[Footnote 43: Harleian MS. 6988, art. 69, orig. entirely in the King’s hand.]
In October the battle of Edgehill was fought, and in November there were encounters at Brentford and Turnham Green, after which the King took up his winter quarters at Oxford.
Essex, the Commander-in-Chief of the Parliamentary forces, commissioned Lord Fairfax to command the armies in Yorkshire and the adjacent counties; therefore henceforth Fairfax was to be Newcastle’s principal enemy.
Fairfax whose name in arms through Europe rings, Filling each mouth with envy or with praise.
Fairfax had a great advantage over Newcastle, having served with the English army in the Low Countries, whereas Newcastle had had no military experience. He had also the recommendation for a command in Yorkshire, that he was a Yorkshireman both by birth and by blood. On the other hand he laboured under the disadvantage of the intense dislike and contempt of his fellow-Yorkshireman and brother officer, Sir John Hotham, the Governor of Hull. There were very few “gentlemen, or men of any quality, in that large county,” says Clarendon, “who were disaffected to his Majesty”. The chief of these were Fairfax, the Hothams, father and son, Cholmondley, and Stapleton.
We must now return to him in the summer of 1642. A special charge, given to him by the King, was the Bishopric of Durham. In that diocese were many sympathisers with the Parliament, and among such were not a few of the clergy. Now Newcastle knew the Dean to be thoroughly loyal to the King; so he issued an order that no sermon was to be preached in the diocese until it had been written out and submitted to the Dean; and he ordered the Dean not only to strike out anything which he might consider savouring of disaffection, but also to put in expressions of devoted loyalty to the sovereign, wherever such sentiments were wanting. Besides this he empowered the Dean to punish any of the clergy who might be in the least contumacious about the matter. We have the Duchess’s authority for this statement.
In spite of the carefully doctored sermons, the Duchess tells us that “there happened a great mutiny of the Trainband Souldiers of the Bishoprick at Durham, so that my Lord was forced to remove thither in Person, attended with some forces to appease them; where at his arrival (I mention it by the way, and as a merry passage) a jovial Fellow used this expression, That he liked my Lord very well, but not his Company (meaning his Soldiers)”.