in 1643. When the Royalists seemed close to taking the town, Hutchinson ordered his men to take Byron ‘or shoote him and not let him scape though they cut his leggs off’.
Sir Henry Slingsby, a Yorkshire squire, described a savage fight ‘between two that had been neighbours and intimate friends’:
At another part of the town of York, Lieutenant Collonel Norton enters with his dragouns, Captain Attkisson encounters him on horseback, the other being [on] foot; they meet; Attkisson misseth with his Pistol, the other pulls him off his horse by the sword belt; being both on the ground Attkisson’s soulgiers comes in, fells Norton into the ditch with the butt ends of their musketts; then comes Norton’s soulgiers and beats down Attkisson and with blows at him broke his thigh bone, whereof he dy’d.
Slingsby himself was a characteristic example of a man who dismayed many of his friends by choosing what they took to be the wrong side. An opponent of Laudism, he thought ‘it came too near idolatry to adorn a place with rich cloaths and other furniture’, and was equally critical of the extravagance and superficiality of the King’s court, yet, while considering it ‘most horrible that we should engage ourselves in a war one with another [having] lived thus long peaceably, without noise of shot or drum’, he became a dedicated Royalist, refused to take oaths which would have allowed him to continue in possession of his estate, and, having taken part in a Royalist conspiracy, was beheaded on Tower Hill.
John Hutchinson, the Nottinghamshire squire, who much resembled Slingsby in his tastes and outlook, was quite as firm in his support of Parliament. So was his wife, though she did regret that her husband – who, she was pleased to say, had declined to marry an heiress, the granddaughter of his family’s doctor, because he ‘could never stoupe to think of marrying into so meane a stock’ – had now to associate with ‘factious little people (by whom all the Parliament Garrisons were infested and disturb’d) insomuch that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some opprest by a certeine meane sort of people in the House whom, to distinguish from the most Honorable Gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men’.
Other wives, and mothers and daughters, were often dismayed by conflicting loyalties: Frances Devereux was married to the Marquess of Hertford, a staunch Royalist and Governor to the Duke of York; her brother was to command the forces of Parliament.
Nor was it only friends and members of the same families who were distressed to find themselves in opposing camps, but also men of different generations. Younger men with less experience of the King’s deviousness, and influenced by the opportunities presented by royal absolutism abroad for such as they, tended to be Royalist. Certainly this was so in the House of Commons, where half the Members were under forty years of age and where, as Professor Lawrence Stone has observed, of those under thirty twice as many chose to support the King as fought for Parliament. In the Upper House, of peers in their twenties and thirties who took part in the war, four out of five did so on behalf of the King.
‘Parents and children, brothers, kindred, I and dear friends have the seed of differences and divisions abundantly sowed in them,’ Henry Oxinden, a member of an old Kentish family, wrote home to a cousin from London. ‘I find all here full of fears and void of hopes…Sometimes I meet with a cluster of gentlemen equally divided in opinions and resolution, sometimes three to two, sometimes more odds, but never unanimous. Nay more, I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends.’
Another country gentleman, Thomas Knyvett of Norfolk, wrote to his wife:
Oh sweet hart I am nowe in a great strayght what to do…Walking this other morning at Westminster, Sir John Potts [a Member of Parliament]…saluted me with a commission from my Lord of Warwick [appointed by Parliament, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk] to take upon me (by virtue of an ordinance of parliament) my company and command again. I was surprised what to do, whether to take or refuse. ‘Twas no place to dispute, so I took it and desired some time to advise upon it. I had not received this many hours, but I met with a declaration point-blank against it by the King…I hold it good wisdom and security to keep my company as close to me as I can in these dangerous times and to stay out of the way of my new masters till these first mutterings be over…I do fancy a little house by ourselves extremely well, where we may spend the remainder of our days in religous tranquil.
The King was on his way north. From Hampton Court he had gone to Greenwich, then on to Royston and Cambridge where he was shown round Trinity College and St John’s. From Cambridge he had ridden on to Huntingdon, to the manor house at Little Gidding where the quiet orderliness of the kindly Ferrar family soothed his distressed spirit. He went out shooting and bagged a hare and in the evening, playing cards, he won £5, which he presented to his hostess for her charities; and the Prince of Wales, now eleven years old, was given apple pie to eat in the pantry. ‘Pray,’ the King said on taking his leave, ‘Pray for my speedy and safe return.’
Urged by Edward Hyde, until recently one of the Crown’s opponents, now one of its chief advisers, to do or say nothing which might hinder a compromise settlement, the King from time to time on his northward progress issued a conciliatory statement, but gained little support. People flocked to see him in their thousands. As many as thirty thousand, so it was estimated, came to Lincoln from the surrounding countryside. Few, however, were prepared to join him in arms. There were rumours that most of those who did were papists, rumours that the King did his best to scotch. At Stamford he published a proclamation enjoining the enforcement of the laws against Roman Catholics; and at York he announced his ‘zealous affection to the true Protestant profession and his resolution to concur with Parliament in any possible course for the propagation of it and the suppression of Popery’. He denied that help was being sought in other countries, while still actively seeking it, and assured his people that he longed for the ‘peace, honour and prosperity of the nation’. While he spoke of peace, however, he prepared for war; and, suspecting this, Parliament despatched a committee to York, ostensibly as a diplomatic mission, in reality to keep a close watch on him. The committee found the city far from being the pleasant place which the indefatigable traveller Celia Fiennes was to describe fifty years later. There were scuffles in the streets and rowdy arguments in alehouses. Rival groups ‘ran foul of each other with rough words and rough handling’. Two inoffensive priests, one of them almost ninety years old, whose only offences were their Roman Catholic ministrations, were hanged.
On 22 April 1642 the King sent a party of courtiers to Hull, a town with a strong castle which held a large store of ammunition and artillery in its magazine and a port which the Queen had persistently advised him to seize for the unloading of the supplies she hoped to send him. Among the men who rode out of York on this mission to discover the feelings of the authorities and people of Hull were the King’s eldest nephew, the Elector Palatine, a dull man and compulsive fornicator, whose attachment to Protestantism could not be doubted, and Charles’s younger son, the eight-year-old Duke of York, who had been brought from London by the Marquess of Hertford.
The Governor of Hull was Sir John Hotham, whose natural bad temper was exacerbated by his anxiety not to do anything which might harm his family’s standing in Yorkshire. He had been imprisoned some years before for refusing to collect a forced loan, but his loyalty to Parliament was not thereby taken on trust; and since the Mayor of Hull as well as ‘a goodly number of the townsfolk’ were Royalist in sentiment, Peregrine Pelham, one of the Members of Parliament for the place, spent as much time there as he did at Westminster to ensure that control of the port was not lost.
Since the King’s young son had come to Hull supposedly on a social visit, Hotham decided that he could not very well refuse the party admittance; but when he heard that the King himself intended to visit the town, and was, indeed, on the way with a troop of cavalry, he made excuses, prompted by Pelham, for his inability to receive him at such short notice.
The King arrived at dinner time to find the gates closed against him. There was a shout from the top of the wall. His Majesty, Hotham called down, could not enter. One of the King’s companions shouted back instructions to the people of the town to throw the Governor off the wall and open the gates themselves. No one moved to do so; and, after a time spent in angry remonstrance, the King’s party were obliged to withdraw to York, followed by the Duke of York and the Elector Palatine