Читать книгу Cavaliers and Roundheads - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 9

‘I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’

Henry Oxinden

Immediately upon landing on the Continental shore the Queen set about enlisting help in her husband’s cause, attempting to persuade foreign princes that it was in their own interest to support a fellow-sovereign in his hour of need, cajoling money from the Prince of Orange, doing all she could to induce Charles’s uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark, to come to his nephew’s aid, raising money for weapons and for the pay of volunteers, complaining of persistent colds and coughs and intermittent headaches, yet tireless in her endeavours and firm in her resolve.

She met with little success. King Christian was preoccupied with the protection of Danish interests in northern Germany and with the prevention of Swedish encroachments. The Prince of Orange was hampered by his Protestant people’s support of the English Parliament. Everywhere she went or looked to for help the Queen was made aware of the reluctance of foreign courts to come to the aid of a King who had lost the support of his capital and largest seaport and who was likely to lose the support of his fleet, whose principal naval dockyard at Chatham was already in the hands of Parliament and most of whose captains and crews were soon to declare their allegiance to the Puritan Earl of Warwick, the Lord High Admiral, a forthright, level-headed man of ‘a pleasant and companionable wit and conversation, of an universal jollity’, as Edward Hyde described him, who in turn declared for Parliament and was to make an incalculable contribution to the success of its cause.

Faced with the prospect of losing control of the land forces of the country as well as of the navy, the King dug in his heels. Months before, a Militia Bill, which would have effectively transferred military command from the King to Parliament, had been proposed. It was now pressed upon him again. He would never accept it, he protested. ‘By God! Not for an hour! You have asked that of me which was never asked of any King.’

The House of Commons declined to accept the King’s refusal. They issued the Bill on the authority of Parliament as an Ordinance, providing for the safeguarding of the realm, revoking military appointments previously made by the King, and taking it upon themselves to appoint the Lords Lieutenants of counties who were to be responsible for the recruitment of troops. It was a provocation which the King could not accept, his determination never to lose his right to command his army being just as fixed as his resolve never to lose the right to choose his own advisers. Much to the unconcealed pleasure of extremists on both sides, the battle lines were now drawn: the time for talking and compromise had passed; the struggle was about to begin.

Indeed, it had, in a sense, already begun. In almost every county where beacons were being set and postboys galloped down the roads with urgent messages, there were quarrels and occasional fights; men walked about armed and shouted insults to each other across the streets. Even in the closest families there were deep divisions. In the Verney family, for example, a family described by the King as ‘the model he would propose to gentlemen’, the father, Sir Edmund Verney, Knight-Marshal of the King’s Palace, although prompted in the past by ‘his dislike of Laudian practices’ to vote steadily in the House of Commons in opposition to the King’s wishes, felt in duty bound to stand by his master when called upon to do so. His third son, Edmund, who was to die fighting in Ireland, also sided with the King. But Edmund’s eldest brother, Ralph, Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, threw in his lot with Parliament, much to the family’s distress. ‘I beseech you consider,’ Edmund wrote to him, ‘that majesty is sacred; God sayeth, “Touch not myne anointed.” Although I would willingly lose my right hand that you had gone the other way, yet I will never consent that this dispute shall make a quarrel between us. There be too many to fight with besides ourselves. I pray God grant a sudden and firm peace, that we may safely meet in person as well as affection. Though I am tooth and nail for the King’s cause, and shall endure so to the death, whatever his fortune be; yet, sweet brother, let not this my opinion – for it is guided by my conscience – nor any other report which you can hear of me cause a diffidence of my true love to you.’

Their father confessed that he did ‘not like the Quarrel’ and heartily wished ‘the King would yield and consent to what they desire’. But his conscience was concerned ‘in honour and in gratitude’. He had eaten the King’s bread and ‘served him near thirty Years’, and he would ‘not do so base a Thing as to foresake him’ now.

The Cornish squire Sir Bevil Grenville, grandson of Queen Elizabeth’s admiral, ‘a lover of learning and a genial host’, who had many friends amongst the Parliamentarians and was to die fighting bravely against them, said much the same thing: ‘I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England’s standard waves in the field, the cause being such as to make all that die in it little inferior to martyrs…I go with joy and comfort to venture a life in as good a cause and with as good a company as ever Englishman did; and I do take God to witness, if I were to choose a death it would be no other but this.’

For men like Edmund Verney and Bevil Grenville it was not only that the King’s majesty was sacrosanct, there was also the belief that the King was the defender of the true Church; and although religion became of much more importance later in the struggle than it was in the beginning, it was even now of grave concern. Moreover, while it was never primarily a class struggle, there was an undeniable fear amongst many of the King’s supporters that the lower classes would use this opportunity to turn upon their masters, that the predominantly Puritan merchants and shopkeepers of the towns were intent on upsetting the structure of power to their own advantage, that the King’s opponents represented rebellion and chaos as opposed to law and order. Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Recorder of London, told Ralph Verney that he had overheard the most anarchic speeches being made in Oxfordshire, working men announcing, ‘The gentry have been our masters for a long time and now we have a chance to master them.’ ‘Now they know their strength,’ Gardiner added, ‘it shall go hard but they will use it.’

Many of those who sided with Parliament spoke of their cause with a passion equal to that of Sir Bevil Grenville’s protestation of loyalty to the King, proclaiming their readiness to fight for freedom and justice, to die in a just cause, to defeat the machinations of those whom Simonds D’Ewes called ‘the wicked prelates and other like looser and corrupter sort of the clergy of this kingdom who doubtless had a design by the assistance of the Jesuits and the Papists here at home and in foreign parts to have extirpated all the power and purity of religion and to have overwhelmed us in ignorance, superstition and idolatry.’

There were many, of course, who chose not to take sides, who considered local problems more important than national ones, just as there were thousands who were drawn into the conflict on the side that their landlords and masters elected to support, or who accepted orders from one side or the other merely for the sake of a quiet life. Most of these fought without any sense of mission, as was later to be shown by the ease with which Royalist prisoners were induced to come over to Parliament’s side after their capture and Parliamentary captives to join the ranks of the Royalists. Although religion certainly played an important part in determining allegiances, men like Lord Brooke, one of the King’s most obstinate opponents and, in Milton’s opinion, ‘a right noble and pious Lord’, who urged a crusade ‘to shed the blood of the ungodlie’, were not numerous on either side.

