CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Scotland: The Decision of the Cause

Both parties referred the decision of the cause to God,
and desired that he would give his judgement therein
at the day of battle, as that whereby each side, and all
standers by, might take notice of the mind of God,
concerning the righteousness of their cause …

Letter to Cromwell after the defeat of the Scots by the English

Oliver Cromwell was now in London for only four weeks before taking the road again for another corner of the British Isles, as a result of what Whitelocke rightly drew attention to in this period – ‘the contentiousness of men’s natures, and the little quiet to be expected in this world’. The underground Royalist movement in England was still of an extremely fragile nature, although by April 1650 the inaugural meeting of the Western Association (for the restoration of the monarchy) in which such figures as Colonel Francis Wyndham and Sir John Paulet were prominent, had at least been held at Salisbury under the guise of a race-meeting.¹ But the movement as a whole lacked leadership, while the traditional figureheads, peers and landowners, devoted their energies to the more personally urgent problems of saving their properties from sequestration. It was the contentious Scots who presented the immediate threat to the peace of the Commonwealth. In fact, it had taken this threat an unconscionable time to materialize, considering that the new King had been proclaimed in Scotland only a few days after his father’s death. The delay was due to the persisting divisions in the structure of the country itself, best summed up by the three possible rallying-cries of the Scottish army: ‘Presbytery and King’, ‘Presbytery and no King’ and ‘King and no Presbytery’.

But the subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell had put an end to the hopes of Charles ii from that quarter. A purely Royalist expedition to Scotland – ‘King and no Presbytery’ – under Montrose, foundered. Gradually the young King realized that it was only from Presbytery that he could expect any practical assistance towards restoration; so he came reluctantly to tolerate not only the sacrifice of Montrose, executed by the Covenanters in May, but also by degrees the Covenant itself. He sailed for Scotland on 10 June, and swore an oath to uphold the Covenant aboard ship just before he landed. It was in no sense a conversion, and at least one ardent Presbyterian reflecting wryly afterwards on Scotland’s misfortunes did not acquit his own party from blame in forcing through such an unwelcome deal. Charles, he wrote, ‘sinfully complied with what we most sinfully pressed upon him’. The dire consequences of hypocrisy were however not yet apparent. There was universal joy at the King’s arrival: the market-women at the Tron at Garmouth on the Spey went so far as to sacrifice their baskets and stools to the celebratory bonfires. The happy Scots noticed that like his great-grandmother Mary Stuart before him, on her return to Scotland from France, Charles had escaped capture at the hands of the English by a fortunate Scotch mist: it was, they cried, ‘a like providence’. It was left to a correspondent of Secretary Nicholas, describing it, to add the rueful comment: ‘I pray God he [Charles] prove more fortunate, and some of those that profess for him more loyal.’²

It was true that Argyll immediately took the opportunity to strip the gay young monarch of his own attendants, and substitute some dourer Presbyterians, whose very names were said to remind Charles of the betrayal and death of his own father. Argyll’s power was at this point immense. He even hoped to crystallize it by wedding his own daughter Lady Anne Campbell to the bachelor King. Charles was interested enough in the proposal to test out the reactions of his mother in Paris at the beginning of the next year: after all, he pointed out, no foreign match was at present possible, Argyll was certainly very influential, and a united Scotland, such as this marriage might produce, would prove an encouragement to England. For once Henrietta Maria’s maternal instinct showed her full of both caution and common sense. It was true that there was ‘nothing new or extraordinary’ in that a person as well-born as Argyll’s daughter should be married to the Crown, she said; but since the settlement of Scotland must ever be seen in the context of the recovery of England, was it not a mistake to exclude England altogether from the question of the King’s marriage? These prudent counsels prevailed and the idea was dropped – and since the young lady concerned showed a somewhat priggish streak in her correspondence (although her handsome appearance impressed a visitor to Scotland, Anne Lady Halkett, as equivalent to anything at the Court of England) perhaps she would not have proved a very suitable bride for Charles ii.³

Presbytery was certainly rampant, since the Act of Classes, passed the previous year, had forbidden the employment either in public office or in the Army itself, of anyone other than the most rigorous supporter of the Covenant. Not unnaturally much weeding-out was needed to comply with such a provision, and many good fighting men were to be lost by it. Yet for the time being the Covenanters had their sovereign with them, and under their control. Temporarily it was ‘Presbytery and King’ in Scotland. The one threatened the religious and the other the political settlement of the Commonwealth; it was only a question of time before their Scottish supporters did so by force.

The prospect of a military clash being thus clearly before the Commonwealth, it was less clear who should lead an English expedition when it came to be made. The popular but increasingly withdrawn Fairfax was still in theory Commander-in-Chief of the English Army; but the evidence that Cromwell only accepted the Scottish command when he was personally convinced that Fairfax would not take it is backed up by the testimony of Colonel Hutchinson. Cromwell, he said, laboured almost all night (in Hutchinson’s presence) to win over his former chief. The dialogue between them showed the immense differences of character between the two men. Fairfax gave the planned offensive nature of the expedition as an obstacle to its justice. Said Cromwell: ‘that there will be war between us, I fear is unavoidable. Your Excellency will soon determine whether it be better to have this war in the bowels of another country or of our own, and that it will be in one of them I think without scruple.’ Fairfax’s reply was that ‘human probabilities are not sufficient ground to make war upon a neighbouring nation’.⁴ And for all Cromwell’s appeals to him to consider at least his faithful soldiers, he upheld his own right to do what his conscience bade him.

So it was Cromwell who was given the command of an army which was envisaged as comprising twenty-five thousand men (although the numbers did not live up to this first expectation). This fresh glorification of his position was heralded by a glowing tribute in the first issue of a new Government mouthpiece Mercurius Politicus. Edited by the volatile Marchamont Nedham (formerly a propagandist for the other side) it opened with the spritely question directed to its own credentials: ‘Why should not the Commonwealth have a Fool, as well as the King had?’ Cromwell’s worth was a more serious matter: ‘For my part,’ wrote the editor, ‘if we take a view of his actions from first to last, I may (without flattery) proclaim him to be the only Novus Princeps that I ever met with in all the confines of history.’ In fact there was some discussion as to the proper title for Cromwell’s new position: in the end, although it was formerly ordered that he should call himself ‘General of the Forces of the Commonwealth of England’, he was allowed to choose his own mode of appellation. In this manner Lord-General became the common mode of address. Another newly instituted Government newsletter, the Nouvelles Ordinaires, printed in England but written in French for dissemination abroad, hailed Cromwell enthusiastically in its first number of 21–28 July as ‘Généralissime’ of all the English forces.^*5

If the French did not wish to be impressed by such an obvious instrument of propaganda, then there were still the reports of de Croullé to Mazarin, in which the French envoy referred to the great public feeling of confidence about the whole expedition, and the elaborate preparations being made for it at every hand. The converse to carrying the war into the enemy’s country – thus sparing northern England from another harrowing Scottish invasion – was the perennial problem of supplies. The Navy was expected to play an important part backing up along the coastline (the Scottish navy was by now virtually non-existent, so that little opposition was to be expected). Even so, any commander who neglected to bring with him adequate provisions for his troops would either have to live off the country, which might prove a considerable problem in Scotland, or starve. The report of the Scoutmaster-General William Rowe on stores for Scotland included ‘very well baked bread’, a substance which did not break and had unusual lasting qualities, ‘bisquit-ovens’ for making the rather similar type of biscuit on which the Army was wont to live together with cheese when in the field, horse-shoes and nails, and beds – since to seize them by ‘press’ in Newcastle would it was felt cause too much commotion. Beans and oats were to be shipped, and apples and pears, a welcome respite from the biscuit, to come by sea from Kent.⁷

Although the lack of tents generally for the use of the English soldiers was to prove one of the striking hardships of the subsequent campaign since most of the men found themselves facing the traditional rigours of a Scottish summer sleeping out of doors, at least provision was made for a tent ‘for his Excellency’s person use’ at a single cost of £46, and a hundred other tents were acquired at the humbler cost of £1 each. Nor was the spiritual side to the endeavour, prominent as with Ireland although differently orientated, neglected. Thomas Harrison, for example, who in Cromwell’s absence was to have chief military command in England, showed himself zealous in suggesting arrangements by which Cromwell would be able to carry on the godly life even while on the march. ‘Waiting upon Jehovah’ in prayer should surely be the most important task of Cromwell’s day, to which end Oliver should perhaps keep ‘three or four precious souls’ always at his elbow, with whom he might ‘now and then turn into a corner’ to pray. One such precious soul who did accompany Cromwell was John Owen, who in a sermon to the troops gave a further gloss to the religious nature of the venture by arguing not only that peace could be achieved by war, but also that martial trophies were in themselves capable of bearing spiritual significance: ‘To see a house, a palace, hung round about with ensigns, spoils and banners, taken from the enemies that have come against it, is a glorious thing – thus is the house of God decked.’⁸

Cromwell left London once more on 28 June. The eyes of England were upon him. At Oxford the antiquarian Elias Ashmole took care to note the exact time of his departure – five hours and six minutes – in order to chart astrologically the possibilities of the expedition.^* Among those who rode with Cromwell for the first stage of his journey was John Lilburne the Leveller, temporarily reconciled to the Lord-General. In the course of an affectionate leave-taking, he continued the good work of Harrison by urging Cromwell to care for the souls as well as bodies in Scotland. Cromwell went by Ware and Cambridge, where he tried to reassure the Vice-Chancellor and Doctors of the university that it was not intended to press them to subscribe to the official religion of the country once the Scottish business was over; but the manoeuvre was cynically described by one present as merely an example of Cromwell’s usual desire ‘by courteous overtures to cajole and charm all parties when he goes upon a doubtful service’. Turning towards Northampton, it was here that the great crowds inspired in him the bluff aside to Lambert and Ingoldsby: ‘these very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged’. It was a prophecy of which Lambert was to remind Ingoldsby ten years later when he did actually enter the town again, this time derided as Ingoldsby’s captive.¹⁰ So it was on to Durham, where Cromwell met Colonels Pride and Hacker, and finally Newcastle by 10 July, a pause for breath (and for a fast) and to inspect the sixteen regiments, horse and foot in equal halves, totalling about sixteen thousand men, which it was intended to match against the Scots.

