Welcome to another installment of the full-length
Kings and Generals Documentaries! Today, we're delving into one of the most
pivotal and tumultuous periods in British history – the English Civil War also known
as the War of the Three Kingdoms. This tumultuous conflict, which raged across
the 17th century, was marked by intense battles, deep-seated religious strife, and a web of
complex political problems that tore a nation apart, from the blood-soaked fields of Edgehill
to the besieged city of York, and from the epic showdowns at Marston Moor to the siege
of Oxford. It was a war that pitted brother against brother,
father against son, as opposing forces fought for their vision of England's future. The battle lines were often drawn along religious
beliefs, adding a layer of intensity to an already heated struggle, but the English Civil
War was not just a religious war; it was a social and political powder keg waiting to
explode. The monarchy, led by King Charles I Stuart,
clashed with Parliament over issues of power and taxation. This political turmoil set the stage for a
nation divided, and the consequences would reshape England forever. Join us as we unravel the dramatic and complex
tapestry of the English Civil War, exploring its battles, religious strife, and political
problems that forever altered the course of history. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button
and give us a thumbs up, that helps immensely! As brother turns against brother, it might
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internet at nord vpn dot com slash kings and generals. The Stuart dynasty came to power in England
when the childless Elizabeth I died on March 24th 1603, and was succeeded by King of Scotland,
James VI, who then also became James I of England. This reign united the realms of England, Scotland,
and Ireland under one monarch for the first time, and saw an increase in the popularity
of ‘divine right’, the god-given authority of a monarch to rule as he wished, unhindered
by his nobles or people. After 22 years on the throne, during which
momentous events such as the sailing of the Mayflower and Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot
took place, King James died in March 1625 and was succeeded by his second son, who ascended
to the throne as Charles I. A scholarly oriented man with a penchant for hunting, it immediately
became clear that Charles had inherited his father’s enthusiasm for divine right, and
began acting in ways which profoundly angered influential factions in his country, the most
important of which being Parliament. Today, the British Houses of Lords and Commons
are the governing institutions of the United Kingdom, but in the mid seventeenth-century
this was not yet the case. The king still had executive decision-making
authority and his decree was the only means by which Parliament could legally convene. However, by the mid 1600s the Houses had gained
significant de facto power, such as the ability to raise taxes far more effectively and smoothly
than the king himself, making it hard for English monarchs to operate without parliamentary
approval. Upon ascending to the throne in 1625, the
outwardly Protestant Charles married Henrietta Maria, the staunchly Catholic sister of France’s
king Louis XIII. While this was at first viewed as a shrewd
diplomatic move, Maria’s fervently pro-Catholic actions made the predominantly reformed English
despise her. This religious dimension of the royal-parliamentary
divide was made worse by a number of factors both internal and external. In mainland Europe, the Thirty Years’ War
was raging without end. Many in England and particularly in parliament
wished to take up arms in order to prevent the Catholic counter-reformation from snuffing
out their Protestant brothers, but Charles would not do so in a direct fashion. The meager attempts in 1625 and 1628 of Charles
to intervene at Cadiz and the Siege of La Rochelle respectively were blundered and only
increased tension between the king and his parliament. Even worse than this was the increasing influence
of William Laud, the intrusive Bishop of London who advocated an Anti-Calvinist sect of Protestantism
known as Arminianism. This denomination rolled some Christian practices
back closer to those of the Roman Catholic Church and was viewed as yet another sign
that Charles I was dangerously friendly to the hated Papists. All of these factors gradually ratcheted up
the tension between parliament and the monarchy. In short, it was making England a powder keg. More tangible issues were also at the heart
of the gulf, the most prominent of which was a growing opposition of the propertied classes
in parliament to the absolute rule of their monarch. The first parliament called by the king in
1625 got off to a bad start on this front because of that most enduring of issues, taxes. Usually, parliament would grant a new monarch
permission to levy customs duties called ‘Tonnage and Poundage’ for an entire reign, but for
Charles they only gave such permission for one year. Parliament did grant levels of funding and
taxation that would have been adequate in the past, but that was woefully inadequate
when taking into account inflation and other costs. With parliament continuously unwilling to
grant sufficient funding, Charles began to raise money by his own means. Money was borrowed with the crown jewels as
security for repayment, Tonnage, and Poundage customs were collected regardless of parliamentary
approval, and, most annoying to those affected, so-called ‘forced loans’ were imposed
on Charles’ wealthier subjects. Overall, Charles raised over £250,000, but
these measures caused anger and resentment. Many gentlemen refused to pay and were imprisoned,
while others hindered the actions of local collectors and were similarly jailed by royal
decree without trial. Because this method of imprisonment was normally
only used when the state was in exceptional danger, Charles’ use of it was viewed as
abuse. When parliament was summoned again in 1628,
a representative named Sir Edward Coke authored the Petition of Right, a document which set
out a list of specific liberties which Charles would be absolutely forbidden from infringing. Amongst other things, primary concerns were
the illegality of arbitrary imprisonment and tax collection without parliamentary consent. In desperate need of parliamentary approval
for funding, the king eventually accepted this document, but it is widely believed that
he simply believed he was just reaffirming age-old liberties, and was not conceding anything
new. One of the main proponents of the petition
was a staunch opponent of the king called John Pym, who would later become a parliamentary
leader. Tensions escalated further when, in 1629,
a dispute about continuing royal customs collection was viewed by parliament as an illegal contradiction
of the Petition of Right. When the exasperated king ordered parliament
to adjourn, members held the speaker - John Finch, in his chair so that the session could
not formally end. He was held there long enough for resolutions
against Charles’ religious reforms and his collection of royal duties to be read out,
a slight which was too much for the king. So on March 10th, 1629, Charles I dissolved
parliament and arrested some of the ringleaders who had been behind the unrest, inadvertently
making them martyrs and providing a rallying cry for those who opposed the absolute rule. With the would-be cash cow parliament disbanded,
