Civil War

The first major engagement of the English Civil War (1642-1649) took place two miles from Warmington at Edgehill. The following account is taken from the Warmington parish register at the time.

“The Battell was fought by our Sovraigne Lord King Charles and Th’earle of Essex the Three & Twentieth Day of October being Sabbath Day Ano Dom 1642 partly between Radwaie & Kington. Richard Sannes Captaine of a Foote companie a gentleman of Worcester Shire was buried in Warmington Churchyard the Four and Twentieth daie of October Ano Dom 1642 Alexander Gourden a Scotsman was buried the Five and Twentieth Daie of October Ano Dom 1642 ut supra Also Seven other were buried in Warmington Churchyard shortly after whose names I know not and it is reported that one or two more were buried within the fielde and precincts of Warmington aforesaid.”

This account of the battle and casualties was probably written by the curate, John Batty. The rector, Richard Wootton, was absent from the parish, commanding a Parliamentarian troop.

Captain Gourdin’s headstone is a rare survival. It is not known to which regiment he was attached, nor how it came about that he had this well-carved memorial.

 

In October 2020 The Revd Canon Dr Richard Cooke wrote the following account of Captain Gourdin:

A SCOTTISH SOLDIER

In the churchyard at Warmington there is a gravestone in front of which, each Remembrance Sunday, is laid a poppy. It’s opposite the memorial to those from the village who died in the World Wars of the Twentieth Century, but this stone is much older: ‘Here lieth the body of Alexander Gourdin Captaine buried the 25 Day of October Anno Domi 1642’ it says. The Warmington Parish Register adds that he was ‘a Scotsman’, buried in the churchyard after the Battle of Edgehill two days before, along with ‘Richard Sannes Captaine of a Foote companie, a gentleman of Worcestershire’ and seven others who are not named.

‘Alexander Gourdin’ is the only one of these nine battle casualties to have a gravestone, and the only casualty of this first battle of the English Civil War to have a contemporary monument. His stone is the third oldest in Warmington churchyard; outdoor gravestones, as opposed to monuments within a church, were quite a new phenomenon in the 17^th Century. Formerly, graves were routinely re-used after a few generations, once the bodies had decayed. Generally only those from wealthy families tended to be memorialised at this time.

So who was this Scots Captain, and what was he doing at this battle? Clearly he must have been a royalist, for the King’s army camped out on the night before the battle ‘under Wormington Hills’, and presumably he was brought to the village after the battle, dying a day or two later of wounds. Though his identity had been lost locally, records of the Gordon family in Scotland refer to an Alexander Gordon who was killed at Edgehill. He was ‘Eldest son of Sir Alexander of Navidale, grandson of the 12th Earl of Sutherland (and Bothwell’s divorced wife Lady Jean Gordon)’.

Spelling in the 17^th Century was notoriously not standardised, and if you say Gordon with a Scots accent you can hear why it might have sounded to Warwickshire ears like ‘Gourdin’. Alexander Gordon was a professional soldier who had fought in the wars on the Continent, around 28 years old at the time of his death in 1642. He was born in late 1614 (his birthdate is variously given as 17 September, November or December),and his family was the oldest existing noble family in the British Isles at the time, with an unbroken line going back to the First Earl of Sutherland in 1228.

Alexander came from an illustrious line. His grandmother, Lady Jean, was daughter of the Earl of Huntly and had been divorced from the Earl of Bothwell after only a year of marriage in order for him to marry Mary, Queen of Scots. Her second marriage was to the 12^th Earl of Sutherland, another Alexander Gordon, whom she survived by 35 years, though her third marriage, in her 50s, was at last a love match. She held very firmly throughout her life to the Roman Catholic Church, of which the Huntly family were and continued to be the most prominent champions in fiercely Protestant post-Reformation Scotland. Only two years before her death in 1629, aged 83, her son Robert undertook to make sure that his mother ‘sall outerlie forbear and absteine frome recepting of preistis and Jesuitis and frome heiring of masse in tyme cuming.’ She is described by Antonia Fraser as ‘a figure of genuine intelligence and spirit’ with a ‘cool, detached character’, and, as her son Robert put it, a ‘great understanding above the capacity of her sex’. Her influence was felt strongly throughout the family in later generations – one of her granddaughters, Anne, died in a shipwreck in 1648 fleeing Scotland in search of freedom to practise her Roman Catholic faith on the Continent., and her grandson John (Alexander’s brother) became a Roman Catholic priest.

