On 2 September 1644 Essex’s surviving 6,000 troops surrendered to the king, while Essex fled ignominiously in a fishing boat. The so-called Battle of Lostwithiel was, Essex admitted, ‘the greatest blow we ever suffered’. Charles had gained over 5,000 muskets and pistols, hundreds of swords, forty-two guns, and several wagons laden with powder and match.20 The men taken prisoner were ‘so dirty and dejected as was rare to see’.21 They were now to face further humiliation. The losses of the long battle of attrition had embittered the victors and the prisoners were ‘abused, reviled, scorned, torn, kicked, pillaged, and many stripped of all they had’. Royalist officers beat their men off their traumatised Roundhead prisoners with the flats of their swords. But the local Cornish joined in. One group grabbed a female camp-follower, who had given birth just three days earlier, ‘took her by the hair of her head and threw her into the river’. Charles hanged the culprits for murder. He could not, however, prevent the impoverished Cornish from stripping other Roundhead women of clothes and valuables.22
There were now further victories for the king’s cause in Scotland, led by a former Covenanter, the thirty-two-year-old James Graham, Marquess of Montrose.23 Parliament’s invitation to the Scots to join the war had been intended to defeat Charles quickly and end the fighting. It had helped them to win Marston Moor, but it had also brought the war to Scotland. Montrose’s followers, from Ulster and the Western Highlands, were far fewer in number than the Covenanters, but were excellent warriors. Their fighting abilities ensured the Covenanters could not now help Parliament make the decisive thrust into Royalist territory in the south that was needed to finish Charles. The Scottish army in England had to stay close to the border for any time it might be needed to join their forces at home to fight Montrose.
The fear also remained for Parliament that Charles could yet bring outside forces into England, as they themselves had done. Warwick had issued orders to the navy for the summary execution of any soldiers coming from Ireland captured at sea.24 On 24 October this was followed by a decision in Parliament of historic shamefulness: that no quarter be granted to any Catholic Irish found in England or Wales. While both Royalist and Parliamentarian forces had committed acts of murder and even massacres, this was new: the legal sanctioning of killing on ethnic and religious grounds.* The majority of soldiers coming from Ireland (seven to one) were, in fact, English-born, and had been sent to Ireland from England only after 1641, to suppress the Irish revolt.25 The victims of Parliament’s ordinance would therefore largely be either English Catholics or Welsh Gaelic-speakers: if they also happened to be women it would prove to be all the worse for them.
Charles’s generals and councillors quarrelled constantly. He tried to weigh up the best advice. ‘If thou knew what a life I lead,’ he sighed in a letter to Henrietta Maria, ‘I dare say thou would pity me, for some are too wise, others too foolish, some too busy, others too reserved, many fantastic.’26 He tried to find the balance between being too cautious and too reckless, but this was no easy task and Charles was no great military strategist himself. He was, however, resilient. He was also a brave soldier who inspired great loyalty. As such he continued to prove an extraordinarily tough enemy to defeat, despite all Parliament’s advantages in terms of holding London, in terms of wealth and in terms of the superior military numbers handed to them by the Scottish alliance.
Three days after Parliament had passed the ‘no quarter’ ordinance Charles escaped vastly superior Parliamentarian forces at a second Battle of Newbury. Manchester’s men were exhausted, but on 9 November 1644, with an opportunity to meet the king again in battle in Berkshire about to be passed by, Cromwell stood up at a Council of War to demand action. The campaigning season was about to end and if they did not fight the king now, Cromwell warned, then come the spring they could be facing a French army sent by the queen to make war alongside the Royalists. Manchester demurred: the French were too busy fighting against the Habsburgs in Europe to invade England. Seeking a battle now would also be a mistake. Their men were tired after the fighting at Newbury and a defeat would be disastrous for them. ‘If we beat the king’s army never so many times, [even] if a hundred times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after’, Manchester reminded Cromwell, and ‘if he beat us once, then we are every one of us undone’. In other words, their war aims were no more than a successfully negotiated peace with Charles. If they lost, they would all be hanged as traitors.
