Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  Still the battle was not over. Newcastle’s Whitecoats in the centre local men fighting passionately for their own cause on their own home ground – still struggled on in a hopeless last-ditch attempt to break Manchester’s foot. So it was that refusing all offers of quarter, they died where they stood, barely thirty of them surviving, their white coats, as one eye-witness said, acting as their winding-sheets. By now it was close on 9.30, two hours after the start of the battle, and the light of the long summer evening had quite died away. Yet dark had not come to replace it or shield the shattered Royalists from their hungry pursuers; for with the night had risen a bright harvest moon, illuminating still the slaughter. Cromwell’s victorious cavalry used it to pursue Goring’s horse almost to York itself. Rupert was popularly supposed by his enemies only to have escaped capture by hiding in a beanfield, an incident wittily commemorated in a satirical drawing of the time. The allied armies settled down to sing a Psalm of thanksgiving and then sleep, some of them still supperless, in the blood-stained fields. As for Leven, when he arrived at Leeds and enquired the latest news, expecting to hear of a disaster, he was somewhat surprised to be greeted with the words: “All is safe, may it please your excellence, the parliament’s armies have obtained a great victory.” He then returned hastily to the scene of the battle, where he observed histrionically: “I would to God I had died upon the place.”11

  There was however more than enough slaughter to satisfy any Moloch. Whitelocke reported that everyone agreed at least three thousand Royalists had been killed, while some put it as high as seven thousand. The buriers reckoned the corpses at over four thousand. Right until the end of the eighteenth century graves could be seen at the edge of Wilstrop Wood to commemorate Cromwell’s massive retaliation against Rupert’s cavalry, and at the same date it was noticed that when Lord Petre’s woods were cut down on the edge of Marston “the sawyers found many bullets in the hearts of trees”. There were at least 1,500 Royalist prisoners. The allies fared much better: although their wounded were numerous, not more than three hundred were actually killed. As for the Royalist colours, for which there was a reward of los. for each one captured, enough were taken “to furnish all the cathedrals in England” said one contemporary. Of these hostages of the Royalist fortune, some were taken south to hang in Westminster Hall, others became personal trophies of the victors. There was a story that on the eve of Marston Moor Cromwell had ridden over to Knaresborough to dine, but once there, had disappeared for over two hours. He was found by a little girl at the top of a tower in a locked room: looking through the keyhole, she saw Oliver on his knees, Bible before him, wrestling in prayer. Those prayers had been answered. “Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto us,” wrote Cromwell to his brother-inlaw Valentine Walton two days after the battle. “It had all the evidence of an absolute victory obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally.”12

  War then as now was Janus-faced. The Lord dealt sorrows as well as blessings to the godly, and the true purpose of Cromwell’s letter to Walton was less exultation than the need to break the news of the death of Walton’s son, the young Valentine, after the battle. “Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannonshot,” he wrote:

  It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he v died. Sir, you know my trials this way [the deaths of his sons Robert and young Oliver]; but the Lord supported me with this: that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant after and live for. There is your precious child full of glory, to know sin nor sorrow any more. He was a gallant young man, exceeding gracious. God gave you His comfort. Before his death he was so full of comfort that to Frank Russel and myself he could not express it, it was so great above his pain. This he said to us. Indeed it was admirable. A little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what it was. He told me that it was, that God had not suffered him to be no more the executioner of His enemies. At his fall, his horse being killed with the bullet, and as I am informed three horses more, I am told he bid them open to the right and left, that he might see the rogues run. Truly he was exceedingly beloved in the Army, of all that knew him. But few knew him, for he was a precious young man, fit for God. You have cause to bless the Lord. He is a glorious saint in Heaven, wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice. Let this drink up your sorrow; seeing these are not feigned words to comfort you, but the thing is so real and undoubted a truth. You may do all things by the strength of Christ…

