In Gloucestershire a vicar of severely Puritan views and extremely short temper fell with fury upon a constable who dared to ask him for a loan for the King, pulling out his hair and kicking him into a ditch. In Dorchester there was an equally savage brawl when Lady Blanche Arundell’s chaplain, who had been arrested as he was boarding a ship for France, was hanged and his fellow-Roman Catholics, in attempting to seize relics from his body, were set upon by Puritans. Later there were riots in the countryside when mobs, mostly of unemployed workers, attacked the houses of those whom they accused of being Royalists or papists, tore down enclosure fences and killed deer in parks and woods. From Norwich came rumours of ‘a virgin troop’ of virtuous maidens formed for the protection of members of their sex and for revenge upon ‘papists and Cavaliers’ who had committed outrages against them.
The fear of attack by foreign papists was widespread. In many of the petitions which had been addressed to Parliament by the counties of England since December 1641 this fear seemed to be uppermost in the petitioners’ minds. They were alarmed by the vulnerability of the English coasts to invasion from abroad by papist armies supported by papists at home, the ‘drawing of swords’ and ‘a war between Protestants and papists which God forbid’. ‘At Westminster there was a sense of outright confrontation with the Crown from which there could be no turning back,’ the historian Anthony Fletcher has observed. ‘We find this entirely absent in the petitions. During the weeks they were being written and circulated many town councils looked to their defensive arrangements. But they were preparing not for civil war but for a national state of emergency based on the papist conspiracy.’
In some counties in these early days of the conflict the Royalists, and such papists as there were among them, achieved small triumphs. In Cheshire, at Nantwich, they rode about the town, preventing Sir William Brereton, one of the Members of Parliament for Cheshire, from recruiting there. In Hampshire, at Portsmouth, the extravagant, ambitious and unreliable roué Colonel George Goring, who had been appointed Governor of the port by Parliament, suddenly declared his allegiance to the King. In Oxfordshire, the Earl of Northampton succeeded in carrying off the guns which were being sent through the county to fortify Warwick Castle. In Oxford itself scholars had formed Royalist troops, much to the annoyance of a majority of the citizens; and when the two Members of Parliament for the town tried to put an end to their drilling the scholars turned upon them and chased them off. In the north, Newcastle upon Tyne was seized for the King by the Prince of Wales’s former Governor, the Earl of Newcastle; and Lord Strange, soon to become Earl of Derby on his father’s death, took over several stores of arms and ammunition in the King’s name in Lancashire, and advanced upon Manchester, described by the antiquary John Leland a century before as ‘the fairest, best builded and most populous town in Lancashire’ and by now a centre of the clothing industry and a hotbed of Puritans. The Puritan Lord Wharton, a most handsome and elegant young man extremely proud of his beautiful legs, whom Parliament had appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, also advanced upon Manchester. Lord Strange arrived first and, as the son of a powerful man who owned thousands of acres in the county, he was asked to dinner by the leading citizens of Manchester. Enraged by this welcome afforded to one of the King’s most loyal supporters, some of the more militant clothiers and weavers of the town attacked the Royalist party. There was a short and savage fight in the pouring rain; several of Strange’s men were wounded; and one Mancunian, a linen weaver named Richard Percival, was killed, the first fatal casualty of the war, so it was alleged by his accusers when Strange was proclaimed a traitor by the House of Commons. Strange himself was nearly shot as he rode away to Ordsall.
In York, where young desperadoes eagerly looked forward to the real fighting, the King prepared new plans for the seizure of the crucially important port of Hull. Already the Earl of Newcastle had tried to take the place. ‘I am here at Hull,’ he had written to the King, ‘but the town will not admit me by no means, so I am very flat and out of countenance.’
The King himself now advanced upon the town and made as if to lay it under formal siege, digging trenches and erecting batteries, hoping that this display of preparations for an assault would induce Sir John Hotham to surrender the town into his hands. Indeed, Hotham had promised as much. Not long before, the Royalist Lord Digby had been captured aboard a ketch in the Humber estuary and had been sent as a prisoner to Hull, where he had persuaded Hotham that by delivering up the town to the King’s forces he might not only prevent the war, but earn honour as well as riches for himself. The Governor was persuaded. He released Digby and undertook that ‘if the King would come before the town but with one regiment, and plant his cannon against it and make but one shot, he should think he had discharged his trust to the Parliament as far as he ought to do, and that he would then immediately deliver up the town’. But Hotham was now not alone in command in Hull. To stiffen his resistance Parliament had sent Sir John Meldrum, an experienced Scottish soldier who had served for years in various armies on the Continent, including that of Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden. Led by the resolute Meldrum, upon whose advice the surrounding fields had been flooded, the defenders of Hull made two sallies against the Royalists’ works, ‘the first blood, as some say, that was shed in these unnatural wars’.
Impatiently standing before the troublesome town, the King was approached by the Earl of Holland, who brought one final plea from Parliament that he should abandon his preparations for war and return to London. The King replied that Parliament should first instruct Sir John Hotham to open the gates of Hull as ‘an earnest of their good intentions’. Holland refused to consider such a bargain. Then, said the King, deeply affronted by this offensive challenge to his kingly dignity, ‘Let all the world now judge who began this war.’
With Hull and Manchester and several other strategic places in the north in the hands of his enemies, and with no help to be expected from Scotland, the King began his march on London, hoping that the small army he had so far attracted to his standard would be reinforced as he marched through the Midlands. Men would surely come in from the estates of the Earl of Northampton, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, from those of the Earl of Lindsey in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, and from the Earl of Huntingdon’s lands in Leicestershire. But few men did join him. It was harvest time, for one thing, and for another the King was rumoured to be still making overtures to Parliament as though he intended, even now, to reach a compromise. Men were reluctant to jeopardize their future by openly declaring their support of a cause which might at any moment be abandoned or betrayed. They were also in fear of Parliament. Upon the King’s entering Leicester on 22 July 1642, he was received with ‘warm expressions of loyalty’ from ‘ten thousand of the gentry and better sort of inhabitants of that county’, but he received little practical help from any of them because, so it was said, ‘if the King was loved as he ought to be, Parliament was more feared than he’. When he entered Nottingham in the third week of August he had scarcely more than a thousand men at his command.
The weather was windy and rainy; the people of Nottingham, a town of market traders, tanners and silk workers, were unwelcoming; the news of Royalist fortunes elsewhere was dispiriting. The Royalist standard, attached to a tall red pole, was unfurled in a field in the town – the spot is now marked by a tablet on Standard Hill. It had taken twenty men to carry it into the field, and several of these had to hold it upright in an insufficiently deep hole dug with daggers and knives. A proclamation, denouncing the Commons and their troops as traitors, was haltingly read by a herald. It had been prepared some time before, but at the last minute the King had decided to alter its wording, which he did so clumsily that the herald could hardly read it and stumbled through it with painful hesitation. Later the wind blew stronger than ever and threw the