CHAPTER TEN
It was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost …
Resolution of the Army, April 1648
On 3 May 1648 Cromwell took the road towards the wild and lovely land of Wales, to carry out his own ordained part in the Second Civil War, which was to subdue it. By 8 May he was at Gloucester. Here he made a short speech in front of each regiment, at the end of which he took the opportunity to remind the soldiers of his own claims on their loyalties, it being now two years since he had seen action: how
he had often times ventured his life with them, and they with him, against the common enemy of this kingdom … and therefore desired them to arm themselves with the same resolution as formerly and to go on with the same courage, faithfulness and fidelity, as sundry times they had done, and upon several desperate attempts and engagements … for his part, he protested to live and die with them.
No sooner had Cromwell finished than all the soldiers together gave vent to ‘a great shout and hallow’, throwing their caps in the air, showing that they too had their memories; unanimously they cried out that they would venture their lives and fortunes under his command, against any enemy either at home or abroad.1
The Second Civil War, then, started in an atmosphere of much determination on the part of the common soldiers, as well as their leaders. This new certainty, in contrast to the hesitations of the previous conflict, concentrated not only on the malignant, those responsible for the inception of the war, but also on the arch-villain of the piece, Charles Stuart. One resolution of the Army in April had called him ‘that man of blood’ and spoke of calling him to account ‘if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace’ for ‘the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost …’ In this tough mood the regiments headed for the southern Welsh borders, not only to an area generally believed to be ‘in a flame’ as Cromwell wrote to Fairfax, but also to one owing much of its inflammability to the action of former Parliamentary supporters. Colonel John Poyer, for example, who now raised the south-western peninsula with the aid of redundant soldiers discontented by conditions of disbandment, had actually been made Parliamentary commander-in-chief for four counties at the end of the First Civil War.2
Poyer was an interesting man, a convinced Presbyterian who was also fond of his drink – ‘a man of two dispositions every day’ said Whitelocke, ‘in the morning sober and penitent, in the evening drunk and full of plots’. He was indeed a man of much spirit in every sense of the word, public spirit because he rose from humble origins to become Mayor of Pembroke, and personal spirit for he showed daring and independence in his judgements: when he heard that the great Cromwell was coming after him, he declared that he would be the first man to charge against the Ironsides, and if Cromwell had ‘a back of steel and a breast of iron, he durst and would encounter him’. But the judgement of the Army now on his heels was that Poyer was ‘proud and insolent’, and worse than that, ‘a shameful Apostate’ from their own cause.3
It was thus the presence of their former supporters, both in the Royalist ranks and at their head, which gave the Welsh rising its peculiarly vicious character in the minds of the advancing Army. The availability of such military expertise made it potentially dangerous. A contemporary newsletter spoke of Poyer terrorizing people into obeying him, thus wakening again ‘a discontented party in this kingdom, which began to fall asleep and to acquiesce in the orders of Parliament …’ Simple people, far from the capital, in face of Poyer’s successes began to believe stories such as the return of the King, the restoration of the bishops, and London turning against Parliament. The fate of the army left in Wales had not been enviable, as the agile Welsh took to the hills. An English report complained that, at the same time they often spoiled or took away anything which might have been of use to the soldiers, ‘they being a spiteful, mischievous people’. There was a particular lack of forges and blacksmiths; one unfortunate Englishman was reported as having to pay 40s. to get his horse shod; ‘Mr Vulcan has shown himself a great enemy to our proceedings,’ commented another sufferer. Since mottos in the hats of the so-called Welsh malignants made their desires painfully clear (one read: ‘I long to see His Majestie …’) the Parliamentary pamphlet on the subject ended by suggesting crossly that some unusual course should be taken to ‘bring down the stomachs of this little-less-than-barbarous people’.4
But by the time Cromwell crossed into Wales the Royalists, under Colonel Laugharne, another former Parliamentary commander, had already suffered a crippling blow at St Fagans near Cardiff where they were heavily defeated by Colonel Horton. The remnants of the Royalist army now withdrew to Pembroke Castle, lying on the extreme south-west tip of the land; Cromwell was merely left with a few fortresses to mop up en route to meet Horton. He confronted the first of these, Chepstow Castle, an enormous, proliferating structure on the banks of the Wye, on 11 May. Oddly enough, it was a stronghold he also had a personal interest in taking since, like many of the villages through which they had passed, it formed part of the properties of the Marquess of Worcester, theoretically granted to Cromwell by Parliament. For all pride of ownership, after a sharp struggle to enter the town Cromwell had to content himself with staying in a modest dwelling in a narrow street close to the bridge, while the castle itself, under its vigorous commander Sir Nicholas Kemoys, obstinately withstood siege. In the end Cromwell did not stay to see the conclusion, but leaving Colonel Ewer in charge, pushed forward to Cardiff, and so on round the much-inletted coastline of South Wales towards Tenby. Here the amazing position occupied by Tenby Castle, between two cliffs, with panoramic views as far as Ireland in fine weather, gave its occupant, another former Parliamentary officer, Colonel Powell, with a body of five or six hundred men, an excellent opportunity of holding out for a considerable length of time. Colonel Horton was left to besiege Tenby, while once more Cromwell moved on with the main body of the army.
Tenby surrendered on 31 May, six days after the heroic Sir Nicholas had finally had Chepstow taken from him by storm, refusing to surrender. This left Pembroke. But here, before this undaunted castle, the great victor of Marston Moor and Naseby found himself bogged down for the next six weeks in a long and tiresome siege, which try as he might, he was unable to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. The truth was that Pembroke Castle had been so constructed as to be well-nigh impregnable under the conditions of medieval warfare, and if by chance these conditions were recreated, then the old fortress stood every chance of holding out as long as its supplies did. Taking its very name (Pen Broch, Head of the Inlet) from its position, it was situated above the harbour of Milford Haven, on a creek running down to the port, commanding the sea although not actually on it. Three sides of the haven surrounded the castle, at high tide the water lapping its soaring walls, and the third town side was fortified by a handsome ditch. Still an awesome sight today, by the middle of the seventeenth century Pembroke Castle had already witnessed much passage of British history since the first fortress was raised on its site just after the Conquest. From here Strongbow had set forth to conquer Ireland; from this castle Owen Cadogan had carried off that Helen of Welsh annals, the lovely Nest; here Henry Tudor – Henry VII – had grown to manhood, and close by here in 1485 he had landed on British soil once more to grab the crown at Bosworth, incidentally bringing with him Cromwell’s Welsh ancestor.
