Colchester Siege, one of the most desperate defences, being now plainly without object, terminates on Monday next.[1] Surrender, ‘on quarter’ for the inferior parties, ‘at discretion’ for the superior. Two of the latter, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, gallant Officers both, are sentenced and shot on the place. ‘By Ireton’s instigation,’ say some: yes, or without any special instigation; merely by the nature of the case! They who, contrary to Law and Treaty, have again involved this Nation in blood, do they deserve nothing?—Two more, Goring and Lord Capel, stood trial at Westminster; of whom Lord Capel lost his head. He was ‘the first man that rose to complain of Grievances’ in November 1640; being then Mr. Capel, and Member for Hertfordshire.
The Prince with his Fleet in the Downs, too, so soon as these Lancashire tidings reached him, made off for Holland; ‘entered the Hague in thirty coaches,’ and gave-up his military pursuits. The Second Civil War, its back once broken here at Preston, rapidly dies everywhere; is already as good as dead.
In Scotland itself there is no farther resistance. The oppressed Kirk Party rise rather, and almost thank the conquerors. ‘Sir George Monro,’ says Turner, ‘following constantly a whole day’s march to the rear of us,’ finding himself, by this unhappy Battle, cut asunder from my Lord Duke, and brought into contact with Cromwell instead,—‘marched straight back to Scotland and joined with Earl Lanark’s forces,’ my Lord Duke’s brother. ‘Straight back,’ as we shall find, is not the word for this march.
‘But so soon as the news of our Defeat came to Scotland’, continues Turner, ‘Argyle and the Kirk Party rose in arms; every mother’s son; and this was called the “Whiggamore Raid”’: 1648,—first appearance of the Whig Party on the page of History, I think! ‘David Lesley was at their head, and old Leven,’ the Fieldmarshal of 1639, ‘in the Castle of
- ↑ 28th August, Rushworth, vii. 1242.