Although the usual loyal protests were heard at this army reunion – for these were hardened and disciplined troops Cromwell was to take with him to Scotland – in which the men vowed to live and die with their General, it was not without some more troublesome incidents. One of these centred on George Monk, whose military performance in Ulster had impressed Cromwell sufficiently to offer him the Colonelcy of the regiment just vacated by John Bright. A Yorkshire Puritan of longstanding, Bright had resigned not out of disapproval of the regime but for the down-to-earth reason that he had a chance of buying a sequestered Royalist estate which he coveted.¹¹ The soldiers concerned however were not so disposed to be tolerant of Monk’s change of allegiance as Cromwell himself. They could well remember having defeated him, then fighting for the Royalists, at Nantwich in 1644, and had ended by taking him prisoner. Since the changeover was too much for the men to stomach, it was finally Lambert who received this particular command, in addition to a horse regiment, to contented acclamations of ‘A Lambert! A Lambert!’ A new regiment of men from Newcastle and Berwick was formed for Monk, eventually taking its name from the neighbouring town of Coldstream – so that out of the pride of one regiment came the genesis of another, thereafter glorious in English military history.

It was time to ‘summon’ Scotland. Although in theory a whole country was being addressed rather than a mere fortress, the same convention was observed. The Lord-General clearly hoped even at the last moment to avoid a military confrontation. After Dunbar (when it had finally irremediably taken place) Cromwell acknowledged this former attitude freely: ‘Since we came in Scotland, it hath been our desire and longing to have avoided blood in this business.’¹² The reason was clear, and provided an important clue to his own relations with the Scots: ‘God hath a people here fearing his name, though deceived.’ It was of course an attitude in marked contrast to that which had animated him in Ireland, and there is an equally striking contrast to be seen in the language of his preliminaryDeclarations to the Scots and his first proclamations in Ireland. There is an almost despairing desire to argue the issues, whether theological or otherwise, rather than fight them, as though Cromwell was pathologically reluctant to accept that two groups of the Elect were really intended to fight each other and that for the second time.

The first of these Declarations was specifically addressed. ‘To all that are Saints, and Partakers of the Faith of God’s elect, in Scotland’. It was full of positively tender references to the Scots whom ‘we look upon as our brethren’. An immensely long justification for the English invasion was produced, in which all the issues of previous years between Scots and English, including the killing of the King, were fought over again. In particular the English signing of the Covenant was explained away. It was true that this had tied them to uphold the King’s interest, in order to ‘preserve religion and liberty’, but where the means were not consonant with the end, then ‘the end is to be preferred before the means’. The Declaration ended with further protestations of love towards the godly ahead of them – the precious Scots as opposed to their vile comrades – tacked on to its official threat of war: ‘to the truth of this let the God of Heaven … judge of us when we come to meet our enemies in the field, if, through the perverseness of any in authority with you, God shall please us to order the decision of this controversy by the sword …’¹³

There is further evidence of Cromwell’s inner confusion at this time in the shape of one of his periodic pieces of self-reflection, part of a letter to Richard Mayor once more aimed at his son Dick’s spiritual progress. In this case, he began in friendly fashion by enquiring about his little grand-daughter Elizabeth (Dorothy was backsliding as a correspondent again): ‘I should be glad to hear how the little brat doth. I could chide both father and mother for their neglects of me: I know my son is idle but I had better thoughts of Doll. I doubt now her husband has spoiled her; I pray, tell her so from me. If I had as good a leisure as they, I should write sometimes. If my daughter be breeding, I will excuse her, but not for her nursery.’ It was the typical comment of the busy man to the supposedly less busy, and if he perhaps underrated the cares of the nursery Cromwell was certainly not the first or the last man to do so. But in getting into his stride over Dick’s deficiencies – ‘He is in the dangerous time of his age, and it’s a very vain world’ – he struck a different note. Mayor must counsel his son-in-law; of course it was properly Cromwell’s own duty, yet ‘you see how I am employed. I need pity. I know what I feel. Great place and business in the world is not worth the looking after; I should have no comfort in my mind but that my hope is in the Lord’s presence. I have not sought these things; truly I have been called unto them by the Lord …’¹⁴

It was lucky for Cromwell that, on his own admittance, at least he was not without assurance that God would enable ‘His poor worm and weak servant to do His Will’. Unfortunately the Scots were suffering from, or alternatively were inspired by, the same apocalyptic confidence. The first adversary Cromwell had to meet was in fact a clever propaganda campaign spread by the Scots that the English would impart fearful atrocities upon God’s people as soon as they crossed the border. To this possibility, the news from Ireland naturally contributed. The cutting off of the breasts of the women by English soldiers was a frequently mentioned if daunting prospect. John Nicoll, a Writer to the Signet, believed in such heinous English instincts implicitly, recorded Scots prisoners fettered naked in chains, a soldier whose eyes were put out for having ‘I am for King Charles’ in chalk on his back, and women falling to their knees before the invaders begging for the mercy they did not expect to receive.

In vain Cromwell tried to combat this in his second Declaration, which forbade plunder on the part of the English, and reminded the Scots of the calm English ‘deportment and behaviour’ two years earlier: ‘What injury or wrong did we then do, either to the persons, houses or goods of any? Whose ox have we taken?’ Honourable behaviour to the local population was already exercising his mind as he approached the frontiers of the two countries. On 17 July special letters of protection, signed by Cromwell, had been given to Lady Anne Thornton (a Royalist who had been an involuntary hostess to Cromwell’s troops camping in her grounds at Netherwitton), by which ‘all Officers and soldiers under my Command, And all others whom it may concern’ were forbidden to ‘prejudice’ the said lady ‘either by offering any Violence to her person, or any of her family, or by taking away any of her horses, cattle or other goods whatsoever without special order’. A few weeks later Lady Anne was repaid the £95-odd owing to her on that occasion for corn and grass by another signed order from Cromwell.^*15 But as regards the Scots, the trouble was that under Leslie they were in an excellent position to fight what would now be described as guerrilla warfare, in the difficult lowland country south of Edinburgh. And in such a campaign, the fear of the local people of the invaders was a valuable weapon, not to be sacrificed easily.

Cromwell finally crossed into Scotland on 22 July and six days later – on a Sunday, which shocked John Nicoll – made his first attempt to engage the Scottish army at Haddington, lying between Edinburgh and the east coast. It was now that he had his first taste of the medicine which David Leslie intended to deal out for him for the next few weeks. For Leslie, instead of fighting, simply fell back on Edinburgh which like the neighbouring fortress of Leith had recently been considerably strengthened. At first sight Leslie’s decision might seem surprising, since the Scottish host on its home ground had vast numerical possibilities, and with ten years’ fighting behind it, one way and another, could surely muster as much in the way of training and experience as Cromwell’s New Model. The realities were somewhat different; the army had suffered greatly from the Covenanters’ purges and had lost many veterans. The Highlanders were beginning to fail the summons to the Lowland wars while some old-stagers in arms were still engaged in the north; and although Charles ii ended by reviewing over twenty thousand men, many of these were unusually raw and green. Leslie, the old soldier trained by Gustavus Adolphus and a native Scotsman, hardly needed to look at the map of Scotland, between Edinburgh and the borders its network of hill ranges, the Pentland falls and the Lammermuirs, nor look out of the window at the driving rain (the Scottish summer was living up to its reputation), to realize that he too like Ormonde in Ireland had two potential champions against the invader in the Hunger and Sickness of the Commonwealth army.

