God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Charles had no remaining options. His field armies in Scotland and England were defeated and important garrisons were falling like dominoes. Cromwell marched triumphantly through the south, capturing Devizes (23 September) and Winchester (28 September), and arriving before Basing House a few days later. This was the seat of the Catholic Marquess of Winchester, and had successfully withstood two previous sieges, but it was to become the twentieth garrison to fall to the New Model Army since June. It had been under siege since August and Cromwell arrived on 8 October anxious to get the job done. Two great holes were blown in the walls by his heavy artillery, but still the defenders refused to surrender. As the infantry advanced in the ensuing storm they shouted, ‘Down with papists’, and many within were put to the sword despite pleas for mercy. Among the dead were six Catholic priests and a young woman who had tried to protect her father. Women were roughly handled, and partially stripped, although there were no rapes. The house was pillaged without restraint and the sudden release of food stores onto the local market temporarily depressed prices.55

  Basing held considerable symbolic significance; it had been besieged three times and was emblematic of loyalty and, to the King’s opponents, popery. The marquess, standing bareheaded in defeat among the ruins of his house, responded to taunts by saying, ‘If the King had no more ground in England than Basing I would venture as I did… Basing is called loyalty’. He added, perhaps pathetically or just unnecessarily, ‘I hope that the king may have a day again’.56 Among those humiliated by the conquerors was Inigo Jones, architect of the Banqueting House and designer of the court masques of the 1630s in which the majesty of the King had served to reconcile the competing passions of his people in order to bring peace.

  Just as the war had started with a series of whimpers rather than a bang, so it petered out. Abandoning his northward march, Charles went initially to Newark, one of his remaining strongholds, where he was rejoined by Rupert, who was forgiven by a council of war on 26 October, and the King set out again for Oxford. In November 1645 Goring left for France, in part because of his health and partly in hope of a high command in the continental forces expected to be mustered the following spring. His command had passed to Lord Wentworth, who suffered heavy losses to Cromwell’s forces at Bovey Tracey on 9 January. Other garrisons surrendered in quick succession. Exeter was besieged and at Torrington, on 16/17 February, Hopton’s army was destroyed. The Prince of Wales fled to the Isles of Scilly, and Hopton to Cornwall, where he surrendered on 12 March. His army was disbanded over the coming weeks. Exeter fell a month later, leaving Pendennis Castle standing alone in the west, but even after the New Model Army had swept through the west the war twitched on. Hereford fell on 17 December and by then Chester and Newark were very strictly blocked up. Hopton’s had been the last force of any size in England, and Exeter the last significant stronghold aside from Oxford and Newark. Lord Astley had 3,000 men with him in Worcester and was ordered to try to cut his way through to Oxford, but the parliamentarians caught them at Stow-on-the-Wold, and Astley was forced to surrender on 20 March. In Wales, Raglan and Harlech held out, but without waiting for the fall of Oxford Charles could not really have been expected to delay surrender much longer than he did. He left Oxford in disguise on 27 April, surrendering to the Covenanters at Southwell on 5 May. As part of his surrender terms he delivered Newark on 8 May. When Oxford surrendered on 24 June, Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice left England for France and the Netherlands respectively. The last redoubts were Pendennis, which surrendered on 16 August, Raglan, which followed suit three days later, and Harlech, which held out until March 1647.57 It was a feeble end to the military campaign, but in surrendering to the Covenanters, Charles had shown some astuteness about the coming political campaign to win the peace.

