by the pro-Parliamentary governor, Sir John Hotham, who expelled the party, causing it to withdraw with the King to York. Early in July, the King returned from York with a force of 3,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry, intent on besieging the city, now garrisoned by reinforcing Parliamentary troops commanded by Sir John Meldrum, returning to York while leaving Lord Lindsey in command through the siege. Meldrum ordered some effective sorties out of the city, the last of which, on 27 July, blew up the arsenal Lindsey's troops had set up at Anlaby, west of Hull. Lindsey's force, whose cavalry were unsupported by the infantry who had withdrawn to Beverley, gave up the siege after this loss of their munitions and retreated back to York, lifting the siege. Battle of Edgehill As Lord Lindsey was a most experienced soldier of 59 years of age at the start of the English Civil War, King Charles I had appointed him General-in-chief of the Royalists for the Battle of Edgehill. However, the King had imprudently exempted the cavalry from Lindsey's command, its general, the King's nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine, taking orders only from the King. Rupert was only 22 years old, and although an experienced soldier who had fought in the Thirty Years' War, he had not yet learnt that cavalry should also be used in support of infantry and not just against the enemy's cavalry. With Lindsey was his son Montagu Bertie, Lord Willoughby who had seen some service against the Spaniards in the Netherlands, and after his return had been made a captain in the Lifeguards, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Anthony van Dyck has left portraits of the father and the son; the one a bald-headed, alert, precise-looking old warrior, with the cuirass and gauntlets of earlier warfare; the other, the very model of a cavalier, tall, easy, and graceful, with a gentle reflective face, and wearing the long lovelocks and deep-point lace collar and cuffs characteristic of Queen Henrietta's Court. At eight o'clock, on the morning of 23 October 1642 King Charles was riding along the ridge of Edge Hill, and looking down into the Vale of the Red Horse, a fair meadow land, here and there broken by hedges and copses. His troops were mustering around him, and in the valley he could see with his telescope the various Parliamentary regiments, as they poured out of