“To his good freinds, the Burgesses and Townesmen of his Towne and Manor of Oswester:
I have of late receaved a Letter from my honble good Lord and freind, the L. President of Wales, wch declared unto mee, a great desire in his Lpp to give some satisfaction to you uppon a Peticon given him from yor Towne, as exceptinge against the Course wch Mr. Lloyd, my Officer, healde with you. Nowe you must knowe, that I doe, and will avowe him in such things as he, in his discreation, shall find to bee profitable for mee wch, perchaunce, may bee displeasinge to you, but herin you may further wronge yor selves then you are aware off; for yf you shall deny to yeald mee thoes Rights & Proffits that are due unto me, as Lord of the Manor, you must then knowe, that I doe look for at Mr. Lloyds hands such a resistance of yor wills as I may not bee prejudized thereby: & I knowe his understandinge & discreation is such, as he would not drawe mee into frivolous and needles questions.—Therefore I must tell you, that yf you have refused the duties whch belonge unto mee, that I will execute my remedies as the lawes of the Land will allowe mee. But, becawse I wolde not be thought rigorous, and that yt may appeare that my L: President hath the powre of an honorable & kind ffreind in mee, I am contented that yf you doe sende upp to the Tearme at Winchester, such as shall have powre to followe the cawse in the behaulf of you all, that then the questions wch are risen between the Steward & you shall, yf yt may be, have an end; by Councill chosen of each syde; wch Course shall please mee well: but yf yt happen otherwise, the fault shall not be myne, for I desire not contencons; but then of necessety, Lawe must determyn them. In the meane tyme, I charge you all to carry yor selves respectively and duetifully to my Officers; for you must learn to obey, yf you will desire to be obeyed; wch you, being a Corporate Towne, should principally desire. And soe I leave you for this tyme, untill I heare further from you. From the Court at Wylton, this 25th of October, 1603.
Yor Lovinge freind & Lord,
SUFFOLKE.”
James I. in 1616, granted a Charter to the town, thus removing “divers doubts and ambiguities” which had “arisen concerning the ancient liberties, francheses, &c., of the town and borough of Oswaldstre,” and extending their liberties and privileges, as well as confirming them a body corporate, by the name of “the Bayliff and Burgesses of Oswestry, in the Countie of Salope.”
About this period a heavy blow was struck at the commerce of the town, by the Drapers of Shrewsbury (a reference to whose complaints and apprehensions has already been made), “who weary,” says Pennant, “of their weekly journeys to Oswestry, determined to transfer the market to their own town, from that in which Queen Elizabeth had established it. But this attempt proved in the first instance abortive. The Lordship of Oswestry was enjoyed at this time by Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, to whom it had been granted by the late queen, in the 43rd year of her reign. He was in great favour with James, in whose Court he held the office of Lord Chamberlain, and to whom he had recently recommended himself by his vigilance and promptitude in the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Possessed of the highest notions of the privileges of the peerage, and jealous of the infringement of his rights by the traders of Salop, he issued his mandate to them by one of their own body,—Arthur Kynaston, merchant of the staple, a younger brother of the house of Ruyton,—to desist from such attempts in future. Their answer is recorded in their own books: it is entitled ‘The copy of a letter sent by the Company to the Earle of Suffolk, Lord Chamberlain of his Majestie’s househoulde, ye 24th June, 1609.’ ‘Right Honerabell,—Your letter bearing date the second of this June, by the hands of Mr. Kiniston wee have received: wherein ytt appereth yor Lordship was informed that wee the Societie of Drapers wentt aboute by underarte and menenesse to withdraw your markett of Walsh clothe from your towne of Oswester;’ and they proceed to exculpate themselves from the charge in those phrases of submission which were in that day the established usage of inferiors in their addresses to those above them. This was their tone during the plenitude of the Earl’s power, which, five years after the date of this letter, received a great increase by his appointment to the exalted post of Lord High Treasurer of England. During this time we may be sure ‘the market for frize and cottons continued, where, according to Heylin, it was originally fixed, at Oswestry.’ But in 1618, the King’s necessities caused an enquiry into the management of the treasury, and Suffolk, whose unbounded expenses in his magnificent palace at Audley-End, had brought him into pecuniary difficulties, was fined by the Court of Star Chamber in the vast sum of £30,000, and dismissed from all his employments. The clemency of James mitigated this enormous fine, but the influence of the Earl of Suffolk was gone; and in 1621 the Shrewsbury Drapers made an order upon the books of their Company, ‘That they will not buy cloth at Oswestry, or elsewhere than in Salop.’”
