Revolting Women · Part 3 · First published August 2025

Women and the English Civil War

The Civil War fractured political and religious order — and stretched the accepted boundaries of women’s public action with it.

Breaking roles

During the English Civil War and its aftermath, women petitioned, published, provisioned, gathered intelligence and defended households and strongholds. The surviving evidence places them inside the political conflict, not merely beside it.

Women signed mass petitions, circulated pamphlets and defended religious dissent. Royalist women helped finance war. Others carried intelligence or provided medical care. Some defended castles under siege. Women also participated in radical movements connected with the Levellers and Diggers.

Women behind the war

Henrietta Maria

Queen consort to Charles I, Henrietta Maria raised money and military support abroad and returned to England in 1643. Her political activity was central enough to attract intense hostile attention from Parliamentarian opponents.

Elizabeth Lilburne

Elizabeth Lilburne supported John Lilburne’s political campaigns, helped circulate his writings and petitioned Parliament on his behalf. Women associated with the Leveller movement increasingly claimed the right to petition in their own political voice.

Katherine Chidley

Chidley was a religious controversialist and pamphleteer who argued for toleration and challenged established assumptions about authority. Her work places a woman directly inside the print politics of the revolutionary period.

Brilliana Harley

Harley managed family affairs and defended Brampton Bryan during siege. Her surviving letters provide unusually rich evidence of politics, religion and household responsibility during civil conflict.

Mary Bankes

Lady Mary Bankes became associated with the defence of Corfe Castle during Parliamentarian attacks. Her case illustrates how female military action could be praised while still being framed as exceptional because of her sex.

Jane Whorwood and Elizabeth Alkin

Women also appear in intelligence networks. Jane Whorwood was connected with Royalist efforts on behalf of Charles I. Elizabeth Alkin, often known as “Parliament Joan”, combined political intelligence with care for wounded soldiers.

Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish used print rather than the battlefield. Her writings explored politics, authority and women’s capacity for public action, including imagined female military organisation.

How contemporaries described them

The language used about politically active women was often hostile. Petitioners could be dismissed through sexualised or domestic insults; women who fought or spoke publicly could be described as “Amazons”, “viragos” or as acting beyond what was supposedly fitting for their sex.

That rhetoric matters because it shaped how later readers encountered women’s political activity. Participation could be recorded and simultaneously framed as aberration.

Erasure and rediscovery

After the Restoration, much of the political world that had made women’s public petitioning possible contracted. Cheap print, ephemeral petitions and scattered correspondence survived unevenly. Later narratives of the Civil War often returned to kings, generals and battles.

Modern scholarship has reconstructed much more of this history from petitions, pamphlets, state papers and letters. The result is not a story in which women replaced men at the centre of the war. It is a better-supported one in which women were visibly part of the political crisis.

From 1381 to 1649

The point of the Revolting Women series is not that every uprising produced the same kind of female participation. It is that women repeatedly appear in the documentary record when rebellion, religion, law and political authority come under pressure.

The question is therefore less whether women were present than why popular historical memory so often narrows those crises back down to male leaders.