Lady Jean’s second husband, the 12^th Earl of Sutherland, had had an even more difficult and traumatic upbringing than her. It included the poisoning of his own father in front of him in 1567, when he was 15, and a forced marriage to the daughter of his guardian, the Earl of Caithness, who was twice his age. Once he came of age his marriage was quickly dissolved because of his wife’s notorious adultery and he married Lady Jean. But he handed over his Earldom in 1581 to his eldest son, John, who was only 5 years old at the time, and retired from public life, leaving his wife to run the estates. He died in 1599. The 12^th Earl had two additional surviving sons, Sir Robert (born in 1580), who became the family historian, and Sir Alexander (born in 1585), who was the father of the Alexander buried at Warmington.

The most prominent of the three brothers was Robert, a courtier, scholar and man of action. The accession of James Stuart to the English throne in 1603 led to an influx of Scots to the Royal Court in London, Robert among them. In 1606 became a Gentleman of the Privy Bedchamber, which gave him close access to the king, and he was knighted and given a life pension of £200 a year in 1609. In 1613 he married Lucie Gordon, who had been brought up at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire with the king’s daughter Elizabeth, to whom her mother had taught French.

While Robert was linked ever more closely with the royal family, back in Scotland the family’s relationship with Roman Catholicism continued to be problematic. In 1606, Robert’s brother John, the 13^th Earl, was accused of being a secret Catholic and, with his wife and mother, confined to Inverness. Further and more serious accusations in 1614, brought by the Sutherland’s by-now-hereditary enemy, the Earl of Caithness, led to imprisonment for John in St Andrews and later in Edinburgh. Alexander, the youngest brother, got word to Robert at Court in London and the king intervened to allow John freedom for a few months to attend to his affairs. He eventually seems to have come to some accommodation with the authorities of the Kirk, but it was perhaps too much for him, and he died later in 1615 leaving his son (also John) to succeed him as 14^th Earl, a minor as John himself had been when he became Earl.

In 1617 James I returned to Scotland for the first time since he had left for the English throne in 1603. He was accompanied by Sir Robert Gordon (who won an archery competition held before the king at Holyrood). Robert had become the new Earl of Sutherland’s ‘tutor-at-law’ and now set about reviving the Earl’s somewhat flagging fortunes. He sold some of his own personal property and paid off the debts that had accumulated on the Earl’s estate in 1621. In 1623 he continued the family feud when he received a commission to pursue the Earl of Caithness, who had been declared a rebel, with fire and sword, and captured Castle Sinclair, the Caithness family seat.

Robert’s influence at Court continued when Charles I succeeded his father in 1625. He continued in his Privy Chamber post, and was given a trusted role as the young king’s private messenger to his new bride, the French Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria. As a sign of Charles’s favour, Robert was created the first baron of Nova Scotia, with an estate of 16,000 acres across the Atlantic, as part of a new but ultimately unsuccessful settlement there. In 1633 when Charles came north for his rather belated coronation as King of Scotland, Robert deputised for the Lord High Chamberlain of Scotland, and carried Charles’s train at the coronation service in Holyrood Abbey. He joined the Scots Privy Council in 1634, and was with the court at Durham in 1639 as Charles decided what to do with the Scottish Covenanters who had risen in protest against the King at this attempt to reintroduce bishops and an Anglican Prayer Book. By this time Robert was almost 60, and he seems to have retired from the court at this point. Through the next years of conflict and civil war in Scotland he appears occasionally as a mediator, but seems mainly to have concentrated on writing the history of his own family.

Prominent amongst the Covenanters who opposed the king was John Gordon, the 14^th Earl, Robert’s nephew and former ward, who was impeccably Protestant and Presbyterian. John Gordon led the nobles of Scotland in signing the National Covenant in Edinburgh in February 1638. His coming of age in 1630 may have changed the atmosphere within the family, coming just a year after his redoubtable Catholic grandmother’s death. Sir Robert’s religious allegiances were never very clear – the result most probably of many years survival at Court – but those of his younger brother Alexander were. Like his mother, he was a committed Roman Catholic. During his nephew’s minority, Alexander seems to have had a significant role in the Sutherland family. He mostly seems to have remained in northern Scotland, while Robert travelled to England, and quite often to France. At some point Sir Alexander took on the important role of Sheriff of Sutherland, normally filled by the Earl if he was of age, and there was, no doubt, some financial advantage to having a key role in the family’s affairs while his nephew grew to adulthood. But when John Gordon returned to the family estates in 1630, after studying at Edinburgh and St Andrews, to take up his earldom, he redeemed mortgages on his lands and energetically set about enforcing law in the local countryside to the consternation of the local gentry, probably including his uncle. It may be no coincidence that soon after, in August 1631, Sir Alexander left his own lands in Navidale, just north of the Sutherland family seat of Dunrobin Castle, and where he had occupied Helmsdale Castle which he had restored in 1616. With his family he relocated to Kilmore in Ireland, a specifically ‘Scots Catholic enclave in planation Cavan’, amidst many Scots Presbyterian settlers who had been given land by the Crown to strengthen Protestant presence in Ulster. In 1636 the move seems to have become permanent, as Sir Alexander sold his lands in Navidale to the Gunn family for £800. This wasn’t a great deal of money (only four years’ worth of his brother Robert’s court pension, for example) and may suggest that the family was short of cash.

