In 1648, the Duke of York, second son of Charles I, made a dramatic escape from St James' Palace in London to the safety of the Low Countries. This successful Royalist intrigue was partly made possible by the assistance of one Anne Murray - later Anne, Lady Halkett - whose knowledge of women's clothing was particularly helpful in constructing the Duke's cross-dressed disguise. The record of her involvement in this exciting but dangerous escapade - history in the making - is not to be found in the formal histories of the period of the English Revolution, but in her own autobiographical memoir, an apparently private text which remained in manuscript until 1875.

Anne Halkett’s experience, unusual though it may seem, is nonetheless illustrative of what we might call women’s relationship to history in midseventeenth-century England. The startling and unprecedented turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s brought events of public historical importance to the domestic doorstep and led many women to undertake hitherto ‘masculine’ activities: the sole running of households, the management of goods and finances, the writing of Parliamentary petitions, and the judging of events for posterity. In other words, women made history in this period. ‘Women’s histories’, the title of this chapter, is a term which not only encompasses the historical lives and interventions of women during this period, but also reminds us that these were inscribed in the women’s own texts. As a consequence, our notion of ‘history’ itself may need adjusting, not only from male to female but also from public to private (if such a divide can ever be upheld), and from interpreted past to immediate present.