‘Courage, my Soul, now learn to wield
The weight of thine immortal shield.
Close on thy head thy helmet bright.
Balance thy sword against the fight.
See where an army, strong as fair,
With silken banners spreads the air.
Now, if thou be’st that thing divine,
In this day’s combat let it shine.’
‘A Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ by the poet and Republican Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
The Civil War changed dramatically during the late summer and autumn of 1643. Parliament and the Scots signed the Solemn League and Covenant, a treaty that promised invasion from the north. Soon afterwards, a truce enabled Charles to bring back troops that had been fighting the Catholic rebels in Ireland. If the effect of Scotland’s entry into the war were to be nullified, the Royalists would need to deploy the troops from Ireland as an efficient counterweight. In the meantime, Charles must juggle his resources to meet the challenge of five enemy armies operating in his kingdom.
Rupert pushed for command of the influx of troops from Ireland. For success, the prince would have to adapt his proven flair in attack to conditions that demanded defence. His instinct was for independence, with his favourite officers by his side. He longed to be far from the internal bickering of Oxford, where his presence seemed to act as a lightning rod for the disaffected. ‘The army is much divided,’ wrote Arthur Trevor, one of Rupert’s sympathisers in the town, in November 1643, ‘and the Prince at true distance with many of the officers of horse.’[fn1] The gulf was also growing between Rupert and the queen, although Charles demonstrated continuing trust in his nephew, giving him British peerages on 24 January 1644, so that he could sit in Oxford’s Royalist Parliament as Earl of Holderness and Duke of Cumberland. The Parliamentarians marked this last elevation with a new nickname for Rupert: ‘Plunderland’.
The prince had no intention of attending the makeshift House of Lords while there was fighting to be done. He started 1644 by proposing a ruse to capture the important rebel stronghold of Northampton. This involved riding his cavalry into the town while posing as Parliamentarian reinforcements. Once inside the walls, the Royalists would reveal their true identity and overwhelm the garrison. However, this typically bold plan was — equally typically — rejected as unworkable and risky.
In the middle of January 1644, the Scots invaded England through thick snow. At the end of the month, Sir Thomas Fairfax trounced Byron’s army outside Nantwich, in Cheshire. Rupert, convinced that the northwest was set to become a key battleground in the war, had secured a new command as captain general of the counties of Chester, Lancaster, Worcester, Salop, and the six northern counties of Wales. He set off for Shrewsbury on 6 February, while summoning reinforcements from Bristol.
Rupert’s latest duties demanded a complex balancing act. Of real concern was the precarious situation of the Marquess of Newcastle’s army to the east of the Pennines. Out on a limb, it was simultaneously awaiting one visit from the Scots and another from Parliament’s northern forces. The prince could not allow the enemy to isolate and destroy Newcastle’s men: he must do all he could to support it against the Allied armies. At the same time, Rupert needed to be on hand to assist Charles’s headquarters at Oxford, which was under increasing pressure from Parliament’s forces in the Thames Valley. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1644, the prince remained on the move, attempting to sustain the Royalist cause on its two most challenging fronts.
This was a critical time in the war, which led to a hardening of attitudes. The Royalist vicar of Barton upon Humber prayed that the king’s enemies should suffer all manner of damnation: ‘Let horror and amazement take hold on them, and keep them in a perpetual alarm … Their sons and their daughters that were the joy of their hearts, let them be cut off in the flower of their days; and the wives of their bosoms, let them be given into the bosoms of those that hate them. And when they have seen all this, and a world of misery more than all this, let their last end be like the rest, let them go down to the grave with a tragic and disastrous death.’[fn2]
Meanwhile, Parliament met the arrival of Royalist troops from Ireland with a decree that they would be executed on capture. When the rebels took thirteen of Rupert’s men near Nantwich — all English, but falsely classified by their captors as Irish Papists — they hanged the lot of them. The prince was furious. Soon afterwards he captured fourteen of the enemy. Thirteen of these he hanged in reprisal, releasing the fourteenth with a curt message for his superiors: if the Parliamentarians dared to repeat their outrage, two of their men would be executed for every Royalist prisoner hanged. Nobody thought the prince was bluffing — his stark threat ‘stopped that efflux of blood ever after.’[fn3]
Rupert remained busy in the field, his difficult task complicated by a lack of support from the king’s council of war. Of its members, lords Forth and Astley appreciated Rupert’s talents and were broadly sympathetic, while the Duke of Richmond was a good personal friend to the prince. However, lords Digby, Percy, and Wilmot were all favourites of the queen, and Sir John Culpepper joined them in a cabal whose common enemy was Rupert. Charles increasingly listened to this vociferous clique despite Digby’s negligible military record, Percy’s poor showing at Newbury (he was blamed for the Royalists’ crucial shortage of gunpowder), and the gifted Wilmot’s legendary debauchery. Rupert’s friend Arthur Trevor warned that influential enemies at court would succeed in isolating the prince from the king, unless he secured further military glory: ‘For’, Trevor observed, ‘I find no court physic so present for the opening of obstructions as good news.’[fn4]
Such an opportunity soon presented itself. Newark was the key Royalist staging post between Newcastle’s Northern Army and the headquarters of Oxford. In February, Sir John Meldrum began to besiege Newark with a 5,000-strong army. Charles ordered Rupert to march from Chester to Newark’s relief. Summoning men from Shrewsbury, and recruiting en route, the prince organised horses for as many of his troops as possible, in order to speed his passage. The Royalists covered the ground fast, taking a cross-country route that avoided major roads. With the rebels unable to monitor the progress of this secret march, Rupert’s sudden appearance outside the town took Meldrum completely by surprise. Although Rupert’s men were exhausted by the speed of their advance, they had to fight immediately: their besieged colleagues were facing starvation.
