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

by Diane Purkiss

  Only half an hour after the battle had begun, a Royalist victory seemed imminent. But the New Model was saved by the clash between Cromwell and Langdale on the left. Cromwell, seeing Langdale advancing, trotted to meet him, his flank protected by the bad ground on his right. Whalley’s troops, doubtless filled with holy thoughts by Richard Baxter, had the advantage of moving down the hill, and the advantage of numbers too.

  Joshua Sprigge, a chaplain like Baxter, gave an eyewitness account of the battle: ‘Colonel Whalley being the left hand on the right wing, charged first two divisions of Langdale’s horse, who made a very gallant resistance, and firing at a very close charge, they came to the sword; wherein Colonel Whalley’s division, routed those two divisions, driving them back.’

  Before Langdale’s men could get to the top of the hill, Clarendon later wrote, they gave back, ‘and fled farther and faster than became them’. Cromwell did not lose an instant. He sent two regiments to stop Langdale’s men from rallying, and the rest of his men attacked the Royalist foot’s flank and rear. Astley’s men, already tired, pushing at the New Model pikemen, could do little to oppose Cromwell’s thundering horsemen, who drove hard against them, swords and pistols out. Now Okey ordered his dragoons to mount, and they charged into Astley’s men on the other flank, who gave way, and began to fling their weapons down, crying out for quarter. Cromwell’s two regiments chased Langdale off the field.

  Watching from a nearby hill, Charles was horrified, shamed. He turned his horse, and prepared to charge Cromwell’s men himself. Beside him, the Earl of Carnwath seized his bridle as if the king were a naughty little boy, and with ‘two or three full-mouthed Scottish oaths’, said, angrily, ‘Will you go upon your death in an instant?’ This may have been Charles’s idea; he knew of Richard III’s final charge. But the result was chaotic. As Carnwath swung Charles’s horse around, to the right, it was misinterpreted as a signal. Someone shouted that they must march right, away from Cromwell’s pursuing cavalry, and the whole body of horse galloped frantically rightwards. Thus the mounted reserve never came to the aid of the infantry. One infantry brigade hung on against the relentless pressure; Fairfax eventually charged against it personally, cutting down an ensign, taking his colours, wielding his sabre like any other cavalryman. Rupert finally arrived back at the battlefield, and was greeted by the spectacle of the Royalist foot surrendering their arms. Only the cavalry reserves were still on their feet, and the king was trying uselessly to rally them for a last charge. They were menaced by Cromwell’s horse, and Fairfax was assembling his infantry and horse, too, for a last attack.

  The Royalist cavalry did not charge. It fled. And it left behind the king’s foot, men who had fought for him at Edgehill, at Newbury, at Lostwithiel when Essex’s army had been defeated and captured. The army which had been close to winning now stood like grass, waiting for the scythe.

  The New Model had already overrun the Royalist baggage-train. There were hundreds of women there, soldiers’ wives who came to cook and wash for them, and the less respectable women who followed the army too, some of them richly dressed, with money. ‘They [the Royalist army] carried along with them many strumpets, who they term “leaguer Ladies”’, noted the Lancastrian diarist Edward Robinson. ‘These they made use of in places where they lay in a very uncivil and unbecoming way.’ Prim and godly responses to such scenes might lie behind the outrage which followed. The New Model men attacked every woman there; all of them were branded as whores, by having their noses slit or their faces slashed. A hundred were simply murdered. Only the previous week, a newsbook had reported that a thousand Irish women followed the king’s camp. Well, said the soldiers, they were Irish. And they didn’t even speak English, some of them – and they had knives. Whores and camp-sluts, attending a wicked army.

  Probably they were from the king’s Welsh levies, and the knives were being used to get midday dinner for their partners. Now they lay in their blood.

  In London, the newsbooks reported the massacre. No one condemned it, and Cromwell and Fairfax left the perpetrators unpunished.

