Pistoleer: Roundway Down

by Smith, Skye

  In situations where there is no historical record of a non-fictional character's location or actions, I have attributed actions to them that would have been logical and in keeping with their character.

  A notable exception to this rule is with Robert Blake, who eventually became Admiral Blake, the father of the modern British navy. There is almost nothing known about Blake's whereabouts or actions in the years 1638 through July 1643, at which time his heroic stand at Bristol made him the darling of the London news sheets. In this book I have Blake commanding a company of dragoon's in Waller's army. Waller's mention of Blake's help at the Battle of Lansdown Hill is the earliest historical mention I have found that references Blake's military career.

  3. What was a Pistoleer? (for more info see the Appendix of Book One)

  During the English Civil War, Dutch style Pistoleers eventually became referred to as Dragoons, named after the blunderbuss style pistol that they carried (which was the sawed off shotgun of its time). They were considered mounted infantry because only 'gentlemen' could be considered cavalry. They rode lighter, cheaper horses, wore only enough armour to protect chest and back, and were more likely to carry a multipurpose axe than a cavalry sabre, as a sword was the weapon of a 'gentleman'. Their other weapons may have included ordinary pistols or a carbine ... a shortened musket.

  During a large battle Dragoons were often kept back as a strategic reserve, but before the battle they would be used as couriers, scouts, and skirmishers. The weakness of the dragoons was that all of their guns were single shot, and loading them while riding was almost impossible. Their advantage was that they were an infantry force that could be moved and repositioned quickly - thus they were a flying squad.

  4. What are the differences in dates between Julian and Gregorian calendars?

  Quick answer: add ten days to the Julian, and add 1 year if prior to March 25. Sometimes, almost.

  The Julian calendar was standardized by Julius Caesar to better align with the solar year, with January 1 as the first day of the year, and the solstices and equinoxes falling on December 25, March 25, June 25 and September 25. Julius adopted it because the existing Roman calendar was based on moon months, so did not track the solar year. He copied the calendar of Alexandrian Egypt, which was Greek. Even Julius got the leap year corrections wrong, so even his new calendar crept ahead of the solar reality by about 3/4 of a day per century.

  The Roman Empire's Christian Church in Constantinople used the Julian calendar, but a break away protesting group of Christians under the King Bishop of Rome (later known as the Pope) decided to Catholicize it by fixing Saint's Days to solar dates and then proclaiming that the sun was wrong when the calendar got out of sync with the sun. They even decided that March 25 should be the first day of the new year rather than January 1. (Now you know why fiscal year ends are often March 31). By 1582 the Pope's version had shifted ahead of the solar reality by 10 days, making a mockery of Jesus being born on the solstice of December 25 because in 1582 the shortest day of the year fell on December 11.

  Pope Gregory was forced to correct the calendar because even illiterate farmers were ridiculing the Catholic calendar, never mind all the new age scientists. The Gregorian Calendar skipped ahead the ten days that had been lost due to Julius's faulty leap year correction, put the first day of the year back to January 1, and corrected the leap year formula. Too bad he didn't skip ahead twenty days instead, for that would have put the solstices/equinoxes on Dec 31, Mar 31, June 30 and Sept 30.

  It gets even more muddled after that. Due to the reformation, many kingdoms did not accept Gregory's new calendar, while others accepted some of the corrections but not others. For instance, Scotland went Gregorian in 1600, but England not until 1752. When studying historical dates, therefore, it is important to know which calendar they relate to. For instance, March 10, 1640 may actually be March 10, 1641 or March 20, 1641. This is why some notations will use March 10, 1640/41.

  5. Why was Lowestoft such an important port?

  Lowestoft is England's closest protected port to Holland and the Rhine, and allows the shortest crossing of the North Sea between Holland and Suffolk. In the 17th century, a sailing ship (or fishing boat) in trouble due to North Sea storms would be very thankful to such a port.

  The taking of Lowestoft by Cromwell, including the attempt to abduct him, are a matter of record and though some of my characters are fictional, the description of the skirmish, the town, the port and the historic characters is not.

