described Dowsing going about ‘like a Bedlam breaking glasse windowes, having battered and beaten downe all our painted glasse…mistaking perhaps the liberall Arts for Saints…and having defaced and digged up the floors of our Chappels, many of which had lien so for two or three hundred years together, not regarding the dust of our founders and predecessors, who likely were buried there; compelled us by armed Souldiers to pay forty shillings a Colledge for not mending what he had spoyled and defaced, or forthwith to go to Prison.’
Such plate as did reach the King from Cambridge was mostly handed over for melting down to Thomas Bushell, an ingenious and enterprising engineer and entrepreneur, who managed with notable success the royal mines of Wales. As the King himself acknowledged in a letter of thanks, Bushell performed ‘manie other true services’ in the Royalist cause: ‘Your providing us with one hundred tonnes of leadshot for our army without mony, which ws paid before twentie pounds per tonne; and your helpinge us to twenty-six pieces of ordinance…and your contracting with merchants beyond the seas for providing good quantities of powder, pistol, carabine, musket and bullen…and your cloathing of our liefe guard [of miners] and three regiments more with suits, stockings and shoes when we were ready to march in the feild.’
With Bushell’s help a mint was established at Shrewsbury and recruits were soon being paid 45. 4d. a week, more than many were earning in civilian life. Later that year musketeers were being paid at the rate of 65. a week and horsemen as much as 175. 6d. But these rates had to be lowered as the months went by, and by the spring of 1644 the pay of ordinary soldiers had dropped to 45. a week; corporals had 75., sergeants 105. 6d., lieutenants £1 85., and captains £2 125. 6d. But these amounts, roughly the same in both armies, were often no more than notional. In the ranks of Royalists and Parliamentarians alike there were frequent complaints about pay being late or not forthcoming at all, and in the areas through which their armies passed there were just as angry charges that soldiers pillaged what they could not or would not buy. A soldier was supposed to receive every day from the commissariat two pounds of bread, one pound of meat or cheese, and an allowance of either wine or beer. But in these early days of the conflict he very rarely did so, and was driven to living as he could off the country, or as it was sometimes termed ‘at free country’, much to the distress of the people at large. A characteristic petition from the ‘inhabitants of Middlesex and other south-eastern counties’ complained of the ‘intolerable oppression of Free Quarter’ which rendered them ‘no better than mere conquered slaves [of the soldiers] who like so many Egyptian locusts fed so long upon [them] at free cost’.
In the Royalist army colonels of horse were ordered ‘to quarter and billet their respective regiments in such places as we have assigned, and there to take up such necessary provisions of diet, lodging, hay, oats and straw as shall be necessary for them. And if there shall not be sufficient for such supply in their quarters then they are to send out their warrants to the several parishes adjacent, requiring the inhabitants to bring in all fitting provisions for their daily supply. For all which, as for that taken up in their quarters, they are to give their respective tickets, and not to presume upon pain of our high displeasure, to send for greater quantities than will suffice for their numbers of men and horses.’
Tickets were, however, not always given for the provisions taken: and, when given, were not always honoured. Civilian people consequently ‘carried away or hid all their provisions, insomuch as there was neither meat for man or horse: and the very smiths hid themselves, that they might not be compelled to shoe the horses, of which in those stony ways there was great need’.
A sergeant recorded at about this time, ‘At Aynhoe we were very scanted for victuals; at Chipping Norton our regiment stood in the open field all night having neither bread nor water to refresh ourselves, having also marched the day before without any sustenance.’ Outside Swindon his regiment came upon some thousand sheep and sixty head of cattle. Persuading themselves that they belonged to ‘malignants and papists’, they immediately rounded them all up. Such behaviour was common enough in both armies.
Warned of Essex’s approach towards Worcester, the King ordered Prince Rupert to take half the cavalry which had so far assembled under the royal standard to intercept him. By 23 September, the Prince’s horse were about two miles south of Worcester near the village of Powick where the river Teme flows into the Severn. As he approached the Severn he was told that a body of Parliamentary horse, some thousand strong, had crossed the Teme at Powick Bridge behind him. They were advancing up a narrow lane between thick hedges which gave them no room to manoeuvre. Prince Rupert immediately saw his opportunity. Drawing his men up in the open field at the end of the lane, he prepared to charge as soon as the enemies’ leading horsemen had emerged from it. Waiting until a goodly number had appeared from behind the hedge, the Cavaliers galloped forward at their commanders’ order, overthrowing those Parliamentary horsemen who had come out into the field and throwing the rest into the utmost confusion as they rode this way and that, incapable of understanding, still less of carrying out, such orders as were given them. ‘Our wounded men they brought into the city,’ so Nehemiah Wharton recorded, ‘and stripped, and stabbed and slashed their bodies in a most barbarous manner and imbrued their hands in their blood. They also met a young gentleman, a Parliament man – his name I cannot learn – and stabbed him on horseback with many wounds, and trampled upon him, and also most maliciously shot his horse…All night we had small comfort, for it rained hard. Our food was fruit, for those who could get it; our drink, water; our beds, the earth; but we pulled up hedges, pales and gates and made good fires…Thus we continued singing of psalms until the morning. Saturday morning we marched to Worcester [which Prince Rupert had abandoned as being indefensible] the rain continuing the whole day, and the way so base that we went up to the ancles in thick clay; and, about four of the clock after noon, entered the city where we found twenty-eight dead men, which we buried…We shortly expect a pitched battle, which, if the Cavaliers will but stand, will be very hot; for we are all much enraged against them for their barbarisms, and shall show them little mercy.’
The Royalists claimed a great victory at Powick Bridge. So also did the Parliamentarians, who were in the habit of claiming victory even in battles which had never been fought. But Essex recognized that his cavalry would have to be far better trained before they engaged the Cavaliers again. They must, he instructed, practise the ceremonious forms of military discipline so that in future they would know how to ‘fall on with descretion and retreat with care’.
Encouraged by this victory and by the reputation which his nephew had gained from it, the King welcomed the recruits, who continued to come to him at Shrewsbury from the surrounding areas, in much improved spirits. By the beginning of October he had six thousand foot soldiers at his command, in addition to the horsemen whom Prince Rupert was training as assiduously as were Essex’s officers the Parliamentary cavalry; and by the middle of the month he was ready to march upon his recently abandoned capital, convinced, as Edward Hyde said, that it was owing to ‘the wonderful providence of God that from the low despised condition [he] was in at Nottingham, after the setting up of his standard there, he should be able to get men, money and arms and, within twenty days of his coming to Shrewsbury, to march, in despite of the enemy, even towards London’.
The King set out for London on 12 October, following the course of the Severn down to Bridgnorth, where the people came out into the streets to cheer him on his way, then turning east for Kenilworth, gathering more recruits en route until he had over fifteen thousand infantry and some eight thousand horsemen, more troops than he was ever to command again. They were not as well armed as his officers would have liked, some of the Welshmen who had joined him at Wolverhampton having to be content with pitchforks and even scythes and sickles; but he had twenty field guns and the men appeared to be in as good spirits as he was himself. They had been much encouraged by their cavalry’s victory at Powick Bridge and were already congratulating each other upon the superior merits of the young commander, Prince Rupert, who, for all his squabbles with his fellow-commanders, had undoubtedly instilled confidence into their men. He had found a ‘very thin and small army’ at Nottingham, as Sir Philip Warwick, one of his officers said, ‘and the Foot very meanly armed’. But he had soon ‘ranged and disciplined them’ and ‘put such spirit into the King’s army that all men seem’d