Pistoleer: Invasion
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Since it is normal to hide or protect things from looters, many non-combatants were beaten. Since the king's army was far more prone to looting the townsfolk, they were also more prone to raping the women. In Germany rape was viewed as just another form of looting, but Prince Rupert's heroic flying army took it one step further by forcing women to cooperate by threatening their families. The rebel army had a different attitude from the gentlemen royalists. The rebels were mainly townsfolk where (prior to and during the Civil War) prostitution was pervasive, so they were well used to paying for sex. The royalists were "old school” who took sex as their right.
15. Were the Clan MacLeod guarding the walls of Chichester for the royalists?
Quick answer: Maybe
Accounts from both sides applaud the company of Scots that guarded Chichester's walls for the royalists. I could find nothing more about them, such as who they were, how they got there, and what happened to them. From logical conjecture, they were highland Scots from the west coast. These highlanders took Charles’s side during the Bishops war with the Covenanters. Charles used the Scottish and Irish rebellions as an excuse to gather an army in England, which led to the Army Plot (a failed coup d'etat of the English parliament).
From the times of the Vikings there had always been a separation of peoples between the east coast lowlanders and the west coast highlanders. The west coast and Irish Sea were influenced by the rustic Vikings of the Norwegian fjords, while the east coast was influenced by the Byzantine connected Vikings of Denmark and the Baltic. During the Norman genocide of the Anglo-Danes, the east coast became influenced by the Normans. The Norse kept their influence on Northern Ireland and the West Coast for a few centuries longer. This means that Northern Ireland and the islands and highlands of the west coast shared culture, peoples and clans.
The Macleods were a leading clan that spread across all of these regions. The Macleods would therefore have taken part in Charles’s army in England, and in the Scottish armies that were sent to Ireland to quell the rebellion there. So, were the Scots on Chichester's walls western highlanders? Very, very likely. Would they have included Macleods? Very likely. Would they have been shipped from Chichester to Ireland? Very likely for this would solve two problems for parliament. It would get them out of England, where they were not wanted, and would put them in Ireland where they could support the other Scots who were quelling the rebellion under the command of the Covenanters at the request of both the king and the English parliament.
16. Did Queen Henrietta really steal the crown jewels and pawn them?
Quick answer: Yes.
Ever since William the Conqueror there has been a misunderstanding by the kings about what is theirs, personally, and what belonged to the Crown. The Crown is the sum total of everything that "belonged in common to everyone” that was administered but not owned by the king. The crown jewels did not belong to Charles and Henrietta despite their frequent claims to the contrary.
Henrietta physically took the crown jewels into her possession and claimed them as hers, with her husband's permission but without the permission of Parliament. In a day when you could still be hung for stealing a horse, she should have been hung. She fled England (where she was hated as the Catholic witch who was ruining the kingdom) to The Hague in Holland, with the crown jewels in hopes of selling them. She was able to sell some of the smaller pieces, however she was unable to sell the well known signature pieces. Those she used as security for loans worth far less than the jewels. In other words, she pawned them.
As a side note, various kings have gone to extreme measures to steal crown land from the English public. William the Conqueror enacted the Forest Law, which claimed all wild land on his behalf. By the time of Henry VIII there was too little useful common land left for him to steal, so instead he stole all of the land belonging to the Monasteries (the second largest land owner after the Crown). Under the Stuart regime, allowing drainage projects to be considered 'enclosures' allowed the Stuarts to steal common wet lands. More recently a prime minister was knighted because he had "forced” the royal family to pay taxes on Crown property, thus giving the royal family a modern legal claim to the property.
17. Why did Henrietta flee to The Hague rather than to Paris?
Quick answer: She was delivering her daughter Mary to be married to William, the son of the Prince of Orange.
Henrietta would have been welcome in every royal court in Europe, for she was well connected. She was the Catholic queen consort of the (supposedly Protestant) King of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. She was the daughter of Catherine de Medici of Florence, once the Queen of France, and sister to the ailing King of France. Charles’s sister Elizabeth was the Queen of Bohemia in exile in The Hague, Holland. As a Catholic monarch in a Protestant kingdom Henrietta also had access to the courts of Rome, Vienna, and Madrid.
