Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Chapter Nine - Rushing to Defeat

  ‘Courage, my Soul, now learn to wield

  The weight of thine immortal shield.

  Close on thy head thy helmet bright.

  Balance thy sword against the fight.

  See where an army, strong as fair,

  With silken banners spreads the air.

  Now, if thou be’st that thing divine,

  In this day’s combat let it shine.’

  ‘A Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ by the poet and Republican Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

  The Civil War changed dramatically during the late summer and autumn of 1643. Parliament and the Scots signed the Solemn League and Covenant, a treaty that promised invasion from the north. Soon afterwards, a truce enabled Charles to bring back troops that had been fighting the Catholic rebels in Ireland. If the effect of Scotland’s entry into the war were to be nullified, the Royalists would need to deploy the troops from Ireland as an efficient counterweight. In the meantime, Charles must juggle his resources to meet the challenge of five enemy armies operating in his kingdom.

  Rupert pushed for command of the influx of troops from Ireland. For success, the prince would have to adapt his proven flair in attack to conditions that demanded defence. His instinct was for independence, with his favourite officers by his side. He longed to be far from the internal bickering of Oxford, where his presence seemed to act as a lightning rod for the disaffected. ‘The army is much divided,’ wrote Arthur Trevor, one of Rupert’s sympathisers in the town, in November 1643, ‘and the Prince at true distance with many of the officers of horse.’[203] The gulf was also growing between Rupert and the queen, although Charles demonstrated continuing trust in his nephew, giving him British peerages on 24 January 1644, so that he could sit in Oxford’s Royalist Parliament as Earl of Holderness and Duke of Cumberland. The Parliamentarians marked this last elevation with a new nickname for Rupert: ‘Plunderland’.

  The prince had no intention of attending the makeshift House of Lords while there was fighting to be done. He started 1644 by proposing a ruse to capture the important rebel stronghold of Northampton. This involved riding his cavalry into the town while posing as Parliamentarian reinforcements. Once inside the walls, the Royalists would reveal their true identity and overwhelm the garrison. However, this typically bold plan was — equally typically — rejected as unworkable and risky.

  In the middle of January 1644, the Scots invaded England through thick snow. At the end of the month, Sir Thomas Fairfax trounced Byron’s army outside Nantwich, in Cheshire. Rupert, convinced that the northwest was set to become a key battleground in the war, had secured a new command as captain general of the counties of Chester, Lancaster, Worcester, Salop, and the six northern counties of Wales. He set off for Shrewsbury on 6 February, while summoning reinforcements from Bristol.

  Rupert’s latest duties demanded a complex balancing act. Of real concern was the precarious situation of the Marquess of Newcastle’s army to the east of the Pennines. Out on a limb, it was simultaneously awaiting one visit from the Scots and another from Parliament’s northern forces. The prince could not allow the enemy to isolate and destroy Newcastle’s men: he must do all he could to support it against the Allied armies. At the same time, Rupert needed to be on hand to assist Charles’s headquarters at Oxford, which was under increasing pressure from Parliament’s forces in the Thames Valley. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1644, the prince remained on the move, attempting to sustain the Royalist cause on its two most challenging fronts.

  This was a critical time in the war, which led to a hardening of attitudes. The Royalist vicar of Barton upon Humber prayed that the king’s enemies should suffer all manner of damnation: ‘Let horror and amazement take hold on them, and keep them in a perpetual alarm ... Their sons and their daughters that were the joy of their hearts, let them be cut off in the flower of their days; and the wives of their bosoms, let them be given into the bosoms of those that hate them. And when they have seen all this, and a world of misery more than all this, let their last end be like the rest, let them go down to the grave with a tragic and disastrous death.’[204]

