The Great Siege of Newcastle 1644

Rosie Serdiville, John Sadler

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752459899
• eBook ISBN: 9780750953498
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the autumn of 1644 was fought one of the most sustained and desperate sieges of the First Civil War when Scottish Covenanter forces under the Earl of Leven finally stormed Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the King's greatest bastion in the north-east and the key to his power there. The city had been resolutely defended throughout the year by the Marquis of Newcastle, who had defied both the Covenanters and northern Parliamentarians. Newcastle had held sway in the north-east since the outbreak of the war in 1642. He had defeated the Fairfaxes at Adwalton Moor and secured the City of Newcastle as the major coal exporter and port of entry for vital Royalist munitions and supply. Without this the north was lost. If anything, Newcastle was more important, in strategic terms, than York and it was the city's fall in October which marked the final demise of Royalist domination of the north. The book tells the story of the people who fought there, what motivated them and who led them there. It is also an account of what happened on the day, a minute-by-minute chronicle of Newcastle's bloodiest battle. The account draws heavily on contemporary source material, some of which has not received a full airing until now.

1

Being Introductory

The Forward Youth that would appear

Must now forsake his muses dear,

Nor in the shadows sing

His number languishing

Tis time to leave the books in dust,

And oil the unused armour’s rust,

Removing from the wall

The corslet from the hall.

‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

The first consideration with a general who offers battle should be the glory and honour of his arms; the safety and preservation of his men is only the second; but it is in the enterprise and courage resulting from the former that the latter will most assuredly be found.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Into the Breach

On the afternoon of 19 October 1644, a grey day of autumn, smoke eddied over the scorched walls of the northern city and the jumble of close-packed buildings gapped and scarred by shell. Civil strife, unseen in England since Bosworth and Stoke Fields more than a century and a half ago, was now enjoying a full, bitter flowering. In part this was an ancient grudge, Scots and Northern English, honed by three full centuries of bitter hate and constant strife, from snarling lancers with border names, to crack of cannon and the clothyard storm on a dozen bloodied fields and more.

The attackers shuffled out into columns, a drab legion in ragged hodden grey, morion and corselets scoured to a dull glow. Dry-mouthed, each man stood, waiting, while dour ministers moved along the columns offering the solace of God’s word.

Above, the cannonade reached a fury. Great black clouds of sulphurous fumes obscured the lines already half hidden by camp followers burning rubbish, the ancient Scots’ smoke screen. Trumpets blared and the assault started, men stumbling forward hefting the ungainly weight of puissant pike or blowing on match, officers drew swords.

It was begun.

The Great Cause

James VI of Scotland and I of England has generally not enjoyed a good press: slack-jawed and unprepossessing, learned yet often foolish, his achievements have been largely overlooked. A proficient linguist who rode and hunted well, he managed to prevail against both the rampant anarchy of the nobility and the arrogant intolerance of the Kirk whilst successfully merging the crowns, no mean task in itself. He is regarded as a highly successful King of Scots. Nonetheless, his English subjects were disappointed: he appeared a poor successor to Elizabeth and his son Charles was even worse. Whilst James, a wily tactician, readily exploited the differences between his opponents, Charles very early mastered the knack of uniting the opposition against him. Charles had many virtues – he was tolerant in an age of creeping intolerance, cultured, pious and brave – yet he showed little interest in his northern kingdom and less understanding. His policy, such as it was, encouraged Laudian-style episcopacy (rule of the Church by bishops), an anathema to many Scots. He excluded the Lords of Session from the Privy Council and then terrified the Scots nobles by threatening to seek recovery of all property taken over since the accession of his grandmother, Mary, in 1542.

These concerns were rendered trivial when Charles thought to introduce the Book of Canons (incorrectly labelled as ‘Laud’s Liturgy’, and generally considered more popish than the English Prayer Book). Riots ensued and an outraged populace flocked to sign the National Covenant in 1638. As opposition swelled, protestors demanded the withdrawal of the liturgy and the expulsion of the bishops from the Privy Council. Anti-Episcopalian sentiment began to mount. The Covenanters, as the signatories to the Deed were known, sought a free Parliament, the General Assembly of the following year openly defying the King and purporting to abolish episcopacy.

Charles was persuaded to use force against his Scottish subjects, but his attempts to raise a viable army foundered. The rabble he managed to gather drank and pillaged their way north but never amounted to a military expedition. The following year saw Charles once again trying to recruit adequate forces; to no one’s surprise, other than perhaps his own, meeting with scant success. The Scots fared better, their regiments swelled and drilled whilst the tide of change gathered momentum. The clerical estate was abolished. The Covenant became an obligation rather than a choice. The executive power rested in a Committee of the Three Estates and the Kirk (the dominant reformed church in Scotland) ably championed by Argyll, took effective control.

