THE BATTLE OF LEDBURY

Are you a Cavalier, a Roundhead, a worried Mushy Middle spectator, or a doler-out of dodgy-looking alphabet soup from the cauldron?

In the middle of July, 2019, Graeme Gibson and I attended a poetry festival in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England, egged on by my old Virago pal Ursula Owen. Ledbury’s town centre is Elizabethan and earlier:  I read poems in a building so slanted that you had to cling to the floor, and Graeme drank beer in a pub with cranium-threatening low ceilings. We went to a lecture on Brecht, we listened with pleasure to folksingers, we wallowed in assorted cultural fleshpots.

An added attraction was a staging of the Battle of Ledbury by The Sealed Knot, the largest battle re-enactment society in the world. The Knot, though named after a Royalist secret society of the Cromwell era, is politically neutral: it’s an educational outfit, not a purveyor of propaganda. It stages battles only in the locations where they actually happened, and it only does battles from the English Civil War of the 17th Century. Anyone can join – age and gender are not barriers – as long as they’re willing to put on the gear, follow their commanders’ orders, and fall down on cue. Unlike those felled in real battles, they can get up again five minutes later and carry on. Stepping on temporary corpses is discouraged.

The Civil War pitched the Royalists upholding Charles 1 and the Absolute and Divine Right of Kings against the Parliamentarians convinced that those governed should have a say, especially in how their tax money was spent. The Parliamentarians, known as Roundheads, eventually won over the Royalists, known as Cavaliers. Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector – paradoxically, a kind of dictator who claimed to be upholding the quasi-democratic ideals for which the Parliamentarians had fought. (Napoleon, making a similar claim a couple of centuries later, was well aware of Cromwell.) Though the monarchy was later restored it no longer absolutist, so the puritanical Roundheads prevailed, sort of, on the whole. But they lost the Battle of Ledbury.

Monty Python stages Pearl Harbour, featuring the Battley Townswomens’ Guild

I’m up for any battle re-enactment, including Monty Python’s Pearl Harbour as staged by the Battley Townswomen’s Guild weaponizing their purses, so of course we attended. The real battle was fought through the streets of the town but that might have shattered windows, so the 2019 version took place on the rugby pitch. We were at the Roundhead end; they even had a Puritan pastor offering up an authentic-sounding prayer, trusting in God to provide victory. The Cavaliers were late showing up; however, but they appeared at last from behind a hedge.

The battle was joined! The musketeers shot their pretend bullets, the artillerymen fired off their weeny cannons, the pikemen clashed, the drummers drummed, the combatants fell down and rose again, and we spectators cheered them on: Go! Go! Where? Where? We want Victory, Over there!

In 1066 And All That – the well-known 1930 spoof on history – W.C. Sellar memorably said that the Cavaliers were “Wrong but Wromantic,” whereas the Roundheads were “Right but Repulsive.” That got me wondering about the division: what values cause a person to choose which category? And which would I rather be? Munching it over with some friends, I offered as a rule of thumb that Cavaliers valued loyalty over purity, whereas Roundheads –taking the position that the most important thing was the state of the eternal soul vis à vis God – valued purity over loyalty. Thus, among the Cavaliers it doesn’t matter how many orgies you’ve indulged in or how many bribes you’ve taken as long as you pledge your fealty to King and Cause, and among the Roundheads you can declare that your conscience or a voice from God has decreed that you have to throw your best friend under the bus, thus signalling your position as one of the Elect. The worst slur among present-day Cavaliers is “traitor,” the worst among present-day Roundheads is “hypocrite,” coupled with an accusation of moral degeneracy of some kind.

In both camps a minor transgression of the code may become a hanging matter. Such trangressions can also be used against you by rivals and enemies. Cavaliers pride themselves on high living, great parties, and conspicuous consumption, Roundheads on self-denial, abstemiousness, and other signifiers of virtue. There can be Cavaliers on the “left” and Roundheads on the “right,” but as a rule the Cs are R and the Rs are L. Let it be said too that both loyalty and purity have their upsides: no army can function without loyalty, and any business system or government will rapidly become corrupt without some standards of purity, or at least honesty. (And, of course, either can be some of both.)

It's also observable that the preponderance of one over the other goes in cycles. Already there are signs that the Roundhead age that’s been lived through in (especially) North American universities and media enterprises over the last eight years or so is on the wane. It replaced a previous cycle in which Cavaliers were dominant; evidently the fun times had gone too far, and those for whom they had not been fun made themselves heard.

Resentment and fear are driving forces for these pivotal moments. And the pivotal moments themselves can be very difficult to navigate. Accuse or be accused? That is often the question. It’s hazardous to attempt an intervention when Joan of Arc is cooking at the stake: you’re likely to fry in your turn. I recall Washington Irving’s story, “Rip Van Winkle:” the antihero wakes up after a sleep of twenty years to find that the American Revolution has taken place and it’s no longer cool to say you are a loyal subject of King George. Such pivots may take twenty months or twenty days or even twenty minutes, but the discomfort of those caught on what was once the right side but is now the wrong one can be deeply unpleasant.

Most people, of course, are neither Cavaliers nor Roundheads. They are spectators, not wishing to get sucked in, or possibly decapitated. They’re always being pressured by one side or the other – cowards, lukewarmers lacking in zeal, the mushy middle, etc. But it’s when the mushy middle gets tired of the excesses of extremists that the balance shifts. “We’ve had enough of THAT. Too crazy! Let’s give the others a say.”

Then there’s us folks working the verbal sideshows. We’re the ones stirring the word cauldron, throwing in the questionable potatoes and similes, and ladling out the dodgy alphabet soup, a bowlful of which I’ve just served up to you.

Whaddaya think, Mushy Middle? Tasteless? Too much oregano? Better than no soup at all? Really terrible? You could always make some of your own…

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P.S: Check out this terrific outfit! She even did the purse! I think she’s a Cavalier supporter, but I’m not sure…