Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