17
THE GREATEST BATTLE of the war so far was about to take place at Marston Moor in Yorkshire. On 2 July 1644 an Anglo-Scottish army of 30,000, under the Scottish Earl of Leven and Parliament’s Earl of Manchester, faced 20,000 Royalists under Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, and a former governor of the Prince of Wales, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle. It was said that Newcastle was of ‘no religion, feared neither God nor the Devil, believed neither in heaven nor hell’.1 He had a reputation for fighting with utter fearlessness. When a battle was over, however, he would retire to his music and ‘his softer pleasures’, refusing to be disturbed ‘upon what occasion ‘soever’.2 This could be awkward for junior commanders, whom he had a record of ignoring for two days at a time. Nevertheless, he inspired the devotion of his men.
The low open countryside of the moor’s battleground was ‘the fairest ground for such a use as I have ever seen in England’, a soldier recalled.3 The armies were laid out ready for the fight almost like the toy model armies Charles had played with as a boy: infantry in the middle, and cavalry in the wings. The weather, however, was unseasonably cold. It had been a day such as this for the Battle of Towton during the Wars of the Roses: winter ice clinging to heather in summer bloom. The shattered bones of the Towton dead still lay under Yorkshire soil, waiting to yield up their terrible evidence of slaughter and desperate violence: pulverised skulls and forearms cut where they had been raised in self-defence from merciless blows in a guerre mortelle – a battle to the death.
The usual preliminary for a battle began at Marston Moor late that afternoon with a Parliamentarian bombardment. It stopped at 6 p.m. to be succeeded by the rich sound of men singing psalms. When a hailstorm broke, Rupert and Newcastle retired for supper in their carriages. The singing also ended. It seemed the day was to end peacefully and battle would come in the morning. Then at 7.30 p.m., beneath the staccato of raining ice, a deep rumble began. The Roundhead cavalry of the Eastern Association was moving down a low hill ‘in the greatest order and with the greatest resolution that ever was seen’, under the command of their forty-five-year-old general, Oliver Cromwell.4
Oliver Cromwell was a descendant of a sister of Henry VIII’s ruthless vicar general, Thomas Cromwell. The family had changed their name from Williams and Oliver sometimes referred to himself as ‘Cromwell aka Williams’. A gentleman born, Cromwell was nevertheless not a rich man, and before the war he had lived more like a yeoman. There had been periods of depression and he had thought himself to be ‘a chief, the chief amongst sinners’. Everything had changed on the day he became convinced he was ‘among the congregation of the first born’, one of God’s elect predestined for heaven, despite his sins.5 This certainty had inspired him to powerful religious preaching, and this in turn had earned him a place in Parliament as MP for Cambridge. There, in the Commons, his passion and self-assurance had ensured he stood out from the crowd.
One fellow MP remembered first noticing Cromwell at the beginning of the Long Parliament in November 1640. ‘I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman,’ the MP recalled, and ‘came into the House well clad’. Cromwell was speaking on behalf of a servant of William Prynne – the Puritan whose ears had been cropped for sedition after he had suggested the queen was a whore.6 Stocky and balding, with a thick nose, Cromwell was dressed in a ‘cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His linen was plain and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood [from shaving] on his little [neck] band, which was not much larger than his collar’. Cromwell was nevertheless a striking figure, above average height, a ‘sword stuck close to his side: his countenance swollen and reddish: his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour’. By the time he had finished speaking ‘one would have believed the very government itself was in danger’, were Prynne’s servant not to be forgiven his indiscretions.7
Cromwell had ‘no ornament of discourse, none of those talents which use to reconcile the affections of the bystanders’.8 But his sense of mission ensured that, when it mattered, and the hour came, ‘he was to act the part of a great man’.9 Before Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham, and while others dithered, Cromwell had moved decisively, recruiting men and seizing the arms stored at Cambridge Castle. As the war got under way he ‘had a special care to get religious men into his troop’. He did not care whether or not they were orthodox Protestants and he was equally unconcerned with the social rank of his officers. ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else,’ he once wrote. It sounds romantic, liberal even, but many of his men were judged fanatics.
Moderate Puritans balked at the fervour they found in Cromwell’s cavalry. ‘Proud, self-conceited, hot-headed sectaries had gotten into the highest places and were Cromwell’s chief favourites,’ one Parliamentarian officer complained.10 Cromwell’s own commander, the forty-two-year-old Manchester – who had purged the clergy in the eastern counties of Laudian clerics, and personally ordered the destruction of crosses and other ‘superstitious images’ – viewed them with equal distaste, expressing dismay at this ‘swarm’ of those ‘that call themselves the godly: some of whom profess they have seen visions and had revelations’.11 At Marston Moor, however, Cromwell’s sectaries had their opportunity to show their fighting worth.
