Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  He knew that few among the distinguished but essentially amateur warriors that held high commands of the English Army in Scotland were inclined to undertake – or incapable of achieving – that duty of holding men together under such duress. This included not only Fleetwood and Lambert, but the Captain General, Oliver Cromwell himself, who was nervously biting his nails to the very quick for fear of the trap he had led his army into. Had God deserted them?

  Monck chuckled grimly to himself; not if he had anything to do with it! Besides this grave charge was Oliver’s reward for his own secret service to the Captain-General. Now, thought Monck, there was an irony!

  Behind him his men grew restless; murmuring ran hither and yon through the ranks and in a low growl he called for silence. The men obeyed at once, word being passed down the line. Monck sensed movement out there in the darkness and even as he stood in the sodden morass of roadside grass he felt through the wet soles of his boots the ground tremble under the steady advance of Leslie’s cavalry.

  ‘Pass the word,’ he growled again to left and right, his voice level and striving not to alarm the oncoming horse, ‘to stand to, present pikes, musketeers to make ready!’

  ‘Aye, sir, stand-to, present pikes and make ready!’

  He heard the company sergeants pick it up and the urgent whisper vanished into the darkness on either flank. As the word passed down the line he saw the ripple of pike-heads as their hafts were dug in at the boot and the sharp points lowered, inclined ready to receive the oncoming cavalry: at least they might surprise Leslie a little. Monck hoped at least some of the musketeers had glowing slow-matches in their gunlocks.

  After a few moments pregnant with suspense, out of the wet darkness all along the front, emerging like ghosts, came the nodding heads of horses and the faint gleam of rain on helm, cuirass and sword-blade.

  ‘Give fire!’

  The volley was sporadic, a spluttering coughing, the powder of many damp and ineffectual, but the enemy’s horses baulked at the sudden appearance out of the rain of the steady, steel-tipped ranks of Monck’s infantry. Horses did not like pikes and their riders did not enjoy the flailing of leaden balls the musketeers – posted in the intervals between the companies of pike-men – now flung among them. It had been a long day and the rain dampened the ardour of the weary attackers and while the musket balls rattled rather than killed, others galled the jittery horses. A few gallant souls came on until their mounts, eyes gleaming, their hard-bitten mouths foaming at the constraint of their bits, turned aside. Fewer still, pressed by those behind them, near impaled themselves on the steel hedge, whereupon Monck seized his opportunity.

  ‘Advance pikes!’ he roared, and the front ranks thrust forward two or three steps; it was enough. Horses reared and screeched with pain as some pike-men found a target. Somewhere to Monck’s left a cavalry man lost his seat and fell with a mixture of clattering armour and the dull, sodden thud of bodily impact, to be trampled under the enraged and frightened hooves of his own horse.

  ‘Back! Back!’ Monck heard someone in authority cry, and a trumpet brayed the order to retire. Monck went forward, over the few dead and wounded – horses and men pressed into the mire. God! What a country for campaigning! He was followed by his company captains who, with drawn swords, despatched the wounded, both troopers and their mounts. It was a grimly bloody but necessary business and his subordinates were harshly professional. Confident that he had seen the last of the Scots for the night, Monck halted his men and returned to the line, ordering the men to lay down on their arms and the captains to post their pickets again. Finding a spot under the lee of a dry-stone wall Monck sat down, pulled his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes, wrapped his cloak tightly around him and went to sleep. The last thought that went through his mind before the sleep of exhaustion overcame him was that there would be more such work to do on the morrow. And that it would be raining.

  The following day it was clear that although Monck had thrown back Leslie’s half-hearted probe on the rear of the retreating English, the Scottish general had out-marched them on the right. Much of Leslie’s force was now ahead of them, occupying the hummock of Doon Hill, a commanding spur of the Lammermuir Hills that lay just south of the road to Berwick. During a day of constant drizzle falling from an overcast sky, wherein a low mist obscured a full view of the Scots movements, detachments of Leslie’s Covenanters came down from the hill and extended their line northwards, towards the coast and the town of Dunbar, barring the Berwick road to the south-east. Their line of retreat now blocked, the English Army was cut off.

