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The city of Norwich, England’s largest provincial city during the 1640s, sat deep within the Parliamentarian-controlled territory of the Eastern Association. It is sometimes wrongly dismissed as isolated from the fighting, and only marginally affected by the Civil Wars.
Yet in this podcast, Andrew Hopper, Professor of Local and Social History at Oxford Lifelong Learning, shows how the city was far from peaceful during these years. He traces how Norwich’s citizens were drawn into supporting the Parliamentarian war effort. The religious and political divisions in the city, sharpened by the experience of civil war, persisted well beyond the conflict and into the following century.
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“That yeare I lost Repps, some lost theyre witts, others lost theyre honestie, and which is most strange and remarkeable, the Citye of Norwich lost the Mayor; certainly the Citye was not well kept, when the keeper of it, could not keep himselfe.“
Thomas Ramsey, parson of Crostwick, to John Utting, Mayor of Norwich,
17 December 1647.
So reflected Thomas Ramsey in a letter to John Utting in 1647 on the outbreak of Civil War in Norwich five years earlier. Ramsey had been the minister of Repps in Norfolk, and had recently been thrown out of his living by the Parliamentarians. Ramsey was remembering how Norwich’s Royalist sympathising mayor, William Gostlin, had been deposed and a Parliamentarian city government established in 1643.
Yet Norwich is often dismissed as having been only marginally affected by the Civil Wars. It suffered no sieges as comparable provincial capitals did at York, Bristol and Exeter. It was a walled city of 20,000 inhabitants, making it second only to London in size. It was situated deep within Parliamentarian territory and defended by the powerful Eastern Association.
Familiar features of Civil War history are absent: there was no garrison warfare, no punitive raiding, no widespread plundering, nor movements by Clubmen. Yet the city was far from peaceful. Norwich suffered sixteen executions for mutiny and Rebellion, severe rioting, repeated recruiting and Impressment, heavy taxation and a ransacked cathedral. It endured plague and flood, and a massive explosion that left the Mancroft ward of the city devastated.
Parliamentarian control of Norwich was briefly threatened in 1643 and in 1648, since its citizens were far from united behind Parliament’s cause. Most important, the Civil Wars deepened religious and political divisions among Norwich’s inhabitants, strengthening factions that endured well into the eighteenth century.
The religious divisions in Norwich that were so important in 1642 can be traced back to the 1620s and became especially pronounced with Matthew Wren’s appointment as bishop late in 1635. Home to many Puritans, the diocese of Norwich was among the largest and most troublesome in England. Bishop Wren, a formidable enforcer of Charles I and Archbishop William Laud’s policies, was enthroned as bishop to bring things under control.
Charles, Laud and Wren sought to reinforce a high church tradition that stressed ceremony, clerical dignity and order. They insisted upon ministers wearing surplices, and demanded that communion tables be placed behind altar rails in the east end of churches. They restricted preaching and sermons by their critics. Enforcing use of a new Prayer Book, they excommunicated and removed objecting ministers from their livings.
Not surprisingly, these developments antagonised Norwich’s hard-line Protestants, who, derided by their enemies as Puritans, saw themselves as the persecuted Godly. They perceived royal policies as popish innovations, and established their own ministers in rival city lectureships. Wren’s aggressive style of church government irritated many of Norwich’s aldermen. Even the Royalist Earl of Clarendon reflected that Wren’s ”great pride and insolence provoked all the gentry, and in truth most of the inhabitants” of his diocese. Defamed as ‘Little Pope Regulus’ for introducing idolatry and devil-worship into the church, Wren was probably the most unpopular bishop the diocese has ever had.
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The largest migration overseas of Norwich citizens occurred during Wren’s time as bishop. About 500 Norvicians left England, most of them bound for Holland, a much safer refuge than braving the North Atlantic crossing to New England. The Laudian style of churchmanship intensified discord between leading Puritan aldermen and cathedral clergy. Points of disagreement usually arose over the corporation’s seating in the cathedral, the preaching of sermons and the immunities enjoyed by people living in cathedral precincts.