  6. Was there a plot to betray Bristol to Prince Rupert's flying army?

  Yes. Just as it is described. The infamous turncoats were executed a month later. The bodies of the two men that Rupert lost at the dyke were returned to him and even though he asked for only one pound of tobacco to cover the funeral costs, the payment was made twice, once by the governor and once by the colonel on behalf of the killer who refused to pay. Was the killer Robert Blake? Perhaps. There is no record of the killer's identity. At the time Blake was most likely one of Colonel Popham's dragoon captains.

  7. Who were the Clubmen?

  Quick answer: Vigilante militias.

  Because Britain is an island, it needed a large defensive navy (the Summer Fleet), but had little need of a large standing army. Traditionally it had a small professional army who could call upon local militia's to bolster their numbers or to do the logistic work of supporting the army. In pre-Norman times these militia were called the fyrd. By the Civil War they were called the Trained Bands. When Parliament took control of most of the trained bands, the king dusted off a law that allowed him to press ALL able men into his service as a militia force.

  As the local militia groups were pulled into armies and marched away, and as armies began marauding villages and towns, and even sacking them (as with Brentford), a third type of militia sprung up... the independent clubmen. The local clubmen were a vigilante militia organized primarily for local defense, and defense from all comers no matter whose side they were on. Since the young and trained men had already been pulled away, the clubmen tended to be older and wiser and less likely to be pressed into an army. It was they who repaired or built fortification and barricades and it was they who would man those barricades when strangers approached.

  8. Were Waller's marches against Malmesbury and Cirencester really a ruse?

  Absolutely. The royalist siege of Gloucester and the eventual relief of that siege first by Waller and then by Essex is fundamental to understanding the military campaigns of 1643, and my books give a credible account of them. Waller's march on the "who cares" town of Malmesbury was a ruse, and no one was more surprised than Waller when the garrison surrendered, so then he had to repeat the ruse on Cirencester.

  Once every royalist in the area had been called in to Cirencester, Waller left his camp fires burning and marched through the night to cross the Severn before the royalists woke up to the ruse. The surprise attack on Highnam decimated the Welsh army to the extent that the Welsh played no great part for the rest of the war.

  9. Was a great treasure captured on a ship at Chepstow?

  Absolutely. On the Dragon of Bristol, the famous ship of the Northwest Passage explorer, Captain Thomas James. There is no record of what that treasure consisted of. Dutch silver dollars is only my interpretation, as is my crediting the capture to Robert Blake. The factual accounts were either destroyed after the restoration of the Stuart regime, or have been lost in some rare book collection somewhere, so my interpretation is as good as anyone’s.

  10. What was William Waller's connection to Robert Rich?

  Sir William Waller and Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick were the same age and were both born into wealth beyond avarice. In their youth while Rich was founding colonies and commanding privateer ships in the New World, Waller was serving in the Venetian army and in the continental Thirty Years War.

  As of 1636, Waller was a shareholder in Rich's flagship Providence Island Company, so they must have been at least business confidents. Sinc
e the shareholder list of that company parallels the list of leading Parliamentary Reformers, they must have shared many other friends and acquaintances amongst reformers. Waller was the MP for Andover, just north of Winchester, so it makes sense that he be the experienced officer chosen to chase the king's men out of the South.

  11. Was there really so much looting and raping going on?

  Yes. The fate of the non-combatants, especially the women and children, is always the saddest tale in any war, and especially in a civil war. The royalist and the rebel forces were very different in their approach to non-combatants. The king was constantly short of cash, so his army looted whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, while pretending such was justly due to the king. Parliament generally made a point of paying for what they needed, although they often paid with the proceeds from looting royalist palaces and cathedrals.

