Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Hearing of this latest gain, Sir John Meldrum, in Manchester, scoffed at the prince as ‘that fierce thunderbolt which terrifies the ignorant’.[215] Less dismissive were Meldrum’s colleagues in Liverpool, who were subject to Rupert’s ferocious night attack. Here, civilian lives were most certainly lost and pillaging was rife. It was the capture of Bolton and Liverpool that Charles was appreciating, early in the Tickenhill Letter: Liverpool’s port, with its easy access to Irish reinforcements, was a particularly valuable prize.

  Yet Rupert’s mood was more distracted than triumphant. Correspondence from Arthur Trevor to the Marquess of Ormonde states that news had reached the prince from Oxford, ‘that the king grows daily more and more jealous of him and his army; and that it is the common discourse (at the openest places where men can discover themselves) of the Lord Digby, Lord Percy, Sir John Culpeper, and Wilmot, that it is indifferent whether the Parliament or Prince Rupert doth prevail; which did so highly jesuit Prince Rupert, that he was once more resolved to send the king his commission and get to France ... This fury interrupted the march ten days; but at length time and a friend, the best coolers of the blood, spent the humour of travail in him, though not that of revenge; to which purpose he hath sent his letter to the king for the removal of them from his council; and if this be not done, he will leave this war and sit down.’[216]

  The accuracy of Trevor’s account is hard to ascertain. Certainly, Rupert was aware that his enemies at Court were at work, trying to drive a wedge between him and his uncle. However, their success to date must have been limited, given the loving and respectful tone of Charles’s Tickenhill Letter. Equally, we know that Rupert was indeed delayed for ten days, but this was not spent sulking, but in trying to get the necessary supplies for his march to York. It appears that Lord Percy did not unduly exert himself in getting the Prince’s requirements to him on time.

  These delays infuriated Rupert. All the correspondence from Charles and his senior councillors emphasised the need for speed, and expected the quick completion of the prince’s twin tasks in the north before he rode to the salvation of the king in the south. However, he had hoped to finish his own operations in Cheshire and Lancashire before being summoned elsewhere. The demands of the council of war meant this task must be left incomplete. Rupert appreciated how daunting the challenges before him would be: for a start, the three enemy armies around York totalled 30,000 men and were well supplied.

  The prince needed more men and more weapons. The arrival of George Goring, General of the Northern Horse, gave Rupert an additional 1,000 cavalry. Goring also injected an even greater sense of urgency, bringing first-hand accounts of the extreme peril facing the York garrison. Although expecting the imminent arrival of Sir Robert Clavering and 1,000 fresh infantry, Rupert felt compelled to set off on his rescue mission without them. He was aware that he would be severely outnumbered when facing the allies. After a final rendezvous in Skipton, on 26 June, Rupert marched towards York with just 15,000 men.

  En route, Rupert stayed a night at Denton House, a home of the Fairfaxes — two of whom were enemy commanders. The Civil War saw the destruction of many of the homes of prominent participants. Only three months earlier Rupert had dined with the widowed Lady Beeston, at Bridgenorth. He thanked his hostess for her hospitality, invited her to leave with her most precious belongings, then torched her home. A year before he had done the same to Wormleighton House, the main residence of the Earl of Sunderland. The young earl had died fighting for the king at Newbury, but his massive home could not be left vacant, vulnerable to Parliamentarian occupation, so it was blown up. Now, the prince’s troops expected to be let loose on Denton House. However, when walking round the interior, Rupert recognised a face in a family portrait. It belonged to a Fairfax who had died in the Palatinate a generation earlier, fighting for the prince’s father’s cause. Out of respect for this sacrifice, the prince ordered the property to be left intact.