Yet Wren did not completely unite Norwich’s corporation against him. The historian, Matthew Reynolds, uncovered evidence for lay initiatives by future Royalist sympathisers to beautify the churches of St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory during the 1620s. These efforts clearly anticipated the Laudian style. The cathedral clergy became firm supporters of Charles, Laud and Wren’s changes. By 1637, Wren received written pledges of support from fourteen of the city’s clergymen. Magistrates from the Anguish family (later destined to support the Royalist cause) became enthusiastic enforcers of Wren’s policies.
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By 1638, there were signs that Wren had worn down opposition, even that Norwich’s Puritan movement had reached a low point. But fortunes changed with the calling of the Long Parliament in November 1640. The position of the cathedral clergy and Laudian party came under threat as the confidence of their opponents grew. Complaints against clergy who had supported Wren grew louder. The corporation complained to the House of Lords that the mayor, aldermen and councillors had been forced to attend long Sunday services in the cold cathedral without comfort breaks. During these, they complained that the city’s poor had been allowed to sit in a wooden gallery above them and throw things down at them, including bibles, shoes, spit, urine and excrement.
One newsbook reported that, on Shrove Tuesday 1642, anxious cathedral clergy raised an armed party to defend the cathedral close from feared rioting by apprentices. The tract declared that the cathedral courts had been “the cause of many a sorrowfull heart in Norwich”, and its author ridiculed the dean and chapter, declaring
“to the world the sillynesse of these Cathedrall blades: It is a signe that they have no law for the maintenance of their pipes, that are so afraid of the pulling of them down by boyes.”
This tract heralded the vengeance inflicted upon the Laudian cathedral once the Parliamentarians secured their control of Norwich in 1643.
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Fear of Catholics and supposed popish plots was another critical factor stimulating Parliamentarian recruitment in Norwich in 1642. An anti-Catholic panic occurred in September 1640 when it was feared that Catholics intended to fire the city. These fears intensified in November 1641 when news that Irish Catholics had risen in Rebellion and massacred Protestant settlers arrived in the city. That month London newsbook reported another
“great uproar in Norwich concerning the papists arising there, they being intended to burn the whole city.”
When taking sides became critical in August 1642, Parliamentarian newsbooks claimed that Cavalier horsemen were looting Norwich’s outlying villages, exploiting a popular mentality that identified Cavaliers as plunderers of the poor commoners.
The Parliamentarians began to consolidate their control of Norwich in August and September 1642. The city’s Assembly Book recorded orders from Parliament to secure the city, to implement its Militia Ordinance and to confine Catholics to their dwellings. A committee was formed to coordinate the city’s defences. Parliamentarian deputy lieutenants met at Norwich and took control of the county Militia. Twenty-four captains pledged themselves to support Parliament’s choice as Lord Lieutenant for Norfolk, the Puritan Earl of Warwick, while a military engineer was paid for advice about fortifying the city.
The Puritan minister, William Bridge, returned from exile in Holland to deliver thunderous sermons to Parliamentarian volunteers in Norwich. He declared that these raw soldiers were the bulwarks of England and of the Protestant faith. He invited listeners to consider the consequences of a Royalist victory:
“should the Ammonites prevaile (I mean that malignant Jeusuiticall party prevaile) in the Kingdome, what a dark and blacke day would it be upon England? … what would they do, yea what would they not do? … everyone should sit down and think with him selfe, what shall I give or do, that my person should not be enslaved? that my wife and daughters be not abused, that my poor children be not massacred, that my house be not plundered, that my Country be not betrayed?”
