In the thirteen years since P R Newman published his expensive and ambitious biographical directory Royalist Officers in England and Wales 1642-1660 [1] it has become something of a sport amongst English Civil War enthusiasts to challenge individual entries and to discover inaccuracies. However, Newman, to quote his own words, compiled Royalist Officers "very much as a research aid rather than as a completed study in itself" [2], and as such it still remains a valuable reference. He has also freely admitted that "alterations and ammendments...were inevitable". [3] It is therefore with due apologies to the beleaguered Dr Newman that this article must begin with just such an alteration:
William Maxey appears to have fought for most of the first and second Civil Wars under the command of Sir Charles Lucas. Many historians from Reid to Morris [4] have written that the bulk of Lucas' regiment came from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire; a fact that Newman appears to endorse by stating in Royalist Officers that William Maxy (sic), "almost certainly properly rendered 'Maxy'...was born in 1608, the son of Richard Maxy of Burgh, Lincolnshire, by Susan the daughter of John Bayly of Normanby." [5] At first glance, this would seem a confident and authoritative statement; however, there is now overwhelming primary source evidence to prove that this Lincolnshire "William Maxy" was not the officer who rode with Sir Charles Lucas. The "real" William Maxey was, in fact, an Essex man.
In the parish church of Bradwell-juxta-Coggeshall in Essex, nestling against the former estates of the Lucas family themselves, stands an impressive epitaph erected by a former Royalist officer. Henry Maxey, to the memory of his father and brother. It is from the copious details inscribed on this monument that much information can be gleaned on the origins and early life of William Maxey.
By the date of William Maxey's birth, his family had resided in the county of Essex for well over a century. Before William's grandfather, Anthony Maxey, had inherited Bradwell Hall, the family had lived at Saling. The medieval ancestors of the Maxey family had held Maxey Castle, on the border between Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.
William Maxey himself was the third son of Sir William Maxey, a Justice of the Peace, and his wife, Helena Greville, daughter of Sir Edward Greville of Harold's Park, Essex. This remarkably productive couple bred no less than three sons (Greville, Henry and Williaml and seven daughters. The children's upbringing was extremely strict, as Henry Maxey recalled of their father,
- "His constant course was to call them up by 5 of ye clok in the morning and cavsing them to Demaund his blessing upon their knees and it being given them then he heard them yt could saye and learned them yt could not ye Lordes prayer ye beliefe and ye ten comandments and then caused every one of them one after ye other to read some of David's psalmes and each of them a chapter and to give an accompt what they remembred." [6]
With such evidence of his demeanour towards his children, one cannot help but wonder what sort of sentences Sir William handed down to the delinquents who appeared before him in court! He brought his children up "to learn in their youth to fear God and honour ye King." [7]
At the death of his childless brother in 1624, Sir William, now 67, inherited the family fortune and thus moved his enormous family into Bradwell Hall. Apart from the disparity in their wealth (the Lucas estates then brought in over £4,000 per annum), there were many similarities between the Maxeys and the neighbouring Lucases. Both families reguariy held appointments in local government and the Essex Trained Bands. Whilst the eldest son and heir, Greville Maxey, held a part-time commission in the Trained Bands, his younger brother William appears to have followed the well trodden path of a third son and become a professional soldier.
In King Charles' second campaign against the Scots in 1640, the state papers mention a Captain Maxey. A letter from the deputy lieutenants of Montgomeryshire in the Calendar of State Papers for July llth 1640 states,
- "In the absence of the rest of the deputy lieutenants here we have sent out 200 able men for the King's service in the present expedition & have delivered them to Capt. Robert Broughton & Capt. William Maxey, authorised by the Lord General to receive them upon the 10th of July by indenture." [8]
The seniority of Maxey's rank implies a professional background, most likely begun in Flanders. There seems no other reason to give the third son of a provincial JP the rank of Captain. After the fiasco of the second Bishops' War, "Captaine William Maxie" followed the path of many former Flanders professionals and campaigned in Ireland under the command of Sir Fulk Hunks. [9] Maxey was still serving in Leinster at the outbreak of civil war in England in August 1642.
Hunks' regiment returned to England sometime between November and December 1643 and was involved in action on 26th December. The whereabouts of Captain William Maxey during this period, however, is uncertain. Sir Charles Lucas was commissioned to recruit a regiment of 500 horse for the King's Oxford army on March 20th, 1643. [10] The available evidence indicates that Lucas had some difficulty in raising the necessary numbers, and built up his strength gradually through the summer months of 1643). [11] One of Sir Charles' main priorities would obviously have been the selection of officers. It is therefore likely that Sir Simon Fanshawe was appointed Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment at an early stage, possibly even before he had any men to command. Fanshawe was a man Lucas could trust, as both families had been neigbours, and occasionally business partners, for several generations.
