From The History Of Warminster by the Rev. John Jeremiah Daniell, published in 1879:
Ludlow And Wansey
The cruel war between Charles I and his Parliament broke out in 1642. At the beginning of 1643, as the prospects of the Parliamentary party in Wilts seemed but gloomy, Edmund Ludlow, of Hill Deverill, having assumed an attitude of very pronounced hostility to the King, was sent down into the county with a commission to raise a troop with all speed.
On 30 April, 1643, one Capt. Jones, under orders from Sir Edward Hungerford, plundered Longleat House. The soldiers broke open wardrobes and cupboards, and carried off dresses, plumes of feathers, a green velvet saddle, another fine velvet saddle covered with green lace, four new military saddles, other harness, three horses, one grey mare, and swept the larder and cellar clean of food and liquor.
Ludlow was soon at the head of a body of troopers, gathered chiefly at first from the parishes in which he, or his father, held property; and hearing that some of the King’s forces had ransacked his father’s house at Maiden Bradley, “I conceived (he says in his memoirs) that I might take some stragglers, or some way or another annoy the enemy; therefore I went thither after night with about forty horse, when I could hear of no men, yet I found much provision which a gentlewoman had obliged the people of the town to bring together and which she was preparing to send to the King’s army; amongst which was half a dozen pasties of my father’s venison, ready baked, which we carried away with us.” Next year he appears in Wilts as High Sheriff by warrant of Parliament and commander of a regiment and was joined amongst men of Warminster and its neighbourhood, by Henry Wansey, of Warminster, who received a commission as his Major. Henry Wansey had seven sons, some of whom fought for the King, some for the Parliament. There is a tradition in the family that when on a certain occasion a Council of War was being secretly held in an underground chamber in Major Wansey’s house, his little daughter was brought down that the officers might see the beauty of the child; she afterwards constantly averred that “the soldiers gave her blood to drink.” It was Port Wine, only then just introduced into England. The table used at this Council was afterwards removed to a new house of the Wanseys, in Church Street, now called the Mission House of St. Boniface, and a few years ago on attempting to move it, it fell to pieces.
Sir Edmund Ludlow led about his troops all over the county, and was engaged in numerous conflicts, but never seems to have accomplished any brilliant achievements; he often crossed swords with the dashing Cavaliers, of North Wilts, headed by Sir James Long, of Draycot, the King’s Sheriff.
After the battle of Lansdown, Ludlow, hearing of Waller’s advance to Devizes, marched towards Warminster, and “on our way searching the houses of some persons disaffected to the public, we found two of our most active enemies, whom we took prisoners.” He was lying near Warminster, when, tidings reached him of Waller’s complete discomfiture at Devizes, on which he fell back. During one of the pauses between some of the fierce struggles round Devizes, a Royalist trooper advanced alone into the open space between the two armies; the challenge to single combat was accepted by Jehu Wansey, either a son or near relative of the Major, who rode out of the ranks, engaged his antagonist, and after a desperate struggle, overpowered and killed him on the spot. This young Warminster soldier escaped all the dangers of the battle and the rout on Roundway, and was swept away with Waller’s shattered columns in their flight to Bristol. He passed unscathed through other scenes of blood, but finally received a deathwound from a bullet in Ireland.
“They have put an obstinate fellow with some foot in Master Arundel’s house at Hornesham,” records a royalist print of the day, June, 1644. This “obstinate fellow” was Major Wansey, who had occupied Woodhouses, an old mansion, near Longleat: here he was blocked in, and hard pressed by Sir F. Doddington. Ludlow, now at Devizes, received pressing entreaties from Wansey for immediate aid, but, under a false report that the enemy had now drawn off from Woodhouses he continued yet some time inactive, until another urgent summons from Wansey brought him down to Warminster, but with only two hundred and eighty men. He sent out of the town a reconnoitring party of forty horse; these came into collision with an equal number of troopers on the Heath, (above Warminster Common, where old arms are yet dug up), and after a brisk skirmish, returned with some prisoners, who reported that Sir Ralph Hopton had reached Woodhouses with a thousand horse. Ludlow soon felt the presence of this energetic officer. He was immediately attacked by Doddington, driven out of Warminster, and chased down the Imber road, over the Downs to Salisbury, where he arrived with only thirty troopers. He had ordered his men to kill their horses, and to hide amongst the corn, and in the villages: but a great many perished.
