God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [326]
Colchester, isolated since mid-July, was by mid-August completely alone and the county of Essex, which had previously been spared the horrors of war, was now to experience them in full. The siege lasted eleven weeks and by the end conditions were appalling. Food quickly ran short and it was said that at the time of the surrender there were no cats or dogs and few horses left alive. Water supplies had been cut or spoiled and both sides had destroyed property by fire in order to deny cover to the enemy. There had been heavy bombardments, which had also caused extensive damage. Houses, property and livelihoods had been consumed. Desperate inhabitants, led by starving women, demanded surrender, but Norwich refused. Instead he sent the women and children out of the town, but the besiegers would not let them pass. Caught between the two armies they were eventually readmitted to the town. Contemporaries were shocked by conditions in the town after its fall.
The siege of Colchester, 1648
How sad a spectacle it is to see goodly buildings, well furnished houses, and whole streets, to be nothing but ruinous heaps of ashes, and both poor and rich brought almost to the same woeful state, to see such people scarce able to stand upon their legs,… to see poor and rich men, late of good quality, now equal to the meanest, toiling and sweating in carrying some mean bed or other away, or some inconsiderable household stuffs out of the burning, all of them with wailing weeping ghastly countenances and meagre thin faces, shifting and flying in distraction of mind they scarce know wither.
Another witness remarked on the ‘sad spectacle to see so many fair houses burnt to ashes and so many inhabitants made feeble and weak with living upon horseflesh and dogs, many glad to eat the draught and grains for preservation of life’.44 One comparison that came to mind was with Magdeburg, the town which suffered most notoriously in the Thirty Years War.45 Here, in Colchester, was a moment when England threatened to turn Germany.
The horrors inflicted on Colchester were within the laws of war, but only just, and both sides accused the other of a lack of decency. Fairfax, in refusing passage to the women and children, had denied their often-claimed right to special protection, but he did so in order to keep up pressure on Norwich to bring an end to an increasingly futile resistance. If Norwich thought their suffering was too great then he should accept the offer of a treaty to end the siege. The defenders were also accused of having used poisoned bullets and there were rumours of cannibalism. Norwich’s decision to hold the city was increasingly difficult to justify in military terms, and his refusal to surrender threatened to waste human lives. To the besieging parliamentarians it was this stubborn and unjustifiable denial of military realities that was the root cause of the enormities.46
When capitulation came, the defenders could therefore hope for little sympathy. Their resistance had persisted well beyond the point dictated by common sense. They chose to surrender only under pressure of civilian rebellion and news of the defeat at Preston. Norwich made some show of being involved in a negotiation, but was forced to a humiliating capitulation on 27 August, ten days after Hamilton’s army had been crushed. All officers above the rank of captain surrendered at mercy rather than quarter – that is to say that their fate depended on the discretion of their captors and there were no guarantees. In this case, it meant ‘without certain assurance of quarter so as the Lord General may be free to put some immediately to the sword if he see cause’. Junior officers were offered quarter ‘for their lives’ – which guaranteed them freedom from physical harm, warm clothes and food. It was explained though that in this case this meant only that they would have ‘their skins whole, though stripped of all their