The Love of the Lindseys
Young Montague Bertie, Lord Willougby, tended his dying father behind enemy lines.
1642
King Charles I 1625-1649
Young Montague Bertie, Lord Willougby, tended his dying father behind enemy lines.
1642
King Charles I 1625-1649
At eight o’clock on the morning of the 23rd of October, 1642, King Charles I gazed down on the field of Edgehill, and the Parliamentarian army that awaited him there. It was the start of the English Civil War, which would all but end with the King’s execution in January 1649.
LORD Lindsey had once served alongside their opponent that day at Edgehill, the Earl of Essex, and recommended using the infantry against him.
But on the advice of his young nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the King, who had never commanded an army before, ordered a spectacular cavalry dash to sweep the enemy from the field.
For a moment, it seemed to have worked; but the Parliamentarians regrouped, while the careless Royalists scattered in search of plunder.
Lindsey was shot through the thigh-bone. Seeing him fall, his son Lord Willoughby immediately surrendered to the enemy, so he could tend his father’s wounds in a nearby hut.
Essex generously offered his surgeon, but Lindsey pointedly refused. His life ebbed away early the next morning, with his son still by his side. It took Charles a year to secure Willoughby’s release.
Another six years on, Willoughby was one of seven noblemen who formed the King’s sorrowful, silent, snowy cortège among the ruins of St. George’s Chapel.*
King Charles I was executed by the Parliamentarians on 30th January, 1649. He was buried, grudgingly and without funeral rites, in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.