Yorkshire in the Civil Wars – A bloody stategic battleground

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Speaker: Many histories of the civil war fought in England, focus on the south and the midlands. In contrast this programme shines a light on the significant role played by the county of Yorkshire in the north of England, in parliament’s victory during the Civil Wars.

[00.25]

In this podcast, Professor Andrew Hopper of the University of Oxford, argues that the importance of Yorkshire in the north has often been underplayed. Yorkshire provided the new model army with its first commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax. Parliament would not have won the war if the Royalist northern army had not been defeated on Marston Moor, outside York.

[00.50]

The conflict also reshaped the county itself, out went the traditional personnel of local government, provided by the Royalist gentry. These men were replaced as Justices of the Peace by lower born men, many of them clothiers and tradesmen who had served as officers in Fairfax’s Yorkshire army.

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Listen as Professor Hopper explores the story of these revolutionary years.

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Mike Gibbs: Andy, thanks for joining us to discuss the civil wars in Yorkshire, why do they require special attention?

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Andrew Hopper: Well I think there is a temptation to see the civil war in northern England as distant from the centre of events in the Thames Valley, where the armies of Charles I and the Earl of Essex clashed famously. But Yorkshire was no secondary theatre in this conflict. It was heavily fought over especially during the First Civil War of 1642–6, and it was scarred by the sieges of Pontefract and Scarborough castles during the Second Civil War from 1648–9.

[01.56]

So from 1642–4, control of territory in Yorkshire ebbed and flowed as garrisons were planted and towns changed hands. In 1643, Yorkshire hosted the largest royalist army of the civil wars. This was an army that provoked panic at Westminster and by August that year it looked like it might even deliver a victory for the king.

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In 1644 Yorkshire witnessed the largest campaign and battle of the war, with so many troops conducting operations that the mammoth confrontation that followed at Marston Moor has been called ‘The Battle of the Five Armies’.

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Now the West Riding of Yorkshire on its own was England’s largest county and the most populous part of Yorkshire. It witnessed the heaviest fighting, as both sides recruited thousands of soldiers there in an ongoing struggle for control.

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Mike Gibbs: And what role did Yorkshire play in the outbreak of the war?

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Andrew Hopper: Well the King looked to the north to build his first army when he fled from London after his botched attempt to arrest the Five Members. And he established the royal court at the King’s Manor in York from March 1642.

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I think Charles was drawn to Yorkshire because Hull contained the second largest arms magazine in England, after the Tower of London. Weapons and munitions had been stockpiled there after the Bishops’ Wars with Scotland.

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So obviously he wanted to seize control of that arsenal, to equip an army he intended to raise to restore his authority by force. Therefore, the King appeared before the walls of Hull at the Beverley Gate on 23 April 1642. He demanded to be admitted but the parliamentarian governor and MP, Sir John Hotham, refused. This marked the moment when the King’s person was openly defied for the first time. This episode is the famous basis for Hull’s claim to be the birthplace of the Civil Wars.

[04.05]

Humiliated, Charles began to raise forces under the guise of a ‘royal guard for his person’. And a week later, on 30 April, in the courtyard by the Dean’s Hall in York, a gentleman called Sir Francis Wortley, whose deer park near Sheffield had been emptied by organised gangs of poachers, stood up to make a dramatic gesture before a large crowd, drawing his sword, waving it around and declaring ‘for the King, for the King!’

[04.38]

Wortley won the notoriety that he sought. He was denounced by one parliamentarian propagandist as the son of the devil. The following month in London one wit reported that ‘All men that are for the Parliament are no more termed Roundheads, but Hothamites… and all those that are for the King are called ‘Wortheleshites’.

[05.00]

The King returned to Hull to besiege the town for three weeks during July and it was here that the first blows commenced in civil-war Yorkshire. But by then Hull was too well garrisoned, fortified and supplied to be taken by the King, so Charles raised the siege and moved south to famously raise his standard at Nottingham on 22 August.

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Mike Gibbs: So how did the gentry as a whole in Yorkshire react. Were they all for the King, all for parliament, or were they split?

