By four in the afternoon Cicester was in Royalist hands. According to contemporary accounts 300 defenders were killed and 1,200 taken prisoner. 3000 muskets, all five pieces of artillery and fourteen colours were captured. Barton Farm was burned down and the town plundered. Even John Plot, a Royalist sympathiser, found his house in Coxwell Street “full of soldiers and £1,200 taken”.
The prisoners, including Colonel Fettiplace, John George and the Revd. Alexander Gregory, minister since 1632, were held overnight in the parish church. They were then roped together and made to struggle on foot through the mud to Oxford, where their spokesman was obliged to kneel in the market place to offer their abject submission to the King. The town was garrisoned by Royal troops and subject to a punitive levy of 4,000 per annum.
 |
A HUMBLE PETITION
The "inhabitants of "poor distressed Cirencester" acknowledge their submission to Charles's "justly incensed army" and beg forgiveness.
|
From a contemporary Parliamentarian account:
There is an interesting article on the hardships of the Civil War Gloucestershire in The Independent, 09.01.1993: On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the storming of Cirencester, the Corinium Museum had on show three hoards buried in the local area during the 1640s, two sets of coins and twelve "fine, chunky, broad- bladed" silver spoons found beneath the floor of a shop (? in Cirencester) in 1963.