Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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