After which, the wars breaking out in England, between that King and his Parliament, he and divers other officers were commanded to return back into England for the King’s service; where soon after his arrival at Plymouth, that stood for the Parliament, then besieged by the King’s army, he was cajoled out of his allegiance to King Charles I. by his country gentlemen then in that place in garrison, and engaged against that King, to become Lieutenant-Colonel to Colonel Nicholas Boscawen’s troop of horse, then posted there. From whence he was commanded, with several other troops of horse, to go outside the lines, under conduct of the Earl of Stamford, then Governor of Plymouth for the Parliament, and to fight the King’s army that besieged it under conduct of Sir Ralph Hopton, Knight, and Sir Richard Grenvill, Knight and Baronet, the King’s Generals in the West; where, after a sharp engagement and loss of many men between both parties, the victory fell to the King’s army; and then and there the said James Hals, and many other gentlemen were taken prisoners of war, and forthwith sent prisoners to Lidford Castle in Devon, under custody of Marshall Ellery, of St. Colomb Major. Where soon after several of his companions, or fellow officers and soldiers, viz. Mr. Leach, Mr. Morris, Mr. Brabyn, and others, were executed without trial or judgment, as guilty of high treason. But the said James Hals had his life spared or given him by the General Sir Richard Grenville, Knight, upon account of consanguinity, but not without many frowns and angry threats; (a sure token of his clemency, as his smiles and embraces were of death and destruction, suitable to those of King Richard III. and King James I. and Caius Caligula, Emperor of Rome,) to dissuade him from the Parliament service to that of the King’s, with promise of greater preferment in his army; all which proving ineffectual, he was sentenced a straight or close prisoner to that tremendous castle, in daily expectation of death; where he remained immured up for about twenty months space, in great want, durance, and misery, till General Essex came into those parts with the Parliament army, and set at liberty him and other Lidford prisoners, by Captain Braydon raised the siege of Plymouth, and sore distressed Hopton and Grenville in Cornwall. During the time of this James Hals’ imprisonment in Lidford Castle, amongst others there came to visit him one Mr. Doctor William Brown, of Tavistock, who gave him a copy of rambling verses and observations he had made upon the borough and castle of Lidford, for his diversion; which verses, for want of the original, I find false and imperfectly set forth and printed in Mr. Prince’s Worthies of Devon, therefore I have hereunder set it down verbatim from the Doctor’s own copy, given Mr. Hals, viz.: