Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

238 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

and directed Byron to take his precious convoy to the king in Shrewsbury. To

cover his withdrawal he positioned about 1,000 horse and dragoons in the

vicinity of Powick Bridge, two miles south-west of the city. Essex meanwhile

had sent Colonel John Brown ahead with a roughly equal number of dra-

goons to clear his advance, and on 23 September Brown unexpectedly ran

into Rupert’s skilfully posted rearguard. Brown was desperately keen to

attack, and though his troop commanders, who included three MPs, advised

caution he overrode them. He did not know that he was taking on not only

Rupert in person but his brother Prince Maurice and such skilled command-

ers as Byron and Henry Wilmot. His men were caught in a deﬁle, and when

Rupert charged them the result was very soon a rout. He lost at least ﬁfteen

ofﬁcers and many more soldiers, including ﬁfty or more taken prisoners.

Few actions involving only 2,000 men have been so much written about as

Powick Bridge, but its signiﬁcance really was disproportionate to its scale. It

came at a time when many still doubted the king’s ability to ﬁeld an army cap-

able of engaging the parliament’s, and its effect on the morale of both sides

altered the terms on which they met in their ﬁrst major battle a month later.

It also launched Rupert’s English reputation. The prince was only twenty-

three, but he had commanded a cavalry regiment when he was sixteen, and in

addition to his prowess in the ﬁeld he was a serious student of fortiﬁcation,

siege warfare, and the use of artillery. Three years as a prisoner of war in the

castle of Linz on the Danube had given him leisure for study, and may have

sharpened the pricklier side of his nature. He was not an easy colleague in the

king’s council of war, and his attitude to the civilian population smacked too

much of the German campaigns in which he had learnt his profession. His

capacity to take overall charge of an army in a major battle was, and remains,

an open question, but he was beyond doubt a formidable and charismatic

leader of cavalry, and his devotion to his uncle’s cause was complete.

Essex duly entered Worcester the day after the clash at Powick Bridge, and

he stayed there for over three weeks. Despite his earnest injunctions to his

ofﬁcers to maintain discipline, his men plundered the houses of nearby

catholic gentlemen and systematically vandalized the cathedral. They demon-

strated their godly horror of superstition by urinating in the font, ripping

down the organ, breaking every statue within sight, and relieving themselves

as and when they felt inclined. When the royalists reoccupied the city later in

the year they were naturally appalled by the sacrilege and the stench. This sort

of behaviour is so commonly attributed to ‘Cromwell’s soldiers’ that it is

worth mentioning that none of his troops were with Essex in Worcester and

Cromwell himself was far away. His men were not guiltless of iconoclasm,

but it was, regrettably, a characteristic of parliament’s forces generally and by

no means peculiar to his command.

Worcester and Shrewsbury are only ﬁfty miles apart, and it is a measure of

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 238

The Blast of War 239

both sides’ limited eagerness for battle that their armies remained rooted so

close to each other for nearly three weeks before either sought the other out.

The king moved ﬁrst, on 13 October, and he boldly set his march towards

London. Essex left Worcester on the 19th, only when he knew where the

royal army was heading. Charles had never lacked the will to ﬁght, but it was

only now that he felt that he had the means to do so. He set off with about

6,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 1,500 dragoons (mounted troops who

normally fought on foot), and by the time the three Lancashire regiments

joined him in the Midlands his army totalled about 14,000. Numerically it

was almost a match for Essex’s, but it was indifferently equipped, despite the

recent arrival of a large convoy of weapons purchased on the continent; many

of the Welsh foot were armed only with pitchforks and clubs.

For days the two armies groped their way towards each other, neither with

much knowledge of the other’s movements. Essex naturally intended to place

his between the royalists and London, but he seems to have thought mis-

takenly that the king was aiming to attack Banbury and he marched to its relief.

Charles had marginally better intelligence and the advantage of Rupert’s

sense of terrain, so on the prince’s advice he formed up his army, early on Sun-

day the 23rd, on the ridge of Edgehill near Kineton, across the road from

Warwick to Banbury and Oxford. When Essex learnt where the enemy really

was, just as he was about to go to church at eight in the morning, he found

that the king’s forces were ranged in line of battle between him and London,

instead of the other way round. He did not want to ﬁght, since he was expect-

ing to be joined next day by John Hampden with three foot regiments and

eleven troops of horse, the force which had relieved Lord Brooke and War-

wick Castle. But he had no choice, and even without Hampden’s brigade he

was not outnumbered, though the royalist cavalry was superior both in

strength and quality. Seeing that the royal army had moved forward from the

steep slopes of Edgehill to positions just forward of the village of Radway, he

deployed his own half way between it and Kineton, facing south-east.

