The Making Of The British Army (4 page)

Opposite Rupert’s wing, three-quarters of a mile or so down the hill and beyond a hedge, the left wing of the Parliamentary cavalry was well supported by musketeers and cannon. Indeed, Parliament’s line, comprising three ‘tertias’ (brigades) of infantry, outnumbered the Royalists by 3,000 musketeers and pikemen; but this margin was less than the earl of Essex had hoped for (there were many stragglers behind him still after his rapid march from Worcester), and he therefore moved two cavalry regiments from his right to behind the infantry, leaving just one regiment of horse supported by dragoons and musketeers on that flank.

But this, to Essex’s mind, did not matter, for Parliament was not going to attack first. After all, Charles had the advantage of the slope, and Rupert had a reputation for dash. Essex was not going to risk his infantry to the shock action of a cavalry charge as they advanced uphill. And so the morning passed with little but mutual jeering and a desultory and ineffective exchange of artillery. The battlefield was still a quietish sort of place until the lines came to close quarters; a man might say his prayers or play a game of cards until the moment came.

In the early afternoon Astley knelt down and in the hearing of all prayed: ‘Oh Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.’ Then he rose, and with a ‘Forward, boys!’ led the Royalist line in a steady march down the hill. Half a mile on they halted and the cannon on both sides opened fire; but the smoke and noise was greater than the harm, and the guns soon fell silent again.

Essex, though dismayed by the passing of the day to no effect, and not least by Astley’s half-advance, was not going to be tempted into attacking. But neither was he going to wait idly on Charles’s whim. He decided to send dragoons to probe the Royalist right, following them up with horse and a few of the supporting musketeers from his left flank. It was about three o’clock, the sun was already low in the sky, and the Royalist right had little difficulty seeing them off. It was not exactly the opportunity Rupert had hoped for, but at this hour it was his best chance. He gave the order, and both wings of his cavalry began to advance, the plumed host surging forward at first in an amiable trot, for all the world like gentlemen taking their sport.

There was a tactic much favoured by Spanish cavalry, the
caracole
, in which successive lines of horse would canter elegantly up to the enemy line, wheel to the left and discharge their pistols. But Rupert was having none of this: he would have his men go at a gallop, firing as they collided with the enemy horse. Then, seizing sword from scabbard, they would forge a path through the mass of horse by sheer momentum. It was how Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes had borne down on so many of their German opponents. And there was only one way to deal with it – a counter-charge.
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Essex’s cavalry, trained (in so far as they were trained) after the
Dutch model, awaited the attack with pistol and carbine rather than preparing for a counter-charge. But Rupert’s cavalry, confident men on powerful horses, with the hill giving impetus to their advance, were a terrifying sight to men who might ride to church of a Sunday, or drive a plough in spring and autumn, but had never heard the thunder of so many unfriendly hooves. They fired an ineffective volley, turned and fled the field.

Rupert’s men spurred after them, quickly overrunning the cannon and muskets on both flanks of the Parliamentary line. Without cavalry to cover them, the line might indeed have been rolled up from end to end, but the Cavaliers, high on the thrill of the chase, instead galloped on in pursuit of the fleeing Roundheads until, some miles on, they came upon their baggage train, where in time-honoured fashion they fell out to loot. A century and a half later the duke of Wellington would still be complaining about the cavalry’s ‘habit of galloping at everything’.

Seeing the collapse of the Parliamentarian flanks, the Royalist infantry now advanced boldly. But in the centre of the Parliamentarian line two brigades had stood firm, and with no Royalist cavalry in sight to oppose them, Essex counter-attacked with the two regiments of cavalry he had posted behind these stalwarts in the centre.

The situation suddenly looked dangerous for the King’s side, for there was no mounted reserve, Charles having allowed his Life Guard to join Rupert’s charge. But ‘the foot soldiers stood their ground with great courage,’ as one chronicler wrote, ‘and though many of the King’s soldiers were unarmed and had only cudgels, they kept their ranks, and took up the arms which their slaughtered neighbours left to them’.
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In the ensuing ‘push of pikes’, a cosy term to describe brutish hand-to-hand fighting, the Parliamentarians were just too strong, and at length the Royalist centre gave way. Indeed for a time it looked as if Charles would have to concede, but both sides had been badly shaken by their crude initiation to battle, and were rapidly exhausted by the close fighting. At the last minute some of Rupert’s men came cantering back to put heart into the Royalists, and the earl of Essex prudently broke off battle. Neither side had achieved a decisive advantage. It was the dead and dying who were left in possession of the field.

It had been during this last desperate push of pikes that the earl of Lindsey was shot through the thigh. The veteran of the Prince of Orange’s service, who in vain had advocated the more compact battle line of the Dutch infantry (just as he had used Dutch engineers to drain the Lincolnshire fens to which he gave his name), now cursed in the bitter cold of the night. Why had the King not heeded his counsel, taking instead that of a 23-year-old thruster? ‘If it please God I should survive,’ he declared to his son, ‘I never will fight in the same field with boys again!’

