The initial deployment was not complete until late afternoon, and several hours of inconclusive skirmishing had achieved little by 7 p.m. At that point Rupert thought the battle would be postponed until the next day, and Newcastle was repairing to his coach to enjoy a pipe of tobacco. But as a thunderstorm broke, the parliamentary infantry began to advance. The rain interfered with the matchlocks of the royalist advance guard and the parliamentarians” infantry successfully engaged with the main body of the royalist infantry. But the royalist riposte was very successful. Goring advanced on the parliamentary cavalry ranged against him, and his men began to inflict heavy losses. Byron, perhaps encouraged by the sight, advanced on Cromwell, but in doing so had to tackle the difficult ground himself. Perhaps that contributed to the ensuing rout, in which Cromwell’s cavalry were triumphant. But with Fairfax’s cavalry now defeated and Goring’s men inflicting heavy losses on the infantry it seemed as if Rupert’s decision might be vindicated. Many Scottish troops fled and at one stage all three parliamentarian generals appeared to be in flight, thinking that a royalist victory was in the offing.
It was the discipline of Cromwell’s cavalry that transformed this position. Fairfax made his way behind royalist lines to tell Cromwell what had happened on the opposite flank. Cromwell was able not only to rally his cavalry but to lead them back behind the royalist lines before leading a devastating charge on Goring’s forces from the rear. This was utterly decisive – the royalist infantry were now completely exposed, and outnumbered. Most surrendered, and the parliamentary victory was total. It is likely that the royalists lost at least 4,000 men, probably many more, and a further 1,500 were captured. Rupert left York the next morning with only 6,000 men and Newcastle refused to make a fist of the defence of York, preferring exile, he said, to ‘the laughter of the court’. York surrendered two weeks later and the parliamentary forces in the field now easily outnumbered the royalists. This was the worst case that Charles’s letter had sought to avoid: the loss of both York and his field army.
Marston Moor was certainly a massive blow to royalist morale, and decisive for the war in the north, but Parliament was robbed of an outright victory in England by a combination of poor military judgement and political hesitancy. The military adventure launched by the Earl of Essex and the reluctance of the Earl of Manchester to pursue a complete victory allowed the King to recover his position in the west and enter winter quarters in Oxford in triumph.
In mid-June, having lifted the siege of Lyme and captured Weymouth, Essex set off into the west. Waller could not offer support partly because of the reluctance of the London Trained Bands to serve for long away from home. Nonetheless, supported by the navy under Warwick’s command, Essex initially enjoyed considerable success. By early to mid-July he was threatening Exeter, where Henrietta Maria was recovering from the birth of her daughter, Henrietta Anne, on 16 June. Essex refused her safe conduct to Bath and offered instead personally to escort her to London. Given what subsequently happened, this would have been a considerable boon to the parliamentary cause, but Henrietta Maria refused – as both she and Essex knew she faced impeachment in London. Instead she fled to France, on 14 July, and never saw her husband again.19
Influenced by the threat of the northern army moving south, and also perhaps by this threat to his wife’s safety, Charles moved decisively after Essex. On 26 July he reached Exeter and rendezvoused with Prince Maurice, who was at the head of 4,600 men, at Crediton the following day. Essex, meanwhile, was further west at Tavistock, where he had been received triumphantly – Plymouth had been secured. Cut off by a royal army and having secured Plymouth this might have been the moment for discretion, but instead Essex resolved to push on. On 26 July he decided to go on into Cornwall, arriving at Lostwithiel on 3 August. The King had pursued him, arriving at Liskeard the previous day.20
Now bottled up, with the King’s army behind him, Essex had put himself in a desperate position. On 30 August he prepared to withdraw. The following night his cavalry were able to ride away, itself something of a puzzle since the King had been forewarned and yet apparently failed to cover the likely route of escape. The infantry fought a retreat to Fowey but were cut off by the arrival of a force under Goring, which commanded the road. That night Essex instructed Skippon to make such terms as he could while Essex himself slipped away on 1 September. The King offered surprisingly generous terms to Skippon, given the dire position in which Skippon found himself.21
This was a massive blow to morale. Mercurius Aulicus was withering in its scorn, asking ‘why the rebels voted to live and die with the earl of Essex, since the earl of Essex hath declared he will not live and die with them’.22 According to the terms of surrender negotiated by Skippon the army was to be allowed to march out with its colours, trumpets and drums, but without any weapons, horses or baggage apart from the officers” personal effects. They were offered convoy, the sick and the wounded were to be given protection, and permission was given to fetch provisions and money for the defeated troops from Plymouth. These could be claimed as honourable terms, but they did not stick, and the defeated army was subject to humiliations amounting to atrocity. The royalist convoy could not protect the unarmed soldiers from attack and local people, men and women, joined in the assault. They were stripped by the women, and left lying in the fields. Some were forced ‘to march stark naked, and bare footed’, and pillage and assault continued. One victim was a woman three days out of child bed, stripped to her smock, pulled by her hair and thrown into the river. She died shortly after. Ten days later the survivors, perhaps 1,000 of the 6,000 who surrendered, marched into Poole, ‘insulted, stripped, beaten and starved’. Their numbers had been winnowed by desertion, but there were many who died on the road, after an honourable surrender.23 If the propaganda effect was dire, the strategic importance could not be exaggerated: ‘By that miscarriage we are brought a whole summer’s travel back’.24 Essex’s adventure, for which he was solely responsible, had gone a long way towards grabbing stalemate from the jaws of victory.
