Eventually forty prisoners broke out and escaped to safety, then told all. Smith became such a byword for brutality that even his own side disowned him. The London Parliament debated the issue and the Oxford Parliament had him imprisoned after three days in the pillory.
Now conditions in the castle were better, but still imprisonment was viewed as a just punishment for rebels, and a deterrent. Those who refused the option of changing sides might be lucky enough to be freed in a prisoner exchange, but that was rare; they could fester in cramped cells for years. For food, clothes and writing materials, they had to rely on friends outside; when held in enemy strongholds, this was impossible. Their lives passed from the humiliation of capture through malnutrition, depression and despair. Sores, diarrhoea and arthritis commonly afflicted survivors. With no exercise, no glimpse of outside light, and nothing to do but carve their names on prison walls, some would begin to hallucinate. Weakened, if they then caught jail fever, they soon perished. Many would die. All knew that death was the most likely end for them.
Nerissa Mcllwaine and Juliana Lovell were willing to bring food and medicine to men held in the castle. The prisoners were allowed rare inspection visits from their own side, visits which cheered them, because they knew they were not entirely forgotten. But requests to bring charity were rebuffed. Nerissa and Juliana were turned away by an assistant jailer in the castle gateway on the Mound. 'Ladies, they are nothing but rebels and traitors. Execution is all they deserve.'
'If we abandon our civility and humanity' Nerissa Mcllwaine lectured him, 'we deny ourselves grace.'
When the two women were then asked scornfully why they should want to help the enemy, their answer was simple. Juliana explained: 'If our own husbands are ever captured, we hope some good woman among the enemy will show them kindness.'
It did not convince the jailer, who never did allow them in.
At the beginning of July, a crucial battle took place. It was known that Prince Rupert was blazing through the north at the head of a large army, which with reinforcements had reached over fourteen thousand horse and foot. Heading up through Cheshire and Lancashire, he had stormed Stockport and Bolton, met resistance at Liverpool, crossed the Pennines, reached Skipton Castle and surprised his opponents by bursting out at Knaresborough. On Rupert's sudden approach, the Parliamentarians raised the siege of York and began moving away south. Although Lord Newcastle wanted to rest his exhausted garrison and wait for the enemy's armies to disperse in their own time, Prince Rupert always preferred to fight. The Parliamentarian allies, who numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, far more than even his large array, heard of his eagerness and turned back to give battle. The Royalists, with the pick of the ground, drew up on Marston Moor. They had plenty of space on clear moorland, protected by a road and a significant ditch that would hamper enemy charges.
Word reached Oxford on the 9th of July that Prince Rupert had accomplished a great Royalist victory. It was reported that one of the Parliamentary leaders, the Earl of Manchester, was slain, and that Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Scots general David Leslie had been captured. General rejoicing broke out. Bonfires blazed. Ale flowed in the streets. Church bells rang.
Three days later the King, with his own troops in the west, received the Prince's dispatch telling the true story. Marston Moor was a disaster, a bloody defeat. The North was lost. York was lost. The intended march on London would never happen. The King's best troops were destroyed. Lord Newcastle's famous infantry, his Whitecoats, had stood and died to a man. Their bankrupt commander had fled to the Continent. Prince Rupert's fabulous reputation lay in shreds.
Parliament had found a new hope in Oliver Cromwell. For him the battle was a personal triumph; first his leadership of his 'Ironsides' had scattered Rupert's elite cavalry, then intelligence and discipline enabled him to rescue the situation elsewhere at the crucial time. Through Cromwell, Marston Moor could be a crucial turning point in the civil war.
Accurate accounts of the battle were quickly printed in London. Reality filtered up the Thames Valley to the Royalist headquarters. From Oxford's perspective, the battle in the north seemed far away and hard to appreciate. The false atmosphere of rejoicing died only slowly. For a long time no wounded men were brought south; few wives heard for certain whether they had been widowed; there were no eye-witness stories. It seemed unreal. The King, who had been pottering about on his endless manoeuvres against Essex and Waller, was currently penned in the West Country so his reaction was not witnessed. Prince Rupert was thought to have taken refuge at Chester with the rags of his cavalry but no one knew that for sure, or could say when, if ever, he might reappear in Oxford.
Life went on.
That Marston Moor was critical would slowly be accepted. The King, ever hopeful, ever sanguine when faced with losses, reassured despondent supporters that reverses would happen and that fortune might change in his favour again. Charles soon seemed justified when, after defeating William Waller at Cropredy Bridge, he was offered a great chance: the Earl of Essex wandered through Dorset and Devon, capturing Royalist houses and relieving Lyme and Plymouth, then calamitously continued on into the Cornwall peninsula. With Waller defeated, King Charles was safe to follow Essex. The Parliamentarians reached an area where the population was Royalist to a man. Eventually Essex was completely trapped at Lostwithiel. Though his cavalry cut their way out and Essex himself escaped by sea in a fishing smack, the infantry were starved into surrender. They laid down their arms and were allowed to march out, though every possible indignity, insult and hardship were inflicted on them by the King's men as they struggled to walk home across England.
While the King exulted, Parliament hastily summoned the Eastern Association troops back south. They were to join with the rags of Waller's army and prevent the King from sweeping to victory. A second battle was fought at Newbury. Weak deployment by the Earl of Manchester allowed the King to evade what should have been a decisive action. This was the occasion when Oliver Cromwell's exasperation with Lord Manchester brought him to argue for a new kind of army, which would be concentrated under one tried and determined commander. But while that idea was discussed in Parliament, the year ended with the same kind of stalemate as previously, Marston Moor almost seeming to count for nothing.
In Oxford one Sunday in early October a terrible fire occurred. For the garrison, the townspeople and those left behind by the field armies, this assumed much more importance than any aspect of the war. It began when a foot-soldier who had stolen a pig was roasting the beast in a cramped dwelling near the North Gate. The little house caught light. Fanned by a high north wind, flames spread rapidly. A frightening conflagration raced through much of the western area, from George Street south through St Ebbe's, destroying houses, stables, bakeries and brewhouses. As well as providing billets for soldiers, this was an area of labourers and artisans, who lived in cramped small cottages with too many thatched roofs and wooden chimneys. Oxford houses at the time tended to be built with timber rather than brick or stone. Their beams, bargeboards and decorative pargeting were grey with age and tinder-dry; the closeness of the buildings helped the flames to leap ferociously through entries and passageways.