As the rumble of Cromwell’s advancing cavalry grew to a roar there was panic in the dozing Royalist camp. Then the tall, slender figure of Rupert was seen with his white hunting poodle Boy, dashing for his horse. He shouted at his confused cavalry, ‘Do you run? Follow me!’ They did as they were asked, mounted their horses, and attacked the Roundheads with gusto. ‘Cromwell’s own division had a hard pull of it: for they were charged by Rupert’s bravest men’, one Parliamentarian recalled, and the two sides ‘stood at swords point a pretty while hacking at one another’.12 Cromwell was injured in the neck and forced to leave the field bleeding heavily, but the Scottish regiments halted the ferocious Royalist advance and Cromwell’s men then killed Rupert’s horse from under him.
With Rupert and Cromwell out of action on the east wing, the Royalist cavalry on the right wing was cutting through the Roundhead lines. They were supported by Newcastle’s ‘Whitecoats’, foot soldiers in undyed uniforms – men Henrietta Maria had known during her months in the north. For one Royalist the noise of battle was such that ‘In the fire, smoke and confusion of that day I knew not for my soul whither to incline.’13 Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cavalry regiments were put to flight, and the whole of the allied Roundhead–Covenanter third line and two regiments of the fourth also broke, some without firing a shot. Almost half the allied army was now on the run, including the men under Sir Thomas’s father, Lord Fairfax, over half the Scots and Manchester’s regiment of foot. The Royalist northern horse chased the enemy for miles and the news spread that the Royalists had won the day.14 But the remaining Scottish regiments withstood the Royalist charges, and after Cromwell’s cavalry had gone to the aid of the allied right wing the battle began to turn. Rupert remained trapped behind enemy lines, unable to act as the general he was and give direction. Newcastle, who had arrived late on the field, was reduced to fighting almost as an ordinary officer. By nine o’clock Cromwell’s men could boast, ‘we had cleared the field of all our enemies’.
Newcastle escaped, but the Whitecoats were trapped against hedgerows. They died where they stood in ranks and files, the last of the wounded lying on their backs thrusting their weapons at the horses that rode over them. Only thirty survived. Fleeing Royalists were chased to within a mile of York, a full moon allowing the killing to continue for hours, and their bodies were left scattered along three miles of road.15 ‘God made them as stubble to our swords,’ Cromwell remarked with satisfaction. Manchester felt differently. He asked his men to thank God for their victory. But the slaughter – worse than any battle since 1642 – had convinced him there was little that was holy in this terrible civil war.
The next day, the sun rose on a grim spectacle: ‘thousands lay upon the ground, dead and not altogether dead’.16 Bone-white corpses twisted in unnatural shapes lay stripped of clothes and valuables, their stillness contrasting with the frantic activity of the living. Lord Fairfax had lost his younger son, Charles, while his elder son, Sir Thomas, had his face cut open with a sword slash. Lord Fairfax’s own role had been less courageous than that of his children. Having fled the field he had remained away from the battle. Now he had his men hunting down the Royalist ‘colours’ (the flags representing the honour of the individual Royalist units). He sent to London ‘so many as upon a sudden we could as yet receive from the soldiers, who consider it a credit to keep them’.17
Prince Rupert had, like Newcastle, escaped capture, but his white dog, Boy, had not been so fortunate.
The great hunting poodle whelped by Puddle had become legendary after appearing in a Royalist spoof on a Puritan pamphlet entitled ‘Observations Upon Prince Rupert’s white dog called Boy’. Printed in 1643, it had followed an earlier poem about Boy, also designed to poke fun at the Puritan determination to root out popish ‘superstitious’ practices, expressed in what the Royalist pamphleteers judged the Puritans’ own superstitious fears of witchcraft. According to the spoof pamphlet Boy was Rupert’s familiar and had magical powers that made the Prince bulletproof. These Royalist jokes had, however, backfired. On the eve of the Battle of Newbury in September 1643, Roundhead soldiers had killed a local woman as a witch, believing she was working for Rupert. There were Roundheads who had taken the stories about Boy as evidence that Rupert – and even the king – really were in league with the Devil. fn1
When Rupert’s horse was shot from under him, Boy was seen bounding after his master, but he never made it to the bean field where Rupert had hidden. The Roundheads crowed that it was a magic bullet, fired by a Puritan soldier ‘who had skill in necromancy’, that had brought Boy down. Numerous woodcuts were printed depicting the poodle’s lifeless body, often by the bean field. In some a witch stands over the dead dog, weeping as if he were her own child.18 Boy was gone, but, it seemed, witches remained.
