Marston Moor (2 page)

A group of horsemen watched the procession from the north bank of the Tweed. They were clustered around a man perched on a dappled grey mare. His face was deeply lined, his red hair and whiskers shot through with veins of slate, so that he could not hide his advancing years. And yet they regarded him with reverential silence. The man shivered, glancing down to fasten the last of the silver buttons that brightened his black cassock. ‘
Alea iacta est
, Davey.’

The man mounted to his side was younger, leaner and heavily wrapped against the cold. He let out a lingering breath, studying the bilious cloud of vapour as it rolled from his nostrils. ‘Will they stand?’

The older man looked across at his companion, blue eyes narrowing. ‘They’ll fight, and they’ll stand, and they’ll die if I say so.’

Davey shook his head. ‘Not our lads, Sandie. The English.’

The general gazed back at the army that rumbled inexorably across the Tweed. He wore a wide, dark hat with a single blue feather, which he tilted down against the biting wind. ‘They’d better,’ he replied, and he said it with feeling, because his name was Alexander Leslie, First Earl of Leven, and he was commander of the Army of the Covenant; the best, hardiest, most fearsome army to be found anywhere in the Stuart dynasty’s three kingdoms. But they could not win this war on their own. They would need the English Parliamentarians to grow a backbone for the new alliance to bear fruit. He eyed a company of foot as they slewed awkwardly across the river, their blue bonnets bright against the pale frost. ‘That ice had better not break.’

‘It is as thick as castle walls,’ Davey replied.

Leven cast him a withering glance. ‘Castles crumble with enough pressure.’

Davey offered a shrug. ‘You wanted speed, Sandie. At this rate we’ll be half the way to Alnwick before the buggers know we’ve marched.’

Leven knew he was right. The crossing, precarious as it was, had seemed a risk worth taking. God had sent the cold, and with His touch the bottleneck of the bridge had been negated. It would be foolish to ignore such providence. ‘I want a proclamation,’ he said after a short time.

‘A proclamation, my lord?’ Davey was nonplussed.

‘Proclaim throughout our ranks, Lieutenant-General, that plundering, ravishing and whore-mongering are forbidden.’

David Leslie, Lieutenant-General of Horse, screwed up his thin mouth. ‘Forgive me, my lord, but that’ll be a tall order to—’

‘And lewd language,’ Leven went on as if his second in command had not spoken. ‘I’ll have none of that in my army. Make no mistake, Davey. We are foreigners here. We share a king with the English, but not a kingdom.’

‘Foreigners in England are myriad, my lord,’ Leslie argued. ‘Fortune-seekers from the Low Countries. You and I both fought with them in the Swedish service. And what of the Welshmen who fight? Celts crawled down from their mountains. Or the Cornish?’

‘Trickles in the face of a flood,’ Leven answered. ‘We outnumber Herbert’s Welsh division tenfold, and the Cornish many times over. Besides, the Cornish have slunk back into the south-west. They do not lance the heartland of their enemies. But we? We are vast, and we are here to stay. The common sort will not find comfort in our presence. We must, therefore, behave impeccably. They must welcome us at their hearths or we will not survive the winter.’

‘Very well, my lord.’

‘Derogatory remarks, Davey,’ Leven added.

‘My lord?’

‘Referring to His Majesty. No word of irreverence or insult towards King Charles will pass a Covenanter’s lips. He remains our king. We are nae here to topple him, but to aid the English in extricating his person from the smooth-tongued advisers he so calamitously admires.’

David Leslie nodded. ‘I’ll see it done, sir.’

The Earl of Leven touched his spurs to his snorting grey’s flanks so that she skittered forward. He drew her up at the edge of the frozen river. On the far side his formidable force was rapidly assembling in the hoary dawn. He had more than twenty thousand men in all. Many were veterans of the European conflict; more still had served with him in the Bishops’ Wars, where the king’s army had been trounced and humiliated. They were granite-hewn, experienced and godly. And they were ready for a fight.

