Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ So also did they at Chester. Money came in, too. In the recent past money had been one of the King’s most nagging worries. Before these present troubles the resources of the Crown had been badly affected by both inflation, which had presented a problem to all the governments of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the economic depression of the early seventeenth century; and after the war had begun the King’s finances, already close to breakdown when he came to the throne, and indeed long before that, sunk to such a parlous state that when he had arrived in York it was estimated that he had as little as £600 left. But thanks to rich well-wishers like his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earl of Newcastle, whose losses in the struggle were said to amount to an enormous sum, the King was soon able to pay for rapidly growing forces. The Marquess of Worcester continued to supply the King with immense sums of money. His family raised no less than £117,000, which today would be worth well over £2 million; and when the Prince of Wales was sent to visit the Somersets at Raglan Castle he was presented with several pieces of the family plate.

      The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were not so generous. Little of the college plate which was set aside for the King at Cambridge actually reached him; and, for fear of Parliamentary punishment, not much was offered anyway, several colleges ignoring the King’s repeated request, much to the satisfaction of the city’s Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, who marched a party of soldiers to King’s College with drums beating to prevent any treasure from that rich college falling into Royalist hands. Other colleges collected varying amounts of plate, but hardly any was sent, and most of what did leave Cambridge never reached its destination.

      These were sad says for Royalists in Cambridge. Three heads of colleges were arrested and carted off to London to be imprisoned there; other members of the University known to support the King were insulted as they walked the streets; the University preacher was attacked and forcibly prevented from giving a Latin sermon; the Vice-Chancellor and several of his colleagues were locked up on a particularly cold night without food or fires for declining to pay the taxes the Parliamentary Commissioners demanded of them; eventually twelve heads of colleges and 181 Fellows and other senior members of the University were deprived of their positions, sent away to earn their livings as best they could, and replaced by acknowledged Puritans. The Fellows of Queens’ College were purged in their entirety. ‘The whole Corporation of Masters and Fellows,’ so it was reported, ‘were ejected, imprison’d or banish’d thence’; and, according to Thomas Fuller who had entered the college at the age of thirteen in 1621 when his uncle was President, there was not a single scholar left in the college either. The President, Edward Martin, who suffered several years’ imprisonment, was replaced by Herbert Palmer, a well-known Puritan and reputed author of Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Arms, a book justifying the use of force against the King.

      At Queens’ the Parliamentary ordinance for ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’, the destruction of altar rails, candlesticks and crucifixes, and the removal of communion tables to the body of the church, was obeyed with particular ruthlessness. ‘We beat downe about no Superstitious Pictures besides Cherubims and Ingravings,’ wrote Parliament’s agent for implementing the ordinance in East Anglia. ‘And we digged up the steps for 3 hours and brake down 10 or 12 Apostles & Saints within the Hall.’

      Elsewhere in Cambridge there were similar depredations. Colleges, purified of their papist excrescences, the stained glass in their chapels smashed, were turned into barracks or prisons; collections of ancient coins were appropriated and sold; a review of soldiers was held in King’s College Chapel; avenues of trees in college gardens were cut down for fortifications; several bridges were destroyed; and on Cromwell’s orders in St Mary’s Church, where the Book of Common Prayer was torn to shreds, the wood carvings were destroyed though there was evidently ‘not one jot of imagery or statue work about them’.

      William Dowsing, the son of a Suffolk yeoman, who was commissioned with the task of demolishing superstitious monuments, ornaments and pictures in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, kept a detailed journal of his work, minutely recording his depredations in the churches and chapels of East Anglia. At Haverhill, for example, in the process of working what he called his ‘godly thorough reformation’, he claimed to have broken down ‘about an hundred Superstitious Pictures; and seven Fryars hugging a Nunn; and the Picture of God and Christ; and divers others very superstitious’. ‘200 had been broke down before I came,’ he added. ‘We took away two popish Inscriptions…and we beat down a great Stoneing Cross on the top of the Church.’

      At Peterhouse, Cambridge, so Dowsing said, he was responsible for the demolition of ‘two mighty great angels with wings and divers other angels and the four Evangelists and Peter with his Keys over the chapel door…and about 100 cherubims and divers superstitious letters in gold, and six angels in the windows…and 60 superstitious pictures, some Popes and some crucifixes, with God the Father sitting in a chair and holding a globe.’ An eyewitness described Dowsing going about ‘like a Bedlam breaking glasse windowes, having battered and beaten downe all our painted glasse…mistaking perhaps the liberall Arts for Saints…and having defaced and digged up the floors of our Chappels, many of which had lien so for two or three hundred years together, not regarding the dust of our founders and predecessors, who likely were buried there; compelled us by armed Souldiers to pay forty shillings a Colledge for not mending what he had spoyled and defaced, or forthwith to go to Prison.’

      Such plate as did reach the King from Cambridge was mostly handed over for melting down to Thomas Bushell, an ingenious and enterprising engineer and entrepreneur, who managed with notable success the royal mines of Wales. As the King himself acknowledged in a letter of thanks, Bushell performed ‘manie other true services’ in the Royalist cause: ‘Your providing us with one hundred tonnes of leadshot for our army without mony, which ws paid before twentie pounds per tonne; and your helpinge us to twenty-six pieces of ordinance…and your contracting with merchants beyond the seas for providing good quantities of powder, pistol, carabine, musket and bullen…and your cloathing of our liefe guard [of miners] and three regiments more with suits, stockings and shoes when we were ready to march in the feild.’

      With Bushell’s help a mint was established at Shrewsbury and recruits were soon being paid 45. 4d. a week, more than many were earning in civilian life. Later that year musketeers were being paid at the rate of 65. a week and horsemen as much as 175. 6d. But these rates had to be lowered as the months went by, and by the spring of 1644 the pay of ordinary soldiers had dropped to 45. a week; corporals had 75., sergeants 105. 6d., lieutenants £1 85., and captains £2 125. 6d. But these amounts, roughly the same in both armies, were often no more than notional. In the ranks of Royalists and Parliamentarians alike there were frequent complaints about pay being late or not forthcoming at all, and in the areas through which their armies passed there were just as angry charges that soldiers pillaged what they could not or would not buy. A soldier was supposed to receive every day from the commissariat two pounds of bread, one pound of meat or cheese, and an allowance of either wine or beer. But in these early days of the conflict he very rarely did so, and was driven to living as he could off the country, or as it was sometimes termed ‘at free country’, much to the distress of the people at large. A characteristic petition from the ‘inhabitants of Middlesex and other south-eastern counties’ complained of the ‘intolerable oppression of Free Quarter’ which rendered them ‘no better than mere conquered slaves [of the soldiers] who like so many Egyptian locusts fed so long upon [them] at free cost’.

      In the Royalist army colonels of horse were ordered ‘to quarter and billet their respective regiments in such places as we have assigned, and there to take up such necessary provisions of diet, lodging, hay, oats and straw as shall be necessary for them. And if there shall not be sufficient for such supply in their quarters then they are to send out their warrants to the several parishes adjacent, requiring the inhabitants to bring in all fitting provisions for their daily supply. For all which, as for that taken up in their quarters, they are to give their respective tickets, and not to presume upon pain of our high displeasure, to send for greater quantities than will suffice СКАЧАТЬ