It has been estimated that there were about 1,300,000 boys and men in England between the ages of sixteen and fifty in 1642, and that well over a quarter of them were to take an active part in the struggle. And of those who succeeded in remaining observers rather than participants there were few who escaped the war’s consequences. Even so, there were many who were not too sure what all the fuss was about, or, as Sir Arthur Haselrig said, did not really care what government they lived under, ‘so long as they may plough and go to market’. Some did not even know there was a conflict at all. Long after the war had started and the first battles had been fought, a Yorkshire farm labourer, when advised to keep out of the line of fire between the King’s men and Parliament’s, learned for the first time that ‘them two had fallen out’.

There were also those who shilly-shallied, disguising such convictions as they had, like the Earls of Clare and Kingston. The former of these, in the dismissive words of Lucy Hutchinson, whose husband had been appointed Parliamentary Governor of Nottingham, ‘was very often of both parties and never advantag’d either’; while as for the Earl of Kingston, ‘a man of vast estate, and not lesse covetousnesse’, he ‘divided his Sonns betweene both Parties and conceal’d himselfe’. Then there were those, of course, who changed sides as opinions were modified and as the fortunes of war favoured first one side then the other.

The Verneys were far from being the only family broken by the quarrel. When, for instance, a convoy of treasure was being carried to the King’s headquarters through East Anglia, Henry Cromwell, a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Cambridge, brought out fifty men to protect it on its way, while Valentine Walton, who was married to Oliver Cromwell’s sister, ordered two hundred men to seize it. The resultant fight was witnessed by a crowd of impartial, though fascinated villagers. There were similar disagreements in the family of Stephen Goffe, Rector of the parish of Stanmer in Sussex. One of his sons, a zealous Puritan, decided to join Parliament’s army when the moment came; another became chaplain to the King and a spy in the Royalist cause. John Hutchinson’s family was also divided, his Byron cousins fighting for the King and one of them, Sir Richard Byron, serving in the Royalist force which was to assault Nottingham in 1643. When the Royalists seemed close to taking the town, Hutchinson ordered his men to take Byron ‘or shoote him and not let him scape though they cut his leggs off’.

Sir Henry Slingsby, a Yorkshire squire, described a savage fight ‘between two that had been neighbours and intimate friends’:

At another part of the town of York, Lieutenant Collonel Norton enters with his dragouns, Captain Attkisson encounters him on horseback, the other being [on] foot; they meet; Attkisson misseth with his Pistol, the other pulls him off his horse by the sword belt; being both on the ground Attkisson’s soulgiers comes in, fells Norton into the ditch with the butt ends of their musketts; then comes Norton’s soulgiers and beats down Attkisson and with blows at him broke his thigh bone, whereof he dy’d.

Slingsby himself was a characteristic example of a man who dismayed many of his friends by choosing what they took to be the wrong side. An opponent of Laudism, he thought ‘it came too near idolatry to adorn a place with rich cloaths and other furniture’, and was equally critical of the extravagance and superficiality of the King’s court, yet, while considering it ‘most horrible that we should engage ourselves in a war one with another [having] lived thus long peaceably, without noise of shot or drum’, he became a dedicated Royalist, refused to take oaths which would have allowed him to continue in possession of his estate, and, having taken part in a Royalist conspiracy, was beheaded on Tower Hill.

John Hutchinson, the Nottinghamshire squire, who much resembled Slingsby in his tastes and outlook, was quite as firm in his support of Parliament. So was his wife, though she did regret that her husband – who, she was pleased to say, had declined to marry an heiress, the granddaughter of his family’s doctor, because he ‘could never stoupe to think of marrying into so meane a stock’ – had now to associate with ‘factious little people (by whom all the Parliament Garrisons were infested and disturb’d) insomuch that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some opprest by a certeine meane sort of people in the House whom, to distinguish from the most Honorable Gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men’.

Other wives, and mothers and daughters, were often dismayed by conflicting loyalties: Frances Devereux was married to the Marquess of Hertford, a staunch Royalist and Governor to the Duke of York; her brother was to command the forces of Parliament.

Nor was it only friends and members of the same families who were distressed to find themselves in opposing camps, but also men of different generations. Younger men with less experience of the King’s deviousness, and influenced by the opportunities presented by royal absolutism abroad for such as they, tended to be Royalist. Certainly this was so in the House of Commons, where half the Members were under forty years of age and where, as Professor Lawrence Stone has observed, of those under thirty twice as many chose to support the King as fought for Parliament. In the Upper House, of peers in their twenties and thirties who took part in the war, four out of five did so on behalf of the King.

‘Parents and children, brothers, kindred, I and dear friends have the seed of differences and divisions abundantly sowed in them,’ Henry Oxinden, a member of an old Kentish family, wrote home to a cousin from London. ‘I find all here full of fears and void of hopes…Sometimes I meet with a cluster of gentlemen equally divided in opinions and resolution, sometimes three to two, sometimes more odds, but never unanimous. Nay more, I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’

Another country gentleman, Thomas Knyvett of Norfolk, wrote to his wife:

Oh sweet hart I am nowe in a great strayght what to do…Walking this other morning at Westminster, Sir John Potts [a Member of Parliament]…saluted me with a commission from my Lord of Warwick [appointed by Parliament, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk] to take upon me (by virtue of an ordinance of parliament) my company and command again. I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse. ‘Twas no place to dispute, so I took it and desired some time to advise upon it. I had not received this many hours, but I met with a declaration point-blank against it by the King…I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times and to stay out of the way of my new masters till these first mutterings be over…I do fancy a little house by ourselves extremely well, where we may spend the remainder of our days in religous tranquil.

The King was on his way north. From Hampton Court he had gone to Greenwich, then on to Royston and Cambridge where he was shown round Trinity College and St John’s. From Cambridge he had ridden on to Huntingdon, to the manor house at Little Gidding where the quiet orderliness of the kindly Ferrar family soothed his distressed spirit. He went out shooting and bagged a hare and in the evening, playing cards, he won £5, which he presented to his hostess for her charities; and the Prince of Wales, now eleven years old, was given apple pie to eat in the pantry. ‘Pray,’ the King said on taking his leave, ‘Pray for my speedy and safe return.’