The dismal end to Leslie’s campaign should not blind one to the masterly resources with which he exploited the potentialities of his situation beforehand. As Charles Fleetwood wrote in despair by the end of August, the main problem of the English was ‘the impossibility of our forcing them [the Scots] to fight – the passes being so many and so great that as soon as we go on the one side, they go over the other’.¹⁶ Although Cromwell now followed Leslie up to Edinburgh and bombarded the town both from Arthur’s Seat, the foot of Salisberry Hill, and from the English ships off the coast, Leslie would not be drawn from his fortified lair. Falling back to Musselburgh, on the east coast a few miles south of Leith, Cromwell suffered from being harried by the Scots in the rear. A new Declaration issued from here to the Scots was more furious in tone, and referred to the national religion as ‘a covenant with death and hell’, a phrase which although echoing his thunderous denunciation of the Roman Catholic clergy at Clacmanoise, was particularly referred by him to its source, a half-chapter of Isaiah.¹⁷ This denunciation of the people of Judah, who would be obliterated by ‘the Lord of Hosts’ having been led astray by false priests, he adjured the Scots to read.^* Compelled by wet weather and the hilly country to seek further supplies Cromwell then fell back east to the better port of Dunbar.

Thus August was spent by the English in a series of advances and retirements, in the course of which many of their men (it will be remembered that they were tentless) became sick. At one point Mercurius Politicus mentioned two thousand of them as being useless. So their vital supplies were gradually eroded, and still there was no proper decisive engagement with the Scots. One rather limited contact did at least provide an amusing incident. Cromwell had taken a small party out, probably near Coltbridge, which encountered a Scottish picketing party. This body withdrew hastily, but not before one solitary soldier had fired his carbine. Cromwell shouted out that if it had been one of his own soldiers he would have cashiered him for firing at such a distance. The man retorted that it had not been such a random try as all that: having been with Leslie at Marston Moor he had recognized his target as being Cromwell himself. But in the main it was a merely frustrating time. Cromwell was further exacerbated by criticisms from London where it was considered by some that he was acting too softly towards the Scots by not living by ruthless confiscation off the country. William Rowe reported that he was also being accused of enriching one nation with the treasure of another. That there was some substance in the charge can be seen not only from the references of a man like Nicoll, who afterwards attributed the Scottish defeat to English gold, but by Cromwell’s genuine and continued desire to conquer the Scots by persuasion if possible.¹⁸ Alliance not extirpation was the aim, and English gold could be useful in the cause of the former and not the latter. Any opportunities presented to parley with the Scottish officers were fully exploited.

On 27 August a battle of sorts did take place at Gogar in Midlothian in which the successful employment by Leslie of some exceptionally boggy ground prevented Cromwell using his cavalry although the English in general had slightly the best of it. Thereafter Leslie withdrew once again, apparently thinking it necessary to cut Cromwell off from Edinburgh, while the English themselves drew back to the coast probably in order to cope with their increasing quantity of sick soldiers, by shipping them home from Musselburgh. But now Leslie decided at last to come after them. Having harried their rear, and challenged them further at Haddington, by 31 August he had the English marching down the narrow coastal strip, about eight miles in width, that stretched back from the sea before the vague shapes of the vast Lammermuirs began to rise. The Scots, with a vast army at their command – twenty-three thousand men – were able to march parallel to this procession, which certainly to outsiders must have had much of the character of a retreat. Finally on Monday, 2 September, they occupied a position of extraordinary strength on the very edge of the Lammermuir chain, known as Doon Hill, which loomed over the sick and wary forces of the English camped at Dunbar beneath. The position of the English, with about eleven thousand men still capable of fighting, and even those men at the fag end of a debilitating campaign, was perilous in the extreme. Cromwell’s situation as their General, with the chill North Sea to one side, the mighty Scots on their escarpment glowering like greedy wolves at the sick men, the road south to Berwick via Copperspath carefully blocked by Leslie, can only be compared to that of the hero of an adventure serial, who at the end of any given episode seems to have reached finally and unalterably the point of no escape.

But like such a hero, Cromwell did in fact burst his bonds and struggle free for the next episode of his career, and coming from the improbabilities of fiction, to the probabilities of history, the question must arise as to what his own intentions were within the trap of Dunbar. Did he in fact intend to retreat, shipping his men away from the still unvanquished land of Scotland, temporarily defeated by exactly those weapons on which Leslie had confidently counted, hunger and sickness? Was the escape from Dunbar then merely a lucky break – one of many in a career where fortune certainly played its part – based on Leslie’s mistake? Such a decision of retreat would have been in effect a tremendous admission of defeat: no other English army could possibly have been sent against Scotland until the next spring. For the time being ‘the controversy by the sword’ would have been settled by the divine umpirage in favour of the Scots, even if the two swords had never actually clashed. It was also temperamentally unlike Cromwell to consider such a defeatist course, one of his undoubted assets being his type of military optimism. By believing in the eternal possibility of victory, he took the exact risks that were necessary to bring it about. The recourse to Dunbar fits then more easily into a pattern of strategy by which he still hoped intensely to lure Leslie to fight. To this end Richard Deane, the artillery expert, was being summoned up from England and Cromwell was keenly awaiting his arrival (which again supposes that he did not intend to sail). When Cromwell wrote to Haselrig at Newcastle on 2 September, asking urgently for reinforcements, he certainly recognized the perilous fact of their predicament: ‘I would not make it public, lest danger should accrue thereby.’ Yet he ended with his usual unfaltering confidence: ‘Our spirits are comfortable (praised be the Lord) though our present condition be such as it is. And indeed we have much hope in the Lord, of whose mercy we have had large experience.’¹⁹

Cromwell, hemmed in as he might be, had one great strength which a General of his calibre could not fail to recognize. If Leslie wished to attack him, he could only do so by coming down off the escarpment, particularly as Cromwell’s men at Dunbar were out of reach of Leslie’s guns. The forces of the Commonwealth were grouped, some in the town itself, and some to the south of it, around about Broxmouth House, a property belonging to the Earl of Roxburgh, whose grounds ran down to the sea itself. Also running to the sea was a stream, known as the Broxburn. Encased in a wooden glen and small in scale, nevertheless its sides were so steep as to give it something of the character of a ravine in an otherwise flat coastal landscape. It was while at Broxmouth House, taking counsel with Lambert and other officers, that a slight movement was discerned (with the aid of perspective glasses) in the Scottish camp, which almost seemed to hang above their heads, so close was it, and yet so high. It was four o’clock in the afternoon of the Monday. According to a story Cromwell loved to tell afterwards, he had just finished praying and had received sufficient solace as a result to bid ‘all about him take heart for God had certainly heard them, and would appear for them’. Now, as though in direct answer to his prayer, he saw the Scots begin to desert their position, and prepare to descend on to the low ground. Cromwell’s reaction was instantaneous: ‘God is delivering them into our hands, they are coming down to us.’²⁰

And sure enough, on those seemingly impregnable heights, the decision had been taken, not by Leslie but by the Committee of the Estates, representing as it were the Scottish Covenanting command, that the Scots should descend and camp beneath the lee of the escarpment, preparatory to attack. As a decision it certainly illustrated the weaknesses of government by committee, although it is possible that Leslie had more hand in it than was afterwards admitted, since he may well have believed that this was the one pitched battle – on the most advantageous terms to the Scots – for whose benefit he had been studiously avoiding all the other more dubious engagements. For him too, the season was wearing on, with the Scottish host notoriously prone to slip away round harvest time to bring it in. An anecdote told by an English soldier who was captured before the battle, cross-examined by Leslie and released to join his comrades, suggests that Leslie was under a genuinely false impression concerning Cromwell’s strength, as well as havering over his intentions. He asked the man whether the English intended to fight. What did he think they came here for? was the robust answer. ‘How will you fight,’ replied Leslie, ‘when you have shipped half your men and all your great guns?’ Although the soldier retorted that if Leslie came down off the hill, he would see many of both in great abundance, Leslie does not seem to have accepted the correction.²¹

So now the Scots did make the fatal descent, and reformed their line in an enormous arc, like the spread of a huge fan, from the coast itself in the south to the Broxburn river, placing the majority of the horse which had been on the left wing, now across on the right, where the stream was narrowest, to guard against a crossing by the English. Outnumbering their enemies as they did by approximately two to one, the Scots lay down in the fields amid the corn, for happy slumbers, their match dowsed, their horses unsaddled, their officers in some cases even parted from their men and housed in farms, expecting a magnificent victory, the decision of the cause, on the morrow. But Cromwell was not disposed to wait for the morrow. The Scottish disposition was examined minutely and curiously by the Lord-General, aided by Lambert, at a conference at Broxmouth House. By Cromwell’s own account, their spirits remained resolute and Henry Fletcher later confirmed the tradition that Cromwell remained calm on the eve of what, in his own view, must be ‘his Masterpiece or his Misfortune’. Not a few of them, wrote Cromwell afterwards, shared the faith ‘that because of their numbers, because of their advantages, because of their confidence, because of our weakness, because of our strait, we were in the Mount and in the Mount the Lord would be seen; and that He would find out a way of deliverance and salvation for us …’²²

The way that the Lord chose was to put into the minds of Cromwell and of Lambert, apparently at the identical moment, the significance of the enemy’s new posture, which by moving two-thirds of the left wing to the right, ‘shogging also their foot and train much to the right’, had caused the existing right wing of their horse to edge uncomfortably down towards the sea. They now had insufficient ground to manoeuvre. ‘I told him I thought it did give us an opportunity and advantage to attempt upon the enemy’, wrote Cromwell, to which Lambert immediately replied that ‘he had thought to have said the same thing to me’. They then sent for Monk and explained their idea, subsequently passed on to some of the other Colonels who ‘also cheerfully concurred’.^*