  ‘We must now needs stand and fight,’ Monck growled to Major Abraham Holmes.

  ‘And needs must die to save Oliver’s neck,’ Holmes responded.

  ‘Happen that will be the fate of some among us,’ Monck agreed.

  ‘’Tis a pity it has come to this.’

  ‘Aye.’ Monck looked at his subordinate and grinned: ‘But that is always a possibility for a soldier.’

  Holmes stared at him for a moment and then caught his meaning and smiled back with a chuckle. ‘’Tis in God’s hands …’

  ‘God may need a little help,’ said Monck mounting the horse that had been led up on his orders.

  All day Monck, attending to the duty that was rightfully Lambert’s, brought forward the English units and deployed them along the line of the Broxburn as it roared in spate from the hills to the sea through small but precipitate ravines and wider, shallower crossing places.

  For their part, the enemy closed the trap. As the day drew to a close the English Army was entrapped, and knew it. Psalm-singing seemed the only remedy most colonels of the New Model could devise for this circumstance; they were not used to finding themselves in so dreadful a position under such foul conditions. Nor were they used to contemplating ruinous defeat.

  During the late afternoon, Monck had passed once through headquarters. A seated Cromwell had been pouring over a map, biting his lower lip, with Lambert standing beside him in – or at least so Monck thought – an attitude of piety designed to conjure up the help of Almighty God. He called his own small staff about him and set about posting pickets to cover the Army’s rear and to secure his own especial responsibility, the artillery train.

  ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he said at one dismal point as the wind began to rise and blew their mud-caked cloaks about their wet legs, ‘Leslie has no artillery to speak of; a few light guns, so all is not quite lost.’

  Afterwards a few of his own officers, Holmes included, recalled that alone amongst the English, only General Monck exhibited any optimism that dreadful day. Tough and dutiful, he was still at his rounds long after dark, apparently oblivious of the hopelessness of the Army’s situation. There were some, even among the beleaguered staff, who thought it clear evidence that George Monck was none too bright.

  *

  ‘Douse that lantern!’

  Monck heard the muttered remark this order prompted and stopped, to turn on the three young officers trailing in his wake. The fitful lantern-light fell upon a shiny slurry of wet earth, mud-caked boots and the three dejected forms as they stood in their sodden cloaks lashed by wind and rain. The light was extinguished and the impenetrable gloom closed round them, isolating them as individuals even as they stood close together.

  ‘You will see better when your eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness,’ Monck said kindly, ignoring the hint of insubordination, for they were exhausted and his order to accompany him as he made his last rounds of the lines and the artillery park in the Army’s rear, had sorely tested their obedience. They did not want a homily but they deserved one.

  ‘It is precisely now, gentlemen, when we are caught in so parlous a position as we now find our Army, that we must most exert ourselves. Such,’ he added, his tone hardening, ‘is the duty of officers.’ He stared unseeing in their direction for a moment, then turned and walked on, his boots slithering and squelching in the mud churned up by the horses and handful of carts that had be
en hauled out of harm’s way a few hours earlier.

  They were indeed in a parlous state. The English Army’s back was to the sea where the only escape was in an inadequate handful of store-ships lying in Dunbar harbour. To their front – towards the south-east – now firmly deployed across the road to Berwick-on-Tweed and the English border, lay twenty-three thousand Scots Covenanters under the able command of David Leslie. The Scots Army was more than twice the size of the force under Oliver Cromwell which, after an eight day march in appalling weather through country stripped of supplies, had failed in Cromwell’s objective of quickly seizing Edinburgh. In evading a decisive action, Leslie had exhausted the English Army, tempting Cromwell into a series of fruitless probing engagements, his guns of insufficient weight-of-metal to blast their way through Leslie’s carefully constructed defences.

  Unable to recruit all their necessities at Musselburgh, the invaders had been compelled to retreat, with Leslie and his moss-troopers in hot and eager pursuit. Reduced to a bare ration of stale cheese and biscuit, forced to drink burn-water or looted small beer, the English soldiers rapidly succumbed to the bloody flux as they tramped wearily through the sodden countryside under lowering skies, incessant rain and gales of wind.

