As never before or since, the Civil War brought fear and bloodshed into people's homes and set neighbour against neighbour.
Like most of Gloucestershire, Cirencester declared for Parliament. Indeed, Cirencester Marketplace goes down in history as the site of the very first forcible opposition to Charles I:
In a famous incident, on 23rd August 1642 Lord Chandos, the Deputy Lieutenant of the county, arrived in the town with a Commission of Array to raise troops for the King. He met with a hostile reception and soon fled, but an angry mob fell on his carriage, abandoned in the Marketplace, and tore it to pieces. It is easy, three-and-a-half centuries later, to make this into an amusing anecdote but it wasn't like that at all; the crowd involved numbered several hundred and the episode was ugly, violent and fraught with tension.
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| The "Attack on Lord Chandos' Coach" is the subject of a splendid, if very romanticised, painting by the local Victorian artist John Beecham. Bingham Gallery [from ArtUK] |
A garrison of two regiments, raised by Lord Stamford, seconded by local militia and volunteers, anxiously set about strengthening the defences. The pleasant gardens of the gentry served as sites for five small canons (sakers): two mounted on the wall of the Oakley Mansion, one in the garden of Abbey House, another in the Market Place and the fifth in the area of Cricklade Street. The dry stone walls of houses and gardens were reinforced and the main streets bristled with makeshift barricades “chaines, harrowes, and waggons of bavins or Risebushes” (ie.bundles of brushwood and logs furnished with spikes).
Here is a description from a contemporary Royalist account:
Bibliotheca gloucestrensis (1825) p. 159-174: