Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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which would suggest that about one in ten inhabitants of provincial cities and

towns were made homeless—and many more in the main theatres of war.

But it was not only in war-torn regions that people lost their homes, because

many were deliberately demolished before an enemy came near. Few towns

still had their medieval or Tudor defences intact, and some newer ones had

never had any. Where defensible walls survived, many buildings had gone up

outside them since the last serious ﬁghting in the Wars of the Roses, and these

gave cover to attacking troops and miners, or denied the defending gunners

or musketeers the clear ﬁeld of ﬁre that they needed. Many suburban

dwellings were pulled down when war broke out, sometimes by order of the

corporation, more often on the insistence of the local military commander.

And in most defended towns existing fortiﬁcations needed to be extended or

new ones created; bastions were built out from old walls and sconces erected

outside them. Usually this necessitated the demolition of dwelling-houses,

though in the suburbs some were so ﬂimsy that they could be taken down and

reerected elsewhere.

Damage by direct military action took many forms. Bombardment was

only one, and the slow rate of seventeenth-century cannon-ﬁre and the limit-

ed effectiveness of solid shot ﬁred at low velocity made it much less destruc-

tive than those who have been under modern aerial or artillery attack might

imagine. Fires were a greater menace, especially where thatched roofs were

the norm, and considerable use was made of red-hot shot to start them. Even

more effective, and more damaging to civilian morale, were the hollow iron

grenades ﬁlled with gunpowder or quick-burning material that were ﬁred

over the walls by large mortars with a high trajectory. But these were scarce

and very expensive weapons; Essex had only one mortar in 1643, as did Fair-

fax when the New Model ﬁrst took the ﬁeld, though by the end of the war he

could deploy six in an important siege. Fires were sometimes started by

attacking troops, if they had the wind behind them, in order to blind or choke

the defenders, and towns which refused terms of surrender were sometimes

torched in the aftermath of an assault, if it had proved costly in casualties. Yet

considering how combustible most houses were when timber, lath-and-

plaster and thatch were the commonest building materials, serious ﬁrestorms

were surprisingly rare and most ﬁres were more or less successfully contained.

Town corporations were well aware of the danger and made serious provi-

sion against it. The worst ﬁre in England during the war years, which

destroyed three hundred houses in Oxford in 1643, was started accidentally;

the war had nothing to do with it.

In the most heavily war-damaged towns it might be thirty years or more

before their stricken suburbs were fully rebuilt. Gloucester’s population had

338 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Stephen Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (Stroud, 1994), p. 66 and passim.

This and the following paragraphs are heavily indebted to Dr Porter’s excellent study.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 338

not recovered its pre-war level by the end of the century, and York’s was

about the same in the 1760s as in 1640, but this was partly because the tide of

economic expansion was passing these cities by. Elsewhere there was a great

deal of reconstruction in the 1650s and 1660s, and most of the material rav-

ages of war were repaired within a generation.

Some losses were of course irreparable, and the destruction wrought in

some cathedrals, whether by military action as in Lichﬁeld or bigoted icono-

clasm as in Ely, was tragic. Churches in defended towns quite often suffered

because their towers were manned by gunners and snipers, or because they

became the last refuge for a desperate garrison. Not all were rebuilt, and one

reason why some survive in ruins is that many towns had become over-

provided with churches by the 1640s. It is always worth checking whether the

smashing of medieval glass and statuary which the folk memory chalks up to

‘Cromwell’s soldiers’ can be justly blamed on them. Often it turns out to have

taken place in the ﬁrst wave of the Reformation nearly a century earlier,

under the aegis of Thomas Cromwell, and most of the deliberate wrecking

that did occur during the Civil War had the authority of a parliamentary ordin-

ance of August 1643 which commanded the general demolition of altars and

defacement of paintings and images. One of the parliamentary visitors who

executed this order, William Dowsing, destroyed more ecclesiastical treas-

ures in the two counties of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk than all the soldiery

of both sides in the whole course of the Civil Wars. This is not to excuse the

vandalism committed by parliamentarian troops, who had been taught to

regard cathedrals as centres of idolatry and did considerable damage to a

dozen of them, as well as to Westminster Abbey. But parish churches suffered

much less by them; of more than 9,000 in England and Wales they are known

to have despoiled fewer than thirty.

