The Lord Mayor was called upon to summon the Trained Bands, those companies of armed citizens originally raised to maintain order in the City and to suppress riotous behaviour. But the Lord Mayor at this time was Richard Gurney, a former silkman’s apprentice who had been left a fortune by his master and had subsequently married a very rich wife; and, as a zealous Royalist, Gurney refused to issue the summons. The Trained Bands mustered anyway, by whose orders no one was sure; and soon six thousand citizens were standing ready to withstand any troops the King might bring against them.
The officers of the Trained Bands were mostly members of the Fraternity or Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handguns. Later to be known as the Honourable Artillery Company, this was an ancient regiment of gentlemen much interested in military affairs, several of whom left London from time to time to gain experience of warfare in foreign countries. Their men, musketeers and pikemen, were citizens elected for such duty by the aldermen of their wards and called upon to provide themselves with the necessary equipment. In addition to his immensely long pike, the citizen choosing to become a pikeman had to appear on parade with a breastplate and backplate, a gorget to protect his throat, tasses to guard the thighs, and a helmet. The musketeer also had to have a helmet as well as a musket, musket rest, powder flask and ‘bande-leers with twelve charges, a prymer, a pryming wire, a bullet bag and a belt two inches in breadth’. The cost to a musketeer was reckoned to be £1 3s. 4d., to a pikeman £1 2s. od. In addition both had to arm themselves with swords. Pikemen considered themselves superior to musketeers not only because their weapons had a more ancient and respectable lineage, but also because anyone could fire a musket, whereas it took considerable strength and a decent height to handle a pike effectively.
The amount of training the men undertook depended largely upon the energy of their officers. Some colonels called their men out infrequently between general musters, a few scarcely ever, so that it came to be said of their bands, as it was of some Trained Bands in the counties, that the instruction they most commonly received was training to drink. Other officers, such as Captain Henry Saunders of Cripplegate, demanded that their men parade at six o’clock in the morning for an hour in the summer months, insisting that this unwelcome discipline was ‘no hindrance to the men’s more necessary callings, but rather calls them earlier to their business affairs’. At least Captain Saunders did not require the men to practise shooting at that time in the morning, ‘neither to beat drumme nor display Ensigne but onely exercise their Postures, Motions and formes of Battell’ so that those still abed near their training ground were not unduly disturbed.
Traditionally, the London Trained Bands could be summoned for service only upon the orders of the Lord Mayor. But after Richard Gurney’s refusal to call them out that January night, the House of Commons declared that the authority for their summons would no longer rest with the Lord Mayor alone but in future must reside with a committee comprising members of the Court of Common Council and of the Court of Aldermen as well as the Mayor himself. At the same time a Committee of Safety was formed, consisting of six Aldermen and six members of the Court of Common Council, to supervise London’s warlike preparations; and, more significantly yet, Philip Skippon was appointed commander of all London’s Trained Bands at a salary of £300 a year.
Philip Skippon had been a soldier all his adult life since leaving home in Norfolk. He had fought on the Continent, been wounded more than once, and had returned to England some years before as a captain in the Dutch service. A good and brave man of devout and simple religious faith, which was later to find expression in three books of devotion addressed to his fellow-soldiers, he was respected by men and officers alike. His strong Puritan views were well known, his courage as undoubted as his administrative abilities. In conjunction with a newly formed Committee for London Militia, he reorganized the Trained Bands into six regiments known by the colours of their ensigns – Red, White, Blue, Yellow, Green and Orange – the regiments having six or seven companies with two hundred men in each company. The nominal colonels of the regiments were influential citizens, mostly leading Parliamentary Puritans, appointed for political, family or business reasons rather than for their military capacity, but the lieutenant-colonels and junior officers had experience if not of warfare at least of training and drilling with such units as the Guild of Artillery. Care was taken to ensure that the companies comprised men drawn from the same wards of the city, so that Portsoken men served with Portsoken men, for instance, and Farringdon with Farringdon. The friendly rivalry of the Trained Bands, whose various traditions dated from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was thus preserved. In the hands of Philip Skippon they were a formidable force.
On 10 January, the day upon which Skippon’s command of the Trained Bands was confirmed, the King left Whitehall for Hampton Court, fearing that the life of his wife was in jeopardy even more than his own. He drove through streets thronged with people crowding round his carriage and waving placards on which was scrawled the single word Liberty. The next day the five Members of Parliament whom he had tried to arrest came out of their hiding places in Coleman Street and, accompanied by numerous watermen and cheered by crowds on both banks, were taken by barge upriver to Westminster. Here they were met by Philip Skippon and his London Trained Bands, their ensigns flying in the winter air, wearing in their hats or waving on the points of their pikes, ‘like a little square banner’, a copy of The Protestation, a document remonstrating against the policies of the King and the Church but vague enough to be accepted by all other than extreme Royalists.
From Hampton Court, where – since no preparations had been made for their arrival – ‘the princes were obliged to the inconvenience of sleeping in the same bed with their Majesties’, the royal family moved on to Windsor. From here the Queen and Princess Mary, who was to join her new husband in Holland, left for Dover with ‘small attendance and pomp’, accompanied by the household’s tiny dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, who in happier days had been picked up by the gigantic porter at the palace gate as a tasty morsel between the two halves of a loaf of bread. The Queen also took with her urgent messages for military help addressed to the Prince of Orange and the King of Denmark, a large selection of the crown jewels which she hoped to sell or pawn, and a code in which she was to write forceful letters to her husband urging him to be resolute in dealing with his enemies and to remember ‘that it is better to follow out a bad resolution than to change it so often’, warning him against ‘beginning again [his] old game of yielding everything’, and, in her fear that she or her friends might be sacrificed as Strafford had been, reminding him of the promise he had made to her at Dover – ‘that you would never consent to an accommodation without my knowledge and through me…If you do not take care of those who suffer for you, you are lost.’
‘I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’
Henry Oxinden
Immediately upon landing on the Continental shore the Queen set about enlisting help in her husband’s cause, attempting to persuade foreign princes that it was in their own interest to support a fellow-sovereign in his hour of need, cajoling money from the Prince of Orange, doing all she could to induce Charles’s uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark, to come to his nephew’s aid, raising money for weapons and for the pay of volunteers, complaining of persistent colds and coughs and intermittent headaches, yet tireless in her endeavours and firm in her resolve.
She met with little success. King Christian was preoccupied with the protection of Danish interests in northern Germany and with the prevention of Swedish encroachments. The Prince of Orange was hampered by his Protestant people’s support of the English Parliament. Everywhere she went or looked to for help the Queen