five

THE CIVIL WAR AND
THE INTERREGNUM, 1642–1660

On the Eve of the Civil War

When the English Civil War began in August 1642, there was no other town in the county more clearly committed to the parliamentary cause than Boston. It might have been expected that support for Parliament in the town would have been weakened by the emigration of about 250 of Boston’s most dedicated Puritans in previous years. This, however, does not seem to have been the case. Rather, a series of events during the 1630s tended to consolidate Puritanism and parliamentarianism in the town, and by the summer of 1642 there was no shortage of young men both in Boston and in the nearby villages who were ready and willing to take up arms against their king.

The long-established Puritan majority on the corporation, which had developed quite early in Elizabeth’s reign, was consolidated during the twenty-one years of Cotton’s incumbency, during which he established a considerable personal following both in the town and in the surrounding district. Events elsewhere, however, also played a major part in strengthening Puritan sentiment. Very early in his reign, Charles I managed to earn widespread opprobrium by his insistence on his right to raise forced loans from his subjects rather than seek the consent of Parliament for new taxes. Among those in the county who took a stand against the king on this issue, and flatly refused to pay the loan, were a large group from Boston and neighbouring Holland towns, including the town’s mayor, a local woollen draper, Edward Tilson, and one other alderman. Both men were hailed as heroes in Boston, especially when their defiance led to their arrest and a brief spell of imprisonment in the Fleet prison in London.

When Charles found himself obliged to recall Parliament again, in 1628, the anti-Royalist sentiment in the town made itself dramatically obvious by the unprecedented support shown by the town’s freeholders for the candidature of 25 year-old Sir Anthony Irby. He was one of the younger members of the local gentry and the richest landowner in the town, but, more significantly, one who had refused the king’s loan demand. The choice of MP had, until this time, always been left to the Assembly, but in this election a group of the town’s freeholders intervened to make their opinions known. The Assembly voted unanimously to approve the choice of its Recorder, the zealous Puritan Richard Bellingham, to take one of its two seats, but split by fifteen votes to fourteen to reject Irby in favour of the sitting MP, Bishop Williams’ secretary and nominee, Richard Oakley, for the other seat. A group of enraged freeholders then called a meeting to express their views and all sixty-seven present voted in favour of Irby. When the matter was appealed to the House of Commons’ Privileges Committee, Irby’s election was upheld.¹

Matters of money, parliamentary authority and religion were a potent mix that would cost Charles much support across the country during the next few years. In Boston, however, there were special reasons for bitterness. The demands for forced loans, to which the corporation felt obliged to eventually submit, together with the arrest and imprisonment of its mayor and other local men, did much to alienate the townspeople, but Charles’ and Laud’s religious policies were felt even more sharply by many, as large numbers demonstrated by their decision to quit the country altogether in the 1620s and 1630s, to face instead the trials and dangers of beginning a new life in the New World. For those who were left behind, however, their resentment was only intensified by the enforced removal of Cotton in 1633 and the flight of some of his closest allies in the town. Shortly after, there followed the persecution of Cotton’s protector – and Archbishop Laud’s great enemy – Bishop Williams, which ended in 1637 with Williams’ deprivation, an extremely heavy fine, and imprisonment in the Tower of London, convicted of perjury.

In Williams’ absence, Laud was able to finally enforce his will on the church in Lincolnshire. To the horror of a great many in Boston, three of the town’s leading citizens – all of them former mayors – were charged with inconformity in the Court of High Commission, all the ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer were once again enforced, and all the clergy were now obliged to wear the surplice. Cotton’s successor, the former town preacher, Anthony Tuckney, was a Puritan and a product of Emmanuel College, and possibly Cotton’s cousin, but he proved himself more ‘conformable’ than his predecessor and escaped censure. In April 1634, however, Richard Westland, Edmund Jackson and Edward Tilson were summoned to appear before the Court of High Commission charged with failing to stand at the creed, failing to bow, with not kneeling to receive communion, of having prayer meetings and preaching in their own houses, and forbidding the use of the organ and part-singing in the church. They managed to escape serious punishment by assuring the court that they now conformed in all the things for which they had been accused, by claiming that their meetings had been for town business and were not conventicles, and by accusing their accusers of being motivated by revenge and of being, in one case, a ‘profane swearer’ and in another ‘a profligate fellow and filthy fornicator’. They also ensured that when Archbishop Laud’s commissary, Sir Nathanial Brent, carried out his visitation of the parish that August (while they were still awaiting judgement), he was received with very considerable politeness and given a very good dinner. When the visitation report was received, the vicar and churchwardens seem to have carried out its demands to the letter; statues broken by Cotton’s iconoclastic followers were removed completely, windows which they had broken were repaired, the bells were re-hung, the royal arms were set up, the churchyard fenced and, perhaps acting on the suggestion of Archbishop Laud – and certainly with his enthusiastic approval – Tuckney re-established a library above the south porch, gave a number of his own books to it and invited the local clergy to do so as well. As a fellow Arminian, Laud may well have known Dr Peter Baron, and he certainly knew his father’s writings on Arminianism. It is highly likely, therefore, that he had also heard of Dr Baron’s attempt to establish a library over the porch in 1610.²

Revd Anthony Tuckney.