Unfortunately Cromwell was singularly ill-equipped to deal with what thus might be described as the cradle of his family’s fortunes. While the Colonels Poyer and Laugharne were well dug in within with a considerable body of men, Cromwell himself had no suitable big guns with which to dent such walls of up to twenty feet in thickness, not much affected by his culverins and drakes. For all that the committee of nearby Carmarthen dutifully sent him shells and shot cast in their iron furnaces (Mr Vulcan was now more amicable) and Hugh Peter collected him some heavy guns from Milford Haven, he desperately needed a proper siege train from England; but when the vital shipment set out from the Bristol Channel, it was wrecked in a storm on the way and ended up at Berkeley in Gloucestershire. Then straightforward assault failed when the besiegers’ ladders proved to be too short for walls of such immense height, including a four-storey, seventy-five-foot keep. Another attempt to storm the castle was repulsed when one of Cromwell’s Majors failed to bring in the reserves of pikemen and musketeers at the crucial moment. In the subsequent fierce fighting around the town, Laugharne managed to steal out of the castle and attack the Roundheads most effectively from the rear, killing thirty of them.
The Cromwellian camp was on the hills of Underdown, southeast of the town itself; Cromwell himself lived about two miles away at Welston Court, above Lamphey, with a rolling view to the haven; it was the house of a Captain Walter Cuney who had fought for Parliament at Tenby, and according to local tradition Cromwell spent much of his time there in bed from an attack of gout.* But the interminable lagging siege was enough to give any commander twinges of impatience, without need of the ravages of disease, particularly since the situation of the Army elsewhere in England called urgently for the attention of its most celebrated General. The main problem of the besieged was of course provisions, and this in turn reacted unfavourably on the mood of Poyer’s soldiers who had not expected at the start of the rising to be led by him to starvation and incarceration. On 14 June, when the siege had already been effective for over three weeks, Oliver wrote optimistically back to London that ‘in all probability they cannot live a fortnight without being starved’. He also repeated rumours of the exceptional discontent of the inhabitants, said to have threatened to cut Poyer’s throat. To this the Colonel, showing his usual bold front, merely replied that if relief did not come by Monday night ‘they should no more believe him, they should hang him’. But Monday came, and with it no relief; it could only reach the beleaguered men by sea, and like Sister Anne in the fairy story of Bluebeard, they watched and waited from their high barbican, scanning the horizon of the haven; in vain for there were no Royalist ships to be seen. When at long last some vessels were sighted at the end of the estuary, a great shout of rejoicing went up from the garrison, who believed that the young Prince Charles had come to their aid with a fleet. Alas for their hopes, these were the equally long-awaited Parliamentary ships. There was now only ‘a little bisquit’ left to eat, and the horses were down to eating the thatch from the cottage roofs.5
But Cromwell was wrong too. It was not a fortnight, but another month before Pembroke was finally induced to surrender, and then treachery probably played its part as well as hunger. One of this redoubtable castle’s assets was its excellent water supply. This came in part from a natural limestone cave in its vaults, known as Wogan’s Cavern, leading down to a watergate on its south side, and in part from a conduit pipe leading to a hill near Monkton on the other side of the town. Cromwell seems to have considered first the idea of battering down this cavern, although the lack of damage there suggests he abandoned it; but he did cut the pipe, quite possibly as a result of the information betrayed by one Edmunds living at Monkton. If the tradition of Edmunds’s treachery is true – his family were said to have been known as the Cromwell Edmundses thereafter – the story ends sardonically with Cromwell hanging Edmunds for his pains, instead of paying him the lavish reward he expected. At all events on 11 July, Poyer and Laugharne, having little choice about it with their rebellious and starving troops, threw themselves on the mercy of Parliament.
And on the whole Cromwell did show great mercy. In Henry Fletcher’s words in his biography, Cromwell’s aim was ‘not to be too prodigal of precious blood; knowing that victory to be cheapest which is won without blows’. Specifically there was to be no plundering in the town. But he also discriminated markedly between those who were Royalists by conviction, i.e. in both wars, who emerged comparatively lightly with a mere two years’ exile, and those who were renegades from the Parliamentary side. ‘The persons excepted are those that have formerly served you in a very good cause,’ Cromwell reported back to the Speaker; ‘Being now apostasised, I did rather make election of them than of those who had always been for the king; judging their iniquity double; because they have sinned against so much light, and against so many evidences of divine providence.’6 The three leaders, Poyer, Laugharne and Powell, were taken down to London to the Tower and all three given the death sentence, although at Fairfax’s instance only one was actually shot. According to the morbid if picturesque custom of the time, a child drew out the lots. For both Laugharne and Powell the lot read ‘Life Given by God’. But Poyer’s paper was blank, and it was thus, nine months later, that he was duly shot in public at the Piazza at Covent Garden.
In vain had Poyer in his petition to Parliament for clemency spoken of his Puritan past, how in the First Civil War he had been one of the first who had appeared ‘against the Common Enemy’. In Cromwell’s view this sort of earlier good record was merely the measure of the harmful treachery of such turncoats; as late as November, he was still demonstrating how deep was the disgust he felt for the renegades by flying into a fury at the news that Colonel Humphrey Matthews, also captured at Pembroke, had been allowed to make composition for his punishment. Formerly a Colonel in the Parliamentary Army ‘he apostasised from your cause and quarrel … And how near you were brought to ruin thereby, all men that know anything can tell …’ This then was the importance of Cromwell’s Welsh campaign in his own development: he was certainly not seized by any particular xenophobic hatred of the Welsh peasantry, as he was to show for the Irish, calling them merely ‘a seduced and ignorant people’.7 His deep hatred was reserved for those ‘arch-cavaliering rogues’ whom he blamed for stirring up the poor silly innocent Welsh from the outside. It was a residue of dislike to be added to his already fast-growing resentment against those responsible for the Second Civil War, men who wilfully ignored the obvious lesson of Providence to be derived from the victories of the First.
Cromwell’s expedition to Wales had a secondary consequence of quite a different nature. His absence from London inevitably cut him off from the day-to-day development of political matters there; this detachment was to be prolonged into a total absence of seven months. Yet this is the most crucial period in which the dark necessities that led to the death of the nation’s sovereign were spun round Charles like webs by his enemies; Cromwell, afterwards regarded by many as the chief spider, was neither necessarily innocent nor ignorant of what was going on, but he was physically absent from the scene. Again, neither his ultimate responsibility nor his inner intentions need be affected; but inevitably his own actions were altered by being subject to this cutting-off process. It also has the unhappy effect of casting further obscurity on the truth of his own motives and participation.
Although the pacification of Wales now proceeded apace, elsewhere in the British Isles the cause of the Army still presented alarming facets. Risings in Kent and Essex had been suppressed by June, but Fairfax, with Ireton, was still occupied with the aftermath: the Royalist commander Sir Charles Lucas had retreated into the town of Colchester with about four thousand men and from there refused to be dislodged despite a protracted siege. Pontefract Castle, a formidable fortress south of Leeds in the direction of Doncaster, in a position to exert an effective stranglehold on surrounding territories, had been betrayed to the Royalists on 1 June; that too needed reduction by the Army – if it could be done. There were further insurrections during the month of June in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire; while across the narrow seas the young Prince of Wales had journeyed from France to Holland, and waited to sail with the nine Royalist ships which had been assembled. But as always, it was from the North, from the Scots, that the real danger was to be feared. And on 8 July, three days before the surrender of Pembroke Castle, the Scottish army, at this point about eleven thousand strong, had at last crossed the border.