  The king's forces would freely loot any house, village, or town that was accused of helping the rebels. During battles, the royalists had great trouble keeping their cavalry on the battlefield when the alternative of looting the enemy camp presented itself. Meanwhile, the rebel army tried to constrain their looting to the estates of the wealthiest royalists because they needed the support of the common folk. As that included all of the hated bishops, it was normal for the rebels to loot their palaces, their Cathedrals and their other buildings. Both sides looted the wealthy, but it was the royalist looting of the common folk that had such a grievous effect. This because the winter of 1642/43 was brutal, and life would have been hard enough for the folk even if the king's army had not stolen everything from them.

  Since it is normal to hide or protect your valuables, women, and children from looters, many non-combatants were beaten by the looters. Since the king's army was far more prone to looting the common folk, they were also more prone to raping the women. The leaders in this would have been the "old school” petty nobility who viewed the bedding of common women as a traditional right. In the Germanies by this era, rape was punished as a form of looting, so Prince Rupert's heroic flying army played semantics and extorted "willing" sex from women by threatening their families.

  The following is a verse from a song popular amongst royalist cavalryers and well shows their attitude:

  "Go burn some rebel town for such alone

  Are bonfires suited to the joys we own

  And let the falling ashes sprinkled lie

  On traitors heads let them repent and die"

  Accounts were "cleansed" during the Restoration Period of Charles II to portray the royalists as being as moral as the rebels, but even if that had been true, the difference between the royalist pattern of confiscating their supplies and the rebel pattern of paying for them would also have set the pattern for their supplies of sex. Prior to and during the Civil War, prostitution was public and pervasive, so both sides would be getting lots of sex. According to pattern, the royalists would confiscate the sex (rape), while the rebels would pay for the sex. I have been unable to find any academic study of the pregnancy rate amongst English women during the years 1642/43, but a safe assumption would be a spike in the numbers, even though the number of "live" births may have been abnormally low.

  12. Who were the Campdeners?

  The Campdeners were followers of the royalist opportunist Baptist Noel, 3rd Viscount Campden (1611-1682). He and his father were staunch royalist politicians in Rutland. Rutland is the tiny (18 mile by 17 mile) landlocked county between Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire and it has only two towns, Oakham and Uppingham. Noel was a man of dissolute ways, and his company of Campdeners were renown for being an ill disciplined hoard of plunderers who looted and raped their way across the northern Fens. To encourage such vicious raids on undefended villages, the king promoted Noel from captain to colonel to general all within three months.

  13. Was the plague of 1643 Typhus?

  From the historical accounts of the symptoms and how it seemed to spread, the best fit would be Typhus (or War Typhus). At the time the English physicians did not know much about Typhus, although it had plagued the continent for a century. English physicians on the scene thought it was the mysterious and deadly disease that had plagued Elizabethan times - Sweating Sickness.

  What ever it was, it shared many symptoms with the various flu's and agues of the day, but with more severe fevers. Some have suggested that it may have been an insect born virus similar to Lyme Disease or Dengue fever. With European trade now worldwide, there were many new diseases being brought to England, the most pernicious of which was malaria. (Oliver Cromwell died of malaria, a disease he likely caught while living in the Fens of Cambridgeshire.)

  The epidemic of 1643 spread quickly through the infantries of both sides because the infantry lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions, which were made worse by a damp, cold spring. The high fatality rate could be related to the first symptom - lethargy and weakness, which the officers may have treated as shirking or cowardice rather than as an illness that needed attention. The lethal dangers are due to not controlling the fevers (boiled brain) and from dehydration, so the great death toll may be completely the fault of the officers for not taking it seriously.

  As mentioned in the story, the medical scholars Nicholas Culpeper, Thomas Johnson, and William Rosewell all had first hand knowledge of the illness, but the best historical account was from Thomas Willis who was studying medicine in Oxford at the time. For the first time in English history he provided a detailed medical account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent of its prevalence. The infantries and the folk of the occupied towns suffered from this epidemic well into 1644.

  14. Was John Hampden killed by his own pistol?

  Yes. Although the accounts in the newssheets of the day had him heroically but horribly wounded by two musket balls in the shoulder, he died from gangrene poisoning from a horrific hand wound caused by his own pistol backfiring. There is a historical account that the backfire was caused by the pistol being accidentally loaded twice. Physicians were sent out from London, but their ministrations did not stop the gangrene from spreading as a simple amputation would have.

  The public's memory of Hampden's goodness and intellect was so strong that it survived even Charles II's forced "cleansing" of history after his restoration. Hampden was heavily quoted by the fathers of the American Republic.

  15. Did Hampden really save a payroll of 27,000 English pounds?

  Hampden may not have directly saved the payroll as described in the story, but his actions at Chalgrove Field definitely helped to save it. Parliament had appointed him responsible for the paying of the troops, perhaps out of mistrust of General Essex. In those days a pound sterling was the same as a pound of silver, but remember that silver is weighed by troy measures so 27,000 pounds amounts to "only" 10 long tons of silver coins. At a ton per cart, this would be ten farm carts of coins.

  Of course the historical accounts do not tell the mix of coins. The gross weight of coins would be much reduced if there were a lot of gold coins as well as silver. This is not as likely as it may seem because gold coins were too valuable to be used for paying salaries. For instance, no market stall would have change for a gold coin.

  16. So who won the Battle of Lansdown Hill?

  Like many of the larger battles of 1642/43, the actual results were almost tied. In such cases it was what happened immediately after the battle that determined who actually won it. For instance, Edgehill was a tie, but afterwards the royalists regrouped at a position on the highways to the south of the rebels where there was no army between them and London, so they were considered the winners.

  At Lansdown, the rebels under Waller were worried by the continual dogged attacks of the Cornish infantry, so they withdrew under cover of night. Meanwhile the royalists under Hopton had lost so many of their Cornish infantry that they also withdrew under cover of night. Waller was the first to realize that both armies had withdrawn, and he took the initiative and rallied his army to h
arry the withdrawing Hopton. Hopton was wounded and had lost Colonel Bevil Grenville (the leader and rally point of his infantry), so he retreated. Waller is therefore considered the winner.

  17. Was General Hopton blinded by an explosion?

  Yes. Two powder carts exploded after the Battle of Lansdown Hill and he was temporarily blinded by the blast. In my novels I do not stray from the historic accounts of people and events, and I entwine my fictional characters into historic scenes using logic and reasonable assumptions. In cases where there are no historic details, I use logic and reason to fill in the gaps.

  18. Was cavalry loosing its key role in battles by 1643?

  Yes and no. Classic cavalry yes, mounted infantry no. Back in 1066 England was invaded by a force of classic cavalry (made possible by the Norman use of the stirrup) and were met by the English mounted infantry who just barely failed to stop them. At Hastings, the Normans led their horses to the battle and then fought mounted, whereas the English rode their horses to the battle and then fought on foot. For six hundred years afterwards the classic cavalry "lorded" themselves over the infantry with their egotistical "better than thou" mentality, which was supported by a class(ic) based social system.

  The republicans of the Netherlands, and then of England could not gain nor could they trust the political support of the psycho mentality prevalent in classic cavalry, so they tended to depend on mounted infantry instead (Pistoleers, Dragoons). The advances in musket and field gun technology eventually trumped the sabres and lances of the classic cavalry, so in response the cavalry began arming themselves like the dragoons and adopting dragoon tactics (as did Prince Rupert in 1643). Eventually the biggest difference between dragoons and cavalry was the egotistical mentality of the cavalry.

  The classic cavalry continued in England from the Restoration until the machine guns slaughters of 1914. This was supported by the strong caste(class) systems of India and England. This means that the English used ineffective classic cavalry against cannons and grape shot for over 200 years. By 1800 the rest of the world were using troops of pistoleers (dragoons) even though they were referred to as cavalry because the officers (not the men) had the egotistical mentality of the classic cavalry. In the USA, General Custer tried to press the "cavalry mentality"onto his troops of dragoons so that they would willingly slaughter women and children, but he was defeated by the mounted infantry of the Sioux nation.