Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  In vain had Poyer in his petition to Parliament for clemency spoken of his Puritan past, how in the First Civil War he had been one of the first who had appeared “against the Common Enemy”. In Cromwell’s view this sort of earlier good record was merely the measure of the harmful treachery of such turncoats; as late as November, he was still demonstrating how deep was the disgust he felt for the renegades by flying into a fury at the news that Colonel Humphrey Matthews, also captured at Pembroke, had been allowed to make composition for his punishment. Formerly a Colonel in the Parliamentary Army “he apostasised from your cause and quarrel.. . And how near you were brought to ruin thereby, all men that know anything can tell…” This then was the importance of Cromwell’s Welsh campaign in his own development: he was certainly not seized by any particular xenophobic hatred of the Welsh peasantry, as he was to show for the Irish, calling them merely “a seduced and ignorant people”.7 His deep hatred was reserved for those “arch-cavaliering rogues” whom he blamed for stirring up the poor silly innocent Welsh from the outside. It was a residue of dislike to be added to his already fast-growing resentment against those responsible for the Second Civil War, men who wilfully ignored the obvious lesson of Providence to be derived from the victories of the First.

  Cromwell’s expedition to Wales had a secondary consequence of quite a different nature. His absence from London inevitably cut him off from the day-to-day development of political matters there; this detachment was to be prolonged into a total absence of seven months. Yet this is the most crucial period in which the dark necessities that led to the death of the nation’s sovereign were spun round Charles like webs by his enemies; Cromwell, afterwards regarded by many as the chief spider, was neither necessarily innocent nor ignorant of what was going on, but he was physically absent from the scene. Again, neither his ultimate responsibility nor his inner intentions need be affected; but inevitably his own actions were altered by being subject to this cutting-off process. It also has the unhappy effect of casting further obscurity on the truth of his own motives and participation.

  * * *

  Although the pacification of Wales now proceeded apace, elsewhere in the British Isles the cause of the Army still presented alarming facets. Risings in Kent and Essex had been suppressed by June, but Fairfax, with Ireton, was still occupied with the aftermath: the Royalist commander Sir Charles Lucas had retreated into the town of Colchester with about four thousand men and from there refused to be dislodged despite a protracted siege. Pontefract Castle, a formidable fortress south of Leeds in the direction of Doncaster, in a position to exert an effective stranglehold on surrounding territories, had been betrayed to the Royalists on i June; that too needed reduction by the Army – if it could be done. There were further insurrections during the month of June in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire; while across the narrow seas the young Prince of Wales had journeyed from France to Holland, and waited to sail with the nine Royalist ships which had been assembled. But as always, it was from the North, from the Scots, that the real danger was to be feared. And on 8 July, three days before the surrender of Pembroke Castle, the Scottish army, at this point about eleven thousand strong, had at last crossed the border.

  This mighty beast now lumbering south with only Lambert’s slender northern command to stay it, was in fact suffering from many internal weaknesses, even if these were more apparent to those on the spot than to the Parliamentary leaders alarmed by news of its approach. Political and religious disputes in Scotland had delayed its departure fatally; the “Engagers”, those who subscribed to the secret Carisbrooke agreement with the King (and would not necessarily insist on him taking the Covenant) strove with the more extreme Presbyterians who regarded it as a precondition. Not only did the vital months pass, months when the Scots might really have caught the English in disarray, but military power finally passed into the hands of the Engagers, since both Lord Leven and David Leslie, those veterans of skilled campaigning, withdrew. In cornmon with the Covenanting leaders such as Argyll, and the ministers, these opponents of the new Scottish regime watched with hostile interest but without participation while the numerically large but singularly illequipped force was put together under James ist Duke of Hamilton.8

  For one thing the Scots had not a single gun, quite apart from being low in ammunition; even their troops were hardly the well-seasoned lads of Marston Moor, many of them never having held a pike before. Their cavalry was an improvement on the general picture, but on the other hand they lacked horses for drawing their wagons, which meant that supplies or horses – had to be picked up along the way, in both cases infuriating to the countrymen who were thus robbed. Indeed the lack of provisions, combined with the inevitable lack of discipline among raw men, meant that this Scottish expedition set up new records for plunder and depredation as it passed through the north of England, a fact which was not to be without significance in its general reception there. Much of the added strength of this foray to replace the King on his throne was after all intended to come from English Royalists, and indeed Presbyterians, joining in on the way. But the Army was able to counter the attractions of such loyal behaviour with plausible suggestions that the Scots had been promised English land as a reward – a rumour which even Cromwell repeated in one of his letters.

