The Making Of The British Army (5 page)

The
vade mecum
issued to every man of the New Model Army.

As the crow flies, from Edgehill where the war began in 1642 to Naseby where effectively it ended in June 1645 is but 30 miles. And in three years of fighting little appeared to have changed in the design for battle, although at Naseby it was the Parliamentarians who would form up on a ridge, with the infantry in the centre (five large regiments in the front line and three in reserve) under the New Model’s admirable serjeant-major-general Sir Philip Skippon. Commissary-General Henry Ireton had command of the left wing of five and a half regiments (predominantly horse), and on the right was his future father-in-law, Cromwell, with six and a half regiments. As at Edgehill the artillery, a mere eleven guns, was ‘penny-packeted’ in the intervals between the infantry regiments, and just as at Edgehill they would play little part in the battle, the first salvoes going high and the two sides soon too closely engaged for the guns to be safely used. But if the deployment for battle was the same, the soldiers of the New Model were very decidedly not. Properly regimented, well armed, well drilled, well motivated and well led, they would be a match for the
élan
with which the Royalists could undoubtedly still fight. And unlike the King’s, the cavalry of the New Model could charge home and then rally quickly to exploit its shock action.

Poor King Charles: he had taken Rupert’s advice to rally the Scots and recover the north of England, but in truth all chance of this had been lost – and with it Rupert’s reputation as a commander – in July 1644 at Marston Moor outside York. Rupert had only evaded capture, indeed, by hiding in the corn; sadly his dog ‘Boy’ failed to do likewise, and was captured and summarily shot. At Naseby, Charles must have known that the tide was running ever more strongly against him, and Rupert that the dashing cavalry charge no longer decided matters. And now they faced the New Model for the first time. Nevertheless, morale was by no means low, for they had stormed Leicester a fortnight before (and dealt with the defending garrison brutally), drawing Parliament’s troops north from the siege of Oxford, Charles’s de facto capital.

If only they had had the high ground. However, it was perhaps as well that the New Model was drawn up
behind
their ridge, for, well trained as they were, many a man had not seen battle, and there was still the touch of majesty in the Cavalier ranks as they formed up below – the drums, the trumpets, the colours streaming, the morning sun glinting on armour. And in the midst of the great, proud panoply rode Charles himself, sword drawn. He would personally command the reserve of infantry (the King’s and Prince Rupert’s regiments of foot) and his Life Guard of Horse: whatever else might be said of this king, he did not lack courage. Jacob Astley, his splendid serjeant-major-general, who had prayed on his knees before Edgehill, was deftly deploying the battle line, while 2,500 horse under Rupert and his brother Prince Maurice champed and pranced on the right wing facing Ireton’s stolid troopers. And over on the left Sir Marmaduke Langdale, high sheriff of Yorkshire, who had come south at the head of 1,500 horsemen known for both hard fighting and indiscipline, was taking unruly post on the flank of the mile-long line opposite Cromwell’s grim-faced professionals.

Rupert was intent on attacking, for all that doing so uphill would be no less risky than the Parliamentarians had found it in the opening battle of the war. But with the sharp spur of his ignominy at Marston propelling him, Rupert now led his Cavaliers in a charge straight at Ireton’s men, with Astley’s infantry beginning their more measured advance behind him. The clash of mounts was violent, and Rupert’s first line was checked. Then into the mêlée galloped the second line under the earl of Northampton, and the unexpected happened: Ireton’s men broke.

The Royalist cavalry swept on after them, baggage-bound exactly as at Edgehill, not stopping till it reached Northampton 15 miles away, giving Ireton a chance to recover – if not quite as quickly as on the New Model’s training grounds of East Anglia. The Royalist advance would now depend on Sir Marmaduke Langdale’s men neutralizing the other flank of the New Model’s cavalry – the flank commanded by Cromwell.