The action, on 21 March 1644, was a triumph for Rupert, although not without its alarms. The Royalist cavalry led the attack, the right wing slicing through its opponents with ease. But Rupert’s troop was caught in an awkward scuffle, the distinctive prince presenting an irresistible target: ‘Three sturdy Roundheads at once assaulted him: one fell by his own sword, a second was pistolled by one of his own gentlemen, and a third, laying his hand on the Prince’s collar, had it chopped off by O’Neal.’[fn5] Undaunted by his narrow escape, Rupert urged his cavalry on.
The Royalist infantry followed the horse with an aggressive advance, which convinced Meldrum that his position was hopeless. He surrendered on generous terms, which allowed him to march his survivors to another rebel stronghold. However, Meldrum was forced to leave behind valuable supplies: 4,000 muskets, 50 barrels of gunpowder, 11 cannon and 2 mortars. More importantly, against all expectations, Newark had been saved and the Marquess of Newcastle’s army was spared dangerous isolation. ‘Nephew,’ wrote the king, ‘I assure you that this (as all your victories) gives me as much contentment in that I owe you the thanks as for the importance of it, which in this particular believe me, is no less than the saving of all the north, nothing, for the presence being of more consequence; how to follow this (indeed beyond imaginable) success, I will not prescribe you …’[fn6] The speed and secrecy of the march, the decisiveness of the attack, and the importance of the result mark the relief of Newark as one of Rupert’s greatest military achievements. Clarendon called it: ‘As unexpected a victory as happened throughout the war.’[fn7]
The breathing space won for Lord Newcastle was short lived. Rupert was forced to resume his balancing act, providing simultaneous support for the Royalist armies in the north and in the Thames Valley. Newcastle urged Rupert to remain in the northern Midlands, within range of his army, convinced that this was the sphere of the conflict where the war could be decided in a day. However, the vulnerability of the king’s cause in the south demanded the prince’s return to the Welsh borders, on a recruiting mission. In his absence the rebels quickly gnawed away at the advantages gained by the relief of Newark, recapturing Lincolnshire and then defeating Lord Bellasis’s Royalists at Selby. Newcastle moved with his men from Durham to York, adding his infantry to the garrison there, while despatching his cavalry south to seek Rupert’s renewed help. ‘If your Highness do not please to come hither, and that nay very soon too,’ the marquess implored, ‘the great game of your uncle’s will be endangered, if not lost; and with your Highness being near, certainly won: so I doubt not but your Highness will come, and that very soon.’[fn8]
Taking stock of the Royalist situation across the nation in mid April 1644, Rupert proposed a bold plan to the council of war: the king should concentrate his infantry in Oxford and its four surrounding garrison towns, with enough cavalry to be able to sustain them through foraging. Charles would then depart for the west with the remainder of his horse and join up with Prince Maurice, recently appointed Lieutenant General of the Southern Counties. The king would help Maurice’s army, which was having a difficult time besieging Lyme — one of the few remaining rebel strongholds in the southwest. Rupert, meanwhile, would take his army back north and repeat his recent heroics by lifting the siege of York. Provided the Thames Valley garrisons could hold out in the interim, the king and his two nephews would then return to Oxford to relieve the Royalist capital, their combined forces ready for a concerted assault on London. ‘The great crisis of the North being expected’, Prince Rupert’s logbook recorded, ‘a Council of War at Oxford resolved to put off fighting with Essex till that be over.’[fn9]
The prince headed northwards, buoyed up by unaccustomed support for one of his ambitious proposals. However, approval for Rupert’s northern design had not been universal. As soon as he had departed, the king was persuaded to remain in Oxford, concentrating his forces nearby, while Reading’s defences (the town had been recaptured after the battle of Newbury) were pulled down and abandoned. Soon afterwards the Royalists also quit Abingdon, Lord Digby taking the opportunity to blame this painful decision on Rupert’s absence with so many troops.