  The real weakness of the Scots was however, like the real strength of the English, at the top. The earlier military career of the Duke of Hamilton had been unfortunate, and would not have commended itself to Napoleon, who liked his Marshals to be lucky; a man of forty-two, supported by the huge dominions of the Hamiltons, for over a century the second family in Scotland, he was the elder brother of that Earl of Lanark who had acted as a commissioner in negotiating the controversial Engagement with Charles.* ( * Born William Hamilton, he had been created Earl of Lanark by Charles I in 1639. He subsequently succeeded his brother as 2nd Duke of Hamilton.) But Hamilton was hated by the ministers for having refused to sign the Covenant, while his qualities as a statesman scarcely made up for his unsuitability as a commander, for he had a regrettable knack of showing himself weak when he should have been strong and then making things even worse by reversing the process. In any case Hamilton had further problems within his own command: the Earl of Callander, the Lieutenant-General, was a man admittedly of proper military experience, having fought abroad in the Dutch Army, but he had aroused suspicion by his conduct on the King’s side in an earlier phase of the war. Baillie referred to “his very ambiguous proceedings”, making many Scots reluctant to put their “lives and religion in his hand”;9 worst of all he had a highly autocratic temperament, rigid in his views, incapable of bowing to those of others – it was not a propitious nature in a second-in-command.

  Once across the border, the truly appalling English weather, record wetness even for a northern July, presented the Scottish expedition with a further obstacle. At Carlisle Hamilton was joined by that Royalist commander of the First Civil War, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, and the three thousand men with whom he had been holding the fortress since its insurrection in April, bringing Hamilton’s total to something like eighteen thousand. Lambert’s duty from the English side was obviously to hold off this considerable body of men until his army could be reinforced; but as Hamilton was also inclined to wait for further reinforcements from Scotland, both armies now adopted waiting postures, Hamilton at Kirkby Thorne between Penrith and Appleby, and Lambert to the southeast at Barnard Castle. Lambert believed that Hamilton must try to cross the Pennine mountain chain into Yorkshire, and for any form of encounter his own army needed reinforcements either from Yorkshire or from the newly released army of Oliver Cromwell.

  Cromwell himself had been slogging his way across Britain to this end since the fall of Pembroke. The distance to be covered was immense, from the south-west tip of Wales to the north of England; his men were exhausted, and particularly badly equipped by the end of the Welsh siege. But the news of a vast Scottish army heading south, with the possibility by one dramatic victory
of undoing the whole achievement of the past six years, was enough to send him, both as a strategist and an Independent, on his hard days of marching. Much of the cavalry was sent on in advance: he himself marched with only a modest force of three thousand foot and twelve hundred horse. His energies on the way were greatly taken up with trying to get further supplies for his men. There is a note of furious expostulation to the Derby House Committee on 24 July from Gloucester: his “poor wearied soldiers” were desperate for shoes and stockings for the long march north. This need at least was met by the Committee: three thousand pairs of each were consigned, and caught up with Cromwell at Leicester, although he had previously lingered at Warwick Castle for three days hoping for some improvement, only moving on at a further urgent request for assistance from Lambert. Luckily Leicester brought comforts for the inner man as well: wine, biscuits, sugar, beer and tobacco were provided by the thoughtful Mayor and Aldermen, wise in their generation. And Cromwell was also able to acquire some local forces including “five or six hundred horse” from the surrounding counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire as well as Leicestershire, as he told Derby House from Nottingham on about 5 August.10