It was in this manner that the daring break-out plan was conceived and one soldier afterwards remembered Cromwell spending the night riding through the various regiments by torchlight, on a little Scottish nag, ‘biting his lips till the blood ran down his chin without his perceiving it’, his thoughts far away on his vital plans for the secret attack. So it was at dawn – or as it turned out, slightly before, probably about four a.m. – the steep defile of Broxburn Glen was crossed, and the English were in a position to fall upon the unsuspecting Scots, who had themselves expected to make the attack somewhat later in the day. It was evidently still dark when the manoeuvre took place, for one narrative speaks of moonlight: six cavalry regiments under Fleetwood, Lambert and Whalley, and three and a half regiments of foot made the crossing in silence, thus successfully passing the Scottish right wing. Another infantry brigade under Overton remained on the further side of the Glen, where the guns were skilfully disposed by the expert Richard Deane, and Okey’s dragoons probably began the battle by supporting them here too. It was as day was breaking that the assault force, having reformed its lines in equal secrecy on the other side of the burn, began its fierce essay. And although the cavalry was to break through eventually, for the time being the Scots held them in check with their long Spanish lances, while for others there was what Cromwell called afterwards ‘a very hot dispute at sword point’. Monk’s infantry in the centre met even stiffer resistance, and even fell back under the enemy’s pikes. It was at this point that Cromwell, with his masterly eye for the battlefield, employed one of the openings left in the Scottish arc, and threw in his own regiment under Goffe and White, ‘very reasonably indeed’, to the left of the centre where Scots and Monk were fighting it out so harshly.^*23

The war-cry of the English was ‘The Lord of Hosts’: it was the final great culmination of the 46th Psalm: ‘The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge’, that paean which five years later Cromwell was to describe fervently as ‘a rare Psalm for a Christian’. That of the Scots was quite simply ‘The Covenant’. Perhaps Cromwell with his mind still on Isaiah’s 28th Chapter also recalled another verse of it – ‘In that day shall the Lord of hosts be for a crown of glory, and for a diadem of beauty, unto the residue of his people.’ The Bible, the religious fervour of it all, was much on his mind as due to this crucial intervention he was able to watch the battle turn in the English favour. By six o’clock, just as the sun was rising over the North Sea, he was heard by Sir John Hodgson saluting the orb in triumph, quoting the words of the 68th Psalm: ‘Now let God arise and his enemies be scattered.’ For now the horse had broken savagely through after their first temporary repulse and ‘flew about like Furies, doing wondrous execution’; as for the Scots, in Cromwell’s own words, they were ‘made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to their swords’. White-locke put it less glamorously: ‘The Scots were driven like turkeys by the English soldiers.’²⁴

The result was indeed the most terrible rout for the Scots. Some were chased for as much as eight miles. Three thousand were believed slain and ten thousand taken prisoner. Such were the adversities of both sides in respect of supplies that the situation of the former was almost preferable. On the forced march south of the prisoners there were fearful hardships: desperate captives were reported snatching raw cabbages from the gardens at Morpeth. But for Cromwell, Dunbar had in truth turned out to be his masterpiece. Credit should be given where it is due for the superb fighting machine that the English army now presented, well-trained enough to execute such a difficult exercise as that silent perilous dawn manoeuvre at the end of a telling campaign in the field, and against vastly superior odds. Lambert was one of the heroes of the battle, doing exceptionally well both in planning and later by personal courage rallying the horse in their moment of crisis. Then there were the weaknesses of the Scots’ command, the doubtful decision of the ministers influencing the Scots Committee of Estates to descend from the plateau and re-camp, using what Cromwell with contempt called ‘the instruments of a foolish shepherd, to wit, meddling with worldly policies …’ But taken all in all, Dunbar was Cromwell’s day and its victory the greatest of a great career.

It was Cromwell who both inspired the assault, and then threw in the reserve at the vital moment in the vital place. He was acting not from strength, but from a situation which even his most jealous enemies could not describe as propitious. As Sadrach Simpson wrote to him frankly from London: previously he had often owed his triumphs to being ‘too many, too vigourous’ when he fought; at Dunbar he had faced the supreme test of feeling ‘the cold earth and want of provisions in a strange country’. It was no wonder that Cromwell himself in his long report back to Parliament described Dunbar as ‘one of the most signal mercies God hath done for England, and His people, this war’. On 4 September, the morrow of the battle, he dashed off letters not only to Parliament, the President of the Council, and Haselrig at Newcastle, but also to Ireton in Ireland, his ‘beloved wife’ in London, his ‘loving Brother’ Richard Mayor in Hampshire, and even Lord Wharton; all showed signs of a high, almost delirious state of rejoicing, the latter letter actually beginning: ‘I, poor I, love you!’ And according to Bishop Burnet, he loved much to talk about the battle afterwards, in which manner the details of his own behaviour there have come down with reliability.²⁵ While 3 September had taken its first step forward to becoming ‘his most auspicious day’.

In their reactions to Dunbar, the varying segments of contemporary opinion showed up clearly. That of England was predictably ecstatic. Whitelocke was in his coach on his way to Chelsea, having got as far as Charing Cross, when a messenger accosted him and panted out: ‘Oh my lord, God hath appeared gloriously for us in Scotland; a glorious day, my lord, at Dunbar in Scotland.’ But as he was in too much of a hurry to reach the House of Commons to give any details, Whitelocke had perforce to change direction and follow him to hear the report read aloud. It was resolved by the House that a Dunbar medal should be struck, which should be given equally to both officers and men.^* The services of the official medallist Thomas Simon were engaged, and for the portrait of Cromwell proposed to be thereon, he made a special journey to Edinburgh at the beginning of the following year – despite the modest protests of the Lord-General, who wrote back to London on the subject: ‘I may truly say it will be very thankfully acknowledged by me, if you will spare the having my Effigies on it …’ A picture of Parliament on the one side would ‘do singularly well’, but Cromwell wanted the Army depicted on the other, and the inscription The Lord of Hosts over it, ‘which was our word that day’. However Simon with much dexterity managed to squeeze in a token skirmish on one side, above the profile bust of Cromwell, and the war-cry was duly employed. And Cromwell was sufficiently pleased with the result to commission from Simon a similar medal of himself as Lord-General of the Army, arising out of the same visit, so that either Simon or the passage of time evidently overcame his scruples.²⁶

While the Scots in London grew pale, and were insulted in the shops as the news of the defeat spread, de Croullé wrote back to Mazarin full of affront at Cromwell’s prolonged praises of God in his Dunbar despatch: it showed, he said, the full measure of his hypocritical nature and that of his whole faction. More to the point, de Croullé also ruminated with alarm on the militant spirit produced in the English by this victory: there was talk now of reversing all the monarchies, in which case France would certainly be the first to be attacked. As if in confirmation of his words, the official Nouvelles Ordinaires devoted the whole of its current issue, for spreading to Europe, to the Dunbar despatch. Oliver St John, in a lyrical letter from London to his cousin Cromwell, put into words much of the prevalent English feeling that this striking victory totally justified them in their recent attitude to the Scots: ‘… both parties referred the decision of the cause to God,’ he wrote, ‘and desired that he would give his judgement therein at the day of battle, as that whereby each side, and all standers by, might take notice of the mind of God, concerning the righteousness of their cause … He is the God of Judgement,’ he cried, ‘and according to the appeal, takes the umpirage upon him.’²⁷

It was an attitude that many of the now unhappy Covenanting Scots shared. For none took a more serious view of their defeat than the Scots themselves, and this was not only along the lines that the flower of their army had been hideously routed, leaving much of southern Scotland under what was virtually an English military occupation. It was the clear, the undeniable, the evident rejection of their cause by the Lord – the verdict of God’s umpirage – which fazed and harassed many of the Scots. In a sense, they showed an admirably honourable bearing towards this appalling providence, and did not attempt to hide from themselves that their own fallibility must be in some way responsible for this rejection. Robert Baillie referred to the Lord overthrowing them ‘contrary to all appearance … by our own negligence’ and saw in their subsequent divisions further proof of ‘the Lord’s hand now upon us’. Psychologically it was so much easier for the supporters of King, rather than those of Presbytery, to accept the reverse. What to young Charles ii was merely ‘that sad stroke’ of Dunbar, became in Nicoll’s Diary an instance of divine vengeance on the Scots, a further instance being the bad weather for the harvest, all of which had to be atoned for by fasts and humiliations (which did indeed become increasingly frequent in post-Dunbar Scotland). Later Nicoll would see in Worcester merely a further argument for the ‘hot wrath and indignation of the Lord against the kingdom of Scotland’ and come to the melancholy conclusion that ‘the cloak of piety’ there must have covered ‘much knavery’ at this time.²⁸

Of course Scottish resistance was not ended by Dunbar. Leslie escaped to Stirling, the fortress gateway to the Highlands, where he gathered together a force of four or five thousand men. Cromwell’s ex-colleagues Strachan and Kerr, both keen Presbyterians, took the road to western Scotland where they hoped to raise more men. King Charles was at Perth, where he intended to acquire troops from the loyalists further north under the Royalist Middleton, which force he later attempted to join in preference to the Covenanters in the abortive expedition of October known as ‘the Start’. But the need to swallow and digest the humiliation of Dunbar still further divided the Scots into the hard-line ‘Remonstrants’ who wanted the Covenant strictly adhered to and distrusted Charles’s attitude to it (perhaps slackness had been the fault of the Scots); then there were the ‘Resolutioners’ who were milder, and driven by the obduracy of the former to ally with the Royalists, previously known as ‘malignants’. There was a natural advantage to Cromwell in all this. The tendency would be now for the Scottish nationalist party of the future to take on a much more Royalist slant. This left Cromwell to indulge in overtures and arguments with the former Covenanters as individuals, attempting to persuade them that since God had clearly declared himself in favour of the English, he must also favour a looser form of religion. And of course this bent towards conversion and fraternal discussion was where his inclination had always lain with regard to the Scots. It fitted too with his rough ideas of social policy towards the Scots – there were to be no wholesale confiscations of land here as in Ireland, but wherever possible an attempt at an agreement.

