To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  But Leslie’s voice was not loud enough to overturn the king’s impetuous urge to try to reverse a year of military disappointment by capitalising on the southern kingdom’s apparent vulnerability. Charles was determined to go south, and his impulsiveness trumped Leslie’s experience, knowhow, and feeling of impending doom.

  On 12 August Parliament passed an Act that noted that ‘Charles Stuart’ and his forces had been forced to leave Scotland after ‘finding their own weakness and disability to continue longer in that country’. The king’s army had not so much invaded Scotland, it was declared, but had rather ‘fled into England’. The Act stated that Charles had ‘been declared a Traitor to the Parliament and people of England’, and that anyone who communicated with him, or offered him support of any kind – ‘any victuals, provisions, arms, ammunition, horses, plate, money, men, or any other relief whatsoever’ – would be guilty of high treason, and ‘be condemned to suffer death’.3 It was understood by all that Charles, already declared traitor, would suffer the same fate if captured. But what if he succeeded?

  Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of a leading regicide, recorded the panic in the highest echelons of the Commonwealth as news of the Scottish advance reached them: ‘The Council of State … at that time were very much surprised at hearing that the King of Scots was passed by Cromwell, and entered with a great army into England. Bradshaw himself, as stout-hearted as he was, privately could not conceal his fear; some raged and uttered sad discontents against Cromwell, and suspicions of his fidelity.’ Eighteen months earlier these men had dared to judge and kill a king. Now that king’s son was heading south, with vengeance his spur.

  ‘Both the city and the country,’ Lucy Hutchinson recalled, ‘… were all amazed, and doubtful of their own and the Commonwealth’s safety. Some could not hide very pale and unmanly fears, and were in such a distraction of spirit as much disturbed their councils.’ Several of these meetings were, she recorded, punctuated with ‘raging and crying out’.

  Lucy’s husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, was an unflappable figure who had kept the Parliamentary cause afloat in Nottingham during the most challenging years of the First Civil War. He was not a man for surrender, or for flexible principles. Taken aback by his comrades’ panic, he urged them ‘to apply themselves to counsels of safety, and not to lose time in accusing others, while they might yet provide to save the endangered realm; or at least to fall nobly in defence of it, and not to yield to fear and despair’.

  Colonel Hutchinson set about rounding up all known supporters of the Crown in Nottinghamshire, to prevent them from joining the Scottish army. It was a procedure repeated throughout England and Wales. ‘Many gentlemen in the county of Monmouth, suspected not to be friends to the Parliament, are secured, and their horses seized on for the service of the State,’ the newsbook the True Informer reported.4 In Essex, the Reverend Ralph Josselin recorded in his diary for 29 August 1651 that there was an ‘Order to disarm and secure malignants in the County, and to raise volunteers for the security and defence of the same’.5 All known or suspected Royalists who were still at large had their weapons confiscated, and were forbidden to move more than five miles from their homes. While the threat from the north grew, the Council of State tightened its control throughout England by raising and reinforcing its local militia forces.

  There were fears that the Royalists might appear in other parts of England, in support of the Scottish land army. The east coast was seen as being particularly vulnerable. King’s Lynn, in north Norfolk, and Lowestoft, in Suffolk, were considered the most likely landing points, while Felixstowe was also ‘a place of great concern’.6 General Blake, in his forty-two-gun flagship Victory, was ordered to keep his fleet ready off the East Anglian coast to intercept any seaborne invaders.

  At the same time the Council of State wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Edward Salmon, governor of Hull, a city known to contain a large armoury: ‘We know that the Scottish army in England has a special eye upon Hull, and has long had designs upon it.’7 The number of phantom naval invasions keeping the Commonwealth on its toes demonstrates the deep concern that Charles’s progress had triggered.

  Reports of the king of Scotland’s advance into England were eagerly followed around Europe. Michiel Morosini, Venice’s ambassador to France, reported secretly to the doge and Senate: ‘Such favourable news comes from England that if there was not reason to fear that the queen [Henrietta Maria] announces it designedly, it might be possible to hope for the restoration of the monarchy. The king has entered England with 16,000 combatants, he defeated two corps of cavalry and is proceeding with growing prosperity, various towns have deserted for him, while his forces are augmented by the nobles who keep flocking to him.’ Morosini added one significant caveat to his dispatch: ‘But he is being followed by Cromwell, and here the Court prefers to hope rather than to fear.’8 The champion of the New Model Army had set out from Leith with eight mounted and eight infantry regiments, looking to join up with Parliamentary forces converging on Charles from two other directions.

