=Prince Rupert.=--The busy occupants of the line of road traversed by Leland and Camden had serious trouble a century later. Charles I. on his way, in 1642, to Edge Hill had stopped at Aston Hall, which had been built early in the seventeenth century, and was believed to be from a design by Inigo Jones. Sir Thomas Holte had been true to the King, but had become unpopular with the Birmingham people, who were on the Parliamentary side. Aston Hall was attacked and besieged for three days, and the traces of the cannonading still remain. In the April of the next year, 1643, the fiery Rupert advanced to Birmingham from Camp Hill, and was stopped in Deritend by the barricades and valour of the people, but he forced his way, plundered and fired eighty houses, and left the town on the other side after heavy losses of life and limb. Clarendon has described Birmingham “as of great fame for hearty wilful affected disloyalty to the King as any town in England,” and the town had supplied the Parliamentary army with 15,000 swords, but “Prince Rupert’s Burning Cruelty to Birmingham” only intensified the opposition to the King and his cause. =A City of Refuge.=--The latter part of the seventeenth century saw many marked advances in the prosperity of the town. The extravagances of the restoration period greatly increased the demand for many of the products of Birmingham ingenuity and skill. The demand for fire-arms also encouraged and extended one of the trades which was afterwards to become one of the great industries of the town; not only so, but Birmingham had become a sort of City of Refuge for reformers of all sorts, and a sort of Free Port for many sorts of manufactures which, owing to the customs of corporate towns, were restricted elsewhere. The “five mile,” and other acts, drove out many useful and able people and sent them to reside in a place where there was more elbow room and more free air, and thus not only the population but the energy and usefulness of the inhabitants rapidly increased. The visits of George Fox had stimulated many people, like those of Wesley a century later, and every influence, industrial, political, religious, social, seemed to continue and develop and intensify the life and progress of the town.