  Indeed death was often a slow and messy business, not always instant obliteration, in the days of cannon balls and pikes, of few surgeons (only one with two mates to each regiment was normal even in the New Model) and no field hospitals at all. The last action of some of Newcastle’s heroic Whitecoats, beaten to the ground, was to gouge the stomachs of their enemies’ horses with their pikes as a final measure of desperate revenge. Edmund Ludlow’s young cousin, the Cornet Gabriel Ludlow, died slowly and painfully “with his belly broken and bowels torn, his hip-bone broken, all the shivers and the bullet lodged in it”. In his agony, he asked Ludlow to bend down and kiss him before he died. The glamour of seventeenth-century warfare was in the spirit and courage of the charge, there was nothing glamorous in the grim sight of the field after the battle, where great tragedies mingled with small. “Alas for King Charles, Unhappy King Charles!” exclaimed the Royalist cavalry commander Sir Charles Lucas, a veteran fighter, now a prisoner of the Scots, as he gazed on his fallen Royalist comrades on the moor.13 Prince Rupert’s mascot, the spaniel Boy, had vanished before the battle and was found dead after it.

  But courtesy was shown. Colonel Charles Towneley of Lancashire had fallen and the next day his wife Mary who was at Knaresborough, waiting vainly for news, came over to search for the body. She stood watching some of the Roundhead men stripping the bodies, according to the ugly if inevitable custom of the victors, until an officer came up to her and begged her to abandon a scene where she might so easily be offered insults by the troopers. Calling up one of his own men, he ordered the fellow to ride Lady Towneley away en croup. As she was carried back to Knaresborough she enquired the name of her protector from the trooper. It was Oliver Cromwell. Lady Towneley lived until 1690 and the story of Cromwell’s chivalry to the widow of an enemy was handed down in her family.14 Perhaps Cromwell’s own letter to Walton with its mixture of compassion, sympathy for the bereaved parent, and pride in the unflagging military zeal of the dying boy, making the troopers partso that he could see “the rogues run” where he lay, best sums up that strange aftermath of a battle fought in a civil war, where the heart of the country bleeds with the deaths of both sides.

  Yet curiously enough, in spite of the fact that Cromwell’s letter was essentially concerned with the boy’s death, devoting only a few preliminary lines to the course of the battle, it has sometimes been used as proof that he minimized the role played by the Scots in order to claim the whole credit for the victory for himself and his own men. Cromwell’s actual reference to the Scots was indeed of the briefest: “The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords, we charged their regiments of foot with our horse, routed all we charged.” But then he wasted little time on the battle itself- “the particulars which I cannot relate now” – before turning to a full and moving description of young Valentine’s last hours.15 The truth was that this letter was no battle report, as has sometimes been implied by his critics, but a heartfelt letter of condolence to an intimate friend.

  If however Cromwell himself is acquitted of deliberately underplaying the Scottish achievement in this particular letter, what estimate should we place upon their participation, and how far indeed was the successful outcome of Marston Moor due in fact to the crucial charge of the Scots? For as Lord Saye put it: “herein indeed was the good service David Leslie did that day with his little light Scotch nags”, doing exec
ution on the enemy’s broken regiment. One interesting aspect of the contemporary reception of the battle is that at first both sides hailed it as a victory, much as had happened at Edgehill; in this case the mistake was due partly to the difficulty of communications between Yorkshire and the South, partly to the genuine doubts about the outcome which had existed right up to Cromwell’s final obliterating action. The Royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus for example claimed a Royalist triumph in an issue dated 30 June - 6 July, and the editor later explained the mistake by saying that his report came from those troops driven from the field by Rupert’s first charge.16 In Ireland the Earl of Ormonde received a report from Arthur Trevor who had actually been present, saying that one side had had the better of it on the right wing, and the other on the left, so that the outcome of the battle was merely doubtful, now both sides “being retired with broken wing and gone to the bone-setter”. By 12 July the Venetian Ambassador in London still did not know which side had won although he was confident that there had been a “sanguinary” engagement.17