the king made peace with his foreign enemies and embarked on a period of sole rule. To his supporters, it was the ‘Personal
Rule’, but to his enemies, it was the more sinister-sounding ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny’. There is a general assumption that this decade-long
period must have been evil by its very nature. While many occurrences within these twilight
years of peace directly led to the strife of the 1640s and 50s, it was not nearly as
horrific as is often portrayed. In England, Personal rule began quite positively. While hardcore Puritans - radical protestants
who were convinced that the reformation was only half-done, thought that so-called High
Church Arminianism was the devil’s work, the common man was not as opposed. Many ordinary people responded quite positively
to the more formal approach to religion and readily embraced William Laud’s moderate
reforms at the beginning of the 1630s. Even Henrietta Maria became more docile and
it’s clear that the Personal Rule was a happy time for the royal family in a personal
sense. The queen even gave birth to a child named
Charles in May of 1630, a child who three decades later, would be King of England in
his own right. Younger Charles’ birth was supposedly celebrated
with great enthusiasm across all three kingdoms that the Stuart dynasty held sovereignty over,
with bonfires lit in the baby’s honour. It must have been a happy time which the royals
were soon to look back on with sorrow. Later, as a widow in her native France, Maria
described her feelings during the 1630s golden years, stating that ‘I was the happiest
and most fortunate of queens, for not only had I every pleasure the heart could desire,
I had a husband who adored me.’ In Continental Europe, the situation calmed
somewhat during the Personal Rule with the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lutzen in 1632. Despite the Swedish king’s reputation as
a hero of Protestantism, the stalemate which ensued in the aftermath of his passing began
to decrease the level of religious fear and paranoia felt in English society. Catholic dominance of the Thirty Years’
War during the 1620s had conjured a spectre of yet another invasion of the British Isles. With the stalemate, the threat deteriorated
significantly, if it was ever possible at all. Meanwhile, Charles proved himself a champion
of theatre, painting, architecture, music, and other aspects of high culture. Overall a Capuchin priest named Father Cyprien
reported back to his superiors in France that ‘England is an abundant country, and has
no taxes; the inhabitants lead a luxurious life, far removed from the poverty of other
places’. As we will see, however, all was not well
in England. Despite the queen’s increasing contentment,
her zealous Catholicism was set to be an insurmountable problem for Charles. However much he tried, suspicious Protestant
doubters would forever believe that Maria was attempting to use her position to slide
England back into the grip of Rome. The queen’s many Catholic attendants who
had accompanied her to England also proved themselves an issue, though not in Charles’
own opinion. The king actually seemed to find the Catholic
courtiers quite charming and found himself able to relax in their company. While that may be the case, it is crucial
to note in Charles’ defense that he does not seem to have been ‘going Catholic’
in any way, but had polarized interests which made it seem like he was. Specifically, he was tolerant of Catholics
and an enemy to the extreme Puritans whom he and his new Archbishop of Canterbury saw
as a threat. Upon ascending to that position in 1633, Laud
began to overreach his authority and make everything worse for almost everyone who didn’t
share his own view on church matters. In addition to his Pope-lite innovations to
the Church of England, which convinced many Puritans that they were gradually being delivered
to the Catholic church on a silver platter, Laud also repeatedly prosecuted Puritans and
opponents of ‘Episcopacy’ - the government of a church by bishops. One trial in 1637 became notorious for its
brutality, involving three men named John Bastwick, William Prynne, and Henry Burton. They were pilloried for their defiance against
Laud and had their ears cut off - Prynne had already suffered this punishment in 1634,
and so his face was branded to bear the letters S.L., or ‘seditious libeler’. This awful torture didn’t have the effect
Laud wanted, and even moderate Protestants viewed the trio as martyrs. To them, it was becoming clear what was happening. Vile Catholics were being allowed to practice
out in the open, while good, pious Protestants were persecuted. William Laud would soon after cause the spark
which eventually set England ablaze. As the Venetian ambassador said of him: ‘This
pest may be the one which will ultimately disturb the kingdom’. Despite the largely peaceful and tranquil
nature of Charles’ early Personal Rule, the need for money had not diminished in the
slightest. Unwilling to call another parliament to grant
him subsidies, a number of creative measures were used to raise royal funds and at the
same time bypass Westminster. Predictably, these clever legal tricks were
viewed by parliament as blatant, petty cash grabs. The first of these measures was the selling
of monopolies over a product or industry to one individual or company, exploiting a loophole
in the law that forbade this. Despite raising over £30,000 per year for
the king, this policy angered almost everyone else. Merchants excluded by the monopoly were annoyed
because they couldn’t trade, and regular labourers were annoyed because, under monopolies,
prices tended to rise in return for inferior products. Most infamous was the soap monopoly. Dubbed ‘Popish Soap’, this product supposedly
blistered the hands of those using it and, because of the Catholic manufacturing board
of the monopolist company, was said to blister the soul of protestants as well. Charles also began re-introducing obsolete
medieval laws in strange ways, reviving ancient fines on knights, people living in royal forests,
and people building homes outside of designated areas in London. These fines were originally designed to coerce
the fined individual into stopping a certain action, moving out of the forest for example. But Charles did not want the individual to
cease the action, because he wanted to keep fining them and bringing in the money. While this is a technically legal and clever
use of the letter of the law, it went against the spirit of the law and was widely viewed
as unjust. The king’s most infamous fundraising measure
was called ‘ship money’, which was re-introduced in its original form in 1634. It essentially served as an emergency financial
levy in case of invasion which allowed the king to collect money if there was no time
to call parliament. Maritime counties would contribute funds for
the construction of ships which would then theoretically be used in the defense of those
countries. It was a fair system if employed as it was
intended, but of course Charles I found a way to make it despised. Supported by the meddlesome Archbishop Laud,
Charles extended the collection of ship money to inland areas as well, areas which were
traditionally exempt due to their lack of a coast. Moreover, the collection of ship money was
an emergency levying of funds, and there was no true emergency. However, the king got around this by having
his lawyers bring up an old statute dictating that it was the king who determined what was
or was not an emergency. So, the king got his money, at first. When the ship money tithe was repeated year
after year though, it became a massive problem to parliament. After all, annual monetary tithes are, in
reality, taxes, and taxes could only legally be raised with parliamentary consent, however
much the king tried to legally state that it was not a tax. Naturally, all of this generated intense resistance
from such individuals as John Hampden, whose actions in 1637 challenging Ship Money gave
him a reputation as a champion of individual liberty. It also connected the parliamentary cause
with property rights. Throughout the latter part of his Personal
Rule, opposition began to mount increasingly against King Charles I. However, this opposition could not be channeled
into any meaningful change due to the irregular and infrequent intervals in which parliament
convened. Nevertheless, this state of affairs would
soon change due to growing unrest to the north in Scotland, where the meddling of one Archbishop
Laud was about to trigger a war. Scotland’s decentralized and radically protestant
church, known as the Presbyterian church, had deeply ingrained roots in the country’s
lowlands, and parts of the highlands. The Scots held onto their native faith lovingly,
so when Charles and his administration tried to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer
on them by royal decree, England’s northern neighbor began to implode. Nationalist sentiment was stoked among all
the classes, all the way from leading Scottish nobles down to the servant girls, one of whom
notoriously threw a stool at the minister in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh when he
attempted to read from the Anglican book. An organized response came on February 29th,
1638, when Scottish lords signed the National Covenant: a pledge to uphold the native Scottish
religion at all costs. This covenant pledged loyalty to the king,
but on the condition that the Presbyterian church was maintained in its unmolested form. This covenant circled around Scotland and
gained rapturous support on all fronts, with its adherents becoming known as ‘Covenanters’. Over the next year, attempts at a negotiated
solution failed and war became inevitable. As a result, both sides began to raise their
armies, the highly-motivated Scots more quickly than the English, many of whom were actually
sympathetic to the Scottish cause. Critically, this war-footing began to push
Charles’ finances to the breaking point. To further compound matters, many of his aristocratic
financiers were Catholic. The First Bishops’ War of 1639 was short
and inconclusive, ending with the Pacification of Berwick, which both sides realized would
not put an end to the conflict. So, both the Scots and English began preparing
for its resumption. However, Charles’ war chest had run dry,
and with all his sources of finance dried up, he was forced on April 13th to summon
what would become known as the ‘Short Parliament’, the first in eleven years. However, after just three weeks of subsequent
stalemate and frustration on both sides, the king dissolved parliament again on May 5th
1640. Charles then immediately resumed collection
of the hated ‘ship money’ in order to fund his war. The Second Bishops’ War of 1640 was a complete
disaster for the king. A Scottish army of 20,000 Covenanters led
by the highly competent Earl of Leven managed to outmaneuver the English, and, not long
after, defeated them at the Battle of Newburn. Following what was the first Scottish victory
on English soil since 1388, Leven occupied Northeastern England. As a note, the Earl of Leven, also known as
Alexander Leslie, had spent the previous decade fighting in the Thirty Years’ War in the
service of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus. We've previously covered his contribution
to the Siege of Stralsund. To end this disastrous conflict, Charles signed
the Treaty of Ripon, the terms of which required that the king pay the Scots £850 per day
to maintain their occupation. Now burdened by this new financial drain in
addition to his own army, Charles was once again forced to call a parliament. Holding its first session on November 3rd
1640, this would become known as the ‘Long Parliament’, because it would not be formally
dissolved until March 1660. This time, parliament was almost totally united
against the king, and its more radical Puritan elements, led by the Earl of Warwick, began
to dominate affairs. His radical allies tried and executed the
Earl of Strafford - Charles’ chief minister, began lengthy legal proceedings against Archbishop
Laud, and secured other unprecedented concessions from the Crown. All of these demands and more were set out
in the Grand Remonstrance, a document of grievances and conditions, the most crucial of which
would have deprived the king of many traditionally royal rights and privileges. It didn’t seem that Charles was going to
accept any further restriction of his power anyway, but an external factor now intervened
and made everything that much worse. In October of 1641 a Catholic revolt led by
Felim O'Neill of Kinard erupted in Ireland. Thousands of protestants were already dead
and many more were refugees, it was clear that an army would be necessary to quell the
Irish. But under whose authority would the army be
raised? Parliament no longer trusted the king with
military force, fearing that he would use the army against them, while the king would
not accept parliament’s control because of the same reason. For some reason, perhaps because Charles had
uncovered evidence that his enemies in parliament had been conspiring with the Covenanters,
Charles marched to the House of Commons with 400 soldiers on January 5th 1642. There, he attempted to arrest five MPs: John
Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode, the ostensible
ringleaders of his imagined covenanter conspiracy. When this attempt embarrassingly failed, the
royal family quickly left London and went to Windsor Castle, fearing that the parliament-supporting
London mobs would be riled into a fury against them. From this point forward, King Charles and
his opponents at Westminster edged slowly closer to civil war, with each side unwilling
to blink, and both sides hoping that the other would do so first. Charles was able to convince many of his English
and Welsh subjects that he stood for the defense of their traditional constitution and Elizabethan
church doctrine, while parliament argued that the king ought to be deprived of his remaining
constitutional powers, as it was clear that he could not be trusted to use them. This too attracted many supporters, as did
the widespread puritan desire in parliament to undertake radical religious reform. In the end, both sides attracted enough support
to take the final step towards civil war. By early 1642, Charles had moved his court
north to the city of York. Attempting to seize control of the situation
in Ireland and assume military authority of their own, parliament unconstitutionally issued
the Militia Ordinance in March 1642, permitting them to raise an army and appoint its commanders. They chose the staunch anti-royalist Robert
Devereux, the Earl of Essex whose father had been executed after an attempted coup against
Elizabeth I. Now requiring an army of his own to counter
that of his enemies at Westminster, Charles passed the equally unconstitutional Commission
of Array, allowing the king’s chosen ‘Commissioners’, usually local nobles, to levy troops from