  14

  Winners and Losers

  The Costs and Benefits of Civil War

  England had paid a huge cost for this parliamentary victory, in lives and property. In 1640 the Shropshire village of Myddle had a population of less than 600, possibly much less. If Myddle was typical in age and sex ratios then there would have been no more than 175 adult men in the village, 55 aged between 15 and 24 and 120 between 25 and 59. It is therefore quite startling to learn that 21 of the young men of the village went to war: 40 per cent of the men under 25, 12 per cent of the men under 60. This was a rich recruiting ground for the royalist armies and, unsurprisingly, all but one of them went to fight for the King. Thirteen did not return. One died at Edgehill and two others, Reece Vaughan and John Arthur, died at the siege of Hopton Castle, where the parliamentary defenders were eventually butchered and dumped in a ditch. Three Preece brothers died, two of them in fighting at Ercall and one hanged for horse theft. Nat Owen met his end at the siege of Bridgewater in 1645. He had been wounded earlier, in a fight with a comrade over plunder, and was unable to move, his comrades unable to help him. He died in the flames. The only parliamentarian, Thomas Mould, was shot in the leg while fighting in the parliamentarian cavalry. A neighbour recalled that his leg healed ‘but was very crooked so long as he lived’.1

  Villages all over England must have had similar tales to tell and similar wounds to heal. The most systematic estimates of war deaths put the total at 62,000 between 1642 and 1646, probably the equivalent to the population of the four largest cities in the country, London aside. Nearly 80,000 more were taken prisoner.2 These deaths were widely spread across the country, although East Anglia and Wales saw many fewer than the regions where field armies were frequently in action. On the other hand, these figures are derived from incidents large enough to have been reported, but there were probably many other deaths which went unrecorded. Richard Gough recalled seeing, as a schoolboy in Myddle during the war, a clash between parliamentary and royalist garrison soldiers happening upon each other in the village. A man was badly wounded. Gough had gone with the minister to pray for him and saw the man lying on a bed ‘with much blood running along the floor’. He died the next day.3 Such memories lasted a lifetime, but they were not the stuff of press reports. Between April 1644 and December 1645 Guy Carleton, vicar of Bucklesbury, Berkshire, buried four soldiers, all of whom died individually and probably not in any recorded incident.4

  Others died accidentally. Ralph Hopton was severely wounded when a casually placed tobacco pipe ignited barrels of gunpowder and two other soldiers in his army died from the accidental discharge of muskets. Edward Morton was blown up, along with his four children and his house, while mixing gunpowder for the royal army. His wife’s escape was said to be providential, since she had tried to dissuade him from doing this work for the royalists.5 Another judgement was visited on Captain Starker, inspecting the loot taken from the capture of Houghton Tower in Lancashire. One of the company lit a pipe, which ignited the powder, killing himself, his captain and sixty of his comrades.6 The consequent burn and shatter wounds were horrifying. Richard Wiseman, a surgeon in the royal army, reported such an accident at the battle of Worcester in 1651: ‘A soldier… hastily fetched his bonnet full of gunpowder, and whilst he was filling his Bandoliers, another soldier carelessly bestrides it to make a shot at one of the enemies… In firing his musket, a spark flew out of the pan and gave fire to the powder underneath him’. The man filling the bandoliers was ‘grievously burned in the hands, arms, breast, neck and face’, but the careless soldier suffered more fearfully. He was ‘burned and scorched in all the upper part of his thighs, scrotum, muscles of the abdomen and the coats of the testicles… And indeed it was to be feared, that when the Escar should cast off from his belly, his bowels would have tumbled out’. In this case the outcome was happier. After the town fell Wiseman’s assistant saw the former soldier escape and the latter was ‘cured’.7

  Not all were so lucky: many of the fallen died of their wounds, often in pain and some time after the battle. John Hampden took six days to die of wounds received at the battle of Chalgrove Field, six agonizing days. Care of the wounded was taken seriously but was limited by b
oth resources and expertise. Wiseman, seeking to learn from his battlefield experiences, seems to have made a diagnostic distinction between those who died howling like dogs and those who died screaming. His later Treatise of Wounds reflected a serious and hopeful attempt to save more lives, but it is also a catalogue of horrors. Wounds tended to be burns, slashing cuts, the effects of fragmentation agents or gunshots. For the latter there was little in civilian life to prepare a surgeon for his battlefield experience, and Wiseman devoted considerable space to trying to pass on what he had learned about them. Shattered bones and the threat of infection were the principal dangers. As Wiseman noted, an undressed wound was within days full of maggots. Amputation was often done immediately, while the wounded men were still in shock, since their courage might fail them later, but Wiseman was keen to try to save limbs as well. Those who survived initially had a good chance of surviving in the long term, however. The maimed could expect some care following their initial treatment, either in hospitals or quartered with people willing to care for them in return for payment.8

