Even before the Civil war started various key ports and fortifications were being snaffled either by Parliament or the Crown. Some, like Bristol and Lichfield, changed hands more than once inflicting severe damage on the local populations.
Chester sitting as it does on the River Dee was one of those strategic locations. It gave access to Wales, to Ireland and to the North. It was also Royalist in sympathy. Before the war it was a very fine town indeed. After the civil war, the siege and the plague which struck in 1647 it looked very much worse for wear.
By the end of 1643 Sir William Brereton (pictured right) who had been one of the MPs for Cheshire and been elected in 1640 to the Long Parliament had secured most of the surrounding countryside for Parliament. The Royalists extended Chester’s defences to include new earthworks recognising that their time would come. In 1644 those defences were improved by Prince Rupert – who seems to have got everywhere.
Rupert, had been named President of Wales in February 1644 but very swiftly irritated the local military commanders – mainly because he replaced them with experienced English commanders. The Welsh, unsurprisingly, were also becoming a bit fed up with the war. Rupert, having rocked the metaphorical boat left the region with rather a lot of its soldiery to lift the siege at York.
Parliament took the opportunity to gain an advantage over the depleted Royalist troops and took Oswestry which had, until then, been in Royalist hands. As the year went on things became even worse for the Royalists. A shipment of gunpowder on its way to Chester from Bristol was captured. The gunpowder was then used against the Royalists at Newton. This in turn led to the loss of Montgomery Castle. On the 18th of September the two forces met in open battle. The Battle of Montgomery is the largest battle to have taken place on Welsh soil during the English Civil War. The Royalists lost.
As a result of this loss Lord John Byron, the Royalist military commander (pictured at the start of this post) could not put an army in the field and so Chester was effectively besieged. The Wheel of Fortune had turned in less than a year – from besieging Nantwich at the start of the year Byron now found himself besieged. By the summer of 1645 Brereton had control of most of Cheshire but the royalists still controlled the crossing point of the River Dee which enabled forces and supplies to get into and out of the town via North Wales which was Royalist.
Basically the siege was somewhat protracted by the fact that both sides kept nipping off to have a fight somewhere else. For example Prince Maurice, Rupert’s little brother, arrived in February 1645 but then left again taking a large number of Byron’s Irish troops with him.
With depleted numbers it was only a matter of time before the Parliamentarians drew closer to the town. There was also the bombardment. Byron wrote that Brereton had sent a barrage of 400 canon balls into Chester – which is pretty impressive. The original aim of the Parliamentary command had been to break the walls so that the town could be taken by storm. This proved ineffective and a tactic of bombardment was employed. There was widespread damage to property, injury and terror. On the 22nd September 1645 there was a partial breach of the wall but Byron received word that King Charles was coming with 4,000 cavalry.
On the 23 September Charles marched out of Wales and crossed the Dee into Chester – he had approximately 600 men. The rest of them were with Sir Marmaduke Langdale who crossed the Dee south of Chester with the intention of outflanking the Parliamentarians -making them the filling between his force and Byron’s.
Unfortunately the Northern Association Army were in the vicinity and upon receiving news of what the Royalists were up to had made a forced night march to intercept Langdale. The two armies spent the morning of the 24th September in a staring match before repositioning themselves at Rowton Heath. The king and his commanders inside Chester could do little but watch from the walls as the royalist cavalry was broken.
On the evening of the 25th September Charles recrossed the Dee with the tattered remnants of his relieving force. Byron refused to surrender. The Parliamentarian noose grew tighter around Chester and the bombardment became ever more intense. This didn’t stop Byron from trying to attack his besiegers on occasion.
When Chester did surrender it had more to do with starvation that the number of rounds of artillery fired at it. The mills and water supplies had been badly damaged by the bombardment. Lack of ammunition meant that the Royalists lost control of the crossing point and supplies could not enter the town.
Brereton shot propaganda leaflets across the walls to persuade the defenders to surrender but from October onwards there were no further attempts to breach the walls. Approximately 6000 people behind Chester’s walls were starving and diving of disease. It was just a question of waiting. By December 1645 the town’s defenders began to desert.
Chester’s mayor persuaded Byron to surrender in January 1646. The able bodied were allowed to leave whilst the sick and the starving were to be permitted an opportunity to recover. Brereton took possession of Chester on 3rd February 1646.
A quarter of Chester had been burned. What their artillery hadn’t destroyed the Parliamentarian soldiers now smashed.