Worse was to come, at least in political terms. Fairfax, Leven and Manchester apparently felt that Marston Moor would force Charles to seek terms, and they did little to pursue an outright victory. In Manchester’s case, at least, this reflected his belief that a lasting peace would be one recognized as honourable by all parties, and could not be delivered by total military victory. War was a means to peace, and had to be treated with caution.25 This hesitancy allowed Charles to consolidate his position during September. Following his triumph over Essex, Charles moved eastwards again, arriving in Tavistock on 5 September. Having abandoned the attempt to retake Plymouth he sought to relieve garrisons further east and his forces established themselves at Chard, and both Barnstaple and Ilfracombe were retaken. His aim was to strengthen the garrisons at Basing House and Banbury to shore up the position of Oxford. This began to look like a potential threat to London and it finally spurred Manchester to bring his Eastern Association forces into the King’s way. It proved difficult to co-ordinate and supply the parliamentary armies, and the Trained Bands contingents were reluctant to move too far, so Waller was forced to pull back from the west in early October, unable to gain support for his position in Sherborne. As Charles continued to advance Parliament began to consolidate forces, calling off the siege of Donnington on 18 October. The King’s next objective was to lift the siege of Basing House, but Essex and Manchester joined forces there just in time, on 21 October, and the King was forced to withdraw to Newbury. Together with Waller’s remaining forces, and levies from the London Trained Bands, the parliamentarians were finally able to bring a large force, perhaps of 18,000 men, to bear on a royal force which on some estimates was only half as strong.26
Despite this advantage in numbers the parliamentary forces did not win the second battle of Newbury (28 October). Not winning was in these circumstances almost as bad as losing. Explanations for the failure differ, but in essence the parliamentary battle plan was complicated and wa
s not effectively executed. When night fell the outcome was still unclear and both sides had lost about 500 men, but the following morning the royalists decided not to renew the fight. They were allowed to because the parliamentary council of war decided not to follow them, at least not until it was too late. In the heated exchanges about this issue Manchester spoke in favour of restraint, and Waller, Haselrig and Cromwell urged more vigour. Posterity has on the whole blamed Manchester in particular. Moreover, the difficulty in executing the battle plan may have lain with Manchester, who was in command of one arm of a pincer movement. He moved too late to make it work, and his hesitancy during the battle had been damaging to the parliamentary cause, at least according to some accounts.27
Over the next ten days there were further manoeuvres, particularly concerned with Donnington Castle. It was summoned to surrender on 31 October and refused to do so. Charles and Rupert set out to relieve it on 7 November and succeeded two days later. Passing through Newbury once again the parliamentary forces refused battle, a decision that again lay with Manchester and enraged a number of men under his command. At a council of war, Manchester famously made the case for limited war: ‘The king cares not how of the fights but it concerns us to be wary, for in fighting we venture all to nothing’. By this he meant: ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves’. Cromwell spoke equally famously on the other side: ‘My lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never so base’.28
After the Lostwithiel and Newbury campaigns Parliament’s position was far worse than would have been predicted after the great victory at Marston Moor (see Map 3). Reasons were easy to enumerate: the Essex debacle; the immobility of Parliament’s forces prior to the Newbury campaign; and also, perhaps, hesitations and misjudgements during and after the battle. Although parliamentary forces enjoyed some successes in some of the local struggles in the period after Newbury, overall strategic weaknesses had been revealed. Charles, by contrast, and despite a failed attempt to lift the siege of Basing House, was able to enter Oxford in triumph on 23 November. His position was much better than could have been hoped after Marston Moor. The royalists now set about a reconstruction of their forces, integrating the survivors of Marston Moor with the royal army under Charles’s personal command, undertaking a recruitment drive and encouraging the formation of auxiliary regiments for local defence.29
His position had been further improved by the formation of an armed royalist party in Scotland, which served as a significant distraction for the Covenanting forces in England. An obvious response to the intervention of the Covenanters was to open up a front in Scotland, and this is what Charles chose to do. In March/April he switched his support away from those who had sought to promote a moderate royalist coalition in Scotland to the more confrontational policies advocated by Montrose and Antrim. All Scots who did not support the King were now regarded as his enemies and Montrose began to plan a war against Argyll using Irish soldiers. Antrim was sent to Ireland to negotiate for the service of Irish Catholics in Scotland. Montrose’s scheme for an invasion of Scotland achieved little and on 6 May he was forced to retreat to England.30
Nonetheless, Montrose’s view of Scottish affairs was to triumph, with very bloody results, later in the year. Shortly after Marston Moor, he met Rupert to discuss the continuing difficulty of securing a commission to promote a royalist rising in Scotland. As far as Montrose knew, troops were not arriving from Ulster, but he set off regardless, to try to open up a new front in Scotland. As it turned out, two days after his meeting with Rupert, men did arrive on the west coast of Scotland, and this allowed Montrose to raise forces among the Highlanders. It was the prelude to a dramatically successful campaign in the Highlands through the autumn of 1644 and into 1645.31
