War Game

Digby noticed a bright splash of red dye on the crushed grass dummy5

beside the boy's left foot.

'Get out of the way,' he commanded.

As the boys parted he saw that the pool was bright red.

He took two steps forward and looked down.

One thing Jim Ratcliffe certainly wasn't doing was shamming.

PART 1

How to be a good loser

1

CROMWELLIAN

GOLD HOARD

WORTH 'MORE

THAN ?2m'

By a Staff Reporter

A subtle skein of historical mystery, interwoven with the red threads of piracy, civil war and sudden death, surrounds the discovery yesterday of a great treasure of gold, thought to be worth more than ?2 million, at Standingham Castle in Wiltshire.

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The discoverer—and the probable owner—of this vast fortune is Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, 26, who inherited the castle recently on the death of his uncle, Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe, 70, after a long illness.

The gold, nearly a ton of it in crudely-cast ingots, is now under guard awaiting the coroner's inquest which must by law decide its ownership.

Meanwhile, Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, who is a Roundhead 'officer' in the Double R Society, which re-enacts English Civil War battles and sieges in costume, has revealed how his special knowledge of the period helped him to discover what so many others, Oliver Cromwell among them, have sought down the centuries.

Yet the story that he has finally unravelled begins, it now seems likely, not at Standingham Castle at all, but far out in the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1630, with the disappearance of the Spanish treasure ship Our Lady of the Immaculate Concepcion.

Legend has it that this ship fell prey to one of the last of the Devon sea dogs in the Drake image, Captain Edward Parrott, of Hartland, whose own ship, the Elizabeth of Bideford, was lost that same summer on the North Devon rocks.

It was widely believed in the West Country, however, that Captain Parrott had earlier landed the gold secretly (since England was nominally at peace with Spain at the time), and then had put to sea again.

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No confirmation of this rumour emerged until August, 1643, when during the Civil War a party of Parliamentary horsemen from North Devon led by Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, the Captain's son, took refuge in Standingham Castle to escape capture by the Royalists.

Colonel Parrott and his men reinforced the defenders of the castle, which had been re-fortified by its owner, Sir Edmund Steyning, himself a fanatical supporter of the Parliamentary cause.

They brought it no luck, however. For after a Roundhead relief force had been defeated at the battle of Swine Brook Field, twelve miles away, the castle was stormed by the Royalists and the majority of its defenders massacred.

Both Colonel Parrott and Sir Edmund were among the dead, but it is known that the Royalist commander, Lord Monson, instituted a thorough—

but fruitless— search of the castle directly afterwards. The historical assumption (though one not widely maintained until now) is that both the search, and indeed Lord Monson's energetic prosecution of the siege, had been inspired by some knowledge of a treasure brought to the castle by the Roundhead horsemen.

The North Devon legend of Spanish gold now became firmly rooted in rural Wiltshire, strengthened by a second search, reputedly by Oliver Cromwell himself, in 1653. Since then there have been at least four other major treasure-hunting operations, the last in 1928 by the late dummy5

Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe's father.

This long record of failure, which led most historians to discount the whole story, has now been ended by Mr. Charles Ratcliffe's brilliant historical detective investigation.

Standing beneath the crenellated outer ramparts yesterday, Mr. Ratcliffe, a youthful and colourful figure, said: 'I have never believed the experts who said either that there never was any gold, or that Cromwell must have found it in 1653. As a boy I listened to all the old stories, and I believe that local traditions are worth far more than the half-baked facts in the history books.'

Mr. Ratcliffe, who is a postgraduate sociology student and runs a workers' paper in his spare time, said that he had not searched haphazardly for the gold.

'First I studied all the known facts and compared them with the local tales,' he said. 'Then I simply put myself into Colonel Nathaniel Parrott's shoes.

'I took my final conclusion to a distinguished historian of the period, and he agreed with me.

But I shall tell the full story of that at the coroner's inquest to be held shortly.'

And he added intriguingly: 'I can say that once I had worked out what really happened I didn't have to search