In the early 17^th century young gentleman tended either to attend university (though usually without taking a degree) or went abroad to gain military experience. Most were expected to have some knowledge of military matters: the medieval codes of chivalry had not completely disappeared, even if the pattern of warfare had evolved. The younger sons and branches of the Scots nobility especially were known as good and serious soldiers, and Shakespeare’s Henry V, which though set in 1415 reflects the society of 1600, famously includes ‘Captain Jamy’ who is described by his Welsh comrade Fluellen as

a marvellous falourous gentleman, that is certain; and of great expedition and knowledge in th’ aunchient wars, upon my particular knowledge of his directions: by Cheshu, he will maintain his argument as well as any military man in the world, in the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans.

Though it’s a caricature, this simple portrait shows a type of Scots gentleman-soldier versed in the science and history of war.

In 1618 the election of the strongly Protestant Frederick, Elector Palatine, to the throne of Bohemia, and his subsequent expulsion from his kingdom after only a single winter’s reign sparked conflict, which we now know as the Thirty Years’ War, between the Protestant states of northern Europe and the Roman Catholic Habsburg Empire. Many young Scots and Englishmen entered Dutch or Swedish service on the Protestant side some out of religious feeling, others out of loyalty to the Stuarts (Charles I’s sister Elizabeth was Frederick’s wife), and still others because they would be paid well. In 1631 the 14^th Earl had been asked to provide troops in support of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king and leading soldier of the day. The Earl himself had his hands full at home, but his younger brother Adam answered the call, and sailed to Hamburg, aged only 19. He died at the Battle of Nordlingen in Bavaria in 1634, having risen quickly to the rank of colonel. Nordlingen was a defeat for the Protestant forces, followed shortly by the Peace of Prague which brought fighting to an end for a brief period.

Adam’s cousin, the younger Alexander Gordon, first emerges at this point, but he was apparently at first attracted to the opposite side, for the Spanish Ambassador in London heard that an Alexander Gordon, kinsman of the Earl of Sutherland, was eager to raise troops for the Spanish crown for service in the Netherlands in 1635. Alexander got into trouble in Brussels for payment of a bill with a local tailor, probably in connection with raising troops. In 1635 Alexander would himself have been 20 years old, and he might already seen some brief military service, either on the Continent or in the sporadic fighting which plagued Ireland or Scotland. His initial plan to serve the Spanish crown perhaps suggests that he followed the religious beliefs of his father and grandmother rather than those of his cousins, although given the state of the war at the time, the Spanish forces were probably the more prudent choice as the Habsburg cause which they supported seemed to be dominant. However, the plan seems to have come to nothing, and not long afterwards we find Alexander raising troops again, but this time for the Swedish crown and from his native Sutherland. He seems to have sailed finally in 1637, when, with his brother John (the future priest) and other ‘young gentlemen’ of Sutherland, he left Aberdeen for Germany, possibly being shipwrecked on the way. Once there they joined the regiment of another Alexander Gordon, which was involved in the successful Swedish campaign in Saxony and Bohemia in 1638-9 particularly as a detached force near Dresden. After two years’ service in Germany, Alexander was released from Swedish service in late 1639.

There is no further direct record of him until the entry in the Warmington Parish Register, but we can make some educated guesses. Assuming he returned to the British Isles in early 1640, Charles I was moving into ever deeper conflict with his subjects. In Scotland the Covenanters opposed the king who was massing an army in response; in Ireland troops were being raised amongst the Catholic population to support the king by an invasion of England, greatly antagonising the strong Protestant element in Parliament at Westminster, and in 1641 the Ulster plantations erupted into extreme violence as the settlers were attacked by local Catholics. For Alexander, now a veteran, either the Scottish or Irish context would have afforded opportunity for soldiering. Sir Alexander, his father, is recorded as living in Kilmore, Ireland, ‘with his sons’ in 1641.