  Moving on to Knaresborough, a day’s march short of York, the prince gathered together his force and prepared for action. ‘It hath been daily reported this fortnight, that P. Rupert is coming to raise the siege,’ reported the chaplain to the Earl of Manchester, one of the Parliamentary generals in the north. ‘Now it’s rumoured that he is upon the borders of this county with a great Army. But our eyes are towards Heaven, from where comes our help, and we will pray and wait upon the God of our salvations and mercies.’[217] The Scots saw matters in a more apocalyptic light: ‘The manner briefly was thus, Rupert, or the second Nimrod, the mighty Plunderer, the beginning of whose kingdom is confusion, come in his hunting carrier, with his fellow hunters, and near 20,000 bloodhounds attending them, all more ravenous than wolves, and fiercer than tigers, thirsting for blood.’[218]

  Rupert was pleased to learn that the three enemy commanders — Manchester, Fairfax, and Leven — had decided to advance to meet him, rather than wait to be attacked. This lifted the siege of York, to the joy of the garrison and inhabitants: they knew the allies were on the point of completing mines that would have collapsed their defences. As the Anglo-Scots departed for action against the prince, they could hear triumphant hollering coming from within York’s walls.

  Rupert confused the enemy scouts by making a feint, which prompted the allied generals to deploy on moorland 3 miles to the west of the city. They were sure that they could intercept the prince there with their massively superior forces. Rupert sidestepped them, though, sending his men on a tortuous route that eventually brought them to the unprotected north gate of York. They relieved the city and overran the enemy camp outside its walls. The Marquess of Newcastle was quick to praise the prince: ‘You are welcome, Sir, so many several ways, as it is beyond my arithmetic to number, but this I know: you are the redeemer of the North & the Saviour of the Crown. Your name, Sir, hath terrified the great Generals and they fly before it.’[219]

  The allied generals, however, had not gone far. That evening they marched their men to the nearby village of Long Marston, where they spent an uncomfortable night. ‘Our soldiers did drink the wells dry,’ remembered one of the Parliamentarians, ‘and then were necessitated to make use of puddle water.’[220] As they suffered, they pictured the Royalists helping themselves to the provisions stockpiled in their abandoned camp outside York.

  The allies expected the prince’s forces to recuperate within York’s walls, before returning south via Newark.

  It was the logical move. But Rupert, having completed the first part of his mission, now looked to obey his interpretation of the Tickenhill Letter, and bring the enemy immediately to battle. He sent a brusque order to Newcastle to meet him the next day, 2 July, at four in the morning, with 10,000 men. The combined Royalist forces would then attack, catching the enemy off-guard in the early morning.

  The marquess resented Rupert’s tone: the young man was a prince, but he was a foreign one. Newcastle, on the other hand, was the king’s commander in the north and enjoyed unofficial vice-regal status: Charles permitted him to confer knighthoods as he saw fit and to mint his own coins. As a general, the marquess was a mere figurehead — he was not a professional soldier, but an amateur man of letters. Newcastle was, in truth, a loyal dilettante. He was a friend of the philosopher Hobbes and of the poet William Davenant — indeed, he made Davenant his general of artillery. Parliamentarian pamphleteers found Newcastle an easy target: they claimed that he lay in bed until eleven, before combing his hair until noon. His chief military adviser was Lord Eythin — the Scotsman who, as James King, had let Rupert down so badly at the battle of Vlotho.

  Rupert arrived in Newcastle’s sphere of influence, convinced that he was the agent of the king’s will. Social niceties had little importance to the prince in such urgent times. This attitude resulted from his misreading of Newcastle’s character. Rupert had recently received a typically florid letter from the marquess, which seemed to show a willing subservience to the prince’s superior military pedigree: ‘Neither can I resolve anything since I am mad
e of nothing but thankfulness and obedience to Your Highness’s command.’[221] This fawning led Rupert to assume, wrongly, that he could take the lead. In doing so, he upset one of his most enthusiastic admirers, just when unity was most required. To be sent curt instructions by a man less than half his age was an affront to this proudest of grandees, a grandson of Bess of Hardwick and once the governor to the Prince of Wales.

  Despite feeling affronted, Newcastle followed Rupert’s commands and ordered his troops to assemble early the next day. However, the marquess’s men were in no condition to obey: they had run wild after deliverance from the eleven-week siege, plundering the enemy camp and becoming riotously drunk. Furthermore, Eythin told the soldiers to stand down till they had received their salary (it was Friday — pay day) — a decision that sent the men back to their drinking and pillaging, when they should have been preparing for battle.