  Charles’s envoy to Venice was Thomas Killigrew, whose expertise was in the theatre, not diplomacy. He boasted that his king was unopposed on his triumphant march south, and that it was thus fair to ‘hope, with the Divine assistance, [that] his Majesty will soon recover his crowns’. Killigrew also claimed that his master was ‘supported by all the nobles and leading people’ of England.9 Killigrew chose not to weigh down his pronouncements with detail or evidence.

  Sir Edward Nicholas, one of the late king’s closest advisers, heard equally upbeat reports, which helped to brighten up his impoverished exile in Antwerp. These also exaggerated the progress of Charles’s march south, and the vulnerability of his enemies. Nicholas was right to note, though, that the royal advance ‘hath given those at London a notable alarm’.10

  Similarly optimistic reports reached Bruges, from where Richard Parker wrote home: ‘Travellers from London report that Shrewsbury, Chester, Bristol, and Lichfield have declared for the King, and that he was within thirty miles of London, with 15,000 horse; that they are full of fear and have disarmed many of the citizens of London, which I wish we may find confirmed by post.’11 But the confirmation never came.

  The Council of State had better intelligence, which soon soothed the councillors’ initial panic. It was noted that ‘few come to’ Charles, ‘and those generally the scum of the people’. Richard Baxter, a leading English Puritan, put this reluctance to join the invaders down to the Scots’ recent defeats at Dunbar and Inverkeithing. This, he believed, ‘persuaded all men that necessity forced them [to invade], and they were look’d upon rather as flying than as marching into England; and few men will put themselves into a flying army which is pursued by the conquering enemy’.12

  The Scots were also ragged, which deterred would-be recruits from believing they would triumph. They were clearly under-equipped for their task, to the extent that their artillery was comprised of guns made of leather, not metal. The Duke of Hamilton, leading his cavalry regiment south, wrote with embarrassment about how ‘people were laughing at the ridiculousness of our condition’.

  National prejudice also played a part, for the invaders were regarded as strangely alien beings. A Parliamentarian newsbook enjoyed the fundamental problems that Charles’s sympathisers in the west of England experienced in basic interactions with the Scots: ‘Although there are many in those parts that are disaffected enough to the Parliament, yet by reason of the broad language of the Highlanders, they cannot understand them, and by the reason of the mixture of many other nations in the King’s army, they stand off at a distance, and look upon them rather with eyes of amazement, than affection.’

  The Scots were believed, after centuries of English propaganda against their fierce neighbours, to be compromised by an inborn savagery: ‘It is advertised,’ the True Informer said, ‘that many of the Scots Foot are sick in England, the softness of the southern air not suiting with the toughness of their temper, and complexion.
’13 The wild men of the north were viewed as fish out of water.

  False reports whipped up further hostility to the Scots. They were wrongly accused of murdering civilians in Nantwich and Northwich in cold blood. In fact, Charles insisted on the strictest discipline from all his men. When two of his soldiers were found guilty of stealing apples from an orchard, they were executed. But Parliament’s propaganda served its purpose, provoking widespread fury and galvanising resistance. ‘The early and angry drums did this morning call forth all our City Regiments into the fields,’ recorded a London newsbook, ‘where with the hamlets, and the soldiers of the Borough of Southwark, they exercised their army, and made gallant appearance in Finsbury Fields, the Parliament being present.’14

  There was a similar account from Tothill, near Westminster, stating that: ‘London had a rendezvous last week, where were 14,000 horse and foot in the field, at a very short warning.’15 In a dramatic flourish, the public hangman appeared in front of the troops to burn a declaration that Charles had released, asserting his right to the throne. Then, after the beating of drums and the sounding of trumpets, Parliament’s condemnation of the Scottish invasion was read out in full.

