Introduction | Soldiers | Prisoners | Mobs and mob violence
Citizens | Sacks and sieges | The aftermath

Soldiers

In May 1643, Wardour Castle in Wiltshire was attacked by a Parliamentarian force and, after a short siege, surrendered to it. In December, the castle’s owner Sir Henry Arundell led a counter-siege on behalf of the king (and, presumably, himself). During the storming of the fortress, a Royalist musketeer named Hilsdean was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, he suddenly realised to his horror that he had been shot by his own brother, who belonged to the Parliamentarian garrison.

*

The enemy’s cannon ... were somewhat dreadful when bowels and brains flew in our faces.
Henry Foster, Parliamentarian sergeant at the 1st battle of Newbury, 20 September 1643

It was lamentable ... to behold the heaps of bodies and the diversities of slaughter this tragedy had compiled.
Anonymous eye-witness after the 1st battle of Newbury

*

English Protestant hatred for the Irish was so intense that it was virtually racial. In 1644, Parliament declared that captured Irish soldiers were not to be classified as prisoners of war, but were to be executed. Within Cromwell's New Model Army, suspicion of officers of being Catholics, or sympathetic to Rome, led to killings and mutiny.

*

In the fire, smoke and confusion of that day ... the runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless and so full of fears that I should not have taken them for men.
Arthur Trevor, Royalist eye-witness at the battle of Marston Moor, 2 July 1644

*

The Parliamentarian soldier Lieutenant Philemon Mainwaring was taken prisoner at Eccleston, Cheshire on 15 October 1645. Three months later, he wrote:

The town is in as ill a condition as almost you would wish. On Thursday last in evening at the Parade, 300 Welshmen laid down their arms and told Lord Byron unless he would afford them more meat they would do no more duty, but rather choose to stand to the mercy of the enemy than to be starved in town.

*

In about 1700, Richard Gough wrote, in his History of the Parish of Myddle (in Shropshire):

Some accidents which happened in the Parish of Myddle in the time of the wars ... William Preece of the cave (who was commonly called Scogan of the Goblin hole) went for a soldier in the king's service and three of his sons Francis, Edward, and Willliam, two of them Francis and William were killed at High Ercall. The old man died in his bed, and Edward was hanged for stealing horses ... And if so many died out of these three towns, we may reasonable guess that many thousands died in England in that war.

Top

Scene from Channel 4's Blood on Our Hands