  It was not until nine o’clock in the morning, five hours after the appointed time, that Newcastle joined Rupert. With him came just 2,500 men, a quarter of the force expected by Rupert. The prince’s welcome was terse: ‘My Lord, I wish you had come sooner with your forces, but I hope we shall yet have a glorious day.’[222] There were further delays while Newcastle insisted on rounding up his crack infantrymen. These soldiers, known as ‘Newcastle’s Lambs’, wore white tunics (which gave rise to their other nickname, ‘the Whitecoats’) — they would, they promised, dye them scarlet in their enemies’ blood. These were experienced warriors, but the wait for them was costly, finally extinguishing Rupert’s hopes of launching a surprise attack. The prince set off for Marston Moor, intent on battle but unable to dictate its timing. When the Whitecoats joined the main Royalist body later in the afternoon, many of them were still sobering up after the previous night’s excesses.

  In the other camp, the allies’ spirits were mixed. Soldiers were entitled to daily beer and bread, but the penny loaf each man had brought with him had long since been consumed and most of the beer had been left in the Anglo-Scottish camp outside York. They had expected a battle with the Royalists, then a swift return to their siege of the city, but Rupert’s brilliance had left them detached in the field, with inadequate supplies.

  There were jealousies between the Parliamentarians and the Scots, which had led to plans for the two units to separate. However, these were rescinded when the unexpected news arrived that Rupert was marching to engage their combined force. They were confident of their prospects in the imminent battle. Besides their numerical advantage — they were 28,000 men to Rupert’s eventual 18,000 — the allies were sure that God was on their side: He would doubtless lead them to victory over the licentious hordes captained by the wicked ‘Prince Robber’. Their password for the battle was ‘God with us’. As they marched towards Marston Moor, they sang Psalms.

  *

  Even after two years, the fact that a civil war was being fought was not universally known. On reaching the moor, some soldiers discovered a farm worker going about his business and ordered him to be gone. The disgruntled labourer asked why he should move. When told that he was standing on a field that was about to host a battle between the king and Parliament, he said: ‘Whaat! Has them two fallen out, then?’[223]

  First occupation of the moor narrowed the odds slightly in the Royalists’ favour. When the allies arrived in the early afternoon of 2 July, they found Rupert’s men deployed along a 2-mile front, musketeers and artillery at the ready behind the moor’s ditch and surrounding hedges. With summer showers falling, the Earl of Leven arranged his soldiers on a hilltop overlooking the moor. The surrounding fields were swathed in mature crops — rye, beans, and corn.

  From mid afternoon the allied cannon fired intermittently. At a council of war with Newcastle and Eythin, the prince revealed his intention to attack. Eythin favoured defence, his opinion of Rupert evident in his inflammatory interjection: ‘Sir, your forwardness lost us the day in Germany, where yourself was taken prisoner.’[224] The sharpness of this insult seems to have knocked Rupert back, for this most aggressive of soldiers agreed to stand in defence until the morning. Newcastle, meanwhile, expressed fear that the enemy might attack sooner — a thought that, curiously, the prince seems to have dismissed out of hand. The marquess retired to his carriage, reassured that Rupert had matters under control, and lit his pipe.

  The Royalists had broken ranks to eat supper when, in the late evening, the enemy attacked in huge numbers. ‘Our Army’, reported a Parliamentarian, ‘in its several parts moving down the hill, was like unto so many thick clouds, having divided themselves into Brigades.’[225] Rupert, the master of surprise, was taken completely unawares. His men were unable to re-form in time to defend the ditch, allowing Oliver Cromwell’s cavalry to charge on, into the Royalist right wing. Rupert had been excited at the prospect of fighting this celebrated enemy, but now he witnessed at first hand the destructive horsemen — to whom he gave the nickname of ‘Ironsides’ — combine the impetus of his Cavaliers with a level of discipline that they had never approached.

  Thunder and storming rain accompanied the allied attack, adding to the pandemonium in the Royalist lines. Lord Byron, on the right wing, had been commanded not to venture forwards, but the sight of enemy cavalry fast approaching was too tempting: he ordered the charge. The desperate result was that Rupert’s musketeers were unable to fire, in case they also shot their own men. Meanwhile, Byron’s two thousand troopers were no match for Cromwell’s three or four thousand, and they retreated across difficult terrain, sustaining further casualties as they went, marshland and a rabbit warren slowing their flight. Cromwell pushed on, shrugging off a slight neck wound and pressing home his advantage.