Yes, thought the Earl of Leven, the die was indeed cast. The Army of the Covenant had finally crossed the frontier. They were in foreign territory, marching south to crush the malignant Royalists and end a war. The invasion of England had begun.

PART 1

GENEVA OF THE NORTH

Chapter 2

Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, 28 May 1644

The steep-banked clough carved a ragged gully to the east of the small town. At the ravine’s deepest reaches the River Croal swirled and bubbled between reeds stooped against driving rain, a glassy streak overlooked by the timber-framed houses clustered on the flatter terrain along its west bank. The mosaic of woodland, pasture and meadow that fringed Bolton was swollen with springtime bounty: hedgerows were bursting with berries, woods were thickening and luscious; even the wide, desolate gritstone expanse to the north seemed greener than ever before. It was an Eden nestled on the edge of the great moors.

And yet, on this drizzle-dampened afternoon the place reeked. Buttery smoke wafted on the breeze, its sulphurous fingers creeping gently, groping alleyways and thatches, barns and carts, curling about the marketplace, meeting and mingling in ominous skeins above the heads of frightened folk.

The streets were empty of all but those bearing arms. Women and children, the elderly and infirm, had long since gone to ground, hiding in cellars and churches, in back rooms and attics, leaving their men to find what tools they could. Those men, five hundred in all, had mustered with the two thousand regular soldiers that had marched through the gates that morning, and already they had been compelled to fight. Because a multitude had come from the south and west, emerging from the rain-blurred woods in dark, dense blocks of horse, pike and shot, marching to the thrum of a hundred drums to converge like a swarm of demons.

The attack had come at just after two o’clock. Four regiments of foot detached themselves from what might have been twelve thousand in all and assaulted earthworks carved from soil and capped in turf. They had advanced in bristling battalions, musketeers flanking a centre of grim pikemen who jabbed up at the defenders on the muddy rampart with their long spears, the height of the work being less than the length of a pike. But the rain had played havoc with the assault, turning powder to black broth and cooling resolve, and the battalions had faltered. Engaged by men protecting their homes and families, they had been found wanting in the murky afternoon, and had been repulsed and humiliated.

The defenders had cheered as the last life evaporated from the glazed eyes of corpses left along the wall, dangling from sharpened stakes like string-cut marionettes, or dumped like sacks in the filth of the outer ditch. They had taunted their persecutors from the slick palisade, given thanks to a shielding God, and prayed that the enemy would skulk back into the woods. But passions were running high. Crazed with zeal from their modest success, Bolton’s defenders had wanted to make a statement. It was a famous town; prosperous as a centre of the English textile industry, it was so well known as a bastion for austere Puritanism that it had been garnished with the moniker ‘Geneva of the North’. It was a Parliamentarian stronghold transformed into a fortress by circumstance, and they had all seen the standards outside, though the gaudy cloths hung limp in the rain. Those colours, adorned with crosses of St George, with badges of heraldry, with Latin inscriptions and with passages of Scripture, left the defenders in no doubt as to who they faced. This was a Cavalier army. Tyldesley’s were here, Broughton’s and Molyneux’s too. Vaughn’s, Tillier’s, Pelham’s, Gibson’s, Eyre’s and so many more. And at their head rode the very talisman of the Royalist cause.

‘This one’s for Rupert of the Rhine!’ the sergeant had snarled as he nodded to the team of musketeers clutching the thick rope. ‘And may his privy member be soured by pox!’

His men had wrestled in their villages’ tug-of-wars; they were strong men with calloused fingers and knotted shoulders, and they grinned as they hauled. But there was no team of ale-drenched opponents on the other end of the rope. Instead, it was slung over the branch of an ancient tree that sprouted, canted and gnarled, from the high bank above the gushing Croal on the town’s eastern flank. There was no wall or ditch here, for the river and clough did that work well enough, and it meant that the tree was visible from a long way off, its branches clawing above the palisade that traced the line of the natural embankment. It was the perfect place to make clear their declaration of loyalty to the rebel parliament, and so they dragged back the rope and the man standing bound and noosed below the branch was hoisted into the air with a sickening jerk. He was an officer of Thomas Tyldesley’s regiment, captured in that brief, white-hot skirmish that had proved to the defenders that they had God on their side. And that Tyldesley’s regiment, like the colonel himself, was full of Papists. What better kind of declaration could be made than stringing one of those Rome-lovers up for the Almighty to see?

