Cavaliers and Roundheads

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

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.

3 TRIAL OF STRENGTH (#ulink_6c6b2379-4ff6-5db1-b718-1bbbe0826209)

‘My Lord, we have got the day, let us live to enjoy the fruit thereof.’

Lord Wilmot

While the King’s forces were withdrawing from Worcester towards Shrewsbury in the late summer of 1642, the Parliamentarians were on the march towards them. They were commanded by Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, the son of that gifted, wayward Earl who had so fascinated Queen Elizabeth I and been beheaded for attempting a coup d’état against her Council. It was difficult to conceive of a son less like his father. Handsome, reckless and opinionated, exasperatingly conscious of his considerable talents, the father had marched about the Queen’s court, his tall figure leaning forward like the neck of a giraffe as though he were a prince of the blood, beguiling women, carelessly offending or carefully charming men. The son, born in London in 1591, was now fifty-one years old, a stolid, stout, retiring man, plodding, honest and taciturn, often to be seen puffing ruminatively on a pipe. He had been married at the age of thirteen to Frances Howard, the sultry, sensual and unbalanced daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, who was the same age as himself. This young bride had soon afterwards become the mistress of Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, and, with the help of her powerful family, had managed to obtain an annulment of her marriage to Essex on the grounds of his impotence. Essex then married Frances, daughter of Sir William Paulet. This marriage too was unhappy and, so it was whispered, unconsummated. Like her predecessor, Frances took a lover, Sir Thomas Uvedale. Soon afterwards she became pregnant. Essex resignedly acknowledged as his own the resultant baby who died soon after its birth. The parents then separated; and Essex went to live with his sister, wife of the Earl of Hertford, at her house in the Strand.

By then Essex had seen a good deal of active service on the Continent. He had not much distinguished himself, but his amenable, dutiful reliability and the loyalty he inspired among his subordinates recommended him to Pym and his friends who had, after all, a very circumscribed field of talent from which to make their selection. At least, silent though he so often was behind those thick clouds of smoke from his pipe, Essex seemed to have a good knowledge of the military manoeuvres practised on the Continent by the commanders of the armies in which he had served; and who else, it was asked in London, could be found with Essex’s authority and reputation?

Essex’s orders were ‘to rescue His Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince and the Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who were then about them’. It was still convenient to suppose that it was not the King himself who was at fault but his advisers, that Parliament was taking up arms to protect the King from them, and indeed from himself, rather as though, in the words of an unnamed Member of Parliament, he were a man contemplating suicide, or ‘as if he were at sea and a storm should rise and he would put himself to the helm, and would steer such a course as would overthrow the ship and drown them all’. In obedience to his orders to ‘rescue his Majesty’s person’, Essex presented himself before Parliament to take his leave of its Members. Ignoring the Commons, he addressed a few words to the Lords then left abruptly, declining to wait for a reply. Several Members of the House of Commons went to look for him, ‘hoping to obtain some word of recognition’. Eventually they found him sitting in the Court of Wards puffing on his pipe. He stood up, acknowledged their presence in silence, his hat in one hand, his pipe in the other, and left the room without speaking.

On 9 September he left London for Northampton. He was cheered as he passed through the streets, though some spectators looked askance upon his troops, ‘ragged looking and marching out of step’, ten thousand of whom had gone on before him, rather more than half of them mounted. Few of them had had any more than the briefest drilling; many were evidently intent upon plunder; and certainly, before they reached Northampton, they had pillaged villages and ransacked houses all along the way, several companies threatening to turn back unless they received their overdue pay. ‘We are perplexed with the insolence of the soldiers already committed,’ one of his officers warned Essex, ‘and with the apprehension of greater. If this go on, the army will grow as odious to the country as the Cavaliers.’

