Open the pages of almost any anthology of English ghost stories and, sooner rather than later, you will encounter the figure of a grim-faced Roundhead, a forlorn Cavalier or a pretty maid ravished by some rambling soldier, or read tales to the effect that this street or that stretch of battlements from time to time resound to the sounds of armed conflict. So numerous are such encounters, indeed, that it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that they are suggestive of the manner in which the conflicts of the seventeenth century survive in the popular memory. In so far as this last is concerned, there are many pointers including, not least, the fact that the incidence of ghost stories tallies closely with the incidence and severity of the armed conflict and other privations to which the areas concerned were exposed (Norfolk and Suffolk being untouched by the fighting, anthologies of the tales of the supernatural that emanate from them are devoid of any reference to the Civil War, whereas those relating to much fought over Yorkshire, Lancashire and Hampshire seem to throw them up by the page). Also significant here, meanwhile, is the fact that at least some stories can be linked to episodes that are known to have happened and yet remain almost entirely unknown to anyone other than a handful of specialists in the military history of the conflict. Take, for example, the case of the Lancashire village of Lydiate. Situated a few miles south of Ormskirk on the main road to Liverpool, the settlement is recorded in one collection of local ghost stories as periodically experiencing the sound of galloping horses, men crying out in fear and the creaking of wagon wheels. For explanation, the author could only make a vague suggestion that it was something to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45, but a little work on his part would have revealed that on 20 July 1644 an action took place on the ridge immediately to the north of Lydiate crowned by the neighbouring village of Aughton. Known as the Battle of Ormskirk, this saw the Royalists, a scratch force of fugitives rallied after the disaster of Marton Moor commanded by Sir John Byron comprehensively routed and driven from the field. Desperate to escape, the survivors fled down for the safety of the Royalist garrison in Liverpool and so the road would indeed have rung to the sounds reported in the story. Despite all this (and much else besides), however, even specialists on the Civil-War period whose approach lies in the field of cultural history have neglected to give the subject due consideration: hence the lacuna in the historiography which the author of this article is hoping to fill with his new work, The English Civil War: Myth, Legend and Popular Memory.
From where or what, though, do the 234 ghost stories catalogued in the pages of said book originate. The first thing to say here is that, notwithstanding claims by such scholars as Keith Thomas that the Reformation destroyed the traditional foundation of such tales by refuting the concept of Purgatory (in Catholic theology, ghosts were manifestations of lost souls condemned to wander the earth until such time as they had served the time deemed necessary for them to expiate their sins), English society was clearly one in which the supernatural continued to hold enormous weight as witness, for example, the frequency with which spectres of one sort or another appear in the works of William Shakespeare. Even if Purgatory no longer had a place in the official canon, meanwhile, it is probable that old beliefs died hard in many of the more remote parts of the country. Nor was such a place actually necessary as an explanation for hauntings, it being perfectly possible to see ghosts as heaven-sent messengers or other manifestations of the Divine will: hence the ability of no less a person than Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain, Richard Baxter, to publish the very first compendium of ghost stories ever to appear in the English language. As for what the Divine will was, of course, it was that the people should accept the victory of Parliament and the legitimacy of the Commonwealth: hence the many reports found in Baxter and other Puritan sources of spectral armies marching as to war or even fighting battles in the skies – in brief, bow down before Old Noll and his legions or face a return to the horrors of 1642-51 (see below). Yet such politicking – something that from time to time can also be found in the Royalist literature albeit in support of the Restoration – was scarcely necessary: their bodies frequently broken beyond all recognition, the bodies of the men who had fallen at Edgehill, Marston Moor and the rest had too often been thrown into mass graves in unhallowed ground without the rites of Christian burial and it therefore seemed entirely logical that, thereby denied admission to Heaven, they would forever wander the scenes of their demise.
Already touched on, we come here to the question of the horrors of war. Thus, by 1651 England was a country in shock, indeed a society gripped by a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Prior to 1642, there had been no armed conflict within her borders since the so-called ‘Revolt of the Northern Earls’ in 1569 and no pitched battle since Flodden in 1513. However, between 1642 and 1646, setting aside the major clashes, the only region to have all but entirely escaped the endless petty campaigning, raiding and skirmishing of which so much of the conflict was composed was East Anglia, while dozens of towns and cities had endured terrible sieges that had laid waste to the built environment, the process being repeated on a more limited basis in 1648 and 1651. Though there is much controversy over the number of men who died in action or later succumbed to their wounds, the number ran into many thousands, while repeated outbreaks of plague in particular ensured that there were also terrible losses among the civilian population. Given all this, the absence of major atrocities – some places such as Birmingham, Bolton and Leicester had been sacked, certainly, but there had been very few acts of outright massacre, if any – was small comfort, while nowhere had been safe from the burden of impressment, billeting, requisition, heavy taxation and economic disruption, and all this in the context of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’, a century-long period of atrocious weather and bad harvests. To the massive human suffering consequent from all this, much as a minority of political and religious radicals revelled in the belief that they were forging a new world, there was added a general sense that the very fabric of society was coming apart and that there was neither safety nor security for rich and poor alike: hence, perhaps, the deep groan with which the crowd that had massed before the Banqueting House in Whitehall greeted the execution of Charles I.