  The New Model captured all the king’s guns, a huge quantity of arms and ammunition, and the king’s coach, perhaps the most important prize of all. Sprigge gloated: ‘all their ordinance, being brass guns, whereof two were demi-cannon, besides two more mortar pieces, the enemy got away not one carriage, eight thousand arms and more, forty barrels of powder, two hundred horse, with their riders, the King’s colours, the duke of York’s standard, and six of his colours, four of the Queen’s white colours, with double crosses on each of them, and near one hundred other colours both of horse and foot; the King’s cabinet, the King’s sumpter, many coaches, with store of wealth in them’. The king’s coach contained his correspondence, and once it was published under the sensational title The Kings Cabinet Opened, it seemed to confirm what his enemies had said about him all along; he had been treating with papists, raising a force of Irish and French Catholic mercenaries, menacing England with popery … ‘the cabinet letters, which discover so much to satisfy all honest men of the intention of the adverse party, fell likewise into our hands’, reported Sprigge. Victory came at a price:

  I saw the field so bestrewed with the carcasses of men and horses as was most sad to behold, because subjects under one government, but most happy in this because they were most of them professed enemies of God and his Son. The field was about a mile wide when the battle was fought. The bodies lay slain about four miles in length, the most thick on the hill where the King stood. I cannot think there were less than four hundred men slain there, and truly I think not many more, and three hundred horse.

  But for now the New Model sat down in the field to enjoy the bread, cheese and biscuits that had been won. It had fought hungry. Its hunger would become more and more of a feature of the years ahead.

  London rejoiced at the news; its low expectations made the surprise even more joyful. The first newsbooks gloated, ‘For the glorious victory that it hath pleased God to give our army under the command of that Heroic General Sir Thomas Fairfax, deserves to be taken notice of in an extraordinary manner.’ ‘I should be much to blame’, wrote one instantly published correspondent, ‘if I should not acquaint so public a spirit as yourself with what God hath done for this kingdom by our poor, despised and contemptible army.’ The army’s low reputation meant that the hand of God in the victory seemed even plainer. And the good performance of the army was stressed, too: ‘All our officers and soldiers did as bravely as could be: the former performed all points of soldiery well, though envy hath frequently bespattered them, as not able to command, and therefore deserted by so many out of fear.’ The newsbooks also reported every rumour: ‘Lieutenant General Cromwell with a gallant party of horse is in the pursuit [of the king].’ Some of them were too optimistic: ‘some of our scouts have just now brought intelligence that Prince Rupert is taken’. The wounding of General Skippon and fears for his health were also reported. This was of particular interest to Londoners; he had been their general too. Londoners were later to enjoy the spectacle of the prisoners of Naseby paraded through their streets. ‘The common soldiers were put into the Artillery Garden in Tothill Fields, the Officers into the Lord Peters house in Aldersgate street.’ In Tothill Fields, the soldiers were treated to sermons by divines eager to convert them to Parliament’s cause.

  Other places heard the news too. Royalist strongholds began to surrender. Carlisle on 2 July, its garrison starved, Pontefract on 21 July, Scarborough on the following day. The king hurried to South Wales, and took refuge in Raglan Castle. He still had a force of sorts – 4000 horse, 2500 foot. ‘There his Majesty stayed three weeks, and as if the genius of the place had conspired with our fates, we were there all lulled to sleep with sports and entertainments; as if no crown had been at stake, or in any danger to be lost’: Sir Edward Walker was baffled, but the king was hiding from reality.

  And all over the three kingdoms, people noted the news. Isabella Twysden did, though she was
preoccupied with more personal matters. Naseby and its outcome crowds its way into her book, jostling for room with entries that describe her dealings with her baby’s nurse:

  The 24 Nurse Jane went to London

  The 21st Sr Mills brought troops came into Kent to barrack for their pay

  The first of April Nurse Jane had 12d for a month nursing of Charles the month was not up till 2 days after

  The 14 of June Sir Tho Fairfax had a great victory at Nasby where he took 12 pieces of ordinance 4000 foot soldiers and the Sc letters.

