Lancaster Castle and the British Civil Wars, 1642–1651
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Contrebis 2019 v37 LANCASTER CASTLE AND THE BRITISH CIVIL WARS, 1642–1651 Michael Mullett Abstract Early in the Civil Wars between King Charles I and Parliament, a Parliamentarian detachment took possession of Lancaster Castle in 1643. Following that capture, the Castle housed artillery seized from a Spanish ship that had been beached on the River Wyre. The Royalist commander, the Earl of Derby, attempted to take the Castle and the gunnery in March 1643 but, failing to do so, vented his frustration by plundering and devastating much of the town of Lancaster. Subsequently, the Castle became the base for a garrison of nominally Parliamentarian troopers, who in fact used the building as a base for raiding the surrounding countryside. Lancaster Castle had become a nest of disorder and was subjected to a government policy of ‘slighting’ (demilitarising) such ancient fortresses. Some damage was done to the fabric that was made good after 1660. Even so, Lancaster Castle’s long-term role as both a prison and court of justice secured its survival beyond the traumas of seventeenth-century civil conflict. The First Civil War Lancaster lies at the geographical centre of the British Isles, between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland and the Principality of Wales that made up the early modern British monarchy. Historians now generally reject the earlier anglo-centric view of an ‘English’ Civil War between Charles I and Parliament, in favour of a view of the conflict that took in all the components of the British Isles. In that light, Lancaster’s strategic centrality becomes all the more striking. The first Civil War was partly provoked by a Catholic Royalist uprising in 1641 in Ireland. With the entry of the Scots into the struggle in 1643, Lancashire’s role as a major focus of the battle for Britain was confirmed. Lancaster was a vital tactical and strategic focal point in the Civil Wars. The townscape ascends to a hill overlooking the River Lune, a military prize whose value has been recognised by successive generations of warriors, from the Romans through the Normans, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Jacobites. All military forces aiming to control north-west England have had to secure the crossings of the great rivers of the region, the Eden at Carlisle, the Ribble at Preston and, crucially, the Lune at Lancaster. Alongside the parish church, the Castle occupied the hill above the town and was the most redoubtable fortification in the County Palatine of Lancashire. At the beginning of the conflict between the Crown and Parliament in 1642, King Charles I’s Royalists, failed to secure this asset: ‘they did not Garrison it neither the towne of Lancaster’ (Beamont 1864). The fortress was thus for the taking. Following the surrender of Preston on 8 February 1643 to an expeditionary force dispatched from Puritan Manchester, a Parliamentarian squadron, consisting of an infantry company and a troop of cavalry under the command of Major Thomas Birch, was sent from Preston to Lancaster (Beamont 1864). This move may have been planned as a reconnaissance mission: ‘to view whether the townes were fortified strongly or no’ (Roper 1907). In the event, however, it paid dividends. Lancastrians lent assistance to Birch’s assault, indicating their pro-Parliamentarian stance in these early stages of the struggle between King and Parliament. A token Royalist occupying force in the Castle was quickly overcome and Birch allowed the senior Royalists of the area, the King’s High Sheriff, Sir John Girlington and the Member of Parliament for Lancaster, Roger Kirby, to depart in peace. Prisoners in the Castle’s gaol were set free: ‘Al the Prisoners they found in it eyther for fellonie or debt they 26 Contrebis 2019 v37 sett them att Libertie’ (Beamont 1864). A Parliamentarian garrison was installed, under the command of Captain William Shuttleworth (Beamont 1864; Broxap 1910; Roper 1907). These victories in the early weeks of the first full year of Civil War were strategically and symbolically significant for three reasons. First, the seizure of Lancaster gave Parliament the prize of the county town, which was the centre of its judicial and administrative activities. Second, the linked capitulations of Preston and Lancaster took Parliamentarian forces out of their south-east Lancashire Puritan heartlands and out into the wider shire, up towards the borders with predominantly Royalist Cumberland and Westmorland. Third, the bold and successful assaults on Lancaster and Preston, aided by the convictions of a formidable Puritan religious ideology, provided an early indication of the military prowess that in the course of the 1640s was to give victory in the first Civil War to Parliament. One theatre