Urged by Edward Hyde, until recently one of the Crown’s opponents, now one of its chief advisers, to do or say nothing which might hinder a compromise settlement, the King from time to time on his northward progress issued a conciliatory statement, but gained little support. People flocked to see him in their thousands. As many as thirty thousand, so it was estimated, came to Lincoln from the surrounding countryside. Few, however, were prepared to join him in arms. There were rumours that most of those who did were papists, rumours that the King did his best to scotch. At Stamford he published a proclamation enjoining the enforcement of the laws against Roman Catholics; and at York he announced his ‘zealous affection to the true Protestant profession and his resolution to concur with Parliament in any possible course for the propagation of it and the suppression of Popery’. He denied that help was being sought in other countries, while still actively seeking it, and assured his people that he longed for the ‘peace, honour and prosperity of the nation’. While he spoke of peace, however, he prepared for war; and, suspecting this, Parliament despatched a committee to York, ostensibly as a diplomatic mission, in reality to keep a close watch on him. The committee found the city far from being the pleasant place which the indefatigable traveller Celia Fiennes was to describe fifty years later. There were scuffles in the streets and rowdy arguments in alehouses. Rival groups ‘ran foul of each other with rough words and rough handling’. Two inoffensive priests, one of them almost ninety years old, whose only offences were their Roman Catholic ministrations, were hanged.

On 22 April 1642 the King sent a party of courtiers to Hull, a town with a strong castle which held a large store of ammunition and artillery in its magazine and a port which the Queen had persistently advised him to seize for the unloading of the supplies she hoped to send him. Among the men who rode out of York on this mission to discover the feelings of the authorities and people of Hull were the King’s eldest nephew, the Elector Palatine, a dull man and compulsive fornicator, whose attachment to Protestantism could not be doubted, and Charles’s younger son, the eight-year-old Duke of York, who had been brought from London by the Marquess of Hertford.

The Governor of Hull was Sir John Hotham, whose natural bad temper was exacerbated by his anxiety not to do anything which might harm his family’s standing in Yorkshire. He had been imprisoned some years before for refusing to collect a forced loan, but his loyalty to Parliament was not thereby taken on trust; and since the Mayor of Hull as well as ‘a goodly number of the townsfolk’ were Royalist in sentiment, Peregrine Pelham, one of the Members of Parliament for the place, spent as much time there as he did at Westminster to ensure that control of the port was not lost.

Since the King’s young son had come to Hull supposedly on a social visit, Hotham decided that he could not very well refuse the party admittance; but when he heard that the King himself intended to visit the town, and was, indeed, on the way with a troop of cavalry, he made excuses, prompted by Pelham, for his inability to receive him at such short notice.

The King arrived at dinner time to find the gates closed against him. There was a shout from the top of the wall. His Majesty, Hotham called down, could not enter. One of the King’s companions shouted back instructions to the people of the town to throw the Governor off the wall and open the gates themselves. No one moved to do so; and, after a time spent in angry remonstrance, the King’s party were obliged to withdraw to York, followed by the Duke of York and the Elector Palatine who, complaining that he had been duped into taking part in the ignominious enterprise, and unwilling to be on what he now felt would be the wrong side in the coming struggle, sailed home to the Continent.

At York the King was able to hold court in reasonable style thanks to the generosity of Edward Somerset, the unpractical Welsh Roman Catholic Marquess of Worcester, and his son, Lord Herbert, who presented him with £22,000 of their family’s fortune, soon to be followed by a further £100,000. Yet although he could offer some of the pleasures that might have been enjoyed at Whitehall, few guests were entertained at his table. The royal musicians were sent for, but they declined to come, explaining that their salaries had not been paid and the expenses of the journey were consequently beyond them. Several noblemen whom the King hoped would join him also declined to do so, among them the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Essex, and the Earl of Holland, Groom of the Stole and First Lord of the Bedchamber. Others, like the Earl of Leicester, complaining of unpaid expenses and debts, made it clear that they might have supported the King more readily had he settled them. As it was, several of the few Privy Councillors who joined him at York did so with evident reluctance, while a quarter of those of their colleagues who had been in office in 1640 chose to side with Parliament. Nor was the King able to win over Lord Fairfax, who had represented the county of York in the Long Parliament and was sent as one of a committee of five to represent Parliament’s interests in York, to report upon the King’s actions and to see what could be done to frustrate his recruitment of troops. Lord Fairfax’s son, Thomas Fairfax, who had been born on the family’s estate at Denton in Yorkshire thirty years before, made it known that he was as ready to defend the rights of Parliament as was his father.

Thomas Fairfax was an attractive man, reticent and reserved, though ruthless when he felt he had to be, slim and so dark in complexion he was known as ‘Black Tom’. His expression was generally mournful in repose, though in battle he became ‘so highly transported’, in Bulstrode Whitelocke’s words, that he ‘seemed more like a man distracted and furious than of his ordinary mildness and so far different temper’. He was ‘of as meek and humble a carriage as ever I saw in great employments,’ Whitelock added, ‘and but of few words in discourse or council; yet when his judgement and reason were satisfied he was unalterable…I have observed him at councils of war that he hath said little, but hath ordered things expressly contrary to the judgement of all his council.’

‘A lover of learning,’ so John Aubrey said, he had matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge at the age of fourteen and had later brought out a volume of poems and translations entitled The Employment of my Solitude; but he had decided early upon a military life and he was not yet eighteen when present at the siege of Bois-le-Duc. On his return to England in 1632 he had announced his intention of joining the Swedish army in Germany. As a young officer he was remarkable for his courage; as a commander he was renowned for the forcefulness rather than the subtlety of his occasionally imprudent attacks and for the discipline he imposed upon his troops, who held him in high regard.

Several Yorkshire noblemen, including Lord Savile, Treasurer of the Household, decided to throw in their lot with the King, but many gentlemen who had left Westminster for Yorkshire repaired to their country estates rather than to York; and when on 12 May Charles formally called upon the gentry of the county to attend him in arms, several of the most influential, Sir Philip Stapleton, Member for Boroughbridge, and Sir Hugh Cholmley, Member for Scarborough, among them, strongly objected to his doing so. They also protested when the King rode to Heyworth Moor to attend a demonstration of loyalty which had been organized by Lord Savile. Hundreds of anti-Royalists appeared from the surrounding villages to spoil the occasion and to present their own petitions to the King. Savile tried to prevent them approaching his Majesty but Thomas Fairfax evaded him and managed to get close enough to push a petition onto the King’s saddle. Charles ignored it and, in riding on, almost knocked Fairfax to the ground.