This mighty beast now lumbering south with only Lambert’s slender northern command to stay it was in fact suffering from many internal weaknesses, even if these were more apparent to those on the spot than to the Parliamentary leaders alarmed by news of its approach. Political and religious disputes in Scotland had delayed its departure fatally; the ‘Engagers’, those who subscribed to the secret Carisbrooke agreement with the King (and would not necessarily insist on him taking the Covenant), strove with the more extreme Presbyterians who regarded it as a precondition. Not only did the vital months pass, months when the Scots might really have caught the English in disarray, but military power finally passed into the hands of the Engagers, since both Lord Leven and David Leslie, those veterans of skilled campaigning, withdrew. In common with the Covenanting leaders such as Argyll, and the ministers, these opponents of the new Scottish régime watched with hostile interest but without participation while the numerically large but singularly ill-equipped force was put together under James 1st Duke of Hamilton.8
For one thing the Scots had not a single gun, quite apart from being low in ammunition; even their troops were hardly the well-seasoned lads of Marston Moor, many of them never having held a pike before. Their cavalry was an improvement on the general picture, but on the other hand they lacked horses for drawing their wagons, which meant that supplies – or horses – had to be picked up along the way, in both cases infuriating to the countrymen who were thus robbed. Indeed the lack of provisions, combined with the inevitable lack of discipline among raw men, meant that this Scottish expedition set up new records for plunder and depredation as it passed through the north of England, a fact which was not to be without significance in its general reception there. Much of the added strength of this foray to replace the King on his throne was after all intended to come from English Royalists, and indeed Presbyterians, joining in on the way. But the Army was able to counter the attractions of such loyal behaviour with plausible suggestions that the Scots had been promised English land as a reward – a rumour which even Cromwell repeated in one of his letters.
The real weakness of the Scots was however, like the real strength of the English, at the top. The earlier military career of the Duke of Hamilton had been unfortunate, and would not have commended itself to Napoleon, who liked his Marshals to be lucky; a man of forty-two, supported by the huge dominions of the Hamiltons, for over a century the second family in Scotland, he was the elder brother of that Earl of Lanark who had acted as a commissioner in negotiating the controversial Engagement with Charles.* But Hamilton was hated by the ministers for having refused to sign the Covenant, while his qualities as a statesman scarcely made up for his unsuitability as a commander, for he had a regrettable knack of showing himself weak when he should have been strong and then making things even worse by reversing the process. In any case Hamilton had further problems within his own command: the Earl of Callander, the Lieutenant-General, was a man admittedly of proper military experience, having fought abroad in the Dutch Army, but he had aroused suspicion by his conduct on the King’s side in an earlier phase of the war. Baillie referred to ‘his very ambiguous proceedings’, making many Scots reluctant to put their ‘lives and religion in his hand’;9 worst of all he had a highly autocratic temperament, rigid in his views, incapable of bowing to those of others – it was not a propitious nature in a second-in-command.
Once across the border, the truly appalling English weather, record wetness even for a northern July, presented the Scottish expedition with a further obstacle. At Carlisle Hamilton was joined by that Royalist commander of the First Civil War, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, and the three thousand men with whom he had been holding the fortress since its insurrection in April bringing Hamilton’s total to something like eighteen thousand. Lambert’s duty from the English side was obviously to hold off this considerable body of men until his army could be reinforced; but as Hamilton was also inclined to wait for further reinforcements from Scotland, both armies now adopted waiting postures, Hamilton at Kirkby Thorne between Penrith and Appleby, and Lambert to the south-east at Barnard Castle. Lambert believed that Hamilton must try to cross the Pennine mountain chain into Yorkshire, and for any form of encounter his own army needed reinforcements either from Yorkshire or from the newly released army of Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell himself had been slogging his way across Britain to this end since the fall of Pembroke. The distance to be covered was immense, from the south-west tip of Wales to the north of England; his men were exhausted, and particularly badly equipped by the end of the Welsh siege. But the news of a vast Scottish army heading south, with the possibility by one dramatic victory of undoing the whole achievement of the past six years, was enough to send him, both as a strategist and an Independent, on his hard days of marching. Much of the cavalry was sent on in advance: he himself marched with only a modest force of three thousand foot and twelve hundred horse. His energies on the way were greatly taken up with trying to get further supplies for his men. There is a note of furious expostulation to the Derby House Committee on 24 July from Gloucester: his ‘poor wearied soldiers’ were desperate for shoes and stockings for the long march north. This need at least was met by the Committee: three thousand pairs of each were consigned, and caught up with Cromwell at Leicester, although he had previously lingered at Warwick Castle for three days hoping for some improvement, only moving on at a further urgent request for assistance from Lambert. Luckily Leicester brought comforts for the inner man as well: wine, biscuits, sugar, beer and tobacco were provided by the thoughtful Mayor and Aldermen, wise in their generation. And Cromwell was also able to acquire some local forces including ‘five or six hundred horse’ from the surrounding counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire as well as Leicester-shire, as he told Derby House from Nottingham on about 5 August.10
When Cromwell did reach the North, what was to be the position between Lambert and himself? Lambert, although his junior by twenty years, was not necessarily going to settle into a suitably deferential relationship. In the North Lambert was the local man, born and bred in Yorkshire; his attractive good looks and his easy carefree manner which endeared him to the troops were belied by what Whitelocke called ‘a subtle and working brain’. It was a point Cromwell intended to clear up before working out his plan against the Scots, and happily the Derby House Committee wrote back unequivocally: that there would be ‘none in the North who will pretend to a command-in-chief while you are there, yet to take away all colour to any such pretence, we have written to all the commanders of forces there to obey your orders’. Armed by this assurance, Cromwell wrote in his turn to Lambert on or about 4 August, asking him to ‘forbear engaging before he came up’.11
Lambert, still believing that the Royalists must eventually cross into Yorkshire, while leaving his main force at Barnard Castle, had himself now withdrawn to Otley, between Knaresborough and Leeds, with the object of preventing Hamilton relieving the siege of Pontefract. Elsewhere the infection of the Royalist rising was by no means cleared out of the English system as a whole. The bug still raged. News of backslidings from the Parliamentary cause came daily; the Governor of Scarborough Castle declared for the King, and July saw further insurrections as far apart as Horsham in Sussex, Hereford, and Newark in the Midlands. Much encouragement was of course taken by the news of the descent of the Scots, ‘bringing their lice and their Presbytery amongst us’ said the RoundheadMercurius Britannicus disdainfully, missing the point perhaps that there were many still in England who were less interested in vermin and theology than in the return of their King and the old order of society. In this context Cromwell’s deliberately eastward slant to his journey through the traditionally Roundhead areas of England and his preoccupation with reinforcements on the way, his determination that Lambert should not battle without him, all make sense. Cromwell had no means of knowing how strong the Royalist reaction might be within England itself, or where it might strike next. It was essential not to dissipate Parliament’s greatest possible asset, a unified striking force.
