Storming of Bolton (1644)
Who Fought
Royalist: 2,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry (total force available to Rupert in the campaign). Parliamentarian: 4,000 men manning the defensive line around Bolton.
History & Significance
The Storming of Bolton, sometimes referred to as the "Bolton massacre", was an event in the First English Civil War which happened on 28 May 1644. The strongly Parliamentarian town was stormed and captured by Royalist forces under Prince Rupert. It was alleged that up to 1,600 of Bolton's defenders and inhabitants were slaughtered during and after the fighting. The "massacre at Bolton" became a staple of Parliamentarian propaganda.
In Lancashire, before the start of the civil war, there was social and economic tension between towns which generally supported Parliament, and the landowning gentry and aristocracy who controlled the rural areas and mostly supported the king as Royalists. There was a religious divide with some towns supporting dissenting nonconformist or puritan movements. Bolton was known as the "Geneva of the north", a reference to the city in Switzerland which was a centre of Calvinism.
The major Royalist figure in Lancashire was James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby. He was slow to take measures to secure the county at the start of the civil war in 1642, and after setbacks the following year, including two failed attempts to capture Bolton, he temporarily abandoned the contest in Lancashire to secure the other area in which he held major interests, the Isle of Man. The only threat to Parliamentarian control of Lancashire came from Cheshire, where a Royalist army under John Byron, 1st Baron Byron, was formed in late 1643. On 26 January 1644, Byron was defeated at the Battle of Nantwich by Parliamentarians under Sir William Brereton and Sir Thomas Fairfax, leaving Parliamentarians in control of the area.
Fairfax's army and some Lancashire Parliamentarians under Colonel Alexander Rigby began the Siege of Lathom House, seat of the Earl of Derby, which was defended by his wife, the Countess of Derby. However, Fairfax crossed the Pennines in late March to rejoin his father, Lord Fairfax, in Yorkshire.
The Royalists had intended to send the king's nephew and foremost field commander, Prince Rupert, to the northwest to retrieve the situation early in 1644. Rupert set up headquarters in Shrewsbury, from where he led a force to the Relief of Newark. It became even more important to regain the northwest when the Fairfaxes and a Scottish Covenanter army began the Siege of York on 22 April. As Rupert lacked the strength to proceed immediately to relieve York, it was agreed at a council of war in Oxford, the king's wartime capital, that he would first move into Lancashire to restore Royalist fortunes, use the Earl of Derby's influence to gather fresh recruits, and secure the port of Liverpool to allow communications with Royalist forces in Ireland.
The ground they fought on
The site of Storming of Bolton (1644) lies on Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation And South Wales Middle Coal Measures Formation (Undifferentiated), bedrock that formed in the Moscovian. The rock here is mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, coal, ironstone and ferricrete.
Among the most striking details of the storming is the means by which the Parliamentarian commander saved himself. Colonel Alexander Rigby escaped the carnage not by breaking out through the fighting but by obtaining the Royalist password and simply walking away through the besieging force in the darkness and pouring rain. He then made his way across country to the great allied army besieging York, where he presented his own version of the disaster, claiming that 1,500 of his men had been ill-armed clubmen fit only to club rather than shoot, and that his true losses were a mere 200 men. The commanders around York received his account with visible scepticism, recording that 'vulgar reports' told a far grimmer story of slaughter rather than flight.
- Royalist: 300 casualties in the first assault; Lieutenant Colonel John Russell wounded, his major taken prisoner. Parliamentarian: Royalists claimed 1,000 dead; Colonel Rigby claimed only 200 dead. Total alleged dead among defenders and inhabitants put as high as 1,600.
Frequently Asked Questions
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