The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  In his memoirs, Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Trevor remembered how it felt to run:

  In the fire, smoke, and confusion of that day, the runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, and so full of fears, that I should not have taken them for men; both armies being mingled, both horse and foot; no side keeping their own posts. In this horrible distraction did I coast the country; here meeting with a shoal of Scots crying out ‘Weys us, we are all undone’ and so full of lamentation and mourning, as if the day of doom had overtaken, and from which they knew not whither to fly, and anon I met with a ragged troop reduced to four and a cornet; by and by with a little foot officer without hat, band, sword, or indeed anything but feet.

  But for Parliament one brigade, under Lord Lindsey, stood like a bristling hedgehog, both flanks exposed, refusing to run, meeting charge after charge with an impenetrable phalanx of pikes, their butts set in the ground. They held their ground; they would not break, and they managed to take Sir Charles Lucas prisoner. They turned the tide.

  For now, returning from having his wound dressed, still on the left, Cromwell managed to rally his men, helped by his second-in-command, Leslie. They charged again, and this time succeeded in putting Rupert’s men to flight, down the long road to York. Cromwell sensibly kept his men together, refused to let them chase the fleeing enemy, and brought them back to the field, a feat which had proved to be beyond Goring or Rupert.

  They were soon joined by Fairfax. Like all the allied troops, he had been wearing a field-sign, a white paper in his hat. He tore it off hastily. Without the field-sign he came right through the Royalist army to reach his own side. When he found Cromwell, he may have ordered him to attack; in any case they did so, and in the nick of time. His ‘lovely company’ struck at Goring from the rear. The combined cavalry moved around Wilstrop Wood, and began an attack on Goring’s horse, who had thought the battle over and won. They broke and fled for York.

  This left the footsoldiers entirely exposed to the Eastern Association cavalry, tough as iron, which wheeled and charged. There were few Royalist cavalry to oppose them, and the foot had no defence against their thunderous onslaught. At first Newcastle’s Whitecoats inflicted heavy casualties on the Parliamentarian horse. They ‘would have no quarter, but fought it out till there were not thirty of them living; whose hap it was to be beaten down upon the ground, as the troopers came near them, though they could not rise for their wounds, yet were so desperate as to get either pike or sword or a piece of them, and to gore the troopers’ horses as they came over them’. This account, sent to the astrologer William Lilly by Colonel Camby, ends with a tribute: ‘I never met such resolute brave fellows, or whom I pitied so much.’ Newcastle’s second wife Margaret Cavendish wrote that ‘every man fell in the same order and rank wherein he had fought’. By then the moon had risen, illuminating the last hedge of pikes collapsing, the white coats of the ‘Lambs’, who had been led to this final slaughter. Only thirty of the four thousand Whitecoats survived the battle. ‘They had brought their winding-sheets with them’, said one observer. Their last act was to gouge desperately at the stomachs of their slayers’ horses, like bulls in the Spanish bullring.

  Why did they refuse quarter? When the attack on their position began, Royalist victory had seemed imminent. They may have thought that a firm stand would make it certain. After all, the resolute defiance of Lindsey’s brigade had saved Parliament from total collapse only an hour earlier. Because the Lambs thought Royalist victory already won, they probably thought that their horse would come up – soon – and rescue them. As well, they were imbued with a military and chivalric ideal; stand and fight; don’t run. Newcastle was partially responsible for this; he threw himself eagerly into the role of chevalier. He adored equitation, dancing, fencing, the arts of a gentleman. Sir Philip Warwick said ‘he had a tincture of a romantic spirit and had the misfortune to have somewhat of the poet in him’. Clarendon noted later that while he liked the pomp and authority of being a general, he delegated military jobs to a professional officer, Lieutenant-General James King.

  Why, then, did the Parliamentarians press on with the futile slaughter? Newcastle’s northern army had been a particular object of dread since the beginning of the war. ‘The Papist army in the North’, it was called, and some Protestants actually deserted early in the war rather than fight alongside Catholics. Fairfax’s troops, too, had been fighting a long, drawn-out guerrilla war against Newcastle’s men. Fairfax, the rider on the white horse, was a crusader against this popish darkness.

  Darkness was indeed enveloping them. By now it was about 9.30. With the Whitecoats died the last hopes of Rupert’s shattered army. The battle had lasted only two hours.

  It is always difficult to estimate Civil War battle casualties. According to the countrymen who interred the bodies, 4150 Royalists had been killed; others said 3500. Another 1500 were captured, along with many arms, colours and vital papers. Among the dead on the field was Rupert’s celebrated white poodle, Boy, believed by some Parliamentarians to be a demon because of his supposed invulnerability to shot. He had slipped his collar at the beginning of the battle. Now he had proved all too vulnerable, like the army whose men he had cheered by his antics. He lay in the mud; 300 Parliamentarians lay dead, too, and many more were wounded. Edmund Ludlow’s cousin Gabriel lay dying, ‘with his belly broken and his bowels torn, his hip-bone broken, all the shivers and the bullet lodged in it’.