There were also now more demands for taxation not voted by Parliament. The episode of the forced loan was repeated in 1635 when Charles claimed his right to collect an annual and national ship money tax, and had his right to do so upheld by the judges in the trial of John Hampden. Opposition to the tax in Boston was intensified by the unprincipled tactics used by the sheriff, Sir Walter Norton, to extract the money. The corporation was united in its determination to resist payment if it possibly could and therefore drew up a petition to the Privy Council pleading the poverty of the town and the decay of trade as reasons to be excused this imposition, although, in reality, trade was, as we have seen, relatively brisk at this time. The corporation’s resistance was encouraged by Sir Anthony Irby, who, with other Lincolnshire gentry, was extremely critical of Norton’s behaviour, and also led the opposition to payment in the hundred of Elloe, the most southerly of the Holland hundreds. Irby also won a lot of local support when, as sheriff himself two years later, he ensured that the tax fell as lightly as possible on the Holland towns, including Boston, and infuriated the Privy Council by only raising two-thirds of the £8,000 expected from Lincolnshire, for which he had to account personally.³

Only a pitifully small amount could be raised in Boston. The first assessment for the town in 1635 was for £200, but by November the corporation had succeeded in ‘procureinge a mittigaccion’ of £130. Two and a half years later the corporation minutes report that only a derisory £3 12s 5d had been raised. The town clerk’s report in the minutes makes no mention of resistance or opposition; he simply explains ‘that divers persons suddenly removed out of this burrough and their assessments could not and cannot be gotten … (and also) that divers persons assessed are soe poore & decayed in their estates that they cannot pay their assessments’.⁴

While attempts were still being made to collect ship money, in 1639, Charles’ Privy Council was also trying to raise an army from among the county’s trained bands to put into the field against his rebellious Scottish subjects. The war against the Scots was not popular. As far as many in Boston could see, the Scots’ principal fault was to oppose the introduction of the English prayer book, a view with which many in the town had much sympathy. Also, the bullying and corruption that accompanied the efforts to raise the necessary force caused further anger, especially as Charles decided that the local gentry could not be trusted with the task and instead appointed professional soldiers. When the local trained bands lined up for a parade in Boston in 1639, before the Earl of Lindsey, who was the high steward of the town, he reported to the Privy Council that he found much resistance among all classes to the trained bands being sent to fight the Scots. While at Boston, he said, ‘a woman presented unto me the great toe of her husband in a handkerchief which he had cut off that he might not be able to march’, and shortly after this the corporation petitioned the Privy Council to allow the local trained bands to be kept in the county, claiming that they feared that if they were removed ‘multitudes of indigent but able-bodied fellows’, at that time employed in fen drainage schemes near the town, would riot.

The mood in the town was not improved when it was learnt that the Privy Council had rejected this request. This, and many other grievances, soon received a national airing, for in April 1640 Parliament was finally recalled after eleven years of Charles’ personal rule. Boston’s representatives, William Ellis of Nocton, the town’s Recorder, and Sir Anthony Irby, were in the ranks of those MPs lining up to criticise the king’s behaviour in the previous eleven years, and Irby, in particular, had a personal grievance against the king. He had been held in custody a few months earlier over his failure to raise the full assessment of ship money while he was sheriff for the county and still faced a Star Chamber investigation into his behaviour. As soon as Parliament met, Irby presented a petition from Boston that was highly critical of the ship money demands and of other oppressive exactions.⁵

Petitions were also presented against the fen drainage schemes which were then proceeding in many parts of the Lincolnshire Fens, including some areas very close to Boston. A number of the county’s gentry stood to make considerable profits from the drainage of large tracts of the Fens, but others feared the loss of their lands. For the local fenmen, whose livelihoods depended on their ability to catch fish and fowl in the Fens and to keep their animals on the summer pastures, the drainage schemes were an utter disaster that they were determined to resist at all costs. The king not only gave full support to the drainage ‘undertakers’, from whose work he expected the Crown to profit considerably, but was also an undertaker himself for the drainage of the Fen area immediately to the west of Boston, the ‘Eight Hundred Fen’.

Faced by a barrage of such petitions from across the country, Charles chose to dissolve Parliament and to try again to raise forces to face the Scots without resorting to parliamentary taxation. During the summer of 1640, yet more orders were made to raise another ship money assessment, but now resistance was stronger than ever, and local officers refused to make or levy assessments, let alone seize the property of those who refused to pay. Virtually nothing could be raised throughout the county and, at the same time, anti-drainage riots against the drainage undertakings were reported in a number of areas, with rioters said to be driving their cattle into the undertakers’ enclosures, cutting the banks and stealing hay.⁶

Charles was obliged to recall Parliament in November 1640, and to raise the money needed to deal with the Scots he was prepared to make numerous concessions to Parliament’s demands, even to the extent of allowing his close friend and loyal supporter, the Earl of Strafford, to be put on trial for treason and executed in May 1641. In Boston, however, the king and his Roman Catholic queen remained figures of deep suspicion. Moreover, a further outbreak of rioting in the West Fen in April 1641, just a few miles to the north of Boston, served only to undermine the king’s authority and to highlight yet another local grievance. In Parliament, Sir Anthony Irby was doing no more than reflecting his constituents’ opinion when he allied himself closely with the king’s most critical opponents in the Commons, the faction of MPs led by John Pym, and acted as teller in favour of Pym’s measures to reduce the king’s powers.