their own regions for service in the royal army. As the twin armies slowly began to grow, Charles
marched from his base at York to the armoury city of Hull, arriving outside its gates on
April 29th. The city contained a vast amount of arms and
ammunition, enough to supply the royalist army’s coming campaign if it became necessary. As it turned out, Charles was out of luck. Hull’s governor - Sir John Hotham, had flipped
to the parliamentary cause and barred the gates to the king, forcing his majesty to
retreat in humiliation, eventually ending up in Nottingham. It was there that, on August 22nd 1642, the
king officially raised his Royal Standard on castle hill. In what was thought by many to be an ill omen
for the coming clash, a storm blew the banner down the following night. The campaign began slowly. On September 9th, parliament’s appointed
commander - Essex, established a headquarters at Northampton with the aim of intercepting
Charles’ army with his own, and preventing any royalist march on London. The king meanwhile was still in a bit of a
shaky situation. With only five regiments of foot and 500 cavalry
troopers by this time, the king’s army needed more men. In order to get them, Charles departed from
Nottingham September 13th and marched west through Derby, Uttoxeter, Stafford and Wellington,
eventually reaching Shrewsbury on the 20th. This position allowed the royalists to absorb
more units Charles’ commissioners had raised in North Wales and Lancashire, swelling his
army to a workable size. While this was happening, the royalist horse
under the experienced command of Prince Rupert took up position in Bridgnorth, aiming to
screen any potential parliamentary attack on the main army. Prince Rupert was the son of Frederick V,
Elector of the Palatinate, who had failed to gain the throne of Bohemia in 1618, essentially
beginning the Thirty Years’ War. After being captured by the Holy Roman Empire
in a military campaign, Rupert had been freed by the diplomatic maneuvering of his uncle
- Charles I. He subsequently came over to England and, gratefully, joined the English
king’s army as an extremely competent cavalry commander. Essex subsequently attempted to prevent a
royalist thrust towards London and deter further royalist reinforcements by marching towards
Worcester. While the bulk of parliament’s field army
was ponderously making its way through the scattered villages of the Midlands, Essex
sent two cavalry regiments ahead to secure the west bank of the River Severn. However, when around a thousand parliamentary
horsemen ran into a similar number of Rupert’s royalist horsemen at Powick Bridge, the former
were quickly routed and driven off by the prince’s superior tactics. This was the first true engagement of the
civil war and was, according to parliamentarian Hugh Peters: “Where England’s sorrows
began.” Buoyed by this initial victory, the now-enlarged
royalist army began to move out of Shrewsbury on October 12th with London as its ultimate
objective - Charles would march on the ‘Vipers’ Nest’ and end the war here and now. A week later, Essex began his eastward march
in pursuit, eventually arriving in the vicinity of Kineton with the aim of protecting Banbury,
while Charles and his army were conducting operations from the nearby town of Edgecote. Because of the two sides’ inexperience in
war, inefficient scouting had not alerted either side to the presence of the other so
close by. A royalist council of war at Edgecote, held
on the 22nd, decided that a 4,000 strong brigade would attempt to seize Banbury the next day. By nightfall, the king’s army was dispersing
into billets around the Wormington Hills, while at about the same time, Essex’s army
finally arrived at Kineton. While Charles was staying at the home of Sir
William Chancie, Prince Rupert rode to Wormleighton and, seemingly by chance, managed to capture
a quartermaster’s party from Essex’s army, which was nearby. After prying information from the prisoners,
Rupert sent a few mounted scouts to Kineton, who returned at midnight and confirmed that
the entire parliamentary army was right there. By 3am on the 23rd of October, Charles was
aware the Essex was in the area and, an hour later, exhausted officers began to dispatch
orders to their men for a general rendezvous near the Edgehill heights. At this point, the king’s royalist army
was between Essex and London, meaning that it could have marched towards London relatively
unopposed. However, Charles and his advisors would not
back away from the clash and decided to do a 180, finally meeting the roundhead army
near Edgehill, three miles southeast of Kineton. By the afternoon of October 23rd, the armies
of parliament and king now faced each other across a section of arable land and meadow
just northwest of the main slopes. To all those present on both sides, it seemed
as though the decisive battle of the war was at hand. With its battle array formed on the level
ground just in front of Radway, Charles I’s royalists arrayed their army in two lines
of battle, opting to deploy in the Swedish-style checkerboard formation rather than in the
Dutch-style, which would allow the second-line regiments to form a continuous front if needed. Infantry brigades in the first line, from
left to right, were those led by Henry Wentworth, Richard Feilding and Charles Gerard, while
those to the rear were led by Sir Nicholas Byron and John Bellasis. All appear to have been about the same size,
for a total infantry force of just over 9,000 men. Opposite them were Essex’s infantry, formed
up into three large, but loosely formed brigades of roughly 4,000 men each for a total of 12,000
foot. The central brigade took up a mainly defensive
position behind a small hill, while the two on the flanks were slightly in front. Most of the cavalry on both sides of the battlefield
was present on Prince Rupert’s royalist right wing. He held overall command on this flank, had
a unit of a thousand dragoons, and was opposed by James Ramsay’s parliamentary cavalry. Also on this side of the battlefield was a
unit of parliamentary dragoon mobile infantry and musketeers hidden to ambush in a nearby
hedgerow. On the other flank, slightly less numerical
royalist cavalry under Henry Wilmot faced those commanded by the Duke of Bedford. It’s said that King Charles visited every
unit of his cavalry and all of his infantry formations in order to review his troops and
encourage them for the coming battle. He even wished to ride with his army, but
was persuaded to retire to the rear with his small lifeguard cavalry reserve, the majority
of which had persuaded the king to let them join Rupert’s charge. The first major battle of the English Civil
War finally began at 2PM with an artillery duel. Lasting for one hour, neither bombardment
inflicted heavy losses and served more as a loud prelude to the real battle. While this was going on, dragoons on Rupert’s
extreme right wing were able to discover and eventually repel the roundhead ambushers within
the hedgerow, providing the main cavalry force with a free run at the enemy. With Essex’s army unwilling to move first,
fighting began when both of the royalist cavalry wings launched a thunderous, head-on charge
at their opposition. Using the latest cavalry shock tactics of
direct charge imported from the continent by Prince Rupert, the king’s horsemen on
both flanks swept away parliament’s cavalry, which still used stationary Dutch tactics