Castles and country houses suffered heavily during the wars, usually

because they were garrisoned. Most castles underwent the greatest damage

after the ﬁghting ceased, when they were deliberately made indefensible.

Some, like Banbury and Tickhill and Pontefract, were in large part demol-

ished, but more often they were ‘slighted’, which generally meant having their

outer walls destroyed while their living quarters were left relatively intact.

That was the fate of Kenilworth, Sudeley, Dudley, Denbigh, Montgomery,

Pembroke, and Raglan, among others. Many country houses too were gar-

risoned. The more important defended towns were commonly surrounded by

a ring of satellite garrisons, often in suitably sited mansions strengthened by

defensive works, and if the central stronghold had to be abandoned the satel-

lites were sometimes demolished so as to deny the enemy the use of them.

Between Two Wars 339

Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 109–10. St Paul’s may be added to the eleven cathedrals

named by Dr Gentles.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 339

Between 150 and 200 country houses are reckoned to have been destroyed,

including such a gem as Sir Baptist Hicks’s mansion in Chipping Campden. In

the later stages parliament made a conscious attempt to limit the damage.

Countermanding a county committee’s instructions to burn a great house in

order to prevent it from being occupied and defended by the royalists, the

Committee of Both Kingdoms stated in April 1646 that it did not ‘think it ﬁt

that all houses whose situation or strength render them capable of being

made garrisons should be pulled down. There would be then too many sad

marks left of the calamity of this war.’

There were sad marks enough, but

many country houses were rebuilt, and England was just entering upon her

most glorious age of domestic architecture. The loss was not as great as in the

case of medieval churches and castles, nor was the resultant distress to be

compared with that of the poor whom the war rendered homeless.

The country was deeply war-weary when the ﬁghting ended, but the

prospects of its ﬁnding relief in a generally acceptable peace were heavily

clouded. Superﬁcially, a settlement might seem not to have been too difﬁcult,

since the war had not been a clash between irreconcilable ideologies. Both

sides had professed to take up arms for much the same things: the rights and

privileges of parliament, the just powers and prerogatives of the king, the true

protestant religion, the fundamental laws of the land, and the liberties of the

subject. That went for the Scots too, though their conception of the true

protestant religion was different from that of most Englishmen. But the dif-

ferences went deeper than the public rhetoric suggested, and they had deep-

ened further with the years. In countries where government rested as much on

consent as it did in England and Scotland, a durable peace demanded from the

victors a certain magnanimity and a ﬁrm consensus about what they wanted,

and from the losing side a realistic willingness to accept the minimal conse-

quences of defeat. These desiderata were lacking in the Britain of 1646. The

political divergences within the parliamentarian ranks, and the gap between

the war aims of English and Scots, resulted in their jointly presenting the king

with harsher terms than he could reasonably have been expected to submit to;

while Charles was so dominated by his conviction that God would not let

rebels proper, and that to give up any of his regal powers would be a sin, that

his mind was closed to honourable terms even when (belatedly) they were

offered to him. He never gave up the hope of somehow renewing the war and

winning it.

The main line of political division at Westminster continued to lie between

the presbyterians and independents, but since the chief plank in the independ-

ents’ platform had been to ﬁght the war to a successful conclusion their

340 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Quoted in Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars, p. 63.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 340

ascendancy was much less secure after it was won. The New Model Army,

which was largely their creation, was still their ally, but it was the principal

cause of the continuingly heavy taxes, and a large reduction in its establish-

ment, and consequently in the excise and the assessment, became a popular

policy. It was eagerly taken up by the presbyterians, who had always re-

garded the army, and Cromwell in particular, as their enemies. This, as we

have seen, had forged a marriage of convenience between them and the Scots,

which had tied the millstone of a Presbyterian religious settlement round their

necks, though to be fair many of them embraced it with conviction. The popu-

larity that they enjoyed, especially in the City, as the party which sought to cut

military power and expenditure was, however, offset to some extent by

their denial of liberty of conscience to Anglicans, Independents, and sectaries

alike. The independents were also more interested in genuine constitutional

reform, which would render the king’s government permanently more

accountable to the people’s representatives, so long as ‘the people’ were not

too democratically deﬁned. The presbyterians were not entirely homo-

geneous, but Essex’s party was still a power among them, and most were less

concerned about reform than about ensuring that while the king remained

under harness the reins should be in the hands of the presbyterian magnates

and their clients. It was a paradox that while the presbyterians were the more

anxious to see the king back on his throne and the war machine dismantled as

soon as possible, they made demands regarding religion, the control of the

armed forces, and the appointment of the essential ofﬁcers of state that were

more unacceptable to him than those which the independents were prepared

to offer. For Charles, this was a chink in his enemies’ armour that he would

not be slow to probe.

