7. The Siege of York & Battle of Marston Moor: 1644

 Mrs Wandesford could now turn her mind to her sons' education.  

She need have no worries for her eldest, George.  He was happy and safe in France completing his education with Mr George Anderson, an excellent man and a wise scholar.  (He was also a Scot who was zealous for the Church of England, which must explain why he was an expatriate).  But fifteen-year-old Christopher was causing her a great deal of concern.  He was still suffering terribly from the fit of the spleen – the depression – that had gripped him since his father's funeral.  His torments, Alice remembered, were dreadful to witness.  Mrs Wandesford had exhausted every possible cure and the family's tender care had been unavailing.  But now she could send him to the famous physician Dr John Bathurst, who was in York. 

Dr John Bathurst (1607-59)

So in November 1643, Christopher was sent to York, where he was successfully treated by Dr Bathurst and where he could go to school.  At the same time, his younger brother John began to attend the Grammar School at Bedale.  Life looked very promising.

Unfortunately – 

On 15 September 1643 the King and the Irish rebels had signed a one year truce.  The King could now transfer troops from Ireland to England.  Not only that – he was planning to send Irish Catholic forces to Scotland to join with Royalists there.  But the very idea of Catholic forces was anathema to many in Scotland and England.  The Parliamentarians were now looking at defeat so they came together against their common enemy with the Scottish Covenanters.  On 25 September they signed their agreement – it was called the Solemn League and Covenant.  It was a military alliance and a religious pact.  The Covenanters intended England to have the same form of religion as the Scots.

On 19 January 1644, the Army of the Covenant under Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven marched into England.  On 28 January, the Scottish advance guard was at Morpeth.  The garrison at Newcastle was inadequate – the Marquess of Newcastle led his men out of York to reinforce it, reaching there on 2 February with only hours to spare before the Scots arrived.

Alexander Leslie, 1st Earl of Leven (1581-1661)

For two months the armies manoeuvred against each other in Northumberland and County Durham, but on 12 April the Royalists were forced to evacuate Durham and Lumley Castle.  The Marquess of Newcastle aimed to make a stand at Piercebridge.

During the winter months, Mrs Wandesford had been considering her plans.  Friends advised her to move to York, where both Christopher and John could get an excellent education – and the prospect of a social life must have appealed to her, for herself and for Alice.  She had made up her mind to the plan, packed up her goods and they were on their way when they met with a messenger from a friend, Thomas Danby of South Cave.  He had sent them urgent word that they must turn back because York would soon be under siege.  This must have been just after 11 April, when Parliamentary forces had stormed and taken Selby and York was laid open to attack.  One of the commanders, Sir Thomas Fairfax of Denton Hall in the West Riding, wrote to a friend, 

The blow has made us Masters of the Field in Yorkshire, God grant we may maintain it; and then nothing can hinder us to Teese-side.

So Mrs Wandesford turned back.  She and her two children went to Kirklington, where the Revd Robert Dagget took them into his home until the Hall could be ready for their occupation.  But sixteen-year-old Christopher was in York.

When the Marquess of Newcastle heard of the loss of Selby, he had to leave Piercebridge and march south to reinforce York.  The Scots were coming south behind him.  On 14 April, they occupied Darlington.  The next day they were at Northallerton, where one Royalist regiment resisted them – a forlorn hope.  

The Marquess of Newcastle reached York on 18 April.  The city's Roman and mediaeval walls had been repaired and strengthened in 1642 and an outer ring of earthworks and forts built beyond the walls.  Cannon were mounted on Bootham Bar, Walmgate Bar, Monkgate Bar and Micklegate Bar, and on the castle itself.  The garrison was well provisioned and fully manned.  

On 22 April, the Army of Both Kingdoms – the Parliamentarians and and their Scottish allies – was at York.  The formidable city was now besieged and Christopher Wandesford was inside the walls.

York Castle in 1644

Notes

Dr John Bathurst was the founder of the Bathurst family fortunes.  They owned lead mines in Arkengarthdale and held the manor of Skutterskelfe for a hundred years from about 1659.  The Bathurst Charity is still active in Hutton Rudby.

Alice puts the Battle of Marston Moor as happening on the same day as they were turned back by the message from Mr Thomas Danby, but it's clear from the context that this was not the case. 