Whereas Parliamentarian recruitment was encouraged by a powerful combination of anti-Catholicism and rousing sermons, Royalist potential in Norwich was stifled by lacklustre commitment from Royalist sympathising aldermen, poor coordination with Norfolk’s Royalist gentry and the city’s isolation from Royalist-held regions. Captain Moses Treswell discovered this on 28 July 1642, when he attempted in vain to read the King’s Commission of Array to recruit volunteers in Norwich. The next day, the mayor’s court forbade him from beating his drum. Treswell was arrested and sent to London to be dealt with by Parliament as a traitor.
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In early August, the Royalist Lord Lieutenant, Lord Mowbray, arrived at Kenninghall on the county border, near Diss. Despite summoning the commissioners of array, he failed to rally Norfolk’s Royalist gentry into a local military force. Many Norfolk landowners, such as Sir Jacob Astley and Sir Thomas Corbet, left independently to join the King’s field armies, thereby depriving local adherents of organisation and leadership.
From January to March 1643, Royalist sympathising aldermen became isolated and passive. Their influence was finally extinguished when Lord Grey of Warke arrived in Norwich late in February. As major-general of the new Eastern Association, Grey enforced Parliament’s Militia Ordinance. On 2 March, the mayor, William Gostlin, a Royalist sympathiser, refused to approve orders to requisition horses, so Grey had him arrested and removed to Cambridge.
The spring of 1643 saw increasing military activity in the city. On 7 March, Captain John Fountain led a contingent of volunteers to arrest Royalist gentry at Augustine Holl’s house in nearby Heigham. Parliament ordered that these captives should be handed over to Colonel Oliver Cromwell, whose arrival was shortly expected. Supported by a company of Norwich Dragoons, Cromwell captured another group of Royalist gentry at Lowestoft on 17 March.
The next day, four Norwich aldermen were ejected from office for being Royalist sympathisers. The city elections began on 20 March, the very day Cromwell triumphantly returned from Lowestoft. The Parliamentarian sympathiser, John Thacker, was chosen as mayor elect, along with five new aldermen of similar persuasion, including the Puritans Livewell Sherwood and Matthew Lindsey. A Sequestration committee was formed in Norwich to confiscate Royalist estates in the city.
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From September 1643, the city corporation imposed a loyalty test in the form of Parliament’s Solemn League and Covenant upon the citizens. Lists were drawn up in the city’s churches of those who took the Covenant, and of those who refused it. Those taking this oath swore to adhere to a Presbyterian Church settlement which adherents of a non-Puritan Church of England would have found distasteful. This provides us with a glimpse into the geography of allegiance within the city.
There were very few refusers of the Covenant in the Puritan inclined cloth manufacturing districts in the Wymer and Ultra Aquam wards in the north of the city. But there were a great deal of refusers in the western and southern wards of Mancroft and Conesford, especially in the wealthy parish of St Peter Mancroft itself, where the market place was located.
Parliamentarian recruitment continued, with the maids of Norwich raising money to equip a new Cavalry troop in August 1643. These volunteers, nicknamed ‘the Maiden troop’ rode out under Captain Robert Swallow to form the eleventh troop of Oliver Cromwell’s famous Regiment of Horse. Recruitment into the infantry was much more difficult and the city resorted to Impressment to meet its quotas. One company of infantry were recruited from the Dutch and Walloon ‘Strangers’, some of whose families had lived in Norwich since the 1560s.
Parliamentarian control of Norwich was briefly threatened by the Royalist Earl of Newcastle’s victories in the summer of 1643. It was feared that his army would sweep down through Lincolnshire and invade East Anglia. His soldiers reached Stamford in July and threatened Wisbech. On 13 August, Royalists seized King’s Lynn, offering Newcastle’s army a gateway into Norfolk. In response, the Norwich mayor’s court permitted Livewell Sherwood to beat his drums to call for volunteers to join in the siege of King’s Lynn. Fortunately for Norwich, Lynn surrendered on 16 September and Newcastle’s attentions returned northwards to besiege Hull. Soldiers from Norwich later fought in the Earl of Manchester’s Eastern Association army that defeated Newcastle’s Royalists at Marston Moor in July 1644.
