Marston Moor

by Michael Arnold

  ‘The enemy don white paper in their hats,’ a haughty messenger with russeted armour and hair in glossy ringlets called down to Stryker as he cantered past.

  ‘Paper?’

  ‘Or handkerchiefs.’ The horse continued by so that he had to twist hard to keep hold of the conversation. ‘We, therefore, shall wear none!’

  Stryker knuckled the edge of his hat. ‘Field word?’

  ‘God and the King!’

  As Stryker turned to pass on the order, a wave of sound rolled down from the slopes and flooded the moor, deep in tone but temperate, pleasant even. The Royalist army seemed collectively to hold its breath.

  ‘Psalms,’ Lieutenant Hood said.

  Faith nudged her pony forwards. ‘It is beautiful.’

  ‘Aye,’ Stryker said. All across the ridge, the armies of Parliament and Scotland sang together, voices rising and falling in unison. It was jarring in so martial a scene, yet he could not deny the strange, raw beauty of it.

  ‘They sing psalms!’ a man’s voice, risen to a childlike pitch, ripped through the chorus. ‘I knew it! We stand here, fearful and silent while the righteous worship on high!’ He was dressed in the leather and steel of a harquebusier, but he had dismounted, staggering across the open ground between the foot brigades that made up the second line of Rupert’s infantry and the cavalry reserve commanded by Crane, Widdrington and Stryker. He reeled away from his horse, turning a full circle and staring up at the sullen sky, raindrops soaking his face. ‘Oh, Jesu, we are lost! All is lost!’

  ‘Shut him up, for Christ’s sake!’ Crane’s voice bellowed from further along the line.

  An officer with a silver-capped blackthorn cane spurred his white mount from one of the nearby horse brigades. ‘Smith!’ he called. ‘Get back to your saddle, sir, this instant!’

  Smith laughed a crazed, manic cackle. ‘Doom and damnation is all we may find on this cursed moor!’

  The officer bore down on the ranting trooper, hitting him hard with the blackthorn. ‘To your saddle, man!’

  Smith seemed not to notice. ‘Do you not hear them, my lord? They do sing their psalms, for they know they are Godly and they know they will carry this day.’ The officer caned him again and this time the moon-eyed harquebusier stumbled to his horse. ‘God is on their side, my brothers!’ he called as he clambered into the saddle. ‘He is on their side! We shall be routed! Do you hear me? Routed, and scattered and slaughtered like hogs!’

  A brace of drakes spluttered into life from halfway up the hillside, their bounty screaming over the heads of the foot brigades, dipping as they raced between Stryker’s troop and Crane’s. The woodland crackled behind as branches severed and fell.

  Smith laughed again as his horse walked back to his own section. ‘I will be slain!’ he yelled. ‘Jesu, help me, I will be slain this day!’ His officer, shepherding his return, snapped a rebuke. Smith lurched to the side and vomited. ‘God damn me!’ he spluttered as a stream of greenish bile soaked his thigh. The drakes barked again. ‘God sink me!’

  The blood came before the vomit ceased. The drake bullet, all five careening pounds of it, took Smith in the stomach. He folded in half, dropping the reins and clawing helplessly as his guts spilled down his horse’s flank. Then he was off, toppling face first in the grass. His mount went back to its meal. The Royalist ranks stared, and the Allies sang. A drummer played a solitary rhythm that might almost have been a lament, except that a trumpet call joined in, and then a shouted order and another drum, and Stryker looked to his left, past the Lifeguard and the long line of troopers under Colonel Widdrington. From the direction of the city, entering the field behind banners of distinct red and white, at long last, came the Northern Foot.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Move those guns!’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine shouted at the cowering gun captain. He pointed to a hummock of rising ground that blemished the flat moor close to the ditch. ‘The hump, there. It will be more advantageous.’

  The gun captain, commanding a battery of four small field pieces that had been playing upon the horse of the Allied left wing to virtually no effect, scrunched up the shiny skin of his powder-burned face. ‘It is closer to them, Highness.’

  ‘It will be better drained.’ Rupert glanced pointedly at the half-buried wheels of a smoking robinet. ‘You will not sink.’

  ‘Very well, Highness.’ The gunner doffed his cap.