Doddington, returning in triumph, with some heavy cannon speedily made so considerable a breach in the wall of Woodhouses, that the besieged surrendered at mercy: “but they found very little,” writes Ludlow, “for they were presently stripped of all that was good about them; and Sir F. Doddington, being informed by one Bacon, who was Parson of the parish, that one of the prisoners had threatened to stick in his skirts, as he called it, for reading the Common Prayer, struck the man so many blows upon his head, and with such force that he broke his skull, and caused him to fall into a swoond, from which he was no sooner recovered but he was picked out to be hanged.” In retaliation for the merciless execution of some of the King’s Irish soldiers, Doddington hung twelve of the garrison (who were mostly clothiers), with two deserters, on a giant oak in front of the house. As one of these unfortunate men was being swung off, the rope broke, and he fell to the ground; on which he prayed that his sufferings might be accepted as sufficient punishment, and that he might be allowed to fight for his life with any two of the King’s men. His prayer was rejected. A rough hillock marks the “Clothiers’ Grave.” Woodhouses is destroyed. The oak was made into desks for a school.
In December, 1644, Warminster was held by a body of Royalists, who were engaged in levying heavy contributions in the town and neighbourhood. Wansey, (who had been taken prisoner at Woodhouses, but was speedily released, probably in exchange), taking concert with his superior officer, suddenly burst into the town. The Cavaliers fled towards Salisbury, followed closely by Ludlow, and driven tumultuously into the city, took refuge in the “Prebends’ Close, where the Bishop and singing men did live.” Thence they were driven out into two inns, the Angel at the Close Gate, and the George at the Sand Gate. Vigourously supported by his officers, Wansey, Douett, and Norton, Ludlow fired the houses, and compelled them to yield themselves prisoners at war. He took two hundred horses.
During the next year, Major Wansey was engaged in active service for the Parliament; he raised some fresh horse and dragoons, and seems to have been for a time attached to the regular army, as he was in the fight at Donnington Castle, but was afterwards commanded by the Earl of Essex to continue with Ludlow, and protect the interests of the Parliament in his native county. When the Royalists were fortifying the Close at Salisbury, Wansey drove off the masons, burnt the gates, and took a Colonel, and eighty prisoners. But having moved down into the south-west, and being unsupported, Lord Goring drove him with his local force out of Fonthill and West Knoyle in the rencontre capturing the famous Wansey Standard, bearing the motto, “FOR LAWFUL LAWS AND LIBERTY”.
Ludlow had refused to resign his commission he held from Waller, and accept a new one from Essex. For this reason, “some of Wiltshire of the Essex faction” records Ludlow, “obstructed me in raising of my regiment, and keeping from me those arms that were bought for that end, and detaining our pay from us, so that I and my men had nothing to keep us faithful to the cause, but our affection for it. Yet we were not wanting (he adds) to improve every opportunity in the best manner we could to the service of the country” – So having heard there was a garrison put into Stourton House – “each of us carrying a fagot to one of the gates, set them on fire, together with one of the rooms of the Castle, but those who kept it slipt out at a back door thro’ the garden into the Park, which they did undiscovered, by reason of the darkness of the night.” Having reduced Stourton House to ruins, he hastened to Lord Hopton’s house at Witham, when he captured about a hundred head of cattle, and with them paid his soldiers. On his return he stopped at his father’s house, (now New Mead Farm), in Maiden Bradley, and conveyed to a place of safer custody, the hangings, pictures, best beds, &c., which the servants had so carefully concealed, that they had hitherto escaped the keen search of the enemy.
But the heart of Major Wansey was turning to his fallen Sovereign, and the change in his feelings is the more to be noted and admired, as the King’s power was now hopelessly broken. There had been no cordial co-operation for some time between Ludlow and Wansey, and in his Memoirs he is frequently casting out innuendoes, and making oblique hits at his Major as though he suspected his fidelity both to himself and the Parliament. – “My Major had secured his troop in the rear of all.” – “I was not supported by my Major.” – “My Major had more wit than courage or honesty.” – “My Major not withstanding his artifices, was disappointed in his expectations.” – At last we come to this ominous annoucement – “My Major now openly pulled off the mask, and with about thirty of his troop, and some strangers, under pretence of beating up a quarter of the enemy’s, went over to them, having sent his wife before, to give notice of his design. But his lieutenant, continuing faithful to the public hindered most part of the troop from following him.”
Major Wansey now went heart and soul with the Cavaliers, and seemed determined by strenuous exertion and reckless sacrifice to atone for past errors – but his opportunity for amendment was brief. He had undertaken to raise on his own account a troop of horse for the King, and while recruiting in the north of the county, was confronted by some forces of the Parliament. A desperate hand to hand fight followed, in which he was worsted; and in his effort to escape, while leaping a ditch, he fell with his horse, and was so injured that he never spoke again. His stern old republican leader, writing thirty years after in a foreign land, whither he had been forced into exile to save himself from the gallows, cannot help having one last malignant fling at his old Major – and referring to his sudden and violent death, he hugs the solace, – “Thereby he received such a recompense as was due to his treachery.”
