Balls ...

Horrible weather and stuck indoors all day today, so limited opportunities to blip.

You therefore get a boring history lesson!

These are musket balls from the English Civil War (1640's). One of my ancestors was a Colonel in the Queens Regiment of Horse (who were at one time Queen Henrietta Maria's bodyguard).

On 5th November 1643, he was in action at Olney Bridge in Buckinghamshire where he was "shot through the arm, and who, as his manner is, behaved himself very manfully". He was knighted for his bravery.

He also did particularly well at the Second Battle of Newbury where he commanded his regiment to "stand most gallantly to resist a Parliamentarian charge" and he then counter-attacked and "if Colonel Sir John had not given that brisk charge by which other troops were ready to charge them in the flank, the King himself would have been in very great danger"

He was clearly on first name terms with both the King and Queen Henrietta Maria, and the Queen had mentioned him very positively in one of her letters to her husband.

Such an ordinary man who performed such heroic acts of bravery. Always makes me a little bit sad. His house still stands in Lancashire, and his coat of arms is built into the chimney above the fire-place, and dated 1635. How his life turned upside down over the next 10 years. He surrendered on 30 April 1646, but it's not known what happened to him after this. He just seemed to have disappeared....