The campaign of 1645 was almost wholly unfavourable to the King. When the two armies faced each other at Naseby on June 14, for the decisive struggle, Colonel Rossiter, with the Lincolnshire troops, arrived just in time to take part in Cromwell’s charge on the Royalist left wing. The King retreated eastward after his defeat; but in August he was again approaching the Associated Counties with an army of about 3000 men. In that month the Newarkers made two raids upon Stamford, and carried off some of their opponents; and on the 23rd the King himself passed through the town. But his cause was declining rapidly; and on April 27, 1646, he left Oxford in disguise to take refuge with the Scots before Newark. The night of May 3—his last as a free man—he passed at Stamford in the house of Mr. Wolph; and with the surrender of Newark by his command on May 6, two days after he reached the Scots, the first Civil War ended. In the second Civil War of 1648 Lincolnshire took little part. Early in June an attempt was made by Michael Hudson, rector of Uffington—the chaplain who had guided the King in disguise through the eastern counties—to raise a Royalist force. Accompanied by Stiles, the Crowland parson, he occupied Woodcroft House, near Stamford, where he was soon besieged. On the surrender of the place he was denied quarter, and, having been thrown into the moat, was “barbarously knocked on the head.” A more serious rising took place at the end of the month. A body of Cavaliers from Pontefract, 600 strong, entered the Isle of Axholme and pushed on to Lincoln, where they doubtless hoped to find arms and ammunition, but the magazine had been removed to Hull. After plundering the houses of the chief Parliamentarians, they attacked the Bishop’s Palace, whither the little garrison of a hundred had retired, and reduced it in three hours; they then wrecked and burnt the building, leaving it in ruins. But their commander, Sir Philip Monkton, found it impossible to hold the town, and on July 4 his force was defeated and dispersed near Nottingham by Colonel Rossiter, who commanded for the Parliament in Lincolnshire.