Rebels and Traitors (28 page)

Gideon was anxious. By now they had no provisions. The countryside had been stripped by the enemy of all food, fuel and horse fodder. Everything Gideon had hastily packed in his snapsack had been used up days ago. Bread and beer were a dream; a sour windfall apple, scrounged from an orchard, was a luxury. Unwashed and with shirt and stockings unchanged, his skin was itching and uncomfortable; his own smell was offensive and his comrades repulsed him. Occasionally on the march he caught sight of his brother among the pikemen; set-faced, they conserved energy and exchanged no greeting. Both had learned to tramp ever onwards in a kind of daze, letting hours and miles pass unnumbered. In the damp wolds above Stow, as he lay down stiffly on bare ground with his stomach rumbling, Gideon wondered how much longer the men could continue in this fashion. For him, there was certainly no chance of sitting each evening with a rushlight and writing-slope, to pen a diary for the
Corranto.
A writer needs a good memory. But he was so weary and famished, he thought it unlikely he would ever remember details of the hardships he now experienced.

He had been sorely afraid when Prince Rupert’s cavalry threatened to cut them off at Stow. Worse must lie ahead. By this time the Londoners all understood that, even if they were able to help Gloucester, their chances of returning home were slight.

On the evening of September the 5th, they marched over the Cotswolds and from a high point glimpsed Gloucester below. It lay too far off for the town garrison to hear the salvo of ordnance that Essex fired to announce that help had come. His troops had to spend the night up on the heights, famished, in tempestuous wind and rain, drenched and completely without shelter. When they descended the steep incline, wagons ran adrift, horses were fatally hurt and the men of the London Brigade found that by the time they reached level ground, all the houses where they had hoped to find refreshment were already filled up with other soldiers.

Rest and recuperation would be at hand, however. Alarming smoke turned out to be the enemy’s quarters burning, set on fire as the King withdrew at their approach. After a month’s siege, only sporadic fire came from the city, where stocks of ammunition had reached a critical low. Gloucester had survived only because incessant rain had flooded mines dug by the Royalists under walls and gates. The governor had sent out nightly raiding parties to sabotage the enemies’ works; it was said he plied them with as much drink as they wanted to encourage their bravery, but there were many tales of energy and daring among those who volunteered for night-time missions. Bowmen had fired arrows from both sides, carrying written insults and threats. Fierce resistance by the city troops, together with the staunch mood of the townspeople, had helped Gloucester hold out, although by the time Essex and his army finally marched in, every commodity was stretched and they were down to their last three barrels of gunpowder.

The relief force found terrible scenes. Physical damage ran to thousands of pounds. Sixty-pound shot had torn up the ground. Fiery bombs with sizzling fuses had shot through the air at night like comets, only to whiz through stables too fast to set light to the straw and fall onto house-tops where they melted the lead and caused roofs to collapse. The city defences had been mined and counter-mined. The moat was partially blocked up with timber faggots and with the collapsed remains of experimental moving towers, modelled by some gentleman-scholar on ancient Roman siege-machines, for carrying parties of musketeers up to the city walls. The devastation particularly impressed itself on the Londoners, the Trained Band members, who were thinking hard of home.

The starving relief force was welcomed, fed and housed either in the city or surrounding parishes. They stayed for four days. Gloucester was reprovisioned, refortified, rearmed. The troops could rest and revive, but they knew the King was skulking close by, watching their moves, ready to cut them to pieces when they tried to make their journey home.

By now they were all experts. They knew their position.

‘We’re screwed!’ muttered Lambert Jukes to his brother, picking up the old merchants’ complaint about the injustice of the Ship-Money tax.

‘Utterly screwed and wrung,’ groaned Gideon in reply.

The relieving troops had done their duty, but were caught in a fatal trap.

The Earl of Essex, Old Robin, received insufficient credit for his cat-and-mouse Gloucester campaign. Getting there had caught the Royalists on the hop; extricating his army, if he could do it, would be an even greater feat.

