Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Once the fifth Henry could rob excellent well,

  When he was Prince of Wales, as Stories tell.

  Then Friar Tuck, a tall stout thief indeed,

  Could better rob and steal, than preach or read.[109]

  Rupert, like his princely predecessor two and a half centuries beforehand, was seen as a young warrior whose hot blood lured him into terrible transgressions. The young Palatine, though, was a foreigner, whose peccadilloes were harder to forgive. Furthermore, he had no credit to his name to touch that of Agincourt. His reputation could be blackened without fear; the greater his achievements, the more they must be presented as the sinister accomplishments of a high-born but devilish reprobate.

  The image of the prince was coloured not just by outlaw romance, but also by the acts of real contemporaries. They joined high birth and personal courage to thrillingly daring, dastardly deeds. One such cad was John Clavell, a gentleman thief whose crimes were well known to Charles I’s England: arrested in 1627, he attempted to justify and atone for his misdeeds with a series of pamphlets and plays detailing his exploits, many of which were greatly embellished. Clavell, from a good family that had fallen on hard times, was sole heir to a rich uncle. His unfortunate decision to become a highwayman — which he termed a ‘knight of the roads’ — saw him die impoverished, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. His life of criminality showed that slyness and skulduggery were not the monopoly of the poor and the desperate, but could be attributed to those of gentler blood.

  It was easy for Parliamentarian propagandists to seek to undermine Rupert’s qualities and talents by tapping into this vein of popular story-telling. They presented the prince’s legendary luck as the outrageous tricks of a highborn scoundrel. One of the many nicknames given to Rupert early in the Civil War was ‘Prince Robber’.

  *

  The profile of the prince as foremost Royalist champion was reinforced when he openly challenged the Earl of Essex to fight. The prince, recently made a Knight of the Garter — England’s highest chivalric honour — accused Essex of seeking the crown for himself, and invited him to bring his army to combat the Royalists at Dunsmore Heath on 10 October 1642. This, Rupert claimed, would settle the two sides’ differences in a day: it would be ordeal by battle. ‘And’, offered Rupert, ‘if you think it too much labour and expense to draw your forces thither, I shall as willingly, on my own part, expect private satisfaction as willingly at your hands for the same, and that performed by a single duel; which proffer, if you please to accept, you shall not find me backward in performing what I have said or promised. I know my cause to be so just that I need not fear; for what I do is agreeable both to the laws of God and man, in the defence of true religion, a King’s prerogative, an Uncle’s right, a Kingdom’s safety; think it therefore not strange that a foreigner should take foot upon your English shore with intention to draw the sword, when the Law of Arms prompts him on to that Resolution.’[110] It was this sort of posturing — sincere, forthright, but overconfident — that allowed Rupert’s enemies to represent him as hopelessly arrogant.

  Yet Rupert’s military worth was soon revealed. His ceaseless energy made one Parliamentarian write that the prince ‘slashed through the land as the lightning that strikes from one quarter of the Heaven to the other’.[111] One of his tasks was escorting silver from Oxford University to the safety of Royalist Shrewsbury. Resting at Powick Bridge, 3 miles south of Worcester, he and his men were taken by surprise by 1,000 Parliamentarians in the first notable encounter of the war.

  Rupert immediately leapt onto his mount, urged his men to follow him, and led the counter-charge. Unnerved, the Parliamentarians, discharging their firearms ‘at too uncertain a distance, did no execution; but the front of Prince Robert’s troops coming on, discharged just at their breasts, and quite cut off the front: Serjeant Major Byron shot a bullet into Douglas’s belly; Prince Robert, his brother [Maurice], and Sir Lewis Dives slew each a man; Colonel Wilmot singled out Colonel Sandys, and gave him his death-wounds’.[112]

