Gideon Jukes had found his regiment again, remaining with the dragoons as Sir Thomas Fairfax led the New Model Army through the West Country. They defeated Goring at the battle of Langport, during which picked bands of musketeers led by Lambert Jukes's colonel, Thomas Rainborough, crucially fought their way along the hedges to dislodge the Royalists. Lambert, with his foot wound healed, was back in the regiment. Subsequently, it was Gideon's turn for special action when a detachment under Colonel Okey left the main body of the army temporarily and captured Bath in a surprise dawn raid. They crept up so secretly, they were able to grab the barrels of the guards' muskets that stuck out of the loopholes; the guards fled, and after firing the gatehouse Okey's men took the town. Next the dragoons were at the siege of Bristol. Although they were facing Prince Rupert, he now had the difficulties that had beset Massey here two years before: insufficient troops, especially infantry, for the task of defending five miles of walled fortification. During Rupert's brief but fierce resistance, plague broke out, water ran low and expected orders from the King failed to arrive. None the less, he made good use of carefully positioned artillery, while his cavalry regularly dashed out to raid and harass. During one of these raids, Colonel Okey was taken prisoner, which depressed and unsettled his regiment.
Rupert delayed negotiations until Fairfax broke off discussion.
The ensuing assault was a dangerous and bloody action. The New Model breached the outer walls, then Rainborough's regiment took Prior's Hill Fort. First they climbed the walls in a hail of shot, then when their scaling ladders proved too short, they crept in at the portholes and after two hours' close combat the defenders were massacred. Rupert fell back towards Bristol Castle but when Cromwell's cavalry charged in, the prince realised his position was hopeless. The Royalists were granted terms, and Okey regained his liberty. The Parliamentarians could not know at the time, but Rupert's quarrel with the King over his surrender would soon rid them of the prince for good.
Fairfax then sent Colonel Rainborough to besiege Berkeley Castle, the only Royalist stronghold left between Bristol and Gloucester. He stormed it after a three-day bombardment. His regiment were deployed to Corfe Castle but, required for more important duties, they were pulled out. In December they went into quarters at Abingdon, on watch over the Oxford area as a preliminary to the city's siege. During the city blockade, Rainborough acquired a new sergeant.
Gideon Jukes had been having horse trouble. Never a natural rider, he was ill-suited to be a dragoon, much as he enjoyed it. After his first horse was shot under him at Naseby, the spirited remount he obtained was too strong and conscious of its own superiority. Gideon fought that horse all the way into the west but it finally threw him outside Bristol. His left spur caught, so for a couple of yards he was dragged along, head down. An alert colleague slashed the stirrup, cutting him free. He ended up sprawled in a bush with a dislocated shoulder while the horse galloped off. Ignominiously rescued, Gideon was taken up behind one of his men, as they all chaffed him and called him a dairymaid picked up for a ride to market because she looked good for a roll in a hayrick. An army surgeon took more delight than he thought necessary in wrenching his shoulder back into its socket.
A new horse was allocated by an agent.
A typical 'dragoon nag', this was a wry-nosed, sniffling creature that sickened and died after a day and a half. A horse doctor was summoned, far too late.
'What have you done to this bone-shaker, Sergeant?'
'He was snotty and hot on arrival.'
'You should have rejected him.'
'By the time I got a proper look, the agent was long gone. I hoped the sad beast was just spavined.'
The veterinarian stood up from the carcase and gave Gideon a straight look. He believed his equine expertise had given him acute understanding of human nature too. He was observant, certainly; he saw that Gideon was in his light-hearted mood. 'Have you any real idea what "spavined" means, Sergeant Jukes?'
'None at all. I gather he didn't have it?'
'Bastard strangles,' diagnosed the solemn expert. Gideon noticed the man was bandy-legged and knotted like a bunch of old rope — possibly the results of being thrown and kicked many times.
'Bastardy is more serious than honest strangles?' queried Gideon demurely.
'Goes around stables like a rat through shit. Mounts will be dropping all along the lines now. Keep your head down, or you'll cop the blame.'
'If I can get anyone to help drag him, I'll try to find a ditch upstream of a Royalist garrison to leave him in.' Gideon knew cavalrymen and dragoons felt little sentimentality towards their horses. In the midst of battle nobody could afford to stand weeping over the body of a faithful mount. But despite their short time together, he had taken responsibility for his animal. He felt driven to assert this: 'His name is Sir Rowland.'
'Rather extravagant?'
'Least I could do. He had nothing else going for him.'
Not only did Sir Rowland cause an epidemic, but since the horse had been supplied to him by the army, Gideon had to replace it at his own cost. Highly indignant, he pointed out that the army had been cheated by the two-timing agent, who had passed off on them a horse that was only fit to be fed to pigs. This happened so frequently no one got excited. Gideon then claimed that because of their pay arrears, he had no money for a new horse, 'even a new one of this piss-poor, rib-rattling quality'. He managed by borrowing other men's mounts, until February. When the next campaign season was about to start, the New Model battened down to finish the Oxford siege and his colonel reviewed the condition of his regiment. First he scrutinised the men's spiritual and political views; Okey was famous for weeding out anyone who failed to match his own beliefs. Next he inspected their horses. That was bad news for Gideon.
John Okey had come to view Sergeant Gideon Jukes as a slyly subversive character. This Jukes received pamphlets from London, which Okey suspected were seditious; the sergeant passed them on to others once he had read them. He seemed dangerously intrigued by England's Birth-right Justified, by John Lilburne, a man Gideon had heard of in the Eastern Association while he himself was working for Sir Samuel Luke. Colonel Lilburne, though then on good terms with Oliver Cromwell, had not joined the New Model Army but resigned from service because he refused to take the oath of the Covenant. He believed Presbyterianism, with its enforced suppression of all other beliefs, was just as terrible as imposed Catholicism or high Anglicanism.
Saturnine, highly intelligent and passionately argumentative, 'Freeborn John' Lilburne had become a prolific political author. He had a history of imprisonment for sedition. In 1637, after a pamphlet critical of bishops, he was pilloried, flogged — two hundred stripes — and imprisoned, becoming a popular hero, but was freed by the Long Parliament. Then early in the war, Royalists captured him; they took him to Oxford where they intended to hang him. Parliament threatened retaliation against its Royalist prisoners; in the nick of time Lilburne was saved when his pregnant wife Elizabeth carried a letter from the Speaker of the House of Commons to the King's headquarters. Subsequently he was freed in a prisoner-exchange. Now his quarrel was with Parliament.
Lilburne had embarked on a serious campaign for reform. Gideon had found his pamphlet startling. After a dry argument that Parliament's power should be limited in order to protect individual rights, it went on to denounce a curious mix of monopolies: preaching, as held by the established Church; wool and foreign trade, as controlled by the Merchant Adventurers; and printing. That was what caused Robert Allibone to send this pamphlet to Gideon; it echoed Robert's long-term loathing of the dead hand of the Stationers' Company.