By the evening of 8 August Cromwell was at Doncaster where he received some ammunition from Hull and drove the marauding Royalists of Pontefract scurrying back into the depths of their Norman fastness. He then assimilated the flower of the besieging troops into his own army and abandoned the raw Midland troops he had recently acquired to continue the siege. On 12 August, the two armies of Cromwell and Lambert finally joined up. There was some convivial cheering at the union, and at the emergence of ‘a fine smart army, fit for action’, as one of Lambert’s army optimistically described it.12 They now comprised at least eight thousand six hundred men – Cromwell’s own estimate – and they were together; the question was, where was this fine, smart army to strike the Scots, and more particularly, where were the Scots heading that they might be struck? For Hamilton’s progress through England had continued to be slow and halting. By the end of July he appeared to be advancing rather indecisively in the direction of Lancashire, the traditionally Royalist area which would in theory provide the best catchment for English reinforcements. But he waited another week at Kendal in Westmorland, there to be joined by Sir George Monro and his three-thousand-odd Scottish army, last heard of in Ulster, who had struggled across sea and land to join him. Characteristically Callander now refused to regard this veteran campaigner as his equal, as a result of which the disastrous decision was taken to leave these excellent trained troops behind at Kirkby Lonsdale, together with two other northern regiments, to await the coming of the guns from Scotland. Hamilton led the main army forward, reaching Horny Castle, seven miles north of Lancaster, on 9 August.
It was now imperative that the Scots, all factions of them, and their English Royalist allies, should make up their minds as to their future course. The possibilities were twofold. They could march across the intervening Pennine range, and head as briskly as possible for the capital, taking in Yorkshire on the way; or they could proceed down the north-west coastline through Lancashire. Accounts differ as to who finally swayed the day for the Lancashire route. But it seems reasonable to accept the version of Sir James Turner, an officer present at the council when the decision was taken.13 According to Turner, it was Hamilton who chose Lancashire not only for its possibility of Royalist accretions but also for the hope of being joined by Lord Byron’s troops from North Wales. Langdale also argued for Lancashire (probably now aware from an expedition he had made to Skipton Castle of the gathering Roundhead strength in Yorkshire), as did Baillie, commander of the foot. Callander had no particular view. It was Middleton, in charge of the horse, and Turner himself who proposed the Yorkshire route on the grounds that Lancashire was ‘a close country full of ditches and hedges’, and thus more favourable to Oliver’s trained men (with the exception of the cavalry) than the untrained Scots. Yorkshire heaths, on the other hand, would allow the Scots cavalry to be deployed to advantage. But Lancashire it was. On the Scots marched, leaving Horny on 14 August.
It was now time for Cromwell and Lambert, on their part, to reach their own momentous decision. It is true that it was by now probably too late for the Royalists to have got through Yorkshire. On the other hand Cromwell’s decision, on 13 August, to pursue the Scots over to their own side in close attack was distinctly a gambler’s throw. The sound plan, as a professional soldier writing on the Civil War campaigns has pointed out, would have been to fall back southwards to cover the approaches to London, while at the same time ‘probing westwards with cavalry patrols to locate the enemy’.14 But sound plans do not always make great Generals. It might be sounder to withdraw, although the possibilities of continuing warfare, a slower solution, with more lives lost, more insurrections, the whole tedious blood-letting business of the Second Civil War inevitably prolonged, would be much less immediately satisfactory. It was in Cromwell’s character to prefer the chance at least of the quick decisive victory. Thus these marauding northern bears of the King’s party would be not only held at bay but also eliminated from further mischief.
So from Otley Cromwell and Lambert headed over to Skipton, leaving the artillery at Knaresborough to proceed more directly west. This was moor country, heathered over in August, a land of rounded scars and fells with rocky outcrops, good country for scouting perhaps, with its views to the high Pennines and its gorges, but rough for marching. Nevertheless Skipton was reached by the night of 14 August. Then it was onwards through more pastoral country, through dipping contours to the narrow coastal strip of the sea, with the night of 15 August spent at Gisburn Park. It was beyond Gisburn, on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire, at the Hodder Bridge about three miles outside Clitheroe, that the resolution was taken which brought Oliver at least his most spectacular victory.* The question was of the direction in which the Scots should be pursued. Hamilton had by now reached Preston, a town of some three thousand inhabitants near the coast, south of Lancaster. From here he evidently intended to continue his long southward descent. The obvious ploy – the sound plan – since the pursuit had come so far, was to follow on the course of the river Ribble by the sound bank, thus blocking off the Scots from any further advance into central England. But Cromwell rejected this course. Let the north bank of the Ribble be followed. Let Hamilton be attacked from the north. In short, let the Scots be cut off from their craggy homeland by their raiders.
It is true that Cromwell was helped on to his decision by the belief – erroneous – that Monro’s missing troops were on their way from Kirkby Lonsdale to join Hamilton at Preston. Estimating himself – in this case rightly – to be heavily outmanned, he could not ignore such a chance to cut off Monro; Cromwell told Parliament afterwards that the Scots had had twenty-one thousand men to his mere eight and a half thousand, and even if something is knocked off the Scots total for the two northern regiments left with Monro, he must still have taken on the Scots at a ratio approaching two to one in their favour. It has been suggested that Cromwell deliberately magnified the odds against him (despite Lambert’s comments on low strengths), since at full strength his regiments would have mustered over twelve thousand.15 But while it is possible that Cromwell, whether innocently or otherwise, overplayed the Scots’ totals, the deliberate falsification of his own numbers in the official battle report to Parliament, subsequently printed, seems more unlikely. But numbers apart, the stakes of the battle were immediately raised by this topographical decision. For if the battle was lost, the Scots were twice as free to rampage south. But if they were defeated, then surely they were totally undone.
There is no more dramatic and no clearer account of the reasoning which led up to this decision than Cromwell’s own: ‘we had in consideration whether we should … interpose between the enemy and his further progress into Lancashire, and so southward, which we had some advertisement the enemy intended, and since confirmed that they intended for London itself; or whether to march immediately over the said Bridge … and engage the enemy there, who we did believe would stand his ground …’ The crux came in the next sentence: ‘It was thought that to engage the enemy to fight was our business …’16 So the army spent the night of the 16th encamped in the ‘field’ of Stonyhurst Hall, about twelve miles from Preston, north of the river; it was the home of a Mr Sherbourne, described by Captain Hodgson of Cromwell’s advance guard as ‘a Papist’ (and still today houses such, being a leading Jesuit school).