  Now, to add to their misery, they had been outmanoeuvred by the enemy. Tomorrow they would be forced to fight and, as he trudged wearily through the mud, surrounded by the howling darkness of the wet and windy night, Monck reflected upon the likely outcome. They lay in Leslie’s palm and Cromwell’s vaunted reputation looked likely to be overturned. The English Army in Scotland – the New Model Army – was no longer in good spirits, for all its psalm-singing self-belief in its God-given destiny. The retreat in relentless rain, the lack of provisions and outbreaks of dysentery had, with the constant harrying of the Scots, seriously undermined the English soldiers’ morale. Their physical and moral condition was so compromised that even God, it seemed, had abandoned them while General Leslie’s Covenanters had simply out-marched them. Following a parallel line on the English right, Leslie had overtaken the English column to gain his position athwart the high road to Berwick, his left with its back to the steep rise of Doon Hill and his right almost down to the sea.

  Defeat and surrender confronted the English. Nothing less.

  Even under Cromwell’s iron hand, supported by Fleetwood, his second-in-command, by John Lambert, his Sergeant Major General, and by Monck himself, the mood of the Army had weakened, perhaps fatally. Few could see a way out of the trap.

  During that midnight trudge, it came to Monck with a rueful despair that, once again, despite his personal exertions, he was to be party to military disaster. What its consequences would be for him he dared not consider, but the thought of writing yet another self-exculpatory letter to Anne as some sort of record of what he had achieved was not attractive. The complexities of Ireland had vindicated the first; explaining ill-luck, foul weather and Cromwell’s fool-hardy advance offered no attraction in a second. He thought briefly of Anne and then, for a moment, he regarded himself as Jonah, destined to bring ill-luck upon all those with whom he associated. Was it the battering of Battyn that had so excited God against him? Or was it his betrayal of the King’s cause? Or, he thought with a spasm of guilt, of the great lie he had told to preserve Cromwell? God, in His omnipotence, knew he could have done little else and that, insofar as he had been able, he had stuck to some semblance of honourable principle in the abominable tangle of this world’s dismal affairs. But God made judgements notwithstanding mitigating facts; no doubt poor Judas could advance some excuses for his betrayal of Christ, but look what happened to Judas! And God was undeniably partial; did not the parable of the Prodigal Son prove that? Virtue rested with the steadfast elder brother who had done his duty, but God overset that and prospered the fickle, dissolute and whoring Prodigal. Monck wondered what the psalm-singing Puritan officers of the New Model made of that? It was an uncomfortable train of thought and Monck speedily abandoned it.

  That afternoon he had met with Cromwell, Fleetwood and Lambert in Dunbar where Oliver had sought the opinion of his most influential senior officers. There was, Cromwell, had said, a hope that they might inflict damage upon Leslie, whose left wing seemed constrained by the steep slope of Doon Hill and the gully through which the burn roared in its angry spate. Both Cromwell and Lambert thought they might turn the enemy’s right wing on the lower ground, nearer the sea and thus force the passage through to Berwick. Asked his opinion, Monck did not disagree – it was their only option other than capitulation, a word none could mention – but he held the venture to carry high risk: it was a forlorn hope. But what else could they do? Lambert had asked the question; full of the zeal of the Lord, no doubt, Monck had thought shrugging his shoulders.

  His head full of such considerations, Monck leaned into the wind and pressed forward, his staff reluctantly trailing dejectedly in his wake. Then, after ten minutes, he stopped again and one of his followers blundered into him, apologising as he fought to retain his footing in the slippery mire. Monck could hear the breathing of his companions and looked round. What of their faces was revealed beneath the dripping brims of their hats was faint and pallid.

  ‘The rain has eased somewhat,’ he remarked, ‘and we may make out the lie of the land.’ They had topped a low rise, from which the ground fell away slightly. Below them the Broxburn roared its way down to the sea just beyond the front of the English Army, a thin, faintly intermittent white line bounding the darker patches on the grey-black landscape that marked the English soldiers’ bivouacs. Only a few hissing fires were visible, the difficulty of finding firewood combining with the rain to render all form of comfort quite impossible.

