[1076] “The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex: making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day, September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid the dark rain, ‘on the top of Presbury Hill;’—and understand that they shall live and not die. The King ‘fired his huts,’ and marched off without delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war.... The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man.” Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Cromwell.
[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681.
[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469.
[1079] Dunsford’s Histor. Mem. of Tiverton, p. 184.
[1080] The military events from Rushworth.
[1081] Dunsford, Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton. Harding, Hist. of Tiverton.
[1082] Rushworth. Moore, Hist. of Devonshire, I. 149.
[1083] Beesley’s Hist. of Banbury, p. 387.
[1084] In Somers’s Tracts. Scott’s ed. V. 294.
[1085] Sykes.