Henry Ogle: Not to be Messed With (NU104195)

Eglingham Hall, like most buildings of its type, started small and has been added to considerably over the years. It began as a pele tower and today looks like this:

© Copyright Stephen Richards and licensed for 

reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

When its development was somewhere in between, one Henry Ogle lived there for a time prior to his death in c.1669. He was a staunch Parliamentarian, and was at his most boisterous – nay, cocky – during the days of Cromwell. Around 1649-50 he was involved in two instances for which we have precious little information, but which nevertheless provide a neat little window into what was, at the time, a pretty crazy world.

The first occurred in the wake of the famous Newcastle Witch Trials of 1649. From Thomas Oliver’s A New Picture of Newcastle-upon-Tyne of 1831:

1649 – The Magistrates of Newcastle sent to Scotland for a man who pretended to discover who were witches: on his arrival the bellman went through the town, crying “all persons who would bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they should be sent for and tried by the person appointed.” Thirty women were brought into the town-hall, stripped there, and had pins thrust into their bodies, and most of them condemned for witches!

As a result, fourteen witches and one wizard were executed. The account continues…

The witch-finder went from Newcastle to Northumberland, when [magistrate] Henry Ogle, Esq. laid hold of him and required bond to answer at the sessions, he escaped into Scotland, where he was apprehended, cast into prison, and condemned; when on the scaffold he confessed that he had been the death of 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of 20 shillings each!

No one knows for sure who this notorious witch-finder was, but it may have been the infamous John Kincaid (however, Kincaid was not collared and executed until 1662, so there may be some confusion here).

Henry Ogle of Eglingham Hall may have played a prominent role in the casting out from the region of the pesky witch-hunters, but a year later he had a run-in with his ‘hero’ Oliver Cromwell, who, on the way to the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, stayed over at Henry’s house. Legend has it that the next morning the two of them quarrelled (over exactly what we don’t know), and that they may even have duelled over the disagreement.

I should think that their differences were soon patched up, though, as Henry was elected MP for the county in 1653 and 1654. But the story of the little dispute lived on, and inspired the poem Cromwell’s Visit: An Eglingham Legend by James Hall … and if anyone out there has the text of the said ditty I’d like to hear from them!

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Cromwell at Netherwitton (NZ102904)

Love him or hate him, Oliver Cromwell certainly made his mark on British history. One of the most hotly disputed aspects of his time at the helm of British politics was how he interacted with those who crossed his path – and was he really quite as bad as is sometimes made out?

One interesting piece of evidence in his favour comes from his brief stay at Netherwitton Hall and its environs in the summer of 1651 whilst on his way north to face the Scots. He called in for an overnight stop at the little Northumberland hamlet of Netherwitton, which was watched over by the incumbents of the aforementioned mansion, namely, the Thornton family. The army, consisting of nine regiments of foot, Cromwell’s horse guards and two regiments of dragoons (as well as assorted ‘baggage’) put quite a strain on local resources and one might have feared for the general well-being of the villagers during what must have been a fraught night.

However, a rare survival from the event itself demonstrates the lengths to which the Lord Protector was prepared to go to appease those upon whom he imposed himself. On 17^th July 1651, special letters of protection, signed by Cromwell, had been given to the family’s head, Lady Anne Thornton, by which ‘all Officers and soldiers under my Command, and all others whom it may concern’ were forbidden to ‘prejudice’ the said lady ‘either by offering any violence to her person, or any of her family, or by taking away any of her horses, cattle or other goods whatsoever without special order’. Despite this, of course, considerable damage was done by several thousand men and animals traipsing here, there and everywhere across and around her estate, but, soon after Cromwell had moved on, £95 5s 6d was paid to Lady Thornton as compensation for corn and grass used/destroyed by his army, as well as other random incidents such as the burning down of a barn and the consumption of sixteen sheep. What made the act of reparation especially noteworthy was that the woman in question was a known Royalist.

It is, of course, likely that Cromwell’s action was little more than a ‘keep ‘em sweet’ tactic – and it is not known if any of his compensatory instinct trickled down to the lower classes of the parish, many of whom must have suffered in one way or another.  However, the whole episode is a nice little insight into the sometimes murky world of Cromwellian diplomacy.

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Durham Cathedral & the Dunbar Martyrs (NZ273421)

For all its Norman grandeur, Durham Cathedral was the scene of one of the most heinous war crimes in British history. The story of the Dunbar Martyrs is hardly a secret as such, but over the years the harsh facts of the sorry episode have certainly been conveniently and repeatedly skirted around.

It all began with Oliver Cromwell’s defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650. Thereafter, the English leader, not in the best of moods, proceeded to ransack much of Scotland whilst sending 5,000 prisoners on a forced march south, where they were bolted up in Durham Cathedral. During their journey they covered 120 miles in eight days with no food or water (except whatever they could quickly scavenge) – and almost half the soldiers died en route, with the remaining 3,000 being crammed into the cavernous cathedral building and castle on 11^th September.

