Grant the King a loan £2000, Prince Rupert of the Rhine told the citizens of Leicester, or I will make a Magdeburg out of you.

Rupert, nephew to Charles and commander of his horse, made the demand two days in a letter to the corporation of Leicester, county town of the eponymous shire and a center of the hosiery trade.

If Leicester should refuse or ignore Rupert’s request, “I shall tomorrow appear before your town in such a posture with horse, foot and cannon as shall make you know it is more safest to obey than resist His Majesty’s command,” the letter said.

Rupert’s threats called to mind the sack of Madgeburg in 1631 by Graf zu Pappenheim and Count Tilly of the Catholic League, which resulted in the cruel murder of 25,000 Protestants by their mercenary armies and the utter devastation of a once-wealthy trading city on the Elbe.

The Leicester corporation offered £500. “Ungehort!” bellowed Rupert, and ordered the artillery train brought up from Nottingham.

Inquiring as to the reason for the sudden activity in his camp, King Charles, learning of his nephew’s scheme, ordered Rupert to stand down and sent a letter of apology to the rattled citizens of Leicester.

The King kept the £500. Rupert confessed himself perplexed. Why should he not sack Leicester? Like most manufacturing- and cloth-towns, it boasts a high proportion of Puritans and those sympathetic to Parliament among its inhabitants.

“Zey rebels are, and krieg this ist,” he said in his camp near Leicester, as he fed his much-beloved poodle-dog Boy scraps from a roast chicken. “To my uncle I love much have I, und the rebels will certainly crush in manner ferocious and terrible, ist.”

Rupert said the chicken, stuffed with sausage and sage, was “ein Schenkung” from the proprietor of the Sheep and Staff, an inn in nearby Thurmaston on the road to Nottingham. The innkeeper, discovered cowering in the the basement of the worthy establishment with family and servants, confirmed that the chicken “and the other things” were, indeed, “donations" to "my much-beloved King and the established Church of England."

The son of Charles’ daughter Elizabeth and the Frederick Elector Palatine, Rupert served with the Prince of Orange at the Reinberg seige in 1633, at Breda in 1637, and with the Swedes the year after. Captured on campaign, he was imprisoned in Linz at the castle of Graff von Kuffstein, and paroled last year on promising to never raise arms against the Holy Roman Emperor again.

Rupert’s action against Leicester confirms fears that he would bring the brutal “German school” of warfare to England, with its massacres, pillages, plunders, and outright destruction of villages and towns. The armies of that war, composed largely of mercenaries attracted by the prospect of rape and plunder, are self-financing, meaning pay and supply are extorted from town and countryside, and woe betide those unwilling or unable to pay. At least 20,000 villages and towns in the German states are said to have been destroyed since war broke out there in 1618, when the Bohemians, fed up with the overbearing Hapsburgs, their Catholic overlords, installed Rupert’s father Frederick II as their king.

Rupert is “inexperienced of the customs and manners of England,” said an observor who asked his name not be used “for obvious reasons.”

“His nature is rought and unpolished, which renders him less patient to hear, and consequently less skillful to judge of those things that should guide him,” the observor said.

Rupert visited England in 1637, and won widespread acclaim for his skill at hunting, and in such courtly diversions as masques, and was described by at least one lady as “a romantic and tragic hero.”