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Norwich’s Puritans exacted a zealous vengeance on the cathedral as soon as Parliament passed Ordinances against superstitious images and idolatry. Ironically, the new bishop of Norwich was now Joseph Hall, who was certainly no Laudian. In a tract entitled Hard Measure, Bishop Hall later recalled the unruly and scornful behaviour of the iconoclasts headed by aldermen Lindsey and Sheriff Toft:
“It is no other than tragical to relate the carriage of that furious sacrilege, whereof our eyes and ears were the sad witnesses, under the authority and presence of Linsey, Toftes the Sheriff, and Greenwood. Lord, what work was here! what clattering of glasses! what beating down of walls! what tearing up of monuments! what pulling down of seats! what wresting out of irons and brass from the windows and graves! what defacing of arms! what demolishing of curious stone-work, that had not any representation in the world, but only the cost of the founder, and skill of the mason! what tooting and piping upon the destroyed organ-pipes! and what a hideous triumph on the market-day before all the country; when, in a kind of sacrilegious and profane procession, all the organ-pipes, vestments, both copes and surplices, together with the leaden cross which had been newly sawn down from over the Green-yard pulpit, and the service-books and singing-books that could be had, were carried to the fire in the public market-place; a lewd wretch walking before the train, in his cope trailing in the dirt, with a service-book in his hand, imitating in an impious scorn the tune, and usurping the words of the litany used formerly in the church. Near the public cross, all these monuments of idolatry must be sacrificed to the fire; not without much ostentation of a zealous joy, in discharging ordnance, to the cost of some, who professed how much they had longed to see that day. Neither was it any news, upon this guild-day, to have the cathedral, now open on all sides, to be filled with musketeers, waiting for the Major’s return; drinking and tobacconing as freely as if it had turned ale-house.”
Such was the extent of the destruction, there was no need for William Dowsing, Parliament’s iconoclast general, to visit Norwich. The corporation had already done much of his work for him. But the cathedral was not completely abandoned; the corporation’s ministers used it for civic thanksgivings for Parliament’s victories and Sunday morning sermons, and one of the chapels was set aside as a parish church for the close. But the buildings as a whole did not assume a new role, as at York Minster, which became a well-funded preaching centre for Godly clergy. On 31 May 1650, the corporation of Great Yarmouth petitioned the Rump Parliament:
“to grant us such a part of the lead and other usefull materialls of that vast and altogether useless Cathedrall in Norwich towardes the building of a works house to employ our almost sterved poore and repairing our peeres [piers in the harbour] or otherwise as you shall thinke fitt and sufficient.”
Yet the petition failed, as not even Norwich’s Puritan aldermen would bestow such a valuable resource of stone upon their commercial rivals at Yarmouth.
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Parliament’s financial demands upon the citizens gradually shifted from voluntary donations to compulsory taxation, which by 1644 had reached a weight and frequency hitherto unknown. The most unpopular levy of all was the Excise. Introduced as a VAT tax on essentials from November 1643, it was administered at Alderman Parmenter’s house. It proved a heavy burden on the poor, particularly after its imposition on meat and beer. This sparked riots among Norwich’s butchers from December 1646. Meanwhile the underlying mood of unrest behind the riots was worsened by natural disasters of plague and flood.
A Royalist reaction began to gather strength in the city from 1646, angered at the increasing demands placed upon the city by Parliament’s war effort, and the Puritan attack on festive culture and holidays such as Christmas.
On 1 December 1647, apprentices gathered in Norwich’s castle yard and petitioned the mayor, John Utting, for the observance of Christmas Day. Utting was a Presbyterian and the churchwarden of St Peter Mancroft. He was becoming increasingly inclined to Royalist sympathies. He was later accused of permitting Royalist clergy to preach in Norwich churches, countenancing popular festivities on Charles I’s accession day, and allowing the election of the Royalist, Roger Mingay, as alderman in Mancroft ward in March 1648.