  The rebels withstood another round of fire from Rupert’s men, but the third time they were shot at, at point-blank range, they broke and fled. In the ferocious quarter of an hour of fighting, and in their subsequent flight across a river, dozens of Parliamentarians were slain or drowned, including some of their most promising officers. Their commander, Colonel Sandys, his life ebbing away, repented his disloyalty to the king: Dr Watts, Rupert’s chaplain, received his dying words, which were full of regret. Only a handful of Royalists died at Powick Bridge, though several of the officers who had been at the forefront of the charge were wounded: ‘Prince Maurice hath received two or three scars of honour in his head, but is abroad and merry,’[113] Lord Falkland wrote; while Lord Wilmot’s back was slashed by an enemy sword and Sir Lewes Dives was shot in the arm. Rupert, though ‘he ventured as far as any trooper of them all’,[114] remained unharmed. He wrote to his uncle: ‘Your Majesty will be pleased to accept this as a beginning of your Officers’ and my Duty; and I doubt not, as (certainly) they behaved themselves very bravely and gallantly, that hereafter Your Majesty shall find the same behaviour against a more considerable number. Of this Your Majesty may be very confident.’[115]

  ‘This victory’, a Parliamentarian later conceded, ‘was of great consequence to the Enemy, because [it was] the omen and first fruits of the war.’[116] Clarendon, in his chronicle of the Civil War agreed, recalling that the Parliamentary forces ‘talked aloud of the incredible, and unresistible courage of Prince Rupert, and the King’s Horse’.[117]

  It remained to be seen how the charismatic young general and his spirited cavalry would fare in the more structured arena of set-piece battle.

  Chapter Six - Edgehill

  ‘Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends. Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.’

  Sir John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook

  Both sides in the Civil War looked for past experience when raising their armies, but there were few in either army who could claim to be real soldiers: ‘None was thought worthy of that name, but he that could show his Wounds, and talk aloud of his Exploits in the Low Countries,’ recalled a contemporary, ‘Whereas the whole Business of fighting, was afterwards chiefly performed by untravelled Gentlemen, raw Citizens, and Generals that had never seen a Battle.’[118]

  Parliament found it easy to recruit in London and the southeast, but the intake in rural areas was often raw and easily shocked by the realities of war. The Earl of Bedford reported from Dorset, in the first month of fighting: ‘The men we brought with us were all Trained-bands, so unskilful, from the colonel to the lowest officer, and withal so astonished, when they heard the bullets whistle about their ears ... and when the cannon began to play upon them, they run as if the Devil had been in them.’[119] Bedford estimated that the combination of being shot at and having to sleep rough in the field for two nights, resulted in the immediate desertion of more than half his men.

  The Parliamentarians were short of junior officers and many sergeants suddenly found themselves commissioned. During the first year or more of the Civil War, partly as a result of this lack of leadership, Essex’s troops were cited as pillagers as frequently as the infamous Cavaliers. A Parliamentarian pamphleteer writing from Ludlow in October 1642 was full of indignation about ‘the barbarous and insolent actions of the blood thirsty party’[120] — the Cavaliers. Yet, en route to the first major battle, Edgehill, two Royalists who looted minor objects from an absent Parliamentarian’s home were hanged for their crime. Meanwhile, Lord Clarendon noted with resentment, the rebels’ propaganda was so effective that the many excesses of Essex’s force were buried under the torrent of libels cascading from the printing presses.

  Discipline was difficult to establish in either force, which largely comprised shilling-a-day agricultural labourers on foot and their supposed social su
periors on horse. There were incidents of Essex’s cavalry stealing from his infantry and of his officers being relieved of their possessions by their own men. Sir Thomas More’s observation in Utopia, of 1516, seemed still to hold true in this, the fourth decade of Stuart rule: ‘Robbers do not make spiritless soldiers, nor are soldiers the most cowardly of robbers, so well are the occupations in harmony with each other.’[121] Whichever side could bring its unruly forces under control first, and harness its aggression to its political cause, would enjoy a huge advantage.

