North Shields 800

This year the town in which I live is celebrating 800 years since its foundation. In 1225 a fishing port, accompanied by a small village of huts known as ‘shiels’, was established on the north bank of the Tyne to serve Tynemouth Priory which was situated on the headland at the mouth of the river. The port grew into a harbour and the town expanded so that today around 35,000 people live in North Shields and the surrounding area.

The mouth of the Tyne during the blessing of the fleet ceremony to celebrate North Shields 800 on 20th June 2025. Image by Joan Hammersley, 2025.

As a historian I have been interested in the history of the area since moving here over twenty years ago. From the perspective of the UK as a whole, North Shields might seem like a remote backwater, but for various reasons it played a crucial role at several points during the historical period I am most interested in (1500-1800), not least during the mid-seventeenth-century revolution.

As its origins would suggest, the importance of this area has always been linked to its position at the mouth of the river Tyne, approximately seven miles east of Newcastle. Fishing boats have gone out from North Shields continuously since its foundation. A few still do so today, and Fish Quay remains a great place to buy fresh fish. In the early modern period, though, the Tyne was also important for another reason. It was crucial in the transportation of coal from the rich northern coalfields to other parts of the country - most notably London. Throughout that period coal was the key source of fuel that was essential both for heating and cooking. Consequently, the position of North Shields at the mouth of the Tyne gave it importance within the country and accorded those who controlled it particular power.

The plaque marking the site of the so-called ‘Governor’s Tree’ in North Shields. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

It was perhaps because of its importance in the coal trade that Charles I visited North Shields in June 1633. He had become King of Scotland and England in 1625 following the death of his father James I. He was crowned in England on 2 February 1626, but did not travel north for his Scottish coronation until the late spring of 1633. He left Whitehall on 8th May, but made slow progress, not reaching Durham until June. He made a state entrance into Newcastle on 3rd June, before travelling by barge down the river Tyne to see the ships at anchor on 5th. According to a plaque situated on Tynemouth Road close to the border between Tynemouth village and North Shields, he was welcomed there at the Governor's Tree having disembarked in the Pow Burn, though the veracity of the plaque has been questioned. Unfortunately Charles's visit in June 1633 was not without incident. One of the naval guns that was fired in his honour exploded, killing three men and injuring several more.

An image depicting the opposition to the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland. Taken from True Information of the beginning and cause of all our troubles (London, 1648). From the copy in the Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University: Special Collections Bradshaw 942.062 TRU. Reproduced with kind permission.

Charles was back in Newcastle again between 5 and 22nd May 1639 - though he probably did not visit North Shields on that occasion. This visit was prompted not by ceremony but politics and reflected a third reason why this region was important in the seventeenth century (besides fishing and the coal trade): its proximity to Scotland. Keen to harmonise the religious establishment and practices of his two kingdoms, Charles had sought to impose the English Book of Common Prayer and rule by Bishops on the largely Presbyterian Scots, prompting riots in churches and war between England and Scotland. Charles struggled to raise English troops to fight in Scotland and on his visit in May 1639 he found the troops in a poor state. Just over a year later the King's English forces were defeated by the Scots at the Battle of Newburn to the west of Newcastle. The Scots then entered and occupied Newcastle on 29 August 1640 and the coal trade to London was suspended. The Treaty of Ripon of 14 October dictated that the Scots would occupy the North East (and be paid quartering costs while doing so) and that Parliament would have to be party to a final settlement. This forced the King's hand and was instrumental in bringing about the Civil War. Charles had ruled without Parliament between 1629 and 1640 and the 'Short Parliament' called in the spring was quickly dismissed. This move on the part of the Scots forced Charles to call Parliament again in the autumn of 1640, thereby opening a channel through which his English subjects could voice their own grievances

