Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/354

320 promotion: he here, attempting to defeat some insurrectionary party of this Poyer’s ‘at a Pass’ (name of the Pass not given), is himself defeated, forced into a Church and killed. Drunken Poyer, in Pembroke strong Castle, defies the Parliament and the world: new Colonels, Parliamentary and Presbyterian-Royalist, are hastening towards him, for and against. Wales, smoking with confused discontent all Spring, has now, by influence of the flaming Scotch comet or Army of Forty-thousand, burst into a general blaze. ‘The gentry are all for the King; the common people understand nothing, and follow the gentry.’ Chepstow Castle too has been taken ‘by a stratagem.’ The country is all up or rising: ‘the smiths have all fled, cutting their bellows before they went;’ impossible to get a horse shod,—never saw such a country! On the whole, Cromwell will have to go. Cromwell, leave being asked of Fairfax, is on the 1st of May ordered to go; marches on Wednesday the 8d. Let him march swiftly!

Horton, one of the Parliamentary Colonels, has already, while Cromwell is on march, somewhat tamed the Welsh humour, by a good beating at St. Fagan’s: St. Fagan’s Fight, near Cardiff, on the 8th of May, where Laughern, hastening towards Poyer and Pembroke, is broken in pieces. Cromwell marches by Monmouth, by Chepstow (11th May); takes Chepstow Town; attacks the Castle, Castle will not surrender,—he leaves Colonel Ewer to do the Castle, who, after four weeks, does it. Cromwell, by Swansea and Carmarthen, advances towards Pembroke; quelling disturbance, rallying force, as he goes; arrives at Pembroke in some ten days more; and, for want of artillery, is like to have a tedious siege of it.