Can any wonder that the sheep he commissioned so many hirelings to fleece, robbers to plunder, and wolves to slay, would not follow him? In person, indeed, throughout that summer of 1645, His Majesty was pursuing a kind of warfare too similar to that of Wallenstein or Montrose. It was in the August of this year, scarce two months after the victory of Naseby, that the war surged up nearer us at Netherby, than at any other time. The king had fled from Naseby to Ragland Castle, the seat of the Marquis of Worcester (an ingenious gentleman who spent his living in seeking out many inventions). There he held his court for many weeks; entertained with princely state in the halls of the grand old castle, and hunting deer gaily through the forests on the banks of the Wye, as if his subjects were not themselves in his quarrel hunting each other to death in every corner of his kingdom. Whilst there tidings came to him of the successes of Montrose, and he endeavored to go northward to join him in Scotland. From Doncaster, however, he fell back on Newark, turned from his purpose by the Covenanted army of Sir David Leslie, which threatened him from the North. And then he turned his steps to us, to the Fens and the Associated Counties, which General Cromwell's care, and their own fidelity to the Parliament, had kept hitherto high and dry out of reach of the war, save for some few stray foraging parties. During this August 1645 we learned, however, at His Majesty's hands, the meaning of civil war. The eastern counties lay exposed to attack, having sent their tried men westward with Cromwell and Fairfax; so that we had nothing but our own more recent foot-levies to defend us. The king dashed from Stamford through Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, ravaging the whole country as he passed, and detaching flying squadrons to plunder Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, as far as St. Albans. Several times he threatened Cambridge. On the 24th of August, he took Huntingdon by assault, and four days afterwards, by the 28th, was safe again within the lines of Oxford, with large store of booty seized from the very cradle and stronghold of the Parliamentary army. No doubt the Cavaliers had fine triumphing and merry-making over the spoils at Oxford. But to us, around whom lay the empty granaries and roofless homesteads, and the wrecked and burned villages from which these spoils came, the lesson was not one of submission or of terror, but of resistance more resolute than ever. Prince Rupert had been teaching this lesson for three years in every corner of the realm. His Majesty taught it us in person. A lesson of resistance not desperate but hopeful; for we could not but deem that a king who would indiscriminately ravage whole counties of his kingdom, must look on it as an alien territory already lost to his crown.