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Andrew Hopper: Well they were split. Most of the Yorkshire gentry were horrified by the prospect of war. Generational ties of kinship, marriage and sociability were manifest when in September 1642 a political treaty was signed at Rothwell near Leeds to try to opt out of the war. Ten gentlemen on both sides signed Fourteen Articles of Peace and pledged to raise a third force to protect their property from the soldiers of both sides.

[06.06]

The signatories included the puritan Fairfax family, who infuriated Sir John Hotham by this attempt at neutrality. Hotham sent his son with troopers out of Hull to make the treaty unworkable and the Fairfaxes were soon forced to disown it. Across the county, people were forced to make reluctant choices.

[06.28]

Back in the 1960s, John Trevor Cliffe wrote an excellent PhD thesis profiling the Yorkshire gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War. And he concluded that the parliamentarian gentry in the county were inferior to their royalist counterparts in social status, in ancestry and in numbers, mustering only 128 parliamentarian families to 242 royalist ones. So a kind of 2:1 split there, in favour of the Royalists.

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With the collapse of the peace treaty, by November 1642 Yorkshire’s parliamentarians were gaining the upper hand, driving what royalist forces there were back into the city of York.

Ferdinando Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax, based their West Riding forces at Tadcaster and Wetherby, while the forces of the Hothams at Hull and Sir Hugh Cholmley based at Scarborough, both closed in on York from the east, reaching Stamford Bridge.

[07.34]

Mike Gibbs: Given the strong royalist support that you’ve outlined, how successful were the royalists in mobilising their support in Yorkshire?

[07.46]

Andrew Hopper: Well I think the royalists were very fortunate that the rather lacklustre Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland was replaced as their general in Yorkshire by the dazzling William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle in December 1642. Cavendish – or now we can refer to him as Newcastle –  he became the foremost of Charles I’s ‘grandee’ commanders. These were the royalist generals appointed in the first year of the civil war because of their wealth and status rather than their military experience. With rents worth a colossal £22,000 per annum, Newcastle was the wealthiest nobleman in all the north.

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And he proved himself a great success in rallying support. He raised a royalist army in Northumberland and Durham. He was invited into Yorkshire by the royalist gentry to rescue their position, bottled up as they were in York.

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He began by defeating parliamentarians commanded by John Hotham at Piercebridge on the River Tees on 1 December 1642.  He crossed the river with 8,000 men and arrived in York two days later, sending the parliamentarians into retreat all across the county.

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At the peak of his power in late summer 1643, Newcastle controlled all of Yorkshire along with all northern England east of the Pennines, except for Hull. Now this was the largest territorial base of any royalist commander in the civil wars. He had authority over thirty-two garrisons across the north. And the King invested in Newcastle vice-regal status.

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This enabled him to dub twelve knights, coin money and raise his own taxes across the north called ‘the Great Sesse’, designed to deliver £30,000 every month to support his army. He raised another £20,000 through the Yorkshire Engagement. This was by persuading Yorkshire gentry who signed the Engagement to promise to repay loans to contributors according to the size of their estates.

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Mike Gibbs: And when they look at the actual makeup of Newcastle’s army, where did the soldiers come from, were they all from Yorkshire?

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Andrew Hopper: Well he recruited his army all across the north, most heavily at first in Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire and along the Tees valley. He issued far too many commissions to officers to raise units, leading to companies and troops being under-recruited, and an army packed with flags and officers designed to reflect upon his own grandeur.

[10.31]

But by April 1643, he commanded 18,000 men, the largest army in England at that point. He equipped them with foreign arms purchased in the Netherlands. The Queen herself landed at Bridlington Bay on 22 February 1643 to bring him money and munitions. And she remained with him until June when he sent her south with a guard for her person of 5,000 men.

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Mike Gibbs: Religion is fundamental to everything to do with the civil war as I understand it. How extensive was the Roman Catholic presence in Newcastle’s army in Yorkshire and why was this significant?