  To fill his ranks at the outbreak of war, the king drew heavily on the limited populations of Wales, Cornwall, and the northwest of England. The summer and early autumn of 1642 saw a scrambling to control areas with less clear-cut allegiances. Parliament quickly dominated East Anglia and Kent, and controlled the key Midland towns of Banbury, Coventry, Northampton, and Warwick. They also gained footholds in districts that had suffered from Royalist excesses. In September 1642, a large body of Nottinghamshire gentry approached the Earl of Essex and itemised ‘the innumerable oppressions that they had suffered by the Cavaliers, who daily pillage men’s houses, drive away their cattle, take away their arms and monies, cut and spoil their goods, taking away all means of living and subsisting, all their endeavours tending to the destruction of Religion, King and Kingdom’.[122] They resolved to live and die in Essex’s service.

  Most people, however, were unenthusiastic participants in a conflict that they felt sure was bound to bring them no good. The Recorder of Hereford, while declaring his loyalty to the Crown, begged the king to save his people from the impending apocalypse: ‘O my dread Sovereign, let but your Servant put into your mind the dire effects of War, when flourishing Cities shall be turned to dust, nay this yet flourishing Kingdom shall become its own destroyer, buried in the tomb of blood and slaughter, when our young infants shall be rudely torn from the sad mother’s breast whose shrieks and cries serve as sad music to the sacrifice, when our young virgins and our wives shall be subject to bloody cruelty, when death shall triumph’.[123]

  A neutral pamphleteer, horrified at the ‘great game’ being played by king and Parliament, advised: ‘That his Majesty would understand his Interest to be, to unite, not to divide his Subjects, and to remember with what manner of Trophies the magnanimous Princes of former times have adorned their Funerals and Fame. That he would choose rather to fight in the head of the British Armies, for restitution of his Nephews to their lost inheritance, than employ them here to pillage and destroy his own subjects.’[124] Parliament, meanwhile, should accept the king’s concessions with humility and gratitude. But Charles and his opponents were too far down the warpath to heed the concerns of the common people; they carried on recruiting. When volunteers could not be found, men were pressed into service against their will.

  The rebels had the edge in weaponry. They had taken quick possession of the armaments amassed for the campaigns in Scotland and Ireland. They also seized the royal arsenals and the ironworks of the Weald of Kent. As a result, Parliament never wanted for artillery throughout the war. The early defection of the navy to the rebels was another huge advantage, making it easy to supply their garrisons by sea and also to blockade the king’s ports.

  The Royalists had to work harder. Although they secured the weaponry of some of the county militias, it was the energy of a few key men that transformed the king’s negligible support into a serviceable army. While Rupert’s drive transformed the cavalry, in the regions grandees tried to raise men for the king and to create Royalist enclaves. This effort met with varying degrees of success. In south-central England the Marquess of Hertford, a descendant of Henry VII’s, was frustrated in his efforts on Charles’s behalf. In Yorkshire, though, the Earl of Newcastle successfully formed the Northern Army. He also held Newcastle, a crucial lifeline for aid and arms crossing from the Continent.

  It was thanks to the arrival of the first of the earl’s convoys of arms and ammunition that Charles was able to face Essex’s army, when it moved into the Midlands in September, seeking to bring the king to heel. Parliament had instructed its lord general: ‘You shall use your utmost endeavours by battle or otherwise to rescue his Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince, and Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who are now about them.’[125] Pym and his acolytes wanted the people to believe that the king was a reluctant captive of the Cavaliers and that Parliament was sending an army to rescue him.

  In hoping that the king would be unable to raise a battle-strength army, Essex underestimated the strength and resolve of the Royalists. He had left London on 9 September, amid the crowds’ calls of ‘Hosanna!’, cautiously stowing his coffin in his baggage train. News of Powick Bridge had stunned the earl, his own Lifeguard among the broken units. He was further surprised by intelligence that Rupert had sidestepped his force and hurried to unite with the king’s main army at Meriden, between Coventry and Birmingham. With Essex a day’s march behind them, it appeared that the Royalist target was London, a conclusion that Rupert’s own recollections bear out: ‘The King’s purpose was all the while ... to bring them to a battle, and clear the way to London.’[126] Essex moved quickly southeastwards, hoping to overhaul the Royalists, while sending warnings to the capital to prepare itself for attack.