When the country edged towards civil war during the spring and summer of 1642, after Charles’ abortive attempt to arrest five MPs in the Commons, Boston’s support for Parliament soon became obvious. In March 1642, relations between king and Parliament broke down completely over the latter’s determination to take over the king’s traditional powers to control the militia. A bill to give Parliament the power to appoint lords lieutenants, and thereby control the trained bands and the country’s fortifications, was issued in March as an Ordinance, without royal approval. Lord Willoughby of Parham was then appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire by Parliament and during June 1642 the trained bands across the county were ordered to muster to be reviewed by Lord Willoughby. Almost all assembled for the muster, in spite of the king’s announcement that Parliament was acting without his authority, and therefore illegally, but not all showed the enthusiasm evinced at Boston. At Caistor and Louth, Willoughby met with considerable hostility from some of the local gentry, who made it very clear that they did not accept his authority, but at Boston he and his fellow officers received an enthusiastic reception. On arrival at the town, it was later reported, they were:

entertained by a Hundred voluntiers, handsome young Men, well armed, and every Way well appointed, and a Captain in the Head of them who gave us divers Vollies of Shot, and themselves above an Hour together upon the Market-place, performing very exactly all their Postures, and shewing much Readiness in the Use of their Arms; the Mayor and Aldermen of the Town, and all the Voluntiers came to welcome our Lord Lieutenant and his Deputies to the Town, and expressed great Cheerfuless and Readiness to serve … and indeed we expected no less from this Town and these Parts which we know to be always well affected.

Just a month later, King Charles visited Lincoln and received a rapturous reception from the crowds who gathered to greet him, although only a few weeks earlier the Lincoln militia had mustered before Lord Willoughby. In Lincoln there were clearly some Royalists and probably many neutrals among both the gentry and the general public. In Boston, however, there were few Royalists, and it is unlikely that the people of Boston would have demonstrated the same enthusiasm for their monarch.⁷

When Charles I effectively declared war on his parliamentary enemies by raising the royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, Boston was already in the process of becoming a parliamentary stronghold, and politely refused to obey the king’s order that they must stop drilling and mustering volunteers. A few days later, when it was learnt that a group of Royalist officers from the Netherlands had landed on the coast near Skegness, intending to join the royal army, a force of Boston volunteers was sent to arrest them, and the mayor – who was once again Edward Tilson – had them sent by ship as prisoners to London. Infuriated, Charles was determined to punish the town, and issued warrants to be sent to all other Lincolnshire towns forbidding anyone from giving any assistance to Boston. A London journalist reported that the king’s man in the county, the Earl of Lindsey, intended to attack the town but hesitated to do so as Boston and its neighbouring towns were thought quite capable of raising 4,000 volunteers at six hours’ notice if the town was threatened by the Cavaliers. Boston was also reported to be ‘well fortified by the inhabitants’ and any assault, it was reported, would be ‘very roughly entertained’.⁸

The Civil War

Throughout the years of warfare, Boston remained a loyal supporter of the parliamentary cause. Although there were, no doubt, many neutrals, only a handful of the local gentry supported the king and were fined or had their property sequestered when the conflict ended. The ‘handsome young men’ who had so willingly volunteered for the Boston militia were soon in action, first in arresting and escorting the Cavaliers who landed at Skegness in August 1642 back to Boston, and then assisting in the defence of the town. Rumours abounded that Charles was determined to avenge the slight the Boston Puritans had inflicted, and that consequently 300 Royalist cavalry would soon attack the town, burning and pillaging it as a punishment for its temerity. Volunteers from the town were rushed to Lynn to fetch five cannon, which were then set up at all the entrances to the town and 1,000 more volunteers from nearby villages and other towns of Holland were ordered to the town to help reinforce its defence. This proved a false alarm, but while the work went on to create earthwork defences and improve the training of the volunteers, a force from Boston – led by Sir Anthony Irby – rode towards Cressey Hall, near Surfleet, the home of the Royalist High Sheriff, Sir Edward Heron, to stop his agents from raiding the houses of known parliamentary supporters and seizing weapons and gunpowder. Heron’s men were intercepted by Sir Anthony and his forces close to Surfleet, and forced to relinquish the armaments that they had seized. When Heron himself arrived with a small force to try to regain the booty, he too was captured in the ensuing skirmish.⁹

Sir Anthony Irby, long-serving MP for Boston.

Sir Anthony Irby had only just arrived back in Boston from London, intent on raising a troop of dragoons in the county, so that he might assist the Parliamentarian forces defend the capital against the king. His forces were not ready, however, to join the Earl of Essex’s Parliamentarian army when it stopped Charles’ march on London at Edgehill, in late October. But in December, Irby’s dragoons rode to Hull to answer Lord Fairfax’s call for assistance in trying to stop the southward advance of the Earl of Newcastle’s Royalist army through Yorkshire, and in January the Boston volunteers were successful in crushing a putative Royalist rising in the South Holland Fens.¹⁰

In early December 1642 it had seemed as if the whole county was under parliamentary control, and that substantial forces might be sent north to assist Fairfax. This, however, was not to be, for in mid-December a detachment of Newcastle’s forces arrived in Newark, and quickly established there a well-defended Royalist garrison, which would prove a thorn in the side of the county’s parliamentarians for the next three years. The failure of an attempt by parliamentary forces to recapture Newark in February, in which Boston’s volunteers participated, caused considerable alarm in the town. Newark Royalists had already taken Gainsborough and Belvoir Castle in January, and their success in defeating the Parliamentarian assault in February was followed in March and April by the Newarkers’ capture of Grantham, Stamford and Peterborough. They also inspired the Royalists of Crowland to attack and seize control of Spalding. Boston was now sorely threatened, and its road communications with London and the south were partially cut off. Moreover, morale was damaged because it was widely believed that the Parliamentarian attack on Newark had failed because of treachery, and that enthusiasm for Parliament’s cause was waning in the county. However, on 14 April 1643, Alderman Richard Westland was able to report to his fellow councillors that he had been successful in obtaining more cannon from the parliamentary leadership in London for the town’s defences. Altogether, sixteen cannon were being shipped north to the port, but six of these had to be forwarded to Lincoln, where the parliamentary garrison was, like Boston, in much need of strengthened defences. The corporation also agreed to forego its annual mayor-making feast and to use the £20 thus saved to purchase two of the cannon borrowed earlier from Lynn, which were now due for return. Morale in the town was then further boosted two weeks later when Sir Anthony Irby’s Boston troops, together with a detachment of the Eastern Association, commanded by the as yet little-known Oliver Cromwell, succeeded in forcing the surrender of the Royalist stronghold at Crowland.