There had been an acrimonious dispute between Lindsey, the king’s gener-

al, and Rupert as to the battle formation to be adopted. Lindsey favoured the

Dutch order that he had learnt in the service of Maurice of Nassau, Rupert the

more complex Swedish model which had been highly effective in Gustavus

Adolphus’s armies but required more training and expertise than their present

forces could boast. Charles eventually ruled in Rupert’s favour, whereupon

Lindsey said that ‘since His Majesty thought him not ﬁt to perform the ofﬁce

of Commander-in-Chief, he would serve him as a colonel’, and asked that his

own regiment of foot be posted opposite Essex’s. He fought at its head, and in

the bitter infantry battle that followed he was mortally wounded.

The basic formation of both armies was the usual one of the period, with the

infantry in the centre and most of the cavalry on either wing. After an hour or

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 239

240 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

so of rather ineffective cannonading, Rupert on the king’s right launched the

battle proper with a cavalry charge which completely broke the parliamentar-

ian horse opposite him. Almost simultaneously Henry Wilmot, the king’s

Commissary-General, led an equally successful charge on the left wing. Both

commanders chased the ﬂeeing parliamentarian cavalry to Kineton and

beyond. It was always difﬁcult to halt victorious horsemen in the full excite-

ment of a pursuit, with the prospect of booty before them, and most of these

were in their ﬁrst ﬁght; but it was deplorable that Byron, commanding

Rupert’s second line of cavalry, joined with it in the chase instead of turning it

against the now almost unprotected parliamentarian infantry. He might have

won the battle decisively for the king. What is most striking about Edgehill,

however, is not that both sides lacked the professional skill and discipline to

bring it to a decisive conclusion, for that was to be expected so early in the

war, but that most of the infantry on both sides fought with extraordinary

tenacity and bore heavy casualties. Essex had kept two cavalry regiments in

reserve, and one of them under his Scottish Lieutenant-General, Sir William

Balfour, inﬂicted such losses on the exposed royalist foot that they might have

broken if Rupert and his troops had not returned in time to prevent a rout. The

two armies broke off only when darkness was falling, having fought them-

selves to a standstill. Both spent the night in the ﬁeld; Essex and the king both

took what sleep they could close to their men, and both decided next morning

not to renew the ﬁght. More perhaps hinged on the outcome of this battle than

of any other before Naseby, and there is a kind of natural justice, given the

state of feeling in the country generally, in the fact that it was indecisive.

Militarily the honours were fairly even, but Charles had the potentially

great advantage that the road to London lay open to him. He was in no hurry

to take it, however; there were many dead to bury and even more wounded to

be tended. He secured Banbury on the 27th, and shortly after occupied

Oxford, which was to be his headquarters for the rest of the war. Essex had no

thought of pursuing him, but drew back to Warwick to rest his battered army.

Casualties and (still more) desertions had reduced it to about half its initial

strength, despite its reinforcement by Hampden’s brigade. At Westminster the

will to ﬁght was wavering; the Lords voted to reopen peace negotiations, and

on 2 November the Commons concurred. Without yet knowing this, Charles

set off next day on a march for Reading, with London as his obvious ﬁnal

objective. At Reading, he snubbed the parliament’s peace initiative by refusing

to admit one of its commissioners, Sir John Evelyn, on the ground that he had

just proclaimed him a traitor. Without waiting for its response, he authorized

Rupert to clear his way to London by attacking Brentford.

Essex meanwhile brought his army back to London by way of Watling

Street, and received a hero’s welcome on arriving there on the 7th. He posted

the regiments of Denzil Holles (who had fought very bravely at Edgehill) and

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 240

The Blast of War 241

Lord Brooke in Brentford, but Rupert’s ﬁerce onslaught on the 12th drove

them out with heavy losses, hard though they resisted. When he had taken the

town, Rupert gave it over to his soldiers to sack. This put a strange gloss on a

gracious message that the king had sent to parliament the day before, promis-

ing to receive its peace proposals wherever he might be and suggesting Wind-

sor as the place of negotiation. From now on his pragmatic attitude to peace

overtures deceived only those whose wishes dimmed their judgement.

