Newsletter Number 85
December 2004
From The
Sergeant Major
Dear
All
Welcome
to the Christmas edition of Hopton’s newsletter.
2004
was certainly a very ‘different’ season, consisting of many smaller events
and the two ‘major’ musters. Some were very enjoyable, some not so, and one
will stick in the mind for its uniqueness, namely Margate!
The
point that has been reinforced is that the society needs at least one good
traditional major every year to act as the cement in its structure. When
re-enacting actual events, such as at Audley End, documented events can get in
the way of sheer enjoyment! Our display was accurate, the presentation
professional, and your discipline wonderful [THANK YOU]. The sponsors were
ecstatic, the public thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, and went home educated.
Unfortunately WE suffered from History!
Conclusions?
More large events are required so that we can mix the historically accurate with
those that are a ‘typical representation’, and also, next time we recreate
Naseby, somebody else can be Rupert’s!
Answer?
Get out there and find events…. Hopton’s muster organising team is the best
in the society. Find the event, give me a call, and the rest can be sorted out.
Next
year we have already have five HOPTON’S events in various stages of
preparation:
The
Whitehall party is already organised, and the information for this is elsewhere
in this newsletter.
The
annual commemoration of Cheriton in 2005 falls at Easter, and news of our
gathering will follow shortly.
For
July 9th and 10th the negotiations for a major muster at
Blandford Forum in Dorset are well advanced.
August
Bank Holiday [28th & 29th] will see us once again run
Powderham; the contract is already signed.
And
in September we anticipate our usual end of season visit to Corfe Castle.
There
is a lot of work ahead, but we are in the position where we can produce great
events that will advance our society forward: all help will be gratefully
received!
Thank you for your support over 2004, and I look forward to seeing you all at Whitehall.
Yours in loyalty
Martin
Editorial
Another newsletter another season over
and another load of promises made and quickly forgotten about what we intended
to do throughout a fairly busy, but for me anyway,
unfulfilling year. But we must look onward, obviously the easiest way to do that
is to look back at our successes throughout the year and build on them. For me
it was (as it always seems to be) Corfe in September. Although we were fairly
deplete on the ground this is possibly due to the two preceding weeks which took
a lot of our members to a drunken party in Dorset followed by a ‘bit of a
do’ at Audley End. However those lads and laddettes that attended Corfe, put
up the camp, did the drill, stayed on site, drank the beer, ate the food, talked
to the customers, played with the kids, took the camp back down, all deserve a
medal of some sorts, because if nothing else you made it fun for me.
Other events throughout the year that
are worthy of mention purely because I’ve got nothing else to write about are
George and Margaret’s anniversary bash at Audley End. Even though the early
part of it was ruined by a drunken act of petulance, in the end everybody had a
great time, with free beer and food flowing
in equal measure. Thanks Georgie and a happy anniversary this year too!(hint
hint).
Whilst on the subject of drinking, it
should also be noted that despite small reserve forces deployed at Corfe this
year, you still managed to drink the bar dry in the usual manner (by mid day
Sunday) and in so doing making about £100.00
for the Concorde Collection. Thanks very much for that, thinking about
it, if George hadn’t been so selfish we could have made another £100.00 at
his bash if he had sold the stuff.
So then onwards and upwards, next year
as you can see from the events list are two confirmed dates as well as a few in
the pipeline. The two confirmed dates are the ones that we demand take your
fancy, being Hopton’s events and
Major Musters to boot. I
know that both of these events have been worked on know for a long, long time,
much preparation work needs to be done before any contracts are signed, we now
need a commitment from you to do the easy part. Turn up and help out, it’s a
tried and trusted method, and it works trust me! More of those events in the
next newsletter.
Well the shops are full of happy
Santa’s, piped Crimbo music is played from every shop you decide to walk past
and there’s a Band Aid Single so it must be time to talk about the Whitehall
Banquet and Parade. As I’m sure Martin has said above it is an important do
and there are many, many reasons
for you to turn out in force this year and really show that Lord Hopton’s
Regiment is a significant part of the Kings Army and can, if necessary stand
alone at such events. More about that later too. Anyway details of the banquet
appear in this magazine and this year we are hoping for the best ever attendance
and for the first time of actually making money rather than the usual loss. It
should be easy to do, we’ve had lots of affirmatives from the usual old
ragamuffin suspects, you know the type: Talbot’s, Lunsfords, Rawdons and God
help us I think even the Cavalry have had an invite. So, cheque books out and
get yourself a ticket.