The Earl of Essex himself had good cause to complain of his men’s conduct, but good reason, too, to hope that order would soon be brought into the ranks, since he had many seasoned officers under his command, both British and foreign. Sir William Balfour, a Scottish professional soldier of strong Protestant views, who had once whipped a priest for trying to convert his wife to popery, was with him as Lieutenant-General of the Horse. Essex could also rely upon Sir James Ramsay, another Scottish professional of proved accomplishments, soon to be commended for his gallantry. To give advice in gunnery there was a French expert, on cavalry tactics a Croatian and a Dutchman, Hans Behre, who had his own troop of Dutch mercenaries and was appointed Commissary-General. Moreover there were men of high social rank among Essex’s officers as well as distinguished Members of Parliament. Denzil Holles, Member for Dorchester, commanded a regiment of foot. John Hampden, Member for Buckinghamshire, also raised a regiment of foot whose men wore green coats and were soon recognized as among the best soldiers on either side. Sir Arthur Haselrig, Member for Leicestershire, commanded a troop of horse; so did Oliver Cromwell, Member for Cambridge. Other commanders of regiments included Henry Mordaunt, second Earl of Peterborough, whose father had been Essex’s General of the Ordnance until his death in June; William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele; Henry Grey, first Earl of Stamford; Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke; Edward Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, heir of the first Earl of Manchester. William Russell, fifth Earl and later first Duke of Bedford, was appointed Lord-General of the Horse under Sir William Balfour’s watchful eye.

As Essex’s army advanced towards him, the King continued his withdrawal towards Shrewsbury, pausing on the way near Stafford to address his assembled forces: ‘Your consciences and your loyalty have brought you hither to fight for your religion, your King and the laws of the land. You shall meet with no enemies but traitors, most of them Brownists [followers of the Puritan, John Brown], Anabaptists and Atheists, such who desire to destroy both Church and State and who have already condemned you to ruin for being loyal to us…[I promise, if God gives us victory,] to defend and maintain the true reformed Protestant religion established in the Church of England, to govern according to the known laws of the land [and to] maintain the just privileges and freedom of Parliament.’

At Shrewsbury, as the King had hoped, volunteers flocked to his camp from Wales and the north in ever increasing numbers. So also did they at Chester. Money came in, too. In the recent past money had been one of the King’s most nagging worries. Before these present troubles the resources of the Crown had been badly affected by both inflation, which had presented a problem to all the governments of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the economic depression of the early seventeenth century; and after the war had begun the King’s finances, already close to breakdown when he came to the throne, and indeed long before that, sunk to such a parlous state that when he had arrived in York it was estimated that he had as little as £600 left. But thanks to rich well-wishers like his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earl of Newcastle, whose losses in the struggle were said to amount to an enormous sum, the King was soon able to pay for rapidly growing forces. The Marquess of Worcester continued to supply the King with immense sums of money. His family raised no less than £117,000, which today would be worth well over £2 million; and when the Prince of Wales was sent to visit the Somersets at Raglan Castle he was presented with several pieces of the family plate.

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were not so generous. Little of the college plate which was set aside for the King at Cambridge actually reached him; and, for fear of Parliamentary punishment, not much was offered anyway, several colleges ignoring the King’s repeated request, much to the satisfaction of the city’s Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, who marched a party of soldiers to King’s College with drums beating to prevent any treasure from that rich college falling into Royalist hands. Other colleges collected varying amounts of plate, but hardly any was sent, and most of what did leave Cambridge never reached its destination.

These were sad says for Royalists in Cambridge. Three heads of colleges were arrested and carted off to London to be imprisoned there; other members of the University known to support the King were insulted as they walked the streets; the University preacher was attacked and forcibly prevented from giving a Latin sermon; the Vice-Chancellor and several of his colleagues were locked up on a particularly cold night without food or fires for declining to pay the taxes the Parliamentary Commissioners demanded of them; eventually twelve heads of colleges and 181 Fellows and other senior members of the University were deprived of their positions, sent away to earn their livings as best they could, and replaced by acknowledged Puritans. The Fellows of Queens’ College were purged in their entirety. ‘The whole Corporation of Masters and Fellows,’ so it was reported, ‘were ejected, imprison’d or banish’d thence’; and, according to Thomas Fuller who had entered the college at the age of thirteen in 1621 when his uncle was President, there was not a single scholar left in the college either. The President, Edward Martin, who suffered several years’ imprisonment, was replaced by Herbert Palmer, a well-known Puritan and reputed author of Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Arms, a book justifying the use of force against the King.

At Queens’ the Parliamentary ordinance for ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’, the destruction of altar rails, candlesticks and crucifixes, and the removal of communion tables to the body of the church, was obeyed with particular ruthlessness. ‘We beat downe about no Superstitious Pictures besides Cherubims and Ingravings,’ wrote Parliament’s agent for implementing the ordinance in East Anglia. ‘And we digged up the steps for 3 hours and brake down 10 or 12 Apostles & Saints within the Hall.’