of firing from saddleback. A unit of parliamentarian troopers even deserted
and joined the royalists. With both of Essex’s mounted wings swept
off the field, it seemed like the time was right for the king’s horse to pivot and
launch the coup de grâce against parliament’s flank and rear. However, due to the indiscipline of its commanders
and individual soldiers who were flushed with the glory of victory, they instead continued
chasing the routed enemy. Historians believe that if the royalist cavalry
had halted, regrouped and charged at this point, the English Civil War could have been
put to a decisive end, but it was not to be, and the opportunity was lost. With almost all horsemen now off the field,
both infantry forces filled into a single line of battle and prepared to advance. Musketeers blasted away and softened up the
opposing foot, before the pikemen - wielding their 16 foot long weapons, came into contact
and engaged in a so-called ‘push of pike’, a shoving match during which the two sides
literally pushed each other until one broke. Better equipped parliamentary footmen managed
to gain a slight advantage and casualties slowly began to mount on both sides. Now that all of the royalist cavalry had victoriously
left the field, two parliamentary reserve cavalry units under Sir William Balfour and
Philip Stapleton, which had previously been hidden behind a small hill, struck the flanks
of the Byron’s unit. After subsequently bursting through the royalist
center, Balfour managed to disable a few of the enemy’s artillery pieces. Without knowing it, they had also come extremely
close to capturing the king’s sons - Charles and his brother James. In the midst of the fighting, the king’s
royal standard was seized by the parliamentary infantry, but was then recaptured by a royalist
cavalry officer. By late afternoon inexperienced soldiers on
both sides were shaken by the experience of battle and, by dusk, Rupert’s cavalry returned
and stabilized the situation. Neither side had any further stomach for the
battle and both backed off at nightfall. By the time morning came, the royalists had
retreated from the field and the battle ended as a stalemate. The 1,500 dead soldiers was a small casualty
count when compared to the horrors on the continent, primarily due to the terribly cold
night which followed the battle at Edgehill which helped to seal the fate of many injured
troops. After the brutal and inconclusive battle of
Edgehill, Earl of Essex’s battered and demoralized parliamentary army retreated north to the
safety of Warwick Castle. Meanwhile, jubilant at the news of his army’s
victory, and urged by his firebrand cavalry commander Prince Rupert, King Charles I ordered
a measured advance towards London. He advanced via Banbury, which capitulated
on October 26th, then took Oxford, the city which would become the royalist causes’
beating heart throughout the first war. While the main armies of both factions thrust
and parried each other's blows near England’s great capital city, the embers of conflict
also burst into flames in the outlying counties. In the north, the Earl of Newcastle - Charles’
appointed military governor in the region, assembled a small but disciplined army and
faced off against the parliamentarian Lord Fairfax and his prodigious son and second
in command - Sir Thomas. Throughout the course of 1642, Newcastle gradually
gained the upper hand in Yorkshire, pushing the anti-cavalier forces back to Selby. He enjoyed such success that in December,
the earl even received royal thanks for his service. In the west country, royalist and parliamentary
forces fought a small-scale war of raids and counter-raids near the Welsh border, a state
of affairs that would continue well into 1643. In this theatre too, the king’s men gained
the upper hand. As the war on the periphery continued, the
king’s main army resumed its march on London after stopping at Reading to consolidate. However, this delay allowed Essex to overtake
his opponent by moving via Northampton, reaching London before the royalists got there. The armies clashed again on November 11th,
when royalist troops under Rupert caught and badly mauled two regiments of parliamentary
horse near Brentford - a key staging point on the way to London. Much like they had at Edgehill, the prince’s
victorious troops went too far instead of consolidating their position. This time, rather than simply taking Brentford
as a prelude to moving on to London, his men looted it. While this plundering was gentle when compared
to the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War on the continent, inhabitants of nearby towns
began forming into a citizens army prepared to resist further attacks. When the royalists approached the village
of Turnham Green, only a few miles from London, they were opposed by a ragtag army of 24,000
parliamentarians composed of men from the capital’s trained bands, Essex’s beaten
army, and hastily armed civilians. Against this defensive bulwark, there was
nothing Charles’ army could do. The royalist host was already short of supplies
and still depleted in numbers after Edgehill, and moreover, if the apparently imminent ‘Battle
of Turnham Green’ became a true battle, the killing of London’s ordinary people,
however armed they were, would likely turn the country against its king even more. So, after an incredibly tense standoff lasting
almost all day, the royalist army turned and withdrew at dusk. This was a pivotal moment in the war, for
the royalists had failed to retake the city, and its massive wealth, industry, ports, and
strategic value would remain a keystone of parliamentarian power. After this anticlimax, Charles dispersed his
army to winter quarters in Oxford and the surrounding towns where support for the king
was most pronounced. Over that winter, the famous university city
was transformed into an alternative military capital for the royalist cause. While the king’s army put down roots for
the cold season, Essex’s still numerically superior force concluded the year by besieging
and capturing Reading. After this, with disease and many other issues
plaguing both armies, a stalemate set in. Essex wintered in the Thames valley, where
his army was dormant until the campaigning season of the next year. To further protect the capital, civilians
began digging earthworks and other defenses. By the turn of 1643, it was clear that any
chance of a quick cavalier victory had been snuffed out. On January 23rd, 1643, a Parliamentarian force
under Sir Thomas Fairfax stormed a 1,500-strong royalist garrison at Leeds under Sir William
Saville. After a swift two-hour battle, the royalists
were defeated, the survivors withdrawing to Wakefield in the evening. The sullen appearance of Leeds’ beaten and
downtrodden royalists spooked Wakefield’s own garrison, and by nightfall, this town,
too, was abandoned. The next day, Fairfax’s men occupied Wakefield;
with Leeds and Wakefield taken, a line of communications had been opened between Sir
Thomas and his father. Sir Thomas would remain at Riding until the
end of March when he was recalled to Selby. Meanwhile, Newcastle and his forces returned
to York. Here, his command was faced with two tasks
before he could return his attention to Lord Fairfax. First, he sent General James King with a detachment
of horse troops to escort an ammunition convoy from Newcastle to York. On February 1st, the convoy was ambushed by
a sallying force from the Scarborough garrison, led by the city’s Parliamentarian governor,
