Graham's Magazine, Vol. XIX, No. 2, August 1841

by Various

Those ruins, shapeless now, and undistinguished from the gray crags around them, were then a proud and lordly castle; that huge and rifted pile, that frowns above the lesser fragments, was the square dungeon keep, with battlemented turrets at each aerial angle, and bartizans for shot of arquebuss and musquetoon, and embrasures for heaviest ordnance; while round it swept the massy flankers, with thirteen strong round towers, well garnished with the lighter cannon of the day, sakers and culverins and falcons; and without these, still in concentric circles, half moon and counterscarp and ravelin, glacis and rock-hewn moat—a mighty fortress for the king, whose banner, hoisted there by the fugitives from that disastrous field, still waved defiance to his foemen.

It was a bright October morning with which we have to do; the sun was pouring a broad flood of light over the fertile vale, with its green meadowland, its hanging woods, its ruddy cornfields, and its bright river; over the town and castle, crowded, this with fierce steel-clad veterans, mustered beneath the royal standard, that with the yeomanry and burghers, like their more regular comrades, in arms for church and king against the leaguering hosts of Cromwell; over the camp, the lines, the outposts of the Puritans, which hemmed the destined town about with, as it were, a wall of iron. Upon the heights, just to the eastward of the town, the fierce, enthusiastic Lilburne had fixed his quarters, and hoisted the broad red cross of the parliament, and thence, on every side, had drawn his lines about the borough; the bridge and the high road, on the south side, were kept by a brigade of pikes and two strong bands of horse arquebusiers; the meadows and the vale were swept by four full regiments of the far-famed invincibles, the ironsides of Cromwell; the woods were filled with sharp-shooters, the roads blocked up with mounds and trenches, and all the north side of the town exposed to a tremendous fire from fifty wide-mouthed cannon, which, covered from the castle guns by a projecting hillock, battered the dwellings of the hapless burghers without remorse or respite. Nor were the besieged passive in the mean time, or fearful. Bright sheets of flame would leap out, ever and anon, from the dark castle embrasures, and clouds of snow-white smoke would swathe the giant keep in their dense vapory shroud, and with a roar that told the awful tale of civil warfare even to the distant walls of York, the heavy shot would plunge into the serried columns of the leaguers, thinning their ranks indeed, and shaking for a moment their array, but daunting not their fiery courage, nor damping their enthusiastic zeal. And now, with the long roll of drums and the soul-stirring flourish of the horn and bugle, from this point or from that of the beleaguered town, the cavaliers would sally out on their besiegers. Now by some ford of the swift river, neglected because thought impassable, a little troop of gentlemen, superbly mounted on high blooded chargers, fluttering with lace and waving with tall plumes and blue embroidered scarfs, would dash upon some picquet of the Puritans, and drive them back, scattered and broken and cut down, to the main body; and then, forced to retreat in turn, would fall back foot by foot, firing their petronels and musquetoons from every hedge and coppice, and charging again and again on their pursuers from every spot of vantage, till they had gained the river; then they would wheel, throw in one shattering volley, swim through the eddying waters, and raise their gallant cheer, “God for King Charles!” in safety. Now it would be a steadier and sterner effort; a heavy column would rush out, pikemen and musqueteers and horse in one dense body, bearing the outposts in at the pike’s point, carrying some redoubt, and then deploying in its front, until their pioneers and axemen should spike its guns, fill up its ditches, and level its defences to the ground. Incessant were alarms and panics, sallies and feints and false attacks on the one hand; and, on the other, strict watches, stout resistance, guarded and sure approaches, for Lilburne knew right well the quality of his own troops—the nature of the force opposed to him. He had experienced often in the field the fiery and resistless charges of the impetuous cavaliers; he knew that in the stoutest veterans of the Parliament, none could be found who, for a single dash, could cope with the high-born and chivalrous adherents of the King; but he knew also that undisciplined and fiery gentlemen, how gallant and how desperate soever, would not endure the tedium of protracted operations, the dull monotony of a long siege, where passive opposition only can be offered, the lack of wine and the appliances of mirth, the scarcity of food, the daily sufferings, the daily waste, the daily growing anguish. He knew, and acted on this knowledge. Vastly superior in his numbers, he cared not for the loss of a picquet; he shook not at the defeat of an outpost, the destruction of a redoubt, or the success of a sally. If evening saw the line of his circumvallation broken, the morning sun beheld his working parties on the ground repairing the defences, protected by so powerful masses that any sally must be fruitless to annoy them, and evening found the lines again complete, but stronger, nearer, closer than before. Nor was this all. With his strong cavalry, he kept the country round in constant terror and excitement; he cut off every convoy, before it well had left the place from which it started; he surprised every stronghold of the cavaliers, at miles away from his scene of operations; he took and garrisoned the loyal house of Ripley; he battered Spofforth Castle, the old, time-honored dwelling of the Percies; he quelled the risings of the Langdales, the Vavasours, the Slingsbys and the Stourtons. He indeed bridled the bold valor of the West Riding, as he had boasted that he would—bridled it with a curb of iron!

