Author: Richard Heath

Orders of the day, Volume 32, Issue 1, Jan/Feb 2000

In the years immediately after 1642, Melbourne in Derbyshire was well and truly caught up in conflict. Merchants were afraid to take their goods to market in Derby, and the vicar had escaped to avoid arrest by the Royalist soldiers led by Robert Hardinge of Kings Newton. Melbourne Hall housed Parliamentarian troops, and Sir John Coke the younger, the owner, provided his Wilne ferry boats to transport arms from Nottingham to Kings Mills near Castle Donington, as well as carts for the overland journey to Swarkestone and through Derbyshire. Fighting was constantly flaring up at the other local river crossings.

On February 15 1644 the Royalist Commander Lord Loughborough reinforced his garrison at nearby Kings Mills. Almost immediately the news reached the Parliamentarian Commander John Gell, who led out almost his entire garrison of troops from Derby, determined to retake this important river crossing. “The storehouse was well fortified and Gell’s cannons made little impression.” So with 30 handpicked men he scaled the works in the dead of night, “beat down the windows and stormed in and so forced them to cry quarter.”

Gell reports five killed and twenty wounded, but captured 200 of the enemy, including, as he describes it, “with some malignant countymen fledd thyther for safetie”. Another report stated Sir John Gell captured Kings Mills, taking prisoner one captain, a lieutenant and fifty two men, losing five of his men and forty wounded in the process. Whatever the true story, the struggle went on. During the same year (no exact date given) a Royalist attempt was made to recover the river crossing at Wilne. “The besiegers adopted a method of making their approaches under the shelter of wagons filled with hay, to which, after they had advanced within a short distance of the works, they set fire and commenced the attack whilst their enemies were half blinded by the dense smoke. The smoke speedily filled the entrenchments, compelling the commander of the garrison to surrender.”

Further evidence of the constant battles for these important river crossings comes in an extract taken from the registers of Weston on Trent dated July 4 1644. “Some soldiers buryed of ye garrison at Kings Mill ford held by the Royal Forces.” “August 7 Duck a soldier buried a little aft;” not far from Melbourne as the crow flies. But what happened to the parish’s commanders? Robert Hardinge, a Royalist of Kings Newton, survived the war, a serious court action and near ruin from his extravagancies in supporting and entertaining the King, to receive a knighthood in 1675. Sir John Coke however was not so fortunate; writing to his son from Melbourne in 1644 he states: “You will hear by others how we have been used at Melbourne, first by Gell’s and now by Newcastle’s forces. I have lost all I had in this country, and have no more here to lose where as you know I had above £400 per year.”

So it would appear from the evidence that no-one from either side gained much from the Civil War, least of all the ordinary village folk of Melbourne and Kings Newton.