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an alien force having an impact on society, but were often known to the people among whom they lived, particularly garrison soldiers, of course. Nathaniel Owen’s ‘common practice’ during the war ‘was to come by night with a party of horse to some neighbour’s house and break open the doors, take what they pleased, and if the man of the house was found, they carried him to prison, from whence he could not be released without ransom in money’. But it was Owen who was left to die in the flames by his fellows at Bridgenorth, and who in Gough’s opinion deserved to hang.71 William Preece, Scoggan of Goblin Hole, also worked off a pre-war grudge. He was made governor of a garrison at Abright, and when a group of parliamentary soldiers arrived in town he recognized an old adversary, Phillip Bunny. He broke off from his old soldier’s tricks (he had stood in a window shouting, ‘Let such a number go to such a place, and so many to such a place; and let twenty come with me’, although he had only eight men at his command) to take up a grudge. Taking up a fowling gun he shouted, ‘Bunny, have at thee!’, and shot him through the leg, killing the horse. Following the war many royalist activists were ‘troubled by the Parliament party’, but not Scoggan: ‘he that sits on the ground can fall no lower’.72 War turned Scoggan, one of a kind normally invisible to history, into a local character, whose doings were remembered fifty years later.

As in other wars, some women also had new opportunities. Women petitioners in London had pushed at the boundaries of respectable female behaviour, claiming a traditional voice as defenders of their children but using it to make specific policy recommendations to the House of Lords. Some had voted in the elections to the Long Parliament, and others took public oaths – the Protestation or the Solemn League and Covenant. Women lent money, paid taxes, followed the armies and treated the sick. Their lives were no more insulated from the war than those of men; they too had felt the burdens but saw some of the opportunities. Elizabeth Alkin, ‘Parliament Joan’, was active in the news business, like a number of others – the new freedom of the press offering an opportunity to find a voice, and to serve the public good. Women were also employed as emissaries, their female skills and status allowing them to feel out the possibilities for more formal contacts, and a number of women played very significant military roles. Henrietta Maria, like Lady Macbeth, was reviled for her undue influence over her husband, particularly after the revelation of their letters in the Kings Cabinet opened. When a cannonade forced her from her lodgings at Bridlington in February 1643 it was thought to be ungentlemanly, but she was subsequently known as the she-generalissima. This gender ambiguity was evident elsewhere – in the career of Lucy Hutchinson or of the Countess of Derby. Lucy, however, always presented herself as the loyal wife, her views no more than an expression of her devotion to her husband.73

These public and martial roles posed a kind of challenge to patriarchy – at least in principle. The King’s cause had suffered when 120 women were reported to have been taken in arms at Nantwich, in January 1644, and from the persistent accusation that he was in thrall to his wife.74 It is not too fanciful to see in these gender troubles a reason for the acute anxieties aroused by John Milton’s pamphlet on divorce. It was one of the publications that prompted Ephraim Pagitt to go into print with his denunciation of numerous schisms, heresies and errors of the 1640s. In contemporary polemic these gender troubles were a manifestation of the problem of order, of civil chaos, which seemed an important feature of the war. Political disorder was reflected both in sexual licence – a particular form of gender disorder – and in the intrusion of the feminine into the public arena. The world was governed by opinion (female) rather than knowledge (male), and by a parliament of women.75

Above all, though, it was in the sectarian scare that these anxieties