We have a short account of these proceedings from the other side, from no less a personage than the Vicar himself, Mr. Jacob Rous, who had evidently taken an active part in the movement. He has left in the Parish Register, this note, dated 1646.
“Reader, whoever thou art, that shall have occasion to use this booke, know that by this means for these two following years it comes to be soe imperfect as thou find’st it. On the 14th March, 1643, Colonel Cromwell, with a brigade of horse and certain foote, which he had from Yarmouth, came to this towne and from thence carried away prisoners. Sir Thomas Barker and his brother, Sir John Pettis, Mr. Knivett, of Ashwell Thorpe, Mr. Catlin, Captain Hammond, Mr. Thomas Cory, with others to Cambridge, and with them, myself, Mr. Thomas Allen, Mr. Simon Canham and Thomas Canham, of this towne, so that for some time following, there was in this town neither minister nor clerke, but the inhabitants weare enforced to procure now one and then another to baptize their children, by which means there was no register kept, only those few hearafter mentioned wear by myselfe baptised in those intervalls when I enjoied my freedom.”
We have in these extracts, I believe, the only original records of this exciting episode in the history of our old town. What became of the “army,” which Cromwell had been led to suppose he would find at Lowestoft we are not informed. The accounts give the impression that the inhabitants of Lowestoft had taken very little part in the movement, and that the preparations were the work of the influential “strangers,” with the concurrence of the Vicar, the Parish Clerk, and a few other leading men. Mr. Mighells, one of the leading merchants of the time, had the credit of saving the little town from the fate in which the gallant cavaliers would have involved it, by appearing on the scene and dissuading resistance to Cromwell’s entrance. After a stay of two nights at the Swan, and the capture of the “strangers” and the few “malignants” among the townspeople, Cromwell returned to Cambridge with his troop and left the little town in peace, without considering it necessary to leave any force to insure its future allegiance to the Parliamentary cause.