11. The wars come to an end: 1651

By this time, Alice's brother George, now aged 28, was reaching success in his endeavours to recover his sequestered estates and find a wife.  

Their uncle William Wandesford had been working for some time on the first problem, which was made difficult by the shortage of funds, and he had hit upon the solution.  A distant connection of the family, Richard Darley, was an influential man on the York Committee for Compounding with Delinquents and had promised his help in return for Alice's marriage to his nephew.  Alice was now twenty-five and she had turned down better offers because, as her aunt had said to Captain Innes, she didn't want to marry.  But her uncle said the alternative was ruin for the family and her mother was anxious for them all.  A strange sort of persuasion, she thought, between a sword in one hand and a compliment in the other, but she knew the duty of a gentry daughter and William Thornton was a sober, religious man.  She agreed.  

Meanwhile, George had finally managed to negotiate a marriage contract with Eleanor, the eldest daughter of Sir John Lowther of Lowther Castle near Penrith.

On Easter Eve, 29 March 1651, a rift between George and his 23 year old brother Christopher was healed by Alice.  George had become angry because a mischief-making servant had told him lies about Christopher.  Christopher had been incensed at George believing them.  The ill-feeling between them had grown to such a pitch of anger and animosity that neither of them would be able to take Holy Communion on Easter Sunday.  Alice had taken things in hand.  She calmed them down, entreating them to ask pardon of God and each other for all that had gone wrong between them.  At last they were able to forgive each other freely and, in zeal and devotion, they were all able to receive the Holy Sacrament the next day.  The memory was to be a great comfort to her.

Two days later, his quarrel with Christopher made up, his estates freed from sequestration and his marriage arranged, George was on his way to Richmond to discuss business with his uncle.  Having spent the previous night at Harry Darcy's at nearby Colburn, he called in at Hipswell.  Leaving his mother and sister after loving farewells and having knelt for his mother's blessing, he set off once more, telling his Irish footman James Brodrick to meet him in Richmond at two o'clock.  And so he rode on towards the River Swale.

The Swale is a fast flowing river and in those days was especially liable to flash flooding.  The floods fall, Alice said, down from the dales with a mighty mountainous force.  She had been nearly caught out once or twice – once, when going between Hipswell and her aunt Norton's, the water had been only a little above the horse's fetlocks when she began to cross, but the flood came down with such speed that the water had risen to the middle of the girths before she reached safety.  She was saved because she was only half the horse's length from the further bank by then – if she had been a couple more yards from safety, she would have met with disaster.

So when George rode by the family's little chapel on the top of the river bank and he saw that there was a wedding that day, he asked the people whether the Swale might be ridden.  Yes, they said – there had been a flood but it had fallen and some of them had crossed the water that morning.  So he wished them joy in their marriage and rode very slowly down the bank towards the wathplace, as fords were called in the dialect.  

Two men on the other bank saw him going as carefully and slowly as foot could fall – and then they saw the flood come suddenly and mightily down.  They ran to the river.  But they could only see his horse swimming to the bank and shaking itself.  They caught it by the bridle and they looked for the rider – no sign of him.  They ran to Easby and to Richmond, crying the news and calling for help.  The news came to Hipswell, a grievous and crushing blow, while great numbers flocked down to the river and began to search for George's body.

It was John Plummer, one of the men who had been called as a witness against him for his sequestration, who found him on the Wednesday, four miles downstream of Richmond in a pool near Catterick Bridge.  They thought, from the fact that he was unmarked except for one bruise on his nose, that he had struck his face on some great stone – there were stones like that in abundance, Alice said, at that wathplace.  He had been an excellent swimmer, but that hadn't saved him.  They took his body up and laid it that night at Thomson's at Catterick Brigg, fearing that taking him to his mother's would only deepen her grief and perhaps endanger her life.  The next day, the Richmondshire gentry accompanied the coach that took him to Kirklington to be buried inside the church near the tomb of his great-grandfather Sir Christopher.

St Michael's, Kirklington

Charles II and the Scots invade England: 1651

So the shocked and grief-stricken Mrs Wandesford and her children will hardly have been paying attention when, in August, Charles II and his Scottish supporters invaded England and Cromwell's troops again marched through Yorkshire.  

The town of Carlisle wouldn't let them enter and very few Englishmen were joining their army.  Cromwell marched at speed from Perthshire to the River Tyne and from there – 20 miles a day in extreme heat, with the country people carrying the troops' arms and equipment – he reached Ferrybridge on 19 August.  