Soon the consequences of ignoring Rupert’s plan became apparent. With Abingdon and Reading no longer standing guard over Oxford, Waller joined Essex in an exercise of containment that threatened to isolate the town from the armies of the north and the west. It looked as though the king would be trapped in the town and, if he were forced to surrender, the Civil War would be abruptly concluded. In desperation, Charles slipped out of Oxford with an army of 7,000 men, managing to evade the enemy encirclement by using minor roads leading to the west. Waller and Essex pursued him, but their civilian masters, the members of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, sent the two rebel commanders in different directions, halving their effectiveness at a stroke. Essex was despatched to the southwest, while Waller continued his pursuit of the king alone, his mobile army rich in cavalry.
Charles’s intentions after breaking out from Oxford are not known. He may have hoped to reach Prince Rupert’s army in Lancashire or his plan may have been simply to remain at large until matters looked more favourable. However, the impetus was now with the enemy. Essex made successful inroads in the southwest, while Waller’s troops stood menacingly between the king in Worcester and the prince further north. Hard pressed and demoralised, Charles wrote a letter from Tickenhill, in Bewdley — near Ashby de la Zouch — to Rupert.
Nephew,
First I must congratulate with you, for your good successes, assuring you that the things themselves are no more welcome to me, than that you are the means: I know the importance of the supplying you with powder for which I have taken all possible ways, having sent both to Ireland & Bristol, as from Oxford this bearer is well satisfied, that it is impossible to have at present, but if he tell you that I may spare them hence, I leave you to judge, having but 36 left; but what I can get from Bristol (of which there is not much certainty, it being threatened to be besieged) you shall have.
But now I must give you the true state of my affairs, which if their condition be such as enforces me to give you more peremptory commands than I would willingly do, you must not take it ill. If York be lost, I shall esteem my Crown little less, unless supported by your sudden march to me, & a miraculous conquest in the South, before the effects of the Northern power can be found here; but if York be relieved, & you beat the rebel armies of both Kingdoms, which are before it, then but otherwise not, I may possibly make a shift, (upon the defensive) to spin out time, until you come to assist me: wherefore I command and conjure you, by the duty & affection which I know you bear me, that (all new enterprises laid aside) you immediately march (according to your first intention) with all your force to the relief of York; but if that be either lost, or fried themselves from the besiegers, or that for want of powder you cannot undertake that work; that you immediately march, with your whole strength, to Worcester, to assist me & my Army, without which, or your having relieved York by beating the Scots, all the successes you can afterwards have, most infallibly, will be useless unto me: You may believe that nothing but an extreme necessity could make me write thus unto you, wherefore, in this case, I can no ways doubt of your punctual compliance with
Your loving Uncle and most faithful friend
Charles R.’[fn10]
The king wrote this when his hopes were low, his council of war was divided, and defeat seemed imminent. He was unaware that Essex’s army had departed for the southwest, and assumed that he would be caught and overwhelmed by the earl’s and Waller’s combined forces. Within a fortnight, though, the darkest clouds had lifted. Charles led his army to a handsome victory over Waller at Cropredy Bridge, near Edgehill — providing a glimpse of the ‘miraculous conquest in the South’ referred to in the middle of his letter. But Rupert was not to hear about this change in fortune until too late.
The correct interpretation of this letter exercised Rupert for the rest of his days. The prince read it and understood it to be a command to march directly to the relief of York, before attacking and defeating the Allied armies of Parliament and the Scots. The desperation of Charles’s position, evident in the king’s rambling and unhappy tone, seemed to Rupert to demand the immediate execution of these commands. The alternative, the prince surmised, was the sinking of the Royalist cause.
