"Full soon the curse of Civil War Came all our harmless sports to mar: When law and order ceased to reign, And knaves did eat up honest men; When brother against brother stood And all the land was drenched in blood." --"_Donnington Castle._" [Illustration: THE INNER GATEWAY, READING.] "What a glorious thing must be a victory Sir!" an enthusiastic young lady once exclaimed to the Iron Duke. "The greatest tragedy in the world," he replied, "Madam, except a defeat!" A siege is bad enough: an interesting thing to read and tell of, but, though it only lasted ten days, an event burned deep into the memories of Reading; replete with all but ruin to very many of her citizens; and entirely destroying for all time that town's once famous cloth-trade. As the tide of war ebbed and flowed along the Thames valley, now one side was uppermost, and now the other, and, in either case, it was "woe to the vanquished." One time there were the king's demands, then presently those of the Parliamentary party; fines followed levied unmercifully on recusants as also loans wrung from, at length, unwilling supporters. A letter, still in the town archives, gives a vivid picture of the position of very many in those days in Berkshire and in Oxfordshire. It is a letter from G. Varney to the Town Clerk of Reading, not dated except from the prison into which the soldiers had cast him:-- "Going," says Varney, "to market with a load of corn, the Earl of Manchester's soldiers met with my men, and took away my whole team of horses, letting my cart stand in the field four miles from home; and I never had them more. When the king's soldiers come to us they call me Roundheaded rogue, and say I pay rent to the Parliament garrison, and they will take it away from me; and likewise the Parliament soldiers, they vapour with me, and tell me that I pay rent to Worcester and Winchester, therefore the Parliament say they will have the rent." Still more pathetic is the petition to Parliament that presently was made: "That, since the time the two armies came into the town, your petitioners have had their sufferings multiplied upon them; the soldiers going to that height of insolence that they break down our houses and burn them, take away our goods and sell them, rob our markets and spoil them, threaten our magistrates and beat them; so that, without a speedy redress, we shall be constrained, though to our utter undoing, yet for the preservation of our lives, to forsake our goods and habitations, and leave the town to the will of the soldiers; who cry out they have no pay, have no beds, have no fire; and they must and will have it by force, or they will burn down all the houses in the town whatever become of them."