Abstract
In 1849 the historian Thomas Macaulay set out to describe the character of the English country gentleman of the later seventeenth century—a man withered by age, “unlettered,” “unpolished,” and genealogy-obsessed, rattling about in his Restoration estate with “old swords and holsters” and a long-overdue pension from the king. Although mindful of his continued patrician status, the ex-cavalier, Macaulay wrote, found himself quite literally marked by the battlefields of Naseby or Marston Moor, which he wore on his body in the form of an eye-patch, a gash on the cheek, or a single bullet still lodged in his head. His scars were not simply scars but royalist badges, just as those who once fought against him bore traces, parliamentary traces, on their own bodies. In this sense, more than any story he could tell, the ex-soldier’s body was itself a record of war-making, though one that was imbued with its own romantic mythology; equally important was the role that disfigurement played in shaping his identity, as he continued to define himself through the prism of the past—a past that was memorialized in his own mutilations.1
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Notes
For other accounts and analyses of soldiers narrating their own wounds, see, for example, Andrew Roy, Fallen Soldier: Memoir of a Civil War Casualty, ed. William J. Miller (1996); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), 243-246, 310-315ff; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, 1996), chap. five; Richard Tobias, “Don’t Kill the Messenger: Writing History and War,” Critical Quarterly 47 (2005), 106–114
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Henry Foster, “A True and Exact Relation of the Marchings of the Two Regiments of the Trained Bands of the City of London (1643),” in Bibliotheca Gloucesterinsis, ed. James Washbourne (Gloucester, 1828), 1: 267.
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See John Astington, “Macbeth and the Rowe Illustrations,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), 83.
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As J. G. Marston has pointed out, family was also a heavy consideration in the issuance of honor, even if the king was the ultimate source. J. G. Marston, “Gentry Honor and Royalism in Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies 13 (1973), 27, 35–40.
Susan Clarke, “Royalists Write the Death of Lord Hastings: Post-Regicide Funerary Propaganda, Parergon 22 (2005), esp. 125ff.
For Lucas and Lisle, see Andrea Brady, “Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War, Journal of Military History 70 (2006), 9–30.
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See Henry Power, “‘Teares breake off my Verse’: The Virgilian Incompleteness of Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War,” Translation and Literature 16 (2007), esp. 141–159.
See Geoffrey Hudson, “Negotiating for Blood Money: War Widows and the Courts in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Raleigh-Durham, 1994), 146-169; and “Arguing Disability: Ex-Servicemen’s Stories in Early Modern England,” in Medicine, Madness and Social History, ed. Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone (London, 2007); Mark Stoyle, “‘Memories of the Maimed’: The Testimony of Charles I’s Former Soldiers, 1660–1730,” History 88 (2003), 208.
Sharon Alker, “The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19 (2007); see also Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe and the Art of War,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996), 197–213
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© 2009 Sarah Covington
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Covington, S. (2009). The Wounds of War. In: Wounds, Flesh, And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101098_4
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