  When Cromwell did reach the North, what was to be the position between Lambert and himself? Lambert, although his junior by twenty years, was not necessarily going to settle into a suitably deferential relationship. In the North Lambert was the local man, born and bred in Yorkshire; his attractive good looks and his easy carefree manner which endeared him to the troops, were belied by what Whitlocke called “a subtle and working brain”. It was a point Cromwell intended to clear up before working out his plan against the Scots, and happily the Derby House Committee wrote back unequivocally: that there would be “none in the North who will pretend to a command-in-chief while you are there, yet to take away all colour to any such pretence, we have written to all the commanders of forces there to obey your orders”. Armed by this assurance, Cromwell wrote in his turn to Lambert on or about 4 August, asking him to “forbear engaging before he came up”.11

  Lambert, still believing that the Royalists must eventually cross into Yorkshire, while leaving his main force at Barnard Castle, had himself now withdrawn to Otley, between Knaresborough and Leeds, with the object of preventing Hamilton relieving the siege of Pontefract. Elsewhere the infection of the Royalist rising was by no means cleared out of the English system as a whole. The bug still raged. News of backslidings from the Parliamentary cause came daily; the Governor of Scarborough Castle declared for the King, and July saw further insurrections as far apart as Horsham in Sussex, Hereford, and Newark in the Midlands. Much encouragement was of course taken by the news of the descent of the Scots, “bringing their lice and their Presbytery amongst us” said the Roundhead Mercurius Britannicus disdainfully, missing the point perhaps that there were many still in England who were less interested in vermin and theology than in the return of their King and the old order of society. In this context Cromwell’s deliberately eastward slant to his journey through the traditionally Roundhead areas of England and his preoccupation with reinforcements on the way, his determination that Lambert should not battle without him, all make sense. Cromwell had no means of knowing how strong the Royalist reaction might be within England itself, or where it might strike next. It was essential not to dissipate Parliament’s greatest possible asset, a unified striking force.

  By the evening of 8 August Cromwell was at Doncaster where he received some ammunition from Hull and drove the marauding Royalists of Pontefract scurrying back into the depths of their Norman fastness. He then assimilated the flower of the besieging troops into his own army and abandoned the raw Midland troops he had recently acquired to continue the siege. On 12 August, the two armies of Cromwell and Lambert finally joined up. There was some convivial cheering at the union, and at the emergence of “a fine smart army, fit for action”, as one of Lambert’s army optimistically described it.12 They now comprised at least eight thousand six hundred men – Cromwell’s own estimate – and they were together; the question was, where was this fine, smart army to strike the Scots, and more particularly, where were the Scots heading that they might be struck? For Hamilton’s progress through England had continued to be slow and halting. By the end of July he appeared to be advancing rather indecisively in the direction of Lancashire, the traditionally Royalist area which would in theory provide the best catchment for English reinforcements. But he waited another week at Kendal in Westmorland, there to be joined by Sir George Monro and his three-thousand-odd Scottish army, last heard of in Ulster, who had struggled across sea and land to join him. Characteristically Callander now refused to regard this veteran campaigner as his equal, as a result of which the disastrous decision was taken to leave these excellent trained troops behind at Kirkby Lonsdale, together with two other northern regiments, to await the coming of the guns from Scotland. Hamilton led the main army forward, reaching Horny Castle, seven miles north of Lancaster on 9 August.

