Lambert’s initial aim, with 4,000 cavalry and dragoons, was to dissuade the Scots from contemplating a retreat by blocking off all possible routes home. At the same time Harrison had taken command of the northern militias, and had given them added backbone and professionalism thanks to an infusion of regular troops. Harrison’s brief was wide: ‘to stop what he can, and do what further he thinks fit in the counties as he marches’.20 He was ready to fight, should the enemy turn to engage with him – in fact, he hoped they would. Meanwhile, he and Lambert herded Charles’s forces southwards, as Cromwell raced to join up with them. They could then combine to form a force so enormous that the king of Scotland must surely be overwhelmed.
At the same time the lack of enthusiasm that the Scottish general, Leslie, had felt for the campaign from the start had soon become hollow despair. As he led his men ever further from Scotland, into territory that served up surprisingly few reinforcements, he was increasingly aware of England’s quiet, deep hostility. When he observed Lambert’s men behind him, and Harrison’s in front, Leslie guessed that worse was to follow. Cromwell must all the time be closing in, from who knew where.
While he was too professional to shirk his role as the king’s lieutenant, experience told Leslie that a disastrous end to this ill-judged invasion was certain. In the meantime, he proved incapable of staunching a constant trickling of deserters, and the contagion of despondency spreading amongst his men.
Lambert and Harrison comprised a formidable duo, utterly committed to the destruction of Charles’s army. Scoutmaster General George Downing reported, ‘Both Major Generals will march night and day till they get to them.’21 When they combined their forces, they had an army of 12 to 14,000 men. This, secondary, unit was nearly as numerous as the king’s entire command.
The major generals remained unsure as to Charles’s intended destination. Harrison felt sure it must be Worcester or Gloucester. He was confident that Gloucester would stand firm, its governor being Sir William Constable, an accomplished soldier. Constable also had every encouragement to remain free from Royalist clutches: he had sat with Harrison as a judge of the late king, and had joined him in signing the royal death warrant. Also, as a rebel newsbook of the time reassured its readers, the Gloucester garrison was ‘strongly fortified, and will not be taken either by the flattering declarations, or by the threatenings, of the Scots King’.22
Harrison was less sure about Worcester, an important city made rich by cloth- and glove-making, which had a history of Royalism. Charles I had twice visited it in the First Civil War, when it had early declared for the king. It had also been the last city in England to remain in Royalist hands during that conflict, its 100-strong garrison capitulating in July 1646. In case Worcester was Charles’s destination, Harrison sent 500 Welsh cavalry ahead, to bolster the Parliamentary force there.
The major general had guessed correctly: it was Worcester.
6
The Battle of Worcester
The Pict no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-coloured mind,
But from this valour sad
Shrink underneath the plaid.
From Andrew Marvell’s An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, written in 1650
On Thursday, 22 August Charles arrived at Worcester to find only light resistance. It soon became lighter. Harrison’s recently arrived reinforcements opted for discretion over valour, and quickly chose escape over death or capture. Troops from the Parliamentary garrison tried briefly to persuade the citizens to deny the king access, but realising the hopelessness of that idea, some fled while the rest surrendered.
The mayor and sheriff of the city, Thomas Lyson and James Bridges, welcomed Charles, and proclaimed him king of Great Britain, France and Ireland. After Lyson had led him through Worcester’s streets while holding a sword aloft, Charles addressed English suspicions about his predominantly foreign army. He promised to disband his Scottish soldiers as soon as he had gained his English throne, offered a pardon to those who had fought against the Crown, and ordered all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty to report for a military muster in three days’ time, ‘with any horse, arms, and ammunition they have or can procure’.1 The most notable respondent to this summons was Lord Talbot. But he appeared with a squadron of just sixty cavalrymen. The major of this troop was William Careless, a Roman Catholic who knew the surrounding area well. He was rejoining Royalist colours after a long time on the run from Parliament.
The Scots settled into Worcester, happy to recuperate after their 300-mile march. They were exhausted and footsore; many had neither boots nor stockings. Charles had planned to push his army on after a short rest in the city, but he soon appreciated that his men were in no state to continue further. However, Worcester as a defensive position was a great disappointment. Its fortifications were less robust, and its supplies were fewer, than he had expected. ‘But,’ the Royalists would record, ‘His Majesty thought he could not in honour leave them who had so willingly received him, to be plundered by the enemy.’2 Once they had enjoyed a brief rest, Charles had his men put to work, building a network of outer defences in anticipation of a visit from the enemy.
It was not long in coming. Cromwell’s main force had been in the Vale of Evesham, ensuring that the Scots could not head east for London. Learning that Charles and his men were now digging in at Worcester, on 24 August Cromwell joined his men with those of Lambert and Harrison, to form a combined army in excess of 30,000. Further reinforcements were arriving all the time, militia units coming from as far apart as Essex and Somerset.
The True Informer reported how Cromwell’s mighty force ‘advanced with incomparable cheerfulness and courage, to find out their enemies, amazed as much at their resolution as their numbers, are much about Worcester, which city if it should be so inadvised, as to countenance or admit them, believe me, they will repent it at their leisure’.3 Morale was further improved by the welcome they received from the civilian population, which was happy to supply the Parliamentary force with all that it needed. Meanwhile positive news was coming in from other parts.