  There was, he thought, a slight lightening of the sky; he looked up, a thinning of the cloud, perhaps? Perhaps not, for it was difficult to determine. The moon should be up, but there was little evidence through the scud. Even so, there, to the right, he could now see the dark, humped loom of Doon Hill reminding him, if he needed it, that Leslie’s overwhelming force lay beneath its brow. He scanned the ground that fell away from it to the left, his eye raking the gentle slope beyond the English Army’s front and the rushing burn. Here lay the prolonged encampment of the Scots in a line extending from Doon Hill away to the left, where the windswept sea battered the rocky outcrops east of Dunbar. He took his time, sensing the impatience of his companions; for all their wet misery they were eager to roll themselves in their cloaks and lie down under whatever shelter they could find at headquarters. God knew they might even find a bite to eat, left over from the table of the Captain-General, but they were on Monck’s staff, worse-luck, and the Lieutenant General commanding the artillery not only had a reputation for diligence beyond the call of duty, but Oliver’s wholehearted support. Indeed, it had seemed at times as if Oliver had wearied of his task and resigned himself to all-consuming anxiety, leaving matters of detail to Monck. It was certain that in recent days Cromwell had lost a great deal of his lustre – and no little of his magic either.

  Everyone in the English Army knew of the lengths to which Cromwell had gone to secure Monck a regiment of his own. It was the custom in the New Model Army for each field-officer to command his own regiment and Cromwell had to accommodate his new recruit. When the officers and men of what had been Bright’s regiment, then quartered at Alnwick, were asked if they would accept Lieutenant General Monck as their Colonel they had objected. ‘We captured him at Nantwich!’ they had responded dismissively, adding that ‘he will betray us.’ There were other mutterings, more serious in the God-fearing minds of the Puritan zealots that filled the ranks of the New Model Army; Monck was an adulterous sinner, living in defiance of the Seventh Commandment, contemptuous of the Word of God. He ought, moreover, to have been hanged, for the offence had recently been made capital.

  The new colonel appointed to Bright’s vacancy was the young and charismatic John Lambert, who was accepted enthusiastically and this completed the structure of the force Parli
ament had approved for Cromwell’s operations against the Scots. Monck was left hanging like a loose stirrup.

  Undaunted and determined to both repay Monck the debt he owed him and to establish him in his proper place as Lieutenant General of the artillery (which, without a nominal regiment, was but a cipher in the eyes of the troops), Cromwell had promptly stripped five companies each out of Sir Arthur Haselrig’s Blue-Coats at Newcastle and Colonel George Fenwick’s newly-raised Northumberland Regiment at Berwick. Both had been appointed to garrison duties and Cromwell’s action prised the reluctant soldiers out of their comfortable billets. Of these ten companies he made a regiment for Monck, desiring that Parliament add it to the New Model’s establishment and ordering that the two depleted garrisons be reinforced. Within a fortnight these men had forgotten their billets, forsaken their former identities, to take a new pride in their Colonel for, alone among the high command, Monck was the only professional, and it showed. Monck’s ability soon manifested itself, not least by his concern for his men’s welfare and by the unremitting demands he made upon himself as much as upon them. Such had been the kernel of his jest with Holmes, who had come to him from Haselrig’s Blue Coats. Even amid the present miseries of retreat and entrapment, it was Monck’s men who seemed to hold-up best, as they had demonstrated when they had stood so stalwartly against Leslie’s cavalry probe the previous night.

  Skilled as he was, Cromwell lacked the experience that made of diligence a necessary adjunct to mere command. Lambert was equally handicapped. His abilities as a lawyer competed favourably with his military skills; he was said to be great in council and in the charge of his horsemen, but he relied upon others to attend to the details of commanding the cavalry. The efficient ordering of supplies, even of farrier’s stores, seemed beyond Lambert if only he conceived it beneath his dignity. There was, in Monck’s opinion, a good too much made of dignity among men of Lambert’s stamp. You could only delegate if you understood what was necessary; merely leaving such details to others courted the disaster or negligence, for one failed to spot omissions.