  Sick and wounded soldiers, billeted in and around London, came forward to offer their services in the protection of the capital. They wanted to assist the regiments under the command of two regicide colonels, John Barkstead and Owen Rowe. Barkstead and 2,000 men had been entrusted with guarding Parliament and the City of London. Rowe, a Puritan merchant who had helped settle colonies in Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut, stood ready with his regiment of militia cavalry.

  Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus of 28 August 1651 congratulated the English on staying wise to the madness of supporting the Royalist-Scottish invasion: ‘What a happiness it is, to live to see this day, wherein we have experience of the noble temper of a Nation! That though many of them be divided in matter of particular interest and opinion; yet they so well understand the general interest of England, that they scorn to embark themselves in such courses, as must of necessity, either debase us under the miserable yolk of a Scottish Tyranny, or vassalise us unto the will of an arbitrary Tyrant; for, had God given over the people to run a-madding after the Royal puppet, we could have expected no other consequence, but endless taxes, and inevitable slavery.’

  There was relief in the Parliamentary high command that Charles’s army remained almost entirely Scottish. Apart from the disabling of known Royalists across the land, few Englishmen welcomed the eruption of yet more warfare so soon after the bloodiest conflict that the country would ever know in terms of loss of life per head of population. John Milton had warned, nine months after the late king’s beheading: ‘his son’s restorement … would be so far from conducing to our happiness … that it would inevitably throw us back again into all our past and fulfilled miseries; would force us to fight over again all our tedious wars, and put us to another fatal struggling for Liberty and life, more dubious than the former’.16 This was a message that found an audience in many Royalist circles.

  Even Oxford, which had offered the late king a level of loyalty unsurpassed anywhere else in his three kingdoms, preferred peace under a victorious enemy to a return to the bloody turmoil that the king of Scotland’s invasion now promised. It seemed likely to Oxford’s inhabitants that their city would be the chosen destination of the Scots after they had gathered up Royalist reinforcements in Lancashire and Wales on their way south. Oxford was an attractive staging post from which to launch an attack on London, fifty miles to the south-east. As a result Charles I’s capital in the First Civil War prepared a force to dispute his son’s invasion in what was now the third such conflict.

  The Council of State noted with appreciation the readiness of Oxford’s scholars to serve the Commonwealth. Fresh fortifications were erected around New College, and throughout August commissions were granted to a range of volunteer officers eager to come to the republic’s defence. Captain Draper, governor of Oxford, was ordered to expect the arrival of Colonel Heane, one of the New Model Army’s most respected commanders. He was coming with significant reinforcements, and a commission to take over the city’s governorship.

  Charles had assumed that his charm and physical presence would entice some cities to open their gates to his men as his march progressed. ‘The king omitted nothing that might encourage the country to rise with him, or at least to be neuter,’ one of his cavalry officers wrote. On approaching Shrewsbury he wrote to Colonel Humphrey Mackworth, Parliament’s governor, in flattering terms. He saluted Mackworth as a gentleman, far removed from the rougher element on the rebel side, then demanded that the colonel surrender Shrewsbury’s town and castle to him. In return the king promised to pardon him, and ‘to grant you presently anything you shall reasonably desire’.

  But Mackworth’s reply was full of contempt. He addressed it not to any king, but simply to ‘The Commander-in-Chief of the Scottish army’. In it he stated: ‘I resolve to be found unremovable [as] the faithful servant of the Commonwealth of England: and if you believe me to be a gentleman (as you say you do), you may believe I will be faithful to my trust.’17 When Parliament learnt of Mackworth’s defiant words of loyalty, it sent him a gold chain as a reward.

  Contrary to what his English courtiers had promised him prior to the invasion, Charles was joined by few Englishmen of note on his advance south. The 7th Earl of Derby was the most eminent. He was persuaded to join the king at the insistence of his wife Charlotte. The Countess of Derby was the daughter of a French duke, and a granddaughter of the Dutch leader William the Silent, whose obstinate resistance to Spanish domination had been legendary.

