Sure enough, a figure in fine, gleaming armour paced confidently at the very front of the Parliamentarian advance.
And then Stryker’s attention switched to his own side, as another lone figure scampered out to stand before the Royalists, waving his sword in sweeping arcs above his head. A giant soon joined him, shielding his body from any in the closing rebel ranks that might try a lucky shot, and Stryker realized the smaller man was none other than Sir Bevil Grenville.
An eerie hush descended upon the Royalists then, as the Cornishmen, so grizzled and ferocious, gazed upon the man they revered above all others.
‘It is a day for swords!’ Grenville brayed. ‘A day for fire, and for blood! A day for death! God is with us, my brave lads! Long live the King!’
The Cornish soldiers howled their support, screamed their obscenities, and surged up the hill with an ever-quickening pace. But their cries were quickly enveloped by those coming from higher up the slope, for the oncoming Roundhead force was nearly at full charge now, pikes beginning to lower from their shoulders, points level with the heads and chests of the king’s fighters. The sound of Chudleigh’s pikemen was deafening, overwhelming. There were just so many of them. Snarling and spitting and cursing and raging.
At once the cry went up from the Royalist side to charge their pikes, and down they came like a forest of felled trees, jerked from their breastplate rests to train upon the enemy.
Stryker watched, catching sight of his redcoats within the bristling mass. This was not the protective posture his men had employed to such good effect against Wild’s slashing harquebusiers. They were no longer the barrier to keep horsemen at bay. No more a screen for the musketeers. This time they were the aggressors, the chargers, the killers. He silently wished them godspeed.
On the enemy flank the Roundhead musketeers slowed their run, formed up into a wide line, and fired a huge volley, flames swelling across their front. It should have been devastating, should have torn Grenville’s densely packed pike block to fleshy ribbons, but the king’s men moved too fast and most of the balls whistled into the rearmost ranks as they passed by. The front ranks were safe. They levelled their own spears to meet Chudleigh’s, lowered their chins, braced their shoulders, tightened grips, and swept into the Parliamentarian battaile.
The pikes stabbed in, pressed irresistibly onwards by the men at their butt ends, eleven or more feet further back. They crossed in the air, forming a tangled latticework of wooden shafts. And then they crunched home. The sound was horrific. The clang of metal overlaying the wet slap of punctured flesh, like a cleaver slammed into a butcher’s block. Some of the pikes found immediate flesh, driven hard into faces and necks. Most missed, drilled between the shoulders of the men opposite, suddenly entwined with the myriad other staves that were now locked amongst the bodies of the men they had meant to kill.
And then the strange, low grunt of the push of pike rose up from the press. Stryker knew it well, had heard it so many times before. After the initial smashing, murderous collision, the opposing blocks would stall, for their pole-arms were entwined with those of the enemy and their sword hands were concerned only with maintaining a grip on the pikes. It was now a time for brute strength and courage. The first ranks, those fortunate enough to have been missed by the initial barrage of slicing steel tips, would lean forward, digging heels into the earth like so many mules, thrusting shoulders into the press, driving every ounce of strength they could muster along the length of ash. Many of the pikemen would have spent countless summers hauling on ropes, representing their respective hamlets in the tug-o’-war with neighbouring communities. The push of pike was a similar experience, only in reverse. Men groaned and cursed, they spat and they screamed and they gnashed teeth and heaved until their hands and arms and backs and thighs were fit to burst. And for a moment, one fabulous moment, it seemed as though Grenville’s famed Cornishmen would achieve the unthinkable and break through the far larger rebel block. Chudleigh’s Devonshire force rocked backwards, stunned by the ferocity of the Royalist press and aware that their musketeers had fired too soon. They took a step to the rear, then another, and it seemed as though they might cut and run, but the men behind leaned in, willing them on, shoving them roughly back down the slope.
Sheer momentum took over. The weight of the larger Roundhead battaile, combined with the fact that they were fighting downhill, seemed to turn the tide. It was slow to begin with, Grenville’s hardy Cornish troops digging in, crouching low, grinding back up at them, but the powerful rebel drive staggered forth for the first time since pikes had crossed, and the entire Royalist body shunted backwards, unable to resist.
