‘We must hope,’ the man in green continued, ‘he yet believes our pace is determined by the foot.’
Rupert nodded. ‘And that is why our success must come down to haste. He will not think us capable of coming up with him for several days, or more, given the condition of the roads. So we will catch him napping. The vanguard will surprise Meldrum with his britches round his knees. And you, Henry, will bring up the foot in support. Can I trust ’em?’
The man in green was Henry Tillier, the commander of the infantry newly arrived from the Confederate wars in Ireland. He looked to be in his thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and fastidiously trimmed whiskers. ‘My men are not green, Highness, they merely wear it.’
‘Ha!’ Rupert guffawed like a thunderclap. ‘Very good, sir! And you are right, of course.’ He glanced sideways at Stryker. ‘These are veterans of the toughest grain, Major. Fought in Ireland.’
Stryker offered the best bow he could manage from the saddle. ‘Good to have you with us, sir.’
Tillier flicked a finger at the brim of his hat. ‘Good to be home.’
‘Colonel Tillier?’ Rupert cut in abruptly.
‘Highness?’
‘You are Sergeant Major General Tillier, as of this moment. Command my infantry, if you will.’
Tillier seemed to take a moment to digest the news, then utterly failed to smother a grin. ‘I will, Highness. Gladly I will. And thank you.’
‘Thank me, sir, should you survive. Now be gone. Fetch up the rearguard, get them to haul their slovenly arses to Newark. Make ’em run if you must!’
‘Highness,’ Tillier answered smartly, hauling at the reins so that his snorting charger would turn.
‘And General Tillier?’ the prince called after him. ‘There will be no pause for reflection. I mean to strike as soon as the moment is opportune. You are aware of our plan?’
Tillier’s horse wheeled about, turning a slippery circle in the mud, and he plucked off his hat in acknowledgement. ‘To the last detail!’
20th March 1644
Sir John Meldrum was not enjoying Newark. None could say he had been idle since enlisting with the Parliament. He had played his part at the sieges of Portsmouth and Reading, seen action at Hull, Gainsborough, Axholme, Cawood Castle and Airemouth, and had proved himself an able and pragmatic commander. Yet ever since the Commons had sent him to take charge in Nottinghamshire, matters had refused to run smoothly. From clashes with subordinates at Nottingham itself, to the abysmal weather and the lethargic manner in which his patchwork army had set about reducing Newark’s defences, he suspected God Himself was using the confounded county to test his faith. This morning was no different. Indeed, it was the worst blow yet.
He was fiddling with the lump of chalk as his Council of War entered the blackened chamber that served as his headquarters. He heard a mutter or two as they walked in, but he had grown used to their griping. They commanded detachments drawn from Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Norfolk, and often he suspected they despised each other as much as they despised the enemy. He set down the chalk and rubbed a crusty rag across the red tip of his wind-whipped nose, ignoring their acerbic grumblings.
‘Your scouts,’ Meldrum addressed one of the officers without preamble, ‘have sighted the enemy at Bingham.’
‘It would seem so, Sir John,’ one of the council replied. He was a fair-haired, broad-shouldered local. ‘They have a large force. Chased our garrison clean away.’
Meldrum glared from face to face, but not one of the remaining six officers met his eye. Outside it was raining again, a thin, persistent drizzle that dampened a man’s spirit as sure as it dampened his powder. Meldrum had chosen this room because it was one of the few left relatively intact after the fire, but still the ceiling beams dripped loudly. Already his throat was sore and his nose seemed to drip as readily as the charred Spittal.
He dabbed with the handkerchief again, balling it so tightly in his fist that it began to hurt. ‘Bingham,’ he repeated. ‘Less than ten miles away. Is that right?’ He looked up sharply, gaze resting on Colonel Hobart, commander of his Norfolk contingent. ‘Ten miles?’
Hobart had removed his hat upon entering, and now ran a hand through his lank red hair ‘Eight, at a pinch,’ he said awkwardly, glaring at his boots.
Meldrum sat back, crestfallen. ‘By God, I am confounded.’ He examined the roof. ‘How many do they have?’
‘Eight thousand?’ Hobart answered.
Now Meldrum looked at the Norfolk man. ‘Is that a question or an answer?’ Hobart’s wiry frame twitched in a shrug that only served to irritate Meldrum, and the Scot forced himself to look to one of the others. ‘You. Your scouts informed me Loughborough had gone west.’
