Among the Cotton Charters and Rolls are several booklets, short manuscripts bound together and mostly dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. A great many of them are the private accounts and papers of the Cotton family, but Cotton Ch XVI 18 is something else entirely: a muster book from the English Civil War, more accurately known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Entries recording that Nathaniel Naseby and Thomas Tarlton need muskets and that the whole company has one wagon, three horses, and a carter: Cotton Ch XVI 18, f. 11v

This short volume lists the troops raised for Colonel George Goring, Lord Goring (1608–1657), giving their names and whether they were a musketeer or a pikeman or needed equipment. A note at the back records that this was done on 7 September 1640 and on the orders of the Earl of Strafford, lord lieutenant-general of the royal army.

Entry recording that William Knowles has run away: Cotton Ch XVI 18, f. 2r

Clearly not everyone wanted to sign up. One man, William Knowles, is marked down as a runaway. Five others are listed as sick. In the end, Goring raised 41 pikemen, 104 musketeers, and 12 officers, for a total of 157 men. They were probably raised for the Bishops’ Wars (1639–1640), fought between King Charles I (r. 1625–1649), who wished to reform the Church of Scotland to be more like that of England, and the Covenanters, hardline Presbyterians who resisted him. The conflict marked the beginning of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Luckily for Colonel Goring’s soldiers, the war soon ended with the Treaty of Ripon on 14 October 1640, just over a month after they were mustered.

The total muster for Goring's company, including the signature of Philip D'Ewes: Cotton Ch XVI 18, f. 12r

But this was not the end of Colonel Goring’s military career. An ardent royalist, he would serve as lieutenant-general of the royal cavalry in the First English Civil War (1642–1646). He fought at the Battle of Marston Moor and commanded the western royalist army until its defeat at the Battle of Langport in 1645. Goring then retired to France on grounds of ill-health before going to Spain to command some English exiles in the Spanish army, where he died in 1657.

Painting of George Goring, after Anthony van Dyck, c. 1635–1640

The muster book gives Captain Richard D’Ewes (1615–1643) as Goring’s second-in-command. He had previously served under him in the Netherlands from 1636 to 1637. Richard was the younger brother of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602–1650), an antiquary and friend of Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), who founded the Cotton Collection. Richard and Simonds took opposing sides in the Civil Wars, Richard declaring for the royalists, Simonds for Parliament. Richard had already fought for the king in 1639 and 1640 and he wrote to his brother in July 1642 imploring him to side with Charles, but Simonds refused.

In April 1643, Richard, now a lieutenant-colonel, was besieged in Reading by Parliamentarian forces. As one of the royalist officers leading the defence, Richard was shot with a cannonball in his left leg, tearing the flesh away to the bone. The wound turned gangrenous and the young officer died on 21 April, aged only twenty-eight. His brother wrote that the date ‘had been made sad and fatal to me by the loss of my most dear and only brother’ (J. Sears McGee, An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford, 2015), p. 391).

Etching of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 2nd quarter of the 17th century

The manuscripts of Simonds D’Ewes, including this volume with its reminder of the service that led to his beloved brother’s death, were purchased by Robert Harley, 1st  earl of Oxford (1661-1724), in 1704. His descendants sold them to the nation for £10,000 in 1753, and they formed one of the foundation collections of the British Museum. Although most of these manuscripts are, of course, held in the British Library’s Harley Collection, several hundred subsequently found their way into the Cotton Collection. The original Cottons only went from Cotton Ch I 1 to XVI 3, but many unrelated charters were added to them in the 1790s, and given numbers in an extended sequence. These were at first called 'Cartae Miscellaneae Addendae', but the distinction was dropped in the late 1860s and 1870s, so that now they are all referred to as Cotton Charters. Amon them was Goring’s muster book, which presumably belonged to Richard D'Ewes and passed to his brother Simonds upon his death.

This is just one of more than 1,000 Cotton charters and rolls that we are adding to the British Library's online catalogue. As the project progresses, further blogposts will highlight other interesting documents from the collection.

 

Rory MacLellan

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