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 

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