A History of Britain, Volume 2 (21 page)

By the end of the month York had capitulated. The only bright spot for the king was Cornwall, where the Earl of Essex (who had insisted on taking command over Waller) had managed to get an army of 10,000 hopelessly trapped within a 5-mile strip of land between Lostwithiel and Fowey. Charles, who was personally commanding the campaign (and
enjoying it), asked the earl if he would now consider joining him in a united campaign to clear the Scots from the north, but Essex declined, preferring to depart from his army by boat once he had seen the cavalry break through and escape. Philip Skippon (another who was offered a place in the royalist army by Charles and who rejected it) was left to deal with the débâcle at Fowey, negotiating for his foot soldiers an honourable retreat that turned into a logistical and human nightmare. One of the royalist soldiers who was watching the retreat saw a ‘rout of soldiers prest all of a heap like sheep . . . so dirty and dejected as was rare to see'. Stripped of food, clothes, boots and shelter, attacked by the country people (especially the women), Skippon's men slept in soaking fields and drank from puddles and ditches. One of them remembered being ‘inhumanly dealt with, abused, reviled, scorned, torn, kicked, pillaged and many stript of all they had, quite contrary to the articles of war'. Disease, starvation and untended wounds made short shrift of the army, so that just 1000 of the 6000 who had left Fowey dragged themselves into Poole.

By the end of the year parliament was in control of thirty-seven of the fifty-seven counties of England and Wales and the majority of the most populous and strategically important towns, with the exception of Bristol, Exeter and Chester. But the king was not yet defeated. At the second battle of Newbury in October he had managed to avoid a potentially lethal pincer movement by the armies of Waller and Essex and slugged out the day to an exhausted tie. The wear and tear of Newbury was enough to prevent Charles from breaking through, but not enough to finish him off. And Charles was aware, as much as parliament, of the increasingly acrimonious relations between Waller and Essex on the one hand and Manchester and Cromwell on the other, all of whom were barely on speaking terms, so much did they suspect and despise each other. Attempting to flatten the king was like trying to swat a particularly annoying and nimble housefly. And, although by all measure of the military arithmetic, Charles was losing ground, there was an ominous sense among the military commanders on the parliamentary side that he was prevailing – at least politically – just by avoiding obliteration. As the Earl of Manchester put it: ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is a king still and so will his posterity be after him. But if the king beat us once we shall all be hanged and our posterity be made slaves.' To which Oliver Cromwell, who was rapidly coming to despise what he thought was Manchester's inertia and pusillanimity, retorted, pithily: ‘If this be so, why did we take up arms at first?'

Manchester and Cromwell's arguments over how best to use the now formidable army of the Eastern Association were much more than a
tactical squabble. Cromwell suspected that what he said – in public – was Manchester's reluctance to prosecute the war with all possible energy and severity resulted from a misguided anxiety not to destroy the king too completely lest a great void in the polity be opened up. For his part, Manchester accused Cromwell of filling his regiments with social inferiors of dangerously unorthodox religious opinions, who would be unlikely to subscribe to the Presbyterian rule they were all supposed to be fighting for, north and south of the Scottish border. Oliver Cromwell was, as time would show, no social leveller, nor did he see the army as a school of political radicalism. But he was a recognizably modern soldier in his belief that men fought better when officers and men had a common moral purpose, a bonding ideology. The old knightly ideal by which gentlemen would lead and their loyal men would follow was, he thought, no longer adequate for the times nor for their cause. It was necessarily the Cavalier ethos, not their own. This is what Cromwell meant after Edgehill when he had told Hampden, ‘Your troopers . . . are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and . . . their troopers are gentlemen's sons . . . You must get men of a spirit . . . that is like to go as far as a gentleman will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still.' And when he told the Suffolk committee that ‘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 was not so much asking for a democratized army as for a morally and ideologically motivated godly army. In the bitter debate with Manchester, which lasted into the winter of 1645 and was aired in the House of Commons, Cromwell made it clear that a godly army need not (as the Covenanters assumed) be a rigidly Presbyterian one. More than once he came to the defence of a junior officer accused of being a Baptist or some other kind of unofficial Protestant, on the grounds that those who were prepared to die for the righteous cause should not be slighted to appease the Scots. Whatever Britain Cromwell thought he was fighting for, it was not a Presbyterian united kingdom.

