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Introduction | Soldiers | Prisoners | Mobs and mob violence
Citizens | Sacks and sieges | The aftermathSacks and sieges
Herefordshire
In 1642, Brampton Bryan Castle was in the charge of Brilliana, the wife of the committed Puritan and Parliamentarian commander Sir Robert Harley. The castle was in a Royalist area, and in February, Brilliana wrote a letter to her son Ned that revealed how afraid she was:
Now they say, they will starve me out of my howes; they have taken away all your fathers rents, and they say they will drive away the cattell, and then I shall have nothing to live upon; for all theare ame is to enfors me to let thos men I have goo, that then they might seas upon my howes and cute our throughts by a feave rooges, and then say, they knewe not whoo did it …
On 26 July 1643, having tried unsuccessfully to persuade Brilliana to leave Brampton Bryan, the Royalist Sir William Vavasour and his men surrounded the castle. They attacked the village outside the stronghold, burning down its mills, 40 houses, the parsonage and the church. However, Brilliana still refused to surrender, and on 9 September, the Royalists withdrew to Gloucester. Her letters reveal her strong faith: ‘The Lord would show the men of the world that it is hard fighting against Heaven.’
Brilliana fell ill due to her exertions during the siege, and on 31 October, she died, aged only 43. The Royalists gained the castle the following year, sacking and burning its buildings and transferring all its inhabitants – now prisoners – to Shrewsbury.
Reading
On 13 April 1643, the earl of Essex – at the head of a Parliamentary army comprising 16,000 foot soldiers, 3,000 horse and a train of siege guns – left Windsor for Reading. He sent a stern message to the Royalist governor, telling him to surrender. The governor replied that either he would hold the town for the king or he would starve and die in it.
On Sunday, 16 April, the guns of the Parliamentary army opened fire on the town, and they continued to thunder day after day. Charles I, now worried about the safety of his garrison at Reading, summoned Prince Rupert, and on 24 April the prince, as cavalry leader, joined the king, who was already on his way to Reading to relieve the garrison.
However, just before they began their assault on Essex’s forces, and without their knowledge, the governor hung out a white flag and agreed to surrender. Although the king’s troops fought bravely, they were unable to make any headway without the participation of the town’s garrison. The garrison soldiers were trapped, having failed to force their way across Caversham bridge, and they were further depressed by a sudden storm of hail and rain. They withdrew, hotly followed by the victorious Roundheads, leaving many dead and wounded behind them.
Early on 27 April, trumpets blew and the king's garrison began to leave Reading for Oxford in a long procession. At Friars' Corner, the Parliamentarian soldiers, arrayed in ranks, ready to enter the captured town, began to jeer and insult their beaten foes. Then waggons were plundered and weapons snatched away. When the victors entered the town, houses were sacked, taverns were broken open and, soon, drunkenness was added to the tumult. Discipline did not return for two days. Finally, on Sunday, 30 April, the churches were crowded all day.
Gloucester
Under the defiant leadership of the Parliamentarian Colonel Edward Massey, Gloucester survived a 27-day siege in August 1643, when a garrison of just 1,400 men faced the king's own army of some 30,000. The citizens, who toiled ceaselessly on the fortifications, suffered a fierce bombardment of grenades and incendiaries, before a relief army under the earl of Essex finally arrived from London.
In 1644, when the Royalists sacked Bolton, a number of townsfolk were killed by Prince Rupert’s soldiers, enraged by their losses. According to the parish register, 78 men and four women died in this way. The Royalists claimed to have killed several hundred of the Parliamentarian troops in the town, and that any civilians who had died had apparently been armed and taking part in Bolton’s defence. However, the Parliamentarian news-sheets said that a ‘massacre’ had occurred, with estimates of numbers of dead ranging from 200 to 1,800. In 1651, James Stanley, 7th earl of Derby, was tried and executed for the ‘massacre’ (the Ye Olde Man & Scythe pub marks the site of the execution).
Soon after the sack of Bolton, rather more of the Parliamentarian defenders of Liverpool – about 400 – were killed when the town was stormed after an 18-day siege. But many of these deaths were the result of confused street fighting at night.
Chester
The richer merchants, to whom the king had granted lucrative rights for the production – and presumably import – of goods, declared Chester for the Royalist side. This decision resulted in a siege, one of the longest of the war, and one in which the city's poor suffered considerable hardship.
From 1644, the city was blockaded and bombarded by Parliamentarian troops – led by Sir William Brereton – for 15 months before finally agreeing terms of surrender in early 1646. Deaths and casualties resulted from the firing of flaming mortars into the city, from fighting between soldiers and militiamen on both sides, often on or near the city walls, and finally from hunger, which killed both civilians and, in greater numbers, the Welsh soldiers who were billeted in the city.