William Maxey was also a natural choice; a staunch Royalist, a professional soldier and a fellow-Essex countryman. Not only would Lucas and Maxey probably have known each other from before the war, but Maxey's recent service in Ireland would have been under the eye of Lucas' brother, Sir Thomas Lucas, Commissary General for the Horse. It is not beyond possibility that professional ambition and personal contacts with the Lucases brought Maxey back to the mainland ahead of Hunks' regiment to join Lucas' new unit in the summer of 1643. At the precise time Fulk Hunks' regiment was fighting in Middlewitch, Sir Charles Lucas was in Buckinghamshire, preparing to take a brigade of horse north to join the Marquess of Newcastle. The position of major in Lucas' own regiment would surely have been filled before he marched north.
The northern exploits of Sir Charles Lucas and his regiment of horse are detailed elsewhere [12], and ended for Lucas and Fanshawe with their capture at Marston Moor on July 2nd 1644. If Maxey was indeed the major of Lucas' regiment at this time then it was he whom the Marquess of Newcastle mentioned in dispatches during combat against the Scots at Boldon Hills on March 8th 1644:
- "...we sent off 120 horses to entertain them near their own leaguer, Sir Charles Lucas his major commanding them, where meeting with 200 of the enemy's, the first that charged them not passing 60 of this one regiment, notwithstanding the enemy was so placed before a hedge, where they had some dragooners as it seems, they were confident ours would not have come up unto them; but when they saw that their muskets could not prevent the courage of our men, they turned their backes and leaped over their dragooners, affording our men the execution of them..." [13]
Following the loss of his two superiors at Marston Moor, Maxey now appears to have assumed command of the remnants of the regiment, taking the rank of Lieutenant Colonel (the rank specified by his Cornet, William Frankland, in the List of Indigent Officers in 1663). Lucas' Horse then escaped into Lancashire with the rest of the Northern Horse, now led by Sir Marmaduke Langdale. Just over a month later, a further disaster befell the regiment, as Lord John Byron wrote to Prince Rupert on August 29th 1644,
- "Since Sir Marmaduke Langdale came out of Lankashire, another misfortune hath befallen his troops which were beaten up att Malpas the first night they quartered there, by 200 horse and as many foot from Nantwich, the officers did as much as could bee, but were deserted by their souldiers; Sir Marm: himself is shott in the thigh, and now lyes under the chirgeons hands at Chester, but God be thanked, without danger. Maxey is taken prisoner, and some other officers killed and taken..." [14]
Maxey remained a prisoner of war in Parliament hands for almost a year, until he was exchanged in the late summer of 1645. It may not have been a coincidence that Sir Charles Lucas, by then Governor of Berkeley Castle, had written to Prince Rupert to request a reliable officer only a short while before. [15] On his own exchange in December 1644, Lucas had resumed command of his depleted regiment, and had eventually taken them with him to Berkeley. A senior officer, possibly Maxey, led them out of Berkeley just before Colonel Rainsborough arrived to besiege the castle. It was a service which was repeated three years later.
Unlike Lucas (captured at Stow-on-the-Wold) or Fanshawe (surrendered at Newark), there is no indication as to William Maxey's whereabouts when the first Civil War ended in 1646. Neither William nor his Royalist brother Henry appear in the Calendar of the Committee for Compounding, in Essex or anywhere else. This is most likely because they had insufficient property or money (ie below £200) to interest the commissioners. Although the Edwardian writer C Fell Smith assumed that their elder brother Greville fought for the king, the inspription of the Bradwell church monument infers otherwise. [16] Greville had succeeded to the family fortune at old Sir William's death in 1645, and thus would certainly have been worth in excess of £200 per annum. The evidence of the monument and his conspicious absence from the Committee's list of delinquents suggests that Greville stayed neutral throughout the war and thus protected the family estates
By his death on 15th February 1648 Greville Maxey was spared another agonizing choice when the unrest in Kent encouraged a Royalist uprising in Essex a few months later. His brothers Henry and William had no such qualms; they were among the first of the Essex gentry to give their support to Sir Charles Lucas when he began to raise troops for the king at the end of May.
Lucas and the Essex volunteers linked with the Earl of Norwich's Cavaliers just south of Chelmsford on June 8th 1648, and began their fateful march to Colchester two days later. William and Henry Maxey appear to have been sent ahead as a vanguard, to beat the drum in Colchester and then return with their new recruits to join the Royalist army on the march; they were the first Royalists seen by Arthur Wilson, the Earl of Warwick's steward, when they knocked on the door of the Parliamentary admiral's mansion at Leez Priory. Wilson later wrote.