As with all civil wars some people change their minds. Having described the Hothams (father and son) shutting the city gates of Hull in Charles I’s face in 1642 it comes as something of a surprise to discover that John Hotham (junior) was executed for treason on 1st January 1645 for conspiring to let the royalists in! John Hotham senior was executed the next day. Unfortunately for them their coat turning tendencies had been proved by the capture of the Earl of Newcastle’s correspondence after the Battle of Marston Moor.
1644 was a year where no one gained the upper hand and the casualties of war grew. The arrival of the Scots in the Civil War ultimately tipped the balance of power in Parliament’s favour but as a result of amateur approaches to warfare the Second Battle of Newbury failed to end matters once and for all. This had the knock on effect of ensuring the rise of the New Model Army and Cromwell’s Ironsides.
Meanwhile two of the Parliamentarian generals were at loggerheads with one another. Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex felt that Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester (pictured above) was getting the better part of the deal from Parliament. Montagu, married to a cousin of George Villiers in the first instance married for a second time to Ann Rich, the daughter of the Earl of Warwick – the Parliamentarian Lord Admiral. He turned from Court towards a more Puritan way of thinking and did not support the king in the Bishop’s War. He was also the peer who supported John Pym at the opening of the Long Parliament and was the one member of the House of Lords who Charles I wanted to arrest at the same time as the five members of the House of Commons. In 1642 he was on his third wife (another member of the Rich family) and had become the Earl of Manchester upon his father’s death. Manchester had been at the Battle of Edgehill but his was one of the regiments that had fled the battlefield. After that he was eventually appointed to the command of the Eastern Association Army – regiments covering Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridge. By the end of 1643 East Anglia was very firmly in Parliamentarian hands and Manchester’s men had broken out into Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. This should be contrasted with Essex and the Western Association Army performance. It is perhaps not surprising that Parliament effectively allowed Manchester to by pass Essex and to liaise with the Scots and with the Fairfaxs.
Fairfax opposed Goring on the right wing: Goring 1 – Fairfax O. Goring and his men got side tracked by the baggage wagons. Crowell was on the left wing facing Lord John Byron (pictured right): Ironsides 1 – Royalists 0. Prince Rupert turned the fleeing royalists round and sent them back into battle. Rupert and his men were evenly matched with the Ironsides. Essentially they hacked one another to a standstill at which point the Scottish cavalry charged in on the Royalist flank and scattered them.
Gloucester is one of the key locations for Parliamentarian and Royalist confrontation. It is the victory that Parliament desperately needed in 1643 and it is perhaps also written about by historians as much as it is on account of the fact that there’s so much primary source material to support the story. The Earl of Stamford arrived in Gloucester in about November 1642 and left a regiment there for its defence.
It’s interesting that in January 1643 the king was still receiving petitions asking him to return to London and his parliament. A Parliamentary committee even visited Oxford where the king was based in order to promise him his safety if he returned to London.
The royalist command in Cornwall was held by Ralph Hopton featured at the start of this post with his wife Elizabeth. In 1642 he and his men had driven the Parliamentarians from Launceston. Whilst Hopton was unable to secure Devon at this time, Cornwall was firmly royalist. This position was confirmed on the 19th January 1643 when Hopton won the Battle of Braddock Down and from there went on to besiege Plymouth which was in Parliamentarian hands. In early 1643 there were a number of skirmishes between both sides but places like Parliamentarian Exeter continued to petition and negotiate for peace between the warring factions. In London, Parliament urged the Devon Committee to raise more money and troops.
t that point the Royalists realise that they could control the whole of the southwest. On the 24th July Prince Rupert (pictured above) and his men rock up outside Bristol (England’s second city at this time) and suggest very nicely that its Parliamentarian Governor Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes might like to surrender. Fiennes declines the invitation and on the 26th Rupert and his forces storm Bristol. By nightfall Fiennes asks for terms and at the beginning of August King Charles visits. Fiennes will ask for a parliamentary investigation into the fall of Bristol as he is widely castigated on account of the fact that Waller has far more success with Gloucester than he has with Bristol – Gloucester requires its own post and besides which is just outside the region I am covering today.
I am currently feeling slightly out of kilter time wise as I have classes running on topics ranging from Kathryn Swynford to the English Civil War with a side interest in the names on my local war memorial – the research for which in the hundredth anniversary is proving fascinating. I almost feel that I should do more blogs to give every area of History an airing!