On 22 April 1648, a messenger arrived in Norwich to convey Mayor Utting to answer charges against him in Parliament. This sparked a petition and then rioting to disobey Parliament’s order and keep the mayor in Norwich. These riots led to an explosion at the Committee House where the county magazine was accidentally detonated. This episode became known as ‘the Great Blow’ and forms the subject of a separate sequel podcast to this one, as the resulting investigation reveals much about how popular politics operated in the city.
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Norwich was not conspicuously involved in the events leading up to the Regicide, although the city assembly ordered a congratulatory letter thanking Cromwell for his solicitude towards the city in January 1649. Meanwhile, a petition addressed by leading citizens to the House of Commons on 25 December 1648 called for ‘impartial justice’ against
“he himself and all such as have been the most notorious incendiaries and instruments in shedding blood.”
Rather sensibly, this was not recorded in the Assembly Book.
In autumn 1650, with the New Model Army engaged away in Scotland, Norfolk Royalists plotted a rendezvous at Easton Heath, about three miles outside Norwich. Suspicious hunting parties and a disorderly crowd awaiting a football match unnerved the authorities. The conspirators hoped to be admitted into Norwich once they had raised enough men, but support failed to materialise. Their muster around 28 November of only 50 recruits quickly dissolved itself, as did similar gatherings at Downham Market, Swaffham and Thetford.
Suspects were apprehended through the evidence of informers. Philip Jermyn and John Pulleston presided over their trials at the shire house in Norwich on 20 December. Six of the unfortunate ringleaders were executed in Norwich market place on 23 December, allegedly crying out ‘God Save the King’ upon the gallows. Francis Roberts and John Barber, both citizens of Norwich, were among them, Roberts allegedly hanged outside his own front door.
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The execution of King Charles brought to power in Norwich a clique of Congregationalists who lacked widespread support in the city. Conservative undercurrents gathered strength in Norwich as the 1650s progressed. In 1658, the Royalist Roger Mingay was elected mayor, and by 1659 those favourable to restoring the monarchy had become a majority on the aldermanic bench.
In January 1660, fourteen Norwich aldermen and twenty-five common councillors signed the Norfolk Address to General George Monck desiring a free parliament. On 10 May ,Charles II was solemnly proclaimed King. The occasion in Norwich was marked by several days of bonfires, feasting and an official thanksgiving on 24 May.
Not everyone in Norwich welcomed the Restoration. Former Parliamentarians, including nine aldermen, were thrown out of office. The city assembly’s legislation since 1642 was denounced as
“inconsistent with and derogatory from the constitutions of a well-ordered monarchical government.”
Robert Swallow, captain of Norwich’s Maiden Troop, was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Norfolk’s Regicide, the Congregationalist Miles Corbet, was captured in the Dutch Republic in 1662 and brought back to be hanged, drawn and quartered alongside fellow regicides, John Okey and John Barkstead.
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The memory of the Civil Wars shaped Whig and Tory rivalry in Norwich well into the eighteenth century. In 1703, the monument in the cathedral to Dean Henry Fairfax was covered with a cloak until the offending word ‘Nasebiani’ had been erased. It was felt that the monument’s commemoration of the deceased dean’s Parliamentarian cousin, Sir Thomas Fairfax, gloried in Rebellion and would provoke a riot by a Tory mob.
The political geography of the city in subsequent centuries was very much shaped by its Civil War divisions. Royalists and subsequently Tories and Jacobites, enjoyed support from the retailers and merchants around the market place in Mancroft ward, while the Parliamentarians, Whigs and dissenters were supported in the wards of Wymer and Over-the-Water, where the cloth trade was located. But Norwich’s Parliamentarian past, much like Robert Kett’s commotions in the city during 1549, was not to be commemorated.
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