Yet Knaresborough still held out!—castle and town held out, though worn and wasted with fatigue and famine. Hastily had the brave defenders thrown themselves into that stronghold, scantily victualled as it was, expecting succors from without, as it were, every hour, and prepared desperately to endure the utmost before submission to their hated foes. Hastily, rashly had they suffered themselves to be hemmed in, without a hope except to die, and desperately had they borne up against the tortures which had rewarded that hot rashness. And now the moment had arrived. For three whole days, the castle and the town had had no food at all! All stores had, many days since, been exhausted; the very grass that grew upon the ramparts had been all gathered, all consumed! The beasts of burthen, the domestic animals, the very vermin, had been sought eagerly for food—had been devoured greedily—till no more could be found at all in that most miserable town. There was not one house but had lost some of its inmates, by that most lingering, most terrible of deaths, mere famine!—and it was on the youngest, the fairest, the loveliest, the most beloved, that the dread doom fell first. The streets were heaped with carcasses, for now the living lacked the strength, the energy, to bury their own dead! Thrice had the burghers risen against the castle, to force its commandant, by surrendering to the Puritans, to free them from that lamentable durance; and thrice had the gray-headed cavalier, who held that last stronghold for an unthankful monarch—while the tears streamed hot and heavy down his emaciated cheeks, and his heart throbbed as if it would burst his bosom, for very pity—ordered the castle guns to play with grape upon the famished wretches, whose despair would have forced him from his duty. Three times, repulsed from the castle by their friends, had that most hapless populace rushed out to the besieger’s camp, throwing themselves upon the mercy of their foes, and hoping so to force their way into the open country, and three times, at pike’s point, had they been driven back into that town of sepulchres and charnel houses.

It was the third day that no particle of food, except some scraps of leather, roasted or sodden into soup, had passed the lips of any of the garrison, on which a sad deputation of the townsmen waited for the fourth time upon the captain of the castle. They came not now in turbulence, hoping to force submission, but tearfully and on their bended knees, to beg that stern old veteran, as they deemed him, that for the love of God, by all his hopes of Heaven, he would have mercy not on them, they said, “for we are men, and can endure the utmost, but for our wives, our perishing wives and children!”

“My friends,” he answered, “I feel for you—God is my judge I do!—and here, here is my witness that none hath heavier cause to feel than I have,” and as he spoke, he opened the door of an inner chamber, and showed to those worn deputies the corpse of a fair, light-haired youth, stretched on a pallet bed, emaciated beyond all conception—yea! literally wasted to the bones! “Look there!” he said, “look there! Six little days ago that famished, cold, dead carcass was the most fair, the sprightliest, the bravest, the best, the noblest boy in all wide England! You see him, as he lies there—my boy, my glorious boy!—oh, God! last pledge of my lost angel, who, dying, left him to my paternal care, which here is proved forever! Gentlemen, ye are answered; when my King’s orders reach me to yield up this hold, then will I yield it up—’till then, please God, I shall maintain it; and so long as my trusty fellows have boots, and sword belts, and buff jerkins, we shall not lack a meal. So, my friends, fare ye well.”

