Published in Windlesora 11 (1992)
© WLHG
Throughout my life I have enjoyed history — reading history, teaching history, lecturing on history and, mainly in recent years, writing history.
‘Consider history’, wrote Thomas Carlyle, ‘with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote time, emerging darkly out of the mysterious eternity, the true epic poem and universal divine scripture’.
Like Carlyle, I am a bit of a romantic. Enjoying history — that is where I begin. True, there is a dark side to history. History is full of: ‘old unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago’.
Wars and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’® dominate much of history. No one could pretend for a moment that history is all sweetness and light. Nevertheless there is much in history that is ‘lovely and of good report’. History can be seen as a drama, sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, sometimes a mixture of both, which embraces the interplay of multitudinous forces, animate and inanimate; the lives of millions of men, women and children, high and lowly, each one different; the development of communities, nations, races, religions.
Local history inspires an enjoyment that general history may not. World history can be fascinating — the sort of history that H. G. Wells attempted in his Outline of History — but it is overpowering in its vastness. National history is easier to comprehend, but even that is wide in its scope. It is the staple of much school history, even if it is set in the context of international history. Local history, on the other hand, brings us closer to the making of history and its study can often bring history to life.
So enjoying Windsor history will be the theme of much of what I write. I came to live in Windsor in 1930. Before that my only view of Windsor was the distant one on railway journeys between Paddington and Oxford. When I did come to teach in Windsor, however, one of my first purchases was the two volumes of Tighe and Davis’ Annals, published as far back as 1858 but still the standard history of Windsor. They were the foundation of my enjoyment of Windsor history. My love of Windsor and my appreciation of its history grew over the years though it was not until my retirement in 1968 that I had the freedom to write and make my own contribution.
Windsor is an historic town; it is a town where the past lives. The older Windsor histories nearly all concentrated on the Castle rather than on the Town. In more recent years attempts have been made to redress the balance. But the history of the Town cannot really be separated from that of the Castle. To write of Windsor in terms of the town only would be like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Windsor Town is there because the Castle is there. And Windsor Castle is where it is because the River Thames is there and the chalk hill is there and London is within a short journey. History is all cause and effect.
‘Windsor’s association with the River Thames has always been an essential part of its life’. That was how I began my article in last year’s Windlesora. And, if anything, I feel that even more strongly now, because I have been re-reading, after many years, Hilaire Belloc’s The Historic Thames. Originally published in 1907, it was re-printed in 1988, along with the colourful illustrations by A.R.Quinton.”
Windsor plays an important part in the book and, if the point needed to be made again, Belloc certainly makes it abundantly clear how much Windsor owes to the hill on which the Castle is situated and to the River. There is much more besides. The story of Windsor (Old and New) cannot be seen in isolation; it must be seen in perspective, as part of a wider story.
The River Thames, although only 215 miles from source to estuary, has always been England’s most important river. It is navigable for most of its course, providing a highway for commerce and for the passage of men. Cotswold stone was brought down the river for the building of St George’s Chapel in the late fifteenth century. Quantities of stone from the great Reading Abbey were transported to Windsor after its dissolution. And, if we want to illustrate Carlyle’s description of history ‘with beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote time . .’, the history of the Thames provides a splendid example. The settlements, the fords, the trackways, the roads, the clearance of the forests and the development of farming and with it a settled way of life can all be illustrated.
The story of Windsor Castle does not begin until after 1066. True, in the shape of Old Windsor, Windsor had a much longer history, going back at least several centuries before the Norman Conquest and the discoveries of twentieth century archaeologists are exciting. None the less it was William I who created New Windsor. He chose the site and built the first castle. Every phase of Windsor’s story followed from that.
What were the reasons for his choice? He might have chosen Reading, where the confluence of the Thames and the Kennet created the possibilities for a defensive position. He might have chosen Staines, where the road crossed the River and which was that much nearer to London. But he chose Windsor, where the upthrust of chalk created the hill which dominated the River, the surrounding countryside and the western approach to London. The wisdom of the Conqueror’ s choice is shown by the fact that Windsor Castle was never occupied by the King’s enemies until the time of the Civil Wars nearly 600 years later.
Belloc makes one point which I have not seen made elsewhere — namely, the importance to the south of Windsor of a far-reaching extent of waste lands (the present Great Park, the Crown lands beyond and the Surrey heathlands) which provided little sustenance to an attacking force.
After the seventeenth century Civil Wars the Castle ceased to have military importance. It became a Royal Palace, the seat of the Court, and this character, with the exception of periods like that of the first two Hanoverians, it has maintained until the present day.
The most personal form of enjoying history is writing history and, since it is personal, the best way of illustrating this approach to the enjoyment of history is to use one of my own books — with apologies to the reader, if required. Royal Castle, Rebel Town was published in 1981. Enjoying history is like a voyage of discovery. New vistas, new horizons come into view all the time. Royal Castle, Rebel Town tells the story of Windsor during the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth in the 1640s and 1650s, when the Parliamentarians were the lords of Windsor and the King and his cavaliers were exiles from the royal castle.
That in itself was a startling discovery, even though history has a habit of surprising us. Windsor historians as far back at least as Tighe and Davis had been aware of this aberration in Windsor’s history. No one, however, had studied the why and the wherefore of what happened. Although I had for many years a special interest in the seventeenth century, it was the reading I did for The Book of Windsor that brought home to me the significance of this episode in Windsor’ s history.