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Andrew Hopper: Historians use to downplay catholic royalist activism would suggest that they were largely neutrals during the civil wars. But the late P.R. Newman’s doctoral thesis showed that 36% of Newcastle’s officers were Roman Catholics and 40% of his colonels were too. Two of his generals, Lord Belasyse and Lord Widdrington were also Catholic.

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So this was so significant because it played into the hands of parliamentarian propaganda that royalists were seeking not just a toleration for Catholics, but also plotting the restoration of Roman Catholicism as England’s state church.

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London newsbooks dubbed Newcastle, ‘the atheistical marquess’ or a ‘semi-papian’. As if Roman Catholicism somehow went hand in hand with Atheism. They called his forces ‘The Queen’s Papist Army’ or ‘The popish Army of the North’. Newcastle was himself a Protestant but he responded in print with a spirited defence of religious diversity in his army, he wrote: ‘That I have in mine Army some of the Romish Communion I do not deny… These I admitted for their Loyalty and Abilities, not for their Religion.’

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Mike Gibbs: And did this make anti-Catholic prejudices especially prominent among Yorkshire’s parliamentarians and that army?

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Andrew Hopper: Yes, the autobiographical accounts we have of parliamentarians explaining why they took up arms all stress their fear of Catholics, and that the slaughter of Protestants unleashed by the Irish Rebellion would be enacted in England also. Looking back, well after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the puritan Joseph Lister of Bradford recalled:

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“King Charles I, then upon the throne, to say nothing of his own wicked disposition, did by the constant solicitation of the bloodie queen, together with the swarms of Jesuits and evil affected councillors, bishops, and men of great estate, place and trust, all put their heads together to destroy Christ’s interest in this nation, and betray their trust every way to the utter ruin and overthrow of religion, and to cut off the lives of the protestants, and so have enslaved this land to Rome, the mother of harlots; whose kingdom is established by blood.”

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Even the Puritan parliamentarian’s gentry tended to see the war as a binary struggle between good and evil. Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cousin, the parliamentarian colonel, Sir William Fairfax wrote in an intimate letter to his wife in 1643: ‘For Thomas’s part and mine, we rest neither night nor day, nor will willingly till we have done God some good service against His and our enemies.’

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Mike Gibbs: And generally, what was the extent of support for Parliament in the county as a whole?

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Andrew Hopper: It very much depended upon the place, so in the East Riding the county was divided during the First Civil War but thanks to the early activism of the Hotham family, the parliamentarians controlled Beverley and Hull. Between them, Sir John Hotham and his eldest son, John Hotham, had been married eight times and so in some way they were related to pretty much most of the East Riding gentry. Their soldiers in Hull were a mixture of local trained bands and companies of volunteers, shipped up from London.

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But the Hothams fell out with the Fairfax family who were appointed instead of them as parliament’s generals in the county, despite having risked far less. They disliked the Fairfaxes’ puritanism and their reliance on non-gentry officers. Ignoring commands from Fairfax, John Hotham chose to campaign alongside his gentry kinfolk in Lincolnshire instead.

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And by 1643 both Hothams, father and son, began to have second thoughts about their parliamentarian allegiance and both men began writing letters to Newcastle, flattering him and holding out the possibility that they might change sides.

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They came under increased pressure from March 1643, when Hotham’s cousin, Sir Hugh Cholmley, changed sides, turning Scarborough castle, along with most of its garrison, over to the royalists. By then, their government of Hull was becoming more and more arbitrary and threatening to the citizens. One royalist poked fun at the citizens’ discomfort under the Hotham’s rule as governors, ventriloquising Hotham in verse:

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“Soe said Sir John Hotham, is this a time to treate?

When Newcastle and Cumberland, me to the walls have beate.

Yee base obedient Cittizens, doe you thinke to save your lives?

My sonne and I will serve you all, as I have served five wives”.

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Mike Gibbs: So that’s the East Riding, what was the situation in the West Riding?

[16.49]

Andrew Hopper: Well here, the parliamentarians gathered an army of a very different character under Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax. An anti-royalist uprising of Bradford’s townspeople armed with clubs, and with no gentleman to lead them, repelled a royalist attack on the town on 18 December 1642, unhorsing and clubbing royalist officers to death in the streets. This inspired Sir Thomas Fairfax to implore his father’s permission to join with what he called ‘the readiness of the people’.

