On 28 January 1642 Captain Philip Skippon ‘marched very privately when it was dark to the backside of the Tower, and stayed at the iron gate with his men … he sent one into the Tower to the serjeant, who commanded the Hamleters, that he should march out of the Tower with his men and come to him. But the serjeant desired to be excused.’ Skippon, snubbingly described by Clarendon as a ‘common soldier’, was actually the son of a minor Norfolk gentleman, who had fought as an officer for the Elector Palatine and then in Holland against the Spanish – two Good Old Protestant wars, giving him plenty of practice for a third. His toughness as a trainer of troops was vital in moulding the London trained bands into the crucial fighting force they became, and he was to become one of Parliament’s most stalwart and sensible soldiers, a major-general of infantry in the New Model Army.
When Nehemiah Wallington described the serjeant’s refusal to obey Skippon’s order as a plot by ‘malignants’ to take over the Tower and the City, he saw such incidents as standing in the way of the political and spiritual rebirth of the nation: ‘you see many an excellent blessing and mercy in this very birth’, he wrote, ‘for this honourable parliament (as the Mother) to bring forth, and cannot’. This defined all the conflicts so far as an effort to turn England into a godly nation.
The king’s departure left Parliament free to begin to gather troops from Anna Trapnel’s East End. A militia committee was established in Tower Hamlets – authorized to assemble and train men and to suppress riot and trouble, and to collect a rate to finance the troops. The Tower Hamlets militia were strongly Parliamentarian, refusing to unite with city regiments whose loyalty to Parliament they suspected. (In 1662 Charles II refused to attend a muster on Tuttle Fields because of a rumour that the Hamleters would shoot at him.) So it came to seem appropriate that at any rate by February 1642, the Tower had come into the hands of the city authorities, its ramparts guarded not by royal troops but by the trained bands of the East End that Charles so hated, the Tower Hamlet bands. Anna Trapnel’s world had triumphed, in London, at least.
London was not the only place with unruly crowds. Many other areas saw violence erupt. In the early months of 1642, some rebellious energies were contained by traditional means. The majority of locales drew up and presented petitions to Parliament, opening with fulsome praise of the institution. Many expressed concern about the king’s evil councillors, by whom they largely meant Laudians and papists. Still others blamed the universities as nests of papistical and Arminian thought. Most expressed dread of a popish invasion; nineteen counties demanded that all papists be disarmed, while others expressed doubts about strict measures already taken. Oxfordshire begged Parliament to administer oaths to those searching recusant houses for arms to prevent them from concealing what they found. But fear of popery also provoked extreme violence. On 13 May 1642, a year after the London crowd had been gratified by Strafford’s death, an Essex village saw a crowd of over a hundred gathered at the blowing of a horn, before marching out to the heath of Rovers Tye, where they tore down a series of enclosures that had been built by the Lucas family. All through Essex, Parliamentarians had rushed to fill the army of Robert Rich, first Earl of Warwick, known as a political activist and as a patron of sermons fervently denouncing popery, just as they had stayed away from the king’s army gathered to fight the Scots two years before. Local Roman Catholics were disarmed, and fortifications built around Colchester. Laudian ministers were quickly silenced. But local magnate Sir John Lucas was determined to bring aid to the king. He gathered horse, arms and men at his residence just outside Colchester’s walls. But his plans were known to his enemies. A night-watch set by the mayor spotted him as he left his house by the back gate. A musket was fired, the local beacon was lit to alert the villages. The trained bands and the Parliamentary volunteers besieged his estate, even bringing two pieces of ordnance. Men, women and children gathered, forming a crowd of around two thousand all told. The attack on Sir John Lucas’s house included an assault on the ladies’ chamber. There, tireless collector (and inventor) of atrocity stories Bruno Ryves tells us, a naked sword was set to Sir John’s wife’s breast. To Clarendon’s later horror at the disregard of rank implied, Lucas ended up in the town gaol, and he was glad enough to be there.
Observers thought this outbreak of rage looked exactly like the ‘inundation of the vulgar’, the rising of the belly against the brain, which had been predicted by the Cassandra-like MP Simonds D’Ewes as the inevitable outcome of civil war. Though the rioters themselves sought to justify their actions by claiming support for Parliament, even Parliamentarians among them spoke of the violence of ‘the rude people’: ‘we know not how to quiet them’, muttered the mayor of Colchester, ‘we could not repress them if we had five trained bands’. In parts of Suffolk, where there were further disturbances, the rioters were said to have denied any religious motivation, saying they were for the king, and would not be governed by a few Puritans.
The Essex-Stour valley mob initially confined itself to attacking the local Catholic community, but soon everyone got a taste for the fun, and the violence became less discriminating. ‘As well Protestants as Papists’ were plundered; similar unpolitical incidents involving the ‘lewd and disorderly people’ were reported in the area in the last three months of the year. ‘Forasmuch as at this present there are disorders and distempers … and evil affected persons who hunger after rapines and spoilings and plunder of men’s houses.’ It was an excuse for a spot of vandalism, but it might be premature to assume there was no class distinction behind the plunder of the houses of the rich. There is some shaky evidence from the inexhaustible Ryves that locals picked out as targets families who were already disliked. Ryves shapes his account around the attack on Countess Rivers because it violates codes of honourable conduct in war: ‘And you may guess what spiritual men they were, and likewise what danger this honourable person was in, they express themselves in rude unchristian language, that if they found her they would try what flesh she had?’
The Rivers family felt menaced from the beginning. Lady Rivers’s sister Lady Penelope Gage wrote anxiously from Hengrave Hall, north of Bury St Edmunds, at the very beginning of 1642, that ‘we are daily threatened by the common sort of people’. Living in St Osyth, the Rivers’s Catholicism had long made them the object of local suspicion and dislike. Ryves claimed the Colchester attackers began a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the countess. They pursued her as if she were a comic-book villain. The crowd reached St Osyth only a few hours after she had made her escape; they were joined by sailors and what one local Catholic called ‘the whole army rout’. At once, wrote a contemporary, they ‘enter the house, and being entered, they pull down, cut in pieces, and carry away her costly hangings, beds, couches, chairs, and the whole furniture of her house, rob her of plates and monies’. Her servants were attacked. She made it to her house at Long Melford in Suffolk, but the crowds followed her there, gathering support en route, especially from seamen, a group especially noted for their strong anti-popery. Countess Rivers was understandably afraid. She sent for help to the Earl of Warwick, but he was at sea, Lord Rich was at Oxford, and Charles Rich was out hunting. So Arthur Wilson, steward of the Earl of Warwick, travelled through the Stour valley on his master’s instructions during the riots, hoping to rescue the recusant Lady Rivers from the fury of the mob. Wilson was a Puritan and a Parliamentarian, but he thought very little of the crowd:
With difficulty I passed through the little villages of Essex, where their black bills and coarse examinations put us to diverse demurs. And, but that they had some knowledge both of me and the coach, I had