Presbyterians, like Manchester, Essex and Harley, and ‘Independents', as those who took the more inclusive and tolerant line on worship called themselves, could at least agree that the war needed to be brought to the king with maximum force in 1645. To that end, parliament attempted to separate politics from the military command by enacting a Self-Denying Ordinance, which required all members of the Lords and Commons to resign their military posts, or vice versa. This effectively removed most of the principal protagonists – Essex, Manchester and Waller – while creating a unified New Model Army under the command of Sir Thomas
Fairfax, the only senior general for whom no one (yet) had a bad word and who made a point of being politically neutral. Apolitical though he was, Fairfax did share with Cromwell a sense of how this core parliamentary army ought to be run. It was to be zealous and godly (a lot more psalm-singing), and it was to be exemplary in its discipline. The standard unwinding techniques for soldiers – drink, cursing and whoring – were to be replaced by quiet sessions with
The Souldiers Catechisme
. Plunder would be savagely punished. (That, at any rate, was the idea: all very nice and Christian in principle but suicidal to enforce in the aftermath of a particularly hideous and prolonged siege.) In return for their sobriety and enthusiastic self-sacrifice, the soldiers were to be made to feel that their generals – all their officers, in fact – genuinely cared for their welfare, that they would be provided with boots, food and shelter, and that when they were lying screaming as their arm was being sawn off they would know there had been a point to it all. Cromwell and Fairfax were in absolutely no doubt of the point to it all.

Translating that certainty into total victory was another matter. Although by the spring of 1645 it looked unlikely (if not impossible) that Charles could win in England, he was now fighting for, and in, Britain. A setback in one of his kingdoms might always be compensated by success in another, and to the wearied and vexed parliamentary generals it seemed that he could go on playing this military shell game indefinitely, until his enemies were all at each other's throats. For there were now internal civil wars in all four of the British nations. They were not taking place in discrete theatres of conflict but were all tangled up in each other's fate. Because Charles could thank his remote Plantagenet ancestors for the most indestructible of his fortresses in Wales, what happened there, especially in the Marches, at castles like Chepstow and Monmouth, would ultimately affect the course of the war in England. Welsh soldiers were already making up a significant part of the royalist armies fighting in the west. Scottish Covenanter troops were stuck in Ireland protecting Presbyterian Ulster against the Gaelic Confederacy, which, given the central importance of the papacy and Owen Roe O'Neill, they believed was the same thing as protecting Scotland and England from impending invasion by the Antichrist. That eventuality seemed much closer in June 1646 when Monro lost a crucial battle at Benburb in County Tyrone against Owen Roe O'Neill.

And in the autumn of 1644, the Covenanter-Catholic, Scots-Irish war came back to Scotland itself, when Alasdair MacColla landed in the western Highlands with a force of 2000 Irish, supplied by his Clan Donald kinsman, the Earl of Antrim, and drawn almost exclusively from
Catholic Ulster. It linked up with the even smaller army of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, whose ambition was to open a second front for Charles in northern and western Scotland. With the bulk of the Covenanter army still in England (from which the English parliamentary command could certainly not afford to release it), Montrose was gambling that he could open a back door to power, rally the Highlands and islands, cut through the weakened Lowlands and go all the way to Edinburgh, where he would overthrow the Covenant and establish a Scottish royalist regime. With that army, he would then invade England and turn the tide there as well.

That was the plan, at any rate – a pan-British, anti-Covenanter solution for the whole country – and it was blessed initially with a spectacular series of military successes against the weakened Covenanter-Lowland armies. But the reason Montrose and MacColla were winning in the autumn and winter of 1644–5 had almost nothing to do with the Marquis' British strategy or his personal alienation from the Covenanters and everything to do with two ancient Scottish feuds. The first was the relentless war between the Calvinist Lowlands and the largely Catholic northwestern Highlands. But even within the Highlands, the obscene slaughters of the Scottish wars were powered by the visceral, unforgiving hatred between Clan Donald (both its Irish and Scots branches) and the Campbells of Argyll. The further away from the killing hills the campaign went, the harder it was for Montrose to keep his army together, although the lure of sacking cities like Perth and Aberdeen helped. The butchery at Aberdeen was especially sadistic, lasting over three days and involving the cold-blooded murder of anyone thought to exercise any sort of public office or authority – advocates, merchants, the masters of the hospitals and almshouses, and scores of other civilians – and leaving a deep legacy of enmity between Irish and Scots. There was, said a contemporary Aberdonian: ‘killing, robbing and plunder of this town at their pleasure. And nothing hard bot pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning through all the streets. Som women they preseet to defloir and uther sum they took perforce to serve them in the camp.'