  Prince Rupert steered his stallion away, cursing his subordinates as roundly as his warbling enemy. His only prayer was that the Roundheads would attempt an advance upon the ditch that was shielded by thorny hedge and lined with muskets. He kicked hard when he saw the red flag of the Marquis of Newcastle bobbing above the densely packed bodies filling the moor, because it was not a small cornet, rippling on the breeze at the head of horsemen, but the huge square of taffeta carried by an ensign of foot.

  ‘It has been a long wait,’ he said bluntly as the leading man, riding before the colour on a sleek charger, took off a yellow-feathered hat to let his tightly curled red hair flow free.

  James King, first Lord Eythin, set his sharp chin. ‘I have had to drag the men from the enemy camp.’

  ‘So I understand,’ Rupert said, bending slightly at the waist as the Marquis of Newcastle reined in beside him on the liveried warhorse that had been brought with his coach. He looked again at the marquis’s military adviser. ‘Saps lined with treacle, were they, General King?’

  ‘It is Lord Eythin now, sir,’ the Scot replied coldly.

  ‘And it is Highness, as it ever was, General King.’ Rupert appraised the broad column of pikemen and musketeers that trudged on to the field. Each banner denoted a new company. He was privately so relieved that his insides churned, for there were thousands, and a large proportion wore the white of Newcastle’s highly regarded regiment. ‘Your tardiness has thrown away the opportunity to attack while they were in disarray.’

  Eythin bridled. ‘And your eagerness to dash men against a superior foe does you no credit.’

  Newcastle raised his hands for calm. ‘Let us dispense with this foolishness, gentlemen. It is undignified in front of the men.’

  Rupert nodded grudgingly and took a sheet of paper from the neckline of his breastplate. He handed it to Eythin. ‘I have marshalled the army thusly. What say you?’

  Eythin scanned the sketch, shaking his head before he had even looked up. ‘I do not approve, sir, for it is drawn too near the enemy, and set at heinous disadvantage.’

  Rupert glowered. ‘The Roundheads are compelled to cross the ditch, yonder.’

  ‘While we are compelled to advance up a steep hill.’

  The prince sucked at his upper lip, then sighed. ‘I will consider withdrawing to a distance deemed safer, if that please you gentlemen?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Eythin replied before his patron could open his mouth. ‘It is almost six of the clock. Too late in the day for battle. We must look to rest the men before nightfall.’

  ‘I would fight yet,’ Rupert said.

  The Scot fixed him with a stare few risked. ‘Sir, your forwardness lost us the day in Germany, where yourself was taken prisoner.’

  ‘I was took prisoner, General,’ Rupert’s retort was caustic, ‘on account of a cavalry charge which would certainly have succeeded had it been properly supported by your own troops.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Newcastle cut in plaintively, ‘this brings us nothing but consternation. What say you, Your Highness? Will you consider an action upon the morrow?’

  There followed a period of silence as prince, marquis and lord eyed one another. The singing on the ridge had ceased, as if the entire Allied army awaited their decision. ‘Move your foot to the right of the formation, General King,’ Rupert commanded eventually. The robinets he had relocated opened up a new barrage to break the spell. ‘I would have them in place should matters take a turn. But send men to bring provisions out of York. We will make camp here for the night and see what the morrow brings.’

  Lieutenan
t-General Oliver Cromwell thanked the pioneers as they finished their work. The warren, installed at Bilton Bream to feed the villagers of Tockwith, had long since broken its man-made limits, and burrows infected the slope like syphilis in flesh. But the team of surly Scots, wielding shovels with calloused hands and brawny shoulders, had done their job well, and a smooth causeway split the pitted terrain so that the soil would not prove hazardous for his beloved harquebusiers. Moreover, the wall and hedge perimeter had been cut through, leaving nothing but a clear run down which any attack could be launched.

  ‘Will you allow me, Uncle?’

  Cromwell bit his lip as he curbed his huge destrier, Blackjack, the beast grumbling as the robinets down on the moor opened up on their position. ‘Nay, Valentine, I will not.’

  ‘Uncle—’ said the boy to his right, who was mounted on an admirably docile mare.