In Oxford bonfires were lit to celebrate the Royalist victory that had come so close at Marston Moor.19 It was days before the truth of their defeat filtered through: the king had lost the north. The Parliamentarian press reported Rupert had renamed Cromwell ‘Ironside’, reputedly after a flanking attack on Cromwell’s cavalry that had failed. It was from this that Cromwell’s troops gained their famous sobriquet the ‘Ironsides’.
The Parliamentarian Earl of Essex did not rejoice at this Parliamentarian victory, however: the achievements of rival generals, in contrast to his own weak performance, were reducing his influence and his popularity had waned dramatically. In London graffiti depicted him as a lazy glutton, with a glass of wine in his hand. He needed desperately a victory of his own. He was now on his way west, heading into Cornwall, the most Royalist county in England. Charles, who had been in the Midlands, followed him. A victory in June, at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge in Oxfordshire, had already restored Charles’s fortunes in the south. Now, in the far west, the two armies fought for eight days in Cornwall’s thick hedgerow country. Essex’s army was squeezed and squeezed until it had little room or life left.
On 2 September 1644 Essex’s surviving 6,000 troops surrendered to the king, while Essex fled ignominiously in a fishing boat. The so-called Battle of Lostwithiel was, Essex admitted, ‘the greatest blow we ever suffered’. Charles had gained over 5,000 muskets and pistols, hundreds of swords, forty-two guns, and several wagons laden with powder and match.20 The men taken prisoner were ‘so dirty and dejected as was rare to see’.21 They were now to face further humiliation. The losses of the long battle of attrition had embittered the victors and the prisoners were ‘abused, reviled, scorned, torn, kicked, pillaged, and many stripped of all they had’. Royalist officers beat their men off their traumatised Roundhead prisoners with the flats of their swords. But the local Cornish joined in. One group grabbed a female camp-follower, who had given birth just three days earlier, ‘took her by the hair of her head and threw her into the river’. Charles hanged the culprits for murder. He could not, however, prevent the impoverished Cornish from stripping other Roundhead women of clothes and valuables.22
There were now further victories for the king’s cause in Scotland, led by a former Covenanter, the thirty-two-year-old James Graham, Marquess of Montrose.23 Parliament’s invitation to the Scots to join the war had been intended to defeat Charles quickly and end the fighting. It had helped them to win Marston Moor, but it had also brought the war to Scotland. Montrose’s followers, from Ulster and the Western Highlands, were far fewer in number than the Covenanters, but were excellent warriors. Their fighting abilities ensured the Covenanters could not now help Parliament make the decisive thrust into Royalist territory in the south that was needed to finish Charles. The Scottish army in England had to stay close to the border for any time it might be needed to join their forces at home to fight Montrose.
The fear also remained for Parliament that Charles could yet bring outside forces into England, as they themselves had done. Warwick had issued orders to the navy for the summary execution of any soldiers coming from Ireland captured at sea.24 On 24 October this was followed by a decision in Parliament of historic shamefulness: that no quarter be granted to any Catholic Irish found in England or Wales. While both Royalist and Parliamentarian forces had committed acts of murder and even massacres, this was new: the legal sanctioning of killing on ethnic and religious grounds.fn2 The majority of soldiers coming from Ireland (seven to one) were, in fact, English-born, and had been sent to Ireland from England only after 1641, to suppress the Irish revolt.25 The victims of Parliament’s ordinance would therefore largely be either English Catholics or Welsh Gaelic-speakers: if they also happened to be women it would prove to be all the worse for them.
Charles’s generals and councillors quarrelled constantly. He tried to weigh up the best advice. ‘If thou knew what a life I lead,’ he sighed in a letter to Henrietta Maria, ‘I dare say thou would pity me, for some are too wise, others too foolish, some too busy, others too reserved, many fantastic.’26 He tried to find the balance between being too cautious and too reckless, but this was no easy task and Charles was no great military strategist himself. He was, however, resilient. He was also a brave soldier who inspired great loyalty. As such he continued to prove an extraordinarily tough enemy to defeat, despite all Parliament’s advantages in terms of holding London, in terms of wealth, and in terms of the superior military numbers handed to them by the Scottish alliance.