The most extraordinary thing about this rapidly moving prelude to the battle of Preston is that Hamilton and the Scots seem to have had absolutely no idea how close the New Model Army were to their position – this despite the boasted efforts of Langdale in the vanguard, whose responsibility it was to gain intelligence. These had certainly brought him into skirmishes with some outriders of the New Model, including a sporting foray with Captain Henry Cromwell’s men near Skipton. On the very day of the 16th Cromwell’s men had captured some Royalist horse at Waddow near Clitheroe, yet the grim truth of Cromwell’s presence in all his accumulated strength still does not seem to have dawned on the other side. Hamilton was therefore left free to make yet another disastrous decision, which on this occasion involved sending the main body of his cavalry under Middleton ahead from Preston, south towards Wigan. This meant that the river Ribble now effectively divided his cavalry off from his main force. By the night of the 16th an ugly suspicion as to the truth does seem to have crossed Langdale’s mind, but it was now too late to recall Middleton. The next day, 17 August, very early in the morning, Cromwell’s men were in the position to descend like the Assyrians on an extremely unprepared fold.
It was of course the Royalist van, under Langdale, at Longridge on the outskirts of Preston, which the Cromwellians were destined to encounter first. The result was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, while Langdale himself rode off to warn Hamilton of the attack. The General with his troops on the Preston Moor, just over a mile north of the town, was engaged in the complicated process of getting the rest of his army across the Ribble by the Preston Bridge to follow Middleton’s advance cavalry. Still he would not face up to the demands of the situation and make the most of his numerical superiority by forming up on the Moor to fight. With folly piled on folly, he continued with the crossing, while ordering Langdale and his three-thousand-six-hundred-odd men to hold off what was in effect the whole striking force of the New Model Army. By the time Langdale returned he found his own men ensconced across the Preston–Skipton road, with the open ground of Ribbleton Moor beyond. It was this road, an exceptionally deep narrow lane, sunk down by natural formation and consequently waterlogged from the wet summer, which gave its character to the first stages of the battle.* For before the main body of Cromwell’s troops could draw up, Cromwell ordered his advance guard of two hundred horse and four hundred foot under Majors Smithson and Pownell to clear the lane. Courage was needed and some faith. Hodgson tells us that when Cromwell rode up with the order to move, they asked for a little patience and some time to ready themselves. To which the General merely barked out the word ‘March’, and march they did.17
By four o’clock in the afternoon, Cromwell considered enough of his men had come up to seize the initiative: ‘We resolved that night to engage them if we could …’ he wrote. The plan was to make use of the lane, ‘very deep and very ill’ Cromwell called it, by first clearing it by musketry and pike, and then sending the cavalry to charge down it; it was a manoeuvre reminiscent of the successful assault at Langport. But the ground was so wet that the cavalry’s tactics in the end proved less important than the desperate hand-to-hand struggles of the infantry to try and clear it. Once more it was ‘push of pike’ and ‘close firing’, and Cromwell afterwards paid glowing tributes to the gallantry of his own men under Colonel Bright, Fairfax’s regiment, and those of Read and Ashton, who steadily pushed their way down against enemy musketry. Yet in the stubborn determination of Langdale’s men, for all their diminutive numbers, it did seem for a time that they had met their match: ‘the enemy making, though he was still worsted, very stiff and sturdy resistance’ said Cromwell. Hodgson praised the valiant troops of Lancashire, ‘as stout men as were in the world and as brave firemen’, this despite the fact that the wretched Langdale received no reinforcements from Hamilton in the course of the day beyond a few Scottish lancers. Langdale himself told Sir Henry Slingsby afterwards that if he had had but a thousand men with which to have flanked the enemy, ‘I doubt not but the day had been sure’.18 As it was, the ratio at this point was reversed into two to one in Cromwell’s favour; yet Langdale held off the New Model for a time estimated between four and six hours (his own and Cromwell’s judgement respectively). It could not last for ever. In the end Langdale’s brave men were beaten down, and retreated, those left alive, into the town in terrible disorder.
Sweeping into Preston itself, the Cromwellian leaders were able to fall upon Hamilton’s crossing party at the bridge. The manoeuvre had proved long-drawn-out with Callander adamant at its continuation. In the ensuing turmoil Hamilton told his rearguard horse to turn back and try and join the advancing forces of Sir George Monro; as a result of this, they were the subject of a real chase by Cromwell’s men north towards Lancaster, and effectively cleared from the battle. Hamilton himself displayed enormous gallantry in action, to which Sir James Turner attested: ‘he showed as much personal valour as any man could be capable of’. Beating a man with his sword who refused to rally, he called for his men again and again ‘to charge once more for King Charles’.19 He himself wished above all things to get back to his own infantry, and with a small party containing Langdale, Turner and some of his own troop, Hamilton demonstrated by his private courage that personal heroism and a grasp of strategy are two quite different qualities. In the end, like Horatius defending the bridge of ancient Rome, Hamilton only got back to his main army by swimming the swollen torrent of the Ribble.
Once committed to the south bank of the river, Baillie formed up the Royalist infantry above the Ribble Bridge on Church Brow Hill, around Walton Hill, quite a considerable eminence which surmounted the town itself and overlooked the frenzied scene. The Ribble Bridge was now the key to the battle, for here the river was broad quite apart from the effects of the incontinently wet summer. Once again the fighting was exceptionally fierce – ‘a very hot dispute’ said Cromwell. Turner witnessed later that Cromwell’s men did have the advantage of being able to charge down to the bridge by quite a steep descent, while the Royalists hurled down great stones from their high ground. Finally Cromwell’s men gained the day at push of pike, and thrust on further up the Darwen, that tributary of the Ribble which later inspired Milton to write sonorously of ‘Darwen’s stream with blood of Scots imbued’. Taking another small bridge, they also possessed themselves of the northern slopes of the hill and Walton Hall, although Baillie defended the position to his utmost. Night fell on both sides, and both sides it seemed would be glad of respite in a day which had begun early for Cromwell, and contained so much of surprise and unalloyed terror and misfortune for his opponents. Cromwell’s men were exhausted, wet and very hungry; very few of them had any proper shelter; but before sleep overtook them, they had at least had the pleasure of discovering a ducal treasure trove at Walton Hall, in the shape of Hamilton’s gold plate, which spilt out of an overturned wagon. The plunder was watched dourly by the Royalists – ‘having no mind to rescue it’ said Hodgson.20
For the Scots there was to be no sleep. Cromwell’s main anxiety, as has been noted, was to prevent them escaping north. To this effect he had posted his guards, always bearing in mind that the main body of the Scottish army had hardly been involved in the battle and could presumably fight again. But a hasty midnight council of war decided the Scots, weary, soaking and battle-stained as they too felt themselves to be, to fall south in order to join up with Middleton’s cavalry as it returned in answer to their hasty summons on the road from Wigan. Once more it was Callander’s plan and once more it prevailed against the doubts of Baillie and Turner who wondered whether such an intricate retreat could really be carried out. Like all Callander’s plans, it was better in theory than practice. The escape took place stealthily, no drum was heard, no match was lit, and for a time successfully. As Cromwell honestly admitted afterwards: ‘we were so wearied with the dispute that we did not so well attend the enemy’s going off as might have been …’ But then the muddle began. The Scottish ammunition, which was supposed to have been destroyed, was in fact merely abandoned, and thus fell profitably into the hands of the English. Worse still, Middleton actually managed to come back from Wigan on another road from that taken by Hamilton so that the two forces missed each other. It has been suggested that it was the return of Middleton which awoke Cromwell to the midnight flit of Scots which had taken place as he slept; at any rate it was the Roundhead ColonelThornhaugh sent in pursuit with two regiments of horse who encountered Middleton, not his Royalist allies. There was a tense fight in which Thornhaugh’s men did well, although he himself was slain, gored in body, head and thigh, to expire with these edifying words on his lips – ‘I rejoice to die, since God hath let me see the overthrow of this perfidious enemy …’21
The battle for Preston now turned into a prolonged and rain-soaked rout, as Cromwell set off in pursuit of the Scots – ‘our horse still prosecuted the enemy, killing and taking divers all the way’ – rather than a renewed conflict. The Scots wisely refused to turn and fight, particularly in view of the fact that they were now without their ammunition. The next night, 18 August, was spent by Cromwell and his men in the fields outside Wigan, as he himself recorded: ‘being very dirty and weary, and having marched twelve miles of such ground as I never rode in all my life, the day being very wet’. There was some skirmishing during the night hours, but it was not until three miles off Warrington that the Cromwellians were finally able to engage with the Scots. Once more the fighting Scots sold themselves only at a high price. Indeed at first the battle was more of a holding operation than a strict contest, for Cromwell awaited the main body of his army, while the Scots would have been happy to have continued their disengagement. But ultimately, for all their ‘great resolution’ (Cromwell’s words) in close charges and disputes it was defeat for the Scots. Baillie offered to surrender the town on favourable terms, and Cromwell, in view of the strength of its position, decided to accept them.