The mouth of the Tyne remained important throughout the Civil War. For the reasons discussed above, Charles was keen to secure the northern counties for himself and he sent the Earl of Newcastle to the region in June 1642. Three hundred soldiers were dispatched to Tynemouth Castle to guard it, the Earl constructed forts at Shields, and men were recruited for defence. Control over the river was also strictly enforced - one seafarer, a Captain Johnson, described trying and failing to get his boat into Tynemouth Haven for fresh water because there were 80 men fortifying the fort next to the old castle. (House of Lords Journal, 5, pp. 170-1, 1 July 1642 'Abstracts of Letters from Newcastle'). Control of the river continued to be a bargaining chip between the two sides. By January 1643 John Marley had been elected mayor of Newcastle and the town was firmly in royalist hands. In retaliation Parliament insisted that London coal ships were not allowed to sail to and from the town until Marley and the other local officers changed sides. While this was a tactical move by Parliament, it resulted in London, which was by then under Parliamentary control, suffering from a lack of coal.

The author’s copy of a map of the Tyne from Ralph Gardner’s England’s Grievance Discovered (London, 1655).

It was this situation that led to the siege of Newcastle in 1644. Scottish troops under General Alexander Leslie (who had led the Scots to victory at the Battle of Newburn) besieged Newcastle from late August with the aim of re-capturing the town for Parliament in order to re-open the London coal trade. The siege ended with a two-hour bombardment on 19 October. Leslie subsequently besieged and captured Tynemouth Castle and by November both were firmly in Parliamentarian hands.

The memorial to Ralph Gardner in Chirton North Shields. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

As well as becoming pawns in the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians, coal and the river Tyne were also a source of local tensions. In 1655 Ralph Gardner, who was from Chirton close to North Shields, published a pamphlet entitled Englands grievance discovered in which he detailed the negative consequences of the control exercised by the Newcastle Mayor and Burgesses over the river Tyne from its mouth to beyond the Tyne bridge, and therefore of the coal trade from the North East. He claimed that both ship owners and local people from Shields had lost money and business as a result and that the heavy-handed imposition of control by the Mayor and Burgesses had resulted in ships sunk unnecessarily and individuals imprisoned and fined simply for doing their job. Gardner commissioned the artist Wenceslas Hollar to produce a map of the Tyne to accompany his work which demonstrated, in stark visual form, the distance from the mouth of the Tyne to Newcastle, and therefore the folly and injustice of the Newcastle corporation's insistence on controlling the trade.

Tynemouth Priory from Priors’ Haven in around 1800. This shows where the Parliamentarian troops would have put up ladders to scale the headland. I am grateful to English Heritage staff at Tynemouth Priory for providing me with a copy of this image.

Finally, the importance of the area around the mouth of the Tyne helps to explain why the defection of the Governor of Tynemouth Castle, Colonel Henry Lilburne, in the midst of the renewal of fighting known as the Second Civil War, was viewed as a major emergency. Lilburne came from a staunch Parliamentarian family from County Durham. One brother, Robert, had been a long-standing Parliamentarian officer and the other, John, was a leading figure in the Leveller movement. Yet in August 1648 Henry suddenly declared himself for the King and sent to North Shields calling on 'all that loved him and King Charls to come to the Castle for his assistance' (Sir Arthur Hesilrige's Letter to the Honourable Committeee of Lords & Commons at Derby-House, Concerning the Revolt and Recovery of Tinmouth-Castle. London, 1648, p. 4). Arthur Haselrige, the head of Parliamentarian forces in the north, sent a considerable body of foot soldiers and dragoons down the river and ordered them to storm the castle at night, using ladders to scale the headland from the water. The task was hard:

but at last ours mounted the works, recovered the castle, and killed many Sea-men

and others, and amongst the number that was slain, they found Lieut: Col: Lilburn

(Sir Arthur Hesilrige's Letter, p. 6).