Pip
How we got
our King back
On 3rd September 1658, Oliver
Cromwell happily died. It was after all one of his personal
anniversaries as that’s also the date of two of his most famous victories,
that of Worcester and Dunbar. Anyway, Parliament and the leaders of the army now
began arguing amongst themselves about how England should be ruled. General George
Monck, who was the officer in charge of the English army in Scotland,
decided he’d had enough and was sufficiently pent up enough to take action,
and in 1660 he marched his not insignificant army to London.
When Monck arrived he reinstated the House of Lords
(there you are, you now know who to blame!) and the Parliament of 1640.
Royalists were now in control of Parliament once more.
Monck then emailed Charles
II, who was living in Holland, (and I imagine having the time of his
stoned out life) to ask him if he would like to come back and do the King thing.
Charles (plastered by the sound of it!) stated that if he was made King he would
pardon all members of the Parliamentary army and would continue with the
Commonwealth's policy of religious toleration (a bit like today really!!).
Charles also conceded to share power with Parliament and would not rule as an
'absolute' monarch as his old man had
tried
to do in the 1630s. Let’s face it, it looks as though he was setting himself
up for a fall!
This information was passed to Parliament who then
eventually agreed to abolish the Commonwealth
(ta ta Aussie’s) and bring back the monarchy. In August 1660, Charles
II and Parliament agreed to pass the Act of Indemnity
and Oblivion. You think we have some strange acts of Parliament now! This
resulted in the granting of a free pardon to anyone who had supported the Commonwealth
government, but Charles managed to secure the clause retaining the right to
punish (execute actually) anybody who took part in the trial and the beheading
of dear old dad. Not bad for the first tete a tete with the enemy eh!
A special court was appointed and in October 1660
those Regicides
who were still alive and living in Britain were brought to trial. Ten were found
guilty and were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. These included Thomas
Harrison (had a great, great grandson who also took part in the civil
wars, can we kill him too?) John
Jones (lead singer with the Oysterband) John
Carew and Hugh
Peters. Others executed included Adrian Scroope, Thomas Scot, Gregory
Clement, Francis Hacker, Daniel Axtel and John Cook.
Oliver
Cromwell, Henry
Ireton, Thomas
Pride and John
Bradshaw were all posthumously tried for high treason (What a waste
of tax payers money…honestly). They were found guilty and in January 1661
their corpses were exhumed and hung in chains at Tyburn.
It
is estimated that about twenty Regicides escaped abroad. Three of them, John
Barkstead, John Okey and Miles Corbet were arrested and were executed
in April 1662.
Charles
then went on to have a fairly successful career as King,
he was a vehement patron of both the arts and sciences, he helped found
the Royal Society who’s early membership included one Isaac Newton.
Chris Wren was great mate of Charles and plenty of dosh was given to the
architect to rebuild London after somebody in Pudding Lane had a crafty fag in
bed and knocked over the ashtray. Wren also constructed the Royal Chelsea
Hospital for Charles who wanted a resting home for retired soldiers in 1681.
Purely coincidentally a statue of Charles stands in the grounds of the hospital,
though why he is dressed as a Roman emperor escapes my deductive reasoning!
Charles
often made the front pages with lurid scandals of illegitimate children and
mistresses all over the world. Charles didn’t do much to contradict these
stories, in actual fact often proving them true by being wood carved climbing in
through the windows of a certain Babara Villiers of Castlemaine and obviously
enjoyed the XXX X as she off loaded six of his fourteen cherubs.
He
also had plenty of other favourites and there wasn’t a Duchess in Europe that
wasn’t put up on Ebay for a quick once over before a meeting was arranged
between our lucky new King and the next hopeful Mrs King. He also a penchant for
an Covent Garden orange seller named Nell Gwynne who was probably one of his
favourites and who had a couple of kids by
him, a James and funnily enough another Charles. The trouble with our Nell was,
that though she was terribly popular with the fashion guru’s and public in
general she did have a bit of a problem with Charles’s expense account and ran
up fantastic debts, which were only paid off in full after Charles’s death bed
wish in 1685 of ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ was obeyed by his brother James
11 who gave her a pension of £1500.