For his behaviour this day Savile was declared by Parliament to be a public enemy no longer of their number. Alarmed by this verdict, he withdrew to his house, Howley Hall, where he tried to come to an accommodation with those whom he had offended through the mediation of relatives of his in London. On 5 April the King, deserted by Savile, was presented with a petition from the Yorkshire nobility and gentry, asking him to come to terms with Parliament.

In London, Parliament now reigned supreme. There were occasional demonstrations in favour of the King whose supporters, encouraged by several of the richer merchants, wore red ribbons in their hats as a token of their allegiance and one day gathered in sufficient numbers to chase a mob out of St Paul’s where they were trying to pull down the organ. Another day a drunken Royalist, brandishing a dagger, forced a pious citizen to kneel down by Cheapside Cross and say a prayer for the Pope. But for the most part Londoners seemed perfectly content to follow Parliament’s lead, to turn out on parade in Finsbury Fields, to lend plate and money at 8 per cent, and to obey the injunctions of the various emergency committees set up by the supporters of John Pym, including a Committee of Defence comprising five peers, the Earls of Essex, Northumberland, Pembroke and Holland and Viscount Saye and Sele, and ten Members of the House of Commons, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and Pym himself prominent amongst them. To lend the weight of incontestable legal authority to his own injunctions and proclamations, Charles ordered the Lord Keeper, Lord Littleton, to send the Great Seal to York and to follow it himself. Parliament retaliated by declaring that no orders or proclamations other than those issued in its own name were valid. This provocative declaration was followed in a few days by the Nineteen Propositions which required Parliamentary control not only of the army, but of the Church, the royal children, the law and of all officers of state. They were, in effect, tantamount to a demand that the King must surrender all executive power. Outraged, he immediately rejected them, condemning their authors as raisers of sedition and enemies to ‘my sovereign power’, as would-be destroyers of ‘rights and properties, of all distinctions of families and merit’, persuading many waverers that Parliament had, indeed, presented him with an ultimatum that could be accepted only with dishonour.

He continued to protest that he intended no violence against Parliament, that all would be settled peaceably. But it could no longer be doubted that he had resolved upon war. The Lords Lieutenant of counties throughout England were ordered to read his Commission of Array, a counterblast to Parliament’s Militia Ordinance.

All over the country unrest was growing and sides were being taken in bitterness, sadness and anger, as castles were fortified, sentry boxes installed by the gates in city walls, trained bands ordered to keep watch on magazines, as posterns and bridges were barred at night, as horsemen were put through their paces, gentlemen studied such textbooks as Henry Hexham’s Principles of the Art Military as Practised in the Wars of the United Netherlands, and farm workers and yeomen were drilled in town squares and country fields. In Leicester the Mayor was sternly warned not to read the King’s Commission of Array by the Puritan Lord Willoughby of Parham, who had been appointed by Parliament to a military command in the area and who proclaimed Parliament’s Militia Ordinance instead, provoking the Earl of Huntingdon’s son, Henry Hastings, to attempt to capture the city with a company of colliers he had called up from the mines on his family’s estates. In London the Royalist Lord Mayor did manage to read the King’s Commission of Array but soon found himself in the Tower for his pains. Elsewhere the publication of the rival proclamations was attended by uproar and violence. At Cirencester the Lord Lieutenant was chased out of the town when he tried to read the King’s Commission; in Cambridgeshire the Lord Lieutenant was similarly maltreated and the palace at Downham of the Bishop of Ely, ‘one of the greatest Papists in the Kingdom’, was invaded and ransacked; at Watlington in Oxfordshire the Royalist Earl of Berkshire was silenced by John Hampden, and his coach was smashed to pieces. There were clashes in Somerset where a Puritan hurled a stone at a crucifix – in a gesture of hatred for symbols of popery common to nearly all counties – and where the Marquess of Hertford, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, was driven out of Wells by Sir Edward Hungerford and forced to retreat into Dorset and then into Wales, while his second-in-command Sir Ralph Hopton, with less than two hundred men, was obliged to withdraw to Cornwall. There was trouble in Wolverhampton where a crowd of men and women had already chopped up communion rails and tables which had been made ‘an idol of’. There was fighting, too, in Worcestershire where a rabble of other would-be inconoclasts, wild in their hatred of what they took to be idolatrous, had been driven across the county boundary; and in Shropshire crowds pelted effigies of Parliamentarian soldiers, already known as Roundheads because of their close-cropped hair which – like that of apprentices who cut their hair short to demonstrate their contempt for lovelocks – was in marked contrast to the flowing tresses of the Royalist Cavaliers, the cabaleros, who were derided for their supposed attachment to the ways of foreign Catholics. And ‘from the Puritanes’ custome of wearing their haire cut close round their heads with so many little peakes as was something ridiculous to behold,’ Lucy Hutchinson explained, ‘that name of roundhead became the scornefull terme given to the whole Parliament party; whose Army indeed marcht out so, but as if they had only bene sent out till their haire was growne: two or three years after, any stranger that had seen them would have enquir’d the reason of that name.’

In Gloucestershire a vicar of severely Puritan views and extremely short temper fell with fury upon a constable who dared to ask him for a loan for the King, pulling out his hair and kicking him into a ditch. In Dorchester there was an equally savage brawl when Lady Blanche Arundell’s chaplain, who had been arrested as he was boarding a ship for France, was hanged and his fellow-Roman Catholics, in attempting to seize relics from his body, were set upon by Puritans. Later there were riots in the countryside when mobs, mostly of unemployed workers, attacked the houses of those whom they accused of being Royalists or papists, tore down enclosure fences and killed deer in parks and woods. From Norwich came rumours of ‘a virgin troop’ of virtuous maidens formed for the protection of members of their sex and for revenge upon ‘papists and Cavaliers’ who had committed outrages against them.

The fear of attack by foreign papists was widespread. In many of the petitions which had been addressed to Parliament by the counties of England since December 1641 this fear seemed to be uppermost in the petitioners’ minds. They were alarmed by the vulnerability of the English coasts to invasion from abroad by papist armies supported by papists at home, the ‘drawing of swords’ and ‘a war between Protestants and papists which God forbid’. ‘At Westminster there was a sense of outright confrontation with the Crown from which there could be no turning back,’ the historian Anthony Fletcher has observed. ‘We find this entirely absent in the petitions. During the weeks they were being written and circulated many town councils looked to their defensive arrangements. But they were preparing not for civil war but for a national state of emergency based on the papist conspiracy.’