Tynemouth Priory on the 11th July 2025 as preparations were being made for the Mouth of the Tyne festival. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

The complex background to Lilburne's defection has recently been investigated by one of my students at Newcastle University, Lucy Delaney. It is a fascinating story revealing the complex interplay between local and national issues and events. That interplay has always been important in this north-east corner of England. Despite its distance from London, geographical, topographical and historical factors have rendered it relevant to the national narrative over centuries. The evidence of this remains in the landscape itself, particularly at the mouth of the Tyne. The headland proudly wears the remnants of its 800+ years of history - national, local and personal - in the priory and castle ruins (now an English Heritage site), gravestones, World War Two gun emplacements, and even the defunct coastguard station. These evidence the diverse roles it has played over the years. Moreover, as I write this, preparations are being made for the annual 'Mouth of the Tyne' music festival, which means that a huge stage has been erected between the Coastguard Station and the Priory ready to welcome the hundreds of revellers who will come to hear the bands that will be playing. This area may be rich in history, but it is also a vibrant place that remains of relevance and value today.

Memories of the British Revolutions

One of the frescoes from the Peers’ Corridor in the Palace of Westminster. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

In the Peers' Corridor of the Houses of Parliament, which leads from the central gallery to the House of Lords, eight frescoes by the Victorian artist Charles West Cope are mounted on the walls. On one side of the corridor are four pictures that depict events from the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars from the Parliamentarian perspective, on the other are four paintings that offer a Royalist account. They were commissioned as part of the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster following a devastating fire in 1834. The idea behind the paintings, and the way in which they are hung, was to represent the fact that the two sides had fought each other during those wars, but that they were now unified once again and working together for the good of the nation. This scheme, and the careful consideration that went into it, reflects the difficulties involved in commemorating the events of the mid-seventeenth century.

Reconciling ourselves to the history of the British Revolutions (1640-1660 and 1688-1689) is perhaps less of a problem today, since those events are no longer central to British public consciousness or the understanding of our own history. In part this reflects the fact that the mid-seventeenth century features only fleetingly in the school history curriculum. Yet the events of those years still resonate in the way in which we conduct parliamentary politics. The adversarial model of parliamentary debate, the fact that the monarch cannot enter the House of Commons without permission, and the exclusion of Roman Catholics from the line of succession to the throne, all date from the seventeenth-century conflicts.

On 3rd September we held a workshop at Newcastle University on 'Memory of the British Revolutions in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries'. Organised in collaboration with colleagues at the Université de Rouen in France, this was a second workshop aimed at building towards a big grant application 'Memories of the English Revolutions: Sources, Transmissions, Uses (17th-19th centuries)' (MEMOREV). This workshop brought together a number of British and French scholars from different disciplines and career stages to consider how the 1640-1660 and 1688-1689 revolutions were remembered, forgotten, contested and reinvented across the British Isles, Europe, and North America between the mid-seventeenth and the early twentieth century. The aims of the wider project (as set out in the workshop by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille) involve several elements:

Linking the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s with those of the late 1680s and early 1690s. These were often linked retrospectively and, as Jonathan Scott has shown, many of the issues that were fought over in the 1640s were unresolved in 1660 and surfaced again at the time of the Glorious Revolution

Taking a broad geographical approach encompassing not just the British Isles but also continental Europe and North America so as to re-examine the impact of these revolutions on European and transatlantic cultures

Exploring the tension between memory and history and the way in which the two impact each other, including the importance of remembering and forgetting in the fashioning of historiography.

In what remains of this blogpost I will explore my own reflections on this stimulating workshop.

While the British Revolutions may no longer hold the place in the public consciousness they once did, episodes from that era still create tensions or problems for those engaged in remembrance, memorialisation, and even historical interpretation. As an historian who regularly teaches the British Revolutions I am acutely aware of this. I know the horrifying fact that the proportion of the population that died in the civil wars was greater than in World War One, and despite my republican sympathies I am uncomfortable discussing - let alone celebrating - the details of the execution of the King.

