Chapter 21 - No Quarter! by Mayne Reid
War in Full Fury
An interval of some weeks after the scenes described, and the war, long imminent, was on. All over England men had declared cause and taken sides; the battle of Edgehill had been fought, and blood spilled in various encounters elsewhere. For besides the two chief forces in the field, every shire, almost every hundred, had its parties and partisans, who waged la petite guerre with as much vigour, and more virulence, than the grand armies with generals commanding. Many of the country gentry retired within the walled towns; they who did not, fortifying their houses when there was a plausibility of being able to defend them, and garrisoning them with their friends and retainers. The roads were no longer safe for peaceful travellers, but the reverse. When parties met upon them, strangers to one another, it was with the hail, “Who are you for—King or Parliament?” If the answers were adverse, it was swords out, and a conflict, often commencing with the cry, “No Quarter!” to end in retreat, surrender, or death.
Looking at the allegiance of the respective shires to the two parties that divided the nation, one cannot help observing the wonderful similitude of their sentiments then as now—almost a parallelism. In those centres where the cavaliers or malignants held sway, their modern representatives—Tories and Jingoes—are still in the ascendant. With some changes and exceptions, true; places which have themselves changed by increase in population, wealth, refinement, and enlightenment—in short, all the adjuncts of civilisation. And in all these, or nearly all, the altered political sentiment has been from the bad to the better, from the low belief in Divine rights and royal prerogatives to a higher faith in the rights of the people, if not its highest and purest form—Republicanism.
From this standard rather has there been retrogression since that glorious decade when it was the Government of England. At the Restoration its spirit, with many of its staunchest upholders, took flight to a land beyond the Atlantic, there to breathe freely, live a new life, call into existence and nourish a new nation, ere long destined to dictate the policy and control the action of every other, in the civilised world. This “sure as eggs are eggs;” unless the old leaven of human wickedness—not inherent in man’s heart, as shallow thinkers say, but inherited from an ancestry debased by the rule of prince and priest—unless the old weeds of this manhood’s debasement spring up again from the old seeds and roots, despite all tramplings down and teachings to the contrary.
It may be so. The devil is still alive on the earth, busy as ever misleading and corrupting the sons of men; in many places and countries, alas! too triumphantly successful, even in that land outre mer, over the Atlantic.
At the breaking out of our so-called, but miscalled, “Great Rebellion,” in the belt of shires bordering Wales, the Royalists were in the majority; perhaps not so much in numbers as in strength and authority. The same with Wales itself; not from any natural belief in, or devotion to, the thing called “Crown,” but because this spirited people were under the domination of certain powerful and wealthy proprietors of the Royalist party, who controlled their action, as their political leanings. Of this Monmouthshire offers an apt illustration, where the Earl of Worcester, Ragland’s lord, held undisputed sway to the remotest corners of the county.
Still, Wales was not all for the King; and where such influence failed to be exerted, as in Pembroke and Glamorgan in the south, and some shires and districts of the north, the natural instincts of the Welsh prompted them to declare for liberty, as they have lately done at the polls. From any stigma that may have attached to them in the seventeenth century they have nobly redeemed themselves in the nineteenth.
Of the bordering counties, Salop, as might be expected, stood strong for the King. The subserviency of its people—for centuries bowing head and bending knee to the despotic Lords of the Marches, who held court at Ludlow—had become part of their nature; hence an easy transfer of their obeisance to Royalty direct.
The shire of Worcester, closely connected with Salop in trade and other relationships, largely shared its political inclinings; the city of Worcester itself being noted as a nest of “foul malignants,” till purged of them by the “crowning mercy.”
As for Hereford county, with its semi-pastoral, semi-agricultural population, it espoused the side natural to such; which, I need hardly say, was not that of liberty. Throughout all ages, and in all countries, the bucolic mind has been the most easily misled, and given strongest support to tyranny and obstruction. But for it the slimy Imperialism of France would never have existed, and but for the same the slimier imitation of it in England would not have been attempted. Luckily, on this side of the English Channel there is not so much of the base material as on the other. When the Jew of Hughenden travestied country squire, patronising and bestowing prize smock-frocks on poor old Dick Robinson, he mistook the voting influence of Dick’s farmer-master. It no longer controls the destinies of this land, and will never more do so if the Parliament now in power but acts up to the spirit which has so placed it. Nous verrons!
Returning to the times of England’s greatest glory, and the shire of Hereford, this, though strongly Royalist, was not wholly so. Many of the common people, especially on the Gloucester shire side, were otherwise disposed, and among the gentry were several noble exceptions, as the Kyrles, Powells, and Hoptons; and noblest of all. Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan—relentless iconoclast. If the name of Sir Richard Walwyn be not found in the illustrious list, it is because the writer of romance has thought fit to bestow upon this valiant knight a fictitious nom de guerre.
But the western shire entitled to highest honours for its action in this grand throe of the nation’s troubles was undoubtedly Gloucester—glorious Gloucester. When the lamp of liberty was burning dim and low elsewhere over the land, it still shone bright upon the Severn’s banks; a very blaze in its two chief cities, Gloucester and Bristol. In both it was a beacon, holding out hope to the friends of freedom, near and afar, struggling against its foes, in danger of being whelmed, as mariners by the maddened ocean.
To the latter city, as a seaport, the simile may be more appropriate, though the former is equally entitled to a share in its credit. But Bristol most claims our attention now, as it was in 1642, under the mayoralty of Aldworth. A main entrepôt and emporium of commerce with the outside world, it was naturally emancipated from the narrow-minded views and prejudices of our insular nationality; not a few of its citizens having so far become enlightened as to believe the world had not been created solely for the delectation of royal sybarites, and the suffering of their subjects and slaves. Indeed, something more than the majority of the citizens of Bristol held this belief; and, as a consequence, showed their preference for the Parliament at the earliest hour that preferences came to be declared. So, when Colonel Essex, son of the Earl of like name—Lord General of the Parliamentary army—was sent thither commissioned as its military governor, no one offered to dispute his authority; instead, he was received with open arms.
But ere long the free-thinking Bristolians made a discovery, which not only surprised but alarmed them. Neither more nor less than that the man deputed by the Parliament to protect and guard their interests showed rather the disposition to betray them. If living in these days, Colonel Essex would have been a Whig, with a leaning towards Toryism. As Governor of Bristol in 1642 he inclined so far to Cavalierism as to make boast of not being a Crophead, while further favouring those who wore their locks long and prated scornfully of Puritans and Quakers. At the time there was a host of these long-haired gentry in Bristol, prisoners whom Stamford had taken at Hereford, under parole, and the indulgent colonel not only kept their company, but joined them over their cups in sneers at the plebeian Roundheads, who lacked the gentility of blackguardism.
Luckily for the good cause, the tongue of this semi-renegade outran his prudence; his talk proving too loud to escape being heard by the Parliament, whose ears it soon reached, with the result that one fine evening, while in carousal with some of his Cavalier friends, he was summoned to the door, to see standing there a man of stern mien, who said,—
“Colonel Essex! ’Tis my disagreeable duty to place you under arrest.”
“Place me under arrest!” echoed the military governor of Bristol, his eyes in amazement swelling up in their sockets. “What madman are you, sirrah?”
“Not so much madman as you may be supposing. Of my name, as also reason for intruding upon you so inopportunely, I take it this will be sufficient explanation.”
At which the stern man handed him a piece of folded parchment, stamped with a grand seal—not the King’s, but one bearing the insignia of the Parliament.
With shaking fingers Essex broke it open and read:—
“This to make known that our worthy and well-trusted servant, Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, has our commission to undertake the government of our good and faithful city of Bristol, and we hereby direct and do command that all persons submit and yield due obedience to the lawful authority so holden by him.
“Signed, Lenthal.”
The astonished colonel made some vapouring protest in speech, but not by action. For the son of Lord Saye and Sele had not come thither unattended. At his back was a posse of stalwart fellows—soldiers, who, that same morning, were under the orders of him now being placed in arrest, but, having learnt there was a change of commanding officers, knew better than to refuse obedience to the new one.
So the deposed governor, forced to part company with his convives, was carried off to prison as a common malefactor. He, too, the son of the Earl of Essex, Lord General of the Parliamentary army—the Parliament itself having ordered it! Verily, these were days when men feared not to arraign and punish—unlucky times for tyrants and traitors! To have concealed a deficit of four thousand pounds in the national exchequer then would have been a more dangerous deception than to waste as many millions now, without being able to render account of them.