‘He did, Sir John,’ the man answered gingerly, feet shuffling as he spoke. ‘Seems he doubled back. And it is not he who leads them.’
Meldrum had expected the news, but still it felt like he had been kicked in the stones. ‘Prince Robber.’
‘We have sighted his colours,’ the scoutmaster confirmed.
Meldrum tasted bile. He swallowed it back down. ‘Double the pickets. Treble them.’ The sneeze came then, an explosion that made him rock back in his chair, the sound pitched high and undignified. He wiped streaming eyes and gritted his teeth, forcing himself to meet the eyes of every member of the council. ‘I want to know when that damnable rake-hell so much as picks his nose, do you understand?’
‘Sir,’ the officers mumbled in unison.
‘And send men up to Beacon Hill. Search the horizon. He is close enough to strike. It may be as soon as the morrow. We must be prepared.’
Colonel Hobart edged out from the sheepish line. ‘I urge you, Sir John, to leave this place. Fall back upon Lincoln where we may consolidate our strength.’
‘Better to sacrifice our mission and protect East Anglia, Sir Miles?’
Meldrum flapped the air as if swatting a bluebottle. ‘Do not pretend you,’ he looked pointedly at the others, ‘any of you, are concerned with our task here. You each look to your own territory. The safety of your own lands.’ He shook his head, exasperated yet again. ‘This disunity will be the breaking of the rebellion, mark my words.’
Although he was tempted – so very tempted – to follow Hobart’s advice, the reality was that Meldrum feared a retreat more than he feared a fight. Cohesion would be hard to maintain during a logistically difficult withdrawal and chased along the Fosse Way by Prince Rupert, his troops would surely disintegrate. Besides, he had been ordered to take Newark, and God had decided to test him. How fitting it was that He should use the enemy’s greatest warrior – a man said to be in league with Lucifer – as His instrument. ‘We will stand.’
‘But, sir…’ Hobart made to protest.
‘Concentrate the foot and artillery here, at the Spittal,’ Meldrum went on as if the Norfolk man had not opened his mouth. ‘The horse will contest the enemy advance.’ He leaned back in the chair, relieved at having made the decision, and retrieved the smooth piece of chalk. ‘The morrow, gentlemen. He will come on the morrow.’
21 March 1644
The Royalist army had made remarkable progress, despite the filthy conditions. After an afternoon of much-needed rest, they mustered in the chill dusk, and marched out of Bingham by the light of the full moon. It was two hours past midnight, and the Fosse Way was empty. Clouds scudded above them in vast silver-edged banks, but the rain mercifully did not come, and the ancient highway, straight as a pike, was almost pleasurable compared to their recent march through Leicestershire’s fields and hedgerows. But it would be a short-lived respite, for, an hour into their march, Rupert had given the order to break off the road and head due east, pushing across open country towards the Great North Road. The makeshift army, scrounged from all the garrisons between Shrewsbury and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, numbered just over six thousand, roughly divided evenly between foot and horse, with three light field guns and a straggling train of baggage. It
was soon stretched in a loose column through meadow and copse, for the majority of the foot were not mounted, and could not hope to keep pace with Rupert’s cavalry, and the single contingent – Tiller’s greencoats – who had been allocated the horses for this final stage. But it was a risk, the prince had determined, worth taking. The plan had not simply turned upon speed, but on surprise, and the prince’s firm belief that the enemy would not imagine him capable of dragging an army – especially one hammered together like scraps of wood – across country in the dead of night, with only the moon as guide.
Stryker felt more alive than he had for days. His defeat by the dragoons, the loss of McCroskey and the ignominious retreat to St Wilfrid’s church had left him utterly deflated, but somehow fate had wrenched his fortunes around. Part of him considered Rupert foolhardy at best. They were marching to war, and, regardless of the sticky ground that churned beneath boots and hooves and wheels, the exhilaration was infectious.
Stryker rode in the vanguard with Hood, Skellen and Barkworth. In front, leading his advance party of fifteen hundred harquebusiers, was Prince Rupert himself, long hair sprouting below the riveted metal sheets of his helmet’s lobster tail, handsome features obscured by the three vertical bars that hung from the peaked visor. His torso was encased in metal, highly polished plate at breast and back strapped down below crossed belts, from which dangled a sword and carbine. His bridle arm was clad in steel, his boots were unfolded all the way up to his groin and a pair of pistols were holstered in his saddle. His blood-red scarf swathed his waist, leaving none in doubt as to his allegiance, and his spurs winked wickedly in the moonlight.
