Chapter Twenty Nine.
The Night Owl.
The conspiracy having been nipped in the bud, and the conspirators in prison, Bristol again breathed freely. The approaches to it were once more open, the thwarted Royalists having withdrawn to a distance; so that Jerky Jack might have made the return trip to Gloucester with a despatch stuck in the band of his hat safe as it inside his wooden leg.
But swifter messengers traversed that road now, cleared of the enemy at both ends, and on both sides of the river Severn.
He who had effected this clearance was Sir William Waller, jocularly styled “William the Conqueror,” from the succession of victories he had late achieved. Also was he known as the “Night Owl;” a sobriquet due to his habit of making nocturnal expeditions that oft took the Royalists by surprise. No Crophead he, but a Cavalier in the true sense; a very Paladin—withal a Christian gentleman. He had separated from slow-going Lord General, and made one of his bold dashes down to the shires bordering Wales; first relieving Gloucester, which was in a manner besieged by the Monmouthshire levies of Lord Herbert. The besiegers were not only brushed off, but the main body of them either killed or captured; only a scant residue escaping to their fastnesses beyond the Wye; whither the “Conqueror” followed, chastising them still further.
Returning across the Forest of Dean, he outwitted the Royalist troops under Prince Maurice; and, once were setting face westward, raided through Herefordshire on to its chief city—which he captured, with a flock of foul birds that had been roosting there ever since its abandonment by the Parliamentarians under the silly Stamford.
But the “Night Owl” himself was not the bird to remain long on perch anywhere; and, gathering up his captured game—a large bag, including some of Herefordshire’s best blood, as the Scudamores, Conningsbys, and Pyes—he rounded back to Gloucester, and on to Bristol.
Not to tarry here, either. Soon as he had disembarrassed himself of his captive train—committed to the keeping of Fiennes—he was off again into Somersetshire, there to measure swords with Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford. As he rode out through the Bath gate at the head of a troop of steel-clad cuirassiers—“Hesselrig’s Lobsters”—the citizens of Bristol felt more confident of safety than ever since the strife began. For now they were assured against danger, outside as within. Internal treason had been awed, the traitors cowed and crushed, by what had befallen the conspirators of March the Seventh. The two chiefs of them, Yeomans and Boucher, had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death—a sentence soon afterwards carried into execution. Grand efforts were made to get them off; the King himself, by letter, threatening to retaliate upon the poor captives taken at Cirencester—such of them as remained unmurdered. Old Patrick, Earl of Forth, his Majesty’s Lieutenant-General, was put forward as the writer of the barbarous epistle. But canny Scot and accomplished soldier as his lordship might be, in a polemical contest he was no match for the lawyer, Fiennes, who flung the threat back in his teeth, saying:
“The men we have tried and condemned are not soldiers, but spies and conspirators. The prisoners you took at Cirencester are prisoners of war. I would have you observe the distinction. And know, too, that for every hair of their heads that falls, I will hang ten of your curled Cavaliers—make Bristol a shambles of them.”
Though not Nathaniel Fiennes’s exact words, they convey his meaning very near. And he could and would have acted up to them, as the King and his counsellors knew. So, whether or not they deemed his argument rational, it was unanswerable, or at all events unanswered, by a counter-threat; and the Cirencester prisoners were spared execution, while the Bristol conspirators went to the scaffold.