Brentford was little more than ten miles from London, and the closeness of

the threat caused great consternation there; but it also aroused a strong spirit

of resistance. Essex left at once to organize what was left of his army, and he

ordered an immediate rendezvous of all the troops in the London area—his

own, the City trained bands, and any other able-bodied citizens who could

appear in arms—at Turnham Green, halfway between Brentford and West-

minster. Thousands of apprentices responded enthusiastically to the call, as

did many militiamen from Hertfordshire, Essex, and Surrey. About 24,000

men mustered in all, almost as many as the combined parliamentary and Scot-

tish armies at Marston Moor, and far more than either side brought to any

other Civil War battleﬁeld. These were not all trained soldiers, of course, but

Essex and Major-General Skippon, the commander of the City trained bands,

posted them in effective defensive positions among small enclosures, with

musketeers lining the hedges to deter a cavalry attack and with well emplaced

guns covering every road and passage. Skippon rode round his companies,

exhorting them in homely terms that spoke from the heart to the heart. Essex

too made the round of the defenders, accompanied by members of both

Houses, and the soldiers threw their caps in the air, shouting ‘Hey for old

Robin!’ It was a Sunday, but they did not go hungry, for their wives and girls

made picnics of their Sunday dinners, which were trundled out to Turnham

Green in nearly a hundred carts, along with quantities of beer and sack. The

king’s army confronted this display of genuine and formidable popular resist-

ance for some hours, and Essex’s guns ﬁred a few shots at it; then it drew off.

The sheer numbers and the disadvantageous terrain would have made an

assault extremely hazardous, and even if Rupert had carried it, his and the

king’s problems would barely have begun. The royal forces caused some fur-

ther alarm by taking Kingston, but Charles returned to Oxford on the 23rd,

and he did not leave it again for another six months. His army did not remain

entirely inactive, for Wilmot stormed and sacked Marlborough on 5 Decem-

ber, and Rupert did the same to Cirencester on 2 February.

Essex for his part thought of nothing but defence during the winter months.

His army very quickly wore out its welcome in the capital, for his men were

so extremely disorderly that parliament promptly passed an ordinance sub-

jecting them to martial law, which despite the Petition of Right gave him

powers of life or death over them. He set up his headquarters at Windsor, and

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 241

242 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

he established garrisons in such important cities as Bristol, Gloucester,

Exeter, Plymouth, Southampton, and Dover, but as time wore on a growing

war party at Westminster began to murmur at his evident unwillingness to

carry the war to the king.

Against most people’s expectations, the ﬁrst brief campaign of the war had

gone better for Charles than for the parliament. Indeed if full use had been

made of the superiority of his cavalry at Edgehill, the battle could have been

clearly won for him. But would even the clearest of victories in one battle have

decided the outcome of the war, as so many of his subjects on both sides

hoped? It is most improbable. The moral effect would have been great, but

the forces under the direct command of the two commanders-in-chief were

only a fraction of those under arms in the country as a whole, and if either

army had gone down to total disaster at Edgehill—which was unlikely, given

the limited military proﬁciency of both—the other side would still have had

men enough in its regional forces to carry on the struggle. At the end of 1642

the king was perhaps marginally better placed, with the Earl of Newcastle in

the northern counties, Sir Ralph Hopton in the south-west, and the still

scarcely tapped fund of loyalty in Wales to draw upon, but if Essex had been

the loser the Scots would not willingly have let the parliament suffer total

defeat; and parliament too had its regional forces.

In Yorkshire they were raised and led by Ferdinando Lord Fairfax, with his

son Sir Thomas in command of the horse, but hostilities in the county had

been suspended in the early autumn while some of its leading gentry, mainly

from the West Riding, negotiated a treaty of neutrality. This was intended to

isolate Yorkshire from any war that might develop elsewhere, and it was an

early example of a series of such treaties. Lord Fairfax and the king’s local

commander, the Earl of Cumberland, both approved it, though Fairfax stipu-

lated that it must be subject to parliament’s consent. Among those who signed

it near Leeds on 29 September were members of parliament on both sides

and the fathers of two outstanding statesmen of the next reign, the Earl of

Danby and the Marquis of Halifax. But parliament could not tolerate such

a challenge to its claimed right to determine national policy, and it was

denounced nearer home by the Hothams, father and son, who had deﬁed the

king in Hull and were still holding the city against Newcastle’s forces. The

Hothams were old rivals of the Fairfaxes, and deeply resentful of the author-

ity that had been given to them over the county’s forces. Sir John attacked the

treaty in a published declaration for presuming ‘to call the conclusions of

England before the bar of Yorkshire, and to indict a parliament (the greatest

council) before the judgement of some few gentlemen, and half of them

delinquents too’.

