POLITICAL HISTORY "humane, no portions of England were burnt to deserts, towns were not reduced to half their size, villages did not disappear wholesale. 808 In June, 1 644, Lord Wihnot, the Earl of Northampton, and the Earl of Cleveland were sent to relieve Dudley Castle with a brigade of horse and 1,000 foot ; but the fighting, judging by the losses incurred, must have been very mild ; and in a letter written soon after, Lord Denbigh, describing the engagement, says he beat the Royalists, and in his force was a Staffordshire regiment commanded by Colonel Symon Rugeley and Major Pinkeney. 309 In October, Stafford, where there was a magazine of importance, was in danger of treason within the walls, and Sir William Brereton, acting on orders of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, occupied it and secured the suspected persons. 310 Among them were Colonel Lewis Chadwick, Lieut. - Colonel Chadwick, and Captain-Lieutenant Hughes, who were sent away to Eccleshall Castle, and Captain Stone was appointed to take charge of the place. In England the year 1 644 was disastrous for the king, and but for the victory of Lostwithiel his cause would have been utterly ruined. In Stafford- shire a list of the places held by the two parties in May, 1645, gi ven by a Royalist officer, Captain Symonds, discloses a very different state of affairs from that at the commencement of the war. ' Eccleshall, Stafford, Russell [Rushall ?] Hall, Chillington, Tamworth, Alton, Peynsley House, Caverswall House are,' he says, ' now in the hands of Parliament ; Lichfield and Dudley Castle are held for Charles.' 311 In May of that year the king was marching north to the defeat of Naseby, and on the sixteenth the prince's head quarters were at Wolver- hampton ; the king lay at Bushbury. On the twenty-second the royal army arrived at Stone, the king lying at the house of Col. Crompton, ' a rebel,' 312 and M.P. for the county 16461660. On the twenty-fourth it reached Uttoxeter, and marched that day by Sir H. Bagot's house in the moorlands, 'a rebellious place.' Although in the enemy's country, the king was unmolested, Lord Byron having informed him that the troops of the Parliament upon the news of His Majesty's advance had retreated. 313 On the twenty-fifth they reached Burton, the king lying at Tutbury Castle, then under Sir Andrew Kniveton. On 14 June came the crushing defeat of Naseby, the king losing all his infantry and all his munitions of war ; but he brought off his cavalry nearly intact from the field, 81 * and still had a force of all arms under Goring in the south-west. The unfortunate monarch was at Lichfield, 815 one of the few places now left to him, on 1 5 June, and lay in the Close ; and next day he marched to Wolverhampton, thence into Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Wales, and Shropshire, returning to Lichfield on 10 August, and having a skirmish with the enemy, from their post at Barton, near Tutbury on the thirteenth, in
- M Trevelyan, Engl. under the Stuarts, 230.
- Cal. S.P. Don. 1644, p. 236. Lord Denbigh in his account says the fight for three-quarters of an
hour was 'very hot,' yet the losses he mentions are trifling. " Ibid. 195. 111 Shaw, Hist, of Staffs, i, 72 ; Harwood, Erdestolck, rvi. 111 Shaw, op. cit. i, 72 ; Cal. S.P. Dom. 1644, pp. 521-2, 534-5. 115 Clarendon, Civ. War, ix, 32. * 14 Trevelyan, Engl. under the Stuarts, 267. sls Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. vii, App. i, 451. 263