The Royalist infantry, too, was making progress. As Sir Edward Walker, secretary of the King’s war council, later recalled: ‘Presently our forces advanced up the hill, the rebels only discharging five [artillery] pieces at them, but [these] overshot them, and so did their musketeers. The foot on either side hardly saw each other until they were within carbine shot, and so only made one volley; ours falling in with sword
and butt end of muskets did notable execution.’ In this push of pike the Parliamentarian foot began to give way, their commander, Skippon, himself badly wounded by a musket ball in the chest (though he would not quit the field).

And now was the moment when Langdale’s cavalry might have tipped the scales. Cromwell knew it, and coolly held his ground rather than shifting to support the wavering infantry, though he could see men in red coats throwing away their arms and making off. Up the slope began the Yorkshire horse. On this flank, however, the ground was broken, and they could hardly get into a gallop, still less keep formation. Cromwell judged the moment perfectly: down the hill he took his ‘Ironsides’, as soon they would be known from Rupert’s lament that they cut through anything, and saw off Langdale’s hearties in short order. Unlike Rupert, however, Cromwell had his men in hand: he sent two regiments in pursuit, and with the rest he turned against the Royalist centre while those of Ireton’s men who had at last rallied attacked on the other flank.

The Royalist foot fought like tigers. Rupert’s regiment of ‘Bluecoats’ stood their ground to the last, their ensign, who would not yield, killed by the Parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax. Charles tried to lead his Life Guard of Horse to the rescue. ‘Sire, would you go on your death so easily?’ cried the earl of Carnwath, seizing his bridle and forcing him to halt. But the tide of Parliamentarian foot and horse was overwhelming, dragoons now pouring fire into the Royalist flanks. With no help from Rupert’s cavalry in sight, those of the infantry that could get away now broke and ran.

The aftermath was bloody and inglorious. Fairfax’s troops hunted down the fugitive Royalists and put to the sword even those who surrendered. Coming on the baggage train they hacked to death a hundred camp-followers, believing them to be ‘whores and camp sluts that attended that wicked army’, or else Irish, or both, though they were in fact simply the innocent distaff side of Charles’s Welsh regiments, who paid highly for their inability to protest their virtue in English.

At Naseby, although the New Model had not performed uniformly well, they had been able to rally, and thereby proved the superiority of professional troops. And now there was no time for Charles to make good the deficit. His cause was all but finished, though there would be another three years of bloody, pointless skirmishing before the war in Britain was over.

*

But when peace came, so did the obvious question: what to do with the New Model? Was a standing army any more lawful, affordable or expedient than it had been before the war? How would Parliament control it?

The place of the army in the state, whether republic or monarchy, remained a fundamental and problematic issue – and by no means, of course, one for these islands alone. In Britain it would not be settled for another half-century; in France, not for two centuries; in Germany, three. The problem was that by 1649, when the execution of King Charles apparently settled the nature of the state, the New Model Army, though its officers were ‘professionals’ and its rank and file in regular pay, had become thoroughly imbued with puritan zeal, and thus politicized. After 1649 it became the means of imposing a political and religious vision on the civil population – as well as conducting the brutal suppression of Catholic (and therefore Royalist) Ireland, where war dragged on until 1653. The decade that followed the execution of Charles I was to see the nightmare that Englishmen had so far only heard of from across the Channel – martial law, the ‘rule of the major-generals’. And the scourge of foreign wars, albeit largely naval ones, returned too.

In fact Cromwell’s missionary zeal and the rectitude of his intentions were by 1658 (when he died) so mired in the cruelty and increasing absolutism of his means that many a man formerly sympathetic to Parliament began thinking himself no better off than his fellows on the Continent who had endured the clash of armies in religion’s name for thirty years. Country gentry and town merchants alike wanted peace, order, lower taxes – and fewer soldiers. Indeed, the legacy of the Commonwealth was to be a hearty dislike of soldiers and a renewed mistrust of standing armies.

