Civil War Siege, Assault and Massacre
During the Civil War Hopton Castle was one of the few castles to be held for the Parliament in the west. Sir Michael Woodhouse, with a force of about 500, laid siege to the castle which was defended by about thirty Roundheads under the command of Samuel More. More eventually agreed terms and surrendered.
There are varying versions of what happened next. According to More's account all those who surrendered, apart from himself, were killed and buried. Other accounts vary on how the siege ended. They state that after a three week siege, More delayed surrendering until the bailey had been taken and the entrance to the keep was on fire, at which point he surrendered at the discretion of Sir Michael Woodhouse, who under the laws of war as they were practised at that time, choose not to accept the surrender and ordered the killings.
The castle was still habitable in 1700 but fell into disrepair soon afterwards. Substantial remnants of the much altered keep remain.
Read more about this topic: Hopton Castle (structure)
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war, assault and/or massacre:
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.”
—Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)