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By Root 1357 0

to square the Vote of No Addresses with the pursuit of a settlement were less impressive than the preparations for war. The obvious solution was to try to secure a deposition or forced abdication in favour of one of his elder sons. Charles, Prince of Wales, now seventeen years old, had fled to the Isles of Scilly in March 1646 and from there to Jersey, before taking up an offer of refuge in France following his father’s surrender. There he was beyond reach or persuasion. His younger brother James, Duke of York, now in his fifteenth year, had been in Oxford during the war. When it ended he was placed under the guardianship of the Duke of Northumberland at St James’s Palace in London. He was not willing to countenance a deal of the kind being proposed and was to escape, at the third attempt, in April 1648, in the course of a specially arranged game of hide-and-seek. Colonel Bampfield was waiting for him, and spirited him away to the Netherlands. Replacing the King was therefore not an option, however attractive it might have been as a way out of the impasse. Henry Marten had made overtures to the Scottish commissioners to try to avert an invasion, but they were rebuffed. Meanwhile men rushed north to sign up for the Engagers” army and both Berwick and Carlisle were quickly occupied in the last days of April. For a time, the prospects for armed royalism looked quite good. In late April the Scottish parliament announced that the Solemn League and Covenant had been broken, called for the establishment of Presbyterianism in England and named its officers. On 4 May the Scottish parliament ordered the raising of an army.18 But it would not arrive for some time, until after England and Wales had been pacified, in fact.19

In the meantime the situation in many areas of England and Wales was tense – the disorders of March, April and May and the rival petitioning campaigns spoke of serious problems for the parliamentary position. On a number of occasions there had been moves to take hold of local magazines and to resist the army, but only two of these movements actually resulted in armed risings against the parliamentary regime: in south Wales in April and May; and in Kent and Essex in June.

Politics in south Wales displayed continuities from 1642, a history which illustrates the uneasy relationship between local grievances and national political platforms. In Glamorganshire in 1642 prompt action by the Marquess of Hertford had secured royalist control, but in 1645, faced with increasing military burdens, a ‘Peaceable Army’ was formed, committed to a programme rather like that of the English clubmen. The King went along with their demands, but when he seemed to be about to renege on the deal the Peaceable Army made common cause with the parliamentarians in neighbouring Pembrokeshire. By February 1646, however, there was open resistance to parliamentary government on more or less the same grounds – the intrusion of new men and the suppression of the rites and traditions of the Anglican church prominent among the grievances. A similar revolt took place in June 1647, defeated by force. In 1648, however, there was a military ally. Colonel John Poyer, the mayor of Pembroke in 1642, had taken military control of the county under cover of a fabricated popish plot. In alliance with Rowland Laugharne he had established military domination in an area where there was little sign of enthusiasm for either side. By 1648 Poyer and Laugharne had many local enemies, however, and Poyer had become very vulnerable should he lose command of Pembroke Castle – his power base. When the armies were rationalized late in 1647 this happened and he was required to hand over the castle to a detachment from the New Model.20 The resulting mutiny became a vehicle for a pro-royalist rising, drawing on the kinds of grievance visible in many other areas.

Although Poyer never accepted a commission from the King, he did put his mutinous troops behind a rising of the Glamorgan gentry. The aim of the movement was to bring the King to a personal treaty, along with demands