Montrose arrived in Perth on 22 August in disguise, with the aim of rousing Highland opponents of the Covenanters and of Argyll. By 1 September he had mustered sufficient strength of Irish and Highland troops to win a major victory at Tippermuir against the hastily assembled Covenanting force. The campaign was bloodier than the English wars, and Highland bands fought for plunder so that each victory was followed by what would in England have been considered atrocities. It has been estimated that nearly 15,000 men died in the fighting associated with Montrose’s campaigns in 1644 and the following year: easily the lion’s share of the deaths on Scottish soil in these years (see Map 5). From Tippermuir he marched on Aberdeen, many of the Highlanders returning home but his army augmented by troops from Angus. On 13 September he arrived before Aberdeen, whose capture was preceded by the murder of a drummer boy and followed by a massacre in a town not known for its Covenanting sympathies. Over the following winter Montrose led a successful march into the Highlands, aiming at the heart of Argyll power. This campaign culminated in a victory at Inverlochy over Argyll’s army, close to his heartland. Although Leven had not removed troops from England in response to Tippermuir and Aberdeen, he was forced to now. Inverlochy offered the prospect of breaking the power of the Covenanters and, hence, of reopening the war in the north of England. When the English campaigns recommenced in the spring, Leven’s movements were influenced by the fact that he needed to remain in a position from which to go back to Scotland, if that proved necessary. In the event, Montrose was never able to find a way of keeping his Highlanders together in order to pursue a more sustained campaign outside the Highlands. The strategic significance of his campaigns was nonetheless considerable: the victory at Marston Moor had closed the northern front in England but Montrose had effectively opened a new northern front in Scotland, and that served to limit Parliament’s operations in the south.32
It is often said that the intervention of the Covenanters made Parliament’s victory inevitable, but that verdict is clearly questionable in two ways. Firstly, the best chance of catching the King in 1644 was in the early spring, and only indirectly a result of the presence of the Scots. It owed much more to the victories of Waller and the march of Essex the previous autumn. Secondly, in so far as the victory at Marston Moor was decisive, it can be said to have resulted from Rupert’s error in seeking a battle and from the intervention of Cromwell’s cavalry during the battle. The subsequent failure to take Oxford, or the King, similarly owed a lot to problems of command and, it is possible to argue, the shortcomings of Essex. Essex had launched an ultimately disastrous adventure in the west, the more damaging since it had involved him in disobeying direct orders from the Committee of Both Kingdoms. His adventure, ending in ignominy at Lostwithiel and the disappointments of the battle of Newbury, pointed up problems in the prosecution of the war. Leven and Manchester, having left the field in apparent defeat at Marston Moor, were presented with a resounding victory, but were then extremely reluctant to follow it up. These misjudgements and hesitations meant that the war was not concluded and Montrose was able to launch a fantastically successful campaign in Scotland.
Modern historians disagree about the blame for these failures and contemporaries certainly did. Since military mobilization was essentially political, it is hardly surprising that this was interpreted politically: military complaints raised political differences and the critics of Manchester and Leven, for example, tended also to be critics of their religious and political views. There was even a hint of resentment about aristocratic power in the parliamentary counsels.33 Without the benefit of hindsight, and a certainty about the structural advantages on their side, many parliamentarians saw this as a political problem: in the sense both of who should be running the war, and of what those running the war ought to be trying to achieve. As in other wars involving coalitions, credit for victory was claimed by different parties with a view to making political capital from the victory; the blame for failure was rarely accepted.
These military frustrations coincided with signs of fracture over
war aims, in particular the church settlement. In 1641 leading Puritan divines in London had met at the house of Edmund Calamy, a prominent London minister. There they agreed to avoid public controversy on the issue of church government in the interests of solidarity in the face of popery.34 The shared ground of the anti-Laudian coalition was the attack on superstition, popery and idolatry, and these had been at the heart of the religious cause of the English parliament through 1643. A counter-polemic, about schism, heresy, ignorant preaching and error was mobilized by royalists, but was also important within the parliamentary alliance – these were threats recognized by all responsible Christians. Simonds D’Ewes, for example, in moving the second reading of the bill for the abolition of episcopacy had also suggested a companion bill to punish ‘tradesmen and other ignorant persons who shall presume to preach’. Similarly, the Grand Remonstrance, while stringent on popery and bishops, had also disavowed any intention to ‘loose the golden reins of discipline or government in the church’, or of allowing ‘private persons or particular congregations to take up what form of divine service they please’.35 Attacks on episcopacy posed this question of religious decency with particular clarity.
God’s FURY, England’s FIRE Page 43