As several speakers from our workshop highlighted, the violence and the regicide have created difficulties for those remembering the events ever since the seventeenth century. Isabelle Baudino's paper was particularly strong on this. While early visual narratives of the period, such as A True Information of the beginning and cause of all our troubles and John Lockman's New History of England, did present the violence - the latter including an image of the execution of Charles I by Bernard Picart - later versions replaced these images with tableaus that encapsulated the event without actually depicting the brutality. Isabelle focused on two scenes that proved particularly popular as means of presenting the regicide and Cromwell's reign respectively in ways that were not too shocking or distasteful.

‘Charles the First after parting with his children’ by Samuel Bellin, published by Mary Parkes, after John Bridges. 1841 (1838). National Portrait Gallery NPG D32079. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Rather than depicting the regicide itself, the authors of narrative histories began alluding to that event by recreating the king's final farewell to his children. As Isabelle noted, the regicide was effectively present in this scene, since the reason Charles was having to take leave of his family was because he had been condemned to death, but the act itself was not shown. That farewell scene became ubiquitous not just in narrative histories but also in other forms, right up to Ken Hughes's 1970 film Cromwell.

The other scene Isabelle discussed also features in that film. It was Oliver Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament in April 1653, which became a symbol or shorthand for Cromwell's authoritarian rule. As Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq noted in her paper, Cromwell as a character has also been problematic for those remembering or offering an historical account of the British Revolutions. This is especially true with regard to his activities in Ireland, but Myriam-Isabelle showed that Cromwell was also a difficult figure for historians such as Frances Wright, whose grand narrative England, the Civilizer appeared in 1848. On the one hand Wright was critical of Cromwell's actions and yet she also sought to exonerate and redeem him, describing him as a wonderful man and a guardian of civilisation.

Plaque at Burford Church. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Wright saw the Revolution of 1640-1660 as a positive event, advancing the civilising process, yet for her - and for later parliamentarian sympathisers - it could be difficult to identify moments or characters worthy of celebration. Waseem Ahmed's paper addressed this issue from the perspective of the Left in examining 'Levellers Day', a commemoration of the Leveller mutiny which resulted in the execution of three men - Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins, and Private Church - at Burford in Oxfordshire in May 1649. Despite the violence of this event, and the fact that it marked the end of the main active phase of the Leveller movement, it is the date that Left-wing activists have chosen as a focus for celebration since the 1970s. In his talk, Waseem provided detail on the background to the annual Levellers Day celebration and drew out some of the complexities and tensions inherent in it. Though effectively a celebration of a moment of defeat it celebrates the bravery of these men who sacrificed their lives for a cause they believed in. Moreover, the event is important in offering an alternative history of the British Revolutions distinct from that offered by the establishment, and is part of a wider argument (encouraged by the Communist Party Historians’ group in the 1950s and 1960s) that England does have a revolutionary tradition.

A second theme that cropped up in several of the papers was the importance of networks - both familial and political - to the preservation of memories (especially more hidden or controversial memories). Cheryl Kerry's paper highlighted this in relation to the 'regicides' who had signed the death warrant for Charles I. She showed both that there was a great deal of intermarrying among regicide families and that a number of descendants of the regicides were involved or implicated in later plots and were prominent among the supporters of William III in 1688-89.

Interestingly, Stéphane Jettot demonstrated that the situation was very similar for a group on the other side of the political divide - the descendants of Jacobites. Again there is evidence of intermarriage and Stéphane particularly highlighted the role played by female family members in maintaining memories through the preservation of documents and artefacts.

Lucy Hutchinson by Samuel Freeman, C. 1825-1850. National Portrait Gallery NPG D19953. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Returning to the civil wars, Lucy Hutchinson, who was the focus of David Norbrook's paper, played a crucial role in preserving the memory of her husband, the parliamentarian Colonel John Hutchinson. David demonstrated how important members of her family then were in controlling the publication of the manuscript of her Memoirs and the format in which it appeared.

Gaby Mahlberg also touched on the importance of networks, this time of those with similar political views, in her paper on the dissemination of texts and images relating to the regicide Algernon Sidney in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany. Gaby noted the important role played by Thomas Hollis and his circle in the creation and circulation of key images. Members of that circle included the Italian painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani, the German engraver Johann Lorenz Natter, and the Baron Stolzh.

Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s engraving of Algernon Sidney for the 1763 edition of Sidney’s works commissioned by Thomas Hollis. National Portrait Gallery NPG D28941. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Hollis and his circle worked hard to keep the memory of the British Revolutions alive in Britain and abroad in the late eighteenth century and saw connections between the events of the mid-seventeenth century and their own times. The third theme that stood out to me from the workshop papers was the importance of reverberations and feedback loops both in preserving memories (by ensuring that events remained relevant) but also in distorting the way in which particular events were remembered.

Several participants highlighted the fact that in nineteenth-century France, discussing the English Revolutions was a subtle way of commenting on the French Revolution and contemporary events in France. In his paper on nineteenth-century French school textbooks, Pascal Dupuy explained that parallels between the Stuarts and the Bourbons were especially common in the Restoration period and that discussions of the Stuarts could be read as comments on the contemporary French monarchy.

Another obvious parallel for the French was that between Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell. As Isabelle Baudino explained, Bonaparte's coup added a new urgency and relevance to the image of Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament. It was not only for the French that Cromwell was a striking character. As Maxim Boyko demonstrated in his paper, Cromwell was interpreted by some Italians through a Machiavellian lens. Maxim noted that the Italians also tended to understand the period of the commonwealth and free state between 1649 and 1653 through the lens of the Italian city states, not least Venice.

These ideas have been very much in my mind as I returned to teaching. In my first week back I encouraged undergraduate students on my special subject 'The British Revolutions, 1640-1660' to think about some of the resonances of that period today. I also engaged in a lively discussion with MA students on British values and citizenship and the extent to which these are rooted in history. I hope the MEMOREV project will offer further opportunities to explore the symbiotic relationship between the past and the present, memory and history.

Who was James Harrington?

Peter Lely's portrait of James Harrington from John Toland's edition of Harrington's works. Image by Rachel Hammersley, with thanks to James Babb.

James Harrington, it must be admitted, is not a household name (at least not beyond my odd little household). Indeed, he is not even particularly well known among scholars, unless they happen to be experts on the English Civil Wars or the history of political thought. Consequently, some justification for why he is a worthy focus of attention seems necessary.

One reason why Harrington is interesting is that he made a contribution both to the development of republicanism in the mid-seventeenth century and to the history of the Stuart monarchy. This makes him unusual in that he straddles what is often seen as the fundamental dividing line of the period. 

The Civil War is often presented as, at heart, a conflict between royalists, who insisted on the divine right of the King to rule, and parliamentarians, who asserted the rights and privileges of Parliament (and of the people it represented) and ended up establishing a republic in order to secure those rights and privileges. Scholars have tended to focus on Harrington’s republicanism, ignoring or downplaying his involvement with the Stuarts.

Traditionally, then, Harrington is known as a leading (for some the leading) seventeenth-century English republican. His best known work The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) served a number of purposes in this context. In the first place, it offered a justification as to why a commonwealth or republic was theoretically the best form of government. Secondly, it demonstrated why that form of government was also the most appropriate for England in the mid-1650s. Moreover, in presenting this claim, Harrington also became one of the earliest writers to offer an historical explanation for the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642. His materialist understanding (that it was changes in economic power, crucially the ownership of land, that prompted political change) prefigured Marxist ideas, and was subsequently used as evidence by Marxist historians of the period. Finally, and most significantly, Oceana offered a detailed constitutional blueprint for a more successful and durable English republic than that which was then in existence. For these reasons, Harrington has long been of interest to specialists in seventeenth and eighteenth-century history and thought. There are, however, other aspects of his life that make him a more complex, and therefore an even more interesting, figure than the conventional understanding suggests.