  Some of Isabella’s family eventually responded to Naseby and its implications with flight: ‘The first or 2 of July 1647 my sister Ann Waler lay at Tunbridge, next day when she was gone Sir Will her husband went through that town, all went tis said for France, 2 horses went with him heavy loaded though little to come to, and she carried a heavy box in her coach, this I was told, they went not to France but back to London.’

  Like Ann Fanshawe, Isabella was both interested in political events and inclined to see them as disruptions of normal family life: ‘The 5 of August my husband came to Peckham where he has not been in 5 years before.’ This sounds bald, but they had a very tender marriage. ‘Never man had a better wife, never children a better mother’, he wrote of Isabella. Before the war, he wrote: ‘I enquire by you of what state the deer are, and wonder much they are so backward, they thriving most in such weather. I thank thee for thy sugar cakes my good heart, which will be very useful to me … Farewell again and again my own dear heart whom I never knew what it was to be parted from till now.’

  Roger Twysden was a moderate in an age of extremists. He was staunchly Church of England, but disliked episcopacy. His response to Naseby was therefore neither dread nor delight.

  In Scotland, the consequences would be more far-reaching than anywhere. From the Scottish point of view, Naseby represented the triumph of Independency, an Independency that was to insist, vehemently, on rule from Westminster, on the same prerogatives as the king had. Independency was a radical extension of Presbyterianism, one which extended the ideas of Presbyterians to an extent that alarmed the Kirk’s most ardent spirits. Independents wanted freedom of conscience, freedom for congregations to choose their own forms of worship. They did not even want the Church to be nationally organized, for any structure might impede the workings of the Holy Spirit among them. Even church buildings came to be suspect, and Independent sects – Baptists, Congregationalists – came to prefer meeting in places that were not called places of worship, assembly rooms and warehouses, to show that they were not bound to any order or hierarchy. Godly John Pym would not have stood it for a moment. It is impossible to be sure how many Independents there were, but there were enough to cause considerable anxiety. Their individualistic radicalism frightened many, for it came to be loosely allied with the party in Parliament and in the army which stood for the prosecution of the war to the last ditch and the outright defeat of the king. From Naseby on, Scotland was fighting against being absorbed into an England run by the Independents, fighting against them just as it had against Charles and Laud.

  XXV Ashes: The Siege of Taunton and the Clubmen

  By early 1645, in other parts of England, the opposing sides so laboriously drawn up had collapsed into victims and perpetrators, the hungry and the full, the homeless and the housed. The struggle to hold on to house and home diminished the importance of abstract political ideas. In the spring of 1645, tired apathy suddenly burst into vehement resistance; true, there had been protests before, but not on such a wide and ferocious scale. Soldiers on both sides were attacked sporadically, as the exhausted civilians vented their rage. Peacekeeping associations began to appear across the south, whose members eventually came to be called Clubmen – because they carried clubs. Courted by both sides, in Dorset and Wiltshire they slightly preferred the king to his foes; in Somerset, they took the opposite line.

  The root of the problem was the Royalist troops that occupied Somerset, who were unpaid and almost entirely out of hand. They were a problem even for the Royalist high command, and those under George Goring were an especial headache. Goring was a man capable of brilliant individual action, but he was also feckless and irresponsible. Consistently putting his personal ambition to be in charge of the western campaign ahead of the king’s cause, he was also notoriously undisciplined, engaging in drunken bacchanals in which his staff were expected to join. Though Goring’s men were to become notorious for ‘continual butcheries, rapes and robberies’, the trouble started with one of Ralph Hopton’s better-disciplined regiments. Troops from Colonel John Tynte’s regiment quartered in a Somerset village called South Brent early in March, and returned in larger numbers around 24 March. They rode in from Bristol, passing through Axbridge during the fair. Bystanders abused them in the street, and eventually a maddened soldier drew his sword against a Cheddar man, who defended himself with a staff, broke the soldier’s sword, but was then beaten savagely around the head. Next, the soldiers robbed a butcher who was on his way home from the fair, and killed a poor labourer they met on the highway. When they finally reached South Brent they seized the fat bullock of a farmer, bought at the fair, beat the servant who tried to deny it to them, put a rope around his neck and pretended to hang him, threatening to do so unless he gave them money. The tithingman gave them what money he had, but they said they would come back tomorrow and tie his neck and heels together if he could not do more to satisfy them.