  Rupert arrived from the rear to take command of the right wing’s second line of cavalry. He was just in time to stop his men from turning tail, their courage wilting at the sight of Byron’s disarray. Through the broken ranks of their colleagues, they could make out the approach of Cromwell’s victorious squadrons, riding at a fast trot, knee to knee, purposeful, focused, and alarming. ‘’Swounds, do you run?’ Rupert shouted in disgust, as he saw his men faltering. ‘Follow me!’[226] But, this time, there was to be no repetition of Powick Bridge or Chalgrove Field. Rupert’s full-blooded charge was shattered by the unyielding ranks of the Ironsides. Half an hour of desperate struggle saw Cavalier and Roundhead hacking and slashing at each other with their swords, their pistols and carbines spent.

  They fought each other to a standstill. The screams of the dying rang out above the dark, metallic rhythm of blade striking blade, which was punctuated by the whinnying of terrified, riderless horses and the bellowed exhortations of officers to their men. The outcome was already decided in the allies’ favour when three regiments of Scottish lancers were let slip, to finish off their colleagues’ handiwork. Marston Moor was the only large-scale battle of the English Civil War where such a force prospered. Generally, this was a conflict better suited to the heavier cavalry. Here, however, the lancers’ nimble ponies, with their lightly armoured riders, caused havoc among a disordered enemy. Overwhelmed for the first time in a major battle, Rupert’s Cavaliers fled, mostly for York. It was every man for himself, and the prince only escaped death or capture by setting his horse at a fence and leaping into a field of beans. From there, he played no further part in the battle.

  *

  The battle of Marston Moor was a see-saw affair. The allied infantry attacked in a running march, quickly breaching the Royalists’ defensive ditch and capturing seven pieces of artillery, before dispersing Rupert’s foot soldiers. The prince, however, had placed a cavalry brigade in reserve, which now fell on the Anglo-Scottish attackers with such ferocity that many of them fled the field. As they ran back through colleagues about to enter the fray, their evident terror persuaded others to join in the flight. ‘It was a sad sight’, wrote a rebel eyewitness, ‘to behold many thousands posting away, being amazed with panic fears.’[227] This haemorrhaging of men convinced several of the senior allied officers t
hat the day was lost. Leven was persuaded to save himself, and rode as fast as he could for the safety of Leeds. Lord Fairfax also quit the field with embarrassing haste. Of the principal commanders, only Manchester remained on hand, personally leading 500 deserters back into the fray.

  On the Royalist left-hand cavalry wing, the mercurial George Goring performed with the dynamism and decisiveness usually associated with the prince. Goring’s infantry support met Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cavalry assault with intense musket volleys, which were followed up with a vigorous charge by the Northern Horse. Although Sir Thomas’s own troop prospered, pursuing beaten opponents from the field, the rest of his men were routed. Returning to check what had happened to them, and bearing a cut to his cheek, Sir Thomas found himself surrounded by Goring’s milling soldiers. Removing a white blaze in his hat, the mark that identified him as an ally, he trotted quietly back to his colleagues in the Earl of Manchester’s ranks with news of his reversal.

  Goring’s efforts could not turn the course of the battle. His second line, commanded by Sir Charles Lucas, made some headway but, eventually, it became bogged down in the huge numbers of the enemy infantry and Lucas was captured. Cromwell now arced his cavalry round with extraordinary discipline, in the defining movement of the day. Using the full sweep of the battlefield, he fell on Goring’s exposed flank from a position that had, at the start of the engagement, been Goring’s own: the result of this brilliant manoeuvre was terrible carnage. Goring and the remnants of his Northern Horse were sidelined by the torrent of Allied troops that now possessed the field. The Anglo-Scottish cavalry, infantry, and dragoons worked in unison, mopping up the remaining pockets of Royalist foot soldiers with brutal efficiency. Cromwell’s deft touch, after the hard graft of the early part of the encounter, had turned the day on its head: Manchester, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Scots’ general David Leslie all made victory possible, but it was Cromwell who had seized the moment and made certain of the result.