  Of course, the impact of the war depended only in part on the quantity of the suffering – it was enough to see the effects of one gunshot in the face for the price of victory to be clear. Following battles many commentators noted the horror of corpses strewn widely and uncared for. After Naseby hastily dug graves proved to be too shallow, so ‘that the bodies, in a short time became very offensive’. In general both sides sought to provide decent burial, at least for their own fallen, but bodies were often stripped and looted despite these attempts to preserve Christian decency. Mutual humanity survived these traumas, but many people saw shocking sights all the same.9

  Although narratives of the war follow the movements of the field armies, it was the presence of garrisons and the ubiquity of skirmishing which characterized the experience of war most of the time. In June 1645 Charles had 40,000 troops at his command. One quarter of them were at Naseby, slightly more in the western army, but nearly half in garrisons in Wales, the west and the Midlands. Most of the recorded deaths in combat took place in minor skirmishes and sieges, in fact, not in the largest battles that dominate the military narrative.10 Garrisons gave access to wealth and resources, control of trade networks and the economic hinterlands of the towns in which they were situated. Mansions and castles also gave control of agricultural hinterlands, and since almost every locality was of divided and questionable loyalty it was essential to maintain a military presence in order to maintain political and economic control. Sieges were also of political significance – both sides making great play of fortitude, loyalty and courage in the face of hardship, or of the triumphant seizure of strongpoints.11

  This form of warfare made immense demands on the civilian population. Fortifications were mammoth construction projects which involved widespread destruction of suburban property. Buildings were cleared to make way for earthworks, to deny the enemy cover and to provide clear lines of fire. Besieging forces also destroyed buildings in order to protect themselves, or for the materials.12 Work on London’s fortifications had started in the autumn of 1642, but the real initiative came in the spring of 1643 in a massive programme of public works. By April 1643 there were twenty-eight ‘works’ (forts or sconces), along with two outworks covering the Mile End Road. The Venetian ambassador reported the following month that they were impressive, and that earthworks linking them would be complete within weeks. These earthworks, which marked the ‘lines of communication’, were ramparts fronted by a ditch three yards wide. From the bottom of the ditch to the top of the rampart may have been as much as six yards. Eleven miles of wall along with the forts, sconces and outworks (designed with the advice of Dutch expertise) seem to have been built in less than a year, much of it in not much more than three months. Nonetheless, the apparent enthusiasm for this work was remarkable. One contemporary observer claimed that 100,000 citizens set their hands to the work; the Venetian ambassador estimated more modestly that 20,000 worked without pay each day, even on Sunday, normally ‘so strictly observed by the Puritans’. The great and the good joined ‘all sorts of Londoners’, marching to the works ‘with all alacrity’. One reason may have been that the very fact of fortification increased anxiety in the City, of course. If much of the work was voluntary, however, this was still a huge financial commitment, paid for by the City, some of it remitted from the tax bill, but some raised by special extra taxes. This was clearly a pay day, albeit one made much in arrears, for victuallers, bricklayers, masons and carpenters as well as for the soldiers and military suppliers.13

  One of the twenty-eight ‘works’ around London’s civil war fortifications

  Much smaller places had to find the resources for large-scale works too: particularly well-studied are those at Exeter, where £4,400 was spent between November 1642 and August 1643, and to good effect too. Oxford and Newark (and Colchester in 1648) were made defensible in the face of increasingly heavy artillery bombardment.14 Fortified country houses and castles became the focus for protracted sieges too: Basing House resisted parliamentary sieges repeatedly before its bloody fall in 1645. Lathom House was similarly celebrated for the heroism of its defenders, and tied up significant numbers of parliamentary troops in the north-west.15

  Garrison towns were fortified and defended, or seized, at massive cost to the local population. Bombardment and the storming of defended towns could be extremely destructive. Estimating the extent of property destruction is no less fraught with difficulty than arriving at estimates of casualties, but it seems that at least 150 towns and fifty villages sustained some damage. Reliable sources for estimating the scale of this damage are available for a sample of these places – twenty-seven towns and seven villages. If the loss in these places is representative of the experience more generally, then across the whole country 10,000 town houses, 1,000 houses in villages and 200 mansions or country houses were lost. This suggests that the war might have made 55,000 people homeless – 2 per cent of the population; that is the equivalent of the entire population of Norwich, Bristol and York combined.16 Obviously such a figure is only indicative of a general order of destruction, but in market towns sieges and associated property destruction were common, and much of it seems to have been concentrated in 1643.