Sir James Long, Sheriff of Wilts. in Jan. 1646, struck a last frantic blow in defence of his fallen master. Bursting out of Oxford with a thousand horse, he swept the county from north to south, gathering up in his dashing course, horses, money, and prisoners. From the terrified townsmen of Warminster, he wrung a solid sum of £1000.
It fared ill for Warminster, as for all the straggling, unwalled towns of Wiltshire in those days. Some fierce Captain, on the one side or other, was often riding into the town at the head of his troop, with a peremptory summons for ammunition, hay, corn, food and money, to be ready at an hour’s notice, and heavy penalty followed if the supplies were not immrediately forthcoming. Plundered alike by Cavalier and Roundhead, and powerless to resist, Warminster suffered in silence. King Charles I himself must frequently have been in Warminster, as he was moving to and fro between Salisbury and Bath, but there is no record of any visit.
There is a tradition in the Halliday family, that Charles II, on his flight from Worcester, in his course from Bristol to the South Coast, slept one night in Mr. Halliday’s house in East-street, Warminster. The bedstead which the King is supposed to have used, still remains – the bed in the course of two centuries, mouldered to dust. Clarendon says – after Charles’ hairbreadth escape at Lyme, and his resolution of endeavouring to reach the sea by Hampshire – “They must pass through all Wiltshire before they came thither, which would require many days’ journey; and they were first to consider what honest houses there were in or near the way, where they might securely repose; and it was thought very dangerous for the King to ride through any great town, as Salisbury.” It is certain that Charles slept at Zeals House, and the distance, and the course of the King’s flight, render it very probably that Warminster was his next resting place, and that Mr. Halliday’s was one of the honest houses in which the King did securely repose. There is a portrait of Charles in the house.
Sir James Thynne had been fined £3,586 by the Parliamentary Commissioners, but in 1646, in consideration of his being responsible for an annual payment of £50 a year to the Church of Frome, he was allowed a reduction of £500. A reduction was also made in regard to Lullington, as he was under obligation to support a minister there. Amongst other compositions for estates near Warminster, there appears only that of Richard Richardson, of Boreham, for £45. The profits of court leets, fines, waifs, estrays, deodands, felons’ goods, and other royalties received by Sir James Thynne, with tolls of fairs and markets, holden within the town of Warminster, were assessed on an average of years, at £80. In 1651, a survey was taken of the honours, manors, and lands, late parcel of the possessions of Charles Stuart, late King of England, of his Queen, and the Prince, and there were found as formerly belonging to him –
All that tithing Silver paid within the Hundred of Warminster at Easter 37s. 6d.
Do. at Michaelmas 38s. 6d.
Fines in the Sheriff’s Court at Iley Oak 10s. 0d.
Total £4 6s. 0d.
Monday morning, 12 March, 1655, at early dawn, a body of two hundred Cavaliers, led by Sir John Wagstaff, Colonels Penruddocke and Grove, entered Salisbury, broke open the gaols and released their royalist friends, who were immediately armed and mounted. They then hurried to the lodgings of the Judges, and of the Sheriff, who had just arrived for the Spring Assize, arrested them in their beds, and dragged them out into the Market Place, where all three narrowly escaped hanging. But as day drew on, the Parliamentary soldiers, who were in the town in considerable number, began to recover from their alarm. Major Henry Wansey, son of Ludlow’s old friend, an energetic young officer, put himself at the head of thirty men, and posted himself in the Sheriff’s house. The Cavaliers immediately endeavoured to dislodge them. But all attempts to burst or burn the door, or get in at the windows before or behind, proved in vain, while from every available opening poured out volleys of small shot, and after an hour’s hard fighting, the Cavaliers withdrew discomfited. If Wansey’s little garrison had been overpowered, the whole city might have gone with Penruddocke. But now his party was cowed, their spirits sank, while the hopes of Cromwell’s adherents rose, and Wansey was mustering all his force for a speedy assault, when the whole troop of Cavaliers rode away out of Salisbury through Somerset and into Devon, hoping for general sympathy in Cornwall. On reaching South Molton at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, completely exhausted, they were attacked by Capt. Crook, and utterly broken, and about sixty of them taken prisoners. Penruddocke and Grove were beheaded. Thus this ill-planned movement came to an end – yet but for Major Wansey’s check at the first moment, the issue might have been serious. It does not appear that the Protector heard of Wansey’s bold stand, or that he ever received any substantial recognition of his important services.