He knew that the Scots distrusted the independents so intensely that they

had been prepared to consider going over to his side, but it is remarkable that

after all the months of Montreuil’s mission he still did not know on what

terms they would ﬁght for him when he put himself in their hands. Can he

have thought that his very presence would ﬁre their loyalty and unsheathe their

swords for him? If so he was soon disillusioned. They were amazed and de-

lighted to acquire so strong a bargaining counter as his royal person, but having

demanded and obtained his order for the surrender of Newark they took him

back to Newcastle with them, where they treated him with little ceremony. He

was very plainly a prisoner. He had not appreciated, though it should have

been obvious, that their commitment to high Presbyterianism was as strong as

his own to high Anglicanism, and that unless he would pledge himself to

impose at least the Westminster Assembly’s version of it on the whole English

nation they would not be prepared to help him. He had to endure weeks of

instruction in the true faith by Alexander Henderson, and much pressure

from the commissioners to convert to it. He began to regret his surrender, and

Between Two Wars 341

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 341

sent a request to Westminster that he should be allowed to come and negoti-

ate with parliament in person. But its members were steadily uncovering the

extent of his intrigues with the Scots, the French, and the Irish, and they went

on unhurriedly preparing their own peace terms. Argyll saw a danger that

England might come to a settlement with him that left the Scots out in the

cold, and he hastened to London to try and prevent it. Parliament’s peace

propositions were ready when he got there and, though they fell short of the

Covenanters’ full objectives regarding religious uniformity throughout

Britain, he and the Scottish commissioners accepted them without alteration.

Scottish fears of a separate English peace, and English suspicions of a deal

between Charles and the Scots, were thus allayed. There was no question of

inviting the king to Westminster, and the Propositions of Newcastle, as they

soon came to be called, were carried north to him by commissioners in

mid-July.

Although there was never a chance that he would accede to them, the

propositions deserve attention because for more than a year they were the

only peace terms to be formally put to him by either England or Scotland, and

they remained a basis for negotiation for longer than that. They were evi-

dently drawn up on the assumption that as a prisoner, defeated in war, he had

no choice but to bow to the victors’ demands. He was asked to swear and sign

the Solemn League and Covenant and to pass acts requiring all his subjects in

all three kingdoms to do the same. He must assent to further acts for the total

abolition of episcopacy, the reformation of religion according to the

Covenant, and the closest possible religious uniformity between England and

Scotland. An oath was to be imposed on all catholics, forcing them to for-

swear not only the pope’s supremacy but their central doctrinal tenets, the

object being to leave no loophole for church papists. Those who declined

it were to be automatically subject to the penalties of recusancy, and to hav-

ing their children compulsorily educated by protestants in the protestant

faith.

In secular matters, parliament was to have sole control of the armed forces

for twenty years, and the right to resume it at any later time when the two

Houses should declare the safety of the kingdom to be concerned. In twenty

years Charles would be 66, an age to which no King of England had lived

since Edward I. No peers made since 1642, nor any to be made in the future,

were to be admitted to parliament without the consent of both Houses.

All the major ofﬁcers of state and all the judges were to be nominated in

perpetuity by both Houses, and were to continue in ofﬁce quam diu se bene

gesserint (for so long as they conducted themselves satisfactorily). As for the

king’s supporters, a long list of both English and Scots were to be excluded

from pardon altogether, more were to be banned from the court and public

employment, and all active royalists were to lose varying proportions

342 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 342

of their estates, from two-thirds downwards, according to the degree of

their ‘delinquency’.