‘The Tickenhill Letter’ is a key document in Prince Rupert’s life story. However, it would be wrong to see it in isolation: there were another half-dozen communications written in a similar vein, all urging the prince to ease the king’s plight in the south by gaining speedy success in the north, before descending to his aid. An undated letter should be seen as a companion to the Tickenhill one: ‘To what I wrote yesterday,’ the king wrote, ‘I can only add that the relief of York is that which is most absolutely best for my affairs whereof again I earnestly conjure you speedily to prosecute that if you have but the least hope to do good there but as I have told you my business can bear no delay for you must either march presently northwards or hitherward, and that without engaging yourself in any other action.’[fn11]
Rupert received these letters after further personal successes. He had invaded Lancashire in mid May, capturing Stockport before rescuing the Countess of Derby and her retainers from a three-month siege. Lathom House, her castellated mansion, was protected by a moat and high wall. Its garrison of 300 included the Derbys’ gamekeepers, deployed as rooftop snipers, whose marksmanship ‘shrewdly galled the enemy’. The countess, a granddaughter of William the Silent and a cousin of Rupert’s, was undaunted by an enemy that outnumbered her force by ten to one. When their leader, Colonel Rigby, summoned her to surrender, she gave his messenger short shrift: ‘Go back to your commander, and tell that insolent rebel, he shall have neither persons, goods, nor house. When our strength is spent, we shall find a fire more merciful than Rigby’s, and then, if Providence of God prevent it not, my goods and house shall burn in his sight; myself, my children, and my soldiers, rather than fall into his hands, will seal our religion and our loyalty in the same flame.’[fn12] Rupert’s intervention spared her from this futile martyrdom.
The prince marched on, at the end of the month, to Bolton — a bastion of Puritanism, known as ‘the Geneva of the north’. It was while he was outside the town that he received the first of the stream of letters from the king demanding his urgent transfer from Lancashire to York. He immediately attacked Bolton. The outcome of the assault remained in the balance until Rupert, incensed by the public hanging of one of his Irishmen, led his infantry on foot in the decisive charge. The Parliamentary pamphleteers presented the ensuing bloodshed as ‘the Bolton Massacre’, claiming that civilians of both genders and all ages had been put to the sword by the Cavaliers. Evidence, however, points to the many casualties being military, and defeated soldiers being allowed safe surrender. We know that when 700 citizens sought sanctuary in the main church, they were spared.
Hearing of this latest gain, Sir John Meldrum, in Manchester, scoffed at the prince as ‘that fierce thunderbolt which terrifies the ignorant’.[fn13] Less dismissive were Meldrum’s colleagues in Liverpool, who were subject to Rupert’s ferocious night attack. Here, civilian lives were most certainly lost and pillaging was rife. It was the capture of Bolton and Liverpool that Charles was appreciating, early in the Tickenhill Letter: Liverpool’s port, with its easy access to Irish reinforcements, was a particularly valuable prize.
Yet Rupert’s mood was more distracted than triumphant. Correspondence from Arthur Trevor to the Marquess of Ormonde states that news had reached the prince from Oxford, ‘that the king grows daily more and more jealous of him and his army; and that it is the common discourse (at the openest places where men can discover themselves) of the Lord Digby, Lord Percy, Sir John Culpeper, and Wilmot, that it is indifferent whether the Parliament or Prince Rupert doth prevail; which did so highly jesuit Prince Rupert, that he was once more resolved to send the king his commission and get to France … This fury interrupted the march ten days; but at length time and a friend, the best coolers of the blood, spent the humour of travail in him, though not that of revenge; to which purpose he hath sent his letter to the king for the removal of them from his council; and if this be not done, he will leave this war and sit down.’[fn14]
The accuracy of Trevor’s account is hard to ascertain. Certainly, Rupert was aware that his enemies at Court were at work, trying to drive a wedge between him and his uncle. However, their success to date must have been limited, given the loving and respectful tone of Charles’s Tickenhill Letter. Equally, we know that Rupert was indeed delayed for ten days, but this was not spent sulking, but in trying to get the necessary supplies for his march to York. It appears that Lord Percy did not unduly exert himself in getting the Prince’s requirements to him on time.
These delays infuriated Rupert. All the correspondence from Charles and his senior councillors emphasised the need for speed, and expected the quick completion of the prince’s twin tasks in the north before he rode to the salvation of the king in the south. However, he had hoped to finish his own operations in Cheshire and Lancashire before being summoned elsewhere. The demands of the council of war meant this task must be left incomplete. Rupert appreciated how daunting the challenges before him would be: for a start, the three enemy armies around York totalled 30,000 men and were well supplied.