In some counties in these early days of the conflict the Royalists, and such papists as there were among them, achieved small triumphs. In Cheshire, at Nantwich, they rode about the town, preventing Sir William Brereton, one of the Members of Parliament for Cheshire, from recruiting there. In Hampshire, at Portsmouth, the extravagant, ambitious and unreliable roué Colonel George Goring, who had been appointed Governor of the port by Parliament, suddenly declared his allegiance to the King. In Oxfordshire, the Earl of Northampton succeeded in carrying off the guns which were being sent through the county to fortify Warwick Castle. In Oxford itself scholars had formed Royalist troops, much to the annoyance of a majority of the citizens; and when the two Members of Parliament for the town tried to put an end to their drilling the scholars turned upon them and chased them off. In the north, Newcastle upon Tyne was seized for the King by the Prince of Wales’s former Governor, the Earl of Newcastle; and Lord Strange, soon to become Earl of Derby on his father’s death, took over several stores of arms and ammunition in the King’s name in Lancashire, and advanced upon Manchester, described by the antiquary John Leland a century before as ‘the fairest, best builded and most populous town in Lancashire’ and by now a centre of the clothing industry and a hotbed of Puritans. The Puritan Lord Wharton, a most handsome and elegant young man extremely proud of his beautiful legs, whom Parliament had appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, also advanced upon Manchester. Lord Strange arrived first and, as the son of a powerful man who owned thousands of acres in the county, he was asked to dinner by the leading citizens of Manchester. Enraged by this welcome afforded to one of the King’s most loyal supporters, some of the more militant clothiers and weavers of the town attacked the Royalist party. There was a short and savage fight in the pouring rain; several of Strange’s men were wounded; and one Mancunian, a linen weaver named Richard Percival, was killed, the first fatal casualty of the war, so it was alleged by his accusers when Strange was proclaimed a traitor by the House of Commons. Strange himself was nearly shot as he rode away to Ordsall.

In York, where young desperadoes eagerly looked forward to the real fighting, the King prepared new plans for the seizure of the crucially important port of Hull. Already the Earl of Newcastle had tried to take the place. ‘I am here at Hull,’ he had written to the King, ‘but the town will not admit me by no means, so I am very flat and out of countenance.’

The King himself now advanced upon the town and made as if to lay it under formal siege, digging trenches and erecting batteries, hoping that this display of preparations for an assault would induce Sir John Hotham to surrender the town into his hands. Indeed, Hotham had promised as much. Not long before, the Royalist Lord Digby had been captured aboard a ketch in the Humber estuary and had been sent as a prisoner to Hull, where he had persuaded Hotham that by delivering up the town to the King’s forces he might not only prevent the war, but earn honour as well as riches for himself. The Governor was persuaded. He released Digby and undertook that ‘if the King would come before the town but with one regiment, and plant his cannon against it and make but one shot, he should think he had discharged his trust to the Parliament as far as he ought to do, and that he would then immediately deliver up the town’. But Hotham was now not alone in command in Hull. To stiffen his resistance Parliament had sent Sir John Meldrum, an experienced Scottish soldier who had served for years in various armies on the Continent, including that of Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden. Led by the resolute Meldrum, upon whose advice the surrounding fields had been flooded, the defenders of Hull made two sallies against the Royalists’ works, ‘the first blood, as some say, that was shed in these unnatural wars’.

Impatiently standing before the troublesome town, the King was approached by the Earl of Holland, who brought one final plea from Parliament that he should abandon his preparations for war and return to London. The King replied that Parliament should first instruct Sir John Hotham to open the gates of Hull as ‘an earnest of their good intentions’. Holland refused to consider such a bargain. Then, said the King, deeply affronted by this offensive challenge to his kingly dignity, ‘Let all the world now judge who began this war.’

With Hull and Manchester and several other strategic places in the north in the hands of his enemies, and with no help to be expected from Scotland, the King began his march on London, hoping that the small army he had so far attracted to his standard would be reinforced as he marched through the Midlands. Men would surely come in from the estates of the Earl of Northampton, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, from those of the Earl of Lindsey in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, and from the Earl of Huntingdon’s lands in Leicestershire. But few men did join him. It was harvest time, for one thing, and for another the King was rumoured to be still making overtures to Parliament as though he intended, even now, to reach a compromise. Men were reluctant to jeopardize their future by openly declaring their support of a cause which might at any moment be abandoned or betrayed. They were also in fear of Parliament. Upon the King’s entering Leicester on 22 July 1642, he was received with ‘warm expressions of loyalty’ from ‘ten thousand of the gentry and better sort of inhabitants of that county’, but he received little practical help from any of them because, so it was said, ‘if the King was loved as he ought to be, Parliament was more feared than he’. When he entered Nottingham in the third week of August he had scarcely more than a thousand men at his command.

The weather was windy and rainy; the people of Nottingham, a town of market traders, tanners and silk workers, were unwelcoming; the news of Royalist fortunes elsewhere was dispiriting. The Royalist standard, attached to a tall red pole, was unfurled in a field in the town – the spot is now marked by a tablet on Standard Hill. It had taken twenty men to carry it into the field, and several of these had to hold it upright in an insufficiently deep hole dug with daggers and knives. A proclamation, denouncing the Commons and their troops as traitors, was haltingly read by a herald. It had been prepared some time before, but at the last minute the King had decided to alter its wording, which he did so clumsily that the herald could hardly read it and stumbled through it with painful hesitation. Later the wind blew stronger than ever and threw the standard down.

These were miserable days at Nottingham. A ‘general sadness covered the whole town’; and so few were the King’s supporters that one of his commanders warned him that, if an attempt were made to capture him, it might prove impossible to save him. The King became so depressed that emissaries were twice sent to London to seek terms for peace, and on both occasions were rebuffed.

In September, however, volunteers began to arrive in increasing numbers. On the sixth of that month Parliament had declared that all men who did not support it were ‘delinquents’ and that their property was to be handed over to sequestration committees. This meant that many of those who would have been happy to remain neutral were virtually obliged to fight in their own defence; it meant, as the Parlimentarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes admitted, that ‘not only particular persons of the nobility’, but ‘whole counties’ became ‘desperate’. Men who feared that their fortunes might well be lost if Parliament won now undertook to fight for the King, in whose victory their own salvation might be secured; while gentry, whose income from land was declining and whose fortunes depended upon the rich perquisites which only the court could offer, needed no further persuasion to fight.