On 25 August the Earl of Derby’s army of around 1,000 men was defeated. It was attacked at Wigan Lane in Lancashire by a force three times its size, led by Colonel Robert Lilburne, a regicide whose brother was a leading Leveller. While fewer than 100 of Derby’s men were killed in the battle, 400 were captured and the rest scattered, pursued by redcoats. What would have been a useful reinforcing army for the king was reduced to nothing.
Derby was among those who fled, after fighting bravely. He had led repeated charges against the enemy, but his raw troops were no match for Lilburne’s professionals. The earl was wounded several times before defeat was sure. He then escaped, fleeing in disguise with Colonel Edward Roscarrock, who was also wounded, and two servants. Reaching the market town of Newport, on the border of the counties of Shropshire and Staffordshire, he sought the advice of a friend, Richard Snead, as to where he could safely hide.
Snead took him to Boscobel, a manor house belonging to Charles Giffard, which was tucked deep inside Shropshire’s Brewood Forest. The housekeeper there, William Penderel, and his wife Joan tended to the earl’s and Roscarrock’s wounds. Derby stayed at Boscobel House for two nights. Then, on 31 August, he set off cautiously to rejoin the king, staying briefly with another Royalist household en route.
The Council of State ordered speedy justice against those of Derby’s men who had been captured. All the officers and one in ten of the private soldiers were to have ‘exemplary proceedings against them, [so] that when the punishment reaches to some, the terror may reach to many, to deter them from the like treasons’.4 But these sentences would have to wait until the alarm caused by Charles’s main army had been dealt with.
The defeat at Wigan Lane marked a crucial turning point for Charles’s chances of a successful invasion. Parliamentary sources reported with joy from Amsterdam: ‘The news of the Earl of Derby’s being routed, and the
General’s [Cromwell’s] approach to Worcester with his Army, hath put them to a stand, and hushed all in a general and serious silence, giving the Scottish King and his Army for lost, though yesterday they recruited their spirits again with a new invention of the king’s having taken Gloucester.’5
The Earl of Derby, the man tasked with bringing a plentiful supply of English soldiers to strengthen Charles’s army, limped into Worcester on 2 September with freshly bound wounds, and just thirty cavalrymen by his side.
Cromwell arrived at Worcester with his army on 28 August. A Royalist wrote with shock of how the republican force had by this stage grown ‘to such numbers as made the enemy near 40,000, and the least any of their officers report them was 36,000’.6 It was, along with the force that Boudicca led against occupying Roman legions, and the sides that clashed at Towton in the Wars of the Roses, one of the largest armies ever to fight on English soil.
Against such overwhelming numerical odds, Cromwell realised that the Royalists would soon have a simple choice: to fight or to take flight. In anticipation that, either way, the king’s men would soon be running for their lives, the Council of State decreed that all of its forces that were not actively preparing for battle should stand ready to scoop up the fleeing enemy. ‘Because none know which way the Scots will take, when they have entered upon that course,’ the Council of State advised its militia leaders in Yorkshire, ‘there will be need of many forces in several places. If this work be thoroughly and effectually done, it will very much contribute to a firm and settled peace for the future.’7
On the same day the Council of State put their commander in Scotland, Lieutenant General George Monck, on notice that a great victory was expected in England over the Royalist Scots, and that he must ‘be in the best readiness you can to entertain any of their stragglers’.8
Further south, militia commanders were ordered to ‘have your forces ready, and spoil all the fords, and stop the passes, to retard their flight’.9 Robert Blake, Parliament’s admiral, was informed that everything on land was fully under control: ‘There are forces on all the passes.’ Nobody must be allowed to escape from the coming reckoning, by land or sea.
Seeing the Parliamentarians arrive in such force, Charles was keen to do what he could to stop them settling in outside the city unmolested. ‘During the enemy’s lying there, the King was very active, and often sent out strong parties,’ it was noted, ‘but the enemy was so watchful, and lay so strong that, though our men behaved courageously, they could get no advantage of them.’10
The Royalists suffered major setbacks in the days before the battle. Charles ordered a night attack by 1,500 of his cavalry, who put on white shirts over their armour so they could be recognised by their comrades in the dark, and sallied out of the city’s gates. But a Worcester tailor called Guyse had betrayed the plan to Parliament, and the Cavaliers rode into stiff enemy gunfire before being forced to retreat. As soon as Guyse was identified as the informant, he was hanged.
Cromwell opted to encircle Worcester, and sent Lambert westwards to prod the Royalist defences on that flank. To his astonishment, Lambert discovered that the enemy had failed to complete the demolition of a bridge over the River Severn at Upton. On the far side were 300 of the king’s soldiers under the command of Major General Edward Massey, a former hero of the New Model Army who crossed to the Royalist side in disgust at the execution of Charles I. Massey’s change of loyalties had seen him derided in a London lampoon as ‘a strange, fat, unliked, small-faced fellow’.11 However, he had quickly become a favourite of Charles’s, joining him first in exile, and then in Scotland. A hugely able and experienced soldier, Massey now let his master down by negligently leaving a single beam intact across the entire length of Upton Bridge.