‘When I move, I mean to move quickly,’ Rupert said, and at first Stryker thought he must be speaking to his dog, Boye, who ambled alongside, white coat brilliant against the blackness. Then he twisted round. ‘Do you know what you must do, Major?’
Stryker’s heart pounded. ‘Aye, General.’
Rupert’s face was a mask in the darkness. ‘I will block Meldrum’s route to Lincoln, but you must spring our trap, Stryker. We live and die upon your success.’
Stryker glanced at the three men who shared in the ignominy of Lornell McCroskey’s escape. They shared this night’s risk. He touched a hand to his own chest, to the scarf that ran from shoulder to hip. It was not red, like Rupert’s, but tawny. ‘We are ready.’
Lornell McCroskey was a survivor, a winner, and that was why he knew it was time to leave.
He had left the infirmary as soon as the sounds of alarm cleaved through his fitful sleep. The guards outside the room had disappeared in the general confusion and he weaved through the fire-damaged corridors unchallenged until he was outside.
By the light of the Spittal’s myriad torches, Lornell McCroskey was treated to a vision of chaos. The old hospice, turned to a fortified leaguer by ditch and stake, resembled a trodden ant’s nest, such was the panic of its inhabitants. Musketeers and artillerymen ran this way and that, faces contorted by dancing shadows, some colliding, cursing, others staring bleakly up at the sky to the north and east. McCroskey could see nothing, blinded as he was by the tremulous flames.
Then he saw Sir John Meldrum. The army’s chief was standing fifty paces to McCroskey’s right, bleary-eyed from slumber, his jaw working furiously as he issued orders to a gaggle of officers clustered in his midst. In one hand he clutched what looked like a rock, chalky white, which he turned incessantly with the tips of his fingers, while the other hand held a perspective glass. McCroskey loped across to where the group stood, wincing at every forced step. ‘Sir John, what is happening?’
Meldrum handed McCroskey the glass and indicated the north-east horizon. ‘The enemy.’
McCroskey took the brass tube. ‘Enemy? Cavaliers?’
‘Prince Robber!’ a red-headed officer mewed, his accent borne of the flat lands around the Broads. ‘Up yon hill! By Christ, he is the devil’s man.’
Another muttered quietly, ‘How has he done this? He was in Bingham. Down the Fosse. He was to approach from the south-west.’
McCroskey kept the perspective glass steady, and eventually, Beacon Hill resolved against the dim sky behind, like a line drawn in charcoal across cloth of darkest grey. Up there were torches, not fixed to walls like those in the Spittal, but dancing like demons, gripped in the gauntleted fists of horsemen. He began to see shapes as his vision adjusted. Scores of troopers emerging in long files from the far side of the summit. The frightened officer had been right. The Royalists had come from the south-east. Not only had their unexpected appearance terrified the Parliamentarian army, they had somehow managed to circle about the siege lines undetected so that they now commanded the Fosse Way to the north. In effect, they had cut off the road to Lincoln, Meldrum’s logical line of retreat.
McCroskey lowered the glass and handed it back to Meldrum. ‘Clever.’
There were more horsemen now, closer, and he realised these were Parliament men stationed up on the hill now streaming back down the slope to swirl around the Spittal’s outer defences, desperate to gain the protection of the leaguer’s guns. Meldrum was issuing orders again. Snapping for the cavalry to intercept any attack, while infantry commanders were dispatched to form up their regiments.
‘I must leave,’ McCroskey said.
Meldrum cast him a surprised glance. ‘You mean to desert, sir?’
‘I mean to take my knowledge to London, sir. Your damned physic holds me prisoner.’
Meldrum shrugged. ‘He says you are not fit to travel.’
‘I will be the judge of that.’ McCroskey thrust a finger into Meldrum’s chest, jabbing hard. ‘You have been gulled by him, sir, and I will not linger here to reap what your stupidity has sown.’
