Roundhead or Cavalier railings
Welcome to the third ‘stop’ on ‘The Cavalier & Roundhead Route’ – a sculpture trail in Lea Park.
This trail was funded through Public Art Funding, and installed in 2024. Find out more about the project through this link.
If you live in Lea Park – the housing estate you are about to enter – then you may know that every street name has a connection to the English Civil War. Read more about that on the starting panel for the Railings Art Work you can find here.
In June 2022, Nicola Henshaw, the lead artist for this Public Art Project, along with support from Thame Town Council, delivered a day of workshops about the Civil War with the then Year 3 students at Barley Hill School. During the day the students were able to take part in cyanatope lessons and a fun game of ‘Civil War Consequences’.
A cyanotype is a print made by exposing light-sensitive paper to UV light. The process is camera-less and produces a blue image. Some of the images created are shown here. The focus were symbols used by the Cavaliers – feathers, and Roundheads – stars.
These images were used by Nicola to create a ‘logo’ for the walk, that you can see on the pedestrian signs between the different locations of each piece of public art.
The students involved also played a game of ‘consequences’, a pen-and-paper game where each person takes turns to create a shared image, without seeing what the previous person has drawn already. So each of the images here was created by 3 different students. As you will see, most of the drawings ended up being Cavaliers with their fancy hats, rather than Roundheads with their boring helmets.
If you want to see the outfit worn by Musketeers at this time, then take a trip to Thame Museum, where you can see one on display. This link will take you to a picture of it.
Allegiance swapping during the Civil War
Each sign has been attributed a different colour background: Red if the person named was known for being a Cavalier, fighting for the King. This was the colour worn by their officers, where as pale blue was worn by Roundhead Officers (pale orange for soldiers) fighting against the King. However often the colours didn’t stick.
Roundhead or Cavalier? It doesn’t matter, because when the English Civil War began, people swapped sides all the time. Cromwell said that some of his best soldiers were former Cavaliers, but we wonder what he made of Scottish Colonel John Urry? He was a Roundhead, then a Cavalier, then a Roundhead, then a Cavalier before he was executed. If you changed sides, it was a good idea to change your colours at the same time. At Edgehill in 1642, Sir Faithful Fortescue and his men left the Roundheads to join the Cavaliers. But many of his men forgot to remove their pale sashes and 18 of their 60 troops were killed or wounded by the Cavaliers they’d just joined.
If you live in Lea Park – try to find your street name and learn who/what it was named after.
Women in the civil war
You may have noticed that everyone listed here is a man. However women played a role in the Civil War too. If you are a women or girl, would you follow a civil war army from place to place? Why? To sell them cheese? To wash their socks? To nurse the sick? To keep an eye on your brother? Or maybe you wouldn’t follow at all? Maybe you’d join the army yourself. And if you think you couldn’t because you’re not a lad – SHHHHH! – you’re very, very wrong.
Jane Ingleby wasn’t a lad. She was a woman Cavalier who charged with the cavalry at Marston Moor in 1644 and she wasn’t the only one. There are many stories of rich and poor, Roundhead and Cavalier women all over the country who fought alongside lovers and brothers during the civil war.
They fired muskets and leapt and ran and wrestled just the same as their fellow soldiers. And some were women drummers. An easy job? What fun! But drumbeats were calls of war. Used over the noise of battle to relay orders to the troops. To march, to attack or most importantly, RETREAT! Such women were immortalised in the ballad, ‘The Famous Woman Drummer’ of the late 1650’s:
In frost and snow, in wet and dry, In winter and in summer,
Her husband was a Muskettier, And she a famous Drummer.
If you want to learn more about the roles that Women played in the Civil War, this article is a good place to start: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2023.2197380#abstract
Challenge Question:
One of the Roundheads shown on the railings is not actually a road in Lea Park. Do you know which one and do you know what in Thame is named after this Roundhead instead? Stop 1 might give you a clue!
Continue the trail:
- Continue to the end of the railings and turn left into Parliament Road.
- Walk to the end of Parliament Road and turn left into Chalgrove Road, and then left again down Webster Close footpath.
- At the bottom of this footpath turn left, and then turn right to walk along PymWalk. Continue down it to meet Roundhead Drive.
- Turn right onto Roundhead Drive, and then almost immediately left into Harrison Place. You will find an entrance to Queen Elizabeth Circle park at the top of this road.
- Follow the path through the park to the next piece of Public Art.