Guildford in the Civil Wars
In February 1642 the people of Surrey presented a petition to parliament. They expressed loyalty to King Charles but distrust of his ministers and of popish influences in the church. The tension between the royal court and many of the countrymen it ruled was coming to a head. It had been growing for many years. Several Guildford men, for example, had refused to pay Ship Money, the semi-legal tax exacted by Charles I. In 1636 the Mayor of Guildford was £60 in arrears for money due from the town, and the Sheriff, Nicholas Stoughton of Stoughton Manor, complained in 1638 of the difficulty of raising the contributions – as he was later to fight on Parliament’s side against the King, he may not have been trying very hard. Surrey looked to Parliament to resist the arbitrary rule of the court. This conflict between court and country also explains why Surrey was strongly Royalist in 1648; Parliament had now become a more demanding central government that Charles’ had ever been

Guildford itself saw no actual fighting – and indeed there was very little in the whole county. It is important however to explain why there was no fighting: after all, Guildford was the hub of West Surrey, and West Surrey stood between London – the key to winning the war – and the Royalist forces in the South-west. Furthermore, there was nearby, at Chilworth, one of the few large-scale gunpowder mills in England. That the town stood firmly under Parliamentarian control throughout the wars was the result of the efforts of Sir Richard Onslow of Clandon. Sir Richard was a leading local magnate, one of the two county M.P.’s and a former Deputy Lieutenant with control of the militia. For militia purposes Surrey was divided into three Divisions – East, West and Middle. In theory, each had a deputy lieutenant in charge, but in fact when war broke out in the summer of 1642 all three deputies, appointed by the Lord Lieutenant (the Earl of Nottingham) – Nicholas Stoughton of Stoughton, Sir Poynings More of Loseley House and Sir Robert Parkhurst of Pyrford – were all Guildford Puritans and friends of Sir Richard. No wonder that a rival of his, George Wither, complained that ‘Onslow’s honour lieth about Guildford and the Western Division’. Having been appointed Colonel of the Surrey militia, Onslow moved rapidly to stamp out any Royalist stirrings: at Haslemere his men disarmed the company of foot that Peter Quennel of Compton had been trying to raise for the king and he arrested Justice Mallet before he could read a proclamation against Parliament at the beginning of August.

Surrey was one of the most parliamentarian of counties and both Guildford’s MPs continued to sit in the Long Parliament rather than join the King at Oxford. George Champion, who had been Town Clerk of Guildford since 1629, was dismissed because of his royalist sympathies. He had to wait twenty years, until after the restoration, to get his job back.

Onslow dominated the committees set up to govern Surrey for Parliament which occasionally sat at the Red Lion, the largest inn in Guildford, now “River Island”. One of these committees vetted the parish clergy of the county. In 1645 it sacked Dr Andrews, rector of St Nicholas and Thomas Wall of Holy Trinity for errors of doctrine, scandalous living and drink. Onslow was ably seconded by Nicholas Stoughton, who commanded a regiment of Surrey dragoons from February 1643. His friendship with Onslow was further cemented in 1647 when his daughter Rose married Sir Richard’s son Arthur. (Arthur Onslow had been elected to the Guild Merchant of Guildford in 1641). Both the middle and the eastern divisions of Surrey contained many gentlemen of royalist sympathies but Onslow in the west prevented them form making direct contact with Sir Ralph Hopton’s cavaliers in Hampshire.

The autumn of 1643 brought the military threat closer. Some royalist troops passed through Guildford on 15th September and in October Sir John Eliot heard rumours that Guildford was going to be burnt by the cavaliers. When Hopton’s army advanced on Farnham in November it was turned back by the Parliamentarian general Sir William Waller. It was a close run thing, and 400 Kentish horsemen had to gallop from Guildford along the Hog’s Back to support him. Waller used Farnham Castle as his base and Guildford as a rallying point for reinforcements. Thousands of troops were billeted in and around the town – which had itself a population of less than 2,000 – and it was this ‘quartering’ more than anything else that was to turn the local people against Parliament after the war had ended.