Meldrum’s jaw dropped, almost more astonished than furious. Eventually he gathered his wits, and his eyes darkened just as a crimson tide flooded his cheeks. ‘M… mind your tongue, McCroskey, or I’ll…’
‘You will what, sir?’ McCroskey felt his temper bubbling over, but the prospect of capture had pushed him past caring. ‘Cradle that piece of old rock and snivel like a scalded bairn?’ He hawked a thick wad of phlegm into his mouth and spat it at Meldrum’s feet. ‘When I tell the Committee how you were hoodwinked by a man barely able to grow a beard, your name will be as cow dung. You’ll be back with your lighthouses quicker than you can wipe your arse.’
Meldrum’s eyes blazed. His lips seemed to flutter, as though he might offer a retort of his own, but then he turned and walked away.
Prince Rupert and his fifteen hundred horsemen crested Beacon Hill two hours after departing Bingham. It was almost dawn, and they could just make out the lines of Roundhead horse deployed at the foot of the slope.
‘How far behind, Colonel Gerard?’ Rupert bellowed at a young officer, his horse turning a tight circle, infected by its master’s excitement.
‘The foot, Highness?’ Gerard pursed his lips. ‘The mounted contingent are already at the foot of the hill. The rest,’ he shrugged, ‘two miles back, so I am led to believe.’
Whether or not the news was what he expected, Rupert did not deign to reply. Instead he stood tall in his stirrups, scanning the crest that was now alive with the thrum of hooves. ‘They are pinned against the river!’ he shouted so that all might hear. ‘I mean to smash them here and now!’ A deep huzzah rumbled up from the armoured column. He pointed towards the rebel encampment, around which units of infantry were beginning to form up behind the cavalry screen. His grin was hellish in the torch flame as he looked again at Gerard. ‘I will scatter the cavalry. We move now. You will remain here.’ He looked skyward as fat raindrops began to spatter the land. ‘Keep two hundred troopers and hold this damned hill until the rest of my army appears.’
Gerard nodded tightly, unable to smother his disappointment. ‘And General Tillier? His own regiment will be here in minutes.’
‘When Tillier arrives, send him down there.’ Rupert indicated a place on the river just north of Newark. ‘The bridge of boats.
Half of Meldrum’s army is stationed on the Island. Tillier’s task is to take that bridge.’ With that, the prince stood tall again, this time unsheathing his sword and holding it high like a steel banner. ‘Courage!’ he screamed, turning his horse again and again. ‘Let us charge them in God’s name!’
Stryker, Hood, Skellen and Barkworth cantered down the western slope of Beacon Hill. They were away to the left of Rupert’s main charge, which careened past them in a torrent of battle-cries and thunder, hooves kicking up gobbets of loose turf. The light was beginning to make inroads now, and the Roundhead infantry – divided into two bodies – could be seen clearly beyond the cavalry screen that waited to intercept Rupert’s attack. They were arrayed in a chequerboard formation, with pike and shot in alternate blocks so that the sixteen-foot-long spears could protect the musketeers from the oncoming horsemen.
The charge smashed home in a matter of seconds. Stryker had seen countless cavalry engagements, had been in a few himself, yet never did the horror of that initial collision dim in his mind or heart. The clash of swords, the crash of metal, the dull smack of flesh on flesh. All followed by shrill, blood-chilling screams. At once the horsemen were indivisible, one man indistinguishable from the next, red and tawny colours dulled by darkness, obscured by rain. The field words, chosen by each side before the assault, would be bellowed at the top of burning lungs.
‘Away with us,’ he said, and the foursome veered further out to the left flank, keeping well clear of the battle raging in front of the ditches and stakes of the leaguer. ‘Ready?’
Skellen spat into the gloom. ‘Too bloody late now.’
‘Aye,’ Stryker agreed.
They reached a lonely stand of trees, the last vegetation before Newark’s killing field began, and plunged into its embrace. There they reined in, sheltering from the drizzle, watching the fierce cavalry fight unfold. Prince Rupert was nowhere to be seen, though Stryker reckoned he could just make out his cornet fluttering madly at the very epicentre of the melee. Pistol shots cracked as horsemen fired into the faces of their foes at close range, the high-pitched reports echoing against the slopes of Beacon Hill. Still the blades clashed and the horses whinnied and reared. Still the Roundhead infantry waited, unable to bring their weapons to bear while there was a chance they would enfilade their own side.
The Prince's Gambit: Major Stryker and the the Relief of Newark Page 6