  Meanwhile, Parliament met the arrival of Royalist troops from Ireland with a decree that they would be executed on capture. When the rebels took thirteen of Rupert’s men near Nantwich — all English, but falsely classified by their captors as Irish Papists — they hanged the lot of them. The prince was furious. Soon afterwards he captured fourteen of the enemy. Thirteen of these he hanged in reprisal, releasing the fourteenth with a curt message for his superiors: if the Parliamentarians dared to repeat their outrage, two of their men would be executed for every Royalist prisoner hanged. Nobody thought the prince was bluffing — his stark threat ‘stopped that efflux of blood ever after.’[205]

  Rupert remained busy in the field, his difficult task complicated by a lack of support from the king’s council of war. Of its members, lords Forth and Astley appreciated Rupert’s talents and were broadly sympathetic, while the Duke of Richmond was a good personal friend to the prince. However, lords Digby, Percy, and Wilmot were all favourites of the queen, and Sir John Culpepper joined them in a cabal whose common enemy was Rupert. Charles increasingly listened to this vociferous clique despite Digby’s negligible military record, Percy’s poor showing at Newbury (he was blamed for the Royalists’ crucial shortage of gunpowder), and the gifted Wilmot’s legendary debauchery. Rupert’s friend Arthur Trevor warned that influential enemies at court would succeed in isolating the prince from the king, unless he secured further military glory: ‘For’, Trevor observed, ‘I find no court physic so present for the opening of obstructions as good news.’[206]

  Such an opportunity soon presented itself. Newark was the key Royalist staging post between Newcastle’s Northern Army and the headquarters of Oxford. In February, Sir John Meldrum began to besiege Newark with a 5,000-strong army. Charles ordered Rupert to march from Chester to Newark’s relief. Summoning men from Shrewsbury, and recruiting en route, the prince organised horses for as many of his troops as possible, in order to speed his passage. The Royalists covered the ground fast, taking a cross-country route that avoided major roads. With the rebels unable to monitor the progress of this secret march, Rupert’s sudden appearance outside the town took Meldrum completely by surprise. Although Rupert’s men were exhausted by the speed of their advance, they had to fight immediately: their besieged colleagues were facing starvation.

  The action, on 21 March 1644, was a triumph for Rupert, although not without its alarms. The Royalist cavalry led the attack, the right wing slicing through its opponents with ease. But Rupert’s troop was caught in an awkward scuffle, the distinctive prince presenting an irresistible target: ‘Three sturdy Roundheads at once assaulted him: one fell by his own sword, a second was pistolled by one of his own gentlemen, and a third, laying his hand on the Prince’s collar, had it chopped off by O’Neal.’[207] Undaunted by his narrow escape, Rupert urged his cavalry on.

  The Royalist infantry followed the horse with an aggressive advance, which convinced Meldrum that his position was hopeless. He surrendered on generous terms, which allowed him to march his survivors to another rebel stronghold. However, Meldrum was forced to leave behind valuable supplies: 4,000 muskets, 50 barrels of gunpowder, 11 cannon and 2 mortars. More importantly, against all expectations, Newark had been saved and the Marquess of Newcastle’s army was spared dangerous isolation. ‘Nephew,’ wrote the king, ‘I assure you that this (as all your victories) gives me as much contentment in that I owe you the thanks as for the importance of it, which in this particular believe me, is no less than the saving of all the north, nothing, for the presence being of more consequence; how to follow this (indeed beyond imaginable) success, I will not prescribe you ...’[208] The speed and secrecy of the march, the decisiveness of the attack, and the importance of the result mark the relief of Newark as one of Rupert’s greatest military achievements. Clarendon
called it: ‘As unexpected a victory as happened throughout the war.’[209]

  The breathing space won for Lord Newcastle was short lived. Rupert was forced to resume his balancing act, providing simultaneous support for the Royalist armies in the north and in the Thames Valley. Newcastle urged Rupert to remain in the northern Midlands, within range of his army, convinced that this was the sphere of the conflict where the war could be decided in a day. However, the vulnerability of the king’s cause in the south demanded the prince’s return to the Welsh borders, on a recruiting mission. In his absence the rebels quickly gnawed away at the advantages gained by the relief of Newark, recapturing Lincolnshire and then defeating Lord Bellasis’s Royalists at Selby. Newcastle moved with his men from Durham to York, adding his infantry to the garrison there, while despatching his cavalry south to seek Rupert’s renewed help. ‘If your Highness do not please to come hither, and that nay very soon too,’ the marquess implored, ‘the great game of your uncle’s will be endangered, if not lost; and with your Highness being near, certainly won: so I doubt not but your Highness will come, and that very soon.’[210]

