When a royalist force made up largely of Somerset’s German and Italian mercenaries arrived on the scene at last, the rebels were forced to break off their siege and then were crushed in a series of increasingly lopsided battles. In the end nothing remained but a panicky mass of fleeing peasants. As many as four thousand men were dead by the time it was all over, most of them killed in combat but the last executed. A striking feature of the whole episode was the extent to which the Crown had to use foreign mercenaries to save itself from its own subjects.