Well-to-do landowners, having made up their minds to support the Royalist cause, raised troops at their own expense, sometimes going so far as to threaten tenants with eviction if they did not come forward, while the promise of money in the King’s own Commission of Array encouraged others to join his side. Many of those who offered their services were obviously incapable of controlling a horse in battle and had to be enlisted as infantrymen. For the most part they looked unpromising material. But the cavalry seemed sound enough, and in the opinion of at least one captain of a Parliamentary troop of horse, they were certainly superior to those on his own side. They were, he said, ‘gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality’, rather than the kind of troopers being enlisted in the Parliamentary cause who were mostly ‘old decayed serving-men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows’. ‘Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows,’ he asked, ‘will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?’

By the end of the second week in September two thousand horsemen and about 1,200 infantry had been enlisted by the King’s officers. Many of these had come down from Yorkshire and some were described as ‘the scum’ of that county; but those who had more recently joined were considered of better mettle, and their commanders capable men.

Chief of the infantry commanders was Jacob Astley, a sixty-three-year-old soldier from Norfolk who had had much experience of Continental warfare and was deemed as fit for the office of Major-General of the Foot as ‘any man Christendom yielded’. Also with the King at Nottingham, as his Colonel-General of Dragoons, was Sir Arthur Aston, a Roman Catholic from ‘an ancient and knightly family’ who, like Astley, had seen much service abroad in the service of the Kings of Poland and of Sweden. These two officers were soon to be joined by another senior professional soldier who had served on the Continent, Patrick Ruthven, recently created Earl of Forth, a Scotsman almost seventy years old, gouty, hard-drinking and deaf, who had won the respect of the King of Sweden, in whose army he had served, by being able ‘to drink immeasurably and preserve his understanding to the last’. He had also preserved into old age his quickness of perception and strategic skill.

Respected as Forth was, however, his fame was shortly to be eclipsed by a man a third his age. This was the King’s nephew, Prince Rupert, the twenty-three-year-old son of the King’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, one of the leading Protestant princes of Germany. Born in Prague in 1619, Prince Rupert had entered the University of Leyden at the age of ten, already familiar with the pikeman’s eighteen postures and the musketeer’s thirty-four, and recognized as a rider of marvellous accomplishment. When he was barely fourteen he had gone off to join the armies in the Low Countries and although his mother had summoned him back on that occasion, he had ridden off again in 1637 as commander of a cavalry regiment to fight the Holy Roman Emperor in the Thirty Years’ War. Within a few months he had been taken prisoner at Lemgo, but by then he had impressed all who came into contact with him with his bravery and resource. He had trained his men to understand that a good regiment of cavalry was not a mere collection of individual horsemen, able to go through the parade-ground movements of thrusting, guarding and parrying with chosen rivals in single combat, but a kind of battering-ram that should thunder down upon its opponents in a powerful mass, overthrowing them and driving them back by the sudden, irresistible force of its impact.

To many who met Prince Rupert for the first time he seemed an intolerable youth. Arrogant, ill-tempered and boorish, he appeared to have no manners and no taste. Before he had left Holland for England he had quarrelled with both Henry Jermyn and George Digby and most of the Queen’s other friends who were in exile with her. Henrietta Maria herself wrote to warn Charles: ‘He should have someone to advise him for believe me he is yet very young and self-willed… He is a person capable of doing anything he is ordered, but his is not to be trusted to take a single step of his own head.’

It was true that he was impulsive and impatient; it was true, too, that his innate reserve and sensitivity led him to hide behind a mask of dismissive hauteur, that his irritation with the mannered politesse of court behaviour induced him to adopt the manners of the tough sailors and dockers with whom, disguised in old canvas clothes, he had chosen to mix as a student in the taverns of The Hague. As Sir Philip Warwick said of him, ‘a sharpness of temper and uncommunicableness in society or council (by seeming with a pish to neglect all another said and he approved not), made him less grateful than his friends wished; and this humour soured him towards Counsellors of Civil Affairs who were necessary to intermix with him in Martiall Councils. All these great men often distrusted such downright soldiers, as the Prince was, tho’ a Prince of the Blood, lest he should be too apt to prolong the warr, and to obtain that by a pure victory, which they wished to be got by a dutiful submission upon modest, speedy and peaceable terms.’

Yet Rupert was far more than a rough, handsome soldier of fortune with a taste for fancy clothes, fringed boots, feathered hats, scarlet sashes and long curled hair; he was more than a cavalry leader of undeniable skill and courage. He was highly intelligent, a remarkable linguist, an artist of uncommon merit, a man with an inventive skill and curiosity of mind that was to give as much pleasure to his later years of sickness and premature old age as the several mistresses who visited him in his rooms at Windsor Castle. Above all, he was a commander whose men obeyed and trusted him. If he was apt to be reckless in the heat of battle, he was ‘as capable of planning a campaign as he was of conducting a charge’.

Henrietta Maria had exaggerated his failings: he may have been far less capable of directing a full-scale battle than leading a cavalry charge; he was certainly incapable of restraining his own excited enthusiasm after an initial success; but he was an inspiring leader of men and the King’s trust in him was not misplaced. His tall, thin figure, ‘clad in scarlet very richly laid in silver lace and mounted on a very gallant Barbary horse’, became as inspiring a sight to his own cavalry as it was alarming to his enemies. His life seemed charmed; pistols were fired in his face, but he escaped with powder marks; when his horse was killed under him he walked away ‘leisurely without so much as mending his pace’ and no harm came to him. The Roundheads accused him of being protected by the devil. They said that the white poodle – which accompanied him everywhere, which would jump in the air at the word ‘Charles’, and cock his leg when his master said ‘Pym’ – was a little demon that could make itself invisible, pass through their lines and report their strength and dispositions to its master.

Although there were capable officers in the King’s army more than twice Prince Rupert’s age and with far greater experience, he was immediately appointed his Majesty’s Lieutenant-General of Horse, a demonstration of royal favour and trust which, combined with his arrogant manner and foreign birth, discountenanced the King’s civilian advisers and his military commanders alike. Prince Rupert did not get on well with either Sir Edward Hyde, now largely responsible for writing the King’s speeches, or with Hyde’s friend Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, who had been appointed Secretary of State a few months before. Nor were Rupert’s relations easy with the haughty, able though unreliable Lord Digby, who was as ambitious to be recognized as a fine general as he was to be seen as an astute statesman. Rupert’s arrival at Nottingham also displeased Henry Wilmot, Commissary-General of Horse, who had to be content to serve as Rupert’s second-in-command, although considerably older than his superior and a seasoned campaigner in Scotland and in the Dutch service. Moreover, the Prince’s commission, which gave him a command independent of the elderly Earl of Lindsey, the King’s Commander-in-Chief, was bound to lead to trouble in the future.