On 7 September Cromwell entered Edinburgh. The city had heard the news of Dunbar in a peculiarly fitting manner, for just as a certain Mr Haig was denouncing the sectaries from the pulpit and outlining their defeat, an exhausted soldier reeled into the back of the church and began to describe on the contrary the slaughter of his fellow countrymen. Cromwell was received at the Nether Bow by three leading citizens, an advocate, a physician and a ‘cordwainer’ (shoe-maker), who treated for the safety of the city. He proceeded to establish himself once more in the house of the Countess of Moray in the Canongate, his habitation of two years back. But almost immediately the further needs of the Scottish campaign took him first round West Lothian, then in the direction of enemy-held Stirling via Linlithgow and Falkirk. He spent one night in St Ninian’s Church near Stirling because the weather was so exceptionally wet and there was no other lodging. Stirling, however, although the garrison was outnumbered by the English, refused to respond to the exhortations of Cromwell’s trumpeter with his summons. But Cromwell took no further action, either because he hoped the Scots would come to join him of their own accord, or because he feared to drive the defenders further north into the Highlands, from where it would be extremely hard to dislodge them. Linlithgow was fortified instead, with the aid of the distinguished Dutch engineer Joachim Hane, and by 21 September Oliver was back in Edinburgh.

Unlike the town itself, Edinburgh Castle had not surrendered. Under its Governor Sir Walter Dundas, it was huge, imposing, well fortified, and from its extraordinary position on its rock commanding the whole city, obviously presented one of Cromwell’s most pressing problems, as well as being likely to turn out one of the most intractable. Indeed a contemporary Scot prophesied that the castle would prove the bone that would break Cromwell’s teeth. Here some of the Presbyterian ministers had taken refuge after Dunbar, not waiting for the conqueror’s arrival, and in the text of his summons, a long and closely reasoned document, Cromwell harangued them passionately for not abiding by the umpirage of Dunbar: ‘Did not you solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? Were not both yours and our expectations renewed from time to time, whilst we waited on God, to see which way He would manifest himself upon our appeals?’ How could they then refuse to let what they described as mere ‘events’ be a test of equity? He appealed to them not to let their personal prejudices stand in the way of renewed understanding.²⁹ But the summons and the arguments having fallen on deaf ears, the bombardment was duly set up, while Cromwell himself travelled across country to visit Glasgow.

Here, in mid-October, the English were much impressed by the small but graceful city, which they preferred to Edinburgh. It was in line with Cromwell’s hopes of curing the Scots – particularly the strict Covenanting south-western Scots – with kindness that he saw to it that the English army as a whole behaved with great civility throughout their stay. Robert Baillie commented on Cromwell’s courtesy, and gave the opinion that as a result the English troops had done ‘less displeasure at Glasgow, nor if they had been at London’. This restraint was the more commendable in that the leaders had to endure a Presbyterian minister, Zachary Boyd, railing at them in one part of the High Church of Glasgow, while in another corner they with greater discretion listened to the words of an English chaplain. Undismayed, Cromwell later sought out Boyd for discussions, and may be felt to have got a little of his own back by an extemporare prayer of two or three hours’ duration. Such inter-denominational feelers were characteristic of Cromwell’s time in Scotland. After his arrival in Edinburgh he had declared his hopes during the winter ‘to give the people such an understanding of the justness of our cause … that the better sort of them will be satisfied therewith’, although he went on to add with humorous indignation: ‘I thought I should have found in Scotland a conscientious people and a barren country; about Edinburgh is as fertile for corn as any part of England, but the people generally given to the most impudent lying, and frequent swearing, as is incredible to be believed …’³⁰

Such reflections could be cured by some honest disputations, of the sort which took place on several occasions between Cromwell, Owen and Alexander Jaffray, who had been taken prisoner after Dunbar. Jaffray, on his own admission, became convinced that the Scots had been in error as to God’s intentions towards the magistrate’s power over the exercise of religion: ‘The mistake and ignorance of the mind of God in this matter – what evils hath it occasioned!’ he exclaimed. In April the following year, on another visit to Glasgow, Cromwell listened quietly enough to Presbyterian sermons, and then asked for further discussions thereafter, because, according to Robert Baillie, he had no wish to contradict the Scots publicly but had genuine hopes that a conference would lead to conversion. The Scots accepted, reluctantly, but feeling it was unavoidable. There followed ‘a long and serious debate’, partly on matters of pure religion, partly on the rights and wrongs of the English invasion of Scotland. Joseph Baynes, reporting it back to London, thought their action ‘sufficiently proved just and necessary’, and although he admitted that the Scottish ministers were not yet satisfied of the justification, yet he was optimistic that ‘divers of their countrymen are somewhat convinced, and will do a little better comply with us than formerly’.³¹

Such a conference, impossible to conceive between Cromwell and the Irish Catholic clergy, was all part of the picture outlined by Whitelocke: Cromwell ‘thus sought to win them [the Scots] by fair means rather than to punish them’. It was an attitude Cromwell was to maintain even after the final defeat of the Scots the next year: in a letter to a friend in New England, he still wrote that the Scots were ‘(I verily think) godly but through weakness and subtlety of Satan, involved in interests against the Lord and his people’.³²In Edinburgh, the church-going habits of the English were the subject of much speculation: they stifled criticism by attending the church of a Presbyterian minister Mr Stapleton and listening with apparent edification. The only outward difference apparent between Covenanters and Independents in the congregation was audible rather than visible: whereas the Covenanters were in the habit of groaning aloud to express their appreciation, the English, in Independent fashion, hummed.

However in the rest of Scotland there remained many areas where the difference between natives and invaders was more profound than that nice distinction between a hum and a groan. In December Lambert at Cromwell’s command finally crushed the Resolutioners of the south-west, kindness having failed to bring them over. The bone of Edinburgh Castle remained to be dislodged from Cromwell’s teeth. The implacable rock had been much attacked by miners, some from the eastern mining districts of Scotland itself, others brought up from the Derbyshire collieries. But the besieged, with much resource, threw pitch and flax and other inflammable materials into the mines to smoke them out. Despite the heavy bombardment of the English guns, grouped on the north side of the Castle Hill (the east side of the castle still showing traces of their work), it was the opinion of one Englishman that guns alone would never wear down the stronghold so long as ‘the defendants have anything of encourage in them’. Edinburgh Castle had already withstood one famous two-year siege under Kirkcaldy of the Grange in the previous century; it had plenty of water and, at the present time, ammunition and provisions for several months. It seems therefore that its ultimate surrender on 24 December had more to do with the state of mind of the Governor, Dundas, than actual hardship. The bombardment had to cease on 16 December when a snowstorm hid the castle from view. By the time Dundas reached terms satisfactory to himself the mines were not even completed. A keen Covenanter, he was quick to join Cromwell’s side thereafter. Heath repeated an unpleasant comment on the whole affair: Edinburgh Castle having heretofore been known as the Maiden, should in future be known as the Prostitute.³³

By the end of 1650, the Royalist inspiration of Cromwell’s Scottish opponents was becoming more marked. When the moderate Resolutioners passed a regulation in the General Assembly on 14 December allowing back into the public service all those who were not actually notorious enemies of the Covenant, that pointed the way still further in this direction for the New Year. Cromwell had as yet failed to take Fife and the valuable Scottish lands lying north-east of Edinburgh, despite having made himself master of the whole of south Scotland, below the Clyde and the Forth. On 1 January King Charles ii was officially crowned at Scone. It was a sign for all those Scots of differing yet mild persuasions to rally behind him. Cromwell and Lambert sent notice to London that the Scots with the King were ceasing to argue about doctrine and were making it ‘not a religious war, but a national quarrel’.³⁴ In the meantime, for all Lambert’s confident prediction that the Scots having ‘filled the measure of their iniquities’, the Lord would speedily judge them, the English provisions were getting rapidly exhausted. The English army in Scotland was also suffering from pay troubles, which if they had a familiar ring to those who had followed the fortunes of the New Model, were not a soothing basis for the New Year’s operations.