Allegedly at the head of 20,000 foot with 2,500 horse*, Alexander Leslie, who had won renown as the defender of Stralsund in the Thirty Years’ War, splashed across the Tweed on 20 August 1640. A scratch Royalist force at Newburn on the Tyne, under Lord Conway, sought to bar his passage south. The English could field no more than 3,500 foot, mainly musketeers and perhaps a couple of thousand horse. A brace of earthwork redoubts commanded the ford (on ground now occupied by Stella Power Station). At dusk on 27 August the two armies faced each other over the placid waters. Leslie made good use of the short summer night, causing his guns to be dragged down to the riverbank where they opened the morning’s hostilities with a brisk fire. Under cover of the cannons’ roar, a vanguard of Life Guards forced the crossing, precipitating a hasty withdrawal by the English which swiftly dissolved into rout. Even a spirited charge by the cavaliers could not stem the rot and the ‘rout of Newburn Ford’ was quickly ended (see chapter 2). Charles now faced the humiliation of seeing virtually the whole of Northumberland and Durham, including Newcastle, under Scots occupation. He was forced to negotiate from a position of weakness, a stance which further dented his crumbling prestige. The concord agreed at Ripon was formally ratified by the King’s Commissioners in 1641 and the Scots marched home, having earned their country some £200,000.

* This figure is open to question and is more fully discussed in Chapter Six.

Coals from Newcastle

The lively seventeenth century writer and traveller Celia Fiennes described Newcastle as ‘the fairest and richest Town in England, inferior for wealth and building to no city save London and Bristol’. She was not exaggerating. By the 1630s the city’s population was fast approaching that of its commercial rival Bristol, probably around 13,000 by the time of the Hearth Tax Assessment of 1665 (assuming a household of approx 4.5 per hearth plus apprentices and servants present in one third of the mercantile properties)¹. Newcastle was amongst the four largest towns in the country and one of the wealthiest. The map of 1638 showing the defences also gives us invaluable information on the layout and density of the wards. These extended beyond the walls to the north at New Gate and Pilgrim Street Gate, to the west at West Gate and, most of all, in the east at Sandgate. Not all was boom and prosperity; around 41 per cent of households were defined as being ‘in poverty’ in 1665².

Howell³ suggests those more affluent wards were clustered in the centre of the town (Castle, Guildhall and Quayside). Poorer wards were pressed against the town’s ancient walls in the north-east and north-west, with the exception of Sandgate which, while on the outskirts, hugged the course of the river⁴. Howell further calculates that the eight inner wards were the wealthiest area of the town, although they probably held no more than 18 per cent of the population and that the residents of these areas enjoyed disproportional representation on the town’s ruling bodies (Common Council and the Twenty Four).

Langton notes that the guild structure had, in previous centuries, led to ‘occupational zoning and social class mixing’. Guild members tended to live close to each other with the workshop and/or warehouse occupying the same plot as the living quarters for master and family; journeymen apprentices and servants would have lived in the upper quarters of the same building. This historic pattern was breaking down as wealthier members of the community, particularly the merchant elite, were developing links with the gentry of the surrounding countryside and buying properties outside the city, thus beginning a process of ‘gentrification’ by progressive disassociation with the urban sprawl which continued into the twentieth century⁵.

Langton’s general conclusion is that during this period, those of greater wealth and higher status occupations resided in town centres. He also points out there are considerable problems with using Hearth Tax figures as guides to relative wealth and with analysing towns at the level of ward or parish, rather than street by street. However, his own analysis of the cartographic information tends to support Howell’s description of the economic zoning of the city⁶. Merchants were increasingly using their wealth to acquire larger homes in the centre. In Newcastle, a swathe of larger houses existed in the area between Castle and Guildhall, although Hearth Tax records do show some larger houses in other areas (the obvious caveat here is that those records relate to the period after the Civil Wars). Militarily, when it came to defending the city by clearing areas beyond the walls, it was those households in poorer wards who suffered most – the larger properties at the centre of the town belonging to ‘hostmen’ (coal traders and shippers) and others of equivalent socio-economic status, were not subject to the same measure of enforced expediency.

