Pistoleer: Invasion

by Smith, Skye

  THE END of Invasion => watch for Book Seven coming soon.

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  The Pistoleer - Invasion by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-15

  Chapter 29 - Appendix FAQ

  The reference material in this Appendix is organized like an FAQ. For an overview of the politics of the time, see the Appendix of Book One 'HellBurner'. Here is a list of the questions that are answered below.

  1. Where can I read about the non-fiction events and characters?

  2. How can I tell which characters are historic and which are fictional?

  3. What was a Pistoleer?

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

  5. Why was the Sack of Brentford such a turning point?

  6. Who were the Clubmen?

  7. Were tradesmen part of Essex's army?

  8. Why were there so many officer defections to the king?

  9. Why were the casualties so heavy with the enlisted men yet so light with the officers?

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

  11. Did Waller invent petards?

  12. Was Waller really called William the Conqueror?

  13. How were military prisoners treated in 1642 England?

  14. How did non-combatants fare in 1642 England?

  15. Were the Clan McLeod guarding the walls of Chichester for the royalists?

  16. Did Queen Henrietta really steal the crown jewels and pawn them?

  17. Why did Henrietta flee to The Hague rather than to Paris?

  18. Was Henrietta's invasion carried to Bridlington by the Dutch Navy?

  19. Where was Henrietta when the English fleet was bombarding Bridlington?

  20. Was John Hotham, Parliament's governor of Kingston-upon-Hull, in negotiations with Henrietta to turn Kingston over to the king's forces?

  21. Was Charles being two-faced in his dealings with the Dutch/French and the Austrian/Spanish alliances?

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  1. Where can I read about the non-fiction events and characters?

  First try "bcw-project.org", the robust and well organized British Civil War website.

  If you can't find it at BCW then do a keyword search on Google. If a relevant BCW or Wikipedia article is listed, then other articles in the list will also be relevant. If not, then add more keywords and search again.

  Note that a Google search will also find digitized versions of rare books and long out of print books, including memoirs from the era of the Civil War. What a wonderful world we live in, where it is so easy to reference the thoughts of the long past. Be warned that most old histories of the Civil War are heavily slanted to make the Royalists look like heroes and republicans look like villains. Blame that on Charles II and his decades long efforts to assassinate the truth and anyone who opposed his saintly father and his equally saintly cousin Prince Rupert.

  For maps and descriptions of the Battle of Brentford, see "battleofbrentford.org", or better yet, read the novel "The Pistoleer - Brentford” which precedes this novel.

  2. How can I tell which characters are historic and which are fictional?

  As a rule of thumb, if the character is a Parliamentarian, has a title, or a military rank of captain or above, then they are historic and so are their families. Otherwise the character is likely fictional. I have kept the descriptions and actions of the non-fictional characters as close to historical accounts as possible.

  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 late 1643 when his heroic stand at Bristol made him the darling of news sheets.

  In this book I have Blake commanding a company in Ruthven's parliamentary army in Devon, which has a very high probability of being true. I then have him on a small ship on the North Sea coast, which is poetic license on my part in order to lead into the plotlines of subsequent novels. One of the greatest mysteries about Blake is how a petty captain of mounted infantry ended up as the shipboard Admiral of Cromwell's fleet. He must have had some experience on ships, and so I have taken the liberty of nudging him into such a role. Did Blake have an argument with Admiral Tromp at Bridlington? That has the likelihood of a lottery win, but something, sometime in unrecorded history must have soured the two men against each other.

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

  Pistoleers were mounted infantry. 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. Their main weapons were pistols, not lances, although many also carried a carbine ... a short musket. They evolved in the protestant Dutch army because that army was short on cavalry.

  During a large battle they 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 Pistoleers was that normal pistols were single shot, and reloading them on a moving horse was slow work. For this reason pistoleers carried more than one gun, and one of them would be a Dragon. A Dragon was a blunderbuss pistol ... a scatter gun, the sawed off shotgun of the era. During the British Civil war companies of Pistoleers were called 'flying squads'.

  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 the Sack of Brentford such a turning point?

  The reason that the Brentford incident of November 1642 became so infamous was that it took looting to its most extreme end ... slaughter. Just as the slaughter of Magdeburg
in Saxony by the army of the Catholic Empire had the unintended consequences of bringing the Swedish Army to Saxony to chase down and obliterate the perpetrators, so too did the slaughter of Brentford by Prince Rupert have unintended consequences. The villages and towns near London, the Thames Valley, and Sussex, even those who had been friendly to the king, became terrified of becoming the next Brentford, so refused help to the royalist armies and formed Clubmen militias for self defense.

  6. Who were the Clubmen?

  Quick answer: Vigilante militias.

  Because Britain is an island, it needed a large defensive navy, and 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 ancient 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 (Brentford), a third type of militia sprung up... the independent clubmen. The local clubmen were vigilante militias 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.

  7. Were tradesmen part of Essex's army?

  Absolutely. Gentlemen were horsemen, but most of Essex's army were infantry. The infantry, especially the Trained Bands of towns and cities, had been heavily recruited from the huge pool of tradesmen apprentices. These were young, well fed, strong men with coin in their pockets and skilled hands and minds, and they were financially backed by their trades masters. Though the gentlemen formed the frame of Essex's army, the tradesmen were the driving force and muscle.

  8. Why were there so many officer defections to the king?

  The problem with any civil war is that families are often split between sides. The English Civil War stemmed from a vocal but mostly non-violent arguement amongst the ruling class, who were all related at the second or third cousin level. As it became more violent, family members were often caught on different sides. A classic example was how elder lords with long memories sided with the Reformers, while their younger sons and grandsons rallied to the king's side in hopes of earning a knighthood or a title.

