On 9 September he left London for Northampton. He was cheered as he passed through the streets, though some spectators looked askance upon his troops, ‘ragged looking and marching out of step’, ten thousand of whom had gone on before him, rather more than half of them mounted. Few of them had had any more than the briefest drilling; many were evidently intent upon plunder; and certainly, before they reached Northampton, they had pillaged villages and ransacked houses all along the way, several companies threatening to turn back unless they received their overdue pay. ‘We are perplexed with the insolence of the soldiers already committed,’ one of his officers warned Essex, ‘and with the apprehension of greater. If this go on, the army will grow as odious to the country as the Cavaliers.’
The Earl of Essex himself had good cause to complain of his men’s conduct, but good reason, too, to hope that order would soon be brought into the ranks, since he had many seasoned officers under his command, both British and foreign. Sir William Balfour, a Scottish professional soldier of strong Protestant views, who had once whipped a priest for trying to convert his wife to popery, was with him as Lieutenant-General of the Horse. Essex could also rely upon Sir James Ramsay, another Scottish professional of proved accomplishments, soon to be commended for his gallantry. To give advice in gunnery there was a French expert, on cavalry tactics a Croatian and a Dutchman, Hans Behre, who had his own troop of Dutch mercenaries and was appointed Commissary-General. Moreover there were men of high social rank among Essex’s officers as well as distinguished Members of Parliament. Denzil Holles, Member for Dorchester, commanded a regiment of foot. John Hampden, Member for Buckinghamshire, also raised a regiment of foot whose men wore green coats and were soon recognized as among the best soldiers on either side. Sir Arthur Haselrig, Member for Leicestershire, commanded a troop of horse; so did Oliver Cromwell, Member for Cambridge. Other commanders of regiments included Henry Mordaunt, second Earl of Peterborough, whose father had been Essex’s General of the Ordnance until his death in June; William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele; Henry Grey, first Earl of Stamford; Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke; Edward Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, heir of the first Earl of Manchester. William Russell, fifth Earl and later first Duke of Bedford, was appointed Lord-General of the Horse under Sir William Balfour’s watchful eye.
As Essex’s army advanced towards him, the King continued his withdrawal towards Shrewsbury, pausing on the way near Stafford to address his assembled forces: ‘Your consciences and your loyalty have brought you hither to fight for your religion, your King and the laws of the land. You shall meet with no enemies but traitors, most of them Brownists [followers of the Puritan, John Brown], Anabaptists and Atheists, such who desire to destroy both Church and State and who have already condemned you to ruin for being loyal to us…[I promise, if God gives us victory,] to defend and maintain the true reformed Protestant religion established in the Church of England, to govern according to the known laws of the land [and to] maintain the just privileges and freedom of Parliament.’
At Shrewsbury, as the King had hoped, volunteers flocked to his camp from Wales and the north in ever increasing numbers. So also did they at Chester. Money came in, too. In the recent past money had been one of the King’s most nagging worries. Before these present troubles the resources of the Crown had been badly affected by both inflation, which had presented a problem to all the governments of Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the economic depression of the early seventeenth century; and after the war had begun the King’s finances, already close to breakdown when he came to the throne, and indeed long before that, sunk to such a parlous state that when he had arrived in York it was estimated that he had as little as £600 left. But thanks to rich well-wishers like his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earl of Newcastle, whose losses in the struggle were said to amount to an enormous sum, the King was soon able to pay for rapidly growing forces. The Marquess of Worcester continued to supply the King with immense sums of money. His family raised no less than £117,000, which today would be worth well over £2 million; and when the Prince of Wales was sent to visit the Somersets at Raglan Castle he was presented with several pieces of the family plate.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were not so generous. Little of the college plate which was set aside for the King at Cambridge actually reached him; and, for fear of Parliamentary punishment, not much was offered anyway, several colleges ignoring the King’s repeated request, much to the satisfaction of the city’s Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, who marched a party of soldiers to King’s College with drums beating to prevent any treasure from that rich college falling into Royalist hands. Other colleges collected varying amounts of plate, but hardly any was sent, and most of what did leave Cambridge never reached its destination.
These were sad says for Royalists in Cambridge. Three heads of colleges were arrested and carted off to London to be imprisoned there; other members of the University known to support the King were insulted as they walked the streets; the University preacher was attacked and forcibly prevented from giving a Latin sermon; the Vice-Chancellor and several of his colleagues were locked up on a particularly cold night without food or fires for declining to pay the taxes the Parliamentary Commissioners demanded of them; eventually twelve heads of colleges and 181 Fellows and other senior members of the University were deprived of their positions, sent away to earn their livings as best they could, and replaced by acknowledged Puritans. The Fellows of Queens’ College were purged in their entirety. ‘The whole Corporation of Masters and Fellows,’ so it was reported, ‘were ejected, imprison’d or banish’d thence’; and, according to Thomas Fuller who had entered the college at the age of thirteen in 1621 when his uncle was President, there was not a single scholar left in the college either. The President, Edward Martin, who suffered several years’ imprisonment, was replaced by Herbert Palmer, a well-known Puritan and reputed author of Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Arms, a book justifying the use of force against the King.
At Queens’ the Parliamentary ordinance for ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’, the destruction of altar rails, candlesticks and crucifixes, and the removal of communion tables to the body of the church, was obeyed with particular ruthlessness. ‘We beat downe about no Superstitious Pictures besides Cherubims and Ingravings,’ wrote Parliament’s agent for implementing the ordinance in East Anglia. ‘And we digged up the steps for 3 hours and brake down 10 or 12 Apostles & Saints within the Hall.’
Elsewhere in Cambridge there were similar depredations. Colleges, purified of their papist excrescences, the stained glass in their chapels smashed, were turned into barracks or prisons; collections of ancient coins were appropriated and sold; a review of soldiers was held in King’s College Chapel; avenues of trees in college gardens were cut down for fortifications; several bridges were destroyed; and on Cromwell’s orders in St Mary’s Church, where the Book of Common Prayer was torn to shreds, the wood carvings were destroyed though there was evidently ‘not one jot of imagery or statue work about them’.
William Dowsing, the son of a Suffolk yeoman, who was commissioned with the task of demolishing superstitious monuments, ornaments and pictures in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, kept a detailed journal of his work, minutely recording his depredations in the churches and chapels of East Anglia. At Haverhill, for example, in the process of working what he called his ‘godly thorough reformation’, he claimed to have broken down ‘about an hundred Superstitious Pictures; and seven Fryars hugging a Nunn; and the Picture of God and Christ; and divers others very superstitious’. ‘200 had been broke down before I came,’ he added. ‘We took away two popish Inscriptions…and we beat down a great Stoneing Cross on the top of the Church.’
At Peterhouse, Cambridge, so Dowsing said, he was responsible for the demolition of ‘two mighty great angels with wings and divers other angels and the four Evangelists and Peter with his Keys over the chapel door…and about 100 cherubims and divers superstitious letters in gold, and six angels in the windows…and 60 superstitious