These were not all the humiliations that parliament proposed to inﬂict. A

king who submitted to so much that offended his deepest beliefs and his sense

of honour could have commanded no respect, and could have had none for

himself. The radical limitations of the historic royal prerogative went far

beyond what was necessary to prevent Charles from doing further mischief,

and the savage penalties and prescriptions proposed for the beaten royalists

might have been calculated to perpetuate divisions in the nation rather than

to heal them. One wonders how many of the authors of these propositions

had even considered what they would do if the king doggedly refused to

accept them. The terms were not even offered as a basis for negotiation, for

the delegates who brought them to him had to admit that they had no power

to treat, but only to take his answers back to parliament. He was under-

standably angry; ‘an honest trumpeter might have done as much’, he told

them. But Loudoun warned him that if he was intransigent he might end up

by being deposed, so his formal reply was to request time to consider and for

a safe conduct to London, so that he could negotiate in person.

That was not at the time a serious possibility, but it was the ﬁrst move in a

long stalling exercise from which he had much to gain. At Westminster, all the

presbyterians and nearly all the independents wanted him back on his throne,

and by playing them off against each other he stood a fair chance of securing

easier terms. As for the Scots, the strict Covenanters were demanding a price

that he was unwilling to pay, but Hamilton led a party of nobles and lairds

who were prepared to ﬁght for him without forcing his conscience, and their

time would come. He had an iron in the ﬁre too in Ireland, where after the

ﬁasco of the Glamorgan treaty Ormond was still negotiating, on his instruc-

tions, with delegates of the Confederates in Dublin. Hostile as Rinuccini was

towards Ormond and all he stood for, the nuncio was prepared to send 3,000

Irish troops to the relief of Chester, the last important town still holding out

for the king. Ormond did sign a treaty with the Confederate delegates in

March 1646, though nothing concrete was to come of it, since Chester sur-

rendered in February. The negotiators agreed to keep it secret for the time

being, but Ormond published it on 30 July. It was to divide the ranks of the

Confederates even further than they were split already, for its concessions fell

far short of what the clerical party wanted. It would have admitted catholics

to ofﬁce without taking the oath of supremacy, so long as they took the oath

of allegiance, but it referred the repeal of the penal laws to the king’s favour

and left all other matters of religion to be dealt with elsewhere. Rinuccini was

strongly opposed to the whole negotiation, and was furious when he heard

Between Two Wars 343

Full text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 290–306.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 343

that the treaty had been concluded, especially as he was not immediately

informed of the fact. There was also much consternation at Westminster that

Ormond had come so close to agreement with the catholic Irish, especially as

the news of it came close on the heels of a severe defeat that Owen Roe

O’Neill inﬂicted on Colonel Monro and his mainly Scottish forces at Benburb

(near Armagh) on 5 June. Six weeks later the Confederates captured Bunratty

and placed the important stronghold of Limerick under threat. These were

sharp reminders that the reconquest of Ireland could not be put off indef-

initely, and that England’s own affairs needed to be put in order before an

army could be released for the task. And before the problems of a peace

settlement were tackled, the ﬁrst Civil War was not quite over, for though the

last royalist garrison in England surrendered in August 1646, the king’s

banner still ﬂew over Holt, Chirk, and Harlech castles in Wales, and it was

not hauled down at Harlech until 13 March 1647.

In Ireland, Ormond’s treaty set the Supreme Council (which generally

favoured it) at odds with the clerical party (which decidedly did not). There

were three parties within the Confederation at this stage. Those who sought

peace with the king in return for access to public ofﬁce and de facto religious

toleration were mostly laymen and included most of the Old English ascend-

ancy, though they were by no means exclusively an Old English party, for no

sharp lines could be drawn between the Old English and Old Irish nobles

and gentry. They were intent on maintaining the king’s rights to his Irish

kingdom, even if he went down to defeat in England, though they expected

reasonable concessions in return for their loyalty. Opposed to them were the

clerical party which took its cue from Rinuccini, though not all the bishops

were equally ready to follow his lead, and O’Neill was not the only prominent

layman to support him; others of the Old Irish interest did likewise, not only

in Ulster, and so did a few ultra-catholic Old English. This party sought the

full restoration of the catholic church in Ireland and an independent Irish par-

liament. Rinuccini aimed at securing the enormous concessions which Henriet-

ta Maria’s representative Sir Kenelm Digby had agreed with Pope Innocent X,

regardless of the fact that Charles would never conﬁrm them. He was quite

prepared to contemplate the defeat of the king; indeed he reported to Rome

that it might actually help the cause, by uniting all Irish catholics against the

