Cavaliers and Roundheads

In the dead of night [6 January 1642] there was great bouncing at every man’s door to be up in their arms presently and to stand on their guard [wrote Nehemiah Wallington, a Puritan turner, in his diary], for we heard (as we lay in our beds) a great cry in the streets that there were horse and foot coming against the City. So the gates were shut and the cullises let down, and the chains put across the corners of our streets, and every man ready on his arms. And women and children did then arise, and fear and trembling entered on all.

The Lord Mayor was called upon to summon the Trained Bands, those companies of armed citizens originally raised to maintain order in the City and to suppress riotous behaviour. But the Lord Mayor at this time was Richard Gurney, a former silkman’s apprentice who had been left a fortune by his master and had subsequently married a very rich wife; and, as a zealous Royalist, Gurney refused to issue the summons. The Trained Bands mustered anyway, by whose orders no one was sure; and soon six thousand citizens were standing ready to withstand any troops the King might bring against them.

The officers of the Trained Bands were mostly members of the Fraternity or Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handguns. Later to be known as the Honourable Artillery Company, this was an ancient regiment of gentlemen much interested in military affairs, several of whom left London from time to time to gain experience of warfare in foreign countries. Their men, musketeers and pikemen, were citizens elected for such duty by the aldermen of their wards and called upon to provide themselves with the necessary equipment. In addition to his immensely long pike, the citizen choosing to become a pikeman had to appear on parade with a breastplate and backplate, a gorget to protect his throat, tasses to guard the thighs, and a helmet. The musketeer also had to have a helmet as well as a musket, musket rest, powder flask and ‘bande-leers with twelve charges, a prymer, a pryming wire, a bullet bag and a belt two inches in breadth’. The cost to a musketeer was reckoned to be £1 3s. 4d., to a pikeman £1 2s. od. In addition both had to arm themselves with swords. Pikemen considered themselves superior to musketeers not only because their weapons had a more ancient and respectable lineage, but also because anyone could fire a musket, whereas it took considerable strength and a decent height to handle a pike effectively.

The amount of training the men undertook depended largely upon the energy of their officers. Some colonels called their men out infrequently between general musters, a few scarcely ever, so that it came to be said of their bands, as it was of some Trained Bands in the counties, that the instruction they most commonly received was training to drink. Other officers, such as Captain Henry Saunders of Cripplegate, demanded that their men parade at six o’clock in the morning for an hour in the summer months, insisting that this unwelcome discipline was ‘no hindrance to the men’s more necessary callings, but rather calls them earlier to their business affairs’. At least Captain Saunders did not require the men to practise shooting at that time in the morning, ‘neither to beat drumme nor display Ensigne but onely exercise their Postures, Motions and formes of Battell’ so that those still abed near their training ground were not unduly disturbed.

Traditionally, the London Trained Bands could be summoned for service only upon the orders of the Lord Mayor. But after Richard Gurney’s refusal to call them out that January night, the House of Commons declared that the authority for their summons would no longer rest with the Lord Mayor alone but in future must reside with a committee comprising members of the Court of Common Council and of the Court of Aldermen as well as the Mayor himself. At the same time a Committee of Safety was formed, consisting of six Aldermen and six members of the Court of Common Council, to supervise London’s warlike preparations; and, more significantly yet, Philip Skippon was appointed commander of all London’s Trained Bands at a salary of £300 a year.

Philip Skippon had been a soldier all his adult life since leaving home in Norfolk. He had fought on the Continent, been wounded more than once, and had returned to England some years before as a captain in the Dutch service. A good and brave man of devout and simple religious faith, which was later to find expression in three books of devotion addressed to his fellow-soldiers, he was respected by men and officers alike. His strong Puritan views were well known, his courage as undoubted as his administrative abilities. In conjunction with a newly formed Committee for London Militia, he reorganized the Trained Bands into six regiments known by the colours of their ensigns – Red, White, Blue, Yellow, Green and Orange – the regiments having six or seven companies with two hundred men in each company. The nominal colonels of the regiments were influential citizens, mostly leading Parliamentary Puritans, appointed for political, family or business reasons rather than for their military capacity, but the lieutenant-colonels and junior officers had experience if not of warfare at least of training and drilling with such units as the Guild of Artillery. Care was taken to ensure that the companies comprised men drawn from the same wards of the city, so that Portsoken men served with Portsoken men, for instance, and Farringdon with Farringdon. The friendly rivalry of the Trained Bands, whose various traditions dated from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was thus preserved. In the hands of Philip Skippon they were a formidable force.

On 10 January, the day upon which Skippon’s command of the Trained Bands was confirmed, the King left Whitehall for Hampton Court, fearing that the life of his wife was in jeopardy even more than his own. He drove through streets thronged with people crowding round his carriage and waving placards on which was scrawled the single word Liberty. The next day the five Members of Parliament whom he had tried to arrest came out of their hiding places in Coleman Street and, accompanied by numerous watermen and cheered by crowds on both banks, were taken by barge upriver to Westminster. Here they were met by Philip Skippon and his London Trained Bands, their ensigns flying in the winter air, wearing in their hats or waving on the points of their pikes, ‘like a little square banner’, a copy of The Protestation, a document remonstrating against the policies of the King and the Church but vague enough to be accepted by all other than extreme Royalists.

From Hampton Court, where – since no preparations had been made for their arrival – ‘the princes were obliged to the inconvenience of sleeping in the same bed with their Majesties’, the royal family moved on to Windsor. From here the Queen and Princess Mary, who was to join her new husband in Holland, left for Dover with ‘small attendance and pomp’, accompanied by the household’s tiny dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, who in happier days had been picked up by the gigantic porter at the palace gate as a tasty morsel between the two halves of a loaf of bread. The Queen also took with her urgent messages for military help addressed to the Prince of Orange and the King of Denmark, a large selection of the crown jewels which she hoped to sell or pawn, and a code in which she was to write forceful letters to her husband urging him to be resolute in dealing with his enemies and to remember ‘that it is better to follow out a bad resolution than to change it so often’, warning him against ‘beginning again [his] old game of yielding everything’, and, in her fear that she or her friends might be sacrificed as Strafford had been, reminding him of the promise he had made to her at Dover – ‘that you would never consent to an accommodation without my knowledge and through me…If you do not take care of those who suffer for you, you are lost.’

2 TAKING SIDES (#ulink_1722c911-948e-59ca-bb4a-dc6ab5db1bb1)

‘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.