His son Captain Hotham reacted more physically by

Reasons Why Sir John Hotham Cannot Agree to the Treaty of Paciﬁcation . . . (1642).

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 242

The Blast of War 243

threatening the walls of royalist-held York and capturing Cawood Castle, the

archbishop’s seat. Archbishop Williams had been fortifying it at his own

expense, but he ﬂed to north Wales rather than stay and defend it. Yet one

wonders whether the Hothams were moved more by zeal for the parliamen-

tary cause or jealousy of the Fairfaxes. The son was in correspondence with

Newcastle by early January and the father before the end of April, by which

time he fully intended to betray Hull to the king.

Once parliament had condemned the neutrality treaty, a struggle for the

control of Yorkshire ensued between the Fairfaxes and Newcastle; the inef-

fectual Cumberland soon retired from the scene. Puritanism was strong

among the small clothiers of the West Riding towns, and they supported the

Fairfaxes with both men and money, especially in Bradford and Halifax. In

Leeds, however, they were held down for a time by a royalist ruling oligarchy,

whose authority rested on a charter granted by Charles in 1626, and who

now admitted a royalist garrison. Newcastle’s wealth and territorial inﬂu-

ence, coupled with his status as a privy councillor and (until recently) gover-

nor of the Prince of Wales, enabled him to raise a sizeable army, which

numbered about 8,000, including 2,000 horse, when he moved into York-

shire late in November. Captain Hotham, who had not yet changed sides,

tried in vain to deny him the passage of the Tees at Piercebridge, and Lord

Fairfax with about 1,500 men fought him at Tadcaster for most of the day on

7 December before having to fall back. By the end of the year the parliamen-

tarians still clung to Hull, Scarborough, Selby, Cawood, and most of the

clothing towns, and on 23 January Fairfax took Leeds by storm. But

Newcastle was master of most of the county and its coast, where he stood

ready to welcome the queen when she should land with a convoy of ships

carrying the munitions that she had purchased in the Netherlands. She ﬁrst set

sail on 6 January, but was driven back by storms.

Far away in the West Country the king’s lieutenant-general, the Marquis of

Hertford, was recruiting with more success after Charles had raised his stand-

ard than he had had earlier, when he had met with the spontaneous popular

resistance of the men of Somerset and adjacent parts. Operating from Sher-

borne, he engaged in rather desultory hostilities against the local parliamen-

tarians, but late in September he embarked most of the men he had raised for

Wales, whence he marched them to join the king’s main army. He left behind,

however, his Lieutenant-General of Horse, Sir Ralph Hopton, who was soon

to prove himself one of the ﬁnest soldiers in all the king’s forces. He had seen

some professional service on the continent; he and Essex had been comrades

in arms in the English volunteer force that fought for the Elector Palatine.

Hopton was a moderate puritan, and as MP for Wells he had voted for

Strafford’s attainder, but he had subsequently rallied to the king with the

other constitutional royalists and had been expelled from parliament. After

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 243

244 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Hertford’s departure he took his small body of cavalry into Cornwall, where

the gentry on both sides had concluded a treaty of paciﬁcation similar to that

in Yorkshire. They indicted him for breaking the peace, and he willingly sub-

mitted to trial, for he aimed to win the county by persuasion rather than

coercion. He was acquitted; and when the Cornish royalist gentry indicted

their opponents in turn, the latter ﬂed the county to join their fellow-

parliamentarians in Devon. With Cornwall now ﬁrmly in royalist hands he

did a ﬁne job of recruiting, though most of his volunteers needed to be trained

from scratch.

Hopton found much less response, however, in Devon, a county with a

thriving and growing clothing industry, though that was only one basis of its

relatively strong parliamentarianism. In December his attempts to capture

Plymouth and Exeter were foiled by the local parliamentarian commander

Lord Ruthin, a Scottish professional—not to be confused with Patrick

Ruthven, another such, whom Charles had recently appointed as his com-

mander-in-chief in succession to Lindsey and made Earl of Forth. Ruthin was

checked in turn when he ﬁrst tried to carry the war into Cornwall. Hopton

was short of arms and money, but was saved when three parliamentarian

warships carrying both were driven by a storm into Falmouth on 17 January.

