Quarrel with the King (28 page)

All the ingredients were here of the destruction that unrolled across the United Kingdom for the next eleven years, founded on the idea that any damage—the killing of fathers by sons, the destruction
of estates—was good and strong if done in the service of the word of God. Any doubts were effeminate fancies, any law a tissue of worldly invention. The custom of the manor had lost all authority.

The result of such sweeping certainty on both sides was that for the next few years a harrow would be dragged across the body of England. No part of the country suffered more than Wiltshire and its surrounding counties, the borderlands of royalist influence both around Oxford and to the west, with parliamentary control in the country around London.

There was a pervasive feeling that wickedness was loose in the land. And in its wake came an unprecedented level of hatred: Parliamentary prisoners taken in the first months of the war were forced by their royalists guards in Oxford to drink the water in which the guards had previously washed. Nothing was safe from the thieving of the armies. The wonderful Quarter Sessions Rolls, on which much of this book relies for its evidence, were preserved only because in January 1643 the Wiltshire justices, wondering how the “sessions records may be preserved in this time of danger,” ordered “a strong chest with two locks and keys for that purpose be provided and kept in the vestry house of Warminster church.”

Rough gangs of pressed soldiers roamed the valleys. “When service happens,” one recruiting sergeant boasted, “we disburden the prisons of thieves, we rob the taverns and alehouses of tosspots and ruffians, we scour both town and country of rogues and vagabonds.” War legitimized violence and theft. Soldiers staying in Salisbury in the spring of 1643 set fire to the beds they had slept on. Others raided a butcher's shop and threw the pig carcasses into the Avon. In the small chalkland village of West Lavington, about eighteen miles north of Wilton, on Sailsbury Plain, one of these savage gangs broke into the house where the young Henry Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne, whose father was famous as a Catholic and royalist sympathizer,
was staying, exhausted after days in the saddle. He was asleep in a chair in the house and woke to find the troopers in the parlor, armed, the women shrieking and fluttering around them. One of the men pulled him up by the hair, knocked him down, and “broke two pistols over his head, without so much as tendering him quarter.” Another, said to have been “a collier,” perhaps a charcoal maker, famously independent men of the woods, “swore that he should die for his father's sake, and putting a pistol to his belly shot him dead.”

A steady stream of casual death, theft, and violence was done to ordinary people. Abraham Hale of the House of Correction at Devizes was forced “to entertayne the Prest souldiers & to make pvision for them wch came to Seven pounds fifteene shillings & Seaven pence,” never paid. On March 25, 1644, in Warminster, a young mother at home alone with her child was surprised to hear a man called George Long knock on her door,

There is no explanation in the records of why Long and his armed friends attacked her and killed her child. At the same time, George Reynolds was asked to be high constable of the hundred but declared himself incapable “haveing byn by souldiers soe heavily abused & beaten yt he is not able to ride nor travel.”

Carriers had “corne and malt taken from them by a turbulent multitude by reason whereof they cannot travel with the said comodities and therefore many poore people in those parts are in great distresse for want of the same.” Widows were robbed, villages burned, and attacks made on hedges and other enclosures. The chance was taken to carry out revenge killings under the cover of ideological difference. After the war, the courts were full of cases trying to decide whether individual deaths were murders or were done in the cause of duty.

All over Wiltshire, parks were broken into and deer chased with greyhounds and shot. Incidents of sheep stealing peaked, and anyone who attempted to retrieve the stolen sheep ran the risk of gangs of men coming to find them. Thomas Astill of Peasemore recovered sixteen of his sheep and was driving them home when he “was overtook by a man on horse back with dogges & other men wth Clubbes who took the sheep away from him.” The gang then threatened to take Astill and his neighbors to Devizes “& have them tyed neck to heels together & afterwards hanged for demanding and medling with the sheepe.”

The people of Horningsham, Maiden Bradley, and Kingston Deverill, three villages at the far western end of the Wiltshire chalk, applied to the justices for permission to take the law into their own hands. The war had left them plagued by thieves:

They wanted a warrant from the court that would allow them to attack and arrest their enemies. But the court, which had worked only intermittently during the war, did not trust this vigilante law. The petition of the three villages is signed by the justices: “Noe order.”

