lower rooms. Next day, the attackers assailed the parish church, close to the house, where some of Colonel Leveson's Dudley troops had been out-stationed. Churches made very defensible strongholds, but it was quickly stormed. The Parliamentarians took French and Irish prisoners, including one female camp-follower who, in the enemy's tradition, was viciously abused as a whore.
The Tews heard the shouts and rattle of fire when the church fell. They were already quaking at cannon balls crashing through the house, and the smell of smoke and panic became too much for them. When enemy soldiers broke through the earthworks on the lawns, the young Tews passed their guns to servants and hid together under a great table in the entrance hall. Parliamentary troops soon burst into the house through its tall, elegant windows. As showers of broken glass fell inwards, large booted men swung through window cavities, shouting and brandishing swords. The defenders cried for quarter. It was granted.
Peering out from their hiding place, Rowan and Joseph then saw some trigger-happy Royalist soldiers kept firing anyway. Two rebels were shot in the face. At the sight of stricken comrades with blood pouring from their mouths, the Parliamentarians went mad. They killed and wounded twenty defenders before being brought under control by officers. Joseph and Rowan Tew cringed against the great carved table leg.
'Play dead Rowan!'
'Who needs to act it? We're done for!'
Eventually the shooting stopped. The attackers had better ways to enjoy themselves than wasting ammunition on a cowed foe. They were here to pillage goods and to capture anyone of quality who could be heavily fined and ransomed. Forty useful prisoners were rounded up. As soldiers rushed past their bolthole to stampede upstairs and search the house, the Tew brothers ventured out into the open, two disingenuous mites holding pieces of white cloth (they had sensibly equipped themselves with these tokens). 'Joseph' considered disclosure, but was deterred by how cruelly the woman previously taken was reviled as a whore. Royalist camp-followers risked mutilation and cold-blooded murder, especially if they were believed to be Irish. Women were hanged as rebels and spies almost as often as men. To be in disguise would not win favour.
The Tews instinctively knew how to pose with the typical hangdog relief of surrendering soldiers. They were stripped of weapons, hats, belts, boots, britches and coats — though not deprived of their verminous shirts, or Joseph would certainly have been discovered. While this was happening, they saw Sir Thomas Holte, a furious old man in his seventies, dragged from the house, bare-chested in the December cold as he had been stripped of even his fine cambric shirt. He and his family were taken away for special ransom. Lesser prisoners were strung together in a line, their hands bound behind them with matchcord, and marched to the church. There they were insulted, threatened and starved. Then the abject prisoners were offered the usual inducement: a dungeon in Warwick Castle, for ever — or repent of their Royalist delinquency, turn and fight for Parliament.
Some hung back, genuinely hating puritans. Joseph and Rowan Tew immediately swapped sides.
The new Roundheads were equipped with coats, shirts, stockings, shoes, britches and Monmouth caps, and allocated another daily allowance (threepence a day). Once they had been judged docile and trustworthy, they were armed with swords and guns made in Birmingham. They regarded these weapons as inferior, but for thruppence a day, plus a roof over their heads, they would put up with anything. Rowan could ride. Most horse thieves could stay safely on anything with four legs. He was given a mount, then appointed to be a light dragoon. His diminutive younger 'brother', who lacked the strength even to support a long musket properly, would be allotted camp duties. They were assigned to a new garrison which had recently been created for Parliament under Colonel John Fox.
Fox ran an irregular, roistering, free-ranging, unsupervised organisation that would eventually be disbanded under a cloud. Two guttersnipes could not have found themselves a more congenial position.
Warwickshire in the civil war was mostly held by Parliament, but a Royalist bloc lay to the west, including all of Wales; its rough boundary ran from Chester down through Shrewsbury and Worcester to Tewkesbury and on to the West Country. The district around Stratford-upon-Avon was Royalist, which provided a safe corridor when the King obtained Welsh recruits. The Midlands were constantly crisscrossed by Prince Rupert. His efforts early in 1643 had achieved their objective: the Queen's convoy of soldiers and ammunition wagons left York and passed safely south, bypassing Birmingham, though resting overnight nearby at the Saracen's Head in the Queen's personal manor of King's Norton. The next day Her Majesty arrived at Stratford-upon-Avon, where she was an overnight guest of Shakespeare's daughter, Susannah Hall, at New Place. There Henrietta Maria was joined by Rupert, and four days later met King Charles and progressed into Oxford.
