Note 102 — REIGN OF CHARLES I.: 1637-1649. (continued 2)

In a curious and rare pamphlet, by William Lithgow, descriptive of the siege of Newcastle (Edinburgh, printed by Robert Bryson, 1645), we get some idea of the wretched state to which the place was reduced in consequence of its investiture of several months. ‘We found great penury and scarcity of victuals, ammunition, and other necessaries within that dejected town; so that they could not have held out ten days longer, unless the one half had devoured the other. The plague was raging in Gateside, Sandside, Sunderland, and many country villages about.’ For this reason, Tynemouth was obliged to surrender also; ‘the pestilence having been five weeks there with a great mortality, they were glad to yield and to scatter themselves abroad, but to the great undoing and infecting of the country about.’

Lithgow, by the way, was dissatisfied with the treatment of Newcastle by his countrymen. ‘As they abused their victory,’ says he, ‘in storming the town, with too much undeserved mercy, so they as unwisely and imprudently overreached themselves, in plundering the town with an ignorant negligence and careless omission.... And as they thus defrauded themselves with a whistle in their mouths, so they pitifully prejudged, by this their inveigled course, the common soldiers of their just due and dear-bought advantages.’