If that is a signal that some fragment of the system of law was still operating, many other places suffered from the ebb and flow of armies to which the whole county was subject, attacked in turn, plundered in turn, taxed in turn, and then, for many, “barbarously burned.” Gentry like the Penruddocks would receive the familiar imploring-cum-threatening letters demanding “£100 for our necessary support and maintenance of our army”—this was from the king's camp—“And of this service we cannot doubt since if you should refuse to give us this testimony of your affection you will give us too great a cause to suspect your duty and inclination both to our person and the peace.” Lesser folk were simply bullied into the provision of goods and services. Thomas White of Potterne, near Devizes, had taken from him

which of course he never was. The armies took food and carriage on tick, but by the time payment was due, had moved on. A mason from Meere, for the want of building work, took to buying and selling cheeses. He was told to take two hundred Wiltshire cheeses to
Oxford “for his Majesty's provision there,” half of the payment on credit. But he was never paid the sixteen shillings he was owed for the cheeses, nor the shilling a day for himself and his three horses for eight days.

Worse still was when an army detachment took up residence where you were living. There was no avoiding what was called “free quartering”; the landowners simply had to provide. In Easter week 1645, Thomas Randoll of Fisherton Anger, between Bemerton and Salisbury, had quartered on him

In the previous November, the mayor and aldermen of Salisbury had been ordered to provide “upon sight” twenty bushels of wheat, twenty quarters of oats, twenty dozen candles, twenty bushels of salt, twenty flitches of bacon, and twenty quarters of meat “whereof we shall exact a punctuall account off yow as yow will answer to the Contrary.” The Pembrokes' old steward John Nicholas, of Winterbourne Earls, was “never free from billeting of soldiers of both sides, some times thirty, forty or fifty men and as many horses three or four days and nights together.” He took to hiding in his pigeon loft when army detachments were seen coming down the road.

No side was better than the other. When Lord Percy's soldiers were quartered in the village of Odstock, on the Ebble, in 1644, they defaced the parish register, drawing wild, looping, carefree scrawls all over one page and an irreverent rhyme, now partly blodged out, on another:

When Cromwell's troopers entered Winchester in 1645, they used the priceless medieval documents in the cathedral's muniment room to make kites.

The royalists who landed in Salisbury in December 1644 were particularly destructive. On a series of ninety-eight little torn notes and scraps of paper the citizens of Salisbury recorded their losses to the troopers of Sir Marmaduke Langdale's famously aggressive cavaliers: shops broken up and plundered; widows robbed; a man deprived of his doublet, hose, and shoes; blankets and a carpet taken; gloves, stockings, and hats stolen. One man, John Russell, a cobbler, had everything stolen and then found he had “a poore sick soldier lieth uppon my hands and I am not able to release him.” William Philipps had a hat taken off his head, all his clothes stolen, both wool and linen, and “they kame a kene aftere word & had a plondeare a kene.” Richard Durnford had his wife's petticoat taken; Bennet Eastman, four pounds “taken out of his pockets in money”; Hugh Smith, his Bible.

The other side was no better. An old man made a pitiable list of the goods in his house, all of which had been taken by parliamentarian soldiers:

The violence left the country littered with victims: men who had been pressed for service with one or other of the armies, who had deserted, been imprisoned, and driven into penury; men falling sick “with a disease called the Mesells” after being exposed to the unprec
edented wartime movement of people; and many men claiming pensions for the injuries they had received in the war. Richard Rickette was “a poor lame mayned man a carpenter at worke at Ridge”—a Pembroke possession to the west of Chilmark—who had been “dangerously wounded crippled & disabled for all future service or labour whereby both himself and a small child is left wholly to the Charitie of his neighbours for their releefe & sustenance.” The justices decided that the parish itself was “to releeve him according to the necessity of the party.” There were men who had been shot in the back and were unable to work; a man blinded, “having lost the sight of both eyes by a cut across his face and left for dead” in Salisbury. Hundreds were left homeless and destitute in the towns that had been stormed and burned, filled with “heaps of rubbish [and] consumed houses, a multitude of which are raked in their own ashes. Here a poor forsaken chimney and there a little fragment of a wall that have escaped to tell what barbarous and monstrous wretches there have been.”

Under the strain of such levels of violence and invasive theft, the social fabric stretched and broke. Men in the villages refused to play their part as tithingmen, the essential keepers of order. Those who had been chosen tithingman before the war found no one willing to take the duty on from them. Parishioners in Lacock were presented to the justices in July 1641 for failing to do their communal work, the essential mechanism for the workings of the village:

Others would not or could not contribute their share of the taxes and rates levied by both sides. Village by village, Wiltshiremen complained that they were being forced to carry the burdens of war alone. Many individuals refused “to pay their rates with their neighbors towards the charge of the prest souldiers.”

The rest of the village needed “to beare their burthen with their neighbours.” It may be significant that both Locke and Ballard were members of long-standing Wylye families, who had maintained the workings of the village over several generations. (The Ballards had the inn the Green Dragon.) None of the three men named—Greene, Patient, and David—appear in the survey of the village made in June 1631. They were newcomers, perhaps parliamentarians, not prepared to contribute to the general fund or to the royalist cause.