  Cromwell stared at the modest hillock beside the ditch that was shrouded now in thick cloud and where the crews worked furiously. ‘Nay, Captain Walton,’ he repeated, the official title a rebuke in itself, ‘and calm your temper before the men. Leven has command.’ He pointed behind, up at the crest near the knoll on the far side that marked the highest point. ‘The battery there will give a salvo to mark the advance.’

  Valentine Walton grimaced but decided to relent. ‘The ditch will not be easy to negotiate. They have shot therein, I am certain.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  The Royalist guns at their new position erupted again. This time the trajectory was good, and their shot flew devilishly close, roaring between the troopers on both sides. The horses made their fears known, skittering sideways with shaken heads and restless hooves. Cromwell called for calm, and his men reformed.

  ‘Perhaps we will not attack,’ his nephew said. ‘The Northern Foot has arrived. Impetus is lost.’

  ‘Aye, perhaps,’ Cromwell said. ‘Remember the Book of Acts, nephew: To do whatsoever thine hand, and thy council had determined before to be done.’ He pointed skyward. ‘The Lord has determined all. There is no impetus, no opportunity, without He who has determined it. We must pray, and allow events to fall into their rightful places.’

  It was then that the last of the guns, having misfired during the full salvo, finally loosed its charge. The ball whined as it traced the slope, only halting when it shattered Walton’s kneecap.

  Stryker gave the order to stand down.

  As the duel between the opposing gun crews had reignited, the foremost sections of the Allied army had moved a short way down the slope in the hopes of drawing the Royalists across the protective ditch, but Rupert had evidently not been swayed. Indeed, the directive to rest had come almost immediately. They were to keep formation, remain all night in line of battle to block the enemy’s route to York, but save their strength for the morning. The men complained, of course, for the moor was rapidly deteriorating into a morass, and the rain kept falling, but supplies were promised from York and their bellies would soon be full.

  The Marquis of Newcastle had retired to his coach to dine, and his personal cavalry unit had escorted it from the field, returning, Stryker assumed, to the comforts of York. Prince Rupert had declined to accompany the marquis, preferring to remain with his army, but he had taken his Lifeguard, under Sir Richard Crane, to the north, seeking privacy from the rabble of his common soldiers and the fury of the cannon.

  The rest of the cavalry reserve, Stryker’s men among them, dismounted and walked their horses to the trees a short distance to the north. Some tethered the animals to the outermost trunks while others went to collect kindling from the drier depths within the forest, but most watched as the Northern Foot made their way on to the moor.

  Field command of Newcastle’s pikemen and musketeers devolved to Sir Francis Mackworth as the units began to take their places within the main infantry body. It would be time-consuming, for there were several thousand, but no full engagement was expected. Time was something they had in abundance.

  As they came through behind their great, swaying banners, Stryker was able to see the pattern, hitherto known only to the High Command, gradually resolve. The regiment of Colonel Cheater and the smaller detachment of Derbyshire foot were forced to move over to the left to accommodate the latecomers, in order that the men released from York could take up position on the right-hand side of the infantry formation.

  With Newcastle’s forces, the foot brigades would be deployed in three lines across the centre of the open moor. Each body – or battaile – in mirror of their counterparts on the rising ground, placed their pikes in a dense block, flanked on both sides by parties of musketeers. The hardened veterans of the Irish wars, under the unflappable Henry Tillier, had long since held the front row, and they would remain in position. The second row was comprised of seven bodies, which had been deliberately arranged to cover the gaps between the units in front, and it looked to Stryker as though four – from Cheater’s, Chisenall’s and the Derbyshire men – had been joined by three of Newcastle’s. The third line, forming up immediately in front of his own horsemen, contained the last of the Northern Foot, Newcastle’s whitecoats, supported by a brigade of horse.

  Mercifully, the rain ebbed. Someone sang. It was no hymn, but a bawdy ditty from a dockyard or tavern, and the men laughed and bellowed along, revelling in the contrast with the men on the high ground. A wagon came up – the first, they hoped, of many – and its hogsheads of ale were broken open and distributed as the genesis of a hundred small fires flickered into life and the musty depths of snapsacks were plumbed for food.