The prince needed more men and more weapons. The arrival of George Goring, General of the Northern Horse, gave Rupert an additional 1,000 cavalry. Goring also injected an even greater sense of urgency, bringing first-hand accounts of the extreme peril facing the York garrison. Although expecting the imminent arrival of Sir Robert Clavering and 1,000 fresh infantry, Rupert felt compelled to set off on his rescue mission without them. He was aware that he would be severely outnumbered when facing the allies. After a final rendezvous in Skipton, on 26 June, Rupert marched towards York with just 15,000 men.
En route, Rupert stayed a night at Denton House, a home of the Fairfaxes — two of whom were enemy commanders. The Civil War saw the destruction of many of the homes of prominent participants. Only three months earlier Rupert had dined with the widowed Lady Beeston, at Bridgenorth. He thanked his hostess for her hospitality, invited her to leave with her most precious belongings, then torched her home. A year before he had done the same to Wormleighton House, the main residence of the Earl of Sunderland. The young earl had died fighting for the king at Newbury, but his massive home could not be left vacant, vulnerable to Parliamentarian occupation, so it was blown up. Now, the prince’s troops expected to be let loose on Denton House. However, when walking round the interior, Rupert recognised a face in a family portrait. It belonged to a Fairfax who had died in the Palatinate a generation earlier, fighting for the prince’s father’s cause. Out of respect for this sacrifice, the prince ordered the property to be left intact.
Moving on to Knaresborough, a day’s march short of York, the prince gathered together his force and prepared for action. ‘It hath been daily reported this fortnight, that P. Rupert is coming to raise the siege,’ reported the chaplain to the Earl of Manchester, one of the Parliamentary generals in the north. ‘Now it’s rumoured that he is upon the borders of this county with a great Army. But our eyes are towards Heaven, from where comes our help, and we will pray and wait upon the God of our salvations and mercies.’[fn15] The Scots saw matters in a more apocalyptic light: ‘The manner briefly was thus, Rupert, or the second Nimrod, the mighty Plunderer, the beginning of whose kingdom is confusion, come in his hunting carrier, with his fellow hunters, and near 20,000 bloodhounds attending them, all more ravenous than wolves, and fiercer than tigers, thirsting for blood.’[fn16]
Rupert was pleased to learn that the three enemy commanders — Manchester, Fairfax, and Leven — had decided to advance to meet him, rather than wait to be attacked. This lifted the siege of York, to the joy of the garrison and inhabitants: they knew the allies were on the point of completing mines that would have collapsed their defences. As the Anglo-Scots departed for action against the prince, they could hear triumphant hollering coming from within York’s walls.
Rupert confused the enemy scouts by making a feint, which prompted the allied generals to deploy on moorland 3 miles to the west of the city. They were sure that they could intercept the prince there with their massively superior forces. Rupert sidestepped them, though, sending his men on a tortuous route that eventually brought them to the unprotected north gate of York. They relieved the city and overran the enemy camp outside its walls. The Marquess of Newcastle was quick to praise the prince: ‘You are welcome, Sir, so many several ways, as it is beyond my arithmetic to number, but this I know: you are the redeemer of the North & the Saviour of the Crown. Your name, Sir, hath terrified the great Generals and they fly before it.’[fn17]
The allied generals, however, had not gone far. That evening they marched their men to the nearby village of Long Marston, where they spent an uncomfortable night. ‘Our soldiers did drink the wells dry,’ remembered one of the Parliamentarians, ‘and then were necessitated to make use of puddle water.’[fn18] As they suffered, they pictured the Royalists helping themselves to the provisions stockpiled in their abandoned camp outside York.
The allies expected the prince’s forces to recuperate within York’s walls, before returning south via Newark.
It was the logical move. But Rupert, having completed the first part of his mission, now looked to obey his interpretation of the Tickenhill Letter, and bring the enemy immediately to battle. He sent a brusque order to Newcastle to meet him the next day, 2 July, at four in the morning, with 10,000 men. The combined Royalist forces would then attack, catching the enemy off-guard in the early morning.