Meanwhile in England, those who had served in the Swedish and Dutch armies were much in demand by both King and Parliament as hostilities crept closer. Gustavus Adolphus, though he had died in battle in 1632, was widely admired as having revolutionised military tactics, particularly by emphasising the need for bold, offensive warfare. He used his cavalry as shock troops to break the lines of an enemy army, followed by speedy action from his infantry to exploit the gaps. Dutch tactics were simpler but more defensive, and the Swedish style was much favoured by the experts. Amongst these was one of the two most experienced British soldiers of the time, Patrick Ruthven, a Scot.

Ruthven had fought extensively under Gustavus Adolphus. By 1640 he was approaching 70 and suffered from deafness and gout, and was known in Sweden and Germany as Rot-wein after his favourite drink which he consumed in great quantities, but he seemed to have a constitution of iron. Ruthven offered his services to Charles I, together with his sons and several other Scots gentlemen, in 1637 when conflict with the Covenanters seemed likely,. He refused command in Scotland unless he could be undisputed chief, something reserved for those grander than himself Charles made him Lord Ettrick in 1639 and the Earl of Forth in 1642). He defended Edinburgh Castle for the king in 1640. As the situation in England deteriorated, Ruthven seems to have gathered a small staff of Scots gentlemen for the King’s service, particularly veterans of the wars in Germany.

Casualties were fewer than we might expect, with most being wounded and comparatively few killed outright. Musket-balls and bullets were lethal only over quite a short range at this time, and artillery fire had been largely negated by the softness of the ploughed fields on which it landed. Sword cuts were probably the most dangerous threat to life, and were frequently infected and led to death sometime after a battle. Many casualties were able to be moved from the battle field and evacuated to Warwick with Essex’s army, or Oxford with the King’s. Most lay on the battlefield until morning, when neither side had the energy to begin the fight again. The King’s coach was used to transport a few wounded, and it seems most likely that Alexander Gordon was conveyed back to Warmington, where perhaps he had spent the previous night before the battle. Within a couple of days he was dead, and he must have died within the parish or he would not have been buried in the churchyard. The house next to the Manor, overlooking the Green, has the name Gourdon, and it would be nice to believe that the name might preserve some local memory of the house where the Scots captain died.

Within a few days the din of battle had moved on. The King moved south, heading slowly to London, but shocked and stunned by the carnage of the battle, the first he had experienced. What happened in Warmington Churchyard on the Tuesday, as Alexander Gordon, Richard Sandys and the other seven nameless casualties were buried? Alexander Gordon’s gravestone suggests that someone, at least, cared enough to mark the spot and to make sure that he, out of all those who died, was not forgotten. A year later the burial of a Royalist major was described like this:

Then they buried him in a warlike manner, with his sword upon his coffin, and a drum beating before him to the church, where he was buried…men giving two volleys of shot there for him and afterwards the same drum beat before them home again.

An order must have been made for a gravestone. Perhaps one of the ‘Scots gentlemen’ who accompanied Patrick Ruthven, or even Prince Rupert or the King might have left money in ‘grateful remembrance’ of Alexander Gordon. Or perhaps another member of his family came to this quiet corner of Warwickshire where, centuries later, we still remember this Scottish soldier each Remembrance Sunday.

Richard Cooke October 2020

King Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, declaring those who opposed him in the name of Parliament to be traitors. There followed a slow progress south through the Midlands as the Parliamentary army, led by the Earl of Essex, shadowed the King’s, and both tried to elude the other in order to make a break for London. By 20 September the King’s army was at Shrewsbury, where it remained until 12 October. It was while they were at Shrewsbury that Patrick Ruthven arrived with his small group of Scots gentlemen to stiffen the military discipline of the king’s soldiers, and to drill the gathering army over the next fortnight or so. Since Alexander Gordon cannot be identified with any regiment at Edgehill, it seems quite likely that he was one of Ruthven’s young gentlemen, in effect his staff officers who were unattached to any particular unit. If he did arrive with Ruthven at Shrewsbury, his family connections would certainly have bought him to the attention of the king.