First, leaving behind his artillery and baggage, he moved north to Tewkesbury. He ordered a classic bridge of boats over the River Severn. Villages on the west bank were scoured for food and fodder, while recalcitrant locals were swingeingly fined and the cash used to reprovision Gloucester. Then Essex sent across an advance unit as if he proposed to march on Worcester. The King immediately moved north, to block the way towards London via Evesham and Warwick.

Under cover of a dark night, Essex suddenly plunged his army south again. They travelled twenty miles across the Cotswolds and gained a day’s advantage. Their rapid departure confused Royalist scouts and commanders, including Prince Rupert — though Rupert afterwards claimed he had warned what was happening but was disbelieved. At two o’clock in the morning, Essex reached Cirencester. There he captured forty wagon-loads of food intended for the King’s troops and guarded only by newly raised recruits. These provisions crucially fortified his men for the perils ahead. Hunted by Prince Rupert’s flying cavalry and pursued by the King with his infantry and ordnance, the Parliamentarians raced for home.

They almost made it. Prince Rupert had orders to find them and force them to make a stand at Newbury, where it was thought the superior numbers of Royalist cavalry could inflict mortal damage. He harried them at Aldbourne, trying to delay them while the main Royalist army caught up. The next day they slowed almost to a standstill as bad weather churned roads to a morass. They were hungry again, for although they had picked up a thousand sheep and sixty cattle as they marched, Londoners did not see themselves as shepherds so the animals had scattered while the soldiers gave their attention to an attack. By this night they were unsure where the enemy now was. As Essex’s men approached Newbury their quartermasters rode in to establish billets, only to discover that Prince Rupert had occupied the town ahead of them. Forced to flee, they abandoned all the food they had collected. So the Parliamentarians faced yet another wretched night in wet, frosty fields, with nothing to eat or drink. Prince Rupert blocked their passage at Newbury; he and his men settled into the town in comfort and waited for the King. The royal infantry arrived. Out in the countryside, the Parliamentarian troops were fatigued and full of anxiety. The King had put himself ahead of them. They had to fight their way through. It would be the first time that the London Trained Bands experienced a pitched battle.

Gideon Jukes’s experience that night was of utter misery. They had seemed so near to home, yet now they were once again trapped in filthy conditions, knowing that they had to batter past the Royalist army — assuming they could. The enemy were relaxing in town, snug and warm in friendly houses, with full bellies and good supplies of beer. Gideon had only eaten a handful of maggoty blackberries all day. He was wet through, yet thirsty, trying to catch rain in a pannikin to drink. They had left behind the towering clouds that scudded up the Bristol Channel, bloated with heavy Atlantic rain, but here in the interior they were still being soaked by incessant showers and tonight they had to endure a hard frost. He could feel that frost beating up from the ground while the evening air chilled him to the bone.

He had marched for a month; he remembered how the first bad weather had run off his clothes, then eventually runnels had trickled inside his shirt and over his collarbones, water dripping from his hat onto his face, water making his shoes squelch, drips hanging permanently from his nose and ears. Once he became wet through, weeks ago, there had never been any way to dry off, even when temporary fine weather gave some respite. The insides of his britches and his buff coat remained soggy; the oil sealing his oxhide buff coat could no longer resist water. His stockings were perpetually damp and his shoes sodden. Whenever he stood still, he shifted from leg to leg, arms slightly akimbo, trying to keep free space between his heavy clothes and his skin, which was now sore, reddened and peeling. One night he had found his left shoe full of blood, from a huge blister which then refused to heal. He had pushed his powder flasks and matchcord inside his clothes to try to keep them dry, but he had so little warmth in his body this was probably achieving little. If he had to fight for his life, would his musket even fire?

So another dark, wild night passed in the open. Essex, Skippon and a few other officers found refuge in a thatched cottage near Enborne where they snatched rest and prayer and planned for the day to come. Out in the fields their men huddled under hedges, silent and apprehensive. Rain bucketed down incessantly. Winds bowled over the lonely Berkshire uplands in long, mournful gusts. Neither weasel nor water-vole was stirring, and the owls stayed in the barn.

