sm found its
stronghold; and the arrival of the queen in February 1643 with arms from
Holland encouraged the royal army to push its scouts across the Trent,
and threaten the eastern counties, which held firmly for the Parliament.
The stress of the war was shown by the vigorous efforts of the Houses.
Some negotiations which had gone on into the spring were broken off by
the old demand that the king should return to his Parliament; London was
fortified; and a tax of two millions a year was laid on the districts
which adhered to the Parliamentary cause.

[Sidenote: The Cornish rising.]

In the spring of 1643 Lord Essex, whose army had been freshly equipped,
was ordered to advance upon Oxford. But though the king held himself
ready to fall back on the West, the Earl shrank from again risking his
raw army in an encounter. He confined himself to the recapture of
Reading, and to a month of idle encampment round Brill. But while
disease thinned his ranks and the Royalists beat up his quarters the war
went more and more for the king. The inaction of Essex enabled Charles
to send a part of his small force at Oxford to strengthen a Royalist
rising in the West. Nowhere was the royal cause to take so brave or
noble a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart from the
general life of England: cut off from it not only by differences of
blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its people, who clung
with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, and suffered their
fidelity to the Crown to determine their own. They had as yet done
little more than keep the war out of their own county; but the march of
a small Parliamentary force under Lord Stamford upon Launceston forced
them into action. In May 1643 a little band of Cornishmen gathered round
the chivalrous Sir Bevil Greenvil, "so destitute of provisions that the
best officers had but a biscuit a day," and with only a handful of
powder for the whole force; but, starving and outnumbered as they were,
they scaled the steep rise of Stratton Hill, sword in hand, and drove
Stamford back on Exeter with a loss of two thousand men, his ordnance
and baggage-train. Sir Ralph Hopton, the best of the Royalist generals,
took the command of their army as it advanced into Somerset, and drew
the stress of the war into the West. Essex despatched a picked force
under Sir William Waller to check their advance; but Somerset was
already lost ere he reached Bath, and the Cornishmen storme