Artic le Scattered remains and paper bodies : Margaret Cavendish and the Siege of Colchester

Many histories of the civil war and biographies of Margaret Lucas Cavendish recount the story that, in 1648, parliamentary soldiers desecrated the Lucas family tomb, scattered the remains of Cavendish’s mother and sister, and tore out the corpses’ hair to wear in their hats. Tracking down the sources of this widely repeated story, this essay examines the role of textual accounts in producing the effect that bodies precede them. Events and stories, flesh, facts, and fiction, prove to be very difficult to untangle. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2013) 4, 452–464. doi:10.1057/pmed.2013.31 Many histories of the civil war and biographies of Margaret Lucas Cavendish recount the story that the Lucas family tomb was desecrated by parliamentary troops in 1648. This is a story so gruesome as to be irresistible. In histories of the civil war the attack on the Lucas family house, St. John's, is usually included as part of a narrative of the siege of nearby Colchester, which Barbara Donagan describes as ‘a central event of the second civil war and a focus of national attention in private letters and public print’ (Donagan, 2008, 313). The attack on the house sets the stage for the arrest of Margaret’s brother, Sir Charles Lucas, a Royalist commander, and his summary court martial and execution. The connection to Cavendish, already married and in exile with her husband, is not always clear. For instance, Diane Purkiss reports that ‘When the Parliamentaries © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 4, 4, 452–464 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ captured the house of Sir Charles Lucas, just south of Colchester, they broke open the family vault and tore apart the bodies of Lucas's mother and sister, cutting off their hair to wear in their hats as scalps’ (Purkiss, 2006, 535; cf. Carlton, 1994, 321). Some readers might not remember that Cavendish was born a Lucas; Purkiss does not remind them at this point in her account. As is standard practice in a popular history, Purkiss also does not specify her source for the sacking of the family vault, presenting it as an event rather than an assertion, and interpreting its meaning for the perpetrators as ‘a kind of tribal magic’ (Purkiss, 2006, 535). While Purkiss does not remind the reader that Lucas was Margaret Cavendish’s brother, biographies of Cavendish, predictably, make Margaret’s status as a member of the Lucas family explicit. Here, too, the desecration is presented as fact. As one example, Katie Whitaker recounts how ‘Entering the Lucases’ burial vault, they [parliamentary forces] broke open the tombs and “scattered the bones about with profane jests.” Margaret’s mother and sister Mary were so recently buried that their hair remained undecayed and this the soldiers “cut off ... and wore it in their hats”’ (Whitaker, 2002, 105). Whitaker’s quotation marks advise the reader that she has this information from a contemporary source, but she does not comment on the source or its provenance. While historians and biographers cannot resist including this story – and who can blame them? – Cavendish herself excludes it from her ‘true relation’ of her life. There might be many reasons why she might shrink from recounting an incident so horrifying and unsettlingly carnivalesque. One possibility is that it never happened, although historians and biographers do not consider this. The surviving evidence of this atrocity consists of texts that, like Cavendish’s autobiography, trumpet their status as true relations or accounts. A ‘relator’ often conveys the information to the reader. While the relator’s credibility resides in access to inside information, he or she recounts reports from eye and ear witnesses at least as often as purporting to be such a witness. These texts often refer the reader to corroborating persons or documents outside the text, but these exist for us now, as they must have for many contemporary readers, only as they are referred to in the text. Examining various relations of the ransacking of the Lucas family vault raises questions about what constitutes a ‘true relation,’ what its status was as evidence for contemporaries, and what its value might be for us now as we attempt to gain knowledge about premodern flesh. The fragments of the Lucas women’s bodies and the tufts of their hair leap off the page as the animate body parts of macabre fantasy, the gruesomely, viscerally undead. These fragments may be figments. Yet they have had a vibrant textual afterlife nonetheless. In this essay, I will explore the possibility that the accounts through which we have access to what happened to the remains of Elizabeth Leighton Lucas and Mary Lucas Killigrew may not simply preserve the traces of their premodern flesh but, effectively, create their flesh. That is, I will be suggesting that the process of textual transmission of premodern flesh might not begin with a body and then lead toward its representation in a text but, rather, begin with textual accounts that produce the effect of bodies preceding them. 1 For similar accounts of this vandalism as fact, see Grant (1957, 101) and Jones (1988, 68). I cannot determine where Jones found the detail that ‘small items of jewellry on the corpses were stolen.’ Jones and Grant both cite HMC, 12 Rep.,