The marquess resented Rupert’s tone: the young man was a prince, but he was a foreign one. Newcastle, on the other hand, was the king’s commander in the north and enjoyed unofficial vice-regal status: Charles permitted him to confer knighthoods as he saw fit and to mint his own coins. As a general, the marquess was a mere figurehead — he was not a professional soldier, but an amateur man of letters. Newcastle was, in truth, a loyal dilettante. He was a friend of the philosopher Hobbes and of the poet William Davenant — indeed, he made Davenant his general of artillery. Parliamentarian pamphleteers found Newcastle an easy target: they claimed that he lay in bed until eleven, before combing his hair until noon. His chief military adviser was Lord Eythin — the Scotsman who, as James King, had let Rupert down so badly at the battle of Vlotho.
Rupert arrived in Newcastle’s sphere of influence, convinced that he was the agent of the king’s will. Social niceties had little importance to the prince in such urgent times. This attitude resulted from his misreading of Newcastle’s character. Rupert had recently received a typically florid letter from the marquess, which seemed to show a willing subservience to the prince’s superior military pedigree: ‘Neither can I resolve anything since I am made of nothing but thankfulness and obedience to Your Highness’s command.’[fn19] This fawning led Rupert to assume, wrongly, that he could take the lead. In doing so, he upset one of his most enthusiastic admirers, just when unity was most required. To be sent curt instructions by a man less than half his age was an affront to this proudest of grandees, a grandson of Bess of Hardwick and once the governor to the Prince of Wales.
Despite feeling affronted, Newcastle followed Rupert’s commands and ordered his troops to assemble early the next day. However, the marquess’s men were in no condition to obey: they had run wild after deliverance from the eleven-week siege, plundering the enemy camp and becoming riotously drunk. Furthermore, Eythin told the soldiers to stand down till they had received their salary (it was Friday — pay day) — a decision that sent the men back to their drinking and pillaging, when they should have been preparing for battle.
It was not until nine o’clock in the morning, five hours after the appointed time, that Newcastle joined Rupert. With him came just 2,500 men, a quarter of the force expected by Rupert. The prince’s welcome was terse: ‘My Lord, I wish you had come sooner with your forces, but I hope we shall yet have a glorious day.’[fn20] There were further delays while Newcastle insisted on rounding up his crack infantrymen. These soldiers, known as ‘Newcastle’s Lambs’, wore white tunics (which gave rise to their other nickname, ‘the Whitecoats’) — they would, they promised, dye them scarlet in their enemies’ blood. These were experienced warriors, but the wait for them was costly, finally extinguishing Rupert’s hopes of launching a surprise attack. The prince set off for Marston Moor, intent on battle but unable to dictate its timing. When the Whitecoats joined the main Royalist body later in the afternoon, many of them were still sobering up after the previous night’s excesses.
In the other camp, the allies’ spirits were mixed. Soldiers were entitled to daily beer and bread, but the penny loaf each man had brought with him had long since been consumed and most of the beer had been left in the Anglo-Scottish camp outside York. They had expected a battle with the Royalists, then a swift return to their siege of the city, but Rupert’s brilliance had left them detached in the field, with inadequate supplies.
There were jealousies between the Parliamentarians and the Scots, which had led to plans for the two units to separate. However, these were rescinded when the unexpected news arrived that Rupert was marching to engage their combined force. They were confident of their prospects in the imminent battle. Besides their numerical advantage — they were 28,000 men to Rupert’s eventual 18,000 — the allies were sure that God was on their side: He would doubtless lead them to victory over the licentious hordes captained by the wicked ‘Prince Robber’. Their password for the battle was ‘God with us’. As they marched towards Marston Moor, they sang Psalms.
*
Even after two years, the fact that a civil war was being fought was not universally known. On reaching the moor, some soldiers discovered a farm worker going about his business and ordered him to be gone. The disgruntled labourer asked why he should move. When told that he was standing on a field that was about to host a battle between the king and Parliament, he said: ‘Whaat! Has them two fallen out, then?’[fn21]
First occupation of the moor narrowed the odds slightly in the Royalists’ favour. When the allies arrived in the early afternoon of 2 July, they found Rupert’s men deployed along a 2-mile front, musketeers and artillery at the ready behind the moor’s ditch and surrounding hedges. With summer showers falling, the Earl of Leven arranged his soldiers on a hilltop overlooking the moor. The surrounding fields were swathed in mature crops — rye, beans, and corn.
From mid afternoon the allied cannon fired intermittently. At a council of war with Newcastle and Eythin, the prince revealed his intention to attack. Eythin favoured defence, his opinion of Rupert evident in his inflammatory interjection: ‘Sir, your forwardness lost us the day in Germany, where yourself was taken prisoner.’[fn22] The sharpness of this insult seems to have knocked Rupert back, for this most aggressive of soldiers agreed to stand in defence until the morning. Newcastle, meanwhile, expressed fear that the enemy might attack sooner — a thought that, curiously, the prince seems to have dismissed out of hand. The marquess retired to his carriage, reassured that Rupert had matters under control, and lit his pipe.