Prince Rupert’s stock with fellow-officers fell even lower when it was decided to leave Nottingham for Shrewsbury where there were better hopes of attracting more recruits. On their way the Prince and his brother Maurice, who had come with him from Holland, made no scruple in clattering up the drives of country houses of known Parliamentary supporters and demanding money with menaces, a practice common enough on the Continent but not to the taste of English gentlemen. It was regarded as a particularly bad example to troops whose discipline was quite lax enough as it was and whose behaviour in houses in which they were quartered was much condemned. Certain other Royalist commanders followed Prince Rupert’s example. Lord Grandison, for instance, rode into Nantwich with his troop and forced his way into several houses belonging to Parliament’s supporters and supposed supporters: it became a saying amongst Royalist soldiers that ‘all rich men were Roundheads’. In Yorkshire a party of Royalists broke into George Marwood’s house at Nun Monkton, near York. ‘It was done in the day-time and by 24 horse or thereabout,’ a Parliamentary pamphlet recorded. ‘They threatened Mrs Marwood and her servants with death to discover where her husband was and swore they would cut him in pieces before her face and called her Protestant whore and Puritan whore. They searched all the house and broke open 17 locks. They took away all his money…and all his plate they could find…And, though it be Mr Marwood’s lot to suffer first, yet the loose people threaten to pillage and destroy all Roundheads, under which foolish name they comprehend all such as do not go their ways.’

Although plundering expeditions were far from general in all counties, and in many areas successful efforts were being made to maintain tranquillity, the behaviour of the Royalists at Henley-on-Thames was not exceptional. Here a regiment under Sir John Byron was quartered at Fawley Court, a large house just outside the town which belonged to Bulstrode Whitelocke, a rich young lawyer and Member of Parliament for Marlow. Whitelocke, who was in London at the time, had sufficient warning of the Royalists’ approach to tell one of his tenants, William Cooke, to hide as many of his valuable possessions as he could. The tenant and his servants ‘threw into the mote pewter, brasse and iron things and removed…into the woods some of [Whitelocke’s] bookes, linnen & household stuffe, as much as the short warning would permit’. But enough remained in the house and outbuildings for the ‘brutish common soldiers’ to indulge in an orgy of plunder.

There they had their whores [Whitelocke recorded in his diary]. They spent and consumed in one night 100 loade of Corne and hey, littered their horses with good wheate sheafes, gave them all sorts of Corne in the straw, made great fires in the closes, & William Cooke telling them there were billets and faggots neerer to them [than] the plough timber which they burned, they threatened to burne him. Divers bookes & writings of Consequence which were left in [the] study they tore and burnt & lighted Tobacco with them, & some they carried away [including] many excellent manuscripts of [my] father’s & some of [my own] labours. They broke down [my park fencing] killed most of [my] deere & lett out the rest. Only a Tame Hinde & his hounds they presented to Prince Rupert.

They eate & dranke up all that the house could afforde; brake up all Trunkes, chests & any goods, linnen or household stuffe that they could find. They cutt the beddes, lett out the feathers, & tooke away the courtains, covers of chayres & stooles, [my] Coach & 4 good Coach horses & all the saddle horses, & whatsoever they could lay their hands on they carried away or spoyled, did all that malice and rapine could provoke barbarous mercenaries to commit.

Soon afterwards, at another of Whitelocke’s houses in Henley, Phyllis Court, Parliament’s soldiers ‘did much spoyle & mischiefe, though he was a Parlem[en]t man, butt bruitich soldiers make no distinctions. Major G[eneral] Skippon directed Phyllis Court to be made a Garryson, & it was regularly fortefyed and strong, & well manned because Greenland [at Hambleden] hard by it was a Garryson for the King, & betwixt these two stood Fawley Court, miserably torn and plundered by each of them.’

General as pillaging became, it was, however, felt that Prince Rupert’s activities were peculiarly unacceptable as those of a foreign interloper, and characteristic of a man who cockily demonstrated his marksmanship in Stafford by shooting the weather-vane off the steeple of St Mary’s Church. In Leicester he threatened to plunder the town unless the inhabitants gave him £2,000, to ‘teach them that it was safer to obey than refuse the King’s commands’. They collected £500 and fearfully presented it to him. The King disavowed his nephew’s conduct; but he kept the money all the same.

Yet, if the depredations of the Royalists were reprehensible, those of the Parliamentarians were quite as bad, if not worse. Sir Philip Warwick recalled that when a Puritan praised the sanctity of the Roundhead army and condemned the faults of the Cavaliers, a friend of his replied: ‘Faith, thou sayest true; for in our army we have the sins of men (drinking and wenching) but in yours you have those of devils, spiritual pride and rebellion.’

The vandalism of the Parliamentarians was not as indiscriminate as Royalist propaganda later suggested. The west window, stone angels and ironwork of Edward IV’s tomb in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, for example, were spared, even though the castle was a Roundhead garrison; and the stained glass in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, was also untouched, though the chapel itself was used as a drill hall. Yet in Canterbury, Parliamentary troops shot at the crucifix on the South Gate leading to the cathedral, rampaged about the aisles and transepts, jabbed pikes into the tapestries and tore the illuminated pages from the service books. Norwich Cathedral might have suffered in the same way had not a force of five hundred armed men poured into the building to help the members of the choir protect the organ from a mob which had succeeded in tearing out the altar rails. In Rochester Cathedral Parliamentary troops smashed glass and statues, and kicked the precious library across the floor. In many other churches effigies upon tombs were hacked about and inscriptions in Latin, ‘the Language of the Beast’, defaced. In Colchester, where the vicar of Holy Trinity narrowly escaped hanging, the house of the Lucas family was invaded, their chapel ransacked, its glass destroyed and the bones from the family tombs thrown from wall to wall. The house of their friend Lady Rivers was similarly attacked and pillaged and robbed of property worth £40,000.

