Not content with plundering civilians, the soldiers plundered each other:
This morning [7 September 1642] our regiment being drawne into the fields to exercise, many of them…demanded five shillings a man which, they say, was promised to them…or they would surrender their armes. Whereupon Colonell Hamden, and other commanders, laboured to appease them but could not. So…we feare a great faction amongst us. There is also great desention betweene our troopers and foot companies, for the footmen are much abused and sometimes pillaged and wounded. I myselfe have lately found it, for they took from me about the worth of three pounds…A troope of horse belonging unto Colonel Foynes met me, pillaged me of all, and robbed mee of my very sword, for which cause I told them I would [either] have my sword or dye in the field and I commaunded my men to charge with bullet, and by devisions fire upon them, which made them with shame return my sword, and it being towards night I returned to Northampton, threetninge revenge upon the base troopers.
Of all the towns which Wharton passed through during his military service few suffered more severely at the hands of plunderers than Worcester. He thought the county of Worcestershire a ‘very pleasaunt, fruitfull and rich countrey, aboundinge in come, woods, pastures, hills and valleys, every hedge and heigh way beset with fruits, but especially with peares, whereof they make that pleasant drinke called perry wch they sell for a penny a quart, though better than ever you tasted in London’. But the town of Worcester, though ‘pleasantly seated, exceedingly populous, and doubtless very rich…more large than any city’ he had seen since leaving London, was ‘so vile…so bare, so papisticall and abominable, that it resembles Sodom and is the very emblem of Gomorrah, and doubtless worse’. It was more sinful even than Hereford whose people Wharton later discovered to be ‘totally ignorant in the waies of God, and much addicted to drunkenness and other vices, principally unto swearing, so that the children that have scarce learned to speake doe universally sweare stoutlye’. Worcester, indeed, was ‘worse than either Algiers or Malta, a very den of thieves, and refuge for all the hel-hounds in the countrey, I should have said in the land’.
It was certainly treated as such. The cathedral, conceded by Wharton to be a ‘very stately cathedrell with many stately monuments’, was ransacked, the organ pulled to pieces, images and windows smashed, books burned, vestments trampled underfoot and kicked about the nave or put on by Roundhead soldiers who pranced in them about the streets. The aisles and choir were used as latrines; campfires were lit; horses were tethered in the nave and cloisters where the traces of rings and staples can still be seen.
In parish churches in Worcester the clergy were required to give their pulpits over to Puritan army chaplains – who harangued soldiers and civilians alike – and were presented with demands to pay money to have their churches spared the punishment inflicted on the cathedral. An entry in the accounts of St Michael’s church reads: ‘Given to Captain and Soldiers for preserving our church goods and writings, 1os. 4d.’
Valuable goods from private houses were seized and sent to London as booty; the Mayor and one of the Aldermen were also despatched to London as prisoners; and some lesser citizens were hanged in the market place as suspected spies.
Outside the town, in the village of Castlemorton, the house of one Rowland Bartlett was invaded by a party of Roundhead soldiers commanded by a Captain Scriven, the son of a Gloucester ironmonger.
In a confused tumult they rush into the house [in the words of a Royalist publication describing an outrage similar to numerous others committed elsewhere]. And as eager hounds hunt from the parlour to the kitchen, from whence by the chambers, to the garrats…Besides Master Bartlet’s, his wives, and childrens wearing apparell, they rob their servants of their clothes: with the but ends of musquets they breake open the hanging presses, cupboards, and chests: no place was free from this ragged-regiment…They met with Mistress Bartlets sweat-meats, these they scatter on the ground: not daring to taste of them for feare of poyson…Except bedding, pewter, and lumber, they left nothing behind them, for besides two horses laden with the best things (Scrivens owne plunder) there being an hundred and fifty rebells, each rebell returned with a pack at his back. As for his beere, and perry, what they could not devour they spoyle.
Nor was this the only unwelcome visit Rowland Bartlett had from plundering Roundhead soldiers. On a later occasion they took away ‘good store of bacon from his roofe, and beefe out of the powdering tubs’. They stole his ‘pots, pannes and kettles, together with his pewter to a great value’; they seized ‘on all his provisions for hospitality and house-keeping’ and then broke his spits. They ‘exposed his bedding for sale and pressed carts to carry away his chairs, stooles, couches and trunks’ to Worcester.
It was near Worcester, in September 1642, that Prince Rupert was to have his first experience of English warfare.
‘My Lord, we have got the day, let us live to enjoy the fruit thereof.’
Lord Wilmot
While the King’s forces were withdrawing from Worcester towards Shrewsbury in the late summer of 1642, the Parliamentarians were on the march towards them. They were commanded by Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, the son of that gifted, wayward Earl who had so fascinated Queen Elizabeth I and been beheaded for attempting a coup d’état against her Council. It was difficult to conceive of a son less like his father. Handsome, reckless and opinionated, exasperatingly conscious of his considerable talents, the father had marched about the Queen’s court, his tall figure leaning forward like the neck of a giraffe as though he were a prince of the blood, beguiling women, carelessly offending or carefully charming men. The son, born in London in 1591, was now fifty-one years old, a stolid, stout, retiring man, plodding, honest and taciturn, often to be seen puffing ruminatively on a pipe. He had been married at the age of thirteen to Frances Howard, the sultry, sensual and unbalanced daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, who was the same age as himself. This young bride had soon afterwards become the mistress of Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, and, with the help of her powerful family, had managed to obtain an annulment of her marriage to Essex on the grounds of his impotence. Essex then married Frances, daughter of Sir William Paulet. This marriage too was unhappy and, so it was whispered, unconsummated. Like her predecessor, Frances took a lover, Sir Thomas Uvedale. Soon afterwards she became pregnant. Essex resignedly acknowledged as his own the resultant baby who died soon after its birth. The parents then separated; and Essex went to live with his sister, wife of the Earl of Hertford, at her house in the Strand.
By then Essex had seen a good deal of active service on the Continent. He had not much distinguished himself, but his amenable, dutiful reliability and the loyalty he inspired among his subordinates recommended him to Pym and his friends who had, after all, a very circumscribed field of talent from which to make their selection. At least, silent though he so often was behind those thick clouds of smoke from his pipe, Essex seemed to have a good knowledge of the military manoeuvres practised on the Continent by the commanders of the armies in which he had served; and who else, it was asked in London, could be found with Essex’s authority and reputation?
Essex’s orders were ‘to rescue His Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince and the Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who were then about them’. It was still convenient to suppose that it was not the King himself who was at fault but his advisers, that Parliament was taking up arms to protect the King from them, and indeed from himself, rather as though, in the words of an unnamed Member of Parliament, he were a man contemplating suicide, or ‘as if he were at sea and a storm should rise and he would put himself to the helm, and would steer such a course as would overthrow the ship and drown them all’. In obedience