Stryker looked on in horror as Chudleigh’s broad, deep battaile began to bow, its flanks curving round the smaller pike block, threatening to completely encircle it. But then he heard a new voice bellow out above the din of battle. It was sharp and strong, stentorian and confident. He looked to his right, only to see Sir John Berkeley step out of line. The man commanding Grenville’s muskets, dressed superbly in a suit of yellow, with open-sleeved doublet and embroidered buff-coat, cupped a hand to the side of his bearded mouth and shouted again. Stryker heard him properly this time, and moved with the rest of the musketeers, the entire body wheeling round from the Royalist right to face the locked push.
‘Give fire!’ Berkeley roared, fist punching the air.
The Royalist musketeers had finally been freed to go to work. Stryker raised his own musket, blew on the match one last time, and eased back the trigger. He did not aim, for it was not necessary at this range. The huge, tightly packed body of rebel pikemen was there for the shooting. Had they waited a few seconds more, waited until Grenville’s pikes finally capitulated, a savage melee ensuing, it would have been an unthinkable manoeuvre, for to distinguish between friend and foe would be impossible. Yet now, while Chudleigh’s men were still braced at pike’s length from the beleaguered Cavaliers, it was near impossible to miss.
All along Berkeley’s flanking party muskets flashed in rhythmic volleys, one rank, then the next, and the next. The nearest files of Chudleigh’s column convulsed, shrank instinctively away from the devastating bullets. And then Stryker saw Sir John draw his sword, and witnessed his lips give a command that was drowned completely by gunfire and screams, but knew what he asked all the same. He reversed his musket, hefting it by the barrel, heavy wooden stock presented like a club, and charged with the rest.
They smashed headlong into Chudleigh’s already battered flank, forcing the confused Roundheads in on themselves. And, in turn, those Roundheads did not know whether to fight the pikemen at their front or the musketeers at the side, and so they did neither. Some of Chudleigh’s musketeers raced around the press of bodies to resist the assault, but they were few compared with Berkeley’s force, and they soon gave ground, unable to reload long-spent weapons.
The braying Cornish pikemen threw them back, hurled themselves into the splintering enemy like a herd of maddened bullocks, forcing the rebels to climb the slope as the king’s men had climbed all day.
The first pikes were thrown down. Men in the front ranks, those facing Grenville’s newly invigorated block, twisted and turned like rats caught by the tail, desperate to flee but unable to move for the press of bodies and the tightly knit staves. Some of the rebels at the back saw their fear, heard their cries, and began to peel away. The men in the centre could not see what was happening, but they sensed the new fear, saw their comrades’ pikes fall like oaks in a gale, and began to jostle their own paths out of the hitherto solid formation.
The Parliamentarian pike block stalled, juddered backwards, cohesion draining away like rainwater through sand, and then collapsed. They turned, racing for the summit as though Satan himself snapped at their heels.
‘We got ’im!’ a man exclaimed. His voice was just one more noise in the cacophony of the fight, but it was somehow different to the others. A vein of surprise, shock even, raised it to a particular pitch that made men peer into the
melee to see what exactly he meant. ‘We got Chully ’iself!’
Stryker ran to where the push of pike had fractured into a hundred personal duels, desperate to see if the proclamation was true. He leapt clean over a grey-coated musketeer’s twisted cadaver, rounded another man whose orange-sashed torso was spattered in fresh blood, and jammed his musket butt hard into the chin of a kneeling rebel who made to draw a thin dirk. In moments he was there, in the thick of a fight that had already dissipated, the Royalists crowing their victory up at the grim-faced onlookers gathered on the crest.
‘He’s mine!’
That voice again. Stryker looked left and right, scanning the bodies of the elated and the routed, until finally his eye fell upon a stocky man in pikeman’s corselet, though it seemed his pole-arm had long been discarded. His face was heavy with stubble, his eyes slightly crossed, and his mouth almost entirely devoid of teeth. And that mouth grinned, broad and predatory, for beneath him, prostrate at the end of his blade but evidently unhurt, lay the man Stryker had first seen as the rebel force had rushed so irresistibly from the ridge.
Major-General James Chudleigh.
There was no such joy on the summit of Stratton Hill.
