Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