This was confirmation full, of Massey’s warning despatch, the conspiracy, everything. But, for better assurance of it, the Governor, with the assembled officers, rushed out of the council-chamber and up to the Castle donjon; there to see the horizon lit up with a yellowish glare which, as soldiers, they knew to be the reflection from bivouac fires. And a wide spread of them, the sky illumined all over Durdham Down, away to King’s Weston.
“Rupert it must be—he, and his plundering host!”
Captain Birch made quick work of the duty assigned to him. In less than twenty minutes after receiving the Governor’s commands, he stood before the door of Robert Yeomans’s house, demanding admission. He had the strength at his back to enforce it—his own Volunteers afoot, with a body of horse, lest the conspirators should escape by flight. And some of both, distributed round the house, already enfiladed it.
It was a large house, its owner being one of the wealthy citizens of Bristol. Forty men were within it, all armed, as the Volunteer officer had been told. At word of what was without they sprang to their arms, some of the more courageous counselling fight. But when they looked through the windows, saw that formidable array, and heard the stern summons “Surrender!” their hearts failed them, and they surrendered. Wisely, too. Had they resisted, instant death would have been their fate. For, among the men with Birch, were some fresh from the affair of Cirencester; themselves escaped, but leaving behind friends, relatives, even brothers, butchered in cold blood. Exasperated, maddened, by the memory of that slaughter—some of them with wounds still unhealed from it—Birch, who was moderate as brave, had a difficulty to restrain them from dealing out death to the malignants. The troopers who accompanied him, smarting under late reverses, would have gladly hailed the order to “fall on.” But the cowed conspirators submitted like sheep, and were marched off to the Castle, every man-jack of them; there to meet other batches brought in by Buck and the different officers who had been detailed for their arrest.
In houses here and there throughout the city, parties of them were found and picked up; all armed, waiting for a signal to sally forth and shed the blood of their fellow-citizens. This has been denied, but a letter from the barbarous Lord Byron to Prince Rupert puts the design beyond doubt. But for the vigilance of the merchant-soldier Birch, and the activity of the “busy mercer” Buck, that night the streets of Bristol would have run blood, and every house in it belonging to a Parliamentarian been sacked and plundered. For the head plunderer, Rupert—he who introduced the word to the English language—stood at that very hour on the top of King’s Weston hill, awaiting a triple signal—the bells of three churches to be rung—Saint John’s, for summoning the Royalist sailors; that of Saint Nicholas, to call out the butchers for butchers’ work congenial to them; while from the tower of Saint Michael’s he expected to hear a peal more especially meant for himself and his freebooters, as it were saying, “You may come on! The gates of Bristol are unbarred for you!”
But he heard it not. They who had been entrusted with the ringing of that fatal peal never rang it. Instead of bell ropes in their hands, they now had manacles around their wrists, and grim sentries standing guard over them.
Rupert waited, watched, and listened, till the break of day showed him the great seaport of the Severn still calm; its gates close shut; its walls and towers bristling with armed men, in attitudes that told them determined on its defence.
Thinking he had been made a fool of, and fearing further betrayal, he hastily beat retreat from Durdham Down to seek the pillage of some city more easy of being entered.
The rising sun saw his back turned upon Bristol; he and his Cavaliers venting loud curses—reviling their partisans inside, whose misleading correspondence had lured them to an expedition ludicrous as bootless.