The Royalists had broken ranks to eat supper when, in the late evening, the enemy attacked in huge numbers. ‘Our Army’, reported a Parliamentarian, ‘in its several parts moving down the hill, was like unto so many thick clouds, having divided themselves into Brigades.’[fn23] Rupert, the master of surprise, was taken completely unawares. His men were unable to re-form in time to defend the ditch, allowing Oliver Cromwell’s cavalry to charge on, into the Royalist right wing. Rupert had been excited at the prospect of fighting this celebrated enemy, but now he witnessed at first hand the destructive horsemen — to whom he gave the nickname of ‘Ironsides’ — combine the impetus of his Cavaliers with a level of discipline that they had never approached.
Thunder and storming rain accompanied the allied attack, adding to the pandemonium in the Royalist lines. Lord Byron, on the right wing, had been commanded not to venture forwards, but the sight of enemy cavalry fast approaching was too tempting: he ordered the charge. The desperate result was that Rupert’s musketeers were unable to fire, in case they also shot their own men. Meanwhile, Byron’s two thousand troopers were no match for Cromwell’s three or four thousand, and they retreated across difficult terrain, sustaining further casualties as they went, marshland and a rabbit warren slowing their flight. Cromwell pushed on, shrugging off a slight neck wound and pressing home his advantage.
Rupert arrived from the rear to take command of the right wing’s second line of cavalry. He was just in time to stop his men from turning tail, their courage wilting at the sight of Byron’s disarray. Through the broken ranks of their colleagues, they could make out the approach of Cromwell’s victorious squadrons, riding at a fast trot, knee to knee, purposeful, focused, and alarming. ‘’Swounds, do you run?’ Rupert shouted in disgust, as he saw his men faltering. ‘Follow me!’[fn24] But, this time, there was to be no repetition of Powick Bridge or Chalgrove Field. Rupert’s full-blooded charge was shattered by the unyielding ranks of the Ironsides. Half an hour of desperate struggle saw Cavalier and Roundhead hacking and slashing at each other with their swords, their pistols and carbines spent.
They fought each other to a standstill. The screams of the dying rang out above the dark, metallic rhythm of blade striking blade, which was punctuated by the whinnying of terrified, riderless horses and the bellowed exhortations of officers to their men. The outcome was already decided in the allies’ favour when three regiments of Scottish lancers were let slip, to finish off their colleagues’ handiwork. Marston Moor was the only large-scale battle of the English Civil War where such a force prospered. Generally, this was a conflict better suited to the heavier cavalry. Here, however, the lancers’ nimble ponies, with their lightly armoured riders, caused havoc among a disordered enemy. Overwhelmed for the first time in a major battle, Rupert’s Cavaliers fled, mostly for York. It was every man for himself, and the prince only escaped death or capture by setting his horse at a fence and leaping into a field of beans. From there, he played no further part in the battle.
*
The battle of Marston Moor was a see-saw affair. The allied infantry attacked in a running march, quickly breaching the Royalists’ defensive ditch and capturing seven pieces of artillery, before dispersing Rupert’s foot soldiers. The prince, however, had placed a cavalry brigade in reserve, which now fell on the Anglo-Scottish attackers with such ferocity that many of them fled the field. As they ran back through colleagues about to enter the fray, their evident terror persuaded others to join in the flight. ‘It was a sad sight’, wrote a rebel eyewitness, ‘to behold many thousands posting away, being amazed with panic fears.’[fn25] This haemorrhaging of men convinced several of the senior allied officers that the day was lost. Leven was persuaded to save himself, and rode as fast as he could for the safety of Leeds. Lord Fairfax also quit the field with embarrassing haste. Of the principal commanders, only Manchester remained on hand, personally leading 500 deserters back into the fray.
On the Royalist left-hand cavalry wing, the mercurial George Goring performed with the dynamism and decisiveness usually associated with the prince. Goring’s infantry support met Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cavalry assault with intense musket volleys, which were followed up with a vigorous charge by the Northern Horse. Although Sir Thomas’s own troop prospered, pursuing beaten opponents from the field, the rest of his men were routed. Returning to check what had happened to them, and bearing a cut to his cheek, Sir Thomas found himself surrounded by Goring’s milling soldiers. Removing a white blaze in his hat, the mark that identified him as an ally, he trotted quietly back to his colleagues in the Earl of Manchester’s ranks with news of his reversal.
