Castle (35 page)
From an attacker’s point of view, mortars were satisfyingly effective. Parliamentarian troops trying to break Banbury castle in 1646 reported screams every time the mortar was fired.
When Roaring Meg arrived at Raglan in August 1646, she was still only a few months old, having been specially cast earlier in the year for the purpose of defeating the Royalist garrison at Goodrich Castle. The young lady came with powerful friends. Escorted by Colonel John Birch, Meg rolled up with five of her sister-pieces, as well as all the conventional cannon that Parliament was able to spare. In terms of the mortars, at least, this was the greatest concentration of firepower so far deployed in the Civil War. Captain Hooper, who was still busy digging his way towards the Royalist lines, now began to construct platforms for the new weapons sixty yards from the castle’s defences.
As the marquis of Worcester watched Roaring Meg and the other mortars being rolled into position, he knew he was caught between
a
rock and a hard place. The level of danger had suddenly become far, far greater. No longer could he hide behind his ancestral walls; if the mortars were fired, there was a good chance that he or a member of his family would be killed. By the same token, surrender was not a tempting prospect. Who knows what a vindictive Parliament might do to him? As he confessed in a letter to Fairfax, the prospect of surrender ‘doth a little affright me’.
Fairfax, sensing the old man’s desperate dilemma, hammered his advantage home. Come to terms, he urged.
‘If you stand it out to the last extremity,’ he wrote to the marquis, ‘[you risk] your person, those of your family (which I presume are dear to you), and the spoil of the castle.’
Fairfax also chose to invoke the memory of another marquis who had defied Parliament to the bitter end.
‘Your Lordship has no reason to expect any better than the Marquis of Winchester received. He made good Basing House to the last, narrowly escaped with his own life, lost his friends, subjected those that escaped to great frights, and hazarded his house and estate to utter ruin, and himself to the extremity of justice.’
At the same time, Fairfax reassured the marquis that he would receive fair treatment at Parliament’s hands. ‘That what I grant,’ he promised, ‘shall be made good.’
And so, after more than two months besieged in his castle, the marquis decided that it was time to surrender. Over the weekend of 15–16 August, negotiators thrashed out the terms of the cease-fire, and on Monday a deal was struck. In two days’ time, it was agreed, the Royalist troops would march out of Raglan castle, unmolested by their opponents, and disband. Certain individuals, including the marquis himself, were exempted from this pardon; and when, on the eve of the surrender, the marquis presented the terms to his men, they pledged to keep on fighting. Their master’s mind, however, was made up. Like Jonah, he said, he would be cast overboard rather than
see
them all perish. Accordingly, the next morning, the Royalist garrison marched out of Raglan, with ‘colours flying, drums beating, [and] trumpets sounding’, just as the negotiators had agreed.
Both the marquis and Fairfax had good reason to be happy with the conclusion. For Fairfax, it was the bloodless outcome he had hoped for – once again, he had achieved victory without needless expenditure, either of men or of money. The marquis also had reason to be grateful. His castle and his household had got off lightly, even if he himself now faced an uncertain future. When the two men met that day, the marquis, true to form, was in good spirits. As the general was taking his leave, the old man made what Dr Bailey called ‘a merry petition’ on behalf of a couple of pigeons, which he had been feeding throughout the siege. Would the great general take the two young birds, as it were, under his wing? With so many hungry soldiers about, the marquis was concerned for their safety.
The only individual who was apparently less than pleased by the bloodless conclusion was Colonel Morgan. He was, after all, the one who had started the siege back in June, and since then he had endured the hardship of living under canvas and fighting in trenches for the best part of two months. Now, thanks to Fairfax’s negotiated surrender, his opportunity to heroically storm the breach had vanished. Worse still, he hadn’t even got to fire a mortar – Roaring Meg had on this occasion stayed silent. Writing to the Speaker in the House of Commons on the day the cease-fire was agreed, Morgan began, ‘After long and hard duty performed, it hath pleased God that commissioners on both sides have agreed upon articles for the surrender of the castle and garrison.’