As daylight broke on 28 August, Lambert ordered eighteen of his best soldiers to cross the girder and establish a bridgehead on the far side. Concerned that they might tumble into the swirling water below, the men sat down to straddle the beam with their legs. They hauled themselves forward with stiff arms, lunge by lunge, praying that their slow and clumsy approach would go unnoticed by the enemy sentries. On reaching the other side, they were quickly spotted. They ran to the village church to make a stand.
The Royalists set the church alight, firing muskets and thrusting pikes in through the windows, while cutting down any who attempted to bolt from the flames. Lambert sent mounted dragoons across the Severn to see if they could rescue his trapped men. Seeing by the dragoons’ awkward progress that it was possible for men on horseback to cross the river, albeit with difficulty, he threw in more and more cavalry reinforcements.
Massey appeared from his billet in nearby Hanley Castle to direct his troops. The fighting was fierce, and he had his horse shot from under him. A ripple of grapeshot then caught him in the head, thigh and right hand, leaving him so badly wounded that it seemed certain he would die.
The Royalists had to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, and leave this western approach to Worcester in enemy hands. From this point on, no reinforcements could reach Charles from Wales or the west of England, two of the most staunchly Royalist areas in Britain. Meanwhile, the king lost the services of Massey, one of his ablest commanders, who was too badly injured to take part in the coming engagement.
Charles took personal command on the day of the battle. Early on 3 September, he went to the top of Worcester Cathedral with his council of war to inspect the enemy’s formations. It was a sparklingly clear morning, with perfect visibility.
It must have been chilling to see tens of thousands of the enemy openly preparing for a major assault. Of particular concern would have been what they spied to the south of the city, where a column of a thousand Parliamentarians was heading for the River Severn with pontoon bridges.
Units commanded by a nest of regicides were on hand to lead the rebels in their two-pronged assault, one of which was made possible by the recent capture of Upton Bridge.
Colonel Richard Ingoldsby was at the forefront of this Parliamentary attack, just as he had been to the fore at the storming of Bridgwater and Bristol. He now held a position with his infantry in front of Powick Bridge. This had been the site, nine years earlier, of the first Royalist victory of the Civil Wars, when Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s shock charge against the cream of Parliament’s soldiers had given birth to the military reputation of the prince and his brave but unmanageable Cavaliers.
Ingoldsby was a cousin and confidant of Oliver Cromwell’s. He had been appointed a judge at Charles I’s trial, but had been absent during the proceedings. He subsequently added his signature to the king’s death warrant, though he would forever claim that he had been forced to do so by Cromwell gripping his hand hard as he wrote. But the document survives, and Ingoldsby’s name appears clearly formed, in an easy flourish that gives no hint of duress.
Also in the front line was the cavalry of Colonel Francis Hacker, whose two brothers were Royalists: one of them had lost his life, and the other a hand, while serving the Crown in their native Nottinghamshire. Hacker had twice been taken prisoner of war, both times refusing his captors’ inducements to change sides. A diehard Parliamentarian, he had been placed in charge of guarding Charles I during his trial, a task he had performed with rough contempt for his prisoner: he had recommended the indignity of having two musketeers permanently by the king’s side, even in his bedchamber, but the proposal was overruled. Hacker had then been the officer to sign the order to execute the king, and had been present on the scaffold when the axe fell.
Alongside Hacker was William Goffe, a man of intense Puritanism. Goffe’s electrifying speech at a prayer meeting of the army in Windsor three and a half years earlier had persuaded many that the king must be tried for treason. He had argued that to fail in this duty would surely lead to the Parliamentary cause being punished by God.
In support of their comrades stood Lord Grey of Groby, commander-in-chief of forces drawn from the Midland counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire,
Northamptonshire and Rutland. He was the only son of a peer to sign Charles I’s death warrant. Grey’s belief in the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown was vividly displayed on his military banner, on which an image of the House of Commons in session was encircled by a series of daggers, gripped tight by determined hands. Lord Grey’s fighting motto, when translated from the Latin, read ‘Through War, Peace’.
To the other side of the Royalists stood Commissary General Edward Whalley, who had guarded Charles I when the king had been held in Hampton Court for several months in 1647. Charles had broken his word to Whalley, and secretly fled to the Isle of Wight. Despite a civil relationship with his prisoner, Whalley had no compunction in judging him guilty of treason at trial, or in signing his death warrant. Wounded a year earlier at the battle of Dunbar, Whalley had accompanied Cromwell on his recent march south. He now stood ready to help secure the defeat of Charles Stuart and his Scottish invaders.
Colonel Thomas Pride and his regiment had taken a central role in preparing the ground for Charles I’s trial, by purging the House of Commons of those Members who might have voted to spare the king. A brewer from London, Pride was one of those who had championed a petition to Parliament in 1648 demanding that Charles be proceeded against ‘as an enemy to the kingdom’.
To Catch a King Page 9