George Wandesford & the Battle of Marston Moor: July 1644

On 1 July 1644, the King's gifted young nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine outwitted the Allied generals and raised the York siege.  The Allies had concentrated their troops on Marston Moor and Hessay Moor, the uncultivated common land to the west of York between Long Marston and Tockwith.  

Rupert of the Rhine (1619-82)

On 2 July at nine in the morning they learned that the Prince's army was approaching them.

There were now five armies at York.  On the Royalist side, there were the 18,000 men of the armies of the Prince and of the Marquess of Newcastle.  On the Allied side, there were 28,000 men made up of Lord Leven's Army of the Covenant, Lord Fairfax's Northern Association and the Earl of Manchester's Eastern Association.  Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell with his regiment of Ironsides formed part of the Eastern Association.  The coming battle – the Battle of Marston Moor – was to be the largest ever fought on English soil.

It was at this moment that 20 year old George Wandesworth arrived on the scene.

George had been obliged to come back from France, hoping to gather some funds from his Yorkshire estates because there was no income coming out of Ireland.  He had been to see his uncle Sir Edward Osborne at Kiveton, which lies about 10 miles east of Sheffield, and was now on his way home.  He and his uncle will have assumed that his best route would lie between Wetherby, which the Allies had taken some months ago, and the besiegers around York.  But Prince Rupert's rapid approach and the manoeuvres of the armies confounded his plans and he found himself among troops preparing for battle – and uncomfortably close to straggling parties of Allied soldiers.  He was glad to come upon his cousin Colonel Edmund Norton's troop of dragoons.  

When he realised what was going to happen, he decided he must go back into York and find his brother Christopher – and in the second lucky coincidence of his day he met young Kit riding out of the town with some other boys.  They were naively going off to see the battle.  A fine brotherly exchange must have taken place before George took his brother up behind him and set off home.  

And then his luck ran out.  He had been seen and recognised in the company of his cousin Edmund Norton and his behaviour was thought suspicious.  A party of Scots horse set off after them.  It was near midnight when George came at last to Kirklington.  He made his way quietly to the gate of the Hall by a back way, not wanting to attract notice by going through the village.  It must have created quite a stir in the household when he and Kit appeared.  

Behind them on Marston Moor, the Allies attacked at half past seven in the evening just as a thunderstorm broke and the Royalists had decided there would be no battle.  It was all over in two hours.  Thomas Danby of South Cave died that day, Alice said, shot to death with a cannon bullet, cut off by the midst of his body as he sat his horse.  The last stand was that of the Marquess of Newcastle's own Northerners, his Northumbrian Whitecoats, who refused quarter and died where they stood.  

Over 4,000 Royalists were dead, and about 300 Allies.  The Allied victory, won for them by Oliver Cromwell's cavalry, had not been inevitable but it was complete.  Two weeks later, the city of York surrendered.  The defeated Royalists were able, under the terms of the surrender, to march out with their arms and colours, on their way to Richmond and Carlisle – but they didn't all get there, because most of the men quickly deserted.   The gates of Micklegate Bar were opened and the victorious Allied armies came into York.   Its churches and the stained glass of the Minster were preserved from pillage and destruction by order of the Allied commanders who now held York for Parliament, the Yorkshiremen Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax.  

Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612-71)

This was the end of Royalist control of the North and the beginning of Oliver Cromwell's reputation as a military commander.  The Marquess of Newcastle left for Holland – his fortune had been spent in the King's course and he was unable, he said, to endure the laughter of the court.  Prince Rupert and the remaining Northern cavalry rode out of York on 4 July to Richmond and from there to Lancashire.  

On the coast, the strategically important Mulgrave Castle had been seized by the Royalists in 1642 – now Parliament retook it and used it as a prison.  At Stockton-on-Tees, which the King had been allowed to keep in his agreement with the Scots when they occupied County Durham, the castle's poorly paid and supplied garrison surrendered to the Scots without a fight on 24 July 1644.   

Some 25 miles to the north of York, Helmsley Castle was still held for the King.  In September it was besieged by Parliamentarian forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax himself, who defeated an attempt at rescue by Royalist forces from Knaresborough.  In November, the food ran out and the Royalist commander negotiated a surrender.  He was allowed to march his men off to join the forces holding Scarborough, while Sir Thomas ordered the castle at Helmsley to be slighted – the curtain walls and the east tower were broken down so that the ruin could not be garrisoned again.  Knaresborough castle itself surrendered after a six month siege – like Helmsley and Mulgrave castles, it too was slighted by Parliament.  Stockton castle was destroyed.  Sir Thomas Fairfax was badly wounded at Helmsley by a musket ball that broke his shoulder, but the Royalists who hoped that he would die of his injuries were to be disappointed.  His forces moved on to besiege Scarborough and its castle.  That was to be a long and bloody business.

Helmsley Castle.  [By Barkmatter CC BY-SA 3.0]

More than sixty miles to the north, the city of Newcastle had been holding out against the Scots, the North's old enemy, since they crossed the border.  After York fell, Newcastle had no chance – there was no possibility of a relief force.  In October, the western part of the walls were broken down by artillery bombardment and mines and the Scottish Covenanters fought their way into the city, the Royalist forces retreating into the Castle Keep.  One of the Scots described the horrors – the desperate courage on both sides, the thundering cannons roaring, the thousands of musket balls flying, the clangour and carvings of swords, the pushing of pike, the wailing of women, the carcasses of men like dead dogs in the streets.  The situation was hopeless and the Royalists surrendered.  

The Scots now controlled the Tyne and they had always been able to use the port of Sunderland on the River Wear – the men who ran Sunderland were Puritans and hostile to the King, and Sunderland had been on the side of the Covenanters from the beginning.

Next: 8. Mrs Wandesford moves to Hipswell: 1644-1645 

6. Chester: smallpox, siege and travelling home: 1643

Meanwhile, there was smallpox in Chester and three of Mrs Wandesford's household took the terrifying disease.  

First to fall ill was seven-year-old John, who caught it from their cousin William Wandesford's sons who were also living in Chester.  Alice was forbidden to go near John but she couldn't resist sending him letters tied to a little dog's neck.  Was it because the little dog had been taken into his bed that Alice caught the infection?  Was it the shock she suffered at the first sight of his poor little scarred face – he had been a beautiful child and of a sweet complexion?  At any rate, now she was taken very ill.  They thought this was because the pustules were staying near her heart instead of erupting through her skin.  More fearful, anxious nursing for Mrs Wandesford, more watching by the bedside at night ... and at last Alice, too, recovered.  

But a nine-year-old boy called Frank Kelly did not survive.  Mr Wandesford had been bowling on the Green in Dublin one day when he noticed that Frank was gathering up his bowls for him.  He was taken with this quick-witted, ragged orphan who gladly joined the Wandesford household, which grew very fond of him, and he was duly educated in Anglicanism to save his immortal soul.  His sight was eaten out with the smallpox, Alice remembered, and his mouth very sore.  They cared for him tenderly – Mrs Wandesford, who dressed his sores as attentively as if he had been her own child, two watchers, the doctor and his medicines – but they could not save him and he died after a fortnight's suffering.

Then the war came unexpectedly close.

Early on 17 July 1643, Alice had been at prayer in the first morning and was now standing looking out at the church of St Mary on the Hill from an open window in the tirritt – which must mean the projecting upper bay – of their house.  Out of nowhere there came a shot, passing so close by that the casement window shut with a bang and the whole tirritt shook.  She was left breathless and shaking with fright.  The enemy was at the city walls.

Old Chester: the Cross and Rows, photographed c1895

Sir William Brereton, a wealthy Cheshire landowner, ardent Puritan and very effective military commander, had launched a probing attack against the city's defences.  After two days, his forces moved on.  Alice was told a consoling tale of incompetence and failure on the part of the besiegers.  Three granados – explosive shells fired from a mortar – were shot into the town.  One hit the sconce – a detached fort – within the walls.  Two of Captain Manwaring's men seized an ox hide and smothered it.  The second landed among a company of women out milking in a pasture, but it fell in a ditch and was quenched.  The third, she was told, fell among Brereton's horse and killed many, so that they raised the siege.  In fact, the city was too well defended and Sir William Brereton's forces moved off.  They would return.

While the city fathers strengthened the defences, Mrs Wandesford made her plans to leave for the Royalist North Riding.

Travelling east: 1643

On 28 August 1643, Mrs Wandesford and her three children, now aged between nine and seventeen, set off for Yorkshire.  With them were several servants and also some tenants – they must have been the people who had left Yorkshire to build Mr Wandesford's new town of Castlecomer and had expected, until the rebellion, to make a life there.  They made an inoffensive company and they were travelling light.  Mrs Wandesford's status as a widowed gentlewoman should be some protection – though there were horrid and frightening stories, of course – and she could reasonably hope for the courteous assistance of Parliamentary commanders.  