Scholars have always known that Harrington’s other great claim to fame, besides being a republican author, was that he had been gentleman of the bedchamber to the captive Charles I in 1647-8, following the parliamentarian victory in the first Civil War. Harrington was employed in this role by Parliament, which was holding Charles prisoner, and he was appointed to replace some of the King’s former servants whom Parliament did not feel it could trust. Consequently, this office was not as strongly at odds with Harrington’s later role as a leading republican as it might initially appear. However, tensions are created by the testimony of those who knew Harrington, which suggest that he was on good terms with the King and had great respect for him. John Aubrey, who was a friend of Harrington’s and wrote a brief account of his life, described Harrington speaking of the King ‘with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable’ and claimed that the King's execution 'gave him so great griefe, that he contracted a Disease by it; that never any thing did goe so neer to him' (John Aubrey, Brief Lives..., ed. Kate Bennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), I, p. 318). Similarly Thomas Herbert, who was gentleman of the bedchamber alongside Harrington, claimed in his Memoirs that Harrington had defended the King’s position on the last peace treaty issued to him, (the Newport Treaty) against some Officers of the Army, and that they had been so angered by his defence of the King’s views that they removed him from his position (Thomas Herbert, Memoirs of the Last Two Years of the Reign of King Charles I (London, 1815), pp. 128-30). Despite these accounts, scholars have tended to play down Harrington’s royal service in the course of emphasising his republicanism. 

Some of the notes that my husband John left me when he died, however, led me to question this interpretation. Further research into Harrington’s own activities, and those of his family, reveal that his role as gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles I, far from being an aberration in his career, was actually the culmination of a family history of service to the Stuarts that dated right back to the beginning of James I’s reign when Harrington’s grandfather and great uncle capitalised on their kinship with the Stuarts to render service and gain favour.

Memorial to Sir James Harington of Exton (1511-1592), father to Sir James and Sir John and great grandfather of James Harrington (1611-1677). Image by Rachel Hammersley.

In April 1603 James Harington of Ridlington (the republican author’s grandfather) and his elder brother Sir John Harington of Exton met the new King (who was their twelfth cousin) in Yorkshire as he made his journey from Edinburgh to London. According to contemporary accounts, James Harington of Ridlington was one of a number of Englishmen whom King James knighted during his journey. Soon after, when the King reached Rutland, he spent several nights at Sir John’s house, and the men hunted together. 

Trust appears to have been established between them, since in June 1603 James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, and his two eldest children, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, also stayed with Sir John Harington’s family on their journey south. Friendships were forged between various family members, not least between Sir John’s son, who was also called John, and the young Prince Henry, and it was presumably on account of these connections that Sir John and his wife became guardians for the young Princess Elizabeth on 19 October 1603, after earlier arrangements had fallen through. She was welcomed into their house in December and Sir John was instrumental in preventing her abduction by the Gunpowder plotters two years later. Princess Elizabeth's connection with the Haringtons continued up to and beyond her marriage to Frederick V Elector Palatine in February 1613. Even after Sir John Harington's death later that year, his wife kept up the connection and was with the Electress when her second child, Charles Louis, was born in January 1618. Not long after this, Frederick was asked to become King of Bohemia. Owing to the short tenure of this position, Elizabeth is sometimes referred to as the Winter Queen. In the 1640s the future author of The Commonwealth of Oceana reinvigorated these family connections with the Stuarts in ways that I will explore fully in my book.

Evidently, then, Harrington is of interest not only to those concerned with seventeenth-century English republicanism, but also to those interested in the Stuart family, court politics and royal service in the seventeenth century. Moreover, it is clear that his role as gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles I cannot be as easily explained away as historians have sought to do in the past. Indeed, this information regarding Harrington’s life raises a troublesome problem. How could the author of one of the most significant republican tracts of the mid-seventeenth century also have been a loyal and attentive servant to members of the Stuart family, including Charles I? This is one of the questions I try to answer in the book on which I am currently working. For a preview of this aspect of the argument, you can listen to the paper I presented as the James H. Burns Lecture at the St Andrews Institute for Intellectual History in September 2016.