  Yet all the while they took their beer and bread, the gun batteries played out a private contest. Over on the left – the enemy right – the muzzles flashed to little effect, but to the right, up at the place of decrepit cony warrens where the first of the day’s blood had been shed, the hitherto tight-knit lines of Eastern Association cavalry were in disarray as a single nest of Royalist guns caused havoc from a raised scrap of moorland. Stryker had stayed to watch as volleys barked back and forth, but now he turned Vos towards the wood as his own stomach gave complaint.

  ‘The Prince sees sense, Lord!’ a familiar voice hooted at his back. ‘You told me he would, and he did!’

  Stryker froze. He wheeled Vos round. It was just after seven o’clock, still daytime for July, but the malevolent skies brought on a dusky veil that made him squint at the face before him. ‘Seek Wisdom?’

  A grin of rotten gums opened like a black slash across the white-bearded face. ‘The Lord told me, boy.’ The old man, cloaked and hooded, jerked a gnarled thumb over his shoulder to indicate the successful battery. ‘That prince, the Lord said, will put his bloody guns where they won’t sink! And Hallelujah for that! ’Tis Cromwell up there, did you know? His bastards are the best horse they got, boy. Need to kill ’em first!’ He tapped his nose with a finger. ‘They’re good troops, boy. Godly, pious.’

  ‘Piety does not make a man swift with steel, Father,’ Stryker chided.

  ‘They’re Puritans, boy! Is your mind full of mould? You listen to us, boy; me and the good Lord above. Those bastard horsemen are deeply religious. Not in a wise, thoughtful way like myself, you understand, but hard-nosed and unswerving. Their dogma is one of Predestination. You know what that is?’

  ‘That all things are fated by God. Man can change nothing.’

  The craggy face creased deeply. ‘A creed which tends to make its adherents fear nothing. Nothing! It makes ’em brave, boy, and it makes ’em ruthless, and it makes ’em mad as rabid badgers. You’ll not break those bastards, boy, for they do not fear death!’

  ‘Keep yourself hushed, Father,’ Stryker warned, ‘lest you wish to frighten the men.’

  Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner winked, twirled about like an acrobat, and cupped palms at his mouth as he bellowed at the nearest of Brownell’s troopers. ‘Worry not, boys, for we will win this fight! The ugliest man in Christendom doth fight the foe!’ He pointed at Stryker. ‘They’ll ignore your blades and run
from him!’

  Stryker slid down from the saddle, boots squelching. ‘It is good to see you.’

  ‘Likewise, boy,’ the priest said, shaking the soldier’s proffered hand. He let his ice-blue eyes drift over Stryker’s shoulder. ‘Sergeant Skellen. Mister Barkworth.’

  Barkworth and Skellen had walked out of the wood edge, Faith a little way behind, and both greeted him warmly.

  ‘’Tis a melancholy sort of eve,’ Gardner went on. ‘Thus, the Lord demands I provide some amusement, do you not, Lord?’ He turned with a wink. ‘So feast your eyes on this!’

  ‘Cap’n Forrester, sir!’ Skellen exclaimed on seeing the officer stride from a group who had been in deep conversation.

  Forrester offered an ostentatious bow, plucking off his hat. ‘Well met, my friends. Damn me, but you are well met indeed.’

  Stryker shook his hand. Forrester’s sandy hair was thinner than he remembered, and the corners of his eyes bore new lines. ‘A hard few months, Forry.’ He threw a soft punch at the captain’s shoulder, where a blue and red cross had been stitched over the red wool of his regimental coat. ‘And what is this?’

  Forrester blushed immediately. ‘An award from the Marquis.’

  ‘Valour, boy!’ Father Gardner cackled, shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘Did I not pledge to amuse? Bloody valour!’

  ‘They recognize it here,’ Forrester said stiffly.

  ‘Pah!’ Gardner scoffed. He began to walk away. ‘My prayers are needed with the regiment, Stryker, but the good captain will regale you, I’m certain!’

  ‘You must regale us,’ said Stryker, fixing Forrester with a wry smile. ‘Come.’

  The guns kept firing as they went over to the trees and the skeleton encampment. ‘You are well, sir?’

  Forrester nodded as he took bread from Thomas Hood. The group gathered under a thickly leafed bough that kept the rain at bay. ‘As can be expected. In truth,’ he added, looking out towards the moor, ‘I had thought to be lying dead by now.’