  It was now imperative that the Scots, all factions of them, and their English Royalist allies, should make up their minds as to their future course. The possibilities were twofold. They could march across the intervening Pennine range, and head as briskly as possible for the capital, taking in Yorkshire on the way; or they could proceed down the north-west coastline through Lancashire. Accounts differ as to who finally swayed the day for the Lancashire route. But it seems reasonable to accept the version of Sir James Turner, an officer present at the council when the decision was taken.13 According to Turner, it was Hamilton who chose Lancashire not only for its possibility of Royalist accretions but also for the hope of being joined by Lord Byron’s troops from North Wales. Langdale also argued for Lancashire (probably now aware from an expedition he had made to Skipton Castle, of the gathering Roundhead strength in Yorkshire), as did Baillie, commander of the foot. Callander had no particular view. It was Middleton, in charge of the horse, and Turner himself, who proposed the Yorkshire route on the grounds that Lancashire was “a close country full of ditches and hedges”,*and thus more favourable to Oliver’s trained men (with the exception of the cavalry) than the untrained Scots. Yorkshire heaths, on the other hand, would allow the Scots cavalry to be deployed to advantage. But Lancashire it was. On the Scots marched, leaving Horny on 14 August.

  It was now time for Cromwell and Lambert, on their part, to reach their own momentous decision. It is true that it was by now probably too late for the Royalists to have got through Yorkshire. On the other hand Cromwell’s decision, on 13 August, to pursue the Scots over to their own side in close attack was distinctly a gambler’s throw. The sound plan, as a professional soldier writing on the Civil War campaigns has pointed out, would have been to fall back southwards to cover the approaches to London, while at the same time “probing westwards with cavalry patrols to locate the enemy”.14 But sound plans do not always make great Generals. It might be sounder to withdraw, although the possibilities of continuing warfare, a slower solution, with more lives lost, more insurrections, the whole tedious blood-letting business of the Second Civil War inevitably prolonged, would be much less immediately satisfactory. It was in Cromwell’s character to prefer the chance at least of the quick decisive victory. Thus these marauding northern bears of the King’s party would be not only held at bay but also eliminated from further mischief.

  So from Otley Cromwell and Lambert headed over to Skipton, leaving the artillery at Knaresborough to proceed more directly west. This was moor country, heathered over in August, a land of rounded scars and fells with rocky outcrops, good country for scouting perhaps, with its views to the high Pennines and its gorges, but rough for marching. Nevertheless Skipton was reached by the night of 14 August. Then it was onwards through more pastoral country, through dipping contours to the narrow coastal strip of the sea, with the night of 15 August spent at Gisburn Park. It was beyond Gisburn, on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire, at the Hodder Bridge about three miles outside Clitheroe, that the resolut
ion was taken which brought Oliver at least his most spectacular victory.* (* Not the Ribble bridge as Oliver wrote in his letter, not knowing the area, but that of its tributary the Hodder; the bridge in question can still be seen, now ruined but beautiful in decay.) The question was of the direction in which the Scots should be pursued. Hamilton had by now reached Preston, a town of some three thousand inhabitants near the coast, south of Lancaster. From here he evidently intended to continue his long southward descent. The obvious ploy – the sound plan – since the pursuit had come so far, was to follow on the course of the river Ribble by the south bank, thus blocking off the Scots from any further advance into central England. But Cromwell rejected this course. Let the north bank of the Ribble be followed. Let Hamilton be attacked from the north. In short, let the Scots be cut off from their craggy homeland by their raiders.

  It is true that Cromwell was helped on to his decision by the belieferroneous – that Monro’s missing troops were on their way from Kirkby Lonsdale to join Hamilton at Preston. Estimating himself – in this case rightly – to be heavily outmanned, he could not ignore such a chance tocut off Monro; Cromwell told Parliament afterwards that the Scots had had twenty-one thousand men to his mere eight and a half thousand, and even if something is knocked off the Scots total for the two northern regiments left with Monro, he must still have taken on the Scots at a ratio approaching two to one in their favour. It has been suggested that Cromwell deliberately magnified the odds against him (despite Lambert’s comments on low strengths), since at full strength his regiments would have mustered over twelve thousand.15 But while it is possible that Cromwell, whether innocently or otherwise, overplayed the Scots’ totals, the deliberate falsification of his own numbers in the official battle report to Parliament, subsequently printed, seems more unlikely. But numbers apart, the stakes of the battle were immediately raised by this topographical decision. For if the battle was lost, the Scots were twice as free to rampage south. But if they were defeated, then surely they were totally undone.