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deputy lieutenants received directions to cause
provision to be made for the billeting of Spaniards should any be driven
on the shore.47 In spite of the king’s instructions,
Kentish sympathy was as ever with the Dutch and not with the Spanish,
while they watched the engagement in the Downs which ruined the Spanish
fleet, and His Majesty was informed that his subjects pillaged the
Spanish ships left abandoned.48
In May 1640, overt rebellion began in Kent with the refusal of the
trained bands to go beyond the county, and the scene described by the
deputy lieutenants to Philip, Earl of Pembroke, the lord lieutenant,49
must have been typical of many others enacted at that date. ‘A
wary and cheerful manage on the part of Sir Humfrey Tufton won upon the
soldiers till the latter part of the day, when an unlooked for silence,
followed by a stubborn sullenness, possessed the rest of the soldiers
and infected the former to the defeat of our better expectations. In
short, we find a confusion; some will not go beyond their colours,
others will not go into Scotland, all are yeomen and farmers who say
they must be assuredly undone by going as refusing . . . They all hope
to be relieved by impressed men if they can be found, which if you will
yield unto, as a present remedy of a distempered cause, it will give
good settlement to the many.’
This was followed by backwardness in supplying arms and coat and conduct
money ;50 and in January 1641 Sir Edward Dering presented a very strong
petition from Kent, praying, among other things, that ‘the
hierarchicall power might be totally abrogated.’51
When the civil war began, the Kentish gentry were actively employed in
both armies. But from the first the royalist cause found most
sympathisers among them, and after giving vent to its discontent in its
strongly worded petitions 52 the county in the main seems to have been
of the same mind, and never ceased to be a source of anxiety to the
Parliament, until the day when it welcomed Charles II back to its
shores. Sir Edward Dering himself finally threw in his lot with the
royalist episcopal party. He took a leading part in the drawing up of
the petition presented by the grand jury at Maidstone to Parliament in
March 1642. This was voted seditious, and in company with Sir George
Strode and Richard Spencer he was impeached 53 and imprisoned in the
Tower. He later raised a regiment of cavalry for the king. In spite of
the harsh treatment received by a former petition of the same tenour
from Kent, which had been burnt by the common hangman earlier in the
same month, about 500 Kentish gentlemen marched up with this petition to
present it, with the result that Captain Richard Lovelace, the poet, and
Sir William Boteler were detained and committed to the gatehouse. 54
47 Ibid. 1639-40, p. 23.
48 Ibid. 33.
49 Ibid. 1640, p. 148.
50 Cal. S.P. Dom. 1640, pp. 446-7,
627-8; 1640-1, p.22.
51 Proceedings in Kent (Camden Society); B.M. Pamphlets, 669,
f. 4.
52 Another petition was brought from Kent and presented to the House of
Peers, February 1642, praying their Lordships’ to go on with the
Commons to a thorough reformation.’ Cal. S.P. Dom. 1641-3, p.
279.
53 Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. v, App. 21, 22. 4,000 Kentishmen, horse
and foot, marched up to London ‘it is imagined.. . on behalf of Sir E.
Dering, knight of the shire, being sorry for the censure and
imprisonment on him.’ Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. ii, App. 47. Sir
Roger Twysden and Judge Mallett were also imprisoned. Sir Edward Dering
threw up his commission 1643, and was the first to take the covenant and
pay a composition for restoration of his estates. Ill-health partly
caused this action, and he died in great poverty 1644, without anything
being arranged.
54 Cal. S.P. Dom. 1641-3, 316. It was here that Lovelace
wrote his famous ‘Stone walls do not a prison make.’ This brilliant
son of an old Kentish family had gone from Oxford to court, but served
in the first Scotch expedition of 1639. |