The town’s port, and its strategic position on the northern flank of the parliamentary eastern counties, meant that Boston was of considerable importance to Cromwell and to the parliamentary leadership. The capture of Crowland was important because it made possible the reopening of the road to London – Peterborough having been retaken by Cromwell’s forces a little earlier – and the threat to the town seemed, for a while, to have receded. In May, it was reported by a minister stationed with the parliamentarian army near Sleaford that ‘Boston was very loving to our souldiers, sending in much provision’, and at the beginning of June, three troops of horse from the town joined with Parliamentarian forces from the garrison at Lincoln to successfully hunt down a Royalist raiding party from Gainsborough, which had been plundering towns and villages in Lindsey. The Royalists were caught at Louth, and although the leaders escaped, they left behind a very considerable booty. Any celebrations in Boston, however, were short-lived, for just over a week later, at Donington, another Royalist raiding party, this time from Newark, routed a force being sent from the town to join the Parliamentarian army in Nottingham. Much worse news then followed. Shortly after recapturing Gainsborough in July, Willoughby of Parham’s parliamentarian forces were forced to abandon that town when the Earl of Newcastle’s enormous army unexpectedly crossed the River Trent just to the north. Willoughby retreated to Lincoln, but Newcastle’s army pressed on southwards and took the city without a fight, its garrison deserting in droves. Willoughby fled to Boston with a mere remnant of his original force, and Cromwell, who had earlier hoped to bring his forces to assist Willoughby at Gainsborough, was forced to retreat to Peterborough and Spalding.¹¹

The garrison and townsmen of Boston now awaited their fate; their situation seemed perilous in the extreme. Early in August, Newcastle’s Cavaliers took Tattershall Castle and, on 8 August, Royalist forces were reported to be near Swineshead, less than 10 miles away. According to Willoughby, in a letter sent from Boston to the Earl of Essex two days earlier, he found ‘the people soe out of hart, that without some speedy supply I think they will all give themselves up to the enimy’. Although there were now more cannon to defend the town, the earthwork defences were far from adequate and Willoughby had been obliged to abandon his artillery at Lincoln, bringing only a bedraggled and defeated force to reinforce the town’s defences. In the same letter to Essex, however, he spelt out the importance of the town to Parliament:

… truly this place Boston is of that importance, that if the enemy gett it he will have the sea by it, and a passage into Norfuck and Suffuck, which will be verry dangerouse as the affaires of the Parliament now goese …¹²

The parliamentary leadership did not disagree. A sum of £1,300 was sent to Willoughby and Cromwell was asked to spare as many men as he could to augment the Boston garrison. Had Newcastle attacked, however, there can be little doubt as to the outcome, but he decided instead to leave only a small Royalist force in the county and to return to Yorkshire in order to lay siege to Hull, which he regarded as a more important objective. A Royalist garrison was installed at Bolingbroke Castle and Wainfleet was also fortified but, for the time being, Boston was safe. Some skirmishing with Royalist forces must have occurred near the town during the next few months, for the parish registers record the burial of twenty-six soldiers between 20 August 1643 and 1 January 1644, but there would be no serious assault on the town, and throughout August and September more parliamentary forces poured into Boston. A new army of the Eastern Association was raised under the Earl of Manchester, with Cromwell as his Lieutenant General of Horse, and on 9 October the campaign to regain control of Lincolnshire was launched when Manchester marched his infantry out of Boston, along the causeway road towards Bolingbroke. Detachments were left at Stickney and Stickford to secure his line of retreat, but the siege of the castle had barely begun when news reached Manchester that a Royalist force from the Lincoln, Gainsborough and Newark garrisons was closing in from the west. The Cavaliers had the best of some confused fighting near Horncastle on the evening of 10 October, but the next morning they were taken by surprise near the hamlet of Winceby by the arrival of the Parliamentarian cavalry led by Cromwell and reinforced by the Yorkshire Horse, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, which had been brought over the Humber from Hull about three weeks earlier. Their combined force completely overwhelmed the Cavaliers, and, after half an hour of bitter fighting, the Royalist forces were routed.¹³

The Royalist garrison at Lincoln fell to Manchester’s army little more than a week later, the Bolingbroke garrison surrendered in mid-November, and Gainsborough on 20 December, leaving the way clear for the Parliamentarian forces to launch a second attempt to recapture Newark in the spring of 1644. A force of 7,000 men, under the command of Sir John Meldrum, a professional Scottish soldier of considerable experience, began the siege of the town in February and included the entire Boston garrison, commanded by its governor, Colonel Edward King. At first the siege went well, but by the middle of March it was becoming seriously weakened by dissension and jealousy among the various commanders under Meldrum, and especially that between Willoughby and King, who had nothing but contempt for each others’ military competence. When, on 21 March, the Royalist general Prince Rupert appeared before the beleaguered town, his assault scattered the besieging cavalry and Meldrum was forced to negotiate a humiliating surrender, under which his forces agreed to abandon their arms and ammunition. King attempted to withdraw his forces to Boston without surrendering their arms but his temerity was soundly punished; the enraged Cavaliers attacked the Boston garrison mercilessly, beating and plundering them, not only of their weapons but, in some unfortunate cases, of their clothes as well.¹⁴

The Old Three Tuns, an inn where Cromwell is said to have stayed in October 1643, shortly before the Battle of Winceby. It stood on the west side of the Market Place until its demolition in 1820.

Another period of Royalist ascendency now followed and Boston was again in danger. Lincoln fell to Rupert only two days after his victory at Newark, and Crowland was again seized by Royalists. The organisation of Boston’s defence against the anticipated Royalist attack was much hampered by divisions in the town stirred up by its governor. Colonel Edward King was a staunch, unbending Presbyterian who had been appointed to the governorship of Boston and Holland by Manchester the previous October. Lacking any diplomacy, he had already alienated a large section of the town when, in trying to raise a regiment of foot soldiers for the Newark campaign, he had tried to disband ‘three hundred Voluntiers which served on their own charges who with the townsmen had always defended the town of Boston, that he might press them to serve under him for pay’. His passionate dislike for separatists also caused problems; he was determined to break up and ban any religious conventicles in the town, going as far as to arrest and imprison a number of local people attending an Independent conventicle. One of his supporters later said of him that he would not ‘suffer them in a disorderly manner to leave the publicke Assemblies where the word was faithfully and orthordoxly preached and vent their own novelties, to the seducing and misleading of the poore people’.¹⁵

The corporation tried to get Manchester to remove him but failed. It then appealed to Cromwell, who decided to appoint the well-known radical and fellow Independent, John Lilburne, as a major in King’s regiment so that he could keep an eye on him and inform him if he felt King’s behaviour was unacceptable. Things came to a head in March, after the Newark debacle. Lilburne and King were natural enemies, but the former was also convinced that King was failing in his responsibilities to ensure the safety of the town. He told King that he believed Boston’s earthwork defences and armaments were not adequate, ‘being in divers places easy for a man with a Pike-staffe to leap over’, and also that reinforcements had to be brought from Lynn. The governor of Lynn, however, was also an Independent as well as Cromwell’s brother-in-law; it was probably for this reason that King refused to accept any help from this quarter. But an attack was expected at any time and Lilburne had the corporation on his side and, more importantly, the trust and support of Cromwell. Consequently, shortly after returning from Newark, King had no choice but to accept the arrival of 400 men from the Lynn garrison. However, as soon as they arrived he tried to send them off to attack the Royalists at Crowland, and when this was refused he went himself, with his own regiment, greatly reducing the numbers of men available to defend the town, and, according to Lilburne, also gravely endangering the town by stripping it of its gunpowder reserves in the process. Fortunately, however, Prince Rupert and his formidable cavalry left the county at the end of March and the threat to the town rapidly receded. The main problem for the area was Royalist raids in the Fens of Holland, rounding up and stealing horses and cattle.¹⁶

The turbulence in the town brought by King’s governorship was also coming to an end. After he returned from the Crowland expedition, which he succeeded in taking in early April 1644, King was soon obliged to leave Boston again to face charges brought by Willoughby in the House of Lords, after both men had publically blamed one another for the failure of the Newark siege, and much else besides. In July he was relieved of the governorship and replaced by the far more diplomatic Colonel Thomas Hatcher, the MP for Stamford. The House of Lords had found in favour of Willoughby and when King refused the Lords’ demand that he make a public confession of his mistakes in Boston Market Place, he was briefly imprisoned.

The tide of war was also now turning in Parliament’s favour. In May, Manchester returned to Lincolnshire with a reorganised army, recaptured Lincoln and regained control of much of the county, and early in July the Royalist army of the Earl of Newcastle suffered a devastating defeat at Marston Moor, near York. Manchester’s withdrawal from Lincoln in September, however, prompted the Newark garrison to launch a further wave of raids across the county and during the autumn refugees from as far away as Louth and Stamford were arriving in the town. Boston had also become, by this time, a transit camp for prisoners captured during hostilities over a wide area, a role which appears to have become burdensome. In November, after a parliamentary raid on Farndon in Nottinghamshire – which had led to the capture of 168 prisoners – the parliamentary commander, Colonel Edward Rossiter, wrote that he hoped Boston would not ‘be angry’ at having to cope with them.¹⁷

After Prince Rupert’s withdrawal from the county in March 1644, Boston was no longer under threat and, rather remote from the conflict and protected by its earthwork defences and a small garrison, was clearly regarded by parliamentary supporters in the county as a relatively safe haven. The costs and burdens of the war for the townspeople were, however, considerable, as Rossiter’s letter seems to recognise. The situation was made particularly difficult, not to say dangerous, when the troops stationed in the town and billeted in the homes of the townspeople were not paid. In October 1643 it was reported that Cromwell had wept when he learnt that the money to pay his troops had not arrived at Boston, shortly before he and Manchester began their attempt to regain control of the county after the earlier loss of Lincoln and Gainsborough. In July 1645, when the war seemed to be almost won following the New Model Army’s victory at Naseby, the mayor and six other members of Boston’s corporation wrote indignantly to the parliamentary leadership complaining that, in spite of the town’s loyalty to Parliament, its garrison had not been paid for ‘many months’:

From the beginning of these troubles we have been forward to advance the Cause of the Parliament. ’Tis very well known of what consequence this garrison is not only to this County but also to the whole Association. It hath notwithstanding been of late so much forgotten that the soldiers though not half so many as are necessary are many months in arrear, and therefore ready to mutiny. The want of pay for their quarters hath so much impoverished the inhabitants that they are no longer able to bear it in respect of which and their late great losses of ships and goods as also, that they have been put to great charges in making great and chargeable works, which they are unable to finish or to hold without assistance of the House. Therefore we pray that a competent garrison may be established, and the arrears discharged, which are above £2,000.¹⁸

The stresses and financial loss of billeting unpaid troops were not quickly removed, but in September the corporation was informed that it would be able to obtain the money necessary from the rents of two sequestered Royalist estates in the area. The corporation minutes make no specific mention of the costs incurred in building and maintaining the town’s earthwork defences, but subsequent correspondence makes it clear that they were both extensive and in bad repair. The defences have, unfortunately, long disappeared, although an earthwork that still exists to the south of the South Forty-Foot Drain, about 400m west of its junction with the Haven, which Pishey Thompson identified as possibly having Roman origins, might have been part of the Civil War defences.¹⁹

The war dragged on for another year until the surrender of Oxford in July 1646, but in Lincolnshire the end had come a little earlier, with the final capitulation of Newark in May, and Charles’ surrender to the Scots at nearby Southwell. It was not until the following January, however, that the Scots handed Charles over to Parliament, and the garrison troops did not leave Boston until March 1647, when orders were also given for the slighting of the defences. But conflict flared up again briefly the following summer – the so-called Second Civil War of 1648 – when Charles managed to persuade a Scottish army to cross the border on his behalf. In Lincolnshire a group of Royalists seized control of Lincoln at the end of June and held it for a few days before the Parliamentary commander, Colonel Rossiter, could organise a force to dislodge them. The response of the corporation was to once more strengthen the town’s earthwork defences, and £30 was spent ‘securing of the town and countrey from the Comon Enimy’.²⁰

Rumour had it that the Royalists could expect help from Boston, but there seems to have been no substance to this, and the new Council of State, established after the execution of Charles in January 1649, continued to regard Boston as a reliable outpost, which could still be trusted as a parliamentary garrison. Fearing future Royalist insurgency, the new government had substantial numbers of muskets, bandoliers, barrels of powder, swords, belts, pikes and drums delivered for safekeeping to the town during March, April and May; and in June it also received the arms and ammunition taken from the former Royalist garrisons at Belvoir and Tattershall. A year later, in May 1650, it also gave orders to the governor to erect a small fort on the river, below the town, having had intelligence that a Royalist force planned to land at the town in support of an attempt by Charles, the Prince of Wales, to regain his kingdom. No such invasion occurred at Boston, but Charles did land in Scotland the following month, and for more than a year, until the defeat of the prince at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September, Boston remained a garrison town. At the beginning of 1651 it was reported that under the command of the governor and his provost marshal were three companies of foot soldiers, each 100-men strong, plus a gunner, the gunner’s mate, and four gunners’ labourers, and that the upkeep of the garrison was costing the country £325 14s 8d per month. Very shortly after the Battle of Worcester the cost was reduced to £9 16s 0d per month, which meant that the garrison was effectively wound up.²¹

Under the Commonwealth and the Protectorate

On 6 December 1648, Sir Anthony Irby was one of over 200 members excluded from the House of Commons by the army owing to his opposition to the trial and execution of the king. The feelings of the corporation on hearing this had to be muted, but they were broadly hinted at by the decision to send a fulsome letter of thanks and appreciation to Sir Anthony on 20 December. The letter was signed by the mayor, Reginald Hall, and by every other member of the corporation. It was careful to avoid any direct reference to Sir Anthony’s exclusion, or to the forthcoming trial of the king, but it could hardly have gone further in praising Sir Anthony for his loyalty to Parliament and his services to the country and to his constituency over the past twenty years, and ended by assuring him that they had no wish to flatter him but only wished to testify ‘our hearty thankfulness unto you, and to encourage you in that further public service which your place and trust calls from you’.²²

It is difficult to believe that so glowing a testimonial would have been written just a fortnight after their MP’s exclusion unless most of the Boston Assembly also shared Sir Anthony’s well-known distaste for the execution of the king and the establishment of a republic. Perhaps anxious to distance himself from such opposition, the governor of the Boston garrison, Edmund Syler, also wrote to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, expressing the garrison’s full support for the army’s demands for impartial justice and constitutional reform, and applauded the army’s coup as ‘a just course, though extraordinary’.²³

In spite of its public support for Irby, the corporation was left alone by the new Rump Parliament, and although the corporation dutifully surrendered its charter for review when called upon to do so in 1652, no important changes were made. The rule of the Rump Parliament was not popular in the town or the county. Continuing high taxes, the quartering of troops in the town, the disruption of trade caused by the outbreak of the first of the Dutch Wars in 1652, the failure to adequately protect the town from the depredations of pirates and the spread of radical religious sects all served to undermine support for the government, even in this most loyally Puritan of towns. Sir Anthony Irby’s opposition to the execution of Charles I meant that he remained a figure of suspicion for both the Rump Parliament and, from 1653, Cromwell’s Protectorate. He was also linked by marriage and ties of friendship to a number of other known Royalists, including Sir William Waller, who was imprisoned on more than one occasion for alleged seditious activities. It may have been partly because of this that Boston continued to be seen by some of those who were with the late king’s son, Prince Charles, as a port which Royalists might usefully seize as part of a plot to assist the prince’s return. Certainly, Cromwell’s government had intelligence of such a plan for, in June 1654 companies of foot soldiers were stationed in the town, as a precautionary measure, under the command of one of Cromwell’s most loyal officers, Major-General John Lambert, who was with him when he disbanded the Rump Parliament the previous April. If there was serious dissent among the members of the corporation, however, it remained muted. A former mayor and member of one of the town’s oldest families, Joseph Whiting, was accused of uttering words against the Lord Protector and was investigated by Cromwell’s Major-General for Lincolnshire, Edward Whalley, in 1655, but nothing could be proved and the case was dropped. The corporation may have felt that it was asserting its independence against the much disliked major-generals, however, when it rather obstinately chose Sir Anthony Irby again as one of its MPs for the new parliament in 1656. It could not have been altogether surprised when he was again secluded, together with seven other Lincolnshire MPs. In the same year the corporation also entertained Sir William Waller to a feast at the Peacock Inn.²⁴

