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It was 26 May 1650. Charles I had been beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall only sixteen months before, and England was a republic. True, it was not a very happy republic. The House of Commons, summoned by Charles in 1640, had long ago lost its royalists, had more recently been stripped of its Presbyterian Members, and was now too obviously the mere rump of its former self. The House of Lords had been abolished. There was no sense of political equilibrium. On the one hand there were complaints that those ‘persons of condition’ upon whom so much of the practical exercise of local government depended had simply withdrawn from active participation in it. On the other, although the army had put down Leveller mutinies in the spring of 1649, there were many who thought that England was nothing like republican enough.
These were uncertain times for everyone, and downright difficult ones for those who had demonstrably been on the wrong side in the recent Civil War. Fate chose this unpropitious moment to provide a son for a West Country gentleman called Winston Churchill, sometime captain of horse in the king’s army, and his wife Elizabeth. They named him John, for his paternal grandfather.
Winston and Elizabeth had married across the jagged political divide of the 1640s. John Churchill the elder was a prosperous lawyer, a member of the Middle Temple, and Deputy Registrar of Chancery before the Civil War, who had bought an estate at Newton Montacute in the parish of Wootton Glanville, near Sherborne in Dorset. Aged about sixty, he was too old to be in arms, but like Robert Browning’s ‘Kentish Sir Byng’ he ‘stood for his king/bidding the cropheaded Parliament swing’ and served as one of Charles’s commissioners. When he came to terms with the victorious parliamentarians he pleaded that he had broken his allegiance to the king in November 1645, after the decisive battle of Naseby but before the surrender of Oxford, the royalist capital, in May the following year. He was fined £440 in addition to the £400 he had already paid, and having thus ‘compounded’ with the victors he was allowed to keep his estate.
John Churchill had not simply bought his way into the gentry with money made in law, but had wed wisely too. In 1618 he married Sarah, daughter of a Gloucestershire knight, Sir Henry Winston, in the City church of St Stephen’s Walbrook, and the couple’s son Winston was born in 1620. Winston had been a student at St John’s College Oxford and, like his father, was destined for a career in the law, for he joined Lincoln’s Inn in January 1637. The Civil War changed his life. He joined the royalist army on the outbreak of war in 1642, and was the storybook cavalier: an early portrait shows a self-confident young man with luxuriant shoulder-length hair and a bright doublet with slashed sleeves, and, typically, he became a captain of cavalry.1 Captain Churchill has left us no account of his service, but a brother officer, Captain Richard Atkyns of Prince Maurice’s Regiment, a Gloucestershire gentleman whose background was much like Churchill’s, remembered how the King’s Horse, threadbare West Country regiments riding up from Devizes and a fresh brigade hurtling down from Oxford, between them beat Sir William Waller’s cavalry on Roundway Down on 13 July 1643. The royalists called it ‘Runaway Down’, as well they might, for they broke the roundhead horse and sent some of them tumbling to ruin down the steep western edge of the down.
I cannot better compare the figure of both armies than to the map of the fight at sea, between the English and the Spanish Armada … for though they were above twice our numbers; they being six deep, in close order and we but three deep, and open (by reason of our sudden charge) we were without them at both ends … No men ever charged better than ours did that day, especially the Oxford horse, for ours were tired and scattered, yet those that were there did their best.2
Winston Churchill’s parliamentarian accusers maintained that he was still in the field against them in December 1645, and in the winter of 1649 he was duly charged with ‘delinquency’. He fought a stiff rearguard action, trying both to haul in money owed him by others and to delay the government’s case against him, no doubt hoping that if it eventually went against him he would have some money for the fine. He could delay the evil day but not avoid it, and on 29 April 1651 the Commissioners for Compounding ordered that:
Winston Churchill of Wootton Glanville in the county of Dorset, gent. do pay as a fine for his delinquence the sum of four hundred and four score pounds; whereof four hundred and forty-six pounds eighteen shillings is to be paid into the Treasury at Goldsmith’s Hall, and the thirty-three pounds two shillings received already by our treasurer Mr Dawson of Sir Henry Rosewell in part of the money owing by him to John Churchill, father of the said Winston, is hereby allowed of us in part of the said four hundred and four score pounds.3
Although the fine was severe enough for a gentleman worth £160 a year, he had paid it by the end of 1651. However, he could not afford to house his family, and we know that he was on bad terms with his stepmother, whom his father had married in 1643, for there was eventually to be an acrimonious squabble over John Churchill’s will.4 Instead, he turned to his mother-in-law, Eleanor, Lady Drake, widow of a Devonshire gentleman, Sir John Drake of Ashe, and daughter of John, Lord Boteler of Bramfield. The Drakes were a substantial Devonshire gentry family, with connections by marriage to the Cornish Grenvilles, and were of the same tribe, though a different branch, as the Elizabethan seaman Sir Francis Drake. Indeed, one of the Musbury Drakes, from whom Sir John Drake descended, had knocked down Sir Francis for daring to use the armorial wyvern that he believed to be his by right.5
Lady Drake lived at Ashe House, a substantial Elizabethan E-shaped building in the parish of Musbury, on the right of the main road winding south from Axminster. She was ‘of good affection’ to the Parliament, had ‘animated her tenants in seven adjoining parishes’ to its cause, and her son John was serving with its forces. She feared a royalist descent upon Ashe and asked the local parliamentarian garrison of Lyme to send troops. They duly arrived, but before they could fortify the place a royalist force under John, Lord Poulett, leader of the Somerset royalists, arrived and took the house. Poulett’s men fired the chapel and an adjoining wing, and ‘stripped the good lady, who, almost naked and without shoe to her foot but what she afterwards begged, fled to Lyme for her safety’.6
No sooner had Eleanor Drake arrived at Lyme than it was besieged by Prince Maurice, one the king’s nephews and brother of the better-known Rupert. The royalists hoped for help from a fleet commanded, in the topsy-turvy way of the loyalties of the day, by the grandson of Lady Drake’s sister, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough. The earl remained in the Channel Islands, and the siege was raised when the Earl of Essex’s main parliamentarian army arrived in the West Country in 1644, enabling Lady Drake to get to London where, on 28 September, she was allocated the house of Sir Thomas Reynell, a gentleman then in arms for the king. When he came to terms with Parliament and compounded for his house in 1646 he accused Lady Drake of wrecking the place in search of concealed treasure, but she continued to live there for some time, herself pursuing compensation from Lord Poulett for the substantial damage his men had inflicted on her own house. In the spring of 1648 she was awarded £1,500, but £500 of this was still owing in July 1650, possibly because Poulett himself had died in 1649.
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