Cromwell snapped back that Manchester ‘had as good have said that we are resolved to have peace upon any terms in the world’.27 Unlike the earl he could imagine a future in which there was no certainty of survival for Charles as king, or for his posterity to succeed him. Hugh Peter, the radical from Massachusetts who was now the leading chaplain in the Parliamentarian army, concurred. Why make a fetish of the need to come to terms with the king, ‘as if we could not live without one’?28
Manchester’s arguments prevailed at the Council of War, but with the campaigning season now ended, the disagreements between the generals shifted to Westminster and the benches of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The split in the Junto that had emerged after Edgehill between war and peace factions now disappeared, and these factions were replaced by what were in effect England’s first two political parties.29
The party associated with Cromwell was called the Independents. They were set on the absolute defeat of the king and included (but were not limited to) many members of the old war-party faction.30 These men had previously agreed to Scottish demands that Presbyterianism be imposed on England because it was the price of the military support that would achieve Charles’s defeat. Since the Scots had failed in this task, the Independents had moved their religious and foreign policy away from being pro-Scots and Presbyterian. Instead they looked to the most ruthless English generals, men like Cromwell, who favoured Independent Puritan congregations that the Scots saw as incubi for heresy and civil disorder.
Manchester was associated with the second party, the ‘Presbyterians’, who favoured a negotiated peace with Charles. They included Essex, who feared religious anarchy and social upheaval under the Independents. Holland was also a leading figure. His brother Warwick, meanwhile, was, if not a fully fledged ‘Presbyterian’, then certainly no enthusiast for the Independents. There was an international dimension to this. The Scottish Covenanters were close to the French–the traditional allies of the Scots. The French were the great enemies of Spain–whose ruin Warwick had sought all his life, and he was therefore inclined to the Scots.31 Where once he had led events, however, now Warwick trailed uncertainly in the wake of Essex, Manchester, and the rising power of their rival Oliver Cromwell.
Despite the religious labels for the two parties, their goals were each primarily secular.32 Both Independents and Presbyterians wanted to gain for themselves the political and military power necessary to impose their choice of peace settlement upon the king and his kingdoms. Their leaders–or grandees–each hoped for a restored monarchy in which they would be the ones holding senior office. The difference was that while the Presbyterian party was prepared to rely on the king granting them senior office freely, following a negotiated peace, the Independents wanted to crush Charles militarily and reduce him to the status of a puppet king.
The struggle for power between the new parties began on 19 November 1644, when Parliament’s Anglo-Scottish executive body, the Committee of Both Kingdoms, began to consider how best to reform–or remodel–Parliament’s failing army. The intention was to streamline its command to make it more effective. A new proposal was then made in the Commons for a ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’ under which members of the House of Lords and House of Commons would resign their commissions. This would clear the decks. Warwick duly lost the navy, while Essex and Manchester resigned their commissions on 2 April 1645.33 Cromwell was also obliged to resign. In their place the army was given a consolidated command under the thirty-three-year-old Sir Thomas Fairfax. He was a commander of proven ability�
��but also a family friend of the Independent grandee the Earl of Northumberland. Although a former peace-faction supporter, Northumberland had lost all confidence in Charles since his cessation of arms with the Irish Catholic Confederates, and had allied with Cromwell.
The Independents had won this round of the power struggle. Cromwell would soon be made the one exception from the Self-Denying Ordinance and would act as lieutenant general of Fairfax’s cavalry. The civil war was now also to enter a more ruthless period. Essex had noticed a key change between Fairfax’s new commission in 1645 and his own in 1642. The phrase that had called for ‘the preservation of the king’s person’ had been omitted. Essex tried, and failed, to have it reinstated. It had once been treason even to imagine the death of a king. No longer. And Charles warned Henrietta Maria that ‘this summer will be the hottest for war of any that hath been yet’.34
* Their new Scottish allies were enthusiastic witch burners. King James, who had burned many witches in Scotland, had even written one of his famous tracts on witches. Charles viewed the obsession with English disdain. Witchcraft in England had been made a capital offence in common law under Queen Elizabeth and there had been several efforts to tar leading Catholics–even members of the royal family–by accusing them of witchcraft, but it had not been very successful. A few English witches were burned during James’s reign but he lost enthusiasm for the stake as his rule in England went on. Catholic Ireland had still fewer cases.
