POLITICAL HISTORY 



Cannon from Portsmouth and miners from Mendip set to work on the 

 1 2th, and by the 15th forced Dives to surrender Sherborne Castle. It was an 

 irreparable loss to Charles, for with it he lost many officers, gentlemen, and 

 soldiers, valuable artillery and arms, and many important papers, which, 

 immediately published by the Parliament, did much harm to his cause.^ In 

 October the castle was utterly demolished. 



The fall of Sherborne gave to the Parliamentary generals the command 

 of the North Dorset route to the west ; and with Bristol (surrendered 

 1 1 September) it completed the chain of fortresses from the Channel to the 

 Severn which hemmed in the king's Devon and Cornish forces, rendering 

 them valueless through inability to co-operate with those of the Oxfordshire 

 district. So far as the south-west was concerned, the strategy of the winter 

 of 1645—6 depended on this cordon drawn from Bristol to Lyme. The siege 

 and fall of Corfe Castle was no integral part of these operations. But the 

 grandeur of Lady Bankes's resistance and the pathos of her surrender have 

 given to the episode a prominence disproportionate with its historical setting. 

 In June (1645), after the receipt of the news of Naseby, Captain Butler, 

 governor of Wareham, had straitened the siege, A month earlier Cooper had 

 been ordered to ' sufficiently block it up ' with a force drawn from the 

 garrisons of Poole, Wareham, Lulworth, and Weymouth.^ Three of the 

 signatories of this document are Dorset men : Denis Bond, Denzil Holies, 

 and Thomas Erie. But Cooper's own opinion of the right method of dealing 

 with the fortress had been strongly expressed the previous November : ' A 

 few foot in Lulworth with a troop of horse will keep Corfe far better than 

 Wareham.'^ In September a party of horse from Oxford made an unsuccessful 

 attempt at relief.* In October, Bingham, governor of Poole, drew the 

 blockade closer, and in December he was reinforced by 400 men from Fairfax,^ 

 now engaged in the subjugation of Devon and Cornwall. The garrison at 

 Chichester, commanded by Algernon Sidney, contributed 100 foot to the 

 siege in February,' and on the loth Pitman, one of the officers of the garrison 

 who had formerly served under Lord Inchiquin, offered to betray the castle 

 to the Parliament. The offisr was accepted, and the castle was taken, by this 

 treachery, 26 February .'^ Sprigge gives forty-eight days as the length of this 

 second siege, and puts Lady Bankes's losses at eleven killed.* The castle 

 was deliberately slighted on its capture.' 



After the Battle of Worcester and the well-known episode in the oak 

 tree. Prince Charles came to Colonel Wyndham's house in South Somerset. 

 Here he remained some while in hiding, hoping to effisct an escape by one 

 of the Dorset ports. Sir John Strangways of Melbury and his son both 

 attempted, but in vain, to arrange for the escape of the royal fugitive. At 

 length Colonel Wyndham managed to prepare all for the Prince's departure 

 from Charmouth. The plan, however, miscarried through the aroused 



' Sprigge, Table ef the Motion of the Army, and Ang. Rediv. 75-6 ; Whitelocke, op. cit. 1 5 2-3 ; Vicars, 

 iii, 255, 257-9 ; Rushworth, op. cit. iv, i, 59, 64, 77-8, 82, 88. 



' Cal. S.P. Dom. 1645. ' Christie, Shaftabury, \, 70. 



* Ludlow, Memoirs, i, 131 ; Sprigge, op. cit. 188, 194 ; Whitelocke, op. cit. i, 5 7 1, 580. 



' Cal. S.P. Dom. 1645-7, PP- '^o, 281, 269, 319. ^ Ibid. 348. 



' Vicars, op. cit. 4, 372-3. * Tab/e of the Motion of the Army. 



" Engl. Towns and Districts, 149. Mr. Freeman apparently imagines the havoc wrought on the building 

 to have been entirely due to siege operations. 



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