To this there was no answer; from this lay no appeal. They went away, as they had come, despairing; they betook themselves to their inhospitable homes, to their wan, starving families, and sat them down beside their fireless hearths, to pray for resignation, and for death to put an end to tortures which were fast becoming too terrible to bear. So the bright hours of daylight rolled over them unheeded, and the dark night came on—that season of repose and quiet, season of respite from all cares, relief from every wo—yet brought it no repose, no respite to the mourners of that city! The groans of manly agony, blent with the wailings of expiring infancy, and the faint sobs of women, suppressing their own agonies lest they should rend the hearts of others, went up that livelong night to Heaven; and there were humble prayers breathed out from penitent Christian bosoms; and there were wild, impatient, fierce ejaculations, which those who uttered them called prayer; and there were desperate blasphemies and curses, such as fiends howl out against the throne of grace, too fearful to be written!

In a low chamber of a lonely dwelling, close to the outposts of the enemy—looking down, indeed, upon the glacis and the dry moat of the town—there sat an aged man, shivering above the last expiring embers of his last brand—it was the last small fragment of the door, that dying brand! All else, the floor, the furniture, the casements, had been consumed already. Upon the hearth, beside the embers, there stood a mug of water, and a large dish, covered with thrice gnawed bones, part of a horse’s ribs, clean picked and broken, so as to reach the marrow. He was a tall and stately figure, was that aged man, and he had been strong, sinewy and vigorous even in his old age; but now his form was bent and all his limbs contracted; the skin, yellow as parchment, was drawn tight across his withered brow; his nose was terribly, unnaturally sharpened, like the nose of a corpse; his eye was dim and lustreless; his ashy lips were glued together with a thin frothy slaver. Yet he had fought that morning in a fierce skirmish, which had well-nigh brought in a drove of cattle, and had been only driven back by a charge of the ironsides, a troop of which, commanded, too, by his own son, had fallen upon their flank, and borne them back into the town when confident of victory and full of high anticipation.

His corslet and buff coat were not yet laid aside; his plumed hat was cast listlessly beside him on the ground, but his blue baldric still sustained his rapier, spotted with many blood gouts, and, in the buff belt round his waist, his pistols, with the hammers down and the pans black with smoke, showed that he had not removed them since he had thrust them back into his girdle, just fired in the heat of action. There he sat, with his hands clenched and his teeth hard set, silent, yet cursing in his heart that recreant son, whom he had never forgiven—no! never for one moment’s space!—that he had joined the Parliament against the King, and on whose head he now invoked the direst of calamities, that, by his too successful charge, he had cut off the last relief from that sad starving city.

Suddenly a faint sound fell on his ear, as of one clambering up the glacis. The old man listened, acutely, breathlessly, as though life were dependant on his sense of hearing!—again it came, clearer and louder, nearer than before. Sword in hand, on the instant the veteran sprang to the narrow casement which overlooked the moat and glacis, and there, scarce three feet from the window, in the steel cap and corslet, the scarlet cassock and unshapely boots of Cromwell’s Ironsides, stood a tall, slender figure. The moon, which was dimly wading through the uncertain clouds, feebly defined the outlines of his form, and half revealed, as the old man fancied, the shapes and weapons of a score or two of his fanatical companions in the dark hollow of the moat below him.

“Treason—to arms—ho! treason!”—shouted the wretched father, at the utmost pitch of his querulous attenuated voice; but ere he had well syllabled the words, a faint and well-remembered sound responded to his high pitched clamor.