The windfall was timely, for Ruthin was advancing westward again. Hopton

joined battle with him at Braddock Down, between Lostwithiel and Liskeard,

and his Cornish infantry put their opponents to ignominious ﬂight; they cap-

tured at least 1,250 prisoners, many arms and ﬁve pieces of artillery. It was

the ﬁrst of a string of brilliant victories for Hopton, but for the present the

urge for peace among the western gentry was still strong. They agreed a truce

on 28 February, and soon afterwards a serious negotiation opened between

the Cornish royalists and Devonian parliamentarians; it was even proposed

to extend it to Dorset and Somerset. Hopton agreed to it because he hoped it

would neutralize the south-west while he took his own army to join the

king’s, and though that was not to come about the cessation of arms did not

ﬁnally end until 22 April.

Other local commanders who played a signiﬁcant part in the war will come

into our story later, but one who earned a national reputation in its early

months was Sir William Waller. Now in his mid-forties, he had as a young

man fought with the English volunteers in the Elector Palatine’s service along-

side Essex and Hopton, but he was no more a professional soldier than they

were. A strong though moderate puritan, he was currently MP for Andover

and a colonel of horse in Essex’s army. Essex sent him with a small force to

reduce Portsmouth, which Goring was holding for the king, and after a three-

week siege Goring surrendered to him on 5 September. During the next four

months Waller went on to capture Farnham Castle, Marlborough, Winches-

ter (which he gave over to plunder, and did not hold for long), Arundel

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 244

The Blast of War 245

Castle and Chichester. On his triumphant return the London citizens hailed

him as ‘William the Conqueror’, and parliament made him Sergeant-Major-

General of Gloucestershire, Bristol, Somerset, and Wiltshire, with ﬁve new reg-

iments of horse and ﬁve of foot under his command. He received his

commission from Essex, but during the next year and more he came to be seen

by the war party as not so much a subordinate of the Lord General as an alter-

native commander. He was soon to be pitched against his old friend Hopton,

with whom he could scarcely have imagined a quarrel two years earlier. They

had been contemporaries at Oxford, as well as in the wars together; their

estates were in neighbouring counties, and until well into 1641 they had both

seemed typical Country MPs.

To explain how the Civil War came about it has been necessary to focus ﬁrst

on the breakdown of political relations at the centre and the activities of the

armed forces that the king and the parliament raised. This has involved con-

centrating on the committed activists on both sides: on the politicians at

Westminster who took the crucial decisions (though not all peers and MPs

were activists); on the king and his close entourage, and others strongly linked

to the crown by service or patronage; on passionate puritans on the one side

and passionate anti-puritans, whether Anglican or Roman Catholic, on the

other; and on soldiers old and new who found their métier when the quarrel

escalated into war. But such activists were still not typical of England, let

alone of Britain, as a whole.

Very many of the country gentry, and still more of the middling sort, could

not understand why the king and parliament could not come to an ‘accom-

modation’, since their public declarations spoke so fair. There seemed to be

so much common ground between them. The actual outbreak of hostilities

heightened most people’s sense that civil war was the worst of evils, for the

year 1642 had seen a marked increase in riots against enclosures, many

attacks on gentlemen’s houses, frequent panics over popish plots, much icon-

oclasm by both puritan fanatics and soldiers, and a great deal of law-

breaking by ill-disciplined troops. There was a widespread fear of a general

breakdown of order. This kind of reaction did not usually express indiffer-

ence to the issues between the two sides, but rather a feeling that war was not

the way to settle them. Those who shared it tended to put their local commu-

nity’s interests ﬁrst and to try to exempt it from war’s ravages, in the hope that

the antagonists on the national stage could come to their senses and to some

agreed terms. There were attempts to negotiate pacts of neutrality in twenty-

two English counties—well over half, that is—and in many towns.

The com-

monest type was that we have seen in Yorkshire, where leading men of both

John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces (1999), ch. 1, esp. pp. 52–7.

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 245

246 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

sides suspended the execution of the Militia Ordinance and the commissions

of array, and bound themselves to renounce all hostilities. But there were

some more ambitious initiatives in counties, notably Cheshire, Staffordshire,

and Lincolnshire, where moderate men dominated the commission of the

peace and used their collective authority not only to demilitarize their terri-

tory but to raise a third force in order to resist any who attempted to invade

it. And lest it be thought that neutralism was most to be found in the sleepier

and less committed parts of rural England, it was widespread in the puritan

and parliamentarian heartland of the east—in Essex, Hertfordshire, Cam-

bridgeshire, Norfolk, and most of all in Suffolk.