of the European war of religion now known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48) was in the Low Countries, where Catholic Spain was struggling to regain its lost dynastic provinces from the Protestant Dutch Republic. During his reign, beginning in 1625, Charles I had been formally neutral during the Thirty Years War. Denied access by France to the overland route from Spain to the Low Countries, the Spanish, despite England’s official neutrality, were given leave by the Crown to transport their naval and land forces to the Netherlands via a British route. The freedom granted to the Spanish to navigate British inshore waters accounts for an extraordinary spectacle on the Lancashire coast in March 1643, with the appearance off the north Fylde shore of a wayward Spanish vessel: ‘a Spanish schip blowne in wth a storme to Weyre water’ (Broxap 1910; Beamont 1864; Roper 1907). The ship was the Santa Anna, belonging to the Dunkirk squadron of the Spanish army of Flanders, a vast craft ‘of great Burden such a one as was never landed in Wyre watter in any mans memory’ (Roper 1907). She had been engaged as a transport for 400 recruits bound for training in the Low Countries, but as a result of the death of her pilot she had been blown very badly off a course that would otherwise have taken her back to her Dunkirk haven, via the English Channel. Besides her human cargo, the Santa Anna was a large-scale weapons-carrier, with 22 cannon, of the best Spanish make: ‘many great peeces of Brasse Ordenances … . It was a wonder to the Country to see such a one’ (Beamont 1864). The gunnery was designed to subdue the Dutch towns but would have been equally adaptable for a war of urban sieges and surrenders in civil-war England. In order to attract attention and assistance for her famished and weakened complement, the Santa Anna, riding at anchor off the Fylde coast, spent two or three days firing off her great guns, thundering across the marshes every time one of these mighty monsters of weaponry was discharged. The appeals for help resulted in the ship being towed into the safety of the Wyre estuary, on the western, Rossall, bank. There her presence and prize value alerted the rival forces into action. Over the Saturday and Sunday of 4–5 March, the county’s Royalist commander, the Earl of Derby, contended for the Santa Anna’s cargo against a Parliamentarian force sent from Preston. However, after the Earl had tried to keep the guns out of the enemy’s hands by sending them to the bottom of the Wyre, the Parliamentarian forces were able to retrieve them from the ship’s hold and from the river bed and convey them the few miles along Bernard Wharf into the Lune estuary: ‘down Loyne to Lancaster and laid in the Castle Guard’ (Roper 1907). This transfer opened a new phase in the contest for the Castle, as Lord Derby tried to make amends for his inability to take the Santa Anna’s artillery cargo in the first place by trying to secure both the Castle and the munitions it now housed. The seizure of the Santa Anna and its cargo was one part of a remarkable Parliamentarian military achievement in the County Palatine in February and March 1643: ‘Lancaster, Preston, the Ship 27 Contrebis 2019 v37 Ordenance, with the whole Country round about, being in the Parliaments power’ (Beamont 1864). The storage of the ordnance in Lancaster Castle now made it a high-priority target for a Royalist counter-offensive. The Earl of Derby assembled a large force of 600 infantry and 400 cavalry, supplemented by 300 Royalist volunteers in the Fylde. The combined force marched north and was joined near Garstang by 600 more men brought in by High Sheriff Girlington and the Catholic Royalist Colonel Thomas Tyldesley. They clashed with a Parliamentarian defence force of 600 musketeers. The town of Lancaster had no stone walling, but with one account noting the ‘mud walls of the town’ (Roper 1907), it appears that some temporary defences had been improvised against a Royalist assault. On 18 March 1643 a message from Lord Derby to the townspeople attempted to win hearts and minds – ‘to free you from the bondage of those declared traitors’ – and tried to reduce the scale of his military operation by securing practical assistance or compliance from the town. The Earl’s address offered the options of ‘fair usage’ versus ‘what the law of the lande and of warre will inflict on you’ (Roper 1907). This meant the punishments of rape, massacre, plunder and destruction could be unleashed by the successful besiegers in the Thirty Years War in Europe on the towns that opposed them. The response of the townsmen in the person of the Mayor, directed by the Castle command, was to the effect that, since the Parliamentarian force had gained the military initiative over the town, the Castle and the artillery, any assistance to the Earl was out of their hands.