The Duke of Hamilton escaped forward into Cheshire with Langdale, and about three thousand of his horse, but Cromwell did not pursue him. Quite frankly, he and his men were utterly exhausted: ‘if I had five hundred fresh horse and five hundred nimble foot, I could destroy them all,’ he wrote on 20 August, ‘but we are so weary, we shall scarce be able to do more than walk after them’.22 It was hardly surprising considering the ground that Cromwell had covered since he left Knottingley, first hard over to Preston, then an immediate desperate engagement, and then a running fight down the coast of Lancashire. Altogether in nine days he covered 140 miles of more or less continuous warfare. In any case, for all his weariness, Cromwell could rest assured that he had effectively put an end to ‘the business of Scotland’. The teeth of the Scottish campaign were drawn. Hamilton got down through the Midlands as far as Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, where he was obliged to surrender by the Governor of Stafford, abetted by the arrival of Lambert. Langdale was captured in a tavern in Nottingham. Of the three commanders, only Callander, with good fortune he had not deserved, escaped altogether to the Continent.
The battle of Preston is to the Second Civil War as Naseby is to the First. Afterwards there was no ground for any proper Royalist hopes. As a Cavalier newsletter of the time wrote with sarcastic despair: ‘Nothing is heard now amongst the brethren but triumph and joy, singing and mirth for their happy success (thanks to the Devil first and next to Nol Cromwell’s nose) …’23 There were two thousand Royalists killed and thousands more captured, as against less than a hundred of Cromwell’s men. It was a crippling piece of work, a pre-emptive strike from the beginning; indeed, even Cromwell’s wildest hopes cannot have envisaged quite such a success, since luck and Scottish failure certainly contributed much to his victory.
Langdale’s inadequate intelligence, Callander’s determined and wrong-headed advice, Hamilton’s weakness in command, to say nothing of the initial failure of his mounting delays – the Scottish army was ‘ruined in an instant and all by misgovernment’ wrote Guthry24– none of these can be ignored in estimating the praise and blame for their defeat at Preston. Without these additional factors, Preston might well have been a more limited triumph for Cromwell, from which the Scottish army might have withdrawn in much better order – although they would still have had to withdraw south. As against that, it was Cromwell the strategist who had brought about the whole confrontation: without his own speed and decision, there would certainly have been no battle at that point. The gambler who makes the lucky throw must at least be given credit for having the nerve to roll the dice. And that Preston was a great victory cannot be doubted. Yet it is interesting to note that Cromwell himself, in his account of the battle and his allusions to it afterwards, seems to have been more than usually conscious of the workings of divine Providence, as though for once he was aware that he had been aided by what some might term good luck as well as good judgement.
He thought it worth recounting in a letter the story of a ‘poor godly man’ on his deathbed in Preston on the eve of the battle, who when he heard that Cromwell’s army was coming after the Scots, called for the woman who looked after him to bring him a handful of grass. Would it wither or not, now it was cut? he asked her. Yes, it would wither, she said. ‘So should the Scots do and come to nothing,’ he replied. And immediately died. The whole tale fits in with the lyrical quality of Cromwell’s report on the battle, in which the messianic strain is more pronounced than ever. Addressed to the Speaker and printed afterwards in the form of a pamphlet like most of his reports, it speaks rapturously of the hand of God proving yet again that whatever of this world exalts itself will be pulled down.
In a more personal letter to his cousin St John, written on 1 September, he ruminated again on the glorious nature of God who provided such signs – ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord’ – while to his ‘dear brother’ Sir Henry Vane, he sent a special message on the subject, hoping that Vane would not make too little of such outward dispensations (as he, Cromwell, must beware of making too much of them). And he commended to Vane a special chapter in Isaiah which commented at length on the vain nature of the desires of the wicked – ‘And many among them shall stumble and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.’ Vane certainly understood the point. Some years later, when he had fallen out with Cromwell, he referred back to the incident in a letter, how Cromwell had sent him a message that he was ‘as much unsatisfied with his [Vane’s] passive and suffering principles’ as Vane was with Cromwell’s own more active ones.25
Cromwell now carried his active principles northwards once more. Turning towards Yorkshire again, he intended to interpose himself if possible between Monro’s retreating army and Scotland. In the meantime in the South the projected naval attack of the Prince of Wales was abandoned. The news of the Preston victory also effected the surrender of Colchester into Fairfax’s hands. Although the defenders gave themselves voluntarily to the mercies of Parliament, these mercies proved rather strained. Fairfax showed himself infuriated by what he believed to have been wanton shedding of blood; two of three Royalist commanders were shot, on the grounds that their intervention in the Second Civil War had been a negation of the oaths of composition which they had sworn at the end of the First. Only Sir Bernard Gascoigne was spared, for the rather surprising touristic reason that as he was Florentine by birth, his killers or their descendants might find themselves subject to persecution during future visits to Italy.