Preparations for writing a book must include much background reading. Not only events, battles, parliamentary debates but, more important perhaps, the main actors must be brought to life. This is where biographical reading is important and this I have always enjoyed. Even that massive biographical compendium, the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, can produce much valuable material, especially for the less well-known characters. The article on Cornelius Holland, Windsor’s republican M.P. during the Civil War and Commmonwealth, is an example. There is no complete biography of Cornelius Holland, but, certainly within the context of Windsor’s history, he plays an important part in the unfolding drama. And here in the DNB is at least a biographical sketch and the framework thus provided can be filled in by research.
The history of a period is always much more than the sum of the biographies of the individual men and women, however important they may have been. Economic factors, geographical factors and many more play their part. What, however, is more enjoyable than a good biography, written with scholarship and imagination?
But after the books — general, specialised, biographical — have been read, there is still a wide open field of research. It is here that the original discoveries can be made. Research can be both time-consuming and tedious. It is, however, a necessary discipline for the historian. And it has its compensations. One is the excitement of working in famous libraries.
I enjoyed most of all perhaps the experience of doing research in the British Library. It is not the easiest library to use. Techniques have to be learnt, even to track down the reference numbers of the pamphlets and manuscripts (or, as is more likely these days, the microfilms) to which one needs access. The Reading Room of the British Library, however, has a special atmosphere of which no historian can ever be unaware. I used the British Library for the Thomason Tracts, some of which refer to Windsor. George Thomason was a bookseller, plying his trade in St Paul’s Churchyard. With the greater freedom of the press that flourished during the period of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth there was an immense output of pamphlets and books. Most of these were collected and preserved by George Thomason and the Thomason Tracts form therefore a unique source for the period. Among them are pamphlets like Terrible and Bloudy News from Windsor, which describes the incidents which accompanied Charles I’s return to Windsor in December 1648. Such sources are the life-blood of history, certainly of local history.
Research can be ‘time consuming and tedious’. Much, however, is interesting and research can be like a jig-saw in which the pieces come together with patience. Moreover, there is always the chance of some example of serendipity, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a happy and unexpected discovery by accident’. Cornelius Holland provided several of these. He is always a shadowy figure, difficult to pin down, but without question important in the story of Puritan
Windsor. So it was exciting to come across a letter from him in a book I found in Maidenhead Public Library. This was The Letter Book of Sir Samuel Luke 1644-45. In March 1645 Holland had a disagreement with Luke, who at the time was Military Governor of Newport Pagnell. He wrote to Luke:
‘Let not us who are all for heaven part in our way thither upon differences in opinions upon things that, if well considered, will no way hinder us to our journey’s end, but let love cover the multitude of all our infirmities and failings’.
We can catch the authentic voice of the Puritan in these words. This may be the only surviving letter from Cornelius Holland. By another piece of serendipity I tracked down what may be the only surviving ‘portrait’ of him. True, it is only a royalist caricature in which Cornelius Holland is included with Cromwell and others in a group of Puritan leaders. But it was a valuable discovery. I saw it first in Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell and, greatly daring, wrote to her for help in finding the original. She referred me to her publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. They in turn passed me on to Tom Scott, their photographer in Edinburgh. Still, no success. Then, several months later, Mrs Scott wrote to say that the print had been tracked down in the Archives Department of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. So we were able to use the caricature on the jacket and as the frontispiece of Royal Castle, Rebel Town.
republican M.P. (extreme left) — Scottish National Portrait Gallery
When all the reading and reasearch are finished, there is still the lengthy process of writing the book and preparing it for publication. I know, however, of few greater joys than seeing everything come together — even with all the writing (or typing) and re-writing involved. There is always the satisfaction of writing a passage that brings an episode to life. Thus the description of the King’s enforced return to Windsor at the end of 1648. He was brought from Hurst Castle on the Solent by way of Winchester and Farnham. The narrative continues:
‘From Farnham to Windsor was a journey of some 25 miles across the heaths and forest lands of Surrey and Berkshire. The day was wet and cold and the roads muddy. The party stopped at Bagshot, near the half-way point, and the King dined with Lord and Lady Newburgh. The King’s horse had gone lame; “a piece of a Nail had unfortunately run into his Foot, at which His Majesty was much troubled”. His host, a racing man and a Royalist, was ready to provide a fast horse, “a brave Gelding, which the Party was somewhat fearful might be too light of foot for them’. Harrison, however, was far too vigilant. The King was placed in the middle of a hundred horse, every soldier having a pistol “ready spanned” in his hand and the journey continued through driving rain and the gathering darkness of the brief December afternoon’.
Whether this has literary merit is not for me to say, but I can still recall the thrill of writing it. And perhaps the greatest of all the moments of joy is when you hold the book, completed at long last, in your hands.
Windlesora has printed many articles by many authors. I am now sure that most of them have enjoyed the experience — the original idea, the planning, the research, the writing. Long may Windlesora continue to provide opportunities for local historians to enjoy Windsor history.
Raymond South
References
- William Wordsworth The Solitary Reaper
- Robert Burns Man was made to mourn
- Hilaire Belloc The Historic Thames Webb & Bower 1988
- S. E. Winbolt The Chilterns and the Thames Valley G. Bell & Sons 1932
- Thomason Tracts E 536 (1) Quoted in Royal Castle, Rebel Town pp 69-70
- The Letter Books of Sir Samuel Luke 1644-5 Historical Manuscripts Commission 1963. Letter 470.
- Quoted in Royal Castle, Rebel Town p 61
Windsor Local History Group 