C.V. Wedgwood

AWKWARDLY for C.V. Wedgwood, she lived some hundreds of years after the English civil war (1642-48), an event in which she was passionately interested. Describing how the balance of power shifted from the monarch to Parliament was in some ways the easier part of her task: there was plenty of documentation, records of speeches, details of legislation and so on. Her problem was to try to see the era through the minds of the royalists and Cromwell's Roundheads, who took their differences to the battleground. Her remedy was to work out the battles on paper, then put her imagination to work as she tramped around the battlefields, if possible in the season when a battle took place. The summers of the civil war were typically English, she noted, with cold windy days and wet evenings. Ice was on the ground in some places in August. The war itself was fought in the main by “talented amateurs”. Cromwell himself had no previous experience of warfare.