  Reconnaissance during these fast-moving weeks was poor, and soon neither army was sure of the other’s whereabouts. It was a shock to all when, on 22 October, the advance rebel units rode into the Warwickshire hamlet of Wormleighton and stumbled upon some of Rupert’s troopers. The prince learnt from these prisoners that the main body of the enemy was near by and his scouts set out that evening to pinpoint its location. They discovered dozens of campfires twinkling round the village of Kineton and raced back with the news. Rupert ordered an immediate attack, but his senior officers restrained him, insisting that such a decision must be referred to the king.

  Charles, after consultation with his other generals, agreed to turn back towards the enemy and offer battle on advantageous ground the next day. Before dawn Rupert received the following message: ‘Nephew, I have given order as you have desired, so that I doubt not but all the foot and cannon will be at Edgehill betimes this morning, where you will also find, your loving uncle and faithful friend, Charles R.’[127]

  Edgehill, near Kineton, was a 650-foot-high ridge whose defensive qualities promised to negate the king’s disadvantage in numbers and weaponry: he had 12,500 men to Parliament’s 14,500. Essex was so eager to accept the invitation to fight that he decided not to wait for straggling troops and artillery to catch up with his main field army. This left the earl with a slight deficit in cavalry.

  *

  There was pre-battle dissent among the Royalist high command, much of it sparked by Rupert. The prince insisted that he answer to no man except the king: he wanted to lead his cavalry in independent command. This has long been held up as an example of Rupert’s arrogance and ambition, but this is to ignore context. It was normal for European royalty to have supreme power in the army — the wholesale reforms in Louis XIV’s French armies, a generation later, left intact the premise that Princes of the Blood outranked marshals in the field.

  The prince’s preferred tactics were more controversial. There were two principal methods of fighting at this time: one the creation of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the other the legacy of Gustavus Adolphus. Rupert favoured the bolder tactics of the Swede. He believed that a bold strike at the rebels was more likely to succeed than the conservative and attritional methods of the Dutch. Lord Ruthven, a 70-year-old veteran who had fought for Adolphus and was now a Royalist general, was foremost among those who agreed with Rupert.

  Charles was militarily ignorant and was easily persuaded by Rupert’s passion. However, the Earl of Lindsey, the king’s lord general and the leading advocate for Dutch tactics, felt humiliated: this was not the first time that uncle had turned to nephew and overruled his senior officer, who (Clarendon recalled) was ‘a person of great honour and c
ourage, and generally beloved; who many years before had good commands in Holland, and Germany, and had been Admiral at Sea in several expeditions’.[128] Apart from hurt feelings, though, Lindsey was also properly concerned that the Royalists’ chances would be compromised by this last-minute change in battle-plan. An accomplished old soldier, who had served in the Lowlands alongside his enemy counterpart, Essex (whom he respected as a fighting man), Lindsey resigned a command that had been so publicly undermined. Demoting himself to the rank of colonel, he elected to lead his own regiment of Lincolnshire men into battle, telling friends that he hoped to meet an honourable death.

  This falling-out over tactics was not so much the result of a young prince’s petulance, as a clear and early example of the disunity in the upper reaches of the king’s high command — a situation that was to hamstring the Royalist cause throughout the Civil War.

  Further ripples came from the highly regarded Viscount Falkland, a supporter of Parliament against the king in the 1630s and an admirer of John Hampden — one of the ‘Five Members’ that Charles had failed to arrest in the Commons, and the most famous opponent of the imposition of Ship Money. Falkland’s mansion at Tew, in Oxfordshire, formed a salon for men of learning in the years before the war. However, Falkland was essentially a cautious man and his radical colleagues’ rush for wholesale constitutional change appalled him. Reluctantly appointed as one of Charles’s secretaries of state, Falkland remained among the moderates on both sides who were sickened by the prospect of compatriots spilling each other’s blood: his constant hope was for a negotiated peace. This aim conflicted with Rupert’s view, that differences with Parliament could now only be settled by clear-cut military victory.