Henrietta had multiple missions on the continent.
* To deliver Mary to the court of Fredrick, the Prince of Orange in Holland to seal a Stuart-Nassau alliance.
* To turn millions of pounds worth of stolen jewels into coin for Charles.
* To buy military supplies and hire a foreign army.
* To charter a convoy of ship to carry supplies and men to England.
Meanwhile, Charles was sending secret offers of alliances to every court in Europe, despite most of these courts being at war with each other due to the ongoing 30 year conflagration.
Henrietta chose Holland because:
* That was where the Orange court was.
* That was where her sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth was.
* That was where the English nobility had fled to.
* That was where the biggest jewelry market in Europe was (because Hebrews were welcome in Holland).
* The place was awash in wealth from the Dutch Banks, Stock Markets, and the India Companies.
* She did not trust Cardinal Richelieu who was running France on behalf of her brother.
18. Was Henrietta's invasion carried to Bridlington by the Dutch Navy?
No and yes. The invading army and the supplies were carried on chartered Dutch cargo ships. Those ships were escorted by the Dutch Navy under Admiral Maarten Tromp. There were seven cargo ships and eight navy ships, so it was a formidable convoy. That Dutch treachery was the beginning of a long slow decay of the trust that the English people had in their long time allies, the Dutch republics. This decay spawned the First Anglo Dutch War of 1652-54 which was mostly an ongoing series of sea battles between fleets under Admiral Tromp and under Admiral Robert Blake. Blake won the last of these battles when Tromp was killed.
19. Where was Henrietta when the English fleet was bombarding Bridlington?
According to Henrietta's letters to Charles, when the bombardment began she was sleeping in a large house near to Bridlington pier. The house was targeted so she fled through the streets, eventually taking cover in the river ditch. A nearby sergeant was hit by shot. The bombardment lasted about two hours. Royalist apologists tell the story of her courageously going into a wrecked building to save a dog. It is quite believable that she would carry a dog to safety rather than a child, because she was of the same cut of female nobility who in the 1800's forbade the use of dogs for pulling carts in coal mines fully twenty years before they forbade the use of children under ten from pulling those same carts.
20. Was John Hotham, Parliament's governor of Kingston-upon-Hull, in negotiations with Henrietta to turn Kingston over to the king's forces?
According to Henrietta's letters to Charles, yes she was. Parliament removed Hotham from the governorship, but only after they had proof of his double dealings. Within a period of twelve months, Hotham was wanted for treason by both sides. He and his son John Jr were both hung.
21. Was Charles being two-faced in his dealings with the Dutch/French and the Austrian/Spanish alliances?
Yes, but this was nothing new. He had been doing this ever since 1628 after his wife's popish advisors paid John Felton t
o assassinate his closest advisor, the Duke of Buckingham. The worst instance was in 1639 after Dutch Admiral Tromp had destroyed the Spanish/Portuguese Armada. The armada was carrying troops from Spain to Dunkirk to bolster the Spanish army so that the Spanish Netherlands would not fall to the Dutch/French alliance. The Spanish troops fled from the ruined ships onto English shores, but instead of returning them to Spain, Charles had them transported to Dunkirk on English ships. Like most kings, his politics was all about what was good for his extended family rather than what was good for the kingdom or his subjects.
The same could be said of Fredrick, the Prince of Orange and protector of the Protestant faith. Had he supported England's Presbyterian Parliament rather than the Catholic Queen Henrietta, the Civil War would have been over in the winter of 1642/43, and England would have become either a constitutional monarchy or a republic. Either way they would have allied themselves to the Dutch republics, and that would have brought the vicious continental wars to an early end. Republics would have sprung up everywhere, millions of lives would have been saved, and the history of the world would have been very, very different. For instance, because English Royalists would have been exiled to the American colonies rather than English republicans, today the UK and Canada would be republics and the USA a kingdom.
THE END of Invasion Appendices
Be sure to watch for more adventures of The Pistoleer coming soon.
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The Pistoleer - Invasion by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-15