As we have shewn in a preceding page, the struggles of the Welsh, to recover the freedom they had lost, terminated with the death of their last great leader, Owain Glyndwr. “Their wild spirit of independence, and their enthusiasm for liberty,” says the eloquent historian whom we have already quoted, “from this period gradually declined. The blood of their beloved Princes was nearly extinct; and their native bravery was subdued, or rendered ineffectual, by their intestine divisions and by their repeated misfortunes. When fierce valour and unregulated freedom are opposed to discipline, to enlarged views, and to sound policy, the contest is very unequal: it is not therefore surprising that the genius of England at length obtained the ascendancy. It was, indeed, an interesting spectacle, and might justly have excited indignation and pity, to have seen an ancient and gallant nation, falling the victims of private ambition, or sinking under the weight of a superior power. But such emotions, which were then due to that injured people, have lost at this period their force and their poignancy. A new train of ideas arises; when we see that the change is beneficial to the vanquished—when we see a wild and precarious liberty succeeded by a freedom which is secured by equal and fixed laws—when we see manners hostile and barbarous, and a spirit of rapine and cruelty, softened down into the arts of peace, and the milder arts of civilized life—when we see this Remnant of the Ancient Britons uniting in interests, and mingling in friendship with their conquerors, and enjoying with them the same constitutional liberties; the purity of which, we trust, will continue uncorrupted as long as the British Empire shall be numbered among the nations of the earth.”
We now approach a period in our national history which has ever been viewed, by opposing political parties, in a conflicting spirit. The turbulent elements of
THE CIVIL WARS
were not allayed until Death had silenced the two great actors in the tragic and murderous drama. The present volume, devoted principally to local history, is not an appropriate organ in which to discuss the merits and demerits of Charles I. and his sturdy rival Cromwell. Charles was doubtless guilty of many gross violations of his prerogative, and plunged into a reckless course of misgovernment, accompanied with galling taxation, which the people, beginning to learn the lessons of liberty, and to understand the genius of the British constitution, would not tamely submit to.
The ill-fated monarch, looking at him through the long vista of two centuries, was greatly to be pitied. The son of a king, who disregarded the instructions of his wise preceptor, George Buchanan, and who, in his rule over the English people, was prodigal, unprincipled, and tyrannical, he ascended the throne with a corrupt education, and urged to despotism and injustice by his infamous minister Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, he speedily exhibited in his regal capacity, a passion for power, which, as Macauley remarks, soon became “a predominant vice; idolatry to his regal prerogative, his governing principle. The interests of the crown legitimated every measure, and sanctified in his eye the widest deviation from moral rule.” Such was the son of a kingly father who was fond of cockfighting, and the brutal pleasures of inebriation, who utterly neglected the affairs of state on the plea that “he should not make a slave of himself;” who sold titles and privileges of all kinds, that his vices might be fed; and who basely deprived people of their patents, after having paid for them to himself. These were only a small portion of the sire’s iniquities. What surprise then can be entertained that Charles, his son, walked much in the father’s footsteps! Notwithstanding his despotic and infatuated measures, to which all the evils of the civil wars may be traced, yet he had many excellencies; and the closing scene of his unhappy life proved that had he been blessed with a wiser tutelage, and taught to govern with a just and righteous hand, he might have descended into the tomb with virtue and honour, embalmed in the grateful recollections of his country.