The genealogist Randle Holme III (1627-99) wrote a vivid diary of what went on during this time:
By this time, our women are all on fire, striving through a gallant emulation to outdo our men and will make good our yielding walls or lose their lives. Seven are shot and three slain, yet they scorn to leave their undertaking and thus they continue for 10 days’ space. Our ladies likewise like so many exemplary goddesses create a matchless forwardness in the meaner sort by there dirty undertakings.
10 October 1645Eleven huge granadoes like so many tumbling demi-phaetons threaten to set the city, if not the world, on fire. This was a terrible night indeed, our houses like so many split vessels crash their supporters and burst themselves in sunder through the very violence of these descending firebrands ... Another Thunder-crack invites our eyes to the most miserable spectacle that spite could possibly present us with – two houses in the Watergate skippes joint from joint and creates an earthquake ... The grandmother, mother and three children are struck stark dead and buried in the ruins of this humble edifice, a sepulchre well worth the enemy's remembrance. But for all this they are not satisfied, women and children have not blood enough to quench their fury, and therefore about midnight they shoot seven more in hope of greater execution, one of these last lights in an old man's bedchamber, almost dead with age, and sends him some few days sooner to his grave then perhaps was given him.
10 December 1645Poor in very great want and many that have lived well formerly go a begging – little bread or beer left. The Welsh soldiers almost famished. Not above 20 cattle in City. They are expecting relief and they will shortly make a sudden sally out through the Eastgate and Northgate and their sally port under the Sadler's Tower. 3,000 fighting men in City, one half Welsh, about 50 horse. The poor people and soldiers willing the city should be delivered up. I believe that, if you summons the town once more, the common soldiers will force their officers to yield.
17 December 1645After the war, many of Chester’s citizens were left homeless and impoverished, having sold all their possessions and spent all of their savings on food. In addition, quite a few were killed by the plague that swept through the city.
Hampshire
Basing House in Hampshire was owned by the Catholic Paulet family, staunch supporters of Charles I. Having been attacked by Parliamentary troops twice, the third – and final – assault came in August 1645 when Colonel John Dalbier and 800 men took up position around the walls. Dalbier even tried an early form of poison gas, burning wet straw mixed with sulphur and arsenic upwind of the house to get the occupants to surrender.
But the garrison held out until Cromwell himself arrived with heavy artillery. By 13 October, the walls of the house had been breached and the defences were stormed. The end was violent: between 40 and 100 people were killed. Parliamentary troops pillaged the house, and an estimated £200,000 (about £10 million today) worth of goods were carried off.
'The dispute was long and sharp,' declared The True Informer, a news sheet, the day after Basing House was taken. 'The enemy deserved no quarter and I believe that they deserved what little was offered them. You must remember what they were. They were most of them Papists, therefore our muskets and swords did show but little compassion.'
A fire finally destroyed the building, and Parliament ordered the complete demolition of what remained. John Paulet had his estates confiscated, and was sent to the Tower of London on a charge of high treason, while his sons were taken away to be brought up as Protestants.
Colchester
In 1648, Colchester was thrown into the thick of the conflict when, on 9 June, a large Royalist army, led by the earl of Norwich, entered the largely Parliamentarian town. They had been hotly pursued from Kent by a Roundhead army led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, who now besieged the town for more than 11 weeks.
The town was unprepared, and although at first the royalists managed to bring in food and ammunition, the completion of encircling siege works in mid-July cut them off from further supplies. In the almost nightly sallies and skirmishes in June and early July, both sides burned or pulled down houses outside the wall. The Royalists held on to St John's Abbey – which had already been attacked by a mob in 1642 – until the Roundheads successfully stormed it in mid-July. Having plundered the house, the Parliamentarian troops broke into the Lucas family vault in St Giles's church, smashed coffins, threw about the bones of the dead and scattered the bodies of recently buried family members. They wore in their hats tresses of long hair ripped out of the scalps of deceased Lucas ladies, as if they were favours.
On 19 July, Norwich attempted to sneak out a small boy with a secret message, but the lad was caught and tortured, his fingers being burned with a match. The boy didn’t reveal his secret, telling his persecutors that he had been instructed to be hanged rather than give them the message.
By the end of July, the besieged were reduced to eating horsemeat, and by the end of the siege on 28 August, dogs and cats were also being consumed. The poor diet and the lack of water, the besiegers having cut the town's water-pipes at the end of July, caused 'fluxes' from which some townspeople died.
During the siege, the Parliamentarians experienced severe losses – estimates range between 500 and 1,000 troops died – while, surprisingly, the Royalists lost only 30 men and two officers. When the Royalists surrendered, two of their officers were shot – for ‘treason’ – in the grounds of Colchester castle. The spot is marked by an obelisk today and it is said that no grass will ever grow there (it has since been covered with tarmac to make sure.) The execution of Royalist officers and the deportation of Royalist volunteers after the siege was described by dismayed observers as ‘a new and terrible thing’.
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