The apprehensive troops rubbed the sleep from their sticky eyes early. Essex had to tell them that the enemy possessed all the advantages: ‘the hill, the town, hedges, lane and river’. Inspired to defiance, his men roared back that they would take them all. They put greenery in their hats for recognition purposes.

Realistically, their options were nil. They had nowhere to retreat. Outflanking the Royalists looked impossible. Their way forward through Newbury was blocked. The Royalists held the crucial bridge over the River Kennet. The only alternative route entailed a detour south across various small field enclosures and hazardous open areas of common-land; it was rough country through which they would have to march and drag their artillery while the enemy constantly attacked them.

Essex chose this south passage. He disguised his intentions as long as possible with a ‘forlorn hope’ that pretended to be advancing on Newbury. In a landscape still marked by inhabitants from before the Romans, ancient tumuli would cover their real march to some extent. At seven in the morning, in a flat valley between Enborne and Newbury, the Parliamentarians drew up their line. They were positioned along a narrow country lane, intending to move through as a body, then up and over Wash Common which lay to their right. Skippon’s brigade occupied the centre, the Trained Bands behind him, acting as reserves and guarding another overgrown and rutted lane which was the only way their artillery train could come up to move onto the common. The guns had to be dragged up a steep incline and even before that could begin, they took three hours to arrive on the scene. But Skippon took early control of a deceptive high point called Round Hill, which fooled the Royalists into believing the Parliamentarians were siting a battery there, with a plan to assault the bridge at Newbury.

The London Trained Bands had been desperately trying to gather nuts and berries from hedgerows as a meagre breakfast, when they heard the sounds of cavalry fighting; Royalist Welshmen had attacked the Parliamentary left flank.
We were in despair,’
mused Gideon Jukes, in his head whimsically becoming the kind of correspondent Robert Allibone wanted,
‘lest the enemy discovered we were so starved that if they but shouted “Toasted cheese!” we would straightway drop our weapons and rush to them, fainting…’
Instead, the Trained Bands arrived at a running march and in a great sweat, afraid they would miss the fight. There was no chance of that.

It had stopped raining.

The Red and Blue regiments spent most of the day on their army’s right flank. They were facing eight Royalist guns and a large body of cavalry, barely the length of two musket shots apart. Prince Rupert himself was about to charge them.

The Red Regiment had been attacked before, at Stow-on-the-Wold and again at Aldbourne Chase. Gideon had fired off his musket, though never before in the thick of fighting, where he knew for sure his bullets were bringing wounds and death. Still, he found himself calm here. He understood that he and his colleagues were dismissed as inept, even by their own side. But critically the Trained Bands had practised, unlike more recently recruited troops. They were inexperienced under fire but had repeated their drill every fortnight until it was second nature; also now they had a month of hardship on the road bonding them. Drawn from shops, workshops and the Customs House, they were clerks, dyers, distillers, confectioners, printers, drapers, tailors, woodmongers and vinegar-sellers. Nothing was expected of them, so they had it all to prove. Labour and business had made them strong and self-willed. Besides, they were Londoners. They wanted to go home.

Throughout that long day, the infantry had very little idea what was happening elsewhere. Frequently it was a formless battle, with the attacking Royalists slight on strategy. Bodies of men locked together and pushed pointlessly for hour after hour, neither side making ground. Afterwards Gideon learned that on the left flank, up against the River Kennet, Parliamentary cavalry fought back so hard they put their opponents to flight; in the centre Skippon’s infantry brigade slogged it out for Round Hill against two of the Byron brothers’ horse; on the right, Royalist cavalry tried to beat back the Parliamentarians from Wash Common, surrounding them in a desperate close struggle until many had died and the remainder were spent. The Trained Bands then bore the brunt of the enemy’s attacks, holding their own as they fought furiously all day, to the astonishment of those who had previously disparaged them.