* A notable Royalist massacre had taken place in Bolton–known as the Geneva of the north–on 28 May. Parliamentarians claimed 1,600 defenders were slaughtered after Rupert stormed the town. Seventy-eight were listed in the parish register, but this would not have included soldiers from outside the town. They did include the names of two women. Royalists said their anger had been triggered by the murder of a soldier who had served against the Irish rebels for the king, but was hanged by the Roundheads as a papist. Many Royalist soldiers had been raised in Lancashire, a county which still had many Catholics. Later on 11 July after a skirmish in Dorchester, Parliamentarians had captured eight ‘Irish’ prisoners. Seven were hanged–the eighth spared ‘for doing execution on his fellows’. This in turn provoked further Royalist reprisals in the killing of prisoners; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol5/pp677-748.
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EVIL WOMEN
ON THE DAY OF HIS DEATH, 10 JANUARY 1645, THE DIMINUTIVE Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, dressed in his habitual black. Laud had been a chief supporter of Charles’s rule without Parliament. Facing trial for his life had been no less than he had expected. Nevertheless, this death had been a long time coming. He had spent four years in the Tower, writing memoirs, as well as penning defences of episcopacy and the liturgy. He might have been left there and forgotten if it had not been necessary for him to appoint bishops at Parliament’s request. When he had refused to appoint an individual who had once been rejected by the king, his enemies in Parliament were reminded that they had unfinished business in his regard.
For Laud, the Church of England was a pillar of a Christian society, which, along with the Crown and a well-established social hierarchy, would protect the weak from the strong. Others saw him as an apologist for tyranny and an enemy of the godly. Popery had been the leading accusation made against Laud at his trial, and he had defended himself from it vigorously. He had ‘laboured nothing more, than that the external worship of God might be preserved’, he told his judges. Puritan neglect of places of worship was a kind of sacrilege while ritual and ceremony were together ‘the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profaneness… too commonly put upon it’. Since the essence of religious ceremonies was that the whole congregation took part, so uniformity of religion in the community had been at the heart of his reforms. Enforcing it had in turn been allied to royal authority.1
It was defiance of royal authority that had cost Laud’s prosecution lawyer, the Puritan polemicist William Prynne, his ears and had branded his face. Defiance of Parliament’s authority was to cost William Laud his life.
As with Strafford, the prosecution had failed to achieve a conviction at trial. Laud had been condemned by Parliament. The Act of Attainder was passed on 4 January 1645: the same day that Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer, and with it the old Jacobean and Elizabethan liturgy of the Church of England. Now, six days later, the seventy-one-year-old was being escorted to Tower Hill. The white-haired old man was harangued and harassed by a mob all the way to the scaffold. Even here his tormentors were so numerous that they barred his way to the block.* ‘I did think’, Laud commented drily, ‘that I might have room to die.’ Despite the clamour he met his end ‘supported by remarkable constancy’.2
Charles was certain God would now punish Parliament for their actions. He ascribed his own misfortunes to divine retribution for having agreed to send the innocent Strafford to his death in May 1641. Charles bore no such responsibility for Laud’s beheading. This Act of Attainder had not borne his signature. It was Parliament’s turn to feel divine retribution, Charles assured Henrietta Maria, ‘this last crying blood being totally theirs’.3
Charles now had to win the war outright or be crushed. He confided in Henrietta Maria that there was no longer any realistic prospect of a negotiated peace. The Independents would expect him to sacrifice his religious beliefs, deny his sacramental kingship and his monopoly of legitimate force. He was equally resolved that he would ‘neither quit episcopacy, nor that sword which God hath given into my hands’.4 To defeat his enemies, however, he had to have Irish troops. He was now prepared to drop the penal laws against Irish Catholics in return for their help, although he drew the line at giving them the right to practise their religion with equal status to Protestants. While negotiations with the Irish continued, those of his councillors who remained strongly opposed to his bringing in foreign troops were sidelined. Several were appointed to a council to advise the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales. Charles had appointed the prince as leader of the Royalist forces in the west, explaining that ‘himself and the prince were too much to venture in one bottom’, for if they were captured together it would ‘ruin them both’.5 The Independents could make the prince a usurper, just as the infant King James had been made a usurper of his own mother’s throne.
