Progress

In a spurt of activity over the last couple of days I finished off a book I'd been reading and nearly completed painting the buildings I bought recently. Now I'm itching to get started on something else. It seems to come and go like that - inactive for months, then completing things like billy-o.

The book was Serena Jones' biography of Sir George Lisle, the Royalist colonel executed by Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in the Second English Civil War. Without wishing to sound like I'm condemning it with faint praise, I think it was a brave move to write a book over 300 pages long when there appears to be scant information about the man. There's very little record of his life before the ECW, the author posits that it is plausible that Lisle could have been a professional solider on the Continent but there is no solid evidence.  I can't fault the scholarship though. Jones does not make any claims that aren't backed up by the sources. The trouble is the sources are thin on the ground.

A lot of the early part of the book is about his family before his birth - there seems to be more about his father's early life than there is about George's. Lisle was the son of a publisher/printer who had links to court (and was some sort of protégé of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham). So really middle class and not landed gentry. That's one in the eye for the Marxist explanation of the war. 

Much of the book consists of accounts of campaigns where Lisle was present (Edgehill, Newbury I and II, Cheriton, Croperedy, Cornwall, Naseby) but again, there is not much about what Lisle actually did because of a lack of surviving contemporary information. The chapter with the most about Lisle's known exploits is the one on Newbury II where Lisle's tercio held of Manchester's attacks in the eastern part of the battlefield. The story was that during a climactic part of the battle, Lisle threw off his coat (and armour?) so that his men could more easily recognise him in his white shirt.

This would make a good little game. The area of this map is 400 x 500 yards. 1,000-2,000 troops on the Royalist side and a few thousand on the Parliamentarian side.

The final part goes into a lot of fascinating detail about the siege of Colchester, arguably the event most associated with Lisle, but not much mention of him. I can see why someone would want to produce a biography of the man* but it could have fit into a much smaller volume than this.

* The story of his execution was the hook for me. In case you don't know, Lisle told his firing squad to come much closer to make sure they would hit him. One of the executioners said words to the effect of "don't worry, we'll hit you", to which Lisle replied, "you have been much closer to me before and missed". How could you not be impressed by a guy like that.

American on the left; English on the right. I will glue the brick walls on something to make them more stable. Maybe cut down the lolly sticks here.

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On Sunday whilst en route to a football match, I planned to rendezvous with a couple of friends at Tottenham Court Road. Whilst there I spotted a church I've not noticed before: St Patricks Church, Soho Square. 

I like this style of architecture. Italianate?