God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [234]
Villages all over England must have had similar tales to tell and similar wounds to heal. The most systematic estimates of war deaths put the total at 62,000 between 1642 and 1646, probably the equivalent to the population of the four largest cities in the country, London aside. Nearly 80,000 more were taken prisoner.2 These deaths were widely spread across the country, although East Anglia and Wales saw many fewer than the regions where field armies were frequently in action. On the other hand, these figures are derived from incidents large enough to have been reported, but there were probably many other deaths which went unrecorded. Richard Gough recalled seeing, as a schoolboy in Myddle during the war, a clash between parliamentary and royalist garrison soldiers happening upon each other in the village. A man was badly wounded. Gough had gone with the minister to pray for him and saw the man lying on a bed ‘with much blood running along the floor’. He died the next day.3 Such memories lasted a lifetime, but they were not the stuff of press reports. Between April 1644 and December 1645 Guy Carleton, vicar of Bucklesbury, Berkshire, buried four soldiers, all of whom died individually and probably not in any recorded incident.4
Others died accidentally. Ralph Hopton was severely wounded when a casually placed tobacco pipe ignited barrels of gunpowder and two other soldiers in his army died from the accidental discharge of muskets. Edward Morton was blown up, along with his four children and his house, while mixing gunpowder for the royal army. His wife’s escape was said to be providential, since she had tried to dissuade him from doing this work for the royalists.5 Another judgement was visited on Captain Starker, inspecting the loot taken from the capture of Houghton Tower in Lancashire. One of the company lit a pipe, which ignited the powder, killing himself, his captain and sixty of his comrades.6 The consequent burn and shatter wounds were horrifying. Richard Wiseman, a surgeon in the royal army, reported such an accident at the battle of Worcester in 1651: ‘A soldier… hastily fetched his bonnet full of gunpowder, and whilst he was filling his Bandoliers, another soldier carelessly bestrides it to make a shot at one of the enemies… In firing his musket, a spark flew out of the pan and gave fire to the powder underneath him’. The man filling the bandoliers was ‘grievously burned in the hands, arms, breast, neck and face’, but the careless soldier suffered more fearfully. He was ‘burned and scorched in all the upper part of his thighs, scrotum, muscles of the abdomen and the coats of the testicles… And indeed it was to be feared, that when the Escar should cast off from his belly, his bowels would have tumbled out’. In this case the outcome was happier. After the town fell Wiseman’s assistant saw the former soldier escape and the latter was ‘cured’.7
Not all were so lucky: many of the fallen died of their wounds, often in pain and some time after the battle. John Hampden took six days to die of wounds received at the battle of Chalgrove Field, six agonizing days. Care of the wounded was taken seriously but was limited by both resources and expertise. Wiseman, seeking to learn from his battlefield experiences, seems to have made a diagnostic distinction between those who died howling like dogs and those who died screaming. His later Treatise of Wounds reflected a serious and hopeful attempt to save more lives, but it is also a catalogue of horrors. Wounds tended to be burns, slashing cuts, the effects of fragmentation agents or gunshots.