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Fairfax arrived in Bradford just a week later and recruited a new army out of the populous cloth-manufacturing districts in and around Leeds, Bradford and Halifax. Unable to transport their cloth to Hull, these districts were desperate, they faced loss of trade and a food shortage. Predictably, their army was short of gentry support and short of cavalry. Their infantry were mostly armed with muskets and clubs, and with scythes laid on poles.

[17.58]

Godly zeal had driven the Fairfax family to side with their poorer neighbours rather than most of their fellow gentry. On 23 January 1643, in a snowstorm and singing Psalm 68, ‘Let God Arise’, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s new army smashed its way through Leeds, forcing the royalist governor, Sir William Savile, to swim for it across the River Aire to escape.

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The London press roared in triumph, declaring Sir Thomas Fairfax to be the Rider of the White Horse in the Book of Revelation, a symbol of Christ’s conquering power, they invited the whole country to rise up and execute ‘Bradford Club-Law’ upon the Cavaliers. Now this was not the kind of war that Sir John Hotham and his son had bargained for. John Hotham wrote to Newcastle:

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“My Lord there is one thing which I fear much: that if the honourable endeavours of such powerful men as yourself do not take place for a happy peace, the necessitous people of the whole kingdom will presently rise up in mighty numbers and whosoever they pretend for at first, within a while they will set up for themselves, to the utter ruin of all the nobility and gentry in the kingdom. I speak not merely at random, the west part of this county affords mighty numbers of them, which I am very confident you will see necessitated and urged to rise in far greater bodies than thrice the Armies that are already gathered here. My Lord, necessity teaches to seek subsistence; and if this unruly rout have once cast the Rider, it will run like wild fire in the example through all the Counties of England.”

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Mike Gibbs: By the time we get to 1643, things are, I guess, finely balanced in Yorkshire, this was a turning point. How did both sides fare in that year in Yorkshire?

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Andrew Hopper: Well for the Royalists it was a question of routing out the Fairfaxes and defeating them in the field, making their superiority in numbers count. Because the Fairfaxes did not have the cavalry or strength to face Newcastle in the field, they split up their army up into garrisons to protect their supporters in the towns of Leeds, Bradford and Halifax. Making those places very difficult for the royalists to take.

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And this frustrated Newcastle whose attempt to besiege Leeds in April 1643 was not successful, and that provoked Newcastle to goad Fairfax in print to name a time and place to fight him in the open field and emulate what he said were: ‘the Examples of our Heroick Ancestors, who used not to spend their Time in scratching one another out of Holes, but in pitched Fields determined their Doubts.’

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The Fairfaxes relied upon what military theorists call a ‘Fabian strategy’. This was building up a series of incremental victories against smaller outlying parts of the enemy’s forces. They relied upon speed and surprise to counter their weakness in numbers. Sometimes this proved successful. On Whitsunday in 1643, Sir Thomas Fairfax led 1,100 men in a dawn attack on Wakefield. They were surprised to discover the royalist garrison there was three times their number, but they nevertheless prevailed, capturing the commander Lt-General George Goring along with 1,500 royalist prisoners. The Royalists correctly predicted that this victory was a lightning before death.

[21.55]

Their surprise attack tactic failed them on 30 June 1643 when outnumbered three to one, once again, the Fairfaxes were at last forced into confronting Newcastle’s army in the field on Adwalton Moor, five miles southeast of Bradford. Caught in the open, their army was crushed, many were captured, leaving the survivors and fugitives fleeing into Lancashire, through the Pennine passes, or across Yorkshire to Hull.

[22.29]

But the day before the battle, the Hothams were arrested in Hull by an uprising of sailors and townsmen. Rightly suspected of plotting to betray the town to the royalists, both Hothams were shipped to London to stand trial. So this meant that the Fairfaxes now had a fortress and new powerbase to which they could flee and attempt to rebuild an army in the wake of their defeat.

