that only supporters of Parliament would have their property ransacked. Charles promised a free pardon to everyone, if the town immediately gave up. He declared that Gloucester had no hope, for 'Waller is extinct and Essex cannot come'.
As the Royalist guns began to thunder and as siege engineers set about undermining the city walls, Gloucester sent desperate pleas for help from London.
Londoners were filled with fear and gloom. If Gloucester fell, London must soon be picked off too. Pamphleteers did their work; false rumours flew that the King was bringing an army of twenty thousand Irishmen. All suburban shops situated outside the Lines of Communication were ordered to close. The Common Council petitioned Parliament; Parliament instructed the lord mayor to take steps to quell the tumults that were once again disturbing the streets. A group of 'civilly disposed women' petitioned the Commons about their hardships and were put off with soothing words. A letter was sent to encourage Gloucester to hold out, while a Parliamentary committee ordered the Earl of Essex to prepare a relief force. Crucially, when Essex mustered his main army on Hounslow Heath, he knew he was to have nearly fifteen thousand men. To beef up his infantry, he would be supported by some of the London Trained Bands.
Chosen by lot were the Red Regiment, which recruited inside the city wall near the Tower, and the Blue Regiment, which drew its members from west of the Walbrook — Lambert Jukes's regiment. They sent a thousand men each. Also to go were three thousand auxiliaries, drawn from the Red, Blue and Orange regiments. On the first night of their march, they camped at Brentford; there some members' eagerness ebbed. They realised they faced weeks away from their homes and businesses, which many had never left before in their lives, not to mention deprivation, hard marching and possible death. They were permitted to find substitutes. Gideon Jukes, who was a member of the Green Regiment which would remain guarding London, received an urgent note from his brother to inform him of this opening. Urged on by Robert Allibone, who wanted him to write reports for the Corranto, Gideon volunteered to change places with a worried woollen draper from the Reds. So both Jukes brothers set out on their first adventure in the field.
The journey west was close on 150 miles. Choosing a long route to avoid the buzzing nest of Royalists at Oxford, the march took twelve days. The London Brigade formed up on the Artillery Ground and had marched for six days before they caught up with the regular army at Aylesford. Then they travelled with the main force, sometimes ahead, sometimes parallel, sometimes behind. Occasionally they sheltered in barns or were entertained at private houses, but mostly these supposedly soft city lads ate only what they could gather from the countryside, drinking brackish water, bivouacked out of doors, sleeping on the ground, lucky if they could make campfires with hedgerow branches or wooden palings and gates. They remained in good spirits, treating it as a duty and an adventure.
They safely bypassed Oxford to the north. As they passed Banbury, they were harried by Royalists under Lord Wilmot. When they entered Northamptonshire, Essex doubled the pace of their march. On the 2nd of September they were twenty-five miles from Gloucester. Royalist skirmishing increased. Prince Rupert met them with around four thousand cavalry at Stow-on-the-Wold. Great squadrons of Royalist horse began to surround the London Brigade, but were beaten off by the main force, using light cannon and dragoons. It was unsafe to halt at Stow so they marched on into the uplands until midnight, sleeping out in the fields where they dropped.
Gideon was anxious. By now they had no provisions. The countryside had been stripped by the enemy of all food, fuel and horse fodder. Everything Gideon had hastily packed in his snapsack had been used up days ago. Bread and beer were a dream; a sour windfall apple, scrounged from an orchard, was a luxury. Unwashed and with shirt and stockings unchanged, his skin was itching and uncomfortable; his own smell was offensive and his comrades repulsed him. Occasionally on the march he caught sight of his brother among the pikemen; set-faced, they conserved energy and exchanged no greeting. Both had learned to tramp ever onwards in a kind of daze, letting hours and miles pass unnumbered. In the damp wolds above Stow, as he lay down stiffly on bare ground with his stomach rumbling, Gideon wondered how much longer the men could continue in this fashion. For him, there was certainly no chance of sitting each evening with a rushlight and writing-slope, to pen a diary for the Corranto. A writer needs a good memory. But he was so weary and famished, he thought it unlikely he would ever remember details of the hardships he now experienced.