Sir Hugh Cholmley, at Yarum Bridge. Although Cholmley’s force held the advantage
of good terrain, they were beaten back from the field. Soon after, Cholmley would defect, declaring
his allegiance to King Charles and transferring much of the East Riding of Yorkshire to Royalist
control. The immediate concern for Charles was a lack
of military resources, particularly gunpowder and match. His wife - Henrietta Maria, was in the process
of ferrying hundreds of barrels of these, other supplies and money to Oxford from the
Low Countries. However, until he received these critical
munitions, the main royalist army was unable to undertake any proper offensives. Failure to capture any of the major port towns
of the south meant that the queen’s convoy had to dock at the northern coastal town of
Bridlington, which was under Newcastle’s control at the time. For the time being, a wedge of parliamentarian-held
territory sat between the king and his much-needed supplies, a fact which made the Yorkshire
campaign of 1643 even more vital. While the queen took residence in York, Newcastle
fought the two Fairfaxes for supremacy over Yorkshire’s valuable ‘clothing towns’. In an early spring campaign, it seemed as
though the royalists were going to maintain their hegemony in the north. Lord Fairfax found himself in a precarious
situation at Selby, having little support. With Newcastle’s main army at York and the
defected Cholmeley holding much of the East Riding, Fairfax’s power now lay solely in
the West Riding. Sir Thomas Fairfax was ordered to bring what
men he could to join him at Sherburn, as Newcastle’s forces were in a good position to intercept
them on their way to Leeds. Sir Thomas soon returned from the West Riding,
bringing a small force of musketeers and horses, supplemented by a large body of clubmen - local
volunteers armed with whatever weapons they could find. Sir Thomas was given the task of creating
a diversion for his father’s march by engaging the small Royalist garrison at Tadcaster. During the march, his troops passed through
the old Medieval battlefield of Towton before making their way to Tadcaster’s outskirts. The Royalist garrison of 3-4,000 men, seeing
Sir Thomas’ large host approaching, promptly abandoned the town to the Roundheads. Newcastle had planned to send a large horse
contingent to intercept Lord Fairfax’s march, but with Tadcaster fallen, he feared his intelligence
reports were off and that rather than advancing to Leeds, Lord Fairfax was actually moving
against him at York. Having this train of thought in mind, Newcastle
deployed his army in an order of battle on Clifton Moor. The diversion by Sir Thomas’ command had
played out perfectly, causing the Royalists to question their enemy’s movements and
intentions. However, finding Tadcaster abandoned, Sir
Thomas opted to destroy the enemy earthworks in town, causing much delay while a sizeable
contingent of Royalists crossed the River Wharfe at Thorpe Arche, just north of Tadcaster,
and was advancing rapidly on his position. The Royalists were led by Colonel George Goring,
who was a capable, yet often erratic cavalier. Sir Thomas’ force marching against the Royalists
was slightly larger than Goring’s, but Sir Thomas only had 150 horsemen compared to Goring’s
complement of around 1,000 horsemen and dragoons. The remainder of the Parliamentarian command
consisted of foot, musketeers, and clubmen. Sir Thomas was faced with a difficult task,
withdrawing in the face of an enemy numerically superior in horsemen across two large areas
of open ground: Bramham Moor and Winn Moor. The area of Winn Moor closest to Seacroft
village was known locally as Seacroft Moor. The Roundheads began their march onto Bramham
Moor, with the Royalist horse hot in pursuit. Offsetting his numerical inferiority by utilizing
country lanes, Fairfax intended to bottle up the Royalists long enough for his foot
units to reach the enclosures between Bramham Moor and Winn Moor. Continuing his steady withdrawal until his
foot had enough time to cross Bramham Moor, Sir Thomas was outraged to find that his foot
troops had not moved an inch from their positions. With the Royalists fast approaching, Sir Thomas
opted to divide his foot companies into two divisions, sending them across the Moor, protecting
their rear with three troops of horse. By now, the Royalists had deployed on the
Moor in three equal contingents and were continuing to shadow the Roundheads’ withdrawal, maintaining
several hundred yards’ distance. Before long, Sir Thomas’ forces reached
the enclosures between Bramham Moor and Winn Moor, but the situation rapidly deteriorated
when the men reached the town of Kidhall. Here, men broke ranks to seek a drink on that
hot day, and the Parliamentarian forces’ cohesion became disrupted. A crisis point was being reached in the battle. When Sir Thomas’ column emerged from the
enclosures onto the moor, Goring’s men were shadowing them a few hundred yards to the
north. Before the Parliamentarians could manage to
reach the safety of Seacroft village, Goring turned his men into battle lines and charged
the disrupted Roundhead ranks. A thousand horsemen bore down on Sir Thomas’
men, who stood little chance in their exposed and greatly-disordered columns. The Parliamentarians, greatly pressed by the
Royalist horse, soon fell into panic and disarray. The militia clubmen fled almost immediately,
while the remaining companies of foot and musketeers put up a slightly better defense. But when the infantry discharged their muskets,
they found themselves defenseless against the Royalist horsemen. Heavily outnumbered, Sir Thomas’ mounted
troops decided to abandon their comrades in the foot companies to their fate. Most of the Roundhead horsemen managed to
retreat, but few of the foot companies and musketeers could escape their current predicament. The Parliamentarians had been well and truly
beaten at the Battle of Seacroft Moor. Over eight hundred prisoners were taken, along
with about 100 - 200 men killed. Sir Thomas Fairfax would describe the battle
as “the greatest loss we ever received.” Unwilling to be defeated so easily, the Fairfaxes
got back at him in May. On the night of the 21st, Sir Thomas Fairfax
stormed Wakefield in an excellently executed night assault and captured Goring in the process. The setback was a shock to Newcastle and meant
that the Yorkshire royalists were unable to spare any troops to assist their queen’s
progress back to Oxford. A few weeks earlier, Essex had roused parliament’s
main army in the Thames valley and used it to besiege Reading, a vital link in the defensive
line shielding Charles’ makeshift capital at Oxford. Essex took the city on April 25th after a
blockade lasting almost two weeks. Unfortunately for the Lord General, his overly
cautious nature and a massive outbreak of Typhus among his soldiers crippled the roundhead
army, threw away its strategic initiative, and gave royalist forces in the area much-needed
breathing room. On June 1st, Henrietta Maria left York accompanied
by 5,000 men and, despite being clearly sighted by Essex’s scouts, was not intercepted. As the supply convoy slowly moved south, the
northern campaign reached a climax when Newcastle’s 10,000 men cornered and crushed Thomas Fairfax’s
three and a half thousand at Adwalton Moor, securing royalist control over Yorkshire and
besieging the parliamentarians at Hull6. Now free of pressure from the Thames valley,
Prince Rupert, victorious in many small raids and cavalry skirmishes, rode north to escort