Goring’s efforts could not turn the course of the battle. His second line, commanded by Sir Charles Lucas, made some headway but, eventually, it became bogged down in the huge numbers of the enemy infantry and Lucas was captured. Cromwell now arced his cavalry round with extraordinary discipline, in the defining movement of the day. Using the full sweep of the battlefield, he fell on Goring’s exposed flank from a position that had, at the start of the engagement, been Goring’s own: the result of this brilliant manoeuvre was terrible carnage. Goring and the remnants of his Northern Horse were sidelined by the torrent of Allied troops that now possessed the field. The Anglo-Scottish cavalry, infantry, and dragoons worked in unison, mopping up the remaining pockets of Royalist foot soldiers with brutal efficiency. Cromwell’s deft touch, after the hard graft of the early part of the encounter, had turned the day on its head: Manchester, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Scots’ general David Leslie all made victory possible, but it was Cromwell who had seized the moment and made certain of the result.
Of these who perished at Marston Moor 3,200 of the 4,000 soldiers were Royalists. A further 1,500 of Rupert’s men were taken prisoner. The Marquess of Newcastle’s proud Whitecoats stood firm late in the evening, aware that the day was lost, but refusing to surrender. All but thirty of them perished, their pale tunics drenched in blood that was not, as they had intended, their enemies, but their own. Parliament’s newspaper Mercurius Britannicus reported that, among the military bounty harvested that evening, was ‘Prince Rupert’s Standard, with the Ensigns of the Palatine, near five yards long, and broad, with a red cross in the middle’.[fn26] ‘Besides all this,’ announced The Scottish Dove, ‘they took very good pillage, and some thousands of pounds in money, and Rupert’s Sumpter [horse].’[fn27]
Under the moonlight, scavenging thieves picked over the bodies of the fallen, stripping them of clothes and possessions. ‘In the morning, there was a mortifying object to behold’, recalled Simon Ash, the Earl of Manchester’s chaplain, ‘when the naked bodies of thousands lay upon the ground, and many not altogether dead.’[fn28] Inspecting some of the casualties more carefully, Ash observed: ‘The white, smooth, skins of many dead bodies in the field gives us occasion to think, that they were Gentlemen.’[fn29] Sir Charles Lucas, as senior prisoner of war, was obliged to identify these bodies. ‘Unhappy King Charles!’ he sobbed, on seeing so many familiar faces frozen in death.
A month later, despite local countrymen being ordered to bury the corpses, a traveller crossing near the battlefield reported that ‘there was such a stench thereabouts that it almost poisoned them that passed over the Moor.’[fn30]
*
Rupert’s beloved dog, Boy, was discovered among the casualties. This was the poodle that had been the prince’s companion since his days as a prisoner of war in Austria. He had since become a lucky mascot to Charles I’s troops. Boy had been left tied up in the Royalist camp, but he slipped his leash in the confusion of battle, running off to seek his master. Boy’s death was celebrated by the Parliamentarians and featured in Ash’s account of the battle: ‘This is only mentioned by the way’, he explained, ‘because the Prince’s Dog bath been much spoken of, and was more prized by his Master, than creatures of much more worth.’[fn31] Rebel propagandists had long portrayed the relationship between prince and hound as unnaturally close: perhaps, they had suggested, their bond had sinister, Satanic undertones:
‘Twas like a dog, yet there was none did know
Whether it Devil was, or dog or no.[fn32]
This, they claimed, would explain Rupert’s unearthly run of success. Maybe the dog was the product of the prince’s sexual encounter with a witch? If so, the death of this familiar must be a poor omen for the king’s cause:
Lament poor Cavaliers, cry, howl and yelp
For the great loss of your Malignant whelp,
He’s dead! He’s dead! No more alas can he
Protect your dames, or get victory.
The effect of the dog’s loss on his master was the cause of vivid conjecture:
How sad that Son of Blood did look to hear
One tell the death of this shagg’d Cavalier.
He rav’d, he tore his Periwig and swore,
Against the Roundheads that he’d ne’er fight more.[fn33]
Rupert made his way back from Marston Moor to York alone. On this sombre journey, it was said, he killed a handful of Parliamentarians who tried to block his way. The young general’s aura of invincibility may have been destroyed in an evening, but the myth of the man endured for now.