You can hear the disappointment and the petulance in his voice when he finally adds that, ‘truly, had not this happy conclusion been made, our mortar pieces would have played very suddenly, and we were come very near with our approaches.’
*
With the siege and the war now over, Fairfax was treated to a celebratory dinner at Chepstow in the evening, before returning home to Bath the next day. In the meantime, the Marquis of Worcester was being transported to London, where he would shortly learn whether the general’s promises would be honoured now he was at the mercy of Parliament. In both houses, there was much debate over what should be done with the defeated Royalists and their castles. On the one hand, these were dangerous fortifications that had cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and the lives of many men to capture. Their continued existence was a temptation, an invitation even, for the king’s supporters and sympathizers to attempt to retake them. If, heaven forbid, they succeeded in doing so, then the same battles would have to be fought all over again. Even simply guarding them against attack would entail a huge commitment of manpower at a time when Parliament was trying to demobilize its armed forces. In such circumstances, the best way to prevent future trouble seemed to be to destroy castles completely. Colonel Birch certainly thought this would be the best way to deal with Goodrich Castle when he and Roaring Meg had finished battering it into submission. Writing to Parliament in order to ascertain ‘the pleasure of the house concerning the demolition or keeping of the castle’, he could not resist venturing his own opinion. ‘I humbly conceive [it] is useless, and a great burden to the country.’
On the other hand, Parliament had to consider its own security. After four years of punishing civil war, the country at large was restless, and Parliament, although victorious, was far from being universally popular. Perhaps, some MPs argued, it would be better to hang on to a few castles for safety’s sake, and keep them garrisoned, regardless of the cost. There were also Members of Parliament, especially the great landowners in the House of Lords, who sympathized with the plight of men like the marquis. Castles were, after all, homes, and the right of an individual to enjoy his property without interference
from
government had been one of the things that they had supposedly been fighting to protect.
In the specific case of the Marquis of Worcester, however, Parliament had already made up its mind long before the old man himself finally arrived in London. Just one week after Raglan’s fall, MPs had voted to demolish the castle and imprison its owner. The marquis was to be sent to the Tower (he was later committed to Black Rod in Covent Garden), and the remains of the castle were to be sold off ‘for the best advantage of the state’.
Destroying a castle, however, especially one as large as Raglan, was easier said than done. When demolition of the castle began in August 1646, it was carried out by teams of men with pickaxes. They began on the top of the great tower and, after a great deal of what one eye-witness called ‘tedious battering’, they managed to remove just one of the five storeys. Sending the old man himself to prison was no problem, but his castle, even in defeat, was proving to be a tough nut to crack.
They could have speeded things up by using explosives, a technique that had been tried earlier in the year at Corfe Castle in Dorset. A mighty twelfth-century keep perched high on a hill, girded by huge circuits of thirteenth-century curtain walls, Corfe had been unsuccessfully besieged several times during the course of the war. When it finally fell to the Roundheads through treachery in February 1646, Parliament wasted no time in ordering its destruction. Sappers set to work undermining some of the walls, and large quantities of gunpowder were used to break the keep and the gatehouses. But as well as being extremely dangerous, this was prohibitively expensive; and for all its advantages of speed, gunpowder left untidy results. The ragged lumps of stone that resulted could not be sold for profit, which was Parliament’s express intention at Raglan.
When, therefore, in the summer of 1647, Parliament finally came to a decision about what to do with castles in general, those who
urged
moderation and financial prudence won the day. A general cull was resisted, and only those fortifications that had been constructed since the outbreak of hostilities were ordered to be demolished.
By this date, members had an even greater dilemma on their hands. In order to defeat Charles I, his opponents had buried their widely differing opinions on politics and religion. Having beaten the king, these deep-seated divisions now resurfaced. Parliamentary leaders saw the opportunity to foist their religious views on the kingdom. The Army, politicized by years of continuous campaigning and smarting at attempts to disband it, rebelled against Parliament, before turning in on itself. Charles I, who had been purchased from the Scots at the start of the year, looked on with ill-concealed amusement. He was ferried around the country from place to place, a willing pawn in the game his enemies were playing against each other.