It is beyond doubt this dark backdrop that generated at least some of the many ghost stories that were in circulation that are known to have been in circulation by the middle of the eighteenth century. In the battles and sieges of 1642-1651 soldiers and civilians had witnessed terrible sights and, over time, real things that people had witnessed – for example, headless corpses propped up in the saddles of horses wandering alone on the fringes of some stricken field – were gradually transformed into stories of hauntings, one of the phantoms supposed to stalk Marston Moor being just such an apparition. In just the same way, it is probable that the dreams that, then as now, plagued many veterans underwent a similar transition: if this or that bed-chamber in such and such a country house became said to be haunted by the figure of a Cavalier or Roundhead dripping in gore, a plausible explanation is that that is exactly what the old soldier who once occupied it saw in his sleep every night, the supposed ghost being the product of the process of Chinese whispers by which the story was passed from generation to generation.
More important than such personal experiences was probably the issue of folk memory, this being something we have already referred to with respect to the Battle of Ormskirk. In the days before general literacy, story-telling was always one of the most important ways that the general populace remembered and made sense of its past (and, indeed, initially its present too) and the extent of that collective recollection was intensified in proportion to the pain and turmoil of the times concerned. Given the agony of the Civil-War period, the folk memories that resulted were particularly numerous and long-lasting, while the horror that they evoked ensured that they became inextricably linked with the tradition of the ghost story. For an excellent case-study, we have only to turn to Chester, a place that between September 1645 and February 1646 endured one of the most terrible sieges in the history of the Civil Wars (by the time the Royalist governor, Sir John Byron, surrendered, much of the city had been destroyed by bombardment while soldiers and civilians alike were dropping like flies in the face of an outbreak of plague that eventually killed 7,000 people). All this being the case, it is no coincidence whatsoever that Chester boasts more Stuart spectres and other hauntings than anywhere else in the country. Some of these – the Cavaliers and their ladies glimpsed on the north walls, for example – are so vague that they are suggestive of everything and nothing alike, including, not least, invention, but others clearly relate either to incidents that definitely occurred or, failing that, have a ring of plausibility. Take the sound of fighting that is heard in Saint Werburgh’s Street, for example. As the bullet marks in the southern walls of the cathedral testify, there was indeed bloodshed here, while we even know the date – 20 September 1645 – and the circumstances – the eruption of a party of Parliamentarian troops through the nearby East Gate during the surprise attack on the city by which the siege was initiated. And take, too, the apparition of Charles I that is claimed to stalk the tower of said cathedral: whether anyone has actually seen that unhappy monarch there is obviously not susceptible of truth one way or the other, but what is not open to debate is that it was from the vantage point that it provided that the king watched the destruction of his army at the Battle of Rowton Heath. As for incidents commemorated by hauntings that are part and parcel of the experience of siege warfare rather than things that are known to have occurred, these are more numerous still: we do not know for certain that a young girl named Henrietta hung herself in the cellar of the Blue Bell inn following the death of her soldier-lover, that a Cavalier was decapitated by a cannon shot while standing at the upper window of the Tudor House in Bridge Street, that an unfortunate sentry was executed for falling asleep at his post while manning the Water Tower, or that headless corpses were seen floating down the River Dee in the wake of Rowton Heath, but it is entirely possible to believe that each and every one of these things actually happened.
To memories of trauma can be added a powerful sense of guilt. In the wake of the Restoration, the Great Rebellion, as it became known, was demonised and that for a good two centuries (it was not until the latter half of the Victorian era that things began to change in this respect). It is no surprise, then, to find that the only Civil-War haunting known to the author that is claimed to project a feeling of evil is the manifestation of the ghost of Oliver Cromwell (there are others) that supposedly lurks in the house in which the Lord Protector lived in Ely, or, for that matter, that story after story features lonely Royalist fugitives trying to escape from this or that stricken field who are murdered, this doubtless being a reflection of the fact that vengeful countrymen outraged by the constant pillaging associated with the ill-supplied Royalist armies vented their anger on such marauders, or, simply, unfortunate stragglers, as fell into their hands. Coupled with this, of course, was a strong push in the direction of the romanticisation of the Royalist cause with Cavalier ghosts being almost invariably figures who are as noble and heroic as their Roundhead counterparts are grim and forbidding.
To conclude, then, it can be seen that plethora of ghost stories that have come down to us from the struggle between King and Parliament constitutes a source that is extremely useful when it comes to exploring how the Civil Wars were experienced and understood at the level of the populace and all the more so when it is considered that the vast majority of the population have left little footprint in the archives. This is not to say that all the stories are true nor, still less, that ghosts exist – of Chester, for example, it is said, that if a landlord discovers that the pub he has just taken over does not have a ghost story, it certainly has one by the following Saturday night – but that does not mean that they can simply be discounted: while it might be absurd to believe that King Charles really can be seen on the tower of Chester Cathedral or, for that matter, that the spectre of Colonel Henry Lunsford haunts Bristol’s Christmas Steps, the spot where he was shot down in the storm of that city in July 1643, the fact that such things were so evidently part of the oral tradition is surely worthy of our attention.
Charles J. Esdaile is a historian and the author of The English Civil War: Myth, Legend and Popular Memory.