In the meantime, Samuel Cordwell continued to make and despatch barrel after barrel of gunpowder from his mills at Chilworth for the use of Parliament. He supplied both the army, and perhaps more significantly, the navy operating from Portsmouth and doing much to defeat the Royalists by cutting off any reinforcements from Ireland and the Continent. Caleb Lovejoy, born near St. Nicholas’ Church in Guildford, had become a wealthy merchant in London and became the contractor supplying wagons to Oliver Cromwell’s army.

The Surrey militia fought as part of Sir William Waller’s army and in June 1644 they mustered at Guildford to besiege Basing House, the garrison held by the Roman Catholic Marquis of Winchester. A letter records that ‘The country came in very freely and courageously. There met many gallant troopermen, stout soldiers …. And on Sunday morning, at 5 of the clock, Capt. Cufly, honest godly minister of Guildford, who goes out with them up9on this design, preached unto them, and after sermon they marched towards Farnham, and so for Basing.’ Francis Cuffley had replaced Dr Nicholas Andrewes as rector of St Nicholas, when the latter was thrown out for religious opinions that did not agree with those of the puritan Guildfordians. It is interesting to see a clergyman apparently serving as an infantry officer. The assault on Basing House failed – it fell to Cromwell himself in the following year, but it shows the Surrey militia as an effective force: the incompetence of these amateur soldiers has often been over-emphasised. In theory, one man in ten in Guildford would have been fully armed and trained by the time the war broke out. The pikeman would have his 18-foot pike and his armour, and the musketeer his heavy matchlock musket, supplied with powder, match, and bullets from the Western Division’s magazine over the Market House in front of Holy Trinity Church. Horsemen posed great problems of organisation – the High Constable of Godalming records how hard it was to obtain horses for Stoughton’s dragoons.

After the threat of a Royalist invasion of Surrey had evaporated, however, the burden of the war began to be greatly resented. The disruption of trade, combined with poor harvest and outbreaks of plague in Guildford in the summer of 1643 and 1644, led to an economic crisis in the locality. In 1644 the large sum of £50 was granted to unemployed weavers, whose trade was already in decline before the wars began. In July 1644 a Guildford gentleman lamented that ‘the towne standeth so much in need occasioned by an extraordinary handle, in respect of the warre which decayed all trade which makes swarms of poor: in respect of the taxes which impoverish many that were formerly able to have reclaimed others: and in respect of the plague which is so sore a visitation in its selfe.’ The burden of supporting the armies was increasingly felt to be intolerable. There was not only the quartering, not only the levying and confiscation of supplies for the soldiers, but also the regular taxes or ‘assessments’ made by the county committees on behalf of Parliament. It is clear that much, probably most, of these demands were met but when they continued long after the fighting ended in 1645 Surrey began to wish for the king again.

With the king defeated, the New Model Army turned its attention to political discussion. Early in October 1647, Guildford saw the gathering of ‘agitators’ from five cavalry regiments, including Cromwell’s own ‘Ironsides’. They issued a pamphlet The Case of the Army Truly Stated in which they demanded that every man over 21 should have the vote. This was not to come about for over two hundred years. In December of that year the farmers of Surrey petitioned Parliament against the quartering of troops, which made it difficult to pay their rents.

In May 1648 a meeting at the White Hart in Guildford supported a county petition urging that the king be restored to his throne and that an end be put to quartering. Some in Surrey began to plot an armed rising for the king. This broke out in July when the Earl of Holland let a party of horsemen from Hounslow Heath to Reigate. However, the professional soldiers of Parliament quickly pursued and destroyed this force near Surbiton before it could achieve anything. The people of Surrey were unwilling to revive the dying embers of civil war, particularly as one of their major grievances, quartering, had been removed as a result of the petition.

Guildford Museum, Castle Arch, Guildford, Surrey

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