  The countess had shown resilience during the Civil Wars to match that of her grandfather. In early 1644 she had overseen the successful defence of the family’s main residence, Lathom House in Lancashire. Her garrison of 300, which included snipers drawn from the estate’s gamekeepers, stood firm for three months against a besieging force of 2,000 Parliamentarians under Sir Thomas Fairfax before being relieved. Even the rebel newsbook Mercurius Politicus conceded the countess’s great achievement, noting that ‘the Amazonian Lady … hath so dignified her Noble House by those heroic feats of Lathom House’.18

  The Derbys’ vast landholdings included the Isle of Man, which they maintained as a Royalist stronghold throughout the First and Second Civil Wars. The earl now left his indomitable wife in charge of the island while he set off for the English mainland, landing on 15 August and meeting up with the king two days later. With him came 300 men, drawn from all of the Isle of Man’s parishes.

  Many of the difficulties within Charles’s army were personified by the soft-faced, dark-haired, thoroughly decent Derby. During the Civil War he had been given command of the Royalist forces in Lancashire and Cheshire. This leading role was awarded because of his hereditary wealth and influence in the two counties, which enabled him to hand 3,000 men to the king early in the conflict. But Derby had limited military ability. His record included a demoralising defeat at Whalley, in Lancashire in 1643, when his defensive generalship cost the Royalists the day. He also participated, a year later, in the storming of Bolton, where a massacre of a thousand soldiers and townspeople took place. The king had promised this lacklustre soldier governorship of five northern and western English counties, as well as all of those in north Wales, if he would help his invasion now. It was desperate stuff.

  Derby’s rigid religious views undermined his main task, which was to attract more supporters to the king’s banner. He had alienated the leading Roman Catholic Royalists throughout Lancashire at the outset of the Civil Wars because of his undisguised contempt for their beliefs. He did not like the High Church Protestantism that Charles I had championed either. Meanwhile he was unable to accept the Scots as allies, since he still saw them as the instruments of the late king’s death. He was an unlikely recruiting officer.

  Derby separated from the main royal force in an attempt to whip up more supp
ort for the invading army. He appeared before a meeting at Warrington, which had previously been his military headquarters, and urged the townspeople to join Charles’s cause. But this approach was rejected by Warrington’s Presbyterians, unwilling to side with the earl when he refused to take the Covenant.

  By contrast, the generals in Parliament’s New Model Army were all by now seasoned and accomplished soldiers, whose more modest social backgrounds were no impediment to high command. Thomas Harrison, in charge of one of the rebel armies in England, was the son of a butcher. John Lambert, who commanded another, was the son of a Yorkshire gentleman. They had both risen through ability to the pinnacle of the New Model Army. These two major generals joined forces near Bolton on 13 August.

  Harrison had made himself one of the most feared and hated of the Parliamentary commanders, distinguishing himself at the decisive battles of Marston Moor, Naseby and Langport. Extreme in his religious beliefs, he was buoyed by the clear certainty that God backed Parliament’s cause. He trusted that ‘the Lord hath now tempted out the enemy from his trenches, fastnesses, and advantages; and we doubt not but He will very speedily discomfit them, and cut this work short in Righteousness’.19 Harrison also looked forward to the prospect of personal revenge: he had ‘got a sore wound’ (so severe that, at the time, it was expected to prove fatal) when fighting the Scots at Appleby in Cumbria during their invasion of 1648, which had deprived him of a role in the decisive battle of Preston later that summer. This time he was determined to be present at the final elimination of the enemy’s military threat.

  Lambert was thirty-two years old during the Worcester campaign, but he had already served Parliament with startling distinction for nearly a decade. An inspirational figure at the battle of Preston, he had performed with equal brilliance during the recent campaigns in Scotland. His close observation of the awkwardness of the remodelled enemy lines before the battle of Dunbar had led to the tactics that won the day so crushingly. Cromwell’s poor health for much of his time in Scotland meant he frequently leant on the energetic genius of Lambert, who was two decades his junior. At the same time, the men of the New Model Army admired Lambert for his rare ability, and loved him for his personal courage. He led from the front, and bore the wounds that went with such risk. And it was Lambert’s brave and brilliant leadership at the decisive victory at Inverkeithing that had unlocked the Scottish defensive campaign, and persuaded Charles to dream that his march south just might lead to restoration.