Derbyshire Trained Bands
- Derbyshire Trained Band
- Derbyshire Trained Band Horse
The Derbyshire Trained Bands of 1638 consisted of 400 men armed with 239 muskets and 161 corslets (body armour, signifying pikemen). They also mustered 33 cuirassiers and 41 dragoons.
In March 1640 it was ordered that Trained Band men should be shipped to Newcastle for service against the Scots: Derby 400. to be shipt the tenth of June at Grimsby, to be at the General Rendezvouz the twenty fifth of May, to march thence the fifth of June1).
In August 1642 King Charles ordered the Derby Trained Band arms seized to equip his nascent field army.
In March 1650 Nathaniel Barton was commissioned Colonel of the Derbyshire Militia Horse and Foot.
Derbyshire Trained Band of Foot
| Active | 1644 |
| 1650 | |
| Country | England |
| Allegiance | Parliamentarian |
| Conflicts | First Civil War |
| Third Civil War | |
| Type | Foot |
| Colonel | Nathaniel Barton (1650) |
| Area Raised | Derbyshire |
| Coat Colour | |
| Flag Colour | |
| Flag Design | |
| Field Armies | Meldrum 1644 |
Trained Band supporting the Parliamentarians
Service History
1644
- March: Battle of Newark?
1650
- Nathaniel Barton commissioned colonel
1651
- September: Barton serving as Major of Colonel Thomas Saunders' Regiment of Horse during the Worcester campaign
Notes
Coats, Flags and Equipment
Notable Officers
Nathaniel Barton
From The Cromwell Association Online Directory of Parliamentarian Army Officers 2)
Nathaniel Barton (1615/16-1672/73). Son of Edmund Barton, rector of Broseley, Shropshire. Nathaniel matriculated from New Inn Hall, Oxford, in 1634, graduated BA in 1638 and proceeding MA in 1641 and BD in 1649. Chaplain to Sir Thomas Burdett and MP for Derbyshire in the Nominated Assembly and the first Protectorate parliament. According to one source, on 13 July 1643 Barton and Captain Hope, ‘two martial ministers of Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire coming to Peterborough, break open the Vestery and take away a Fair Crimson Satten Table Cloth and several other things’ (Calamy Revised, 33). However, the date here is dubious.
In late spring 1643 Barton was major in Robert Haughton’s regiment of Derbyshire and Staffordshire foot at Burton-upon-Trent (of which Thomas Sanders was lieutenant-colonel), and was captured when the town fell to the royalists on 2 July.
After his release, Sanders appointed him captain in the regiment of horse which he raised, of which Sanders was major and Sir John Gell colonel. Gell placed Barton in command of the garrison of Barton Blount, from where he could harass the royalists at Tutbury 3 miles away, and from there he reported to Sir William Brereton. Barton was, however, hostile to Gell, and in Mar. 1645 he was one of those godly Derbyshire captains of horse then serving with Brereton who were more in sympathy with the latter (who in turn described him and Captain Joseph Swetnam as ‘very reverend divines’ (Dore, Brereton letter books, 1.79), and who resented Gell starving their regiment of supply to force their return to Derbyshire. In Dec. 1645 he was one of the officers complaining against Gell to the committee of examinations.
In 1645 he became captain in Richard Graves’s regiment of horse in the New Model Army, and in Mar. 1647 he contradicted the claims of another officer that the regiment was not discontented. After Graves was replaced as colonel by Adrian Scrope, Barton was promoted major, and commanded the regiment’s three troops at the battle of St Fagan’s (8 May 1648). He may have been back in the Midlands by the summer. He was present at the Army Council meetings in Nov. and Dec. 1648, and served in Scrope’s regiment of horse until its disbandment after Burford.
On 2 Mar. 1650, as colonel, Barton was commissioned commander-in-chief of the Derbyshire militia horse and foot and seems to have served temporarily the following year as major of Thomas Sanders’s regiment of horse (previously Francis Thornhaugh’s) and fought in the Worcester campaign.
A JP in 1650, and in Oct., when George Fox was arrested after having followed Barton in preaching at St Peter’s, Derby, Barton was one of the magistrates who examined him (his colleague Gervase Bennet was then the first to use the word ‘Quaker’ in relation to Fox). Barton was a JP in Derbyshire in the 1650s. A moderate in the Nominated Assembly, and a member of the first Protectorate parliament, he was appointed a commissioner for enquiring into the arrears of the excise in Dec. 1654.
When Sanders was re-instated to the command of his regiment after the fall of Richard Cromwell, Barton became its major again until Monck placed other officers in their stead. Barton and Sanders were both arrested in late 1659, apparently for armed resistance; on 27 Dec. the restored Long Parliament ordered their release, and the same day Colonel Hacker released them. Barton was promptly authorized to disarm parliament’s enemies in Staffordshire and a place was found for him as major of Robert Swallow’s late regiment (now under Sanders).
At the Restoration Barton was curate of Caldwell chapel, Stapenhill parish, Derbyshire, but was ejected in 1662. An informer in 1669 accused him of being privy to a conspiracy and described him as ‘Captaine or Major Barton formerly in Armes agt. the late King and a minister att the beginning of the warres…who purchased some of the King’s lands wch he hath lost and is highly discontented’ (Calamy Revised, 33). He made his will on 30 Mar. 1672, leaving a wife (Sarah), two sons and four daughters; it was proved on 10 Nov. 1673.
References: Calamy Revised, 33; Woolrych, Commonwealth, 121, 313, 384n., 410-11; Turbutt, Derbyshire, 3. 1062, 1070, 1078, 1087, 1093, 1097, 1100, 1133, 1138; Dore, Brereton letter books, 1.79, 498, 524; Firth and Davies, Regimental History, 1.103, 105, 107, 109, 114, 283-4, 288-90; CSPD 1650, 504; Slack, ‘Gell and Sanders’, 137; www.theclergydatabase.org.uk; HoP: The Commons, 1640-1660 (forthcoming); Wanklyn, New Model Army, I, 63, 74, 84, 96, 108.
Strength
- 1638: 400 men