his queen the rest of the way. She finally entered Oxford on July 14th to
rapturous applause and the ringing of bells. Everything was going the king’s way, but
the ‘royalist summer’ hadn’t peaked just yet. The main threat to Oxford in 1643 was Sir
William Waller’s newly formed Western Association Army, operating in and around the area of
modern Wiltshire and the southwest, threatening to cut off royalist communication with Wales,
a key recruiting ground. He was opposed in the west by the brilliant
royalist commander Sir Ralph Hopton, an old friend and comrade of Waller’s with whom
he had fought in the Thirty Years’ War decades earlier. He was also a notorious disciplinarian, touting
the firm but fair motto: “Pay well, command well, hang well.” If there was any chance of an eastward linkup
between Hopton’s Royalist army and Charles’ force in Oxford for a combined offensive on
London, Parliamentarian control in the West first had to be crushed. Back on May 16th, Hopton had defeated the
Roundheads at the Battle of Stratton in Cornwall, and his rapid progress into Devon had encouraged
the King to send him reinforcements under Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford. On June 4th, Hopton’s army was reinforced
at Chard, bringing his combined strength up to 4,000 foot, 2,000 horsemen, and 300 dragoons,
as well as 16 cannon. In the ensuing campaign, Hopton, Hertford,
and Prince Maurice would share equal command over their army, combining their dignity,
rank, and military skills to form an effectively-led fighting force. Hertford commanded in name through his social
status, while Hopton led in the field, and Prince Maurice oversaw the army’s horse
contingent. The Royalists’ plan for the summer campaign
in the West relied on the construction of a stout, defendable base of operations by
seizing Wells, Taunton, Bridgwater, and Dunster castle, before applying pressure against the
Parliamentarians’ main rallying point at Bath. Cavalry raids and skirmishes erupted in the
countryside between Royalists and Parliamentarians as Hopton’s army converged on its objectives. On June 9th, a large skirmish broke out south
of Chewton Mendip, in which Prince Maurice was temporarily taken prisoner. A three-week lull then ensued, during which
Waller hoped to augment his army at Bath with additional reinforcements. The Parliamentarian cavalry was bolstered
by a regiment of cuirassiers arriving from London under Sir Arthur Heselrige, bringing
the Parliamentarian cavalry strength up to 2,500, but Waller badly needed infantry. By the first week of July, Waller could field
no more than 1,500 footman against Hopton’s 4,000. The Royalists entered Bradford-on-Avon on
July 2nd, bringing them within five miles southeast of Bath. In response, Waller moved his army to Claverton
Down to halt the enemy's advance. On the 3rd, Hopton’s regiments began pushing
back Waller’s picket posts and other outlying detachments. With pressure bearing down on him from Prince
Maurice, whose horse regiments attacked Claverton, and Hopton’s foot regiments pursuing Waller’s
troops through Batheaston, the Parliamentarians were forced to make a hasty withdrawal into
Bath. At midnight, Hopton evaluated his situation
and considered moving past Batheaston to the southern slopes of Lansdown Hill. However, having just a portion of the army
at his disposal, Hopted decided to wait until Prince Maurice’s horse regrouped with him
the next day. On the morning of July 4th, the Royalists
closed in on Lansdown, only to find that Waller’s army had beaten them to it. Waller’s army was strongly posted on the
summit of Lansdown Hill. Holding a council of war with his co-commanders,
Hopton decided an attack on the position was beyond contemplation, but also, to remain
where they were would only incur further casualties. Just after midday, the Royalists pulled back
to Marshfield, with Hopton covering their withdrawal. Waller knew that the Royalists would try to
make a move to capture Bath from the north by advancing along the ridge of Lansdown Hill. And so, just after dawn on July 5th, he maneuvered
his army along the Roman road, which runs through Lansdown and set up on the north escarpment
in order to counter a Royalist advance from Marshfield. At the top of the hill, Waller instructed
his foot companies to build crude breastworks astride the road ascending the hill, while
simultaneously throwing out a cavalry screen to probe the Royalist picket outposts. Waller’s horse troopers soon located and
engaged the Royalist outposts and began skirmishing with them, harrying them back onto the main
Royalist body at Marshfield. Roused into action by this challenge, at 8:00
AM, Hopton deployed his army, setting it in motion towards Lansdown Hill. He used Tog and Freezing hills as the axis
of his advance on the Roundhead lines. Skirmishing continued inconclusively around
Tog Hill for another two hours, but Hopton and his co-commanders knew they would gain
little from these small actions besides exhausting their limited ammunition supply. At ten that morning, the Royalists began to
withdraw back to their camp at Marshfield to rethink their strategy. But before Hopton’s army had moved even
a mile, Waller sent out most of his horse and dragoon squadrons in pursuit. The timing of his attack was perfect. The Roundhead horsemen sent shockwaves of
panic and confusion surging through the ranks of the Royalist rearguard. Only a stout defense by Hopton’s Cornish
foot regiments in the center and a timely intervention by Lord Carnaravon’s Regiment
of Horse prevented Hopton’s withdrawal from turning into a complete rout. Gradually, more and more Royalist units wheeled
about and rushed to join in the action raging at Tog and Freezing hills. Eventually, the Parliamentarians were driven
back after hours of bloody combat. The Parliamentarian horse squadrons were steadily
pressed back along Freezing Hill, and soon came under a galling enfilading fire from
Royalist cavalry and musketeers. The Roundhead ranks fell into a bout of confusion. However, the Parliamentarians soon rallied
and put up a stiff resistance of their own, slowing Hopton’s progress. By the early afternoon, the Royalists held
firm control of the ground before Waller’s position on Lansdown Hill. Hopton, however, was still less than enthusiastic
about launching what he saw would be a costly frontal assault on Waller’s prepared position
on the high ground atop the escarpment. As Royalist troops waited for orders in the
valley below, they came under an intense artillery barrage from the Parliamentarian guns atop
the hill. Hopton’s Cornish foot regiments impatiently
pleaded with Hopton to charge Waller’s cannons. Finally relenting, Hopton ordered both his
horse and foot regiments to storm the enemy position. The Royalist horse charged up the center through
Freezing Hill Lane as musketeers attempted to drive out the Roundheads from the woods
on either side of the road. It was hoped that the infantry would then
be in a position to outflank Waller’s line. Unfortunately for Hopton, the Royalist horse
squadrons were repulsed in the center with heavy losses, and it was only through Colonel
Sir Bevil Grenville that they managed to maintain the attack momentum. Spotting the Royalist squadrons in the center
falling back in disarray, Grenville led his Cornish pikemen forward, advancing up the
hill with musketeers supporting his left and cavalry holding the right. Their movement partially concealed by a wall
