Abstract
Many histories of the civil war and biographies of Margaret Lucas Cavendish recount the story that, in 1648, parliamentary soldiers desecrated the Lucas family tomb, scattered the remains of Cavendish’s mother and sister, and tore out the corpses’ hair to wear in their hats. Tracking down the sources of this widely repeated story, this essay examines the role of textual accounts in producing the effect that bodies precede them. Events and stories, flesh, facts, and fiction, prove to be very difficult to untangle.
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Notes
For similar accounts of this vandalism as fact, see Grant (1957, 101) and Jones (1988, 68). I cannot determine where Jones found the detail that ‘small items of jewellry on the corpses were stolen.’ Jones and Grant both cite HMC, 12 Rep., Pt. ix, 1891, 27–28, discussed below.
Cavendish uses this phrase in her Sociable Letter 143, published in 1664. See Bowerbank and Mendelson’s introduction to their collection Paper Bodies (Bowerbank and Mendelson, 2000, 11) where the letter itself also appears (81).
My source for this quotation is Bruno Ryves, a royalist clergyman and a member of Charles I’s Council of War. The title of his newsbook, which first appeared some nine months after the events it reports, contrasts outrageous rebels to ‘faithfull Subjects.’ According to Walter, ‘As the title makes abundantly clear one of the most important and frequently cited accounts of the attacks was a piece of royalist polemic. But this is seldom acknowledged by those who use it, and there has been little critical discussion of such a seductively rich source’ (Walter, 1999, 22).
I include the quotation marks here because they are in the Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC) version and, as unreliable as quotation marks are in early modern texts for identifying reported speech, they open up the possibility that this whole description is a quotation from some unnamed source. In addition to occasional quotation marks within this account, the HMC Twelfth Report encloses the whole text in quotation marks (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1891, 19–30).
See Mendle (2001, 14–15, 33, 155). According to Mendle, this defiant gesture so enraged Cromwell that he tried to pull the pamphlets off of hats.
I discuss this ‘acknowledge then forget’ maneuver throughout True Relations (Dolan, 2013, especially 25–26 and 113–116).
Critics have also pointed out that Cavendish’s proclaimed disregard for tombs did not stop her husband William from commissioning an elaborate one for them both in Westminster Abbey (Grant, 1957, 237; Whitaker, 2002, 345). The epitaph, which William probably wrote, identifies Margaret not just as William Cavendish’s wife, the Duchess of Newcastle, and an author, but in terms of her relation to her brother, the royalist martyr, and to Colchester: ‘her name was Margarett Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester; a noble familie, for all the Brothers were Valiant and all the Sisters virtuous’ (Grant, 1957, 239). The tomb was designed and built in 1672 (while Cavendish and her husband were both still alive). She died in 1673 at age 50; William, 30 years older, survived her.
References
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Anonymous. 1648b. A True and Exact Relation of the Taking of Colchester, Sent in a Letter from an Officer of the ARMY, (who was present during the siege in that service,) to a Member of the House of Commons … and An Account of the Cause of Giving no Quarter to Sir Charles Lucas, and Sir George Lyle. London: n.p.
Anonymous. 1884. Colchester’s Tears Affecting and Afflicting City & Country, Dropping from the Sad Face of a New War Threatening to Bury in Her Own Ashes that woful Town. London, 1648. In Ten Scarce Books in English Literature, no. 8, ed. Edmund Goldsmid. Clarendon Historical Society, Edinburgh: Goldsmid.
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Acknowledgements
A Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library enabled me to conduct the research for this essay. I am grateful to Kathryn Schwarz for the invitation that got me thinking about this topic and for probing engagement with the essay in draft and to Barbara Donagan for helpful conversations about the Lucas family.
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Dolan, F. Scattered remains and paper bodies: Margaret Cavendish and the Siege of Colchester. Postmedieval 4, 452–464 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.31