Henry Grey, First Earl of Stamford, had arrived late, and, for the briefest of moments as he scaled the slope from the less formidable north, he had feared that his absence would somehow prove costly. But then, he had reassured himself, young Chudleigh knew the terrain, had a superior army, and also all the logistical and tactical advantages afforded by this formidable position. Indeed, he even commanded more loyalty from the Devon troops than they ever displayed for Stamford.
And yet now, staring open-mouthed at the blood-blackened slope before him, the earl felt physically sick. Because Chudleigh had come dangerously close to throwing it all away.
But all, he knew, was not yet lost.
Stamford had brought one hundred and forty steady cavalrymen with him, and he left them at the hill’s northern periphery, cantering alone through the undulating network of Iron Age earthworks and across the hill’s crest, the two lines of foot stretching out to his right. Over at the southernmost fringe of the summit was a small party of horsemen flanked by a number of men holding the limp colours of various rebel units, and he decided it was there that he would find the army’s senior men.
‘What, in the name of the living God, has that boy done to my army?’
Almost every head in the mounted party turned to him, the ring of standard-bearers moving swiftly out of his way.
One of the group, a small-framed man encased in blackened, gilt-riveted armour, spurred out to greet him. ‘My lord.’
Stamford stared at the armoured man, then down at the anarchic slope. ‘You let him charge out on his own, Erasmus?’ he asked coldly.
‘He commands, my lord.’
Stamford looked up. ‘Not any longer, Collings. I saw that disaster. James Chudleigh is gone, captured or worse, and his ill-advised counterattack has cost me a goodly part of my most seasoned troops.’ He stared back down at the slope. There, without resistance from rebel pikes, and still too far away to be hindered by musketry, the four small Royalist hordes were steadily coming together. ‘There will be no more stupidity this day, by Christ. No more. We still have the advantage of numbers.’
‘Will you send in your horsemen, my lord?’
Stamford glanced back at the mounted men, but shook his head. ‘They will not be required. Let the malignants clamber up to find us. We have four thousand men itching to greet them.’
The Royalist army converged to the right of the advance, naturally veering towards Sir Ralph Hopton’s column.
All four divisions had marched straight up the steep western face of the seemingly unassailable hill, not firing a single shot until they were almost at the summit, and now they had joined. One large, surging, ferocious force, new in confidence, bearing down – or, rather, up – on the heart of the rebel position.
‘He’s been hurt, sir,’ Anthony Payne said as Stryker ran to him.
Stryker quickly apprised the man in fine green clothes who was able to walk only by Payne’s bracing arm. ‘How bad?’
‘Bruising is all,’ Sir Bevil Grenville replied angrily, but winced and swore at a new wave of pain. He had been in the thick of the push of pike, losing his step early on and being swiftly trampled by the boots of friend and foe alike. ‘Damn it, Anthony, let me go!’
Payne shook his head firmly, hauling his master up when the colonel’s legs began to wilt. ‘You must rest, sir.’
‘Mister Payne is right, Colonel,’ Stryker added, acutely aware that morale would take a severe blow if the Cornish knew that their irascible talisman had been injured.
But Grenville managed to shrug himself free of the giant’s bolstering embrace, and forced himself to straighten, breathing deeply through gritted teeth. ‘Be off with your nannying hands, by Christ! My sword!’
Payne had retrieved Grenville’s sword when the rebel block had ruptured, and he handed it to the colonel, hilt first.
Grenville grinned broadly, blood welling bright from a crack in his bottom lip. He raised the blade for his men to see. ‘On!’
They marched on, a single army at last, divided into alternate bodies of pike and musket, drawing ever closer to the waiting rebel lines. Stryker and his men were there, his pikes intermingled with the metal-clad hedgehogs on either side, his musketeers clustered about Ensign Chase and the huge red banner with its two white diamonds. Stryker paced at the head of those musketeers, willing them forward, face grim, words brutal. They were still grouped within the larger force commanded by Grenville, and Stryker shouted for them to walk with heads high, to show their Cornish comrades that they were equally as fearsome. Skellen and Barkworth were with him still, the latter’s eyes gleaming like a cat’s in moonlight, alive with the battle-lust he so relished. Forrester was somewhere near too, leading his own musketeers, for he could hear the captain’s distinctive voice in the crowd, and he felt suddenly sorry that his friend’s own colour was not on the field. A man, he believed, should be allowed to die beneath his own standard.