Of his powerful rival and successor much has, and still may be said, in his praise and condemnation. His character, however, singular and erratic as it was, was mixed, as that of other men; and whilst he displayed a religious enthusiasm and sanctity in most of his public acts, apparently impressed with the conviction that he “was doing God service” in the course in which he had embarked; yet the troublous events of his life—the fears, anxieties, and weakness of his mortal nature—must have convinced him, if he sincerely believed in the religion of which he made so loud and trumpet-tongued a profession, that “he had done many things which he ought not to have done, and left undone many things he ought to have done.” Now that we look calmly back upon Cromwell’s life, we can see much in his administrative policy that elevated the nation during his transient rule, and that has shed its salutary influences even upon the present generation; but the deep, dark spot in his escutcheon—the murder of Charles—a crime which harrows up the feelings, and rouses the indignation of all right-minded men—that foul murder, with all its cruel and inhuman associations, blots out any excellency that he ever did achieve, and stamps his character indelibly as that of a religious, enthusiastic professor only, and not of a Christian man. Charles may have been guilty, and deserving of punishment for his misrule; but we have yet to learn that Cromwell had plenary power to execute the mandate of Jehovah, and to have adopted the inspired exclamation, “Vengeance is Mine!”
“At the breaking out of the Civil Wars,” says Pennant, “the whole of Shropshire, with few exceptions of persons and none of places, adhered to the cause of royalty. Oswestry, like the rest, was garrisoned for the king. The town was defended by a new gate and draw-bridge; the castle was fortified very strongly; and to prevent it from being commanded by the church, in case of the capture of the town, the steeple was pulled down, and a part of the sacred edifice was also demolished.” The same popular author, with his fervid nationality, and strong royalist principles, adds, with evident pride and delight, “The garrison consisted chiefly of Welsh (a people almost to a man staunch in the cause of their sovereign).” The governor of Oswestry Castle at this disturbed period was a Colonel Lloyd. Edward Lloyd, Esq., of Llanvorda, compounded for his estates, as a royalist, in the sum of £300; and at the period of which we write (1643) he was in the prime of life, and therefore physically able to assume the important command of Governor of the Castle. Colonel Thomas Mytton, of Halston, near Oswestry, a man well skilled in military art, and of great personal courage, had united as a commander with the Parliamentary forces, and first signalized himself in an assault upon the town of Wem, which he seized and garrisoned; that place soon became the centre from which attacks were directed against the royalist garrisons in the neighbouring towns. Mytton’s success at Wem was achieved in the latter end of August, 1643; and although he actively assisted the Parliamentary army in its attacks upon other parts of the country, he frequently visited Wem to concert measures for fresh conquests. In January of the following year, a plan was there determined upon for a sudden and covert attack upon Oswestry. The story is on record that Mytton well knew the bon vivant qualities of the Governor of Oswestry. It was said of this royalist Commandant, that in the social circle he was the life and soul of the company, and that when he entered upon the convivialities of the table, he found it a difficult matter to interrupt the rosy hours by wending homewards. Colonel Mytton might know the frailties of his gallant opponent; and, with a strategetic art unworthy of a modern general, he devised a scheme for capturing the Governor and seizing the town of Oswestry. The anecdote proceeds to state, that Colonel Lloyd was to be invited to dinner at the house of a neighbouring gentleman; and Mytton calculated that no dinner invitation would be refused by good-humoured Col. Lloyd. The plot included the spread of further net-work, in which the unsuspecting Governor was to be surely caught. His gastronomic and vinous attachments were to be plentifully gratified; and whilst indulging in bacchanalian revels, a military force, under Mytton’s direction, was to enter the dining room in which the innocent Governor was carousing, to seize him, vi et armis, take him before his own garrison, in Oswestry, and there compel him to issue orders to his officers to surrender the town and castle. The plot, as we have described it, was partly successful, but eventually failed. Colonel Lloyd accepted the apparently-friendly invitation to dinner; and all went merrily on with him for a brief period. The detachment of troops was sent from Wem to take him prisoner, so that the first act of the drama was nearly completed. Whilst, however, the Parliamentarians were on their way to surprise him, two of their scouts were seized by some royalist friends; they confessed their share in the treacherous plot; the Colonel was apprized of the danger he was in, fled from the habitation of his Judas-like host, reached the “post of honour” which he had so improperly abandoned for the pleasures of the table, and secured from the grasp of his enemies both the town and castle. Colonel Lloyd’s misconduct was reported, it seems, to the royalist commander-in-chief, who removed him from his important position, and appointed as his successor Sir Absetts Shipman.