Hereford and the Welsh Marches had been a Royalist recruiting ground throughout the First English Civil War. After Naseby on 14 June 1645, Charles I retreated to Hereford and then on into South Wales, hoping to rebuild his army from Welsh levies and the Irish Confederates. He left Barnabas Scudamore - a prominent local man recently appointed Governor - to hold the city. Scudamore had improved the defences considerably. He had also dealt with a strange episode in the spring when 15,000 clubmen, country folk exhausted by war and looting, marched on Hereford demanding peace before being dispersed by Prince Rupert. Now Scudamore had to do something harder. The Committee of Both Kingdoms in London had ordered the Scots south to attack Hereford. They came via Alcester and stormed the fortified manor of Canon Frome near Ledbury on the way, killing many of the defenders and executing Sir John Barnard, the Royalist commander.

Leven's men reached Hereford at the end of July. After an initial fight at the bridge over the Wye, Leven offered Scudamore surrender terms. Scudamore refused - he had no permission from the king and still hoped for relief - so the Scots settled in for a siege. They were unusually disciplined. Leven kept strict orders against looting, which was the kind of behaviour that, in 17th-century warfare, usually defined whether a town hated or merely resented its besiegers. Several major assaults followed, all of them repulsed. In one of them, the Scottish Major General Lawrence Crawford was killed by a Royalist sniper - a sharpshooter firing from the city walls. The medieval church of St Martin's, on the south bank of the Wye, was so badly damaged by the besiegers' guns that it was not fully rebuilt until the Victorian era. Historians have called Leven's conduct of the siege overcautious, but it was also patient. He was prepared to wait.

Then the news came that broke the siege. On 15 August 1645, far to the north in Scotland, the Marquis of Montrose - leading a Scottish Royalist army with his allied Irish Brigade - had crushed the Covenanter government's forces at the Battle of Kilsyth. The Scottish Lowland regime that Leven represented was on the verge of collapse. With Charles I also marching slowly toward Hereford to relieve the city, Leven made his decision. On the night of 1-2 September he abandoned the siege and marched north. He intended to take his army home to deal with Montrose. The Scottish gambit on Hereford had failed - not because the city resisted brilliantly, but because the war had turned somewhere else entirely. Charles I entered Hereford on 4 September, knighted Scudamore for the defence, and then marched away again, north toward Chester, hoping to link up with Montrose's forces.

Within two weeks of leaving Hereford, the Covenanters had crushed Montrose at the Battle of Philiphaugh on 13 September. Any chance of Royalist intervention in Scotland was ended. Prince Rupert surrendered Bristol the same week. The Royalist cause had only one direction left, and it was downward. On 18 December 1645, just three months after the siege had been raised, Parliamentary forces under Colonel John Birch and Sir Thomas Morgan made a night attack on Hereford. The city was carried by surprise. Most of the garrison were captured before they could form up. Scudamore was arrested and accused of having accepted a bribe to surrender the city, which was almost certainly false - he had defended it through a siege only three months earlier - but he was held without trial in Worcester for several months. Birch was made the new Governor. Hereford remained in Parliamentary hands for the rest of the First Civil War and through the two later Civil Wars that followed.

Daniel Defoe, writing in 1720, recreated the siege in his novel Memoirs of a Cavalier - told from the perspective of an imaginary Royalist participant. Defoe had not been there; he was born in 1660, fifteen years after the events. But his account captured something of what the siege had felt like to those inside the walls. The siege of Hereford is now largely forgotten, overshadowed by Naseby, by Marston Moor, by the larger battles of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. But for the people of Hereford, it was the closest war ever came to swallowing the city whole. The damaged St Martin's stood as a roofless ruin for centuries afterward - a reminder that wars are not lost only in the famous places. Sometimes they are lost in a quiet cathedral city on the bend of the Wye, while a Scottish army sits outside and waits for news that never quite arrives in time.