Three days after Parliament had passed the ‘no quarter’ ordinance Charles escaped vastly superior Parliamentarian forces at a second Battle of Newbury. Manchester’s men were exhausted, but on 9 November 1644, with an opportunity to meet the king again in battle in Berkshire about to be passed by, Cromwell stood up at a Council of War to demand action. The campaigning season was about to end and if they did not fight the king now, Cromwell warned, then come the spring they could be facing a French army sent by the queen to make war alongside the Royalists. Manchester demurred: the French were too busy fighting against the Habsburgs in Europe to invade England. Seeking a battle now would also be a mistake. Their men were tired after the fighting at Newbury and a defeat would be disastrous for them. ‘If we beat the king’s army never so many times, [even] if a hundred times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after’, Manchester reminded Cromwell, and ‘if he beat us once, then we are every one of us undone’. In other words, their war aims were no more than a successfully negotiated peace with Charles. If they lost, they would all be hanged as traitors.
Cromwell snapped back that Manchester ‘had as good have said that we are resolved to have peace upon any terms in the world’.27 Unlike the earl he could imagine a future in which there was no certainty of survival for Charles as king, or for his posterity to succeed him. Hugh Peter, the radical from Massachusetts who was now the leading chaplain in the Parliamentarian army, concurred. Why make a fetish of the need to come to terms with the king, ‘as if we could not live without one’?28
Manchester’s arguments prevailed at the Council of War, but with the campaigning season now ended, the disagreements between the generals shifted to Westminster and the benches of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The split in the Junto that had emerged after Edgehill between war and peace factions now disappeared, and these factions were replaced by what were in effect England’s first two political parties.29
The party associated with Cromwell was called the Independents. They were set on the absolute defeat of the king and included (but were not limited to) many members of the old war-party faction.30 These men had previously agreed to Scottish demands that Presbyterianism be imposed on England because it was the price of the military support that would achieve Charles’s defeat. Since the Scots had failed in this task, the Independents had moved their religious and foreign policy away from being pro-Scots and Presbyterian. Instead they looked to the most ruthless English generals, men like Cromwell, who favoured Independent Puritan congregations that the Scots saw as incubi for heresy and civil disorder.
Manchester was associated with the second party, the ‘Presbyterians’, who favoured a negotiated peace with Charles. They included Essex, who feared religious anarchy and social upheaval under the Independents. Holland was also a leading figure. His brother Warwick, meanwhile, was, if not a fully fledged ‘Presbyterian’, then certainly no enthusiast for the Independents. There was an international dimension to this. The Scottish Covenanters were close to the French – the traditional allies of the Scots. The French were the great enemies of Spain – whose ruin Warwick had sought all his life, and he was therefore inclined to the Scots.31 Where once he had led events, however, now Warwick trailed uncertainly in the wake of Essex, Manchester, and the rising power of their rival Oliver Cromwell.
Despite the religious labels for the two parties, their goals were each primarily secular.32 Both Independents and Presbyterians wanted to gain for themselves the political and military power necessary to impose their choice of peace settlement upon the king and his kingdoms. Their leaders – or grandees – each hoped for a restored monarchy in which they would be the ones holding senior office. The difference was that while the Presbyterian party was prepared to rely on the king granting them senior office freely, following a negotiated peace, the Independents wanted to crush Charles militarily and reduce him to the status of a puppet king.
The struggle for power between the new parties began on 19 November 1644, when Parliament’s Anglo-Scottish executive body, the Committee of Both Kingdoms, began to consider how best to reform – or remodel – Parliament’s failing army. The intention was to streamline its command to make it more effective. A new proposal was then made in the Commons for a ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’ under which members of the House of Lords and House of Commons would resign their commissions. This would clear the decks. Warwick duly lost the navy, while Essex and Manchester resigned their commissions on 2 April 1645.33 Cromwell was also obliged to resign. In their place the army was given a consolidated command under the thirty-three-year-old Sir Thomas Fairfax. He was a commander of proven ability – but also a family friend of the Independent grandee the Earl of Northumberland. Although a former peace-faction supporter, Northumberland had lost all confidence in Charles since his cessation of arms with the Irish Catholic Confederates, and had allied with Cromwell.
The Independents had won this round of the power struggle. Cromwell would soon be made the one exception from the Self-Denying Ordinance and would act as lieutenant general of Fairfax’s cavalry. The civil war was now also to enter a more ruthless period. Essex had noticed a key change between Fairfax’s new commission in 1645 and his own in 1642. The phrase that had called for ‘the preservation of the king’s person’ had been omitted. Essex tried, and failed, to have it reinstated. It had once been treason even to imagine the death of a king. No longer. And Charles warned Henrietta Maria that ‘this summer will be the hottest for war of any that hath been yet’.34