Note 248 — Chapter X

May, Baillie, Mrs. Hutchinson, are as much of this opinion as Sir Philip Warwick and other royalist writers. It is certain that there was a prodigious alarm, and almost despondency, among the parliamentarians. They immediately began to make entrenchments about London, which were finished in a month. May, p. 214. In the Somers Tracts, iv. 534, is an interesting letter from a Scotsman then in London, giving an account of these fortifications, which, considering the short time employed about them, seem to have been very respectable, and such as the king's army, with its weak cavalry and bad artillery, could not easily have carried. Lord Sunderland, four days before the battle of Newbury wherein he was killed, wrote to his wife, that the king's affairs had never been in a more prosperous condition; that sitting down before Gloscester had prevented their finishing the war that year, "which nothing could keep us from doing, if we had a month's more time." Sidney Letters, ii. 671. He alludes in the same letters to the divisions in the royal party.