English parliament. His preferred tactic was to pursue the complete military

conquest of Ireland. Between these extremes there was for several years a

middle group, whose leading ﬁgure was Nicholas Plunkett, a lawyer trained

in Grays Inn, and the third son of Lord Killeen, an Old English Lord of the

Pale. Plunkett was elected chairman of every General Assembly except

the last, and he sat on every Supreme Council. He was a devout catholic (he

counted the inﬂuential Bishop French of Ferns among his allies), but in the

interests of unity, he and his group sought to moderate the positions assumed

344 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 344

by the other two parties, and for considerable stretches of time they held the

balance of power. At ﬁrst Plunkett supported the Ormond treaty, but eventu-

ally he gave his full backing to Rinuccini, seeing the greatest threat to Ireland

in a total victory for the English parliament.

Rinuccini did his best to wreck the Ormond treaty from the moment he

learnt of it. He ﬁrst got the majority of the bishops to sign a declaration, warn-

ing against the conclusion of any peace without his consent. He next sum-

moned a national synod to Waterford, where the assembled Irish clergy

pronounced an interdict on all places that accepted the treaty and excommu-

nicated anyone who gave it any public support. In September the members of

the Supreme Council who had promoted or encouraged it were imprisoned,

and a new Supreme Council of sixteen, chosen by the synod, was set up with

Rinuccini as its president. O’Neill fully accepted its authority, and supported

the nuncio’s plans to conquer the whole of Ireland, beginning with Dublin, by

military force. Thomas Preston, the commander of the army of Leinster, was

much less enthusiastic, partly because of his Old English lineage (his nephew

Viscount Gormanston’s title went back to 1478), and partly because he and

O’Neill had been personal and professional rivals in the Spanish army of

Flanders for a long time before their return to their native country. But for the

present Preston obeyed the Supreme Council’s commands, and the threat that

his forces and O’Neill’s posed to Dublin was immediate and formidable.

Faced with that threat, and with the likely rejection of the king’s authority

over Ireland that lay behind it, Ormond’s position became intolerable. It

would have been even more so if he had been aware that Charles had written

to Glamorgan on 20 July, offering virtually to pawn his Irish kingdom in

return for a large sum of money, and talking of coming over and putting

himself in Glamorgan’s and Rinuccini’s hands. Nor did Ormond know that

Rinuccini was manoeuvring to get him replaced as Lord Lieutenant by Gla-

morgan, who swore an oath of entire submission to the nuncio on 28 Septem-

ber. What he did know was that Charles had publicly repudiated the treaty

that Glamorgan had concluded on his behalf in the previous year. Faced with

an imminent attack on Dublin by the forces of Preston and O’Neill, it is

entirely understandable that Ormond, as a protestant and as the senior Irish

ofﬁcer of the crown, could not contemplate surrendering the city to a body of

rebels directed by an Italian servant of the pope, whose aims for Ireland

clashed heavily with the real interests of his royal master, as well as with those

of the Old English ascendancy that he represented. He therefore applied to

the English parliament for help in defending Dublin, and it sent over com-

missioners to negotiate with him. Before they arrived, however, the city came

under siege by the Confederate forces early in November.

It was not sustained. Rinuccini and O’Neill were afraid that Preston would

strike a deal with Ormond (as he was ultimately to do), and O’Neill ordered

Between Two Wars 345

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 345

him into winter quarters. Rinuccini backed the command with a threat of

excommunication, and since it was so late in the year for campaigning

O’Neill took his own troops into winter quarters. Their lawless and destruc-

tive behaviour outside their native Ulster made them widely unpopular, and

was denounced not only by the moderate Plunkett but by Rinuccini himself.

The immediate threat to Dublin collapsed, and the parliamentary commis-

sioners began a negotiation there with Ormond on 14 November. But he had

never contemplated unconditional surrender, and when he found them

unwilling to allow the king to be any kind of a party to whatever treaty they

might arrive at he broke it off, and they retired into Ulster. His conduct has

recently been severely criticized, and Rinuccini’s strategy of a total conquest

of Ireland justiﬁed as constituting ‘a pragmatic assessment of developments in

the three Stuart kingdoms’.

But Ormond faced extraordinary difﬁculties in

reconciling the opportunist tergiversations of his royal master (when he was

kept informed of them) with the true long-term interests of the house of

Stuart—not to mention his very sincere religious beliefs and his consciousness

of his position as senior Old English magnate. On the whole he behaved with

intelligence as well as with integrity. As for Rinuccini, his policy was not only

bound to alienate a considerable part of the population of Ireland, but it was

militarily unrealistic, for he grossly underestimated the power that England

could bring to bear against his forces once her own civil war was over—as to

all intents and purposes it was before he moved against Dublin.

The Scots were not as indifferent towards the king’s fate as Rinuccini was,

but for the time being they offered him little better prospect of armed assist-

ance. Argyll’s party continued to enjoy more support than Hamilton’s among

the nobles, lairds, and burgesses, and had the Kirk behind it. Since Charles

persistently resisted its pressure to impose Presbyterianism on his English

subjects, it came to regard him mainly as a bargaining counter for securing the

payment of England’s large debts for the maintenance of a Scottish army in

England—debts which continued to mount for as long as it remained there.

Charles came to see little prospect in his current situation beyond a possible

change of gaolers, and from the early summer onward he began to plan an

escape to France or Holland. To keep parliament interested in a possible

negotiation, and to play upon its divisions, he found means from September

onward of putting to it certain counter-proposals to those he had received at

Newcastle. He would consider parting with control of the armed forces for

ten years instead of twenty, and he would conﬁrm the Presbyterian Church of

England, now being established by ordinance, for three years, after which an

assembly of twenty Presbyterian divines, twenty Independents, and twenty

346 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Dublin, 1999), p. 107; see also

pp. 77 f., 106 f., 248–9. Though I differ from Dr Ó Siochrú on some points of interpretation, I am

much indebted to his work, especially concerning Plunkett and his middle group.

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 346

more of his own choosing should work out a ﬁnal settlement. How seriously

he intended these offers is doubtful, since he was simultaneously appealing to

his wife and to his daughter Mary, William of Orange’s wife, to provide the

means for his escape. He was unhappily at odds with Henrietta Maria, who

nagged him in her letters. She was impatient with his scruples about yielding

to the Scottish demand that he should enforce Presbyterianism in England,

which were making it harder for her to interest the French government in

helping him, and she was shocked by his offer to cede control of the armed

forces for ten years. Nevertheless a Dutch ship waited in New-

castle harbour all through the late autumn, ostensibly to have its hull cleaned

but really to carry him overseas. He hesitated, and when he did attempt a

getaway on Christmas Day it was bungled. From then on his guards were

doubled and his seaward escape route was patrolled by naval frigates.

He did not despair, because he had been receiving intelligence that large

parts of England and Wales wanted so much to see him restored that they

might be prepared to rise for him. It was not a vain hope, though it would be

more than a year before the time was ripe for insurrections. The impetus

behind this genuine popular discontent was not any great recrudescence of

ideological royalism but rather a yearning to return to the old ways for which

the monarchy stood in people’s eyes. The peace had brought no substantial

relief from crippling taxation, free quarter, the petty tyranny of county com-

mittees, and violence and plunder by ill-paid and mutinous soldiers. The New

Model’s discipline remained generally satisfactory, despite the fact that its

pay was now far in arrears, but Fairfax’s army accounted for less than half the

men under arms in the country, not counting the Scots. Between May and

September 1646 there were mutinies in no fewer than twenty-two English

counties and in several Welsh ones, and the local population usually suffered

through them.

Hostility to the New Model itself remained strong in the City of London,

which was always a centre of Presbyterianism, both religious and political,

and became even more so with the autumn elections to the Common Coun-

cil. The corporation petitioned parliament for the disbandment of the New

Model Army, complaining of the widespread disaffection within it towards

the new church government, and of the usurpation of pulpits by preaching

soldiers in order to infect the people with ‘strange and dangerous errors’. The

Lords welcomed the petition with ‘hearty thanks’ and had it printed; the

Commons received it coldly.

There had been an attempt by the party of

Essex, Holles, and Stapleton to build up Massey’s western brigade into a

self-sufﬁcient army, capable of counter-balancing Fairfax’s, but in October

Between Two Wars 347

John Morrill, ‘Mutiny and discontent in English provincial armies’, in Nature of the English

Revolution, pp. 332–58; David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford, 1971), pp. 39–40.

Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 145–6.

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