Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