The Upside Down: The War We Never Mention

I recently sat in my local church, St Michael and All Angels, in Great Tew, and listened to the English academic and historian Diane Purkiss talk about how civil wars begin. 

She was speaking at an event commemorating the Great Tew Circle, a remarkable group of scholars and poets that formed a rolling house party-cum-think tank at the manor house in Tew in the years before the outbreak of the first English Civil War in 1642. 

Professor Purkiss is the author of the 2004 book The English Civil War: A People’s History, which opens with a puzzled question: if this is arguably the most important event in English history – a revolution in which the reigning monarch was executed and a republic established – why do we know so little about it? 

We don’t mark it with a day of celebration like Bastille Day or the Fourth of July. If pressed, all most of us have are vague notions of Roundheads and Cavaliers or Puritans banning Christmas. In fact, it was by far the bloodiest conflict English troops have ever fought in, with one in 10 adult males perishing. 

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To answer her own question, our speaker reminded us that this was a war that no one really wanted and that everyone hoped could be avoided. 

That was certainly the position of the Great Tew Circle. The hosts and mainstays were Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, and his wife Lettice. The combination of the Carys’ generous hospitality and their extensive library was a seductive one, and guests would come and stay for extended periods to read and write and discuss the pressing political and theological matters of the day. 

As Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, memorably described it, Great Tew was “a college situated in a purer air”, a place dedicated to tolerance and truth, far from the partisan distractions of the city. 

The key members were Clarendon; a future Lord Chancellor, William Chillingworth; the influential theologian, Gilbert Sheldon, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1663; the poets Sidney Godolphin, Abraham Cowley, John Suckling, and Edmund Waller; and the traveller and translator, George Sandys. Occasional visitors included the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson; and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. 

So, this was rather more than a back-water intellectual love-in: they wielded considerable political influence – Falkland himself became Charles I’s Secretary of State, despite his reservations about the King’ s character and his support for much of Parliament’s agenda.

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What did the Great Tew Circle believe in?  

Its guiding principles were a loose collation, rather than a prescriptive list, and drew inspiration from humanist scholars such as Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. They wanted political continuity (the King and Parliament working productively together), and religious tolerance (navigating a middle way between the superstitious rituals of Catholicism and the reforming zeal of the Calvinists), and all believed that a war would be a disaster – “odious and execrable”, as Clarendon would later describe it.

But war did come, and Great Tew found itself in the middle of the action. 

Sitting in the same peaceful, light-filled church that Falkland and Clarendon once sat in, it was hard to imagine the surrounding fields as a war zone. But a 17th Century army on the march meant a corridor many miles wide, containing thousands of men, wagons and horses, straggling across the open countryside. 

The troops were often hungry, they carried lice, plague, and ‘the new disease’ (probably a strain of typhus) into all the towns and villages they passed through. They took food, livestock, hay, straw, clothing, weaponry, and looted properties they believed to be allied to the other side, torching thatch, stripping churches, and ravaging the grander manor houses. Rape, then as now, was a weapon of war. Atrocity stories spread by word-of-mouth and printed chapbooks deepened the enmity. 

By the end of 1644, Falkland, Chillingworth, and Godolphin were all dead and the country was plunged into a cycle of violence and bigotry.

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But the causes and effects that drive history are more complex than the tragic mess of war often allows. 

The Great Tew Circle survived as more than nostalgia for a lost scholarly arcadia. In his influential 1987 essay, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper concluded that the remaining members, led by Clarendon, “would plan the ultimate return both of the monarchy and the church and determine the form which it would take. They would be the royalist architects of the Restoration and it was their ideas which would triumph after 1660”.  

Indeed, the constitutional monarchy we have inherited today, the one enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights – and a key influence on the American Declaration of Independence – owes much to those balmy days of poetry and free-flowing discussion in Tew.
This feels like a good lesson to hang on to, as battle lines are once again being drawn.

John Mitchinson is a writer and publisher. He is the co-founder of Unbound, the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for books, the co-host of the popular books podcast Backlisted, and a vice-president of the Hay Festival. He was a senior writer for BBC’s QI