In 1648, the dispute between the different factions broke down irrevocably, and a second Civil War broke out. In a series of risings across the country, both discontented New Model Army veterans and die-hard Royalists once again seized castles and garrisoned them against Parliament. The hard-liners, it was now clear, had been right all along: they should have pulled down the castles while they had had the chance. With that chance now gone, and another major struggle ahead, those who advocated more ruthless policies gained the upper hand.
The hard-line attitude, both towards the king and the castles, was ultimately epitomized by one man: Oliver Cromwell. Although Cromwell and the Civil War are frequently referred to in the same breath, it was only at this stage in the conflict that the former East Anglian farmer began to come into his own. Driven by his views on religious liberty, Cromwell had fought in the first war with an uncompromising passion and, through his intuitive military genius, had risen to become one of the leading voices in government by the
time
the war was over. When trouble erupted in 1648, it was to Cromwell as much as to Fairfax that Parliament now looked for its deliverance. The fighting that year was localized but extremely fierce. Fairfax dealt with revolts in the South-East of England, at Maidstone in Kent and Colchester in Essex. Cromwell, in the meantime, had been sent into south Wales to break the rebels in Pembrokeshire, a job that took him most of the summer. In August, Cromwell marched to engage a Scottish army that had crossed the border into Lancashire, and won a resounding victory at Preston. By the start of September, the only thing that stood between Parliament and total victory was the castle of Pontefract in Yorkshire.
Pontefract was a truly impregnable fortress where, as at Raglan, the medieval defences had been massively strengthened by the addition of new earthworks. During the first Civil War it had been besieged for months on end by Parliamentarian troops who, despite being armed with cannon and mortars, were unable to take the castle by storm. When it finally fell in July 1645, it was starvation rather than bombardment that had persuaded the Royalists inside to surrender.
In May 1648, however, the king’s supporters had recovered Pontefract without a fight. It was taken by an ingenious ruse, described over half a century later by the last surviving participant, Captain Thomas Paulden, in a letter to a friend. Paulden explains how he and his fellow-conspirators first attempted to sneak into the castle under cover of darkness one night in the middle of May. They had persuaded one of the corporals in the Parliamentary garrison of the justness of their cause, and he in turn had arranged to be on guard that night.
The simple plan backfired when the Royalists approached the castle walls. ‘The corporal happened to be drunk at the appointed hour,’ said Paulden, ‘and another sentinel was placed where we intended to set our ladder.’ Inside the castle the alarm was raised, and the Royalists beat a hasty retreat.
When the Parliamentary governor heard the news, he strengthened the garrison with hundreds of extra troops, and it now seemed that taking the castle would be impossible. Then, very shortly afterwards, the Royalists received a piece of news that gave them a brilliant idea. With all the extra soldiers now in the castle, the Parliamentarians had run out of sleeping space, and had therefore sent out orders into the town for extra beds. Paulden and co. therefore decided to pose as bed-delivery men. ‘Dressed like plain countrymen and constables… but armed privately with pocket pistols and daggers’, they escorted the furniture right into the heart of the castle. Once inside, they threw off their disguises, whipped out their pistols, and imprisoned the Roundheads in the castle’s dungeon.
Like Greeks at Troy, the daring band of Royalists had pulled off the most audacious coup. They must have been overjoyed; astounded at their good fortune and delighted with their own cunning. ‘Pontefract was thought the greatest and the strongest castle in England’, said Paulden, and yet he and a handful of friends had snatched it from right under Parliament’s nose.
The Cavaliers, however, were not laughing for very long. In August the news came that their Scottish allies had been beaten. By September, the castle was surrounded by five thousand Parliamentarian troops. Finally, in November, Cromwell himself arrived at Pontefract, determined to take the castle at any cost.