He had been sorely afraid when Prince Rupert's cavalry threatened to cut them off at Stow. Worse must lie ahead. By this time the Londoners all understood that, even if they were able to help Gloucester, their chances of returning home were slight.
On the evening of September the 5th, they marched over the Cotswolds and from a high point glimpsed Gloucester below. It lay too far off for the town garrison to hear the salvo of ordnance that Essex fired to announce that help had come. His troops had to spend the night up on the heights, famished, in tempestuous wind and rain, drenched and completely without shelter. When they descended the steep incline, wagons ran adrift, horses were fatally hurt and the men of the London Brigade found that by the time they reached level ground, all the houses where they had hoped to find refreshment were already filled up with other soldiers.
Rest and recuperation would be at hand, however. Alarming smoke turned out to be the enemy's quarters burning, set on fire as the King withdrew at their approach. After a month's siege, only sporadic fire came from the city, where stocks of ammunition had reached a critical low. Gloucester had survived only because incessant rain had flooded mines dug by the Royalists under walls and gates. The governor had sent out nightly raiding parties to sabotage the enemies' works; it was said he plied them with as much drink as they wanted to encourage their bravery, but there were many tales of energy and daring among those who volunteered for night-time missions. Bowmen had fired arrows from both sides, carrying written insults and threats. Fierce resistance by the city troops, together with the staunch mood of the townspeople, had helped Gloucester hold out, although by the time Essex and his army finally marched in, every commodity was stretched and they were down to their last three barrels of gunpowder.
The relief force found terrible scenes. Physical damage ran to thousands of pounds. Sixty-pound shot had torn up the ground. Fiery bombs with sizzling fuses had shot through the air at night like comets, only to whiz through stables too fast to set light to the straw and fall onto house-tops where they melted the lead and caused roofs to collapse. The city defences had been mined and counter-mined. The moat was partially blocked up with timber faggots and with the collapsed remains of experimental moving towers, modelled by some gentleman-scholar on ancient Roman siege-machines, for carrying parties of musketeers up to the city walls. The devastation particularly impressed itself on the Londoners, the Trained Band members, who were thinking hard of home.
The starving relief force was welcomed, fed and housed either in the city or surrounding parishes. They stayed for four days. Gloucester was reprovisioned, refortified, rearmed. The troops could rest and revive, but they knew the King was skulking close by, watching their moves, ready to cut them to pieces when they tried to make their journey home.
By now they were all experts. They knew their position.
'We're screwed!' muttered Lambert Jukes to his brother, picking up the old merchants' complaint about the injustice of the Ship-Money tax.
'Utterly screwed and wrung,' groaned Gideon in reply.
The relieving troops had done their duty, but were caught in a fatal trap.
Chapter Twenty-One — Gloucester, Newbury, London: 1643
The Earl of Essex, Old Robin, received insufficient credit for his cat-and-mouse Gloucester campaign. Getting there had caught the Royalists on the hop; extricating his army, if he could do it, would be an even greater feat.
First, leaving behind his artillery and baggage, he moved north to Tewkesbury. He ordered a classic bridge of boats over the River Severn. Villages on the west bank were scoured for food and fodder, while recalcitrant locals were swingeingly fined and the cash used to reprovision Gloucester. Then Essex sent across an advance unit as if he proposed to march on Worcester. The King immediately moved north, to block the way towards London via Evesham and Warwick.
Under cover of a dark night, Essex suddenly plunged his army south again. They travelled twenty miles across the Cotswolds and gained a day's advantage. Their rapid departure confused Royalist scouts and commanders, including Prince Rupert — though Rupert afterwards claimed he had warned what was happening but was