Irby Hall – the home of Sir Anthony Irby – on the west bank of the river, opposite St Botolph’s church. The drawing was made in about 1770, shortly before it was demolished.

Most members of the corporation were Presbyterians, as was Sir Anthony, although few seem to have shared the more extreme and intolerant Presbyterianism of Colonel King. The Presbyterian cause was strengthened in the town by the vicar, the staunch Calvinist, Dr Anthony Tuckney. Although mostly absent from the town from 1644, when he was appointed Master of Emanuel College at Cambridge, Tuckney won considerable respect for his intellect and scholarship. His status in the town was enhanced in 1643 when he was invited to preach to the House of Commons and to be a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which drew up a national plan for a Presbyterian system of Church government. The corporation showed its support by granting Tuckney £10 towards his expenses.²⁵

It was a reflection of the town’s Presbyterian sympathies that it was able to supply six of the county commissioners asked to serve in 1654 on a committee to investigate and purge ministers and schoolmasters believed to prefer an Episcopal church. Moreover, in 1658 the mayor and five other leading citizens successfully petitioned Cromwell to remove from office a circuit judge, then sitting at Lincoln Assizes, who had ruled that it was lawful for parishioners to refuse to pay tithes if their minister would not administer the sacrament to them (believing them unworthy) or would not baptise their children. In the 1640s, the corporation had decided to support Tuckney’s curate, Revd Bankes Anderson, when he had asked to be excused from undertaking child baptisms, although Tuckney’s academic responsibilities at Cambridge meant that he was now largely absent from the town, and the corporation had some difficulty in finding a minister who would baptise infants.²⁶

Amongst the townspeople, as in the rest of the country at this time, a wide variety of religious views could be found. The Parliamentarian army had long been fertile ground for religious radicals, as Colonel King had found at Boston in 1644, when he attempted to arrest those in his own regiment who refused to attend public services and preferred their own conventicles. Numerous local inhabitants were also found to be attending these services. One of the preachers whom King arrested was Thomas Moore, a weaver from Lynn who led a popular sect known as the Manifestarians. He and his followers claimed to ‘have seene Christ visibly, and seene the Devil also’. No doubt helped by Bankes Anderson’s objections to infant baptism, the Baptists are also known to have been gaining adherents in the Boston area in the 1640s, and in 1653 there were two Baptist pastors in the town. In that year Thomas Grantham, from Halton Holegate, near Spilsby, was baptised at Boston. He would soon become the most important Baptist leader in the county, famed for his courage and persistence in his faith, and for the many times he was arrested and imprisoned – as he was at Boston in 1662, while attending a Baptist conventicle. The Baptists’ great rivals and opponents, the Quakers, also seem to have established at least a small following in the town in the 1650s, probably among the poorer sections of society, to whom their message was particularly directed. In 1656 their founder, George Fox, visited the town and may have won converts. He later recalled that he had just come from Crowland, where he had been roughly handled by the vicar and his clerk, but at Boston he had had no trouble, apart from a ‘raving man’ in the yard of the inn where he stayed the night. Most of the leading inhabitants, he claimed, came to hear him preach and ‘seemed to bee much satisfied … and some were convinct there also’. Two years later one of his disciples, John Whitehead, also tried to preach in the town but, as so often happened to Quakers when they tried to speak in churches, he was arrested, in his words ‘for bearing testimony to the truth in Boston steeplehouse’, and put in the town prison.²⁷

Most people believed in the existence of witches, and in the need to destroy them. Intelligent, well-educated men and women were persuaded by their religious convictions that Satan was alive and active in every community and that witches were his handmaids. The Bible was to be taken literally and the Book of Exodus appeared to make God’s wishes clear: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’; and it was well known that Calvin himself had organised the killing of witches. No Boston people are known to have been charged with witchcraft during the height of the ‘witch craze’ between 1645 and 1647, when 200 witches were put to death in the eastern counties (mainly as a result of the work of Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins), but three years later in 1650, we find three local women being arrested, investigated, and taken to Lincoln Assizes to face charges of practising witchcraft, probably leading to execution. The corporation minutes record that among the expenses paid that year were £1 2s 6d ‘to Thomas Nuttall & others for carrying Allison’s wife to Lincolne Gaole for witchcraft’, 18s paid to ‘Danby & his wife being witnesses att Lincolne Assizes against Allison’s wife’, and £1 14s paid to Mr Sterne ‘for the search of Allison, Proctor and Sacrey, severally accused for witches …’ Nothing more is known about the case but all three were probably poor women who, for reasons that can only be guessed at, had incurred the suspicions of their neighbours.²⁸

