Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  It was true that military magazines such as The Swedish Intelligencer and The Swedish Soldier giving news of Gustavus’s exploits were in common currency in England in the thirties and it has been suggested that Cromwell may have studied them to absorb a knowledge of military principles and military tactics as a substitute for personal experience. But it is a commonplace of military training that a few weeks of firsthand experience at war are worth many months of theoretical training. As Cromwell was now a man of forty-three he must be allowed to be one of the rare military geniuses who were born not made: even the tradition which tries to ascribe to him an early quite undocumented visit to the Low Countries, where he might have been employed as a mercenary, is merely an unwilling tribute to the immense natural aptitude which he displayed.*2 ( * To mention some of his competitors in the stakes of reputation, Julius Caesar had performed military service as a young man, and Wellington of course was trained as a professional soldier from his youth.)

  In 1642 indeed there was no such thing in England as a standing army as we should understand it, and the only permanent forces were the Royal Bodyguards and companies garrisoning the forts. For the various forays of his foreign or Irish policy, the sovereign was accustomed, as has been seen, to raise an army and attempt to get Parliament to pay for it. For the defence of the kingdom in general, should the need occur, reliance was placed upon the militia, or the “trained bands”, to be raised by the Lords-Lieutenant and their deputies and trained by them in pike and musket drill once a month. In fact reality was very far from theory, and with the exception of London where the trained bands did prove to have some meaning as a force, both training and attendance were unsatisfactorily scanty. Every excuse being used to put off attendance, the arms kept were often old and unserviceable and it was a commonly held view that the bands when they were assembled trained for drinking rather than any more martial occupation. Indeed Cromwell’s whole concern for the private habits of his troops, whether they drank or cursed, can only be understood against the slovenly reputation of those soldiers already known to their compatriots.

  Of the troops themselves, those of the foot soldiers divided into pikemen, armed with an enormous and cumbersome weapon between sixteen and eighteen foot long, and musketeers. The latter’s weapons, mainly matchlocks which fired up to a hundred paces, were equally hard to manoeuvre since they involved a complicated loading procedure, battle or no battle, and the ultimate use of a lighted cord or “match” to set off the charge. There were endless possibilities of failure in the firing of a musket, not the least being the danger that the glowing match might warn the enemy of an impending attack, and it was a measure of the inadequacies of “firepower” in the middle of the seventeenth century that people still sometimes called for the return of the longbow.3

  In the absence of bayonets, not yet invented, or the later more manageable flintlocks and wheel-locks, the wretched musketeers were extremely vulnerable against any assault once they had fired; about their only protection apart from helmets or “pots” were so-called Swedish feathers, iron posts with spiked ends which they drove into the ground to ward off a cavalry charge. Evidently they needed to be combined with the pikemen for effective use. Equally, the use of two such clumsily accoutred categories of fighter demanded much skill, and this skill was to be found in a complicated procedure of drill, allowing the musketeers to re-load and the pikemen to surge forward without either body meeting with catastrophe either at the enemy’s hands or their own. But drill and training – one prewar manual, Ward’s Animadversions of War of 1639, listed fifty-six words of command for a musketeer’s drill – were exactly what was in short supply. Once again the admirable daring of some of Cromwell’s early manoeuvres can only be understood against a background of the complicated routines generally considered necessary to execute any movement at all.4

  Cromwell was of course originally a cavalry leader, but it was not as if contemporary attitudes towards the cavalry were any more relaxed. Although cavalry armour had been lightened to about twenty-five pounds, including a “pot”, “back” and “breast”, much emphasis was laid on the graceful ritualistic but essentially unmilitary practices of the manege or training for “great horses”, as laid down by many noble exponents of the art, including the Royalist commander, William Earl of Newcastle. Indeed Charles I himself was an accomplished manege rider. The training of a troop horse was in theory a long-drawn-out business. John Cruso’s Militarie Instructions for the Cavall’rie of 1632, besides confirming the importance of the role of the Captain of horse as a valorous leader of men, was full of elaborate rules for the training of horses in advance to make them suitable for battle.5 Grooms should be prepared to dress them in armour from time to time, and even feed them their oats from a drumhead. Of course as some were already beginning to realize by the start of the war, the future lay with quite a different sort of horse, a small tough horse, of the type used by the country gentlemen for hunting, very unlike the grotesquely overbent horses of the manege. Before the Civil War, it was customary for the cavalry to be trained to fire with pistols and then withdraw in order to reload at a gracious pace without further engagement. The whole movement was planned and slow. Already Gustavus Adolphus had urged his cavalry to push with their swords after firing their pistols. Cromwell increased this trend and in his hands the cavalry charge became not a graceful dance of advance and retreat, but a lethal onslaught which plunged to the kill.

