Siege of Lowestoft

The Siege of Lowestoft was a brief Parliamentarian operation in March 1643 during the First English Civil War, when Oliver Cromwell suppressed a small Royalist rising that had secured the port of Lowestoft in Suffolk. In what was one of the first major actions of Cromwell's Regiment of Horse,^[1] the Eastern Association forces seized arms and took the local gentry prisoner to Cambridge.^[2] Unlike much of Suffolk Lowestoft was sympathetic to the royalists partly due to her commercial rivalry with the Parliamentarian Great Yarmouth.^[3] It was the only battle in the Civil War within the otherwise solidly Parliamentarian Suffolk.^[4] Prisoners taken by Cromwell included the courtiers John Pettus^[5] and Thomas Knyvett.