The Prince of Wales and his council duly left Oxford for the west in March. Charles, meanwhile, prepared to go on the attack in the Midlands.
Dawn on 20 May 1645 was heralded in Leicester by the blast of cannon. The besieged townsfolk were firing at the royal army as they built a battery for the king’s heavy guns. Over the last month they had addressed weaknesses in the town’s defences, and fortified Leicester’s crumbling walls. Scottish soldiers as well as local recruits had joined the 900 or so men of military age already in the town. Nevertheless, Leicester remained short of arms and some of the recent recruits were described as ‘being very malignant, with many coming in who did not intend to fight’.6
At one o’clock the king’s cannon fired two great shots at Leicester: a warning of what would come if the Town Committee did not agree surrender terms. The townspeople worked to further strengthen the fortifications while the committee continued to drag out the negotiations for as long as they could. At three o’clock Prince Rupert lost patience and the Royalist battery began to ‘play’ on the town walls. The defenders fought back ferociously with cannon and musket. At six o’clock Royalist cannon breached the wall on the south side of Leicester.7 The townsfolk dug earth frantically and grabbed woolsacks to fill the gap, with the ‘women and children giving the most active and fearless help’. It took six hours to seal the breach and a Royalist assault then began at two other points.
The defenders fought back ‘with great courage and resolution’. ‘We were thrice repulsed,’ Charles admitted to his wife. Nevertheless, at midnight the Royalists broke through the fortifications and poured into the town.8 In the darkness attackers and defenders fought hand to h
and and street by street, without quarter given.9 A Royalist commander recalled ‘the very women… did take their parts… they fired upon our men out of their windows, from the tops of houses, and threw tiles upon their heads’. There were bodies lying everywhere when resistance ended at around two in the morning, and Rupert’s black colours were raised above the battery.10 Yet still the killing continued. Captured town councillors were shot or hanged in cold blood. Finally, the plundering began.
Many of the Royalist troops were from the poor, mountainous regions of mid Wales and they robbed Leicester without mercy. Churches, hospitals and homes were all ‘made prey to the enraged and greedy soldier’.11 A resident claimed years later that he saw Charles riding through the town in armour, indifferent to attacks on innocent civilians, declaring, ‘I do not care if they cut them three times more, for they are mine enemies.’ At the time, however, a Parliamentarian newspaper allowed that the civilians had only been killed in the angry confusion of battle, ‘rather than on purpose’.12 What the accusations against Charles truly reflect is the bitter legacy of this siege.
One townsman, William Summers, had lost his house and all his possessions, his son was killed and he saw his wife go mad with grief.13 Just how many others must have been left ruined or grief-stricken is indicated by the 140 cartloads of spoils listed as taken from the town, and the parish registers that reveal 709 burials immediately after the siege. But, however terrible the events in Leicester, at last the end of the war seemed to be in sight. ‘If it shall please God to bless me,’ Charles wrote to Henrietta Maria, ‘it may make us see London this next winter.’14 A few days later, his spirits rose further when he learned good news from Scotland, where Montrose had enjoyed further victories. ‘Since this rebellion my affairs were never in so fair and hopeful a way.’15 It seemed that God had indeed taken up the king’s cause.
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