Cromwell’s son Richard now succeeded his father as ‘Lord Protector’, and a power struggle began – among generals, among politicians, among leaders of the religious sects, between Parliament and generals, between generals and the army. Little wonder, therefore, that even those who had fought against the old King were soon looking to a return of the old order – the King in Parliament – which meant the return of a properly elected parliament and, of course, of the King himself.

But to restore the Stuart king would take soldiers, and a man with vision, integrity and grip to lead them. In Scotland commanding the
army of occupation was Lieutenant-General George Monck, an old professional (he had seen much action in Dutch service) who had begun the war a Royalist. Perhaps fortuitously he had figured little in the fighting in England, serving in Ireland until 1643 and then in January the following year being taken prisoner in Cheshire. Refusing the offer of his liberty on condition he changed sides, he had spent the next three years in the Tower, until in November 1646, at the end of the first Civil War – the defeat of the Royalists in England – he finally took an oath of allegiance to Parliament, whereupon he was made major-general and commander in Ulster. In 1650 he took part in the invasion of Scotland, and after the shattering defeat of the Scottish Royalists at Dunbar Cromwell promoted him lieutenant-general and commander-in-chief north of the Tweed. Over the next eight years he had earned a name for firm but fair government and loyalty to his troops – not least over their pay, which was always heavily in arrears. He had not benefited personally from confiscated Royalist or Church assets, and so had no financial stake in Cromwell’s Protectorate. Above all – at least in the eyes of the exiled son of Charles I, the king-in-waiting – he was not a regicide: he had not signed Charles I’s death warrant, nor even been a member of the High Court of Justice which condemned him. He was known to all, indeed, as ‘honest George Monck’, and to some as no more than a simple soldier, almost a bumpkin, an image given force by his rich Devon accent and enormous bulk. He had nothing to fear from the return of the King.

By the summer of 1659 Charles II was trying to make contact with Monck through the general’s brother, a clergyman in the most Royalist of counties, Cornwall, and through Viscount Fauconberg, a grandee of Royalist-inclined Yorkshire.
¹⁰
Charles offered titles and baubles, but the general would not yet commit himself, publicly at least. And so when in the depth of winter honest George Monck gathered his troops at Coldstream, a tiny ‘border toon’ whose name but for this assembly few would know, he had confided his intentions to no one. Some of his men may have had thoughts of their own – Monck for Lord Protector, indeed – but for the most part they were content to follow him in the hope of getting their promised arrears of pay. Before leaving Edinburgh he had paraded and addressed them directly: ‘The army in England has
broken up the Parliament, out of a restless ambition to govern themselves … For my part, I think myself obliged, by the duty of my place, to keep the military power in obedience to the civil.’ It was indeed a statement of fundamental doctrine. No general since the Restoration has tried to overawe Parliament, let alone break it up. Few, probably, have even thought of it.

On 1 January 1660 Monck crossed the Tweed, the border between his command in Scotland and that of northern England, and began his march on London, just as Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon and begun his march on the capital of the Roman republic –
alea iacta est.
Unlike Caesar, however, Monck did not burn his boats, for the Tweed was not quite the legal barrier that the Rubicon had been, and neither was it a Gallic torrent. There was, indeed, a good bridge, although 6,000 men could not cross it expeditiously, and so many of them waded through the icy stream. Was their general for King, or was he for Parliament? No one but Monck truly knew.

Steadily south marched these ‘Coldstreamers’, and all opposition, real and imagined, melted away before them. ‘The frost was great, and the snow greater; and I do not remember that we ever trod upon plain earth from Edinburgh to London,’ recalled John Price, Monck’s chaplain. But unlike some later epics of winter marching – in Saxony, or in northern Spain – when the British army’s discipline faltered, this long haul saw the morale of Monck’s Coldstreamers increasing with every mile, their reception in town and village warm, the church bells ringing joyfully. ‘They were certainly the bravest, the best disciplined, and the soberest army that had been known in these latter ages: every soldier was able to do the functions of an officer,’ wrote Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury. Doubtless he exaggerated a little, but perhaps not too greatly.