The young king had decided to make for the Severn valley, where many had supported his father, but the people there did not welcome a Scottish invasion.  On 6 September 1651, his army was routed by Cromwell and his fellow generals at the Battle of Worcester.  The Scottish general David Leslie was captured and put in the Tower.  Many of the fleeing Scots were killed by locals as they tried to reach the border.  Around 10,000 prisoners were taken, most of them Scots, and they were sent to work draining the fens or shipped off to America.  Charles was on the run for six weeks before he could escape to France – his experiences had taught him more about the people than his father had ever known.  

Now Parliament's rule was secure and Scotland was under English military rule.  Cromwell had already begun with massacres at Drogheda and Wexford to complete the final crushing of the Irish rebellion.  After eleven dreadful years and an enormous death toll, Ireland would soon be subdued and very many more Protestant settlements created on land confiscated from Catholics.  

Note

That was the end of the Third Civil War 1649-51

The World Turn'd Upside Down

When Christmas had been banned, a ballad called "The World Turn'd Upside Down" had appeared in print.  Its refrain was

Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down

For many across the country, the Wandesfords included, the words must have seemed all too true.

Society had been turned upside down during the years of fighting.  Gentlemen and nobles had found themselves fighting alongside artisans and working men.  Ordinary men were driven by hunger into becoming soldiers and some found a chance at last of revenge for old grievances against the sort of men who had always had the upper hand.  Revolt and new ideas were in the air.

There were new religious sects like the Quakers – George Fox, their founder, had made followers across the North and East Ridings – and there were Baptists among Parliamentarian leaders.  There were political revolutionaries like the Levellers.  There were religious radicals – sects like the Fifth Monarchists who believed Jesus was coming any moment to begin a thousand-year reign – and wandering self-proclaimed messiahs.  Witch panics had broken out.  Over 300 people were executed – most by strangling at the stake before burning – in Scotland in the space of eighteen months.  The hysteria had spilled over into Berwick.  Twenty had died in Newcastle.  Matthew Hopkins, who called himself the Witchfinder General, was active in East Anglia, where about a hundred people were executed.

Note

For estimates of the death toll from battle and disease, see for example this Wikipedia entry

Next: 12. From Alice Wandesford's marriage to the return of the King: 1651-1660 

10. The Man of Blood & the English Republic: 1648-1650

 In the early days of 1648 news would come to Hipswell of rebellions and fighting.  The Christmas riots were turning into rebellions, Royalists in Wales had risen, Royalist commanders had taken Berwick and Carlisle and the fleet had mutinied.  

In the very cold, wet weeks of July 1648, the people of Teesdale and Richmondshire realised fighting was coming closer to home.  A Scottish army had crossed into England on 8 July and was quartered at Penrith and Appleby, waiting for reinforcements.  And this time they had invaded to support the King – and this time he had agreed, after secret negotiations with one of the Scottish factions, that he would impose Presbyterianism on the English if they would put him back on his throne.  Finally he had his army – Scots, English and Welsh Royalists, Scots Covenanters and some English Presbyterians.

When this was realisesd, what were people to think?  It must have been baffling and unsettling.  The King's attempt to impose his Anglicanism on the Presbyterian Scots had started the wars in the first place, all those years ago.  For the Wandesfords, their Anglican religion and their King were inseparable and they longed to be rid of the Presbyterian minister forced on them at Kirklington.  Did the King mean to keep his word to the Scots?  And if he didn't, what would happen?

Sir Thomas Danby had given his word not to take up arms against Parliament when he got his sequestered estates back, so for him and men like him the only honourable option was to stay at home and await events.  George Wandesford had a choice.  His property was still sequestered and he had made no promise.  But he decided not to risk his family's safety and security to join with a Scottish army – the last people he would have wanted to join and possibly the very men who had been quartered on them at Hipswell – for a possibly doomed attempt at defeating Parliament.

Then a Parliamentary army of 4,000 men under the able and decisive young Major-General John Lambert of Kirkby Malhamdale arrived to garrison Barnard Castle.  They were waiting to meet the Scots, expecting them to cross Stainmore on their way to Pontefract Castle, which Royalists had retaken for the king.  

General John Lambert (1619-84)

But there was no sign of the Scots – they had moved south, not east.  And their timing was all wrong – the rebellions and the invasion hadn't coincided.  By the time the Scots set off towards Cheshire, Oliver Cromwell had taken the surrender of Pembroke Castle and was on his way north.   General Lambert marched his men south and met Cromwell at Wetherby.  They now had about 9,000 men, half the strength of the Royalists.