- "some thirty or forty gentlemen, collonels, & other officers, came to the gates; protesting, they came from the Lord Goring & Sir Charles Lucas, to protect the house, from violence & rapine of the souldiers. And, finding some of them to be our neighbours (as, Collonel Maxey and his brother; Mr Nevell's son, of Cressmg Temple, & some others, whom I knew) who might do us good, & could do us no hurt (for wee had men enough in the house to grapple with them; they being arm'd onlie with swords. & wee having everie man his carbine or muskett) I lett them in. And truly their demeanour was very fair and civil." [17]
The Maxeys' recruiting drive in Colchester appears to have gone well, enlisting "a good number of the poor Bay-Weavers, and such-like People, wanting Employment...". [18] It was possibly this initial success that encouraged Sir Charles Lucas to think that more men could be recruited in the area. Lucas thus pursuaded Lord Norwich to march the army to his home town and its eventual doom.
Colchester's reception to the mam Royalist army when it came was rather more cold, although only one townsman was killed in the exchange between Lucas' advance party and a unit of mounted militia. Lucas and Lord Norwich hesitated to force their way into Colchester itself, preferring to send in a deputation to pursuade the town authorities to submit peacefully. The two officers selected for this task were Colonel Samuel Tuke and Colonel William Maxey, who, "being both their countreymen, to goe in to the inhabitants and advise their rendering of the place." [19]
Neither William nor Henry Maxey were among the Royalist prisoners taken when Colchester surrendered on 28th August 1648. At least two troops of horse are thought to have escaped shortly before the end of the Siege, and it must be likely that the Maxey brothers led them out.
William Maxey's military career seems to have ended with the surrender of Colchester. How he and Henry Maxey managed to return to Essex and escape punishment after such a public involvement in the Colchester campaign is something of a mystery, perhaps the family still had enough local friends in high places to protect them. The last mention of William Maxey occurs at the bottom of the memorial to his father, which ends
- "William the 3 son served Charles the first in all his wars against his rebells and was Maior Generall of his horse att ye siege at Colchester and died ye 25 of Jan 1659 and lieth buried in this chancell. Henry his [ie Sir William's] 2d son lived to complete this monvment for ye perptuating of ye memory of his dear father is preparing himself to laye his body here and his soule to rest with his predecessors in Abrahames bosom."
Sadly, Bradwell Hall burnt down in 1879, although a Victorian photograph of the Maxey family home has survived. There is also the intriguing rumour of a "fine oil painting of General Maxey", which is said to have been moved from the house before the fire and was evidently still in the possession of family descendants in 1901. [20] The rediscovery of this artifact will hopefully form the basis of a future article.
Footnotes:
- PR NEWMAN, Royalist Officers in England and Wales 1642-1660. A Biographical Directory. Garland Press. USA, 1981.
- PR NEWMAN, The Old Service: Royalist Regimental Colonels and the Civil War 1642-46, Manchester University Press, 1993, p7,
- ibid.
- Stuart REID, Officers and Regiments of the Royalist Army, Partizan Press. 1990, ui, pi 18; Robert MORRIS, The First Battle of Newbury 1643, Stuart Press, 1993, p31.
- Newman, Royalist Officers, p250.
- From the monument in Bradwell-juxta-Coggeshall; see also C Fell SMITH. "Some Notes on the Maxey Family of Bradwell and Saling", Essex Review, Vol X, 1901, p174.
- ibid.
- Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1640, p467
- HMC (Histoncal Manuscripts Commission) Ormonde Mss. II. 1899. p13, Ian RYDER. An English Army for Ireland. Partizan Press, 1987, p36; Newman, op.cit.
- W H BLACK (ed.). Docquets of Letters Patent 1642-6, Public Record Office, unpublished, p20
- The stories of Sir Charles Lucas" various regiments are contained in: David APPLEBY. Our Fall Our Fame: The Life and Times of Sir Charles Lucas (1613-1648), 63,000 words, as yet unpublished.
- Our Fall Our Fame - see note (11).
- C H FIRTH (ed.). The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. Routledge, 1901, Appendix VII, p202
- Staffordshire Record Office, SMS 556. I am grateful to John Barratt for bringing this MS to my attention.
- HMC 9th Report, ii. p437
- SMITH, op.cit.,p173.
- PECK (ed.) Desiderata Curiosa. London, 1779. ii, pp480 et seq.
- Round Mss; WOODWARD & COCKERILL. The Siege of Colchester, Essex County Library, 1979, p6
- HMC 12th Report, IX, p23.
- Ernest N MASON, "The Home of the Maxeys", Essex Review, 1901. Vol X, p208.
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