Reading Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War, as I have been for a long while – but there will be a review soon, I promise, I’ve been put on the trail of Elizabeth Alkin, spy and nurse, c.1600–1655?. From the ONDB (subscription sorry):

Employed from the beginning of the civil war as a spy by the earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, and Thomas Fairfax, in 1645 and 1647 Alkin received payments from the committee for the advancement of money for several ‘discoveries’, including information about the activities of George Mynnes, a Surrey ironmaster who was supplying royalist forces with iron and wire. Increasingly she seems to have concentrated her intelligencing activity on the London news press: in 1648 she was on the trail of Mercurius Melancholicus and the Parliament Kite, and in February 1649 Mercurius Pragmaticus called her an ‘old Bitch’ who could ‘smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best Blood-hound in the Army’ (Mercurius Pragmaticus, sig. 2v). …

In June 1649 Alkin was sent to ‘the house of correction’ for ‘great incivilities’ to Sir James Harrington MP, and the following month was involved in a fracas in the Salutation tavern in Holborn with some soldiers who apparently suspected her of being a royalist (Williams, 131–3). A dispute in the same year over her occupation of the house of Stephen Fosett, surgeon to Sir Arthur Aston (governor of Oxford during the first war and responsible, she claimed, for her husband’s death), resulted in a grant of £50 and a house.

She was evidently a woman who could stand up for herself.

The nursing seems to have come later – she was paid by the government after the First Anglo-Dutch War for her care of wounded soldiers, The ONDB says there was a petition requesting that she be buried in the cloisters of Westminister Abbey – it doesn’t say if that was successful – presumably that’s unknown. She’s got quite some coverage in medical history journals, so she must have made some real efforts for the soldiers – indeed it seems she destroyed her own health in the process.

She’s had a whole book written about her – I. MacDonald, Elizabeth Alkin: a Florence Nightingale of the Commonwealth (1935) – have to check it out. Something about that title, however, doesn’t fill me with confidence.

On the web, there’s a review of a book in which she has her own chapter, a House of Commons Journal entry, but not a lot else.

Speaking of Oxford as a royalist stronghold during the English Civil War:

Anthony Wood – or Anthony a Wood, as he styled himself – was an Oxford type, a kind of person still to be found in the city’s narrow streets. He liked to spend his afternoons picking up old ballads, broadside and pamphlets … He had … 35 items on Conduct, and 660 on Armies, including battles, sieges and civil war. He also collected accounts of treason trials, crimes and murders (357), smoking, cards, feasting, progresses and sideshows (56), and works on the radical sects – among whom he included Presbyterians (179) – and on witchcraft (42) and women (139). He was especially careful about cataloguing the last group, indexing them under ‘Women’s advocate; women’s vindications, women virtuous; women hist of; Women’s rhetroic; women’s history’ Wom Parl. If; Women modish and vanity; women excellent.”

From, Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History, Harper Press, 2006. p. 277

An interesting portrayal of the household of Charles I on the eve of the Civil War:

“… it comprised as much as 1800 people. Some of these were given bed and board, others received what was called ‘bourge of court’, which included bread, ale, firewood and candles. The court also suppored hordes of nobles, princes, ambassadors and other state visitors, who all resided in it with their households, such as Henrietta’s mother Marie de Medici, and her entourage…. Supporting the household accounted for more than 40% of royal expenditure. …

The queen had her own household, which included a full kitchen staff, a keeper of the sweet coffers [probably a popular job, I’d suggest!] a laundress and a starcher, and a seamstress. There were over 180, not including the stables staff.”

From The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, HarperPress, 2006.

What strikes me about this is just how chaotic everyday life must have been in such circumstances. A nightmare should you have been responsible for “security”, as we’d now call it. Sure access to the royal inner chambers would have been tightly controlled, but when the king or queen wanted to go hunting, or otherwise “out” they’d have had to pass through these outer throngs.