  At the beginning of the war it was much to the advantage of Prince Rupert that so many of these hunting gentlemen were Royalists. It was equally to the immense advantage of Cromwell as a cavalry leader that he had what amounted to an obsession about horses, their procurement and their care once they were procured. His early energies were much devoted to this problem, especially to the obtaining by fair means or foul of suitable horses for the Parliamentary cause. On the whole he seems to have preferred fair means, at any rate where “non-malignants” were concerned: we find him writing a postscript to the Suffolk Committee in 1643 apologizing for the seizure of a particular horse from one Mr Goldsmith at Wilby if he turned out not to be a malignant or Royalist. He offered either to return the captured animal, or pay the price of it “Not that I would, for ten thousand horses, have the horse to my own private benefit, saving to make use of him for the Public” he was careful to add.6 Clearly even a horse could bother Cromwell’s lively conscience: for he ended by saying that he would rest “very unsatisfied” and the horse would be a burden to him, unless the matter was sorted out.

  Such elaborate enquiries were the measure of the importance he attached to the subject. Suitable horses cost between .Ł5 and .Ł10: they would incidentally, in the virtual absence of the Arab or the Barb strain, not introduced till later, have looked both oddly small, underbred and heavy to our eyes, fifteen hands being average for a cavalry horse. As the war progressed it was obviously easier to confiscate than to pay, a situation later legalized by Parliament’s sequestration order. Cromwell however was as aware of the need to care for his horses as to pay his troops. Both before Winceby and Newbury, he protested against the employment of exhausted horses, on the second occasion telling Manchester angrily: “they will fall down under their riders if you thus command them; you may have their skins, but you can have no service.”7

  At the outset of the war, unwieldy drills which in any case were but imperfectly understood, stately cavalry incapable of retaliation, and above all the very local nature of the troops raised, all combined to give any offensive a purely temporary nature. Where troops were so inherently anxious not to leave their native area, clearly the emphasis would be on defensive warfare after any given battle, rather than on a pushing fight to the finish. It was easy to understand the point of view of these local men; in conditions where pay and provisions were short they were both reluctant to leave behind home comforts and disinclined to supply “foreigners” – in this case their neighbours, rather than the enemy – with supplies. Sir William Brereton spotlighted this
chauvinism when he described how the garrison at Shrewsbury, although heavily undermanned, was nevertheless anxious to rid themselves of reinforcements sent by near-by Stafford because they were full of mutinous language and reviling expressions and they could not rely on them when danger came.8 Under the circumstances it is easy to understand how volunteers never proved adequate in the Civil War and both sides had to turn to impressment. As for provisions, “free quarter”, one solution by which an army had the right to food and drink from the country folk on deferred terms, was to prove a vexed topic in coming years.

  In the first famous battle of the Civil War, that of Edgehill near Kineton in Warwickshire on 23 October 1642, many of the current theories of warfare were already found to be wanting. The intention of King Charles was to reach London. That of the Parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex, son of Queen Elizabeth’s ill-fated favourite, who had been appointed their General in July, was to head the King off. However, the Royalist forces under Charles’s newly appointed General of the Horse, his nephew Rupert, began the battle by deserting their strong position on a huge escarpment a few miles from Kineton, the Edge Hill. Thus they forfeited the element of surprise and the undoubted advantage of a slope whose gradient was almost one in three. Meanwhile the Parliamentary forces lay in the plain below, with the village of Radway in between. Rupert’s first action was successful. With his horse, he “then charged the rebels … so furiously that we cannot own the honour of a battle but of an execution”, as a Royalist eyewitness wrote afterwards.9 Nevertheless at the end of what might well have been a successful rout of Parliament, his horse thundered on to Kineton and the Parliamentary foot were able to counter-attack successfully while the Royalists busily plundered the baggage of Hampden’s men.

  On the eve of the battle the Royalist Sir Jacob Astley had uttered the prayer of a pious warrior: “O Lord, if I forget Thee this day, do not Thou forget me.” Now as many lay in the icy fields after the battle, including Edmund Ludlow who had nothing but his cloak to protect himself against the autumn frosts, they must have wondered in misery and confusion whether such a prayer had been heard. William Harvey, the scientist, who read a book under a hedge until a bullet grazed the ground, literally showed sangfroidby pulling a dead body over him for warmth against the cold clear weather of that freezing night. Two hundred of Essex’s maimed and unhappy soldiers told a Royalist that they had been tricked into believing that the King was not personally present in the opposing army. Some Welsh soldiers who had taken up arms for Parliament were said to be particularly doleful, and a crude if mournful ditty was later quoted: “The guns did so fart, Made poor Taffy start, O Taffy, O Taffy … In Kineton Green, Poor Taffy was seen, O Taffy, O Taffy .. .”10 Such bewilderments were characteristic of the scene after Edgehill. But Essex now withdrew to Warwick, before travelling on to London, and the King to Oxford, with both sides claiming the victory.* ( * A monument to the battle, a five-foot pillar of Cotswold stone, can be seen on the road between Kineton and Edgehill. Its inscription includes the reminder that many of those who lost their lives in the battle are buried near by.)