Nevertheless the most prominent casualty of Cromwell’s spring campaign – towards the kingdom of Fife, now the centre of Royalist activity – was the Lord-General himself. The weather was by turns soaking and freezing. Cromwell’s health, never totally reliable, had been much lowered by the months spent fighting round Ireland, quite apart from the actual breakdown he had endured there. Scotland, an expedition initiated after only four weeks’ respite, was to take an even greater toll. And as in Ireland he had taken an exceptionally short winter break. On 8 February he fell desperately sick in the Canongate house, probably as a direct result of immersion in a snowstorm while campaigning near Linlithgow. With the typical foolishness of the man of action, who ever insists on taking one step forward before his health is ready for it, Cromwell found himself involved in three relapses within the next few weeks. It was not until the end of the month that he was well enough to discuss plans of battle with his officers, and even then he still apparently felt ‘a little crazy’ in himself, a word he had applied to his own health in Ireland. In its contemporary meaning it conveyed a feeling of shakiness through sheer weakness, a seriously flawed constitution, rather than the modern sense of madness.

An English newsletter of early March included a letter from a gentleman attending on Cromwell to poor ‘Lady Cromwell’ (as his wife was generally known now) in London. It was a measure of public concern for the sick General. Describing how he has scarcely had time in his fervent nursing to put pen to paper, the servant gives this newly encouraging report: ‘Truly Madam, my Lord took his rest very well on Tuesday night last, and so (blessed be God) he has done every night since, and sometimes in the day also, so that he is better sensible both in Dr Goddard’s judgement and his own; hath a better stomache and grows stronger.’ This gentleman was probably Cromwell’s French valet Jean Duret, whose subsequent story even Heath had to admit showed ‘a Ray or Specimen of humanity’ in Cromwell. While ill, Cromwell would only take food from Duret’s hands, letting no one else come near him. Duret himself then fell sick, perhaps out of the exhaustion of nursing, and it was Cromwell’s turn to visit him assiduously. But Duret did not recover. In his dying breath, he commended his mother, sister and kindred in France to his master’s care. Cromwell took the charge with great seriousness. He wrote immediately on the subject to Lady Cromwell in London, who sent for the Duret family and had them seated at her own table. The sister later became one of her maids of honour, the nephews pages, while Madame Duret was greeted personally by Cromwell with gracious speeches. No linguist, he had even taken the trouble to learn some French phrases for the purpose, although his daughters, who did speak French, had in the main to act as interpreters. The burthen of his message was that he, Cromwell, would now act as a son towards her ‘since the preservation of his life had its being in her entrails’. The whole story, both in the devotion of the servant and the kindness of the master, is not only characteristic of the tender private side of Cromwell, but also provides one refutation at least of the old tag that no man is a hero to his valet.³⁵

The news of Cromwell’s indisposition, much exaggerated, ran like wildfire to Royalist circles both at home and abroad; he was said to be so ill on 11 March that his doctors kept his letters from him, although the records of his correspondence show that it was on that very day that he signed an important letter urging upon Parliament the establishment of a northern university at Durham. Education was impressed upon Cromwell’s mind: he had earlier received the flattering news that he had been elected as Chancellor of Oxford University, although he greeted the deputation with speeches of such tortuous modesty that it was only his retention of the seal when its members left that made them realize that he had accepted the position. But in southern England, the first serious Royalist conspiracy took place. At the Hague and Rotterdam there were delicious rumours that Cromwell was dead – and by his own hand. Ralph Josselin in Essex heard that he had died.³⁶ The whole situation, the stalemate in Scotland, the resurgent Royalists, showed the burden that lay on one man, the Novus Princeps.

However by April Cromwell was able to write back to his wife in London, praising the Lord that his outward strength was at last better. It was a missive which showed all his usual family preoccupations: if Dick and Doll were with her, they were to be assured of his prayers and love. ‘The dear little ones’ (Mary and Frances, now fourteen and thirteen respectively) were tenderly thanked for their letters: ‘let me have them often’. But he also played the watchful father: Mrs Cromwell was warned not to entertain Lord Herbert too often to her house, for since Cromwell had been granted by Parliament the estates of his father (Lord Worcester) he feared that the enterprising Herbert might try to recover them by courting Mary. But it was ‘poor Bettie’ on this occasion who received the brunt of the spiritual admonitions. It was she who was to be reminded of the Lord’s great mercy and to beware of those ‘worldly vanities and worldly company’ to which she was suspected of being altogether too partial.³⁷

Under the circumstances, it must have been a pleasure, or at any rate the usual relief of a parent of a large family that not all its members were straying at the same time, to hear from Ireland that Bridget Ireton there was causing a great impression by her piety, while Henry Cromwell was reported to be ‘much crying to God in secret’. Alas, before Oliver left Scotland, he found himself writing a much less happy letter on the eternal subject of Dick, who had now justified his worst suspicions by getting himself heavily in debt. Richard Mayor was given the task of passing on the unwelcome message. Like many addresses of upright fathers to profligate sons, it was ostensibly more in sorrow than in anger: ‘I desire to be understood that I grudge him not laudable recreations, nor an honourable carriage of himself in them: truly I can find in my heart not only a sufficiency, but more, for his own good. But if pleasure and self-satisfaction be made the business of a man’s life, so much laid out upon it, so much time spent on it, as rather answers appetite than the will of God, or is comely before His saints, I scruple to feed this humour.’ But in his subsequent contrast of their two situations, Cromwell campaigning in Scotland, while Dick lolled in sinful ease in England, can be discerned the familiar cry of the father who simply cannot at heart understand why his son is not more like himself: ‘Indeed I cannot think I do well to feed a voluptuous humour in my son, if he should make pleasures the business of his life, in a time when some precious Saints are bleeding and breathing out their last.’³⁸

In May, despite this theoretic recovery which allowed him to visit Glasgow once more, Cromwell was ill again. The Scots put his collapse down to a long nagging controversy he was having with Archibald Johnston Lord Warriston, concerning the return of the Scottish records, which Warriston and his wife were particularly anxious to save. It was supposed that a particularly vehement letter from Warriston had made Cromwell sick. But this time he added the torments of a stone to the fluctuating weaknesses of a fever, and Aubrey asserted wildly afterwards that he had been in such a rage (or pain) that he had pistolled two commanders who had come to his room. Towards the end of the month, despite continued statements of recovery, he was known to have suffered five fits of ague or fever from Friday to Monday. It was not until 31 May that he was reliably known to be walking in the pleasant garden of Lady Moray’s house, and eating and sleeping well. But by this time Parliament had reached a rare state of panic at the prospect – and possible consequences – of their victor’s demise. Like many of the English, putting all Cromwell’s troubles down to the Scottish climate, they instructed that he should repair to somewhere south of the border, in order to recuperate in the more favourable English air. Two doctors, Dr Wright and Dr Bate, were also sent trundling up from London in Fairfax’s coach. However, by the time they arrived, as a newsletter put it, another eminent physician – the Lord in His wisdom – had already said to Cromwell: ‘Live!’ The mortal doctors were left to receive £200 for their pains.³⁹

It was early June before Cromwell was able to travel abroad in his coach, and even then ‘the ill vapours’ proceeding from a Scotch mist sent him scuttling back to Edinburgh again. Cromwell himself wrote of the experience that the extremity of his sickness had been ‘so violent indeed my nature was not able to bear the weight thereof. But the Lord was pleased to deliver me, beyond expectation, and to give me cause to say once more, “He hath plucked me out of the grave!” ’ But perhaps the most apt comment on it all was made by a newsletter of the time: ‘My lord is not sensible he is grown an old man’ – although even that did not quite do justice to the General’s own sagacity, since in a letter to his wife immediately after Dunbar he had confessed privately that he felt the ‘infirmities of age’ marvellously stealing upon him, despite all the sustenance granted to the inner man.⁴⁰ Cromwell was now fifty-two, and beyond middle age by the standards of the time. From Scotland onwards, he could never count on his body as a young, or even fit man of middle age might do. It is important to realize that in consequence of this prolonged scare concerning his health, lasting in effect for five months in the public mind, his death thereafter must always be some sort of possibility.