  Defections only became a problem after both sides had raised armies. Once the king labeled the Reformers as Rebels, and labeled their cause as a treasonous rebellion, wealthy men began to fear being charged with treason, at a cost of their lives, their titles, and their estates. Once Parliament began running the kingdom through ordinances (laws not signed or sealed by the king) they countered the king by also threatening lords with charges of treason.

  9. Why were the casualties so heavy with the enlisted men yet so light with the officers?

  Civil wars catch family members on each side, which is what makes them so grief ridden. The officers and cavalry were drawn from the wealthy classes. Great care was taken by the officers on both sides to spare wealthy looking men, just in case they were related. No such care was taken with the enlisted men, many of whom had been pressed into service and were viewed as individually unimportant.

  As the wealthy tended to be well mounted and well armoured, they had a fighting advantage over the enlisted men. Rather than cavalry companies charging each other with the risk of the mutual slaughter of wealthy relatives, the cavalry tended to charge at and slaughter the enlisted men. At Edgehill, for instance, the casualty numbers were high because Prince Rupert's heroic cavalryers charged into unarmed carters, porters, kitchen workers, and camp followers rather than risk injury to themselves and their expensive horses by charging into formations of pikemen and musketeers.

  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. Since the shareholder list of that company parallels the list of leading 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 colonel chosen to chase the king's men out of Sussex.

  11. Did Waller invent petards?

  No and Yes. The French invented such mines in the 1500's and called them petards, meaning breaking wind. In 1642 Waller's own flying army was moving too quickly for cannons to keep up with them, so he used petards to great effect in blowing down gates, doors, and walls of castles. All you needed was five or ten pounds of gunpowder in a metal container which directs the force of the explosion and a fuse cord to set it off.

  When lose, gunpowder burns and flashes, but does not explode. To cause an explosion you must contain the flash gasses, for instance, in the barrel of a gun. For a petard mine, even a cooking pot will do as a container, with the mouth of the pot flat against the gate and the base of the pot wedged in place so it doesn't easily fly backwards. The theory is simple. You must make it easier for the explosive gasses to blow through the gate than blow the pot backwards. For Waller to have used them so successfully, there must not have been common knowledge about what they were or how they worked amongst castle guards.

  12. Was Waller really called William the Conqueror?

  William the Conqueror was the name that the Fleet Street news sheets gave to Colonel William Waller after his string of successes against the king's regiments in Sussex. Speculation is that he was given this nickname because he was taking the same cities and towns that the Conqueror took in 1066, as that is the only similarity between the two men.

  Both William Waller and William of Normandy were trained and successful as a military commanders, yes, but Waller lacked the ruthlessness to be a conqueror. He was known for forbidding slaughter, restricting looting, and for treating his prisoners well and (too often) freeing them and sending them home. The king's regiments must have trusted his reputation, because they were not afraid to surrender to him even without specific terms of surety. These easy surrenders saved countless lives and injuries in 1642/43 ... and not just amongst enlisted men, but also amongst non-combatants.

  William of Normandy, on the other hand, was very much a ruthless conqueror. On the day he invaded in 1066, England was very much an Anglo-Danish kingdom and London was the largest Danish city on earth and York was the second largest. For the duration of his reign he waged a focused campaign of genocide against the forty percent of the population who were Anglo-Danes. This genocide was so complete that his sons inherited an Anglo-Saxon kingdom where the northern third of the kingdom (the Danelaw) was a barren wasteland.

  For anyone interested in the heroic resistance of the Anglo-Danes to William the Conqueror, reading my HOODSMAN series of historical adventure novels is a MUST.

  13. How were military prisoners treated in 1642 England?

  In Germany and Ireland the Protestant armies were fighting Catholic armies, so the fate of military prisoners was hateful and sordid. In England the armies were both Protestant (of varying degrees) while Catholics masqueraded as protestants, so prisoners were better treated than those of the continent.

  Since the winter of 1642/43 was bitter, however, simply withholding food and warmth from prisoners could cause their death. Keep in mind that when a soldier was first captured they were dismount, disarmed, and then robbed of anything of value, including
boots and clothing.

  Despite his piety, King Charles was not a forgiving man, and his right hand, Prince Rupert, used the vicious German tactics of terror and human shields. Thus the prisoners of the royalists tended to be abused. Unless you were wealthy enough to be held for ransom, the abuse could include beatings, maimings, slavery, or being pressed into the king's service. Food and medical attention were scarce in the king's army, although there was always enough for "those of good breeding” and the "cavalry core” of the king's army. Prisoners were at the bottom of the pecking order.

  Parliament's rebel army took far better care of their prisoners, including food, warmth, and medical care. This made sense since royalists of good breeding would have relatives in the rebel army, and since it was hoped that enlisted men would change sides and join "the good old cause". It was often the case that commoners were simply disarmed and sent home, especially if they were pressed men who lived nearby. Those of good breeding were more likely to be held for ransom.

  Ransom by either side was more about holding hostages than raising money. Hostages to force wealthy families to change sides, or to stay neutral. Hostages to stop the other side from executing a prisoner for treason. Hostages to be traded. Hostages as a source of intelligence.

  14. How did non-combatants fare in 1642 England?

  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 two armies 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, in the name of the king. Parliament generally paid for what they needed, but they often paid with the proceeds from looting great estates.

  The king's army would freely loot any house, village, or town that was accused of helping the rebels. The rebel army tried to constrain their looting to the estates of the wealthiest royalists. As that included all of the hated bishops, it was normal for the rebels to loot Cathedrals, their compounds, and the bishops' many palaces. Note that there was a huge difference in effect between the rebels looting the wealthy, and the royalists looting villagers. This because the winter of 1642/43 was brutal, and life would have been hard enough for villagers even if the king's army had not taken everything from them.