It was all characteristic of the deep animosity felt by the Army towards these authors of their new troubles. Cromwell showed much practical concern for the ‘sad widow’ of the gallant Colonel Thornbaugh, who would now, he felt, be the concern of the Commonwealth, and Hamilton at his trial paid tribute equally to Cromwell’s courteous concern for the ‘poor wounded [Scots] gentlemen’ he had left behind – ‘he [Cromwell] performed more than he promised’. Former Parliamentarians could expect no such civilities.26 Parliament itself, on the other hand, exhibited very little enthusiasm for the whole subject of Preston. The reaction of the House of Commons to the news of victory contrasted not only with the Army’s own, thus emphasizing the growing gulf between them, but also with its behaviour in like circumstances in days gone by. And the difference in attitudes was hammered home still further when, the next day, the Commons deliberately repealed the Vote of No Addresses to the King. Preston after all had helped neither the Presbyterian cause nor that of a personal settlement with Charles. As Cromwell trekked north, the Parliament in the south at whose feet he had still ostensibly laid his victory were preparing to approach yet again in terms of a treaty the man he regarded as personally responsible for the situation leading up to the battle.
A letter from Cromwell of 2 September, to his friend Lord Wharton, reveals his immense disquiet at these developments. The manifest excuse for the letter was the pleasant private task of congratulating Wharton on the birth of an heir, but he could not resist a bitter comment on the deliberate ingratitude of the Commons:27 ‘You know how untoward I am at this business of writing, yet a word. I beseech the Lord make us sensible of this great mercy here, which surely was much more than … the House expresseth.’ If only he could discuss it face to face with Wharton, but meanwhile Cromwell could at least solace himself with an outburst on paper: ‘Oh, His mercy to the whole society of saints, despised, jeered saints! Let them mock on. Would we were all saints. The best of us are (God knows) poor weak saints, yet saints; if not sheep lambs, and must be fed. We have daily bread, and shall have it, in despite of all enemies.’ It was a reflection of Cromwell’s current disgust with the ways of the world that he begged his friend to regard his newborn son as simply another ‘mercy’ and ‘not make you plot or shift for the young Baron to make him great. You will say, he is God’s to dispose of, and guide for; and there you will leave him.’*
By 12 September Cromwell was at Alnwick, and on the verge of crossing into Scotland, having paused for a Day of Thanksgiving at Durham. He also informed the Derby House Committee of his plans. On the same day he issued an order that any straggling Scots from the late defeat should be taken prisoner, so long as innocent Scots were not molested. He was now instructed to recover those two border fortresses at Berwick and Carlisle, which had been reft from Parliament’s hands at the start of the Second Civil War. From Alnwick Cromwell summoned Ludovick Leslie, the Governor of Berwick, in strong terms: there was now, since Preston, no need for further argument concerning the rightness of Parliament’s cause against that of the Scots since ‘the witness that God hath borne against your army in their invasion of this kingdom which desired to sit in peace by you, doth at once manifest His dislike of any injury done to a nation that meant you no harm … If you deny me in this, we must make a second appeal to God, putting ourselves upon Him, in endeavouring to obtain our rights, and let Him be the judge between us …’28
But as it happened the mood of the prevailing powers in Scotland was far from favourable towards a second ‘appeal to God’. The defeat of Hamilton at Preston had seen a parallel defeat of the moderates in Scotland, those in short who had favoured the first ‘appeal’. Those nobles and ministers who had frowned on the Engagers and by their lack of support helped to condemn Hamilton’s expedition, were now naturally in a much improved position. Chief among these and emerging as a formidable man indeed was Archibald Campbell, the 1st Marquess of Argyll. Tall and wiry, with a lifting eyebrow and sly lips, there was much of the fox about him beyond his over-long inquisitive nose and his red hair. He also had a squint – ‘gley’d Argyll’ the Scots called him – but, says Clarendon, ‘though by the ill-placing of his eyes, he did not appear with any great advantage at first sight, yet he reconciled even those who had aversion to him very strangely by a little conversation’.29
One is obliged to deduce that Argyll had charm. As far back as 1637 Argyll had been described as by far the most powerful subject in the kingdom. It was a tribute not only to his perspicuity but also to his vast domains stretching about the west of Scotland, his position as head of a mighty clan whose members had been known to shout in battle that they were not King Stewart’s, but King Campbell’s men. That Argyll was of an ardently religious nature cannot be doubted. That he was also witty and good company Clarendon’s testimony supports. That he was at the same time extremely devious would seem obvious in view of his many shifts of allegiance and position. As a newsletter of the time wrote referring picturesquely to the manner in which he constantly juggled and shuffled the political cards in his own hand: ‘he loveth not a game that must be played above board’. Yet in some sense there is always a particular difficulty in southern judgements on a Highland chief, and it is perhaps too easy to observe as did a satirist of his father:
No faith in plaids, no trust in highland trews
Camelion-like, they change so many hues …30
It would be possible to argue on the contrary that Argyll’s mainspring was a new type of Scottish patriotism; his fluctuating policies did show a wider concern for the future of Scotland, even if this future was also always closely identified with the enhancement of Clan Campbell and its notable chief.
A new Government was now formed for Scotland through the Committee of Estates. The Engagers’ star was well and truly fallen. On the one hand a former commissioner, Loudoun, deserted their cause to become Chancellor. On the other hand a party of religious extremists among the Ayrshire peasantry known as Whigs or Whiggamores* ignited an armed rising against them. An alliance with Cromwell, himself the slayer of the Engagers, obviously had much more to offer the men now in power than the prospect of another battle. The new situation was duly explained to the English commander. Cromwell’s answering letter to Loudoun showed that he too believed there could be much common ground between Scots and English if the late Engagement could be thrown off. ‘And give us leave to say, as before the Lord who knows the secret of all hearts,’ he replied on 18 September, ‘we think one especial end of Providence in permitting the enemies of God and goodness in both kingdoms to rise to that height, and exercise such tyranny over His people, was to show the necessity of unity amongst those of both nations …’ Thus ‘the late glorious dispensation, in giving so happy success against your and our enemies in our victories, may be the foundation of union of the people of God in love and unity …’ It was in a mood then to be cordial with the new men, if not the Engagers, that Cromwell finally crossed the border on 21 September 1648. The same day he wrote to the Committee of Estates to apologize for some inadvertent plundering by his own men, for there was to be no question of the Scots being antagonized by rapacious English soldiers, as the English a few months back had been enraged by the marauding Scots.31 The tone was to be one of amity.