The weather was terrible, the armies made slow progress.  The Scots were short of supplies and they were getting no reinforcements from the English as they passed.  Cromwell crossed the Pennines via Skipton at speed and, catching the Royalists by surprise, he took Preston.  After grim fighting for two hours, his men drove across the Ribble bridge at push of pike, driving the Scots from the bridge over the River Darwen soon after.  In wind and driving rain, the Scots continued south in the mud, exhausted and demoralised.  Wigan, the town that had welcomed the Wandesfords so kindly in 1643, was plundered violently by hungry Scots soldiers, even though it had always been a Royalist town.  Their goal had been Warrington, where they hoped for reinforcements from Cheshire and Wales.  Their attempt ended instead on 19 August with surrender and imprisonment for many, escape for some – and execution for their commander, the Duke of Hamilton.  

Charles I at his trial

The attempt to restore Charles to the throne had failed.  Now the radicals in power in the Army and Parliament had run out of options with him.  The King – that Man of Blood, as they called him – had brought Scottish troops into England and set off another civil war.  More death, more destruction.  His slipperiness and dubious intrigues made further negotiations impossible.  They put him on trial for high treason as an enemy of the people.  And now he rose to the occasion – never in his life had he behaved with such quiet dignity.  The outcome was a foregone conclusion.  He was declared guilty and 59 of the 68 commissioners who sat in judgement signed the death warrant – one of them was Thomas Chaloner of Guisborough.  

Charles was executed on 30 January 1649 in Whitehall, on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House where the glorious ceilings he had commissioned Rubens to paint celebrated the belief in the Divine Rule of Kings that he and his father had held so dear.  

The execution of Charles I

The shock to his supporters was dreadful.  The Annointed of the Lord, the Joy of our hearts, the light of our eyes had been cruelly murdered, wrote Alice, by blasphemous rebels.  And not just to his supporters – the execution of the king by an army faction was deeply unsettling and at the moment of his death, when a groan went up from the silent watchers, the cult of King Charles the Martyr was born.

Note

This was the end of the Second Civil War, 1648

The English Republic and the invasion of Scotland: 1650

England was now a republic and soon Parliament declared it was a Commonwealth – the traditional word for a community founded on the common good of all.  But they had executed the king without consulting the Scottish parliament, and Charles was not only king of England but king of the Scots as well.  Within days of the execution, the Scots proclaimed his son as King.  

While Oliver Cromwell crushed radical mutinies in the army and crossed to Ireland to subdue it with the utmost brutality, the new king Charles II – not yet nineteen years old – went into an alliance with the Scottish Presbyterians, promising, like his father before him, to impose Presbyterianism on the English.  

Charles II c1650,
by Adriaen Hanneman

Now the English Council of State decided to preempt a Scottish invasion by invading Scotland.  

In the middle of July 1650, a large army of some 15,000 men marched through Yorkshire on its way to Durham.  It reached Berwick-upon-Tweed on 19 July.  Oliver Cromwell was in command.  It was another particularly wet, cold summer, and the Scottish commander hoped that sickness and hunger would wear the English down, so he destroyed all the crops and removed all the livestock between the border and Edinburgh.  

Cromwell began by trying to persuade the Scots that young Charles was not a fitting king for them – they were beginning to have their doubts about this charismatic and dashing young man, but Charles was ready to promise them anything and they were not to be persuaded by an invading English general.  It looked as though the Scottish army would succeed triumphantly, but in heavy rain, in sodden fields, it went down to a crushing and surprising defeat at the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650.  It was Cromwell's greatest victory.  

On Christmas Eve, Edinburgh surrendered to Cromwell.  On New Year's Day 1651, the Scots crowned Charles II at Scone in Perthshire.  

Note: the Scottish prisoners in Durham Cathedral

Cromwell was left with a lot of prisoners on his hands after the Battle of Dunbar and he wanted to advance further into Scotland.  He sent 3,900 of them south.  By the time they reached Durham, after an eight day march, some had escaped, some had been shot, and some had died of disease.  The rest – 3,000 of them – were locked inside the disused cathedral at Durham because it was the only place big enough to take them and the Parliamentarians didn't think of churches as sacred spaces anyway.  Conditions got out of control when the bloody flux – dysentery – took hold, and 1,600 were dead within six weeks.  Of the rest, some were sent to work in Sir Arthur Haselrigge's coal mines and in local industry, and some were sent at indentured servants to Massachusetts.  The last were set free in July 1652.  Their story was never forgotten in Durham.  It made the news when bodies were discovered in the grounds of the cathedral square in 2013 and again in 2018 when the results of painstaking investigation were published.  See here for a full account.

Next:  11. The wars come to an end: 1651