But it did not please God. Just before midnight the earl of Lindsey, like so many of his Lincoln regiment, joined the ‘harvest of death’.

Others on the Royalist side were soon thinking the same as their late general-in-chief, if not directly blaming Rupert then recognizing that Edgehill was not the way to make war. And those who had recently seen service abroad also knew that a continental army would have swept them from the field. It was well that Britain was an island, and the navy capable – and that the Parliamentarian army was no better found than they.

Parliamentarian officers were thinking along the same lines, too. Oliver Cromwell, MP for Huntingdon and a captain of horse, had arrived too late on the field at Edgehill to see action, but he had been able to see well enough what had happened. He wrote at once to his cousin John Hampden, one of the Parliamentary leaders:

Cromwell may have been a puritan, but he was a puritan gentleman. However, he also recognized the weakness of the Royalist cavalry. Their lack of discipline had let slip a thorough victory at Edgehill, and he sensed it would not be the last time that Royalist
élan
would turn into unruliness. They could be countered by disciplined troops.

At Edgehill something profound had been, if not born, then certainly conceived:

The change that Kipling wrote of two and a half centuries later was not merely the overturning of the constitution but the dawning of the realization that war could no longer be made in the old feudal way; that there must be system and discipline, and thus (eventually) a regular, professional army. For although there would be another two years’ inconclusive fighting (during which Cromwell would rise to lieutenant-general) before Parliament grasped the nettle and raised an army in which enlisted men received proper training and regular pay, and the officers were selected and promoted on professional merit, Edgehill was the genesis of the ‘New Model’.

And when Parliament did at last grasp the nettle it did so resolutely and without too much scruple: puritan ministers might teach the Gospel, but it was the likes of Carlo Fantom, a Croatian (the Croats were famed for their irregular light cavalry), who would teach the sword. ‘I care not for your cause,’ he boasted: ‘I come to fight for your half-crown and your handsome women.’

Fantom was indeed a notable ravisher, and would soon change sides for the promise of more half-crowns. But the Royalists, on that occasion at least, proved to have the greater principles and eventually hanged him – for ravishing.

The New Model Army would not be especially large, however – 22,000 men and 2,300 officers, two-thirds infantry to one-third cavalry (about the number, indeed, of the British infantry today) – but it would be superbly disciplined, equipped and trained. And for the first time a British army would wear a true uniform – red. Cromwell was certain of the type of man he wanted to lead such troops, too: ‘I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ Out went the officers who had attained their ranks as MPs, and in came
those who had proved themselves capable. While theirs was not a vast army, the Parliamentarians believed that professional quality would make up for lack of numbers, although ironically Charles himself was never able to muster many more troops than they.

Curiously, attempting to raise more troops was in fact the only Royalist response to a war that was not going their way. Charles and his generals did little to change their tactics, nor did they develop any sound military strategy. There were some loyal and able supporters, such as the estimable Sir Ralph Hopton who raised a formidable little army in Cornwall and almost captured the earl of Essex. Hopton’s
Maxims for the Management of an Army
(1643) would have served the New Model admirably, with the terse injunction to ‘pay well, command well, hang well!’ But paying well became increasingly difficult for Charles, and commanding well, to his mind, remained synonymous with birthright, while capital punishment was no deterrent to a man who evaded service in the first place.

By the beginning of 1645, as the New Model was being readied for action, the Royalist forces were spread thinly about the country in a patchwork of sieges and counter-sieges, none of which was vital, and none of which promised a decision. The arrival in the field of the New Model could easily tip the scales irrecoverably in Parliament’s favour, and Charles’s more astute advisers urged him to attack before it was fully formed. But they urged in vain: Charles’s want of military strategy, especially the planning of campaigns, was as great as his want of political instinct.
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For without operational art war becomes a set of disconnected engagements, relative attrition the only measure of success or failure. Charles conflated sieges with sovereignty: not only were towns and cities the source of the money and arms with which war was made, they were key elements of his realm. The Parliamentarians, on the other hand, were not viscerally connected with borough or shire; they were intent only on defeat of the King. Raising the New Model Army was therefore a strategic stroke of huge significance – a move of war-winning potential, for an army that could not be beaten was, self-evidently, able to dictate the course of events in the field, and it was
only in the field, now, that the political issue could be settled. Those of Charles’s advisers who advocated attacking the New Model before it reached its full effectiveness had grasped this essential strategic fact. Unfortunately for the Royalist cause, Prince Rupert, by now general of the army, had not. He proposed instead to recover the north of England and join forces with the Royalists in Scotland.