  The allied troops, exhausted and hungry, held the field. They sang a psalm of victory. There they remained, too spent to move on, drinking from the puddles and ditches that were their only sources of water. When they were refreshed, they stripped the enemy dead, so that the morning light illuminated a field of naked bodies, a few still twitching in the last spasms of life. Battlefield scavengers followed, breaking fingers to get at rings. Relatives arrived, too. As Mary Towneley was rummaging frantically through corpses, searching for her husband’s body, she met Oliver Cromwell. He asked her what she was doing ‘in that vale of tears’. When she told him, he assigned her a bodyguard.

  Sir Charles Lucas was taken around the sprawled bodies, to identify those of sufficient rank to merit burial in individual graves rather than the common pits which gaped for the majority. The sight was too much for him. He began to sob, exclaiming ‘Alas for King Charles!’ Around one soldier’s wrist he saw a bracelet of bright hair; he asked that it be taken off and sent to ‘an honourable lady’.

  The Royalists staggered into York. Rupert’s officers ‘came dropping one by one, not knowing, but marvelling and doubting, what fortune might befall one another’. Micklegate Bar was crammed with wounded. More lay in the streets, crying out in pain. The governor had sensibly shut York’s gates to stop the allied troops entering the town in the wake of the fleeing Royalists, but the fugitives struggled desperately for admission, panic-stricken. Rupert was among the last to reach the city. He had stopped to have a violent row with Newcastle. Each blamed the other for losing the battle.

  Newcastle, his money gone, his forces destroyed, decided to call it a day; he took ship for Hamburg and did not return till after the Restoration. ‘I will not endure the laughter of the court’, he said.

  Allied victory in the north was now only a matter of time. Victory in the war was still far away, though, and Marston Moor did not make it inevitable. It was, said Oliver Cromwell, accurately, crisply, ‘an absolute victory, obtained by the Lord’s blessing’. The Parliamentarians had taken enough colours, it was said, to furnish every cathedral in England. The Parliamentarians were jubilant: this was a victory ‘such as the like never was since this war began’, said Cromwell.

  But Royalist troops, angry, muddled, still roamed the area. A remnant of Rupert’s forces under Sir John Mayney clashed with some Parliamentarians near the village of North Scale in Lancashire. Mayney and his men were driven off, and Mayney fell embarrassingly from his horse in the process. The next day he and his troop returned and took out their feelings o
f angry defeat on the village. It had been abandoned by its frightened inhabitants, so they set it on fire, except for one house known to belong to a Royalist sympathizer.

  York surrendered on 16 July, though some Royalist citadels held out until as late as 1646. The north came increasingly under Parliamentarian and Scottish control; which often meant Covenanters diligently sequestering the assets of ‘delinquents’ and anyone rumoured to be Catholic. A gentlewoman called Isabelle Hixton, for example, was deprived of her entire estate on the grounds that she was a Catholic; it was given holus-bolus to her former shepherd, Thomas Ellison, who had carried messages between Fairfax and the Scots, and so proved his good faith. Ellison was supposed to give Isabelle a pension of a third of the estate’s profits, but he failed to do so, and also set about depleting the estate for quick profits, cutting down trees for timber and ploughing meadows; evidently he thought it unlikely that his good fortune would last long. Ellison said firmly that he was actually bringing wasted land under cultivation. He was eventually forced to pay Isabelle her allowance, but did not hand over the arrears until 1649.

  Rupert, rallying himself, marched north with his straggling remnants, and was met by Montrose, searching for an army to attack Scotland. Rupert didn’t have an army to give him, and instead crossed the Pennines, proceeding down to Bristol, where news of his uncle’s far greater successes in the West awaited him.

  Six days after the battle, London had a moderately accurate account of it, and four more detailed reports within the following four days. News was improving, and travelling faster. Nehemiah Wallington rejoiced in the news. There, he wrote, ‘was God seen’.

  There was some debate about exactly whom God had been trying to help, however; the Scots thought it was their Covenanting faith that the Almighty rewarded, while in London, their role was played down considerably in favour of exultant praise of Cromwell. One pamphlet by Lord Saye and Sele himself eagerly portrayed him as God’s chosen instrument in winning the day; a newspaper called him ‘one of the Saviours (as God has miraculously manifested him to be) of this Israel’. This praise of the very man who, they felt, was eager to obstruct their plans for settlement upset the Scots, who not unjustly felt that they were owed a meed of praise too. What had riled them was a perceived threat to their efforts to coax the Church of England into the Covenant. Cromwell had suggested that some Independents might be unable to submit to the common rule even then being debated by a committee of the Westminster Assembly. They angrily argued that Cromwell was ‘an incendiary’ who should be impeached for ‘kindling coals of contention’. He wasn’t. But he never forgot, and the event hardened his attitude to Presbyterians, whom he had previously tolerated. The little battle was over too.