The justices, meeting at the quarter sessions in the Guildhall, usually only heard lesser cases, which did not carry the death penalty. Those charged with capital offences, such as witchcraft, were ordered to be held in the town gaol, until it was time to have them taken to the assizes. As well as the three unfortunate women taken to Lincoln in 1650, Thomas Nuttall also transported a man accused of horse stealing – another capital offence – and a poor unmarried woman, Elizabeth Eastwood, who was accused of murdering her ‘bastard child’. The annual inventory of the gaol, presented to the corporation, shows that prisoners were usually branded with a red-hot iron when they arrived at the gaol, and were then kept in chains and shackles. If thought deserving of extra punishment they could be placed in the gaol’s stocks, in a room ominously nicknamed ‘Little Ease’.²⁹

Economic Developments, Foreign Wars and Piracy

Heavy taxation and the billeting of troops were unquestionably burdensome for the people of Boston, and much complained of, but in many respects ordinary life seems to have been remarkably little affected by the wars. G.M. Hipkin’s research into social and economic conditions in southern Lincolnshire in this period have shown that, except in 1642–43, when the war came very close to Boston, the rents and profits from the markets and fairs of the town suffered little dislocation. There are no port books surviving from either the 1640s or the 1650s, so our knowledge of the state of the town’s coastal trade and overseas trade is very limited. We have seen, however, that the port was able to play an active role during the Civil War, particularly in shipping victuals, war materials and prisoners, and the one set of customs figures that have survived (those of 1649–50) show the port paying a healthy £400, as much as in 1638–39, which was itself the highest figure recorded since the beginning of the century.³⁰

The situation changed dramatically, however, in 1651. The new Commonwealth government was determined to break the monopoly that the Dutch enjoyed over the carrying trade, and in October 1651 introduced the first Navigation Act, forbidding the importation into England of any goods except in English ships or the ships of the producing country. The Dutch, understandably, saw this as an act of war, and even before the formal declaration of hostilities in the following May, the Dutch government was encouraging privateering raids along the east coast. A letter from the Council of State to the navy commissioners in December 1651 acknowledged that Boston and Lynn were both already suffering heavily from piracy and authorised the hiring of a ‘nimble vessel’ to patrol the coast in this area to act as a deterrent. A Boston shipmaster, Captain Edward Mould, was chosen to command a Yarmouth ship, Concord, a ship of 100 tons and with a crew of forty. Mould was described as ‘a man well experienced on that coast’ and his name does indeed frequently appear in the port books of the 1630s.

The attacks of the Dutch pirates were sufficiently disruptive for the Council of State to also supplement the services of Concord with a navy frigate, the Briar. When it tried to withdraw this help in 1653, the outcry from the merchants and shipmasters of Boston and Lynn was such that it had to be restored. The situation was also made worse, however, by the pressing of able seamen into the Navy. Numerous Boston shipmasters complained that they could no longer carry on business because they had been robbed of their crews. Henry Rosse, the master of the Trial of Boston, complained that he was deprived of all his crew at Gravesend and consequently was left stranded there, with goods for Boston Fair valued, he claimed, at £10,000. The disappearance of the port books makes it impossible to judge just how badly the port’s trade was damaged, but there can be little doubt that on this occasion corporation complaints were genuine. An entry in the corporation minutes for 2 November 1652 records that it had agreed to forego the usual rental paid for the farm of the port tolls by one inhabitant owing to the ‘present great decay of the shipping and trade of this borough occasioned by the great warres now at sea between the English and the Dutch’.

Sailing in convoy, protected by a naval vessel, could also have its own hazards, especially at night, as the Boston dogger, Providence, found on the night of 13 March 1654, when it was accidentally run down and sunk by the much larger Briar, while in a convoy of small ships being escorted from Hull to St Valery in France, carrying £700 worth of Lincolnshire rapeseed and Derbyshire lead. The First Anglo-Dutch War ended early the following April, when the Dutch sued for peace to end the battering that Admiral Robert Blake and his fleet had inflicted on its navy, but Boston’s last casualty occurred three weeks later, when a Boston ship was reported taken by Dutch pirates off the Yorkshire coast.

Blake’s success against the Dutch, however, only encouraged the new government of Protector Cromwell to now strike against Catholic Spain, and very quickly the depredations recently inflicted by Dutch pirates were replaced by those inflicted by privateers operating instead from the Spanish Netherlands, and particularly from Ostend and Dunkirk. Moreover, like their predecessors, the Ostenders and Dunkirkers were men who, in peace time, traded with England’s east-coast ports and therefore had an intimate knowledge of the coast, which they were able to put to profitable effect as pirates. This war also ended speedily in an English victory, after Cromwell’s invasion and seizure of Dunkirk, but not before Boston’s maritime community had suffered a number of losses. At least five Boston men, three of them members of the same family, were taken prisoner when their ship, a collier, was taken. In April 1657, the Mayor of York received a letter they had written from their imprisonment in Ostend, asking him to try to secure their release by organising a prisoner-exchange with Ostend prisoners held in York Castle prison. A similar appeal was also made a month later by another Boston shipmaster, Thomas Ball, held prisoner at Ostend, writing to a London merchant. He ended his letter wistfully, asking the merchant that ‘if you write to Boston, remember me home’. It would seem, however, that neither appeal was successful, as two years later nine prisoners in Ostend – some of them Boston men – wrote to the Admiralty Commissioners to remind them that they were still being held and feared they had been forgotten by the authorities.

But the wars, as always, were not without benefit to some. Local merchants who could gain war contracts could make good profits. One who did so was James Clarke, who first appears in 1651 as a factor for shipping supplies from Boston to Cromwell’s army in Scotland. In 1653–55 he supplied the Navy with cordage, manufactured from both native and foreign hemp, and also with masts, manufactured by carpenters whom he hired for the purpose.³¹