Despite their difference in age, Ruthven was a particular favourite of Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew and the son of his sister Elizabeth. Though Rupert was only 23 he had already gained a good deal of military experience. The Prince had the King’s ear, and urged on his uncle the adoption of Swedish tactics, and this would ultimately lead to a confrontation on the morning of the Battle at Edgehill, when the Earl of Lindsey who had official command of the King’s Army resigned on the spot because he favoured the simpler but more defensive Dutch approach. Prince Rupert had been urging a daring, sudden cavalry thrust at the opposing forces that might extinguish the rebellion with a single charge, and he was supported by Ruthven in this. The King favoured their approach. The battle took everyone by surprise, and so although the Parliamentary army formed up on the Radway side of Kineton on the morning of Sunday 23 October, it took the King’s army longer to move into position. The Royalist troops were billeted across a wide area east and south of the ridge of Edgehill, and the Earl of Essex, commanding the Parliament men, waited for the King’s guns to fire the first shots. As the foot soldiers made their way down the hill or along Warmington valley, the cavalry regiments mustered on the southern slopes of the hill in formation before moving off towards the waiting enemy on the plain below. The staff officers functioned as gallopers, conveying orders and commands to the units in an often desperate attempt to control the unwieldy masses of men. This is where discipline and agreed tactics really mattered, and the staff officers fulfilled a crucial function, deputising on the ground for their generals. This is what may well have been Alexander Gordon’s role, and the staff officers would also have been part of the King’s brief conference in his tent before the battle where he promised that ‘come life or death, your King will bear you company, and ever keep this field , this place, and this day’s service in his grateful remembrance’ after which he rode out along the lines in a black cloak lined with ermine, encouraging his soldiers.

The battle began at 2pm, and the first phase was dominated by Prince Rupert’s cavalry charge, straight out of the Swedish tactical text book, but which left the King’s infantry exposed to the Parliamentary units which survived the onslaught. Fierce fighting followed, with the Royal Standard captured and then taken back. No clear winner emerged by the time dusk fell and the guns fell silent, their clamour overtaken by the cries and groans of the wounded on an Autumn night as cold as anyone could remember.

Casualties were fewer than we might expect, with most being wounded and comparatively few killed outright. Musket-balls and bullets were lethal only over quite a short range at this time, and artillery fire had been largely negated by the softness of the ploughed fields on which it landed. Sword cuts were probably the most dangerous threat to life, and were frequently infected and led to death sometime after a battle. Many casualties were able to be moved from the battle field and evacuated to Warwick with Essex’s army, or Oxford with the King’s. Most lay on the battlefield until morning, when neither side had the energy to begin the fight again. The King’s coach was used to transport a few wounded, and it seems most likely that Alexander Gordon was conveyed back to Warmington, where perhaps he had spent the previous night before the battle. Within a couple of days he was dead, and he must have died within the parish or he would not have been buried in the churchyard. The house next to the Manor, overlooking the Green, has the name Gourdon, and it would be nice to believe that the name might preserve some local memory of the house where the Scots captain died.

Within a few days the din of battle had moved on. The King moved south, heading slowly to London, but shocked and stunned by the carnage of the battle, the first he had experienced. What happened in Warmington Churchyard on the Tuesday, as Alexander Gordon, Richard Sandys and the other seven nameless casualties were buried? Alexander Gordon’s gravestone suggests that someone, at least, cared enough to mark the spot and to make sure that he, out of all those who died, was not forgotten. A year later the burial of a Royalist major was described like this:

Then they buried him in a warlike manner, with his sword upon his coffin, and a drum beating before him to the church, where he was buried…men giving two volleys of shot there for him and afterwards the same drum beat before them home again.

An order must have been made for a gravestone. Perhaps one of the ‘Scots gentlemen’ who accompanied Patrick Ruthven, or even Prince Rupert or the King might have left money in ‘grateful remembrance’ of Alexander Gordon. Or perhaps another member of his family came to this quiet corner of Warwickshire where, centuries later, we still remember this Scottish soldier each Remembrance Sunday.

Richard Cooke October 2020

The Revd Canon Dr Richard Cooke

Principal, Coventry Diocesan Training Partnership

Associate Minister, Edgehill Churches

Sources:

J.Barratt Cavaliers: The Royalist Army at War 1642-1646 Sutton Publishing 2000

M. Braddick God’s Fury, England’s Fire Allen Lane 2008

Richard Bulstrode Memoirs and Reflections 1721 – his account of the prelude to and the experience of the Battle is available at http://www.battleofedgehillexhibitionradway.org.uk/documents/1642-Edgehill-Bulstrode.pdf.

C.Carlton. Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651 Routledge 1994

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Dictionary of National Biography (1890) ‘Gordon, Robert’ at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gordon,_Robert_(1580-1656)_(DNB00)

Dictionary of National Biography (1890) ‘Gordon, John’ at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gordon,_John_(1609-1663)_(DNB00)

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A.Stewart The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I Chatto & Windus 2003

C.V.Wedgwood The King’s War 1641-1647 Collins 1958

A.Woolrych Britain in Revolution 1625-1660 Oxford University Press 2002

P.Young Edgehill 1642: The Campaign and the Battle Roundwood Press 1967

The Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database, Institute of Scottish Historlcal Research , University of St Andrews (https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne/)