  As with the battlefield deaths it is perhaps better to talk of specific experiences than aggregated statistics. The siege of Gloucester was said to have resulted in the loss of properties worth £22,400, of personal goods worth £4,500 and another £2,000 through the deliberate flooding of surrounding fields for defensive purposes. The city had been assessed at £500 for the much-reviled ship money levies, although in 1638 that had been reduced to £180.17 Exeter may have lost one fifth of its houses. Leicester, stormed by royalists on 31 May 1645 and retaken by Parliament only a few weeks later, was said to have lost 120 houses, besides other property damage and plunder.18 It was not just the cities, of course: smaller communities, with fewer resources, might suffer too. Holt and Farndon, small towns either side of the Dee a few miles south of Chester, also suffered substantial damage. The castle at Holt commanded an important bridge over the Dee but the town itself was indefensible. Much property was destroyed, particularly, it was said, by the garrison as a preventive measure. After the Restoration it was claimed that 103 houses had been lost. In Farndon, similarly, houses were destroyed when Brereton forced a crossing of the river in November 1643, and then again in February 1645, following a parliamentary withdrawal when the garrison at Holt carried out further preventive destruction.19 Repair of the damage in many places did not begin until the 1650s, and lasted in some places into the 1670s and beyond. The repair of communal resources – hospitals, schools and almshouses – could take much longer and the damage inflicted on churches and other monuments might be irreparable. The memory of sufferings often lasted longer than the physical loss.20

  Prolonged sieges also bred disease. All civil war armies were prey to typhus, dysentery, plague and fevers, and these were frequently pas
sed on to the civilian population too. The royalist occupation of Exeter in 1643 was followed by the worst outbreak of plague since the great plague of 1625. In the last weeks of the preceding siege the mortality rate had risen steadily. In June 31 burials are recorded. That figure rose to 45 in July and 60 in August but the peak came following the occupation: 95 in October. This was almost certainly ‘war typhus’, a disease which had killed one fifth of the population of Oxford earlier in the year. Under siege once more in late 1645, this time by Fairfax’s triumphant New Model, it was again threatened by disease. Fairfax’s army had already lost men ‘killed by laying out’ and now was ravaged by a mysterious sickness that convinced him of the need to find them healthy quarters. Nonetheless, common soldiers continued to rest in cramped quarters where the ‘New Disease’ claimed dozens of lives each week. During the siege of Plymouth 2,845 people died from disease.21

  Overall, it has been estimated, 100,000 deaths from disease can be added to the tally of casualties in battle, and numerous local examples confirm the general point. According to one calculation 11,817 people died in Devon between 1643 and 1645, 4,193 of them as a result of the war: that is, the war contributed more than one third of the deaths in the county. It seems that only 1,634 of those deaths can be attributed to battle, so that the lion’s share of these ‘war deaths’ arose from indirect causes.22 Nationally burials during 1643/4 were 29 per cent above average, serious enough, but below the level of years of ‘natural crisis’ in 1558/9, 1597/8 or 1625/6. This was, nonetheless, one of the worst years of crisis mortality in the period 1641–1871. In Berkshire, however, the picture was almost unimaginably worse: burials rose 120 per cent higher than their average level. This mortality was concentrated in areas close to garrisons and concentrations of soldiers. Essex’s army, hanging around near Reading for much of 1643, was a grievance in Westminster, but apparently a major health hazard too. The army was grievously afflicted with disease throughout the year, and in parishes across Berkshire there is widespread evidence of the presence of ‘war typhus’, plague, dysentery and other fevers.23