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Mike Gibbs: So was this best it got for the royalists? Was this the high watermark for them in Yorkshire?

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Andrew Hopper: Yes, in retrospect, it very much looks that way. By August 1643, they controlled all Yorkshire except for Hull. But Lord Fairfax had been appointed governor of Hull and had begun building a new army there. He seized the Hothams’ stash and handed out their expensive clothing to his non-gentry officers, in lieu of their arrears of pay. This highly symbolic act was not lost on those fearing for the social order.

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On 2 September 1643 Newcastle’s army was then drawn into a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful siege of Hull. Fairfax’s defenders cut the sluices to flood the trenches of the royalist besiegers, prompting Newcastle into the joke, ‘they call us the popish army, but now see we trust not in our good works’. With his strength diminished by a sally from the garrison, and his cavalry defeated at Winceby in Lincolnshire by Sir Thomas Fairfax, newly linking up with Oliver Cromwell, Newcastle called off the siege on 12 October. In retrospect, this was the turning point of the civil war in Yorkshire.

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Mike Gibbs: How had the conflict in Yorkshire affected the civilian population?

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Andrew Hopper: Well I think it is often forgotten that many Yorkshire civilians had already endured twelve months of occupation by the Scots Army of the Covenant from September 1640 through to August 1641. The county was more impoverished than most a year before civil war in England had even broken out.

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Bereavement, impressment, taxation, requisition of foodstuffs, plunder and forced billeting of soldiers on civilian households, were the principal impacts on civilian life. People were made homeless, suburban houses outside town walls were torn down to prevent cover for potential besiegers. The experience of imprisonment often looms large in petitions from Yorkshire soldiers recounting their wartime memories.

[25.16]

By summer 1644, both sides resorted to impressment to reinforce their infantry. By then it is likely that up to one in five of Yorkshire’s adult male population were in arms.

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Mike Gibbs: Andy, as the principle investigator of the Civil War Petitions project, what new insights have you got from that, into the impact of the civil war on the civilian population in Yorkshire?

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Andrew Hopper: Well our project has published the records for 1,734 maimed soldiers, war widows and orphans, who received county pensions and other forms of welfare, the last of these was not until 1709. So it has shown that considerable tax burden fell upon civilians, to pay for the victims of the war.  One example, in 1674, Thomas Morris of Cowick, an ex-royalist soldier, was granted a pension ‘for the many wounds & hurts in his body at the siege against Bradford and other places, his body also now being broken and he glad to wear an iron truss to stay and support it up withal’.

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Civilians also endured violence and respect for non-combatants varied according to social rank. At the fall of Bradford, after the battle of Adwalton Moor, on 6 July 1643, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s wife, Lady Anne was captured. Only days later, Newcastle gallantly sent Anne safely into Hull in his own coach to re-join her husband. But Bradford was still plundered by royalist soldiers eager to be avenged on the townsfolk for having humiliated them twice before. Fairfax later related the violence suffered by Ellen Askwith, the widow of one of his non-gentry captains. He wrote that the royalists, out of hatred for Askwith, ‘ruined his house, plundered his goods, wounded his wife at Bradford, and brought her and six children into a poor and desolate condition’.

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Even after armed hostilities had ceased in Yorkshire in spring 1646, during the siege of Newark, hundreds of Scots cavalry were billeted on civilians as far north as Ledston and Ledsham, this is near Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a long way from Newark. Complaints about the conduct of the Scots survive from these two villages which make grim reading. One of the chief inhabitants of the parish Ledsham, an old man named Brian Cowpland testified that Scottish troopers came to his house and :

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 “set him down in a chair, called for a basin and shears and cut off part of his beard, and made a piper play the whiles, they laughing and asking what he would do, he told them he had no money for them, they might take his goods if they pleased: Thereupon they putt a wire or bodkin into his mouth, and gagged him, to his very great pain and the loss of 3 or 4 teeth, and put snuff into his nose, which after made his nose and mouth to swell. The said Cowpland’s wife kneeled down and begged them to spare her husband and they got of her in money and hemp about 26 shillings. They made the said Cowpland send for ale and wine for them and because he refused to drink as they required they poured it into his bosom and hereunto they added many threatenings that they would throw him and his wife into the fire.”