Musket fire began to crackle loudly from above, two men fell in quick succession to Stryker’s right, and he realized with a sudden bowel-loosening dread that they had advanced to within effective range.
‘Hold fire!’ Grenville called from the front. ‘Hold, I say!’
Stryker, like the rest, held his shot. They had briefly used their powder to break Chudleigh’s attack, but now the orders from Hopton were to save the precious powder for as long as possible. The whisper that hissed throughout the rank and file – not party to the dire situation with supply – had spoken of a devilish plan to frighten the enemy. To show the Devon folk that men of Cornwall needed no guns to win a fight. Stryker had been amused at the notion at first, but now, as they waded into ever more dense enemy fire, he wondered if such a tactic – albeit an accidental one – might actually work.
And then they were at the summit, the wide expanse where Stamford’s army waited for them, and the drums crashed out a new rhythm. It was the order for the united force to wheel to the left. Hopton’s column, having advanced to the south of the hill, were furthest right, and they took a wide berth, while the leftmost division, Basset’s, would stay put, becoming the anchor for the broad line. Stryker, with Grenville’s bloodied but exultant force, was in the centre.
Just as the Royalists completed their sweeping turn so that they faced due north, cutting off any retreat into Stratton, their right flank was quickly engaged by a desperate block of greycoats. Stryker watched as the men of Hopton’s column endured a storm of musketry, before meeting the rebels at pike point, the long staves passing one another, overlapping like hundreds of interlinked fingers. He stared at that fight, so close to him and yet out of his influence, and he willed Hopton’s companies on, as if some of his own determination might reinforce their bones.
‘Sir!’ William Skellen’s loud voice ripped through his s
kull, forcing his attention back to the front, and he saw that the warning came just in time. More broad, dense blocks of grey-coated pikemen, flanked by units of musketeers, were bearing down on his own position.
‘Muskets!’ Sir Bevil Grenville screamed from his position at the front-right corner of the pike block. He was bruised and battered but still enthused by a remarkable energy, and in this terrifying, exciting, blood-bubbling moment, Stryker understood why the Cornish Royalists would fight so hard for this man. Because, he realized, Grenville would fight for them too.
‘Muskets!’ Sir John Berkeley, hidden in the black void that was Stryker’s blind left side, echoed the order. It was repeated up and down the line by captains and lieutenants and sergeants alike, and, with the greycoats moving swiftly in, scores of musketeers moved to form a swathe of bodies in front of the pikes.
In came the greycoats, pace by thundering pace, their banners waved aloft at their backs, their faces twisted in pure hatred. Fifty yards. Thirty yards.
Twenty-five.
‘Fire!’
Stryker picked the chest of an advancing pikeman and pulled his trigger. The serpent snapped down in its short, vicious arc, the match plunged into the firing pan, and the charge ignited. He jolted back as the heavy stock kicked at his shoulder like an angry stallion, and squinted into the gritty, stinking smoke cloud that immediately wreathed his head. He did not wait to see what became of the man he had marked for death, for he knew the advancing pikemen would not have been stopped by the volley, and he twisted away, moving quickly to form up with the rest of the scuttling musketeers as the opposing pike units collided.
The wrestling match had begun, just as it had on the slope, and, as before, the Royalists were outnumbered. This time, though, the two armies faced one another in a broad line that stretched right the way across the hill, so Berkeley could not send his musketeers to hit the rebel flank.
Mind pulsating with equal measures of fear and excitement, Stryker threw down his musket and ducked beneath the tightly crossed pikes. It was as if he had entered a room newly erected on the pinnacle of this bloody hill, for the wooden shafts above him were so snugly packed, so interwoven, that they formed a ceiling. Neither side could advance, none would go back, and neither could so much as move, so entwined were they in each other’s ash-poled mesh. Stryker stayed low, crouched beneath what seemed like a wattle fence formed miraculously four feet from the ground. There was no room to wield a musket, nor to draw a sword, so he unsheathed his dirk and crawled on hands and knees to the Roundhead front rank.
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 42