Free Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis

at the ready and the Trained Bands were on day and night call-out. Supporters made loans and gifts to Parliament. There was regular recruitment; there were censuses of horses. Royalist sympathisers were targeted. Parliament issued decrees to summon known malignants’, and to confiscate their horseflesh, weapons, money and plate. Those who were absent with the King had their homes broken open and possessions ransacked.
    Everyone waited anxiously. They heard of skirmishes and sieges. In July the Earl of Essex had left London to take up overall command of the main Parliamentary army. The son of Queen Elizabeth’s disgraced favourite, this heavy-jowled veteran had more military experience than any in the aristocracy and was a leading figure in the House of Lords. Famously touchy, he had survived his father’s execution, his own divorce on grounds of impotence and then the flagrant adultery of his second wife. His fighting career had been undistinguished, though he had always been popular with his soldiers for his humane treatment of them, and they called him, affectionately, ‘Old Robin’. Escorted by the Trained Bands, Essex mounted up at Temple Bar, and rode into the City, past St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Exchange, then out through Moorgate on his way north through St Albans to Worcester.
    The King eventually turned south, through the Midlands where he had a mixed reception. Up until that point there had been only manoeuvres. Then in October the King’s army ran into Essex’s forces near Kineton, at the foot of a ridge called Edgehill, and the first true battle of the civil war commenced.
    The engagement was confused. Both sides claimed victory, though neither could capitalise on it. The two armies were traumatised by the confrontation, with their shocked commanders left temporarily at a loss. Essex withdrew to Warwick, the King to Oxford.
    Exaggerating rumours in London claimed that Essex had won a great victory. Then it was said the King was racing south, with Essex in headlong pursuit. Their manoeuvres were more leisurely. But on the 6th of November, Essex and the Parliamentary army re-entered London, having marched straight down the old Roman highway of Watling Street. They were given a heroes’ welcome and quartered out at Hammersmith, in preparation for an expected Royalist attack.
    Meanwhile on leaving Oxford, the King ambled through Reading, besieging opponents’ private houses more from spite than strategy. Commissioners from Parliament rode out to try to negotiate peace. Despite their efforts, on the 12th of November the King’s charismatic nephew Prince Rupert, a commander in the dashing Continental style, fell upon two Parliamentary regiments of foot that he encountered close to London at Brentford under cover of thick mist. Tales quickly arose of Prince Rupert’s brutality. He was said to have massacred the garrison at Brentford; his men had tied prisoners head-to-toe and flung them into pigsties to endure the freezing night; the Royalists drove twenty Parliamentary supporters into the River Thames, forcing them into ever deeper water until they drowned. Whether true or not, such horrors reinforced opposition in London.
    The Earl of Essex heard the guns from the House of Lords, where peers had been debating whether to order a cessation of hostilities. Essex galloped across Hyde Park to his army at Hammersmith. In the City a local deputation went to the Common Council, begging that the Trained Bands should now also be deployed.
    Gideon Jukes was about to see his first military action.

Chapter Five

Turnham Green: 13 November 1642
    Londoners loved a junket. Fairs and feasts had been part of city life since time immemorial. An excursion, with sightseeing, was bound to draw a crowd, especially if there might be gunfire. Parliament dispatched cheese, beer and bread to the army by road, with boats hauling munitions up the Thames. Mothers and wives of Trained Band members loaded carts with food and