Chapter 29 - No Quarter! by Mayne Reid
The Night Owl
The conspiracy having been nipped in the bud, and the conspirators in prison, Bristol again breathed freely. The approaches to it were once more open, the thwarted Royalists having withdrawn to a distance; so that Jerky Jack might have made the return trip to Gloucester with a despatch stuck in the band of his hat safe as it inside his wooden leg.
But swifter messengers traversed that road now, cleared of the enemy at both ends, and on both sides of the river Severn.
He who had effected this clearance was Sir William Waller, jocularly styled “William the Conqueror,” from the succession of victories he had late achieved. Also was he known as the “Night Owl;” a sobriquet due to his habit of making nocturnal expeditions that oft took the Royalists by surprise. No Crophead he, but a Cavalier in the true sense; a very Paladin—withal a Christian gentleman. He had separated from slow-going Lord General, and made one of his bold dashes down to the shires bordering Wales; first relieving Gloucester, which was in a manner besieged by the Monmouthshire levies of Lord Herbert. The besiegers were not only brushed off, but the main body of them either killed or captured; only a scant residue escaping to their fastnesses beyond the Wye; whither the “Conqueror” followed, chastising them still further.
Returning across the Forest of Dean, he outwitted the Royalist troops under Prince Maurice; and, once were setting face westward, raided through Herefordshire on to its chief city—which he captured, with a flock of foul birds that had been roosting there ever since its abandonment by the Parliamentarians under the silly Stamford.
But the “Night Owl” himself was not the bird to remain long on perch anywhere; and, gathering up his captured game—a large bag, including some of Herefordshire’s best blood, as the Scudamores, Conningsbys, and Pyes—he rounded back to Gloucester, and on to Bristol.
Not to tarry here, either. Soon as he had disembarrassed himself of his captive train—committed to the keeping of Fiennes—he was off again into Somersetshire, there to measure swords with Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford. As he rode out through the Bath gate at the head of a troop of steel-clad cuirassiers—“Hesselrig’s Lobsters”—the citizens of Bristol felt more confident of safety than ever since the strife began. For now they were assured against danger, outside as within. Internal treason had been awed, the traitors cowed and crushed, by what had befallen the conspirators of March the Seventh. The two chiefs of them, Yeomans and Boucher, had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death—a sentence soon afterwards carried into execution. Grand efforts were made to get them off; the King himself, by letter, threatening to retaliate upon the poor captives taken at Cirencester—such of them as remained unmurdered. Old Patrick, Earl of Forth, his Majesty’s Lieutenant-General, was put forward as the writer of the barbarous epistle. But canny Scot and accomplished soldier as his lordship might be, in a polemical contest he was no match for the lawyer, Fiennes, who flung the threat back in his teeth, saying:
“The men we have tried and condemned are not soldiers, but spies and conspirators. The prisoners you took at Cirencester are prisoners of war. I would have you observe the distinction. And know, too, that for every hair of their heads that falls, I will hang ten of your curled Cavaliers—make Bristol a shambles of them.”
Though not Nathaniel Fiennes’s exact words, they convey his meaning very near. And he could and would have acted up to them, as the King and his counsellors knew. So, whether or not they deemed his argument rational, it was unanswerable, or at all events unanswered, by a counter-threat; and the Cirencester prisoners were spared execution, while the Bristol conspirators went to the scaffold.
Much has been made of the King’s forbearance in this affair by those who did not, or would not, comprehend the motive. It was pure fear, not humanity—fear of a still more terrible retaliation. At that time the Parliament held ten prisoners for one in the hands of the Royalists—men of such rank and quality, his Majesty dared not put their lives in peril, much less let them be sacrificed. He had his revenge in secret, however, since under his very nose at Oxford many of the hapless captives from Cirencester miserably perished, through the torturing treatment of the Royal Provost-Marshal, Smith.
Finally, the “two State martyrs”—as Yeomans and Boucher have been styled by the Royalist writers—were strung up, protesting their innocence to the last, for all they were little believed. The evidence adduced at their trial clearly proved intent to shed the blood of their fellow-citizens; else why were they and their co-conspirators armed? Independent of this, their design of handing over Bristol to the rule of Prince Rupert and his ruffians meant something more than the mere spilling of blood in a street conflict—it involved the sack and pillage of peaceful homes, the violation of women, rapine and ruin in every way. It was only on getting the details of the trial that the Bristolians became fully sensible of the danger they had so narrowly escaped; convinced then, as Captain Birch worded it, that they had been standing upon a mine.
Notwithstanding all these occurrences and circumstances running counter to the Royal cause, against which the tide seemed to have turned, within Montserrat House—as the late Monsieur Lalande had named his dwelling—was no interruption of the festive scenes already alluded to. Its guests were as numerous, its gaieties gay and frequent as ever. For, to speak truth, the political bias of the planter’s widow, as that of her daughter, was but skin deep. Hair had much to do with it; and, like enough, had the Parliamentarian officers but worn theirs a little longer, submitted it to the curling tongs, and given themselves to swearing and swaggering, in a genteel Cavalier way, they would have been more welcome to the hospitality of her house.
Still not all of them were denied it; for not all were of the Roundhead type. Among them were many gentlemen of high birth and best manners, some affecting as fine feathers as the Cavaliers themselves. For the “Self-denying Ordinance” had not yet been ordained, nor the Parliamentary army moulded to the “new model.”
In view of certain people sojourning in Montserrat House, it need scarce be said that Sir Richard Walwyn and Eustace Trevor were visitors there. Even without reference to the predilections of Madame or Mademoiselle, they could not well be excluded. But there was no thought of excluding them; both were unmistakably eligible, and one of them most welcome, for reasons that will presently appear. They had arrived in Bristol only a short while antecedent to its state of semi-siege, the Powells having long preceded them thither. And now that the approaches were again open, most of their time was spent keeping them so; the troop with the “big sergeant,” and standard showing a crown impaled upon a sword, once more displaying its prowess in encounters with the Cavaliers. After Rupert had disappeared from that particular scene, Prince Maurice, with his corps d’armée, began to manoeuvre upon it, swinging round southward into Somersetshire to unite his force with that of Hertford. To hang upon his skirts, and harass his outposts, was the work of Sir Richard Walwyn; a duty which often carried him and his Foresters afar from the city, and kept them away weeks at a time.
He was just returning to it when Waller passed through. But, entering by a different route and gate from that taken by the latter going out, he missed him. Like enough but for this he would have been commanded along. For the “Conqueror” had carried off with him the élite of the troops quartered in Bristol, almost stripping it of a garrison, to the no small annoyance of Nathaniel Fiennes. Glad was the Governor that the troop with the “big sergeant” had escaped such requisition—overjoyed his eyes to see that banner, bearing the emblem of a crown with sword stuck through it once more waving before the Castle gate.