And there they were kept until 31^st October, with virtually no food or water – or indeed heating. They helped themselves to much of the woodwork within in an attempt to keep warm, but illness and disease quickly gripped the prisoners, with dozens dying every day. One of the few items to escape the captives’ makeshift fires was a clock embossed with a Scottish thistle – an item which survives to this day.

Of the 3,000 who began the ordeal, around 1,400 survived – and most of these were promptly sold as slave labour to the new English colonies in the Americas. About 500 were pressed into lengthy military service overseas.

During maintenance work in the 1940s a mass grave was allegedly discovered to the north of the cathedral, it being (it was assumed) the Scottish burial pit. Subsequent investigations have, however, failed to confirm the theory.

A campaign is currently underway to erect a memorial to the victims of this appalling episode.

Battle of Marske Beach (c.NZ640229)

The Pennyman family were big players in seventeenth century Cleveland. In 1625, they raised the fine pile that is Marske Hall and, in 1632, a certain Sir James Pennyman became Lord of the Manor.

As family tradition dictated, James was a staunch Royalist, so successfully chose the wrong side in the English Civil War. Keen to do his bit, though, at a time in the dispute when the outcome was in the balance, he created a little private army of his own made up of tenants from his estate. And, in 1643, this band of brothers was called into action in the little-known ‘Battle of Marske Beach’. It seems that Cromwell, keen to gain a foothold in this part of the world, tried to land a party of men on the seafront near to the village … and was successfully repelled by Sir James and his army.

When he eventually ‘surrendered’, he was punished for his delinquency and fined £1,200 in 1646. It is thought that it was this financial ‘hit’ which forced him to sell his estate to the Lowthers in 1650. Sir James made his comeback, though: he was elevated to the Baronetage after the Restoration and died – vindicated, presumably – in 1679.

Thomas Jefferson’s Hero? (NU209025)

 

John Rushworth, that is. Who? I hear you ask. Well, the third President of the United States and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was something of a fan of this now largely forgotten native of Acklington Park, a settlement a few miles to the south-west of Warkworth in Northumberland.

Rushworth was born in 1612 to a very well-to-do family with Yorkshire roots. The somewhat remote site of his birth did nothing to hinder his progress in life, however, progressing to Oxford University, from where he graduated in 1640. He became a student barrister, and thence clerk-assistant to the House of Commons, having made the acquaintance of King Charles I – and even married the sister of the future Speaker of the House. When all hell broke loose a year or so later, Rushworth became a supporter of Oliver Cromwell, with whom he had much in common, both politically and religiously. When the English Civil War commenced, he became Secretary to General Fairfax as well as Secretary to the Council of War.

John Rushworth effectively became the first ever official chronicler of a major war, being present at many of the big battles which ensued during 1642-51. He was also involved with negotiations with the king, as well as events surrounding his trial and execution (though he was not a signatory to the death warrant). Oliver Cromwell appointed Rushworth his personal Secretary during his ‘reign’, and was given much in the way of new responsibilities and roles thenceforth, much of them related to law reform.

John Milton, John Bunyan and Samuel Pepys were all close friends of his, and he became MP for Berwick on several occasions over the ensuing decades. In 1659, a year after Cromwell’s death, he published his famous Historical Collections (aka The Rushworth Papers), effectively a chronicle of the Civil War years (if a somewhat biased one), in which he espoused his methods and his reasoning. As Richard Cromwell’s power ebbed away during 1659-60, Rushworth, as Secretary to the Council of State, became, briefly, a very influential figure.

Despite the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, Rushworth managed to maintain positions of power, and was even made a Knight of the Order of the Bath in 1661. But it wasn’t to last. King Charles II never could quite forgive and forget, and Rushworth was eventually tried and imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison in 1684. He died in 1690, isolated from his family (he married and had four daughters) in a damp room in Rule's Court, Southwark, depressed, under-nourished, and suffering from senile dementia, aged 78: “where, being reduced to his second childship, for his memory was quite decayed by taking too much brandy to keep up his spirits, he quietly gave up the ghost in his lodging in a certain alley there, called Rule’s Court, on 12 May 1690”.

When, in 1890, King’s Bench Prison was demolished, ‘Rushworth School’ was built on the site and the thoroughfare was renamed ‘Rushworth Street’. His writings, however, found greatest favour in the US where they served as a source of inspiration for Thomas Jefferson. Rushworth's Historical Collections occupied pride of place in the great man’s library and he often quoted from them. Rushworth’s views of Charles I as a monarch who had “declared war on his own people” were later echoed in words by Thomas Jefferson and others when writing about the reign of George III and his actions during the War of Independence.