  Nevertheless once the dust of battle settled, much prominence was given in the contemporary accounts to Cromwell’s glorious contribution to the success: Ludlow and Whitelocke both ascribed the victory to him, and Whitelocke reported further how he was “much cried up” for his service. Watson, while giving Leslie due credit in his account of the battle, called Cromwell “the great agent in this victory”.18 And indeed, whether Cromwell was absent from the field for the vital rebuff to Rupert or not, it is difficult to disagree that it is Cromwell, the inspiration of the Eastern Association cavalry, the man who, unique among the cavalry commanders of the day, could gather his men to him for a second charge, who is owed the first rank of the battle awards. It was after Marston Moor that Rupert first gave the nickname to his enemy of “Old Ironsides” because his ranks were so impenetrable – the name originated with the man and passed on to his regiment. Leslie and his Scots behaved with courage and aplomb at a crucial moment, which certainly should be applauded but the ultimate honours of Marston Moor go to Cromwell’s methods of discipline and training, now triumphantly vindicated.* ( * The obelisk that marks the battle of Marston Moor, erected jointly by the Cromwell Association and the Harrogate group of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, in addition to a tribute to Fairfax, bears the tactful inscription: “Near this site The Parliamentary Army Left to the leadership of Oliver Cromwell Supported by David Leslie Completed the defeat of The forces of Prince Rupert.” As a considered judgement one could do much worse.) Having said this, one must add that the victory was also much due negatively speaking – to Rupert’s rash decision in offering battle at all. Had he allowed Newcastle time to recover from the siege of York, and the two Royalist armies a breathing space to plan tactics together, his inferior forces might also have been increased, as Ludlow believed, by local recruits drawn by their York success, “like the rolling of a snowball”. Furthermore, having decided impetuously on a battle frankly not justified by his orders from the King, why did he not fall upon the Parliamentary rearguard when he first sighted them as they fell back on Tadcaster? The answer given by his Diary was probably the true one: “If ye P. had fallen upon ye Rear and miscarried it would have been objected that he should have stayed for Newcastle .. ,”19 So Rupert followed up initial audacity with subsequent caution, a fatal mixture in a situation where a policy totally animated by either emotion would surely have provided better results.

  * * *

  The war in the North had now, with the exception of a few castles such as Pontefract which still held out, gone the way of Parliament for ever. Newcastle himself went abroad from motives of disgust and also perhaps self-disgust: in any case he did not wish to be laughed at by the Court. His lieutenant Lord Eythin whose late arrival on the field had aroused Rupert’s ire, went abroad too. “If the victors of Marston Moor had known how to seize their chances,” writes one authority, “they could have won the war by the end of the year.”20 The King had only about ten thousand men left in his army, together with what was left of Rupert’s horse, and the five thousand men of his brother Prince Maurice. The fact that the Parliamentary Generals did not avail themselves of the opportunity for another terminatory strike at their weakened foes was partly due to the innately localized disposition of their central command. Unfortunately this was not yet eradicated by the happy lesson of a joint victory in a pitched battle. It was also due to the internal religious disputes of Presbyterians and Independents in the Parliamentary armies, to which the Scottish resentment of the unfair credit accorded to Cromwell for his part in the battle merely contributed further heat. By 16 July Robert Baillie, chaplain in the Scottish auxiliary army, was complaining from Edinburgh that Major Harrison had arrived and was trumpeting the praises of the Independents all over the city, in order to persuade the world “that Cromwell alone, with his unspeakably valorous regiments, had done all that service”. On 8 July in a narrative read aloud to the House of Commons on the subject of the recent victory, Thomas Stockdale issued the pious hope that it “hath let out much of that ill blood that hath so long distempered the State”.21 It seemed however that there was a considerable amount of ill blood left behind.