  Further uncertainty surrounds Oliver Cromwell’s own part in the battle. The evidence is complicated by the presence of another Oliver Cromwell in the field, his eldest surviving son, a Cornet in Oliver St John’s regiment. On 13 September Captain Cromwell, with Captains Austin and Draper, had been ordered to muster his troop of horse and join Essex’s army. There were seventy-five troops of horse under the command of the Earl of Bedford whose silver banner, diapered and fringed in black, shone before the regiment. Cromwell’s was numbered sixty-seven, and he was certainly present at the end of the battle. But it seems probable that, like Captain Austin and his troop, he only arrived at the scene of action in order to take part in the later counter-attack against the Royalists, having been quartered in a near-by village. Nathanial Fiennes the Puritan MP, now in charge of one of Essex’s troop of horse, described how in attempting to check the Parliamentary rout, he gathered “a pretty body” on a hill. He found himself joined at length by troops including that of Captain Cromwell; together they then marched on Kineton.11

  One need pay no serious attention to the smear spread by Denzil Holies in his Memoirs written some time after the battle when he was Cromwell’s declared enemy, that Oliver had deliberately avoided the conflict out of cowardice, particularly as Holies made no mention of it in his report of the battle written at the time. Cromwell’s own explanation – “he had been all that day seeking the army and place of fight” – which Holies castigated as impudent and ridiculous because he should have been guided by the sound of the artillery, may well have contained the kernel of the truth. Then there was the gleeful story of the Royalist Sir William Dugdale in which Cromwell played the part of an absurd poltroon, first climbing up a church steeple in order to avoid the battle (traditionally that of Durton Bassett) and then swinging away on a bell-rope on seeing both Parliamentary wings routed through a perspective-glass. It has been suggested that this story too might contain a germ of reality and that Cromwell, having arrived late, did climb up the church in order to get a good view, his motive being to join the battle rather than to avoid it.12 The field at Edgehill was both diffused and confused; what is certain is that a charge of personal cowardice in battle against Oliver Cromwell is simply not believable at this or at any juncture in his military career.

  For all his late entry, the battle made a profound impression on Cromwell. Two things caught his attention, the acid darting personality of the fast-flying commander Prince Rupert, the bee who could sting with his cavalry but only sting once, because he could not rally them after the first charge, and the superior quality of these same fighters. Years later he revealed a conversation he had had on the subject immediately after the battle with his cousin John Hampden (Cromwell’s opening words, incidentally, confirm the supposition that he only arrived half-way through) :13 “At my first going into this engagement, I saw our men were beaten at every hand.” For this reason there should be some additions to Essex’s men of “some new regiments”. Cromwell offered himself to take part in this process because he believed that he would be able to bring into play what was so evidently lacking at Edgehill, the right sort of man, with the right sort of temperament for the work. “Your troopers,” he said to Hampden, “are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters and such kind of fellows; and their troopers [the Royalists] are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will be ever able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?”

  Cromwell knew what his own solution would be: “You must get men of spirit.” Urging Hampden not to take his words amiss, because after all what he was suggesting was somewhat bizarre to seventeenth-century ears, he continued that these new soldiers must be “of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still”. At the time Hampden, wise and worthy person as he was, rejected the idea as a good notion but an impracticable one. But time was to show that the scheme, which sprang from Cromwell’s most deeply held conviction of the potential superiority of the godly in terms of worldly success as well as spiritual salvation, was both good and practicable.

  The ghosts of Edgehill continued to haunt the King, as the memory of the defeat haunted Cromwell. Shortly after the battle local shepherds heard once more the sound of the trumpet and the drum, then the awful groans of the dying; spectral horsemen in the sky re-enacted the conflict. The manifestations became sufficiently frequent for the King to send emissaries from Oxford to investigate them and subsequently each side drew its own conclusions from them in printed pamphlets: the Royalists prophesied that the evil rebellion against the King would soon draw to a close, and the Parliamentarians that the King would soon put aside his equally evil counsellors.14

  Cromwell, however, far removed from such supernatural visitations, had now arrived back in London, probably ac
companying Essex, and here he remained for the next few months. He combined his previous role of member of Parliament, with that of a Captain of a troop. The ambivalence of Edgehill as a victory and the lack of confidence among many Parliamentarians was shown by the fact that the King now felt strong enough to reject overtures for peace negotiations. A peace party under Denzil Holies, worried among other things by the successes of the two Royalist commanders, the Earl of Newcastle in the North and Sir Ralph Hopton in the West, began to develop within the Commons to combat the war party under Pym. The Venetian Ambassador heard that many of the Parliamentary leaders were sending gold abroad as a reinsurance against flight. Even when Essex blocked the King from reaching London at the battle of Turnham Green in November, he showed no killer instinct to extinguish the military strength of the sovereign. As Whitelocke put it, it was “honour and safety enough” to Parliament that the King had retreated.15

  Cromwell remained resolutely of Pym’s party; he acted as teller for the Noes when an Act of Oblivion was mooted which would have given the King’s supporters the prospect of indemnity. And from the very first, he was involved in the formation of the Eastern Counties Association and the Midlands Association authorized by Parliament towards the end of 1642 with a view to raising more troops and supplies. He was named a member of the local committees of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire whose task was to make a weekly assessment to help finance the war. This was to be done in every county and city of the Kingdom under control of Parliament, a principle not unlike the old use of ship-money, and the amounts to be paid were indeed based on the old ship-money lists.