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ride to Hull, apparently thinking she would die. His daughter joined him a day after his arrival in Hull, revived after a night’s sleep, and his wife was ‘sent to him with all courtesy by the stately Newcastle, who was too gallant a cavalier to make war on ladies’. Similar courtesies were observed at the siege of Arundel Castle in January 1644. Once negotiations for a treaty had been opened, the parliamentary commander, Sir William Waller, invited Lady Bishop, the wife of the royalist commander, and her daughters to dine with him.88 Such things clearly mattered. On 10 August 1643, when Charles summoned Gloucester to surrender, a soldier and citizen came out to deliver the reply. The city was at His Majesty’s orders as soon as it was signified to them by the two Houses of Parliament, they said. Having delivered their message they wheeled around, turning their backs on the King; and putting on their hats in which the orange ribbons denoting their allegiance were prominently visible, they rode off. This was a gross breach of etiquette, which evoked laughter among the courtiers, but strengthened the King’s determination to press on with the siege. In July, frustrated by his failure to bring the royalists to battle, Essex had proposed to the Speaker of the House of Lords that the terms rejected by the King in Oxford should be offered again. If he refused them, then the King should be asked to withdraw and the two armies be allowed to fight a single battle to settle the quarrel. The idea was studiously ignored.89 Insistence on honourable, civil, courteous behaviour was an understandable response to the moral ambiguities confronted by those seeking to act in a principled and consistent way. Whether, in these conditions, honour had any clear meaning was less certain.

Settling into a longer campaign created new political issues, arising from the war itself. Those who were fighting to preserve legal propriety and those fighting to defend religious decency might change their mind about which side best represented their views. Clearly, there were different views among the parliamentarians about what the war was for and how the cause could be strengthened. From the spring of 1643 until the early autumn, military fortune favoured the King, and this tended to make these questions very pressing on the parliamentary side. Relative military failure, in itself, posed problems for the solidarity of the parliamentary coalition, but it did so in less direct ways too. At Edgehill and Turnham Green there had been an element of excitement, or even euphoria, about the response of the troops. During the following years the hard realities of soldiering became obvious. The horrors endured in Germany during the Thirty Years War were well-known, and fears that England might ‘turn Germany’ were common. They were quickly reinforced by Edgehill, Brentford, Marlborough, Birmingham and Lancaster. The almost forgotten skirmish at Guisborough was sufficiently appalling to shift Cholmley’s allegiance, and the agonizing death suffered by Hampden had many fellows. Charles was in the end reluctant to storm Gloucester, having seen the aftermath of the storming of Bristol, where, as one participant put it, ‘as gallant men as ever drew sword… lay upon the ground like rotten sheep’.90 Given the political uncertainties about war aims the problems raised by these terrible experiences were more complicated than simple revulsion at the experience of warfare: what was this suffering supposed to achieve, and was it doing so?

Military campaigns imposed heavy burdens on individuals and communities and continued fighting posed a problem of political and religious mobilization. But as the campaigns became more destructive, without being more decisive, and novel institutional measures were taken to support them, the war became a political issue in itself, complicating the choices made in 1642. In justifying new measures and trying to stiffen the sinews, again particularly on the parliamentary side, more radical religious and political arguments were voiced. Parliament’s war