The wretched officer had taken a long time to die. He had writhed and kicked, danced a piss-drenched jig with wide, blood-shot eyes and a tongue that lolled purple and huge between wintry lips. In the end he had bitten that tongue off, and a lone crow had been brave enough to swoop for the plunder. Faced with the sight, even the sergeant whose laughter had accompanied the lynching had fallen to pasty-faced silence, as if, with the grotesqueness of the death, the bubble of their zeal had been burst.

And the vast Royalist army, including Prince Rupert of the Rhine, had witnessed it all.

Now, as the corpse turned slowly above the River Croal and the crows circled above the powder-flecked mist, the defenders of Bolton-le-Moors held their breath.

Private Acres was a patch of land to the north-west of the town, a place of ramshackle shepherding hovels and leaky outbuildings thrown up beyond Bolton’s limits. It was where sheep could be corralled when brought down from the moors, and where the accoutrements of the wool trade – rope and shears and fodder and wattle fencing – could be temporarily stored; a dilapidated warren grown out of convenience and now resembling a full suburb of untidy lanes clustered flush against the outer edge of Bolton’s earthen rampart.

‘This way,’ the guide hissed, beckoning a troop of men and horses through one of the narrow lanes.

The man leading his large reddish stallion immediately in the guide’s wake tapped him hard on the shoulder. ‘You’re certain?’

The guide paused, glancing left and right. ‘I live here, sir.’

The fellow with the red horse did not return the smile. ‘If you play me false, Master Grabban, I’ll pull your heart out through your nose.’

‘If he’s playing us false,’ another of the party – a head taller than the rest and shaven-headed, with dark, cavernous eyes – droned sardonically, ‘then we’re all bleedin’ dead.’

Grabban kept his gaze on the leader. The man was a fiend, he felt sure. The Parliament news-sheets never exhausted their reserves of vitriol, branding Cavaliers Satan-lovers, pope-turds and warlocks. But now that he had finally met one, his natural cynicism was in danger of fraying. The soldier, a major, was dressed completely in black, save for a scarlet ribbon tied at one wrist. He had long, black hair, a thin layer of black stubble at cheeks and chin, and his wide hat was black too. That was enough to frighten most God-fearing men, except that the soldier’s face made the rest of him pale in comparison. It was a granite scarp, ragged and rugged, lean and weathered. One eye was gone. Torn or gouged or burned to nothing, just a ruined socket of mutilated scar tissue remained where once it had been. The other eye glimmered, lonely and feral. It was grey, flecked with silver, and it never seemed to rest. Perhaps, Grabban thought, Prince Robber and his friends really did consort with the powers of darkness. He forced himself to look away, pointing at a row of rot-slanted shacks that ran north to south directly across their path. ‘There. Behind them sheds. Outer ditch runs right behind it.’

The major followed his gaze. ‘How are they disposed?’

‘Rigby’s Foot number a thousand or two,’ Grabban answered.

The tall, bald-headed fellow spat at Grabban’s shoes. ‘Nowt like a good intelligencer.’

Grabban ignored him, scratching instead at the burning itch that ever afflicted his stones. ‘Rest are clubmen. Locals.’ Bastards to a man, he thought, deserving of everything that was to come. He walked on, the long line of men shifting into motion at his back, their progress concealed by the leaky rooftops of the tumbledown suburb. In moments they had reached the entrance to one of the shacks. The double doors were open, hanging at awkward angles from broken hinges and providing ample room for the first dozen men and their horses. There was a door on the far side that was closed and barred on the inside. Grabban stood beside it as his charges mustered beneath the low rafters. ‘They’ll have watchers on the wall, but most are to the south, near Bradshawgate. Your fedaries will come north from there.’