  Moving to Lympsham, they ordered the citizens out of bed, telling them to lie upon straw while they had the beds, while at Berrow they wrecked William Lush’s house, stole clothes and bedding, and told him they would burn his house and kill his wife if he did not keep quiet. Others threatened to burn the whole village if the inhabitants did not cooperate. The commander John Tynte was a local from near Nailsea, but most of the thugs were not, and some were Irish; John Tynte’s brother, Henry, announced that ‘most of the country were fools, and good for nothing but to be made idiots’. When ordered into action by Hopton, the regiment refused to move until the villages produced more tribute. This was enough for a local gentleman called ‘John Somerset’ and his followers, who promptly took up pikes and staves, and attacked the soldiers on Good Friday, 4 April 1645.

  This was by no means the only incident of its kind; elsewhere too, troops in search of plunder were set upon by locals who had had enough – or rather, by locals who had not had enough or very much of anything for a long time. The Clubmen were not solely a Somerset phenomenon. There had been Clubmen in Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire in early spring, and nearer Somerset there were risings in surrounding counties – Wiltshire, Dorset – and rather later in the summer further disturbances occurred in South Wales. In autumn, Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex saw Clubmen risings; in Berkshire, some 16,000 men were said to be involved. Evidence – sparse, and contradictory – suggests that the first Clubmen were probably ordinary farmers and peasants who were tired of the likes of Goring, and whose discontent was then exploited or harnessed by gentlemen and professional men.

  Many began by valuing tradition and the rule of law, especially in matters of religion; many greatly disliked the Directory for Worship which had in March 1645 ousted the prayer book. The Clubmen, said one of their critics, wanted ‘the old vanities and superstitions of their forefathers, the old necromantic order of prelacy, and the wondrous old heathen customs of Sunday pipings and dancings’. These aims seemed most likely to be fulfilled by the Royalists for some – perhaps most – but by Parliament for others, and none of the above for still others. Some surviving evidence about their grievances survives in a petition sent to the king by the Wiltshire Clubmen in 1644 and also read in the House of Lords. The Clubmen said that they had ‘more deeply than many other parts of the kingdom tasted the miseries of this unnatural intestine war’, and complained explicitly about the ‘pressures of many garrisons’, while also insisting that their aim was to maintain true religion. Other petitions called for
the return of ‘the ancient ways’. All this diversity means that the Clubmen’s aims have become a matter of debate between historians; some argue that they were like French peasant organizations, hierarchically arranged and led by gentlemen followed by peasants, in defence of that very hierarchy. Others argue that some Clubmen at least had more radical aims. What is clear is that ordinary people were trying to enter the political decision-making process, and that some were already familiar with self-government; the Somerset Clubmen elected their officers, suggesting an allegiance to democratic process, which made it even harder to be subject to the demands of the Royalist armies and their undisciplined men.

  The miseries of Taunton were especially acute. It had been garrisoned by the Royalists for fourteen months from May 1643 and was retaken in July 1644 for Parliament, and placed under the leadership of Colonel Robert Blake. It managed to hold out against a Royalist siege earlier that year. By Christmas of that year, it had been under siege for three months, and the civilians and garrison were both hungry. The Royalist besiegers reported that a sortie from the town had failed when those in the party had stopped chasing the Royalists in order to look for bread in surrounding houses. Many men died this way, ambushed by the Royalists as they rushed out of the houses ‘with the bread in their mouths’.