The immediate consequence of Cromwell’s double bout of sickness was of course much to delay the prosecution of the Scottish campaign. As Mercurius Politicus observed in June: ‘The beauty of the summer is passing away very fast and yet we are not upon any action.’ The English army had now been in Scotland for close on a year, without the cause between the two countries being effectively decided once and for all. Yet the prospect of another winter’s campaign there was something from which all right-minded men must shrink. The English ladies had begun to make the long journey north to join their husbands; they included Mrs Deane and the charming Frances Lambert, who wrote back to London with evident relief of her safe arrival and her reunion with her husband: ‘I bles the Lord I am safe gotten into Scot Land’ (her original spelling preserved) ‘where for sume days I happyly enjoy my dearest frend …’ The Lamberts had elegant tastes: during Lambert’s sojourn in Scotland, his Captain Walker had been writing off to London for a coat for his master ‘such as is most in fashion (the last having been of Tarnetla Hollandaise)’, sword-belts, ‘a good French hat of the best sort’ and later another hat with bands, which should be fashionable yet black ‘for gold and silver pleaseth him not’. Summer riding boots and Spanish leather shoes (which were to be of better stuff ‘than last we took from London’) were the subject of further requests, as were some three dozen quart bottles of the best Canary sack, which were to come by sea to Leith, and it was hoped would arrive before Lambert took the field.⁴¹

Now Mrs Lambert in her turn started ordering up some fine French lawn from London if only because ‘I have nothing to wear about my neck, and I dare not go bare, for fear of giving offence to tender saints …’ And with the prospect of the army’s return to England she began rather illogically to be ‘much satisfied’ with her stay in Scotland. Her husband was ‘gone into the field’ she wrote, and some of the English ladies rode out to watch the fighting. ‘I trust our good God will decide the quarrel between us.’⁴²Lambert’s foray was over the Firth of Forth towards Fife, since it had been decided that the time had come when this fertile area must be seized once and for all by the forces of the Commonwealth; the Scots, securely installed in Stirling, were once more reluctant to be drawn into an engagement. But at Inverkeithing, just north of the firth, Lambert in a spirited and enterprising battle, where the English were numerically roughly equal with the Scots, gave Cromwell just the victory he needed. With this peninsula delivered into the Lord-General’s hands, the time of ‘waiting upon God’ in Cromwell’s words ‘and not knowing what course to take’ was over. The way was clear to push north, and by 1 August Cromwell was actually as far advanced as Perth, bombarding the fortress of St Johnston.

There was only one problem about this extended sally. It left the way equally clear for Charles and the remainder of the Scottish forces under Leslie to pelt for England. There they could raise the Royalist flag anew, with what increment that might involve of rising loyalist troops. In any case the alternative was not particularly attractive, for Cromwell at Perth threatened the Scottish Stirling supplies, and there was no chance of raising further men within the actual bounds of Scotland. So the King took the bait: he plunged for the march on England, at the head of the Scots as Generalissimo. They were across into England at Carlisle by 5 August. On 6 August King Charles ii, ‘the young man’ as Cromwell was supposed to nickname him in his private conversations,⁴³ was proclaimed sovereign of England. The terms of the proclamation offered free pardon to all those who would now join him, whatever their past misdemeanours, with the three exceptions of Bradshaw, the prosecuting counsel Cook and of course the arch-criminal Oliver Cromwell himself.

In the meantime what about the arch-criminal? We left him before Perth, in theory at least out-manoeuvred by the precipitate march of the Scots. But that Cromwell deliberately left the road open as a calculated risk to thus flush out and ultimately finish off Leslie cannot be doubted. Not only did he show himself in no particular hurry to settle Perth, but once back at Leith, he actually took the trouble to explain his plan in advance to the Speaker; ‘I do apprehend that if he [Leslie] does go for England, being some few days march before us, it will trouble some men’s thoughts’ he wrote carefully, but he was comforted by the conviction that ‘we have done to the best of our judgements, knowing that if some issue were not put to this business, it would occasion another winter’s war, to the ruin of your soldiery’.⁴⁴ For this reason any more wary notion of placing themselves between the Scots and England had to be discarded in the greater interest of ultimate settlement. The coming campaign, Cromwell’s last period of active service, showed the culmination of his career as a strategist.

From Leith Cromwell himself now proceeded to march with remarkable rapidity after the royal party, taking with him the foot, having sent on Lambert with the cavalry to harass the Scots’ rear. By 9 August Lambert was at Penrith just behind Charles. In the meantime the south of England had not been idle in preparing to meet what the Commonwealth at any rate considered as Scottish invasion rather than a royal return. Thomas Harrison travelled north, meeting up with Lambert on 14 August. Charles Fleetwood prepared to defend the capital, in case Charles’s intentions were a quick dash towards London. A passion of anti-Scottish feelings began to be drummed up in English breasts by the official newsletter Mercurius Politicus: an early August issue recounted the entire history of the Scottish invasions of England (including Flodden) starting with King Malcolm in 1071, and suggested that anyone so ‘un-English’ as to join Charles should be stoned.⁴⁵

The Royalist answer to this kind of propaganda was of course the natural appeal of a King to his loyal subjects. Unfortunately for Charles the words of his proclamation had fallen on curiously infertile ground. The expected Royalists were simply not flocking to his banner. On the contrary, the newly raised militia was to play an important part in the battle against him. For all that he took the western route towards the south which would bring him in touch with the traditionally Royalist areas of Lancashire and Wales, it was by no means a swelling procession. There was a variety of reasons for this unlooked-for failure. For one thing there was already a deep-dyed dislike of the Scots in the north of England, before Mercurius Politicus did its work, based on the notorious depredations of the Scottish invasion of 1648. This aversion to the Scots was a potent factor in limiting the enthusiasm of the whole Royalist underground movement in England: a man like Sir Rowland Berkeley, for example, a keen partisan of King Charles i, actually spent the day of Worcester deliberately dodging the scene of the battle.⁴⁶ But further than that, there was a considerable spirit of lassitude over the whole country, induced by the potent Government repressions that had followed a premature Norfolk rising in December, and another in April. By the time King Charles reached Worcester, not too far from the Welsh borders, on 22 August, where the loyal townsfolk, extremely Royalist in their sympathies, drove out the garrison to accept him, he had only mustered at his command under sixteen thousand men.

Cromwell the hunter now went by Newcastle and Brancepeth and pressed forward south roughly parallel to his prey, his determination on rapid pursuit seen by the fact that his men were allowed to march in their shirt-sleeves, while local horses were pressed into service to carry their outer clothing and arms. He was at Catterick by 16 August, having averaged twenty miles a day, an astonishingly high figure for infantry. Such a turn of speed brought its problems: on 21 August he wrote off to the Council of State requesting another two thousand men ‘for carrying on and finishing the business of Scotland’ since his men were suffering and falling out from the long march. While Charles at Worcester wrote off desperately to city authorities elsewhere to rise on his behalf, Cromwell reached Rufford Abbey, near Mansfield, the home of his friend and fellow MP William Pierrepont. He then turned west, and at Warwick was joined by his brother-in-law Desborough with Lord Grey of Groby and another two thousand men. Two days later he wrote off for five thousand shovels, spades and pickaxes and a vast quantity of ammunition to come to Gloucester south of Worcester. It was clear that he expected to have to besiege the King.⁴⁷

But here the ill-luck of the Royalists continues. One man who had rallied to the King’s cause was the powerful territorial magnate the Earl of Derby, who had landed from the Continent in Lancashire on 17 August. He now had his force eliminated by Lilburne at Wigan, out of which disaster only Derby himself and a handful of men escaped to join the King within Worcester itself. Cromwell was by now at Stratford-on-Avon; from here on 27 August he had the inclination to write ‘one bold word’ to his friend Lord Wharton, begging him to overcome his scruples and associate himself willingly with what was clearly the Lord’s work, instead of reasoning himself out of His service. Other friends were named, including Hammond, who were allowing their consciences to thus misdirect them helping one another in a regrettable manner to ‘stumble at the dispensations of God’. Considering the pressures now upon Cromwell (‘I have no leisure’ he admitted to Wharton) the letter was a remarkable proof of his desire for unity in what he felt to be a righteous enterprise.⁴⁸ How could people, godly people, be so stubborn as not to realize where the divine will was pointing? By the same night, Cromwell and Fleetwood were together at Evesham, only fifteen miles south-east of Worcester, their combined forces totalling twenty-eight thousand men, and with the prospect of more to come from the raising of the militia.

Within the depths of Worcester, Charles had only about half that number. Moreover his men were exhausted, depressed by the catalogue of failures, and lacked arms. Yet at least Worcester presented in itself a position of natural advantage spreading across the left bank of the broad river Severn as it flowed down to Bristol, and with a range of hills extending between the town and Evesham. The right bank was further guarded by a network of tributary rivers including the Teme. The Royalists, efficiently blowing up the four key bridges giving access to the city, prepared to sell their lives dearly. It was left to Cromwell to counter by sending Lambert ten miles south to Upton, also on the Severn, where he seized one of the bridges with the aid of the dragoons, and rebuilt it. Cromwell himself, who by now had been almost continuously on the march for over three weeks (in weather which had included hail as big as musket balls, killing birds at Towcester, as well as hours of lightning), established himself at Spetchley Park, also south-east of Worcester.

