The first well-recorded battle of the English Civil War on open ground was in the countryside around Southam, 23 August 1642, when Lord Brook ordered his parliamentary guns to open fire on a royalist brigade which had the misfortune to cross his path on the outskirts of the town. When the cannons stopped firing nine years later, 160,000 were dead (3% of the population of Britain), with many others dying of disease, starvation and displacement. The first recorded burial from this conflict was in Southam churchyard, a man called John Brown*, a parliamentary soldier.
[* Not to be confused with the militant American anti-slavery campaigner of the same name, whose actions helped fuel the American Civil War two centuries later.]
Who presided over John Brown’s burial is not recorded. Was it the town’s royalist rector, or some puritan stand in? Whether it was himself or not, the 22 August 1642 was a day of disaster for Francis Holyoake, the minster of Southam.
Until then, in spite of the town being allegedly parliamentarian in sympathy, Francis had lived a peaceful and productive life, a loyal servant of the king as would be expected of someone in his position, and earning himself the nickname ‘The Holy Oak’.
Born at Nether Whitacre in north Warwickshire in 1567, he was educated at Queen’s College Oxford, and steadily progressed over the years in his ecclesiastical career, becoming rector of Southam in February 1604. He was married to a woman called Judith and they had a single son, Thomas, born in 1616. He had a passion for etymology – the study of words.
The standard dictionary of the time has been Rider’s Dictionary. Francis freely plagiarised the work, publishing his own version under the title Rider’s Dictionary Corrected in 1606, with several subsequent editions into the 1640s. There was some dispute about whether this should be allowed, but there was no such thing as copyright law in those days and Francis’s work would have been a familiar reference amongst educated people.
It would be fascinating to know what connections Francis had in literary circles, as well as more about the man as an individual. There is a reference to him in connection with Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (published 1621), but I’m not aware of any surviving documentary information other than the dictionary and some sermons – sadly, on 22 August 1642, the day before the Battle of Southam, his world collapsed in dramatic fashion.
Parliamentarian troops on their way to Warwick chose to occupy Southam. Francis, as a known royalist, had his house stormed, a servant killed (according to a later statement by Francis’s son) and was summarily ejected from his situation as rector. These were brutal times, with parliamentary troops often acting in extremis in their levels of intolerance and brutality towards any perceived opponents. It was claimed that arms were found in his house, but this was according to parliamentarian chroniclers of the time who are not necessarily reliable.
His remaining years were spent in impoverished circumstances, living on charity, his wife dying an early death because of the trauma she suffered (according to a statement made by their son in an appeal to parliament for financial aid for the family). Francis died nine later, aged 86 – a remarkable age for the time – having witnessed a world turned upside down by religious and political extremism and the rise of Oliver Cromwell in English parliamentary affairs. He is buried in St. Mary’s Collegiate Church, Warwick, where there is a memorial stone from the time on the interior wall opposite the entrance to the Beauchamp Chapel.
Images:
* http://www.flickr.com/photos/xanthias/533127481/in/photostream
* http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=11942862720
[First posted at another web address 25 Feb 2014. Minor edits above.]
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