An encounter with the new Scottish leaders ridden down to meet him, the first on their own ground, went extremely well, as Cromwell himself reported, and indeed one of their tactfully chosen emissaries, Major Archibald Strachan, was a Scottish sectary who had actually served under Cromwell at Preston. Some time was spent ‘in giving and receiving mutual satisfaction concerning each other’s integrity and clearness’. Cromwell was happy to testify back to London that in Argyll, Elcho and other gentlemen with them ‘I have found nothing in them but what becomes Christians and men of honour’. The truth was that for all the hard knocks Cromwell had received personally from the Scots over the past five years, threatened with denunciation as an incendiary, plotted against, marched against, he had much common ground with these sincere Calvinists. A man such as Argyll who rose at five and prayed till eight had much in common with the Cromwell who not only prayed passionately himself but also constantly adjured others to do so, even fellow members of the House of Commons in an official battle report. When it came to the dispensations or mercies, the belief of the Covenanters in these vital signs was quite as burning as Cromwell’s own. It is true that they also subscribed to the further view, in which Cromwell could hardly follow them, that the Scottish nation had a special militant mission all its own, to evangelize its neighbour. Some Covenanters in this saw themselves as the true heirs of the Jews – there is ‘a very near parallel betwixt Israel and this church’ Lord Johnston of Warriston, one of the men responsible for framing the Covenant, had written in his diary, ‘the only two sworn nations to the Lord …’ This issue between the Scots and the English, the clash of providences, would be fought out in two years’ time. In the meantime Cromwell and the Covenanters certainly spoke the same language. He wrote to Fairfax on 2 October: ‘I hope there is a good understanding between the honest part of Scotland and us here …’32
The understanding proceeded. Lambert and the main army were now camped at Seaton, where Cromwell joined them, while Argyll hastened purposefully back to Edinburgh. An invitation from the Committee of Estates to visit the Scottish capital duly followed. On Wednesday, 4 October, Cromwell entered Edinburgh for the first time, and was welcomed – such were time’s revolutions – with ‘all solemnity’ by Argyll, and the respect due to ‘the deliverer of their country’. His visit lasted three days. He was lodged in the house of the Countess of Moray in the Canongate, amid other aristocratic dwellings in that narrow but historic thoroughfare: the spacious well-sited gardens at the back led down to Holyrood Park, and looked up to the great crag of Arthur’s Seat.* Scottish hospitality was genial. That night there was a dinner held at the Castle, to which the English Army leaders were conveyed in coaches through the streets of Edinburgh. Argyll was there, and Johnston of Warriston, who had been particularly vehement against the Engagers, having as his nephew Bishop Burnet pointed out ‘no regard to the raising of himself or his family though he had thirteen children, but presbytery was more to him than all the world’. Under such circumstances, and with Lambert’s army at Seaton, it was not difficult for Cromwell to secure all he had come for: all former Engagers and those that had ‘that same ill-affected spirit’ should be removed from offices of trust. Monro had to agree to disband his army. On the Friday, 6 October, Loudoun assured Cromwell that there was total agreement on all his terms. The anger of some of the Scots at this dissolution of their military strength, expressed in the ‘gnashing their teeth’ in the faces of the English soldiers and stealing their horses, we may suppose did not trouble Cromwell.33
Obviously in such discussions, even within such a short space of time, the ultimate destinies of both nations, to say nothing of the fate of the sovereign whom they shared, must have been discussed. Early October was an exceptionally delicate moment of intrigue and negotiation in the South. To the disgust of the Army, Parliament had indeed followed up the repeal of the Vote of No Addresses by a renewed application to the King, and was even now in the persons of Presbyterians such as Holles in the throes of those propositions known as the Treaty of Newport after the town on the Isle of Wight. Holles of course continued to be hampered by the need to look over his shoulder at the Army and the need to bear in mind its wrath if not its wishes. The Levellers continued to press for their own particular brand of government as seen in their Agreement of the People in a series of greater and lesser petitions. While Vane pleaded for the use of the Army’s own Heads of Proposals, Charles came up with the suggestion of a three-year experiment with Presbyterianism, with limited toleration for sects and the control of the militia given to Parliament for ten years. These proposals the Commons had just rejected as Cromwell reached Edinburgh; so Charles was left outwardly thinking of further acceptable concessions, inwardly plotting the infinitely preferable solution of escape. On the Continent the arrival at long last of peace in Europe in the shape of the Treaty of Westphalia also further encouraged him to seek foreign support, newly freed from other responsibilities.
Out of touch obviously with the day-to-day political situation in London, the Isle of Wight, or for that matter the councils of the Army in the South, Cromwell was still bound to talk in some manner of the burning issue of the future with his Scottish hosts. Afterwards the record of these conversations – dependent on Scottish testimony – was used to accuse Cromwell of hypocrisy. In one discussion, according to a leading Presbyterian minister Robert Blair, Cromwell’s eyes filled with tears as he professed his opinions ‘with a fair flourish of words’; this enabled Blair to dismiss him angrily later in a famous phrase as ‘greeting [or weeping] devil’. But it is possible to sympathize with the weeping devil, being needled by the pressing and highly articulate Scots at a time of maximum political uncertainty. A more serious accusation than that of hypocritical tears is contained in the charge of Montrose, later repeated by Clarendon, that Argyll and Cromwell at this point entered into a compact to destroy the monarchy – not necessarily to kill the King, but ‘the keeping of the King always in prison, and so governing without him in both kingdoms’. Montrose used to say that Cromwell bragged about that achievement on his return to London with far more delight than his victory at Preston. Guthry, while admitting that ‘whatsoever passed among them cannot be infallibly known’, wrote in his Memoirs of the general belief that Cromwell had communicated to the Scots his design with regard to the King and had received their assent to it.34
Here it seems essential to distinguish between discussions and a compact. In the course of the former Cromwell might well have tried to discover from Argyll what his reaction would be to an England ruled without a monarchy – a topic on which he had not yet made up his own mind – and Argyll in turn might have indicated a wary acceptance. But that sort of cautious exploration of the other man’s feelings was very far from being a secret compact. Argyll of course always swore afterwards, throughout his trial and on the scaffold, that no such compact had been reached; he showed overwhelming relief when finally acquitted of any part in the King’s death, although condemned on other charges. But a further objection to the idea of a positive compact, and a more effective one, can be raised in the improbability of the notion that Cromwell in early October 1648 had yet made up his own mind as to what should be done about the King. The timing was quite wrong. The situation in the South was so fluid that even the opinion of his own allies in the Army might change from day to day. Furthermore, the extreme neurosis betrayed by his famous letters of the next month to ‘Robin’ Hammond, to be considered in their place in the next chapter, points to a man still in the throes of indecisive anguish on the whole subject of the King and Government.
As it was by 9 October, Cromwell was able to report back to the Speaker of the House of Commons from Dalhousie that all Scotland’s forces were now disbanded. His Scottish mission was accomplished, but all his military work was not yet over. Proceeding south via Carlisle and Newcastle, where he was feasted by the Mayor, he reached Durham on 20 October. Here extremely practical matters awaited him concerning the settlement of the whole of the north of England, and there was also a request from the York Committee that he should personally see to the reduction of Pontefract Castle. The next eight weeks, crucial in English history, spent by others in the South in conferences, councils’ proposals and counter-proposals, were to be spent by Cromwell in matters of military administration three hundred miles from London. It was the necessary finale to what Cromwell always regarded as an unnecessary and mischievous war.