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By Root 1452 0

Thomas Stanley, another of the local men, fired a pistol from a window. It was later said that as Birch’s company closed on them, Birch was heard to give a command to fire. Birch himself was disarmed and ran for cover under a cart, where he might have been killed but for the intervention of Strange. Thinking that the trouble had been averted Strange and his men then made their way towards Sir Alexander Ratcliffe’s, where they had planned further entertainment, but turning around they saw that fighting had started and that four men had been knocked from their horses. In all the confusion a militia man had been killed.

It was symptomatic of these tense and anxious months that there was an immediate local concern to disavow responsibility for breaking the peace.21 Sixty or eighty women from Manchester approached Strange the next morning ‘weeping and wailing and beseeching his lordship not to think any thing of them in the town for that which was done overnight’. Leading townsmen also came to excuse themselves, and were reassured that Strange believed them to have been innocent of any role in the trouble, promising he would be ‘as ready to relieve them and their town as any town in the country’. Twenty-two witnesses, including two constables, attested that Birch, Holcroft and Stanley had been the disturbers of the peace.22 Nonetheless, it was this resistance in Manchester that prevented the whole of Lancashire falling to the royalists.

As war broke out, piecemeal, the gap between the rhetoric of the two sides remained narrow. At Shrewsbury, early in the autumn, the King pledged ‘to the utmost of my power, [to] defend and maintain the true reformed protestant religion established in the Church of England… govern by the known law of the land, and that the liberty and property of the subject may be by them preserved… and I do solemnly and faithfully promise, in the sight of God, to maintain the just privileges and freedom of parliament’. The Earl of Essex’s commission from Parliament, issued earlier the same month, was ‘for the just and necessary defence of the protestant religion, of your majesty’s person, crown, and dignity, of the laws and liberties of the kingdom, and the privileges of parliament’.23

Although the rhetorical differences were slight, the consequences of disagreement were increasingly lethal. At dawn, in the rain, on 9 August, Captain John Smith led a troop of royalist cavalry into Kilsby, Northamptonshire. There they found a crowd armed with muskets and pitchforks. They stopped Thomas Wrinkles and asked him who he was for, and when he replied ‘for the king and parliament’ it was enough to identify him as an enemy. He was shot dead. Thomas Marriot protested and was hit on the head several times with swords and shot as he ran away. John White was speared with his pitchfork as the soldiers searched the village for arms, but as a crowd gathered they found it increasingly hard to move. Armed men appeared at upstairs windows and Smith ordered everyone not to shoot, but they did. Smith’s troops returned fire, killing three or four, and all the crowd ran, except an old man who ran at Smith with his pitchfork. He hit him without much effect, ignoring warnings to desist, before ‘a pistol quieted him’.24

Prior to 1640 the militia had served better as a vehicle for honourable display by the county elite than as a fighting force. In this it had much in common with other local institutions which reflected and expressed the local social order. Social and political power were closely entwined, and these institutions represented the face of that order to local society. In Tudor and Stuart England there was a horror of exposing divisions among the governing elite, but that inhibition seemed now to be giving way under the pressure of events.25 It had happened to Parliament and now it happened to the institutions of local government and in some places this dawning realization led to attempts to pull back from the brink. Although the language used was similar, the meanings attributed to it were quite different, and increasingly