Even the tactical style of the Irish-Highland army defied expectations of modern warfare. Like its English counterpart, the Covenanter infantry had at its heart six-deep platoons of musketeers who, to be effective, were supposed to execute a ‘countermarch'. This involved the first line filing to the back of the six once its weapons had been fired, with the next line replacing them. By the time the original row returned to the front they were supposed to have completed a flawless and extremely rapid reloading. But without intensive drill practice the movement was,
in fact, seldom either flawless or swift, and it was precisely at that moment that the Highland and Irish soldiers dropped their own muskets and charged with sword and shield, cutting a bloody route through the floundering musketeers and pikemen. The ‘Highland' charge (already much used in the Irish war by the Gaelic-Catholic soldiers) was primitive but astonishingly effective. And there were other ways in which the armies of Montrose and MacColla inconveniently refused to abide by the rules, continuing their campaign into the deep Highland winter, especially in the Campbell lands, where villages were devastated, and (as would remain the practice all through 1645 and into 1646) indiscriminately killing any men or boys who might one day serve as soldiers. After a while, strategy simply dissolved into clan cleansing. For MacColla killing as many Campbells as possible became the main point of the campaign, while for Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, counter-killing as many of the Clan Donald and their allies, the MacLean, was equally satisfying. And so the carnage went on and on and on, indifferent to seasons or landscape: blood in the snow, blood in the heather, blood in the pinewoods. In one particularly gruesome atrocity, some hundreds of Campbell men, women and children were herded into a barn, which was then burned to the ground.

Montrose did, in the end, succeed in reaching deep into the Covenanter Lowlands, establishing himself not at Edinburgh, then in the grip of a terrible wave of the plague, but at Glasgow. At Philiphaugh in 1645 his army suffered its first serious defeat, but by early 1646 he was still in a position to do great damage in Scotland on behalf of the royalist cause. So it must have been a shock when, at the beginning of May 1646, Charles himself went to the Covenanter army then besieging the town of Newark and put himself in the hands of the Scots.

But then Montrose's campaign (and the battle of Benburb in Ireland) had been the
only
thing that had gone right for the king in 1645 and early 1646. By the time the New Model Army was deployed in April 1645, parliament, together with its Scots allies, could put 50,000 men in the field and had perhaps the same number in garrisons – much the biggest military force ever to be seen in Britain. The king could field half that number at most. Penned up in Oxford, he had few choices. The first was to cut his losses and respond positively to peace terms set at Uxbridge earlier in the year. But the Solemn League and Covenant had required the king to accept a bishopless Presbyterian regime along with the new Directory of Worship, already distributed in place of the Book of Common Prayer, and this Charles found just as repugnant as he always had. Fighting on, unless he just sat in Oxford waiting for the inevitable siege, meant choosing between moving west or north.

A second option for Charles, recommended by Prince Rupert, was to play to his strengths by moving west and maintaining his military power base along a line of strongholds from Exeter through Bristol and Cardiff to Carlisle, to join with the still undefeated army of General Goring, drawing the parliamentary army into deeply hostile territory and keeping the crucial seaways open to Ireland from whence cometh, it was hoped, some help. Alternatively, a third choice would be to move north towards Montrose, hoping his victories would prove contagious and uniting their armies. After a good deal of dithering, mesmerized by Montrose's success and by an understandable feeling that everything decisive that happened in his reign happened in Scotland, Charles chose the northern option. At the end of May 1645 his army took and sacked Leicester and was moving northeast. Its break-out had the effect, as intended, of drawing Fairfax away from the siege of Oxford and hastening Cromwell eastwards to protect East Anglia. But it also had the undesired effect of bringing those two armies together to face the king in what was obviously going to be a decisive battle, near the Northamptonshire village of Naseby.