A HISTORY OF SURREY 



Parliament and desired the general to give orders that no affront should 

 be offered in the future to the countrymen by the soldiers, lamenting 

 the injury done to their petitioners and the shedding of so much Chris- 

 tian blood of their county. The Commons meanwhile ordered their 

 committee in the county to prevent tumultuous meetings, and desired 

 the Corporation not to allow any large bodies of men henceforth to pass 

 through the City. 1 



Surrey was ripe for a rising when on May 23 Kent was up in arms 

 against the Parliament and army. There were nearly simultaneous 

 risings in North Wales and in the north of England in anticipation of 

 a Scotch invasion. The rest of the south-east was not ready. On the 

 night of May 3 1 and June i Fairfax stormed Maidstone. The Kentish 

 coast was much of it in the hands of the Royalists still, but the main 

 body of their remaining forces marched from Rochester by the road, 

 which Fairfax in his advance had left open, towards London. They 

 crossed the river by boats, picked up some sympathisers near London 

 and marched into Essex, where Fairfax following them hard brought 

 them to a stand at Colchester. Defeated in an attempt to carry Col- 

 chester as he had carried Maidstone he had to sit down before the place 

 for a regular siege. While he with the best of the army in the south 

 was so occupied, and while Cromwell and Lambert were engaged in 

 Wales and the North, an opportunity was given for a rising to be pre- 

 pared in Surrey and Sussex. 



By the influence of the queen the Earl of Holland had been 

 appointed to command the Royalist troops in England. He was truly 

 representative of a great deal of English feeling but totally unfitted to 

 command. He represented English feeling in that he was a former 

 supporter of the Parliamentary cause and supposed to be specially accept- 

 able to the Presbyterians. But he was a vacillating and feeble politician 

 and no soldier. He had nominated an incompetent commander, the 

 Earl of Norwich, to the Kentish Royalists, who had mismanaged the 

 cause in Kent and was now practically superseded by Sir Charles Lucas, 

 Lord Capel and Sir George Lisle in Colchester. Holland himself was 

 preparing for a rising in the neighbourhood of London so openly that ft 

 scarcely needed the ample information of spies to put the Parliament 

 upon its guard.* The Executive Board at the time was the Committee 

 of Derby House, which was a board of members mostly Independents 

 who had superseded the Committee of Both Kingdoms when the latter 

 was broken up by sending away the Scotch members. They were daily 

 informed that Holland was buying horses and raising men. His house 

 in London was frequented by dangerous characters. He had engaged 

 the services of Major Dalbier, a German officer, who had served Count 



1 Whitehcke Memorials. 



8 Yet Holland at his trial had the face to pretend that he stumbled into a rising by accident. ' I 

 was brought by a suddaine accident into a partie that as suddainely was disperst.' He tried to argue 

 that he was not the general. He certainly did little of the duties of one. (See Clarke Papers, Worcester 

 Coll. MSS. 70, fol. 256 and seqq.) Had his judges known their Falstaff they might have answered, 

 ' Rebellion lay in his way and he found it.' 



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