Pip
Cote de Azur
In
1650ish (a couple of years only after the end of our period) King Charles II
turned up in Scotland and started beating up anyone who was stupid enough to try
and stop him kinging and making vague threats about ‘sorting out them down in
London what chopped his daddy’s head off’. Instantly (a couple of months
later really) the English parliament asked Cromwell to go up and give Charles II
a jolly good telling off. Despite just having come back from a
short adventure break in Ireland, where he had done his best to sour
English Irish relations for the next three hundred or more years by massacring
anyone he thought looked and talked a bit funny, Cromwell set off taking along a
couple of thousand of his mates for the company.
In
1651ish King Charles II and his army managed to do a body swerve around Cromwell
and his, and legged it down into England to be with his royalist chums which
meant that Cromwell and his army had to come to a sudden stop, turn around
and come back chasing him. Cromwell (who it appears may not have been an
ardent royalist) sent his cavalry ahead to slow Charles’ army down and he
followed on with the foot soldiers who were forced to average 20 miles a day to
catch up. To get such a high speed for foot the
soldiers were allowed to march in their shirt sleeves while local horses were
pressed into service to carry their outer clothing and arms (unattributed - p.384 Cromwell our chief of men Antonia Fraser 1993).
Pete
The shape of things to come (1)
Most
of you will probably remember the incoherent outburst of yours truly graciously
timed for George and Margaret’s anniversary at Audley End in September,
however some of you may not know why.
Much
has been said by many of you regarding the method by which we now take the
field, plenty was said in the last newsletter as a matter of fact, however from
the outburst came good in the shape of an Officers meeting the following day in
an effort to curb the mal content amongst a) me and b) the others i.e. you, or
at least some of you.
At
the meeting we did decide to talk to the other two regiments and whilst I
can’t detail the exact motions we put in place I can say that I think we have
made a decision that will benefit all, both Hopton’s and the Society, but as
usual it comes at a price.
Quite
simply we must field more soldiers! We cannot justify any of our proposals
unless we take to the field with more soldiers, ideally 20 Pike and 12
– 16 Musket. This has been achieved before and can be achieved again. We aim
to do this by introducing more dummy muskets in to blocks (injured Pikemen, new
recruits etc) and not having anybody unemployed during the battle. New recruits
should not automatically be assumed to carry a Pike they will be given a choice
(now how about that for democracy, would never have happened under George’s
reign!). We are also beginning a recruitment campaign for next year to coincide
with our two major musters. I make no excuses by reiterating that we can only
achieve our goals by getting more people on the pitch!
Now
then read the next article
The shape of things to come (2)
Moving
on swiftly to a not unrelated subject of increasing the numbers. Your officers
(them at the front of the magazine) have decided that the least literate one of
them all (the sixth one down) is to produce a newsletter of such magnitude and
stunning insight that many of our members will flock back in numbers hitherto
uncountable.
Right!
I here you say, get on with it and we’ll all have a good laugh in March when
it drops on the doorstep.
But
seriously folks, the March newsletter is to be distributed to all members from
the last 5 years and will heavily feature the two majors we are organising
alongside the other important events that take place during the year. In
general, it’s an advertising campaign to let our lost brothers and sisters in
on the fact that we are still about, still putting up and taking down tents and
in the main still having loads of fun in the countryside. All officers will
contribute to this issue and hopefully as many of you that have anything to say,
and lets face it you normally do, are being asked to contribute as well, all
articles are not only welcome they are necessary to the overall goal of
increasing numbers and getting the above article accomplished.
Now I know what your thinking! This is my usual ploy
of getting somebody to write something for this newsletter and to a certain
extent you are actually right, however could you all please, please me this
time. Thanks. Sounds like a good song for a record that!
WHO
WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE (3)?
The third
ten week run began on Saturday 19th June.
Keep
Concorde Rolling Fund (3)
Bonus ball
= £55.00
Lottery
= £05.00
Extra
donations etc
= £12.00
Total
=
£72.00
Money
already banked
= £222.00
Grand
Total
= £294.00
The fourth
ten week run began on Wednesday 8th September.
Keep
Concorde Rolling Fund (4)