The local paciﬁcations were predictably doomed to failure. The parliament

could not allow whole counties to opt out of its war effort, and though the

king posed as the friend of peace and took tactical advantage of such over-

tures as were made to him, he had his mind too ﬁrmly set on victory to treat

them seriously for long. Activists might be a minority in the political nation,

but once they had the sword in their hand their will prevailed. There was

never a chance that a locally organized militia could keep out increasingly

professional armies, if they felt a need to enter ‘paciﬁed’ territory. On the par-

liamentary side, the winter of 1642–3 saw the establishment of county com-

mittees with such varying responsibilities as overseeing the maintenance of

troops in the area, the raising of various dues, and the impressment of

recruits. Comparable though less systematic institutions emerged in royalist

territory, with the result that the local gentry, including the magistracy, found

themselves increasingly subject to direct commands from one side or the

other, and in disputed territory from both. They might choose which to obey,

but it was not practicable for JPs, who bore a responsibility to the whole local

population, to defy both.

Sir William Waller gave a typical parliamentarian activist’s view of local

neutrality pacts in a letter to a knight of Devon who had been involved in

negotiating the south-western one:

There can be nothing more destructive to the kingdom and their own counties than

these treaties. The kingdom will lose by this neutrality the strength which might have

been derived from your county, and in this way . . . His majesty will with the more ease

subdue our party in the ﬁeld . . . and then all the privileges these poor counties shall

obtain that sate down ﬁrst will be to be devoured last.

Yet Waller himself had taken up arms with no light heart, and he was soon to

give poignant expression to his sense of the tragic nature of the conﬂict which

engulfed his country. There was to come a point in his campaign against

Hopton, in June 1643, when he was in a tight corner and Hopton wrote to

Quoted in Mary Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, 1642–1660

(Oxford, 1933), p. 56.

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 246

The Blast of War 247

him to suggest a personal meeting, no doubt to urge him to consider suing for

terms. Waller’s letter of refusal has become justly famous, but it is worth

repeating in part because it says so nobly what many who fought on both

sides must have felt:

Certainly my affections to you are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate

my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. . . . I

should most gladly wait on you according to your desire, but that I look upon you as

you are engaged in that party, beyond a possibility of retreat. . . . And I know the con-

ference could never be so close [i.e. secret] between us, but that it would take wind and

receive a construction to my dishonour. That great God, which is the searcher of my

heart, knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service, and with what a perfect

hatred I detest this war without an enemy, but I look upon it as opus domini [the

Lord’s work], which is enough to silence all passion in me. The God of peace in his

own time send us peace, and in the mean time ﬁt us to receive it: we are both upon the

stage and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a

way of honour, and without personal animosities; whatsoever the issue be, I shall

never willingly relinquish the dear title of

Your most affectionate friend and faithful servant.

On the royalist side, an even greater hatred of the war, united to a sense that

a man of honour could not opt out of it, was soon to drive Lord Falkland to

seek and ﬁnd death in battle.

From the ﬁrst winter of the war onward, men of substance found them-

selves under increasing pressure to declare themselves for one side or the

other, whether they wished to or not. Few can have been so lucky as the Mid-

lands parson who wrote in his parish register: ‘When an uncivil war was being

waged most ﬁercely between king and parliament throughout the greater part

of England, I lived well because I lay low’.

Those who did not meet the

demands for money, horses, provisions, and services by the county committee

or by the king’s agents were liable to have their goods distrained, or were sim-

ply plundered. Landowners who regularly supported the royalists, even if

they had little choice, were liable to have their estates seized by the parlia-

ment’s Sequestration Committee, established in March 1643, and to have to

redeem them after the war by paying a heavy ‘composition’.

Yet neutralism did not die with the collapse of the early paciﬁcation treaties,

and a surprising number even of the gentry managed to avoid outright

commitment. Deﬁant neutrality, however, was less common than a pre-

paredness to co-operate just far enough with whichever side had local military

dominance to avoid actual plunder or worse. There were some communities

Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, p. 77.

Quoted in D. R. Guttery, The Great Civil War in Midlands Parishes (1950), p. 11.

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 247