Now! Then! Tag: English Civil War (1642-1651)

Entries for the tag ‘English Civil War (1642-1651)’

A series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians ("Roundheads") and Royalists ("Cavaliers"), mainly over the manner of England's governance and issues of religious freedom.

23 January 1642: Entering Hull to claim it for parliament from Charles I, young John Hotham receives divine warning of his and his father’s acephalous fate
23 April 1642: Having promised parliament to safeguard for it Hull’s crucial arsenal, John Hotham tells it how today he shut the gates of Hull to Charles I
18 December 1642: “Bradford quarter” is given to a Royalist besieger during the First Siege
28 December 1642: Four months into the Civil War, the Puritan John Shawe of Rotherham preaches iconoclasm at St. Mary’s, Beverley
23 January 1643: Thomas Fairfax, the Rider of the White Horse, captures Leeds from the Beast with the help of Psalm 68
5 February 1643: Rioting locals reïnundate Hatfield Chase in protest at flooding and a loss of fishing and fowling caused by Netherlandish colonists and Cornelius Vermuyden’s land reclamation scheme
4 May 1643: The Royalists take Rotherham and begin a search for the preacher John Shawe
21 May 1643: Thomas Fairfax takes two “true prisoners” at Wakefield, but is then surrounded by their comrades
3 July 1643: The Royalists take Bradford after the Second Siege, but are warned off massacring the inhabitants by a ghost
16 June 1644: On Trinity Sunday in the minster on a desperate day during the siege of York by Parliament and the Scots, Thomas Mace hears “the most remarkable singing of psalms anywhere in these our latter ages”
16 June 1644: On Trinity Sunday, Parliament and the Scots breach York’s walls and destroy monastic records with a mine next to St Mary’s Tower
15 October 1645: Unable to distinguish Cavaliers from Roundheads, Lord Digby’s victorious Royalist army flees the battlefield at Sherburn in Elmet and is destroyed
15 February 1647: “A stranger and pilgrim in the world,” Adam Eyre of Thurleston makes his funeral arrangements in his will
18 March 1647: Penistone Puritans request the Committee for Plundered Ministers to remove their vicar, Christopher Dickinson, “a man of scandalous life and conversation”
3 June 1648: Disguised as a furniture remover, John Morris takes Pontefract castle for the Stuarts (and for himself)
28 October 1648: A letter claims that Pontefract Castle under John Morris, its Royalist governor, has become a den of apolitical brigands
5 February 1649: The Puritan John Sharp of Bradford, on military service at Hull, writes passionately to his “cousin” at York
20 March 1649: Judge and Yorkshireman Francis Thorpe justifies to the grand jury at York the recent execution of Charles I
30 January 1650: Alderman Hoyle of York hangs himself at Westminster on the first anniversary of Charles I’s execution, inspiring John Cleveland to verse
10 November 1653: Thomas Baynes (allegedly) compares Parliament’s sequestrators to an agricultural pest
2 March 1665: A sighting of the northern lights at Northowram (Halifax) recalls the eve of the civil war
22 December 1666: The borough of Leeds orders the return of records “public and pious” lost during the civil war
14 May 1673: Long after the longbow’s demobilization, the Scorton Archers agree to shoot annually for a silver arrow
19 August 1728: An elderly gamekeeper at Pilley recalls the extrajudicial execution of a Dodworth man on the orders of young Sir Francis Wortley during the Civil War
16 August 1842: Lancastrian plug-drawing rioters invade Skipton in an attempt to halt the mills
17 July 1844: Tory Radical Joshua Hobson tells Leeds council that Liberal mayor Hamer Stansfield was wrong to prohibit public meetings on the semi-privatised Kirkgate market
13 July 1858: A visit to an alum works near Whitby

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