s service. The place of residence of only one of these individuals - ‘John Palmer of Lan[d]rake, a wounded soldier’ - is recorded.(4) Obviously, the miniscule size of the sample means that it impossible to discern any meaningful patterns from the distribution of petitioners on the Cornish ‘county map’.

Gratuities paid in Cornwall

	Min	Max	Mean	Median	Mode	TOTAL
Maimed Soldiers	10s	£5	£2 10s 10d	£2 10s	£4	£30 10s
Royalists	£1	£1	£1	£1	£1	£1
Parliamentarians	10s	£5	£2 13s 8d	£3	£4	£29 10s
War Widows	£2	£7	£4 10s	£4 10s	n/a	£9
Royalists	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
Parliamentarians	£2	£7	£4 10s	£4 10s	n/a	£9
Other Dependents	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s
Royalists	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
Parliamentarians	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s	£5 10s
ALL	10s	£7	£3	£3	£2	£45
Royalists	£1	£1	£1	£1	£1	£1
Parliamentarians	10s	£7	£3 2s 10d	£3	£2	£44

Pensions paid in Surrey

	Min	Max	Mean	Median	Mode
Maimed Soldiers	£1	£10	£4 3s 3d	£4	£4
Royalists	£1	£10	£4 3s 3d	£4	£4
Parliamentarians	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
War Widows	£3	£6	£4 10s	£4 10s	n/a
Royalists	£3	£6	£4 10s	£4 10s	n/a
Parliamentarians	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
Other Dependents	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
Royalists	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
Parliamentarians	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0
ALL	£1	£10	£4 3s 6d	£4	£4
Royalists	£1	£10	£4 3s 6d	£4	£4
Parliamentarians	£0	£0	£0	£0	£0

Henry Manaton’s petitions were both written after the Civil War had come to an end. In them, he begged the Prince of Wales to recompense him for his service and suffering in the royal cause: either by recommending him for a captaincy in one of the regiments which were then serving in the Netherlands under the command of the Prince of Orange, or by granting him the reversion of an estate in Cornwall. It is not known whether either of these requests was successful. The Parliamentarian petitioner, Simon Bere, was awarded a pension of £4 per annum in 1647. This sum is rather more generous than those which are known to have been granted to former Parliamentarian soldiers with similar injuries in the neighbouring county of Devon. Of the individuals who received support from the Cornish county committee, Elizabeth Cock was given a one-off payment of £2 in December 1646, because her husband had been killed ‘in the Parliament’s service before Pendennis’, while Mary Millis was given a payment of £7 in February 1647, because her husband had been similarly ‘slain in the Parliament’s service’. Finally, the children of Thomas Bennet were given a payment of £5 10s in the same month, because their father, too, had been killed while fighting for Parliament.(5) Because the social status of the recipients was not recorded, it is impossible to be sure how these payments compare with those which were made to deceased parliamentarian soldiers’ widows and orphans elsewhere in the kingdom between 1646 and 1660.

Notes

1. E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (W.D. Macray (ed.), six vols, Oxford, 1888), III, p. 69.

2. A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages, No. 10 (London, 29 February to 7 March 1644), p. 4.

3. A.C. Miller (ed.), ‘Joseph Jane’s Account of Cornwall during the Civil War’, The English Historical Review, vol. 90 (January 1975), p. 101.

4. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS J. Walker, C10, 81, fol. 124v.

5. Ibid., fols 124-125.

Further Reading

Mary Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum (Oxford, 1933).

Amos C. Miller, Sir Richard Grenville of the Civil War (London and Chichester, 1979).

Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the early modern British State (Exeter, 2002).

Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven and London, 2005).