Howell produces a useful table based on evidence taken from the Hearth Tax Assessment of 1665⁷. The contemporary and partisan William Gray uses topography to convey his political message. He emphasises the traditional and long accepted role of Newcastle in protecting the rest of the kingdom from Scottish incursion, employing poetry, description, cartography and morphology to hammer home his view. Certainly, the city’s location so close to the long-disputed frontier and the role it played in controlling that border gave it a most particular importance⁸. By the seventeenth century, with the Scottish threat apparently removed, those great traders of the town had become bankers to the whole region from Tees to Tweed. Money flowed out to lord and landowner from the north. Newcastle provided much needed liquid cash to replace it. Certain, select hostmen acted as bankers on an even greater scale. In 1623, Sir William Selby, part of an affinity of northern merchants which included the Delavals and the Belaysyse, was recorded as lending money to London. Merchants formed a cash rich monopoly based on swelling profits from the burgeoning coal trade. Banking status ensured Newcastle’s hostmen were creditors to both landlord and tenant: ‘This towne unto this countrye, serves in stead of London: by means whereof the countrye is supplied with money’⁹.

An opportunity to invest monies, using the profits of trade and realising a return, has long been seen as one of the drivers of the English revolution: a symptom of the frustration with that level of control exercised by the Crown over the economy and a cause of substantial investment in overseas trade. The latter was perceived as more speculative than investing in domestic schemes; both capital risk and potential return being far greater. During this era no retail banking system existed to facilitate capital being transferred around the country. Goldsmiths were able to offer a rudimentary system of secure deposit and could provide credit notes to be drawn on one of their network in another area but such arrangements were essentially ad hoc and informal¹⁰.

The banking role of Newcastle’s merchants was almost unique and gave them significant control over debtors as well as an opportunity to generate significant returns for themselves. It also meant that these financiers were in a position to enter into joint ventures with gentry anxious to put their lands to commercial use; relationships that might well be cemented in other ways, ideally by dynastic marriages. Connections between the Anderson, Riddell and Liddell families were cemented at the altar, as subsequently was that between the Blacketts and Delavals.

‘King Coal’ was not the only significant generator of economic prosperity – the cloth trade, maritime activity, leather working, glass and salt-making (there were salt pans at South Shields and some at North Shields) all played their part. In terms of cultural life, which clings to the coat tails of economic prosperity, the town was exhibiting levels of sophistication. Chamberlains’ accounts record payments to travelling players, poets and entertainers¹¹. The urban centre acted as a cultural as well as commercial magnet – many of the Northumbrian gentry had town houses, providing opportunities to boost affinities.

Following the Dissolution and ‘privatisation’ of the mines fuelling an upsurge in mining activity during the 1580s, the city was able to respond to the diminishing importance of previously crucial economic activity such as the production and processing of wool. Newcastle was in an ideal position to supply cheap fuel; deposits were close to the surface, extracted from easily accessed pits. Coal could then be transported by water to the city for shipping on to London. The ‘Grand Lease’ (rights to exploit mines in Whickham & Gateshead) had been assigned by Queen Elizabeth I to a consortium of Newcastle merchants. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Newcastle was exporting 150,000 tons per year rising to 300,000 tons to London alone in 1650. The value of the London trade becomes clear when we consider how much was being shipped to the rest of the country, some 200,000 tons. Wrightson, quoting Wrigley, observes: ‘the heat provided by burning one ton of coal is equivalent to that attainable from the dry wood yielded by an acre of woodland. In terms of energy production, then, the miners, coal owners and merchants of the north-east had provided England with the equivalent of two million acres of woodland per year’¹².

The trade became an increasingly significant occupation for those deprived of other employment outside the city; the turbulent border which had provided employment of a sort, usually violent and illicit, had ceased to exist as an economic factor in that sense. Between 1565 and 1625 the coal trade increased twelvefold. Newcastle coal owners opined that 5,800 men were employed in the Tyneside coal industry in 1637–8¹³. Those other local industries – cloth, maritime activity, leather working, glass and salt-making – were increasingly dependant on coal as a ready source of fuel.

Local Affinities

Despite the historic antipathy between lowland Scots and Northern English, cross-border networks were far more commonplace than the ancient enmity might suggest. Take the Delavals, for example Leslie’s daughter Anne was married to Sir Ralph, son of Robert Delaval¹⁴. Robert was aged thirty at the time of his father’s death. He served as sheriff in 1575, 1583 and 1592 and was knighted on 13 April 1603. On his subsequent demise, on 1 January 1607, his eldest son Sir Ralph succeeded him. Ralph Delaval’s younger so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Dramatis Personae
• Glossary
• 1. Being Introductory
• 2. Laud’s Liturgy
• 3. The Gathering Storm
• 4. War in the North 1642–3
• 5. The Winter War 1644
• 6. No Coals from Newcastle – Autumn 1644
• 7. Storming the Walls – 19 October 1644
• 8. Aftermath – Fortitur Triumphans Defendit
• Appendix 1: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 2: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 3: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 4: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 5: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 6: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Appendix 7: The Art of War in the Seventeenth Century
• Notes
• Select Bibliography