The Royalist Lord Denbigh's death at Birmingham changed the balance of power in Warwickshire. Although Parliament then lost Lord Brooke at Lichfield, the new Lord Denbigh fought for Parliament. This Denbigh replaced Brooke in charge of the Midlands Association: Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire. His Committee of Public Safety headquarters were at Coventry. He also had a large base at Warwick Castle, so strong that it was never besieged. Wherever there were suitable large houses he set out to take them from Royalists, fortify the buildings and establish garrisons which would control the countryside, raise money and recruit men to attack other Royalist strongholds.
Some of the rebels in these areas had curious origins. Most colourful were the 'Morelanders' in remote upland country in north-east Staffordshire. Armed only with birding-guns, cudgels and scythes, these shaggy turf-cutters had banded together, giving their leader the sinister title of 'the Grand Juryman'. Their boldest exploit was a doomed attempt to drive the Royalists from Stafford.
Equally seen as outsiders were Fox's men at Edgbaston. Lord Denbigh regarded this garrison as tricky and high-handed. Fox resented his commander's lack of warmth and his reluctance to send funds. If Denbigh's men trespassed into districts he regarded as his own, Fox complained. He wanted personal credit for his garrison's exploits. When he was summoned to Coventry on charges of plundering, and was compelled to cough up 'a goodly sum' to regain his position and his reputation, he made up the fine in further demands on local villages and individuals in the area he roamed.
Where exactly he came from and his true background were obscure. Enemies called him a tinker, yet he was literate, intelligent and effective. When civil war broke out, John Fox had found his role. He drew on his own resources. With him to Edgbaston he brought a brother and a brother-in-law, Major Reighnold Fox and Captain Humphrey Tudman. His core of sixteen men swelled to more than two hundred. Some he recruited for Edgbaston were locals. His clerk was called John Carter; a John Carter junior had been killed by Prince Rupert's men in Birmingham.
Denbigh formally granted Fox a colonel's commission in March 1644, to lead a regiment of six troops of horse and two of dragoons. Even so, it was three more months before Parliament allowed him financial support. Until the money came, he and his men fended for themselves. Robert Porter, the steel-mill magnate, assisted, though he and Fox were later to quarrel tiresomely over manor rents.
When the gentry established garrisons — stalwart knights of the shire with university educations and large landholdings — they were always admired for their energy, loyalty and honour. The real charge such people had against John Fox was that without social advantages and without being asked, he seized the initiative and set himself up at Edgbaston. Both Royalist and Parliamentarian leaders shunned him. Not only was he no gentleman, the job he decided to do for Parliament gave him a touch of the outlaw. His nickname, the 'Jovial Tinker', was because he rarely smiled, though if calling Fox a tinker was an insult, it never seemed to bother him.
Dressed in their latest uniforms, the Tew brothers were sent to serve 'Colonel Tinker' at Edgbaston Hall. This was nothing like the house where they had just been captured. Aston Hall, which lay immediately to the north-east of Birmingham, was brash and boastful, one man's symbol of his own new wealth and power. They found that Edgbaston, on the south-west side of Birmingham, was a moated medieval manor-house with a dovecote, typical of timeless English village life, surrounded by rickety watermills and weedy fishpools. Even when the Tews arrived they could see the idyll was deteriorating. The greens around the house were churned to mud and slime by soldiers' horses. No ducks swam in the moat; there were probably no fish left in the pools. The roof of the adjacent ancient church had been stripped and its bells removed; the lead was being melted down for bullets. The centuries-old Hall was treated with disrespect by Fox's soldiers; it already showed sad signs of wear and would in time be badly damaged, destroyed by fire and lost to posterity.
Brought before Fox for inspection, Rowan and Joseph cast their eyes down, though not too much. They knew the fine line between looking unobtrusive and looking suspiciously meek. Fox, a dour man in his mid-thirties, surveyed them with Midlands scepticism. He accepted them as turncoats; there were plenty of those on both sides. Still, he made it plain he expected nothing good from them and if they tried anything on, he would know about it. He gave them a sombre speech about the garrison, then handed them copies of 'The Soldier's Prayerbook', a religious