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Mike Gibbs: If 1643 then is the pivotal year in Yorkshire, how did the war play out in 1644?

[29.15]

Andrew Hopper: Well I am going to cover that campaign, the one that climaxed at Marston Moor, in a separate podcast, but should point out here that it took the intervention of a Scots army of 20,000 men, and the Eastern Association Army, drawn out of East Anglia, of 9,000 men, to finally defeat Newcastle’s royalists at Marston Moor. Without these external interventions, it would not have been possible for the Fairfaxes alone to prevail in Yorkshire. So their principal achievement was survival and keeping parliamentarian hopes alive during 1643.

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Mike Gibbs: After the decisive defeat of the royalists at Marston Moor, what happened?

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Andrew Hopper: After Marston Moor, the Yorkshire royalists either had to leave the county to serve in the king’s field armies elsewhere, or they could choose to remain, to defend royalist garrisons at castles like Helmsley, Knaresborough, Pontefract, Sandal or Scarborough. The last of these garrisons, Skipton Castle, finally surrendered in December 1645. This brought the First Civil War in Yorkshire to an end.

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Mike Gibbs: So Andy, before we summarise this discussion, could I just get a sense from you,  how deep was the dislike – the hatred even – of the royalists in Yorkshire?

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Andrew Hopper: Well let me give you a couple of little-known examples of this bitterness. During the still on-going siege of Pontefract castle, at the time of Charles I’s trial and execution, there was some significant support for the regicide in the northern armies Council of War and among Yorkshire’s parliamentarian forces more widely. This wasn’t just something supported by the New Model Army. Six Yorkshiremen signed Charles I’s death warrant, more than from any other county. Three of these had served as colonels under Lord Fairfax, one of them was his brother-in-law. These signatories were enacting the instructions of the Yorkshire clergyman, John Saltmarsh of Heslerton. In August 1643, Saltmarsh had become the first Englishman known to have called for the death of Charles I, with the rousing cry ‘root him out and the royal line.’

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Mike Gibbs: Andy, let’s end by trying to summarise the consequences then of the civil wars in Yorkshire.

[31.53]

Andrew Hopper: Well, I think importance of the civil war in Yorkshire and the north is sometimes too easily overlooked. The outcomes there played a big role in the downfall of Charles I. Yorkshire provided the New Model Army with its first war-winning commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax. Yorkshire MPs played a key role in the political process that appointed him. The victory over Newcastle removed the royalists’ northern army, once its greatest from the field, giving the New Model free rein to conduct its year of victories in the south that ended the First Civil War.

[32.33]

Within Yorkshire itself, the parliamentarian victory brought something of a revolution in the personnel of county government, as the county gentry were swept away and replaced on the commission of the peace by lesser men, often men who had filled the officer corps of Fairfax’s Yorkshire army. This was so unsettling because the two sides in Yorkshire came to represent the extremes of the parties for which they had engaged. Newcastle’s ‘Popish Army’ faced what Clarendon termed the ‘rude malice of the people’. Scarred by the massacre of Marston Moor, Yorkshire’s experience of civil war would prove especially bitter.

[33.20]

Mike Gibbs: Andy, thanks for giving us a new and fresh perspective on the civil war. Particularly in the north, because I know you feel strongly that that aspect of the war is neglected. So thanks very much indeed for sharing it with us.

Andrew Hopper: Thanks very much Mike, it has been a pleasure to chat with you as always.

[33.42]

Speaker: You will find other talks by Professor Hopper at our website, www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk, in which he discusses other important battles, including: the battle of Marston Moor in 1644 and the battle of Naseby in 1645; the life of the first commander of the New Model Army, Yorkshireman Sir Thomas Fairfax, the combatants who turned their coats to switch sides, the fate of soldiers wounded in battle and the stories of veterans, widows and their families, uncovered by the Civil War Petitions Project.

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