There was very little that the beleaguered Charles could do now with any true hope of success. The opposing forces, joined by men of the militia, now numbered over thirty-one thousand and the combination of Cromwell, Fleetwood and Lambert effectively ringed him round on the south and east, while new forces were hurrying to block any possible northern escape. Inside the city indecision was the order of the day: no one could decide what should best be done. Should they break out and dive for London? (In any case Cromwell was by now blocking the way.) Or should they simply make a foray to win new supplies? The one sensible suggestion – to make for Wales – was not adopted. One abortive break-out under Middleton and Keith on the 29th to try and crush the English guns’ position on the heights to the east of the city at Perry Wood was betrayed by a Puritan tailor of Worcester named Guise. Although he was hanged the next day, the Scots were pushed back.^* On the same day Cromwell wrote back to London of his future plans: ‘We are thus advancing towards that city. And I suppose we shall draw very close to it. If they will come forth and engage with us we shall leave the issue to God’s providence, and doubt not to partake of glorious mercies. If they avoid fighting, and lead us a jaunt, we shall do as God shall direct …’⁵⁰

But there was a certain impression of leisure both in Cromwell’s letter and in his next preparations, which consisted of bombarding the town from Perry Wood. It was significant that it was almost exactly twelve months since the victory of Dunbar. He rode down to Upton to thank the men there for their work in recapturing the bridge and was received with rapturous acclaim by the troops. His letter two days later spoke of the enemy merely being still inside Worcester ‘and within a few days will have to fight or fly’. Cromwell clearly intended to attack Worcester from the west, in the open fields on the left bank of the Severn, rather than in the heavily defended east. For this a bridge of boats was needed, in the absence of any other form of bridge, across both Teme and Severn, for which heavy boats were towed upstream from Gloucester. Materials were gathered on Monday, 1 September and the two bridges, within ‘pistol-shot’ of each other, were completed by Tuesday, 2 September. Yet it was not until the next day that at daybreak, exactly twelve months after the fateful dawn of Dunbar, the first action began. The conclusion that Cromwell, that master of the quick manoeuvre and surprise attack, dawdled infinitesimally but deliberately after the Council of War on the 29th, to make the two dates concur, is irresistible. The coincidence was the subject of his first comment to Parliament afterwards which began ‘upon this day … remarkable for a mercy vouchsafed to your forces on this day twelvemonth in Scotland’.⁵¹ It was surely an endearing weakness in a man otherwise singularly free from the credulities of many of his comrades, and even recognized as such at the time.

The plan of campaign involved dividing the Commonwealth forces roughly in half: in the east the men should remain at Perry Wood, while in the west Fleetwood with about twelve thousand men was to march to the conjunction of the Teme and Severn rivers, and there fling his two wings across. While the morning was spent in the crossings, which were not complete until early afternoon, Cromwell probably remained at a form of command post at Perry Wood. From this situation later arose a fantastic but enjoyable story of Faustian proportions which the Royalists loved to tell, and whose main real effect was to confirm the impression made on Cromwell’s contemporaries of the unusual significance of the date 3 September in his life. It purported to come from Colonel Lindsay, first Captain of Oliver’s own regiment who on the morning of 3 September was taken by his commander into the wood to meet ‘a grave elderly Man with a Roll of parchment in his hand’, a meeting that filled Lindsay with uncontrollable horror and trembling. The aged unknown promised Oliver to ‘have his will then, and in all things else for seven years’, at which date it would be his – the devil’s – turn to have complete mastery over Cromwell’s soul and body. Cromwell was supposed to have argued the short span – he was expecting twenty-one years and stood out for fourteen – but in the end the compact was made, and he returned crying out joyously to his companion: ‘Now Lindsay, the Battle is our own, I long to be engaged.’ Lindsay however deserted at the first charge, galloped all the way to Norfolk and confided the whole hideous tale to a minister who wrote it down.⁵²

Diabolic interlude apart, by the time the fighting on the west bank was begun in earnest, it was time for Cromwell to move across personally from the eastern front, and throw in further troops including his lifeguards and his own horse, across the Severn over the second bridge of boats. He led his men himself, and once more the famous cry of Dunbar was heard: ‘The Lord of Hosts.’ This time his colours were not white, yet, wrote Robert Staplyton afterwards, ‘the Lord hath clothed us with white garments, though to the enemy they have been bloody’. Mercurius Politicus described how Cromwell did ‘exceedingly hazard himself’ riding up and down and in person offering quarter to the enemy foot – whose answer was merely to shoot at him.⁵³ The effect of this savage flank attack was to knock the Scottish left back into Worcester, and their right, which up to this point was successfully holding Fleetwood’s left to the south at Powick, also inevitably retracted. Even so, the fighting was extremely fierce, and it took Fleetwood some appreciable time to push all the Scots back to the confines of the city. As it was, Montgomery on the Royalist right might have held out longer if Leslie had allowed him aid. Yet the instincts of the old soldier were probably right: whether or not he disobeyed Charles’s orders in ignoring Montgomery’s claims, the only hope for the Scots now lay in some kind of concentration of their forces.

It was now that the young King led a personal sally to the east, against that half of the Commonwealth army still on the Perry Wood heights, a desperate measure attempting his own version of Cromwell’s Dunbar break-out. But it was literally uphill work, a fearful struggle, pike to pike and musket to musket. As the battle line swayed this way and that by inches, there was time for Cromwell’s own troops to come round from the western bank and add themselves to the Commonwealth strength. So now the Royalists were themselves forced back and their own Royal Fort captured by the valiant Essex militia, whose courage, that of ‘newly raised forces’, Cromwell afterwards especially commended. Refusing quarter, the garrison was overrun, and their own guns now turned towards the city. As a result the wretched Royalists found themselves pressed back into Worcester itself from two directions. The result was carnage. Dead bodies of Royalists began to fill the streets. Crushed in the narrow alleys of Worcester, corpses not only of men but of horses began to block all possible passage like heaps of unnatural refuse. Some Scots, perhaps as many as four thousand, did manage to escape through the inadequately attended north gate. But two thousand were killed to a mere two hundred of Cromwell’s men, and eight or nine thousand prisoners taken. Captain John Hodgson said that the demoralization and terror was so great that eighteen men would insist on surrendering to one officer.⁵⁴ Leslie was taken prisoner; so, a day later, was the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Lauderdale and Lanark who had succeeded his executed brother as Duke of Hamilton.

‘A very glorious mercy’, from the point of view of the Commonwealth, so Cromwell fittingly described Worcester to Parliament in a letter dashed off that very night ‘being so weary and scarce able to write’. Later, when he had got his breath he added something more: ‘The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts. It is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy.’ Perhaps the King never had a chance once the Royalists failed to rise, nevertheless for Cromwell’s part he prosecuted the campaign with relentless vigour from the first moment, when this fortunate outcome still lay in the future. His strategy was good in driving the Scots before him, and the two-pronged tactics of the battle, with the aid of such excellent Lieutenants as Fleetwood and Lambert, both men inspired by him, brought their own reward. The last Royalist army had been destroyed. Richard Baxter, ill at nearby Kidderminster, heard the bullets of the pursuers flying towards his window till midnight, while ‘the sorrowful fugitives hastening for their lives, did tell me of the calamitousness of war’. The King only escaped after adventures which might have been related by a seventeenth-century Scheherazade, but owed at least as much to the organization of Colonel Francis Wyndham and the Western Association as to the more romantic contribution of individuals. On arrival in Paris his filthy unkempt appearance shocked the sophisticated French Court.⁵⁵

In contrast, Hugh Peter, speaking to the militia men after the battle, used language which whether intentionally or not recalled that of Shakespeare’s Henry v on the eve of St Crispin’s day: ‘When your wives and children shall ask you where you have been, and what news; say you have been at Worcester, where England’s sorrows began, and where they are happily ended.’^* Constantine Heath, who brought the good news to the House of Commons, was rewarded with the extravagant sum of £30. Mercurius Politicus took the opportunity to go through the whole list of Commonwealth victories, including Naseby ‘that loud declaration from Heaven’, Dunbar where ‘a weary and sick handful of men’ had done such valiant work, and now Worcester, God’s ‘loudest declaration of all’ whereby he seemed ‘as it were with his own finger, to point out to all the world, his Resolutions for England’. ⁵⁶ As for Cromwell, his own baton of war was now hung up like the Royalist colours brought to Westminster Hall to join the earlier trophies of war. Although he was to instigate military expeditions, he never took the field again.

It is an appropriate place to sum up the achievements that made him an unbeaten commander, and in the opinion of one of the foremost soldiers of our own age, Field-Marshal Montgomery, one of the great ‘Captains’ of history.^* It is sometimes suggested that in the ultimate hall of fame where stand the busts of an Alexander, a Wellington or a Napoleon, there is no place for Cromwell. A brilliant cavalry leader of enterprise and daring, an unconventional tactician who owed nothing to early military training, a commander who created an army which was the wonder of Europe, later a master planner who used the same effective speed of the charge – his ‘unimaginable celerity’ as Florius Anglicus put it – on a wider scale for a series of sparkling campaigns, all these laurels are willingly draped upon his brow. But was Cromwell, who acted after all only within the narrow sphere of the British Isles, worthy to be compared with the very great, those who took on war on a global scale? It is true that the confines of Cromwell’s actions prevented him trying his hand at what might be termed grand or global strategy. But he cannot for that reason be denied the title of strategist. The conflict between England and Scotland, if it was held within the British shores, involved two separate nations, and could hardly be described as a civil war. In the last campaign of Worcester, Cromwell employed all his intelligence not only to battle but to throw in all his country’s resources.

This distinction is surely an unfair one, for Generals are not gods, and their role is not to create situations, but to provide solutions. Just as the function of the soldier is to fight battles, the function of a commander is to win battles, and win them in such a way that the last victory also will go to his own side. In this function Cromwell was supremely successful. He never failed, whether in the crucible of Dunbar or with the pincer trap of Worcester, to find either by God’s providence or some special sort of military grace, exactly the type of victory that was required. To achieve what it was necessary to do, and achieve it perfectly, is a rare distinction whatever the scale: it is that which gives to Cromwell, him too, the right to be placed in the hall of fame.