petitions for accommodation through December and January. Throughout the war, in fact, there was a popular royalism in London, drawing on resistance to godly reformation, the financial demands of the parliamentary war effort and loyalty to the monarch. The extent of this can be gauged from the known support offered to the royalists from London and the prosecutions for words spoken against the parliamentary cause. On 8 December a crowd gathered at Haberdashers” Hall, site of the meeting of the Committee of Both Houses for the Advance of Money: originally responsible for raising supplies for the army it had oversight of the imposition of penal taxation on neutrals or passive royalists who had failed to lend money or supplies voluntarily. It was one of the nerve centres of the war effort, in other words, and active parliamentarians present that day were jostled. Four days later a meeting of the City’s Common Council was disrupted by a large crowd. They were identified as royalists by their opponents, but what they demanded was peace: when someone shouted ‘Peace and truth’ someone else immediately replied ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price’. There was violence outside, prompted by the arrival of soldiers going about other business, and petitioners were openly threatening to pursue more violent courses if their demands were not met. Pressure was maintained through the rest of the month, and peace petitions were presented on 17, 19 and 22 December. They drew on the ranks of prosperous and middling tradesmen, and men of relatively conservative religious views can be identified as prominent among them. They seem to have identified the Lords rather than the Commons as their most sympathetic audience.41 The threat of disorder may have lain behind the closing of the theatres in September and the ban on bear-baiting on 12 December.42 In early January a further escalation took place, when a large number of apprentices gathered in Covent Garden to call for peace, threatening to plunder houses there. Their petition claimed 20,000 signatures (probably an exaggeration), but it was agreed that it could be presented only by a delegation of twenty.43
Maintaining the war effort in Parliament and London was a political problem, just as it was for the King in Oxford and the royalist heartlands. The seriousness of the problem entered the calculations of each side about the military strength of their enemy’s position. Two days before the apprentices” peace petition was presented Edgehill was in the news again. On 1 January, between 3 and 4 p.m., ghostly apparitions appeared there that seemed to point to God’s desire for peace. ‘[F]earful and strange apparitions of spirits as sounds of drums, trumpets, with the discharging of cannons, muskets, carbines, petronels’ caused ‘terror and amazement of all the fearful hearers and beholders’. Four days later people in Kineton heard ‘the doleful and hideous groans of dying men… crying revenge and some again to ease them of their pain by friendly killing them’. Trembling in their beds, they heard what appeared to be the beginning of an assault, which sent many to hide in corners or under their bedclothes. Those brave enough to look out of their windows saw horsemen riding against one another before vanishing. The following night a strong watch was set and many people witnessed a full-scale battle, which began at midnight and ended ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ at daybreak.
These events were reported to the King by Samuel Marshall, the minister of Kineton, and Charles sent six men from Oxford to investigate. Having stayed several days they saw and heard these phenomena for themselves and were able to identify a number of the apparitions, including Sir Edmund Verney. Robert Ellit, who claimed to be an eyewitness to these events, had a pamphlet published, as did Thomas Jackson, whose pamphlet rehearsed essentially the same story, with more detail, and was certified not only by Marshall but also by William Wood, JP.44 Sky battles such as this were an unusual but not unknown phenomenon, and were widely regarded