They had some 125 miles ahead of them and a crossing of the wild Pennines.  Roads across the uplands were hardly ever more than drove roads and pack horse trails, and Mrs Wandesford had a choice.  She could follow the valley of the River Wharfe towards Ripley.  That would allow them to take a coach, but it would lead them uncomfortably close to the Parliamentarian cloth manufacturing districts of the West Riding and the Puritan town of Otley.  Or they could choose the more northerly, steeper crossing past Blubberhouses, but that would be best ridden.  Alice usually makes a point of mentioning a coach journey, and she doesn't here – so perhaps they rode.

The first stages of their journey were through territory controlled by Parliament.  After travelling some twenty miles, they came wearily into Warrington in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire at ten o'clock at night.

Warrington had been surrendered to Sir William Brereton's forces on 20 May.  It was now under its new governor, the moderate Presbyterian, Sir George Booth.  

Sir William Brereton (1604-61)

They had an uneasy night, as the town was several times alarmed by reports that Royalists from Chester were approaching.  

Leaving Warrington, they would pass through the Blackburn Hundred where Colonel Richard Shuttleworth of Gawthorpe Hall commanded the army for Parliament.  He gave Mrs Wandesford a pass, by means of which they journeyed the dozen miles to the Royalist town of Wigan.  

Parliamentary forces had sacked the town in April and when they left had taken many prisoners and as much booty as they could carry.  The Wandesfords found it, Alice remembered, sorely demolished and all the windows broken.  The trauma was still vivid and the travellers' arrival frightened the townspeople, who were scared that they were Parliamentarians.  The soldiers had cursed them as Papist dogs and had forced them to watch as they burned five hundred of their Bibles and prayer books at the market cross, claiming there was Popery in them.  Mrs Wandesford was gladly welcomed among them once they realised she was the great niece of Edward Fleetwood, who had been their Rector for thirty years in the last century, and whose memory was still treasured.  They flocked to see her and were as kind as could possibly be.  Alice remembered that even though their Bibles and prayer books were burned, they never missed morning prayers at six and afternoon prayers at four.

The next day the party travelled on to the Yorkshire-Lancashire border.  Some thirty miles from Wigan, they reached Downham near Whalley, three miles from Clitheroe.

But they weren't allowed to go on.  A Parliamentary corporal and his men refused to believe Colonel Shuttleworth's pass was genuine and made them get down with threats and oaths.  Their harsh language and abusive behaviour were terrifying.  Mrs Wandesford and her children were forced to take shelter in a poor dwelling where they lay all night with heavy hearts, fearing that they were about to be used barbarously.  All they could do was wait and hope while one of their servants and two of the soldiers went to find Colonel Shuttleworth, who was ten miles away.  He was, not surprisingly, angry when he saw his own pass and heard what had happened and he sent his son-in-law Captain John Ashton of Cuerdale to deal with the matter and punish the soldiers.  Captain Ashton and his men then escorted Mrs Wandesford and her party to the edge of his jurisdiction.  

Now they needed to get to the other side of the Pennines.  Their next destination was probably Skipton Castle, about sixteen miles away.  It was held by the Royalists and was under siege from the Parliamentarians – but the siege was not very active at this point and Mrs Wandesford had her pass from Colonel Shuttleworth and perhaps also the escort of Captain John Ashton.

From Skipton they could ride east to the Royalist stronghold of Knaresborough Castle, or to Ripley Castle, which was held by Sir William Ingleby for the King.  That would be a journey of twenty to twenty-five miles across wild, empty countryside, climbing to 1,000 feet before dropping down to Blubberhouses, a hamlet of a few mining cottages.  Then there would just be the final twenty miles or so to Snape, which lies between Kirklington and Bedale.  Snape was their destination – it was one of Sir Thomas Danby's manors and Catherine was living there while he was with the King's armies.  She had invited them to come and stay with her.  

They arrived at Snape on 2 September 1643.  They had been six days on the road but now they were in their own country.  For about a year they lived, Alice wrote, with great comfort and safety with her sweet sister Danby at Snape.

Next: 7. The Siege of York & Battle of Marston Moor: 1644