  The separation of the victorious Generals was immediate. Leven went north again to besiege the town of Newcastle. The Fairfaxes concentrated on the Yorkshire fortresses still in Royalist hands. As for Manchester, to the immense frustration of his Lieutenant of the horse, he merely withdrew at a leisurely pace towards his own country of the Eastern Association and showed absolutely no inclination for further bloodthirsty engagements for the time being. When John Lilburne did capture Tickhill Castle against orders, Manchester threatened to hang him. Nor would he listen to pleas to grab the mighty fortress of Belvoir Castle, standing on its lofty Lincolnshire hill, while he could. Still less would he attempt to storm the troublesome Royalist stronghold of Newark, let alone once more try to tackle Rupert who had now reached Chester, by joining up with the local forces of that area under Sir William Brereton. The trouble with Manchester from Cromwell’s point of view, was not that he was at all personally unpleasant – he was on the contrary genuinely humane, “a sweet meek man” the Scot Baillie called him, and he spent the night after Marston Moor ministering to his men’s wants. Nor was his Presbyterianism particularly virulent: Baxter related afterwards that he was for ever trying to get the Presbyterians to tone down their more vehement passages. But Manchester was above all a weak man, happy to be led by others, “debonair” but “very facile and changeable” Sir Philip Warwick called him.22 These might be the qualities of a pleasing companion but they were scarcely those of a great strategic commander. And the paramount need in war for a prompt response to a favourable opportunity was now underlined by the fact that the King’s own fortunes suddenly improved. The opportunity was not to be of long duration.

  For one thing, already before Marston Moor – although the news was not known at the time – Charles had eluded Sir William Waller’s attempts to pen him into Oxford, and on 29 June at Cropredy Bridge near Banbury had inflicted a substantial defeat on his opponents. Prince Rupert was now in control of Chester. Worse still, the Parliamentary General Essex had set off on an expedition of his own to the South to beat up Royalist Cornwall, a foray which also proved singularly disastrous in actual military terms. It culminated in the colossal Parliamentary defeat of Lostwithiel on 2 September, thirty miles west of Plymouth. Although Essex himself, attacked from the rear, managed to hack his way out, and Philip Skippon saved most of the cavalry, about eight thousand of the infantry fell into the King’s hands, together with a great deal of valuable artillery. Charles was now in an excellent position to march once more on the undefended capital.

  Already long before the outrageous news of Lostwithiel was known, Cromwell, the experienced soldier only too well able to appreciate the military realities of the situation, was being driven into a frenzy of frustration at the wilful inaction of his own General who would not pursue Essex to th
e West. By 1 September, when he was still at Lincoln, a letter concerning his duties as Governor of Ely contained the pregnant phrase: “I am so sensible of the need we have to improve the present opportunity of our being master of the field.” A more intimate letter to Valentine Walton a few days later, written confessedly because it gave him a little ease to pour out his mind into the bosom of a friend in the midst of calumnies, made his anguish at lost openings much clearer: “We do with grief of heart resent the sad condition of our Army in the West, and of affairs there,” he wrote. “That business hath our hearts with it, and truly had we wings, we would fly thither. So soon as ever my Lord (Manchester) and the foot set me loose, there shall be no want in me to hasten what I can to that service … Indeed we find our men never so cheerful as when there is work to do …”23

  The two following days at Peterborough and Huntingdon Cromwell tried once more to persuade Manchester to march west, but even the news of Lostwithiel, when it was Manchester’s positive duty to throw his army between the King and London, only brought the characteristic reaction of a weak and indecisive man driven into a corner: he would hang anyone who gave him any more advice. Cromwell himself believed firmly that it was Manchester’s egregiously irritating Major-General Crawford who was the source of all the trouble. Finally he was driven to the expedient of telling Manchester that all his Colonels would resign in a body if a new Major-General were not appointed. The quarrel had moved beyond the confines of Manchester’s army and had to be laid before the Committee of Both Kingdoms; as a result Manchester at last promised to go to the help of the Parliamentary army in the west, while Cromwell in return backed down from his demand that Crawford should be removed.