Letters written by Nehemiah Wharton, an officer in Parliament’s army, give numerous examples of similar depredations committed by his troops as well as of the countless sermons the men attended before and after their pillaging expeditions:

Tuesday [9 August 1642] early in the morninge, several of our soldiers inhabitinge the out parts of the town [Acton] sallied out unto the house of one Penruddock and…entred his house and pillaged him to the purpose. This day also the souldiers got into the church, defaced the auntient glased picturs and burned the railes. Wensday: Mr. Love gave us a famous sermon…also the souldiers brought the holy railes from Chissick and burned them…At Hillingdon, one mile from Uxbridge, the railes beinge gone, we got the surplesses to make us handecherchers…Mr. Hardinge gave us a worthy sermon…We came to Wendever where wee refreshed ourselves, burnt the railes and one of Captain Francis his men, forgettinge he was charged with a bullet, shot a maide through the head and she immediately died…sabbath day morning Mr. Marshall, that worthy champion of Christ, preached unto us…Every day our souldiers by stealth doe visit papists’ houses and constraine from them both meate and money…They triumphantly carry away greate [loaves] and [cheeses] upon the points of their swords…Saturday I departed hence and gathered a compliete file of my owne men and marched to Sir Alexander Denton’s parke, who is a malignant fellow, and killed a fat buck and fastened his head upon my halbert, and commaunded two of my pickes to bring the body after me to Buckingham…Thursday, August 26th, our soildiers pillaged a malignant fellowes house in [Coventry]…Friday several of our soildiers, both horse and foote, sallyed out of the City unto the Lord Dunsmore’s parke, and brought from thence great store of venison, which is as good as ever I tasted, and ever since they make it their dayly practise so that venison is as common with us as beef with you…Sunday morne the Lord of Essex his chaplaine, Mr. Kemme, the cooper’s son, preached unto us…This day a whore, which had followed our campe from London, was taken by the soildiers, and first led about the city, then set in the pillory, after in the cage, then duckt in the river…Wensday wee kept the Fast and heard two sermons…Our soldiers pillaged the parson of this town [Northampton] and brought him away prisoner, with his surplice and other relics…This morninge our soildiers sallyed out about the countrey and returned in state clothes with surplisse and cap, representing the Bishop of Canterbury…Saturday morning Mr. John Sedgwick gave us a famous sermon…

Not content with plundering civilians, the soldiers plundered each other:

This morning [7 September 1642] our regiment being drawne into the fields to exercise, many of them…demanded five shillings a man which, they say, was promised to them…or they would surrender their armes. Whereupon Colonell Hamden, and other commanders, laboured to appease them but could not. So…we feare a great faction amongst us. There is also great desention betweene our troopers and foot companies, for the footmen are much abused and sometimes pillaged and wounded. I myselfe have lately found it, for they took from me about the worth of three pounds…A troope of horse belonging unto Colonel Foynes met me, pillaged me of all, and robbed mee of my very sword, for which cause I told them I would [either] have my sword or dye in the field and I commaunded my men to charge with bullet, and by devisions fire upon them, which made them with shame return my sword, and it being towards night I returned to Northampton, threetninge revenge upon the base troopers.

Of all the towns which Wharton passed through during his military service few suffered more severely at the hands of plunderers than Worcester. He thought the county of Worcestershire a ‘very pleasaunt, fruitfull and rich countrey, aboundinge in come, woods, pastures, hills and valleys, every hedge and heigh way beset with fruits, but especially with peares, whereof they make that pleasant drinke called perry w^ch they sell for a penny a quart, though better than ever you tasted in London’. But the town of Worcester, though ‘pleasantly seated, exceedingly populous, and doubtless very rich…more large than any city’ he had seen since leaving London, was ‘so vile…so bare, so papisticall and abominable, that it resembles Sodom and is the very emblem of Gomorrah, and doubtless worse’. It was more sinful even than Hereford whose people Wharton later discovered to be ‘totally ignorant in the waies of God, and much addicted to drunkenness and other vices, principally unto swearing, so that the children that have scarce learned to speake doe universally sweare stoutlye’. Worcester, indeed, was ‘worse than either Algiers or Malta, a very den of thieves, and refuge for all the hel-hounds in the countrey, I should have said in the land’.

It was certainly treated as such. The cathedral, conceded by Wharton to be a ‘very stately cathedrell with many stately monuments’, was ransacked, the organ pulled to pieces, images and windows smashed, books burned, vestments trampled underfoot and kicked about the nave or put on by Roundhead soldiers who pranced in them about the streets. The aisles and choir were used as latrines; campfires were lit; horses were tethered in the nave and cloisters where the traces of rings and staples can still be seen.

In parish churches in Worcester the clergy were required to give their pulpits over to Puritan army chaplains – who harangued soldiers and civilians alike – and were presented with demands to pay money to have their churches spared the punishment inflicted on the cathedral. An entry in the accounts of St Michael’s church reads: ‘Given to Captain and Soldiers for preserving our church goods and writings, 1os. 4d.’

Valuable goods from private houses were seized and sent to London as booty; the Mayor and one of the Aldermen were also despatched to London as prisoners; and some lesser citizens were hanged in the market place as suspected spies.

Outside the town, in the village of Castlemorton, the house of one Rowland Bartlett was invaded by a party of Roundhead soldiers commanded by a Captain Scriven, the son of a Gloucester ironmonger.

In a confused tumult they rush into the house [in the words of a Royalist publication describing an outrage similar to numerous others committed elsewhere]. And as eager hounds hunt from the parlour to the kitchen, from whence by the chambers, to the garrats…Besides Master Bartlet’s, his wives, and childrens wearing apparell, they rob their servants of their clothes: with the but ends of musquets they breake open the hanging presses, cupboards, and chests: no place was free from this ragged-regiment…They met with Mistress Bartlets sweat-meats, these they scatter on the ground: not daring to taste of them for feare of poyson…Except bedding, pewter, and lumber, they left nothing behind them, for besides two horses laden with the best things (Scrivens owne plunder) there being an hundred and fifty rebells, each rebell returned with a pack at his back. As for his beere, and perry, what they could not devour they spoyle.

Nor was this the only unwelcome visit Rowland Bartlett had from plundering Roundhead soldiers. On a later occasion they took away ‘good store of bacon from his roofe, and beefe out of the powdering tubs’. They stole his ‘pots, pannes and kettles, together with his pewter to a great value’; they seized ‘on all his provisions for hospitality and house-keeping’ and then broke his spits. They ‘exposed his bedding for sale and pressed carts to carry away his chairs, stooles, couches and trunks’ to Worcester.

It was near Worcester, in September 1642, that Prince Rupert was to have his first experience of English warfare.