  After Marston Moor, the allied army dispersed, Leven and the Scots to Newcastle, Manchester to the Eastern Association, while Fairfax remained in Yorkshire. God would have to wait a few more months for final victory, particularly since Manchester was now so appalled by the quarrels and problems that he was seeking a negotiated peace. God’s votary Oliver Cromwell was appalled in his turn.

  One thing that overtook Cromwell was the death of a relative, a man on whom he relied. This is a letter to his brother-in-law on the loss of Walton’s son Valentine Walton. It shows why he had become such a successful commander, why men had followed him to victory:

  Dear Sir,

  It’s our duty to sympathise in all mercies; that we may praise the Lord together in chastisements or trials, that so we may sorrow together.

  Truly England and the church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given to us, such as the like never was since this war began. It had all the evidences of an absolute victory obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat 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. The particulars I cannot relate now, but I believe of twenty thousand the prince hath not four thousand left. Give glory, all the glory, to God.

  Sir, God has taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitate to have it cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own trials in this way, but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for and live for, never to know sin or sorrow anymore. He was a gallant young man, exceedingly gracious. God give you his comfort. Before his death he was as full of comfort that to Frank Russell and myself he could not express it, it was so great above his pain. Then he said to us, indeed it was admirable. A little while after he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that was? He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies. At his fall, his horse being killed with the bullet … 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 by 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.

  Cromwell’s mixture of practical commonsense acceptance that beloved men die in battles, and his genuine regret at losing one, only seems odd to those of us who have been lucky enough not to be tried in the fires of war. The blend of strong, even passionate paternal love and tough truthtelling are typical not only of a good commander, but also of a godly commander, confident in God because from him comes victory.

  William Waller noted Cromwell’s way with words: ‘He did, indeed, seem to have great cunning, and whilst he was cautious of his own words, not putting forth too many lest they should betray his thoughts, he made others talk, until he had as it were sifted them, and known their inmost designs.’

  ‘God made them’, Cromwell thought, ‘as stubble to our swords.’ They weren’t men. They were stubble. Walton was a man.

  Later, a group of Dutch artists suggested to the fledgling English republic that the Banqueting House might now be redecorated. (More Rubens masterworks destined for the Thames, like the Crucifixion from the queen’s chapel …?) What could be more appropriate than pictures of Marston Moor? Then the people could come and see for themselves a lasting record of the triumph of the saints. The proposal was rejected – too expensive, too flagrant, perhaps a little too Stuart – but in the nineteenth century schools and town halls were to fill up with copies of a later picture of the battle by James Ward, so that Marston Moor became a visual monument to Whiggishness.

  XVIII The Cookery Writers’ Tales: General Hunger, Hannah Wolley, Kenelm Digby and the Deer of Corse Lawn

  Armies trample, invade, destroy,

  With guns roaring from earth and air.

  I am more terrible than armies,

  I am more feared than the cannon.

  Kings and chancellors give commands;

  I give no command to any;

  But I am listened to more than kings

  And more than passionate orators.

  I unswear words, and undo deeds.

  Naked things know me.

  I am first and last to be felt of the living.

  I am Hunger.

  (Laurence Binyon, 1917)

  By the time Marston Moor was fought, the men and women of England were fighting a grimmer battle, a battle to find enough food to stay alive. Not just the battered armies but the whole country was getting hungry. Harvests had been poor because of the cold, wet summers, and there were fewer men to get in the crops. The armies ate up household food supplies.

  What made it especially hard was that most families lived precariously on the harvest of the year. Not only was there no refrigeration, but most households had few cooking facilities either. Few households had a range – most food was cooked in a cauldron, or on a girdle (where oat bread could be made). We tend to imagine an idyllic past of self-sufficient smallholdings, but it
wasn’t so. The poor in towns, then as now, did very little cooking; instead there were portable meals and pub foods available at the local alehouse, where the chef was usually a man, just as men were usually butchers, bakers and brewers. London’s food came from swathes of countryside from hundreds of miles around; from medieval times grain-boats came from Henley and Faversham. The standard drink until the introduction of tea and coffee was beer, which provided a lot of quickly-absorbed calories. It also contained a considerable amount of alcohol; people sometimes imagine that it was weaker in the past, but slow fermentation made it likely to be stronger.

  The rural majority ate a diet of deadly monotony. For the poor, bread, and various pulse-based foods called pottage, were the staples. Grain was still consumed as often in porridge or pottage as in bread, and for the very bottom rungs of society bread itself was a festive feast, linked with the saints’ calendar that Robert Harley was keen to extirpate. Even for others, sweet fruit breads like Banbury cakes and soulcakes were linked to the ritual year. They provided sugar and longed-for fat, but they were generally abandoned with the saints’ days they celebrated. This may actually have contributed to an ongoing nutritional crisis. What little variety vegetables could provide disappeared when the poor lost access to land of their own, and they were deprived of what little meat they had when common lands were enclosed for the wool trade. The poor in the seventeenth century may barely have eaten enough fat, or protein.