  Taking stock of the Royalist situation across the nation in mid April 1644, Rupert proposed a bold plan to the council of war: the king should concentrate his infantry in Oxford and its four surrounding garrison towns, with enough cavalry to be able to sustain them through foraging. Charles would then depart for the west with the remainder of his horse and join up with Prince Maurice, recently appointed Lieutenant General of the Southern Counties. The king would help Maurice’s army, which was having a difficult time besieging Lyme — one of the few remaining rebel strongholds in the southwest. Rupert, meanwhile, would take his army back north and repeat his recent heroics by lifting the siege of York. Provided the Thames Valley garrisons could hold out in the interim, the king and his two nephews would then return to Oxford to relieve the Royalist capital, their combined forces ready for a concerted assault on London. ‘The great crisis of the North being expected’, Prince Rupert’s logbook recorded, ‘a Council of War at Oxford resolved to put off fighting with Essex till that be over.’[211]

  The prince headed northwards, buoyed up by unaccustomed support for one of his ambitious proposals. However, approval for Rupert’s northern design had not been universal. As soon as he had departed, the king was persuaded to remain in Oxford, concentrating his forces nearby, while Reading’s defences (the town had been recaptured after the battle of Newbury) were pulled down and abandoned. Soon afterwards the Royalists also quit Abingdon, Lord Digby taking the opportunity to blame this painful decision on Rupert’s absence with so many troops.

  Soon the consequences of ignoring Rupert’s plan became apparent. With Abingdon and Reading no longer standing guard over Oxford, Waller joined Essex in an exercise of containment that threatened to isolate the town from the armies of the north and the west. It looked as though the king would be trapped in the town and, if he were forced to surrender, the Civil War would be abruptly concluded. In desperation, Charles slipped out of Oxford with an army of 7,000 men, managing to evade the enemy encirclement by using minor roads leading to the west. Waller and Essex pursued him, but their civilian masters, the members of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, sent the two rebel commanders in different directions, halving their effectiveness at a stroke. Essex was despatched to the southwest, while Waller continued his pursuit of the king alone, his mobile army rich in cavalry.

  Charles’s intentions after breaking out from Oxford are not known. He may have hoped to reach Prince Rupert’s army in Lancashire or his plan may have been simply to remain at large until matters looked more favourable. However, the impetus was now with the enemy. Essex made successful inroads in the southwest, while Waller’s troops stood menacingly between the king in Worcester and the prince further north. Hard pressed and demoralised, Charles wrote a letter from Tickenhill, in Bewdley — near Ashby de la Zouch — to Rupert.

  Nephew,

  First I must congratulate with you, for your good successes, assuring you that the things themselves are no more welcome to me, than that you are the means: I know the importance of the supplying you with powder for which I have taken all possible ways, having sent both to Ireland & Bristol, as from Oxford this bearer is well satisfied, that it is impossible to have at present, but if he tell you that I may spare them hence, I leave you to judge, having but 36 left; but what I can get from Bristol (of which there is not much certainty, it being threatened to be besieged) you shall have.

  But now I must give you the true state of my affairs, which if their condition be such as enforces me to give you more peremptory commands than I would willingly do, you must not take it ill. If York be lost, I shall esteem my Crown little less, unless supported by your sudden march to me, & a miraculous conquest in the South, before the effects of the Northern power can be found here; but if York be relieved, & you beat the rebel armies of both Kingdoms, which are before it, then but otherwise not, I may possibly make a shift, (upon the defensive) to spin out time, until you come to assist me: wherefore I command and conjure you, by the duty & affection which I know you bear me, that (all new enterprises laid aside) you immediately march (according to your first intention) with all your force to the relief of York; but if that be either lost, or fried themselves from the besiegers, or that for want of powder you cannot undertake that work; that you immediately march, with your whole strength, to Worcester, to assist me & my Army, without which, or your having relieved York by beating the Scots, all the successes you can afterwards have, most infallibly, will be useless unto me: You may believe that nothing but an extreme necessity could make me write thus unto you, wherefore, in this case, I can no ways doubt of your punctual compliance with

  Your loving Uncle and most faithful friend

  Charles R.’[212]

  The king wrote this when his hopes were low, his council of war was divided, and defeat seemed imminent. He was unaware that Essex’s army had departed for the southwest, and assumed that he would be caught and overwhelmed by the earl’s and Waller’s combined forces. Within a fortnight, though, the darkest clouds had lifted. Charles led his army to a handsome victory over Waller at Cropredy Bridge, near Edgehill — providing a glimpse of the ‘miraculous conquest in the South’ referred to in the middle of his letter. But Rupert was not to hear about this change in fortune until too late.

  The correct interpretation of this letter exercised Rupert for the rest of his days. The prince read it and understood it to be a command to march directly to the relief of York, before attacking and defeating the Allied armies of Parliament and the Scots. The desperation of Charles’s position, evident in the king’s rambling and unhappy tone, seemed to Rupert to demand the immediate execution of these commands. The alternative, the prince surmised, was the sinking of the Royalist cause.

  ‘The Tickenhill Letter’ is a key document in Prince Rupert’s life story. However, it would be wrong to see it in isolation: there were another half-dozen communications written in a similar vein, all urging the prince to ease the king’s plight in the south by gaining speedy success in the north, before descending to his aid. An undated letter should be seen as a companion to the Tickenhill one: ‘To what I wrote yesterday,’ the king wrote, ‘I can only add that the relief of York is that which is most absolutely best for my affairs whereof again I earnestly conjure you speedily to prosecute that if you have but the least hope to do good there but as I have told you my business can bear no delay for you must either march presently northwards or hitherward, and that without engaging yourself in any other action.’[213]

  Rupert received these letters after further personal successes. He had invaded Lancashire in mid May, capturing Stockport before rescuing the Countess of Derby and her retainers from a three-month siege. Lathom House, her castellated mansion, was protected by a moat and high wall. Its garrison of 300 included the Derbys’ gamekeepers, deployed as rooftop snipers, whose marksmanship ‘shrewdly galled the enemy’. The countess, a gr
anddaughter of William the Silent and a cousin of Rupert’s, was undaunted by an enemy that outnumbered her force by ten to one. When their leader, Colonel Rigby, summoned her to surrender, she gave his messenger short shrift: ‘Go back to your commander, and tell that insolent rebel, he shall have neither persons, goods, nor house. When our strength is spent, we shall find a fire more merciful than Rigby’s, and then, if Providence of God prevent it not, my goods and house shall burn in his sight; myself, my children, and my soldiers, rather than fall into his hands, will seal our religion and our loyalty in the same flame.’[214] Rupert’s intervention spared her from this futile martyrdom.

  The prince marched on, at the end of the month, to Bolton — a bastion of Puritanism, known as ‘the Geneva of the north’. It was while he was outside the town that he received the first of the stream of letters from the king demanding his urgent transfer from Lancashire to York. He immediately attacked Bolton. The outcome of the assault remained in the balance until Rupert, incensed by the public hanging of one of his Irishmen, led his infantry on foot in the decisive charge. The Parliamentary pamphleteers presented the ensuing bloodshed as ‘the Bolton Massacre’, claiming that civilians of both genders and all ages had been put to the sword by the Cavaliers. Evidence, however, points to the many casualties being military, and defeated soldiers being allowed safe surrender. We know that when 700 citizens sought sanctuary in the main church, they were spared.