General Ludlow's Baptist Comrades

Abstract

"EDMUND LUDLOW was of good Wiltshire family, his father being a knight of the shire in 1640. Trained at Oxford and the Inner Temple, he responded to Charles waging war, by enlisting in the hundred Life-Guards of the Earl of Essex, along with Thomas Harrison and six others who rose to high rank. After Edge Hill, he was detached to defend Wardour Castle, then was commissioned to raise a regiment to serve under WaIler in the West, which was disbanded when the New Model was created. Meanwhile he had been chosen Sheriff of Wilts before he was thirty; then in 1646 succeeded his father as M.P. and owner of Maiden Bradley, seven miles south of Frome, on the borders of Wilts. The governing principle of his life henceforth was loyalty to this Parliament; first as he found it without any Royalist members, then to the Rump after it was purged by Colonel Pride. When he wrote his memoirs, they closed with its disappearance in March, 1660."