on the left side of the road, the Cornish pikemen steadily pressed ahead to the top
of the escarpment, where they came under murderous fire as they crested the hill. The advance came screeching to a halt, and
Sir Arthur Heselrige’s Regiment of Horse charged the stubborn Cornishmen three times
as the Royalists tried desperately to cling on to their position on level ground. Grenville was killed fighting at the head
of his pikemen. For a decisive moment, Grenville’s defense
had broken the offensive spirit of the Parliamentarian horse squadrons. Waller began pulling his men back to cover
behind a stone wall about 400 yards behind his breastworks - the Royalists were now faced
with the challenge of overcoming a second strong Parliamentarian defensive line. The battle was grinding into a stalemate,
as the exhausted Royalists were unable to muster the strength to press onwards against
a second enemy line of defense and be subjected to even more withering fire. The lull didn’t last long, with Waller deciding
to withdraw his army along Lansdown Hill back towards Bath. The fatigued Royalists, low on ammunition
and unable to follow up their hours-long battle with a vigorous pursuit, allowed the Parliamentarians
to retreat before them. However, the wheel of fortune turned quickly. When the cavalier commander inspected prisoners
from the battle, he was injured by an exploding powder magazine and temporarily put out of
action. Early the next morning, the Royalists began
withdrawing to Marshfield. The Battle of Lansdowne had ended in a major
tactical Royalist victory, with Hopton holding the field at the cost of around 2-300 men
killed and another 6-700 wounded. However, Waller believed that Lansdowne was
a strategic victory for the Parliamentarian cause. Although Waller had retreated in good order
and given up the field to Hopton, he had suffered relatively light casualties. The Royalists had been stopped in their attempt
to capture Bath, and they had now become more concerned with safely withdrawing their army
intact rather than conquering the Parliamentarian stronghold. After then receiving reinforcements from Oxford,
Charles’ armies concluded affairs in the west at the conclusive Battle of Roundway
Down. Once again, the royalist advantage in horsemen
paid off, and their mounted charge shattered the parliamentary line. Many terrified and fleeing roundhead cavalry
charged by accident down a hidden 300-foot drop, known since as bloody ditch. With that, the Western Association Army was
utterly crushed. When news subsequently arrived in Oxford that
their enemy’s western army had been totally annihilated, Charles dispatched Prince Rupert
with 5,500 troops to reinforce Hopton’s army. This opportunistic campaign probably intended
to take Gloucester, but Waller’s retreat to the city bolstered its defenses, making
that objective unrealistic. So instead, the royalist field army headed
for Bristol, England’s second most populated city. It also possessed key metalworking industries
which could be turned to the creation of weaponry and a small fleet which had potential as the
beginnings of a reborn navy. Rupert, ‘whose very name was half a conquest’,
reached Bristol unopposed on July 23rd. That day, the Prince quartered himself at
Westbury College, two miles short of Bristol. During the afternoon, he led a reconnaissance
party along the Avon from Durdham Down to Clifton Church in order to scout out the western
defenses of the city. Parliamentarian forces in the nearby Brandon
Hill fort soon opened fire on Rupert’s party. Opting to return to his camp to begin making
siege preparations, Rupert left a contingent of 200 musketeers, 100 pikemen, and a regiment
of dragoons under Colonel Henry Washington at Clifton Church. During the night, Washington’s party sallied
out from Clifton Church and engaged the Roundheads at Brandon Hill fort but were repulsed. More skirmishing across the lines continued
throughout the day. Meanwhile, to the south of the River Avon,
Prince Maurice’s Cornish army began digging entrenchments in preparation for the siege. Cannons were brought up from the rear to form
siege batteries. On July 24th, Prince Rupert demonstrated in
front of the defenses of Bristol, sending an officer and trumpeter to the city walls
with a message for Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, commanding the Bristol garrison. Rupert ordered Fiennes and his men to stand
down, but the Colonel refused. Rupert crossed the Avon with his retinue the
next day to meet with Prince Maurice in a council of war to determine how best to take
Bristol. The main question was how best to take the
city - by a slow, methodical siege or with a direct assault on the works. Prince Maurice and many of his officers in
the Western army implored Rupert to commence a traditional siege operation, but Rupert
and his officers favored an immediate assault on the position. Eventually, Rupert won out, and the stage
was set for an assault on Bristol the next day. The plan for the Storming of Bristol called
for an assault to be made at daybreak. In order to identify friends from foes between
the two armies in the confusion of battle, the password “Oxford” was given out to
the Royalist ranks, and every soldier was to wear a green emblem or article of clothing. Prince Maurice’s Cornish footmen were formed
into three columns with the intent of storming the walls on either side of the Temple Gate. The plan called for a signal shot to be fired
by the various siege batteries at 4:00 AM. At three o’clock on the morning of July
26th, however, the impatient Cornish foot columns began setting off for the attack. Seeing this, Prince Rupert ordered the signal
guns to open fire, commencing the general assault. On the northeast side of the city, a brigade
under Lord Gandison assaulted Stoke’s Croft and Prior’s Hill Fort, but they were repulsed
with high losses, and Lord Gandison was mortally wounded. More bad news soon arrived when a small bomb
placed on the gate at Stoke’s Croft failed to explode. Colonel John Belasyse’s brigade assaulted
the Windmill Hill fort, but without scaling ladders, they could not climb over the wall
and fill the ditches with fascines. Seeing the brigade retreating in disorder,
Prince Rupert personally rode out to rally the regiments, bringing them back up to the
line for a renewed attack on Windmill Hill, but they were still unable to gain headway. Colonel Henry Wentworth led his brigade into
a hail of withering fire at the Windmill Hill fort, and was soon repulsed. To the right of Wentworth’s brigade, Colonel
Washington and his dragoons were able to reach an angle in the wall, out of sight of the
main forts’ enfilading fire. Wentworth’s men soon followed Washington’s
lead. The Royalist column threw their grenades over
the fort walls and stormed the parapet. Heavy fighting erupted inside the fort, and
the Royalist infantry tore down the walls to allow for the horse squadrons to follow
them in. The Roundheads here, led by Major Hercules
Langrish, were unable to stem the onrushing Royalist tide and were soon falling back. Colonel Fiennes’ Regiment of Horse attempted
to counterattack, and an intense melee raged around the Windmill Hill fort until the Parliamentarians
were forced back, and driven into the city suburbs. Seizing the momentum of the attack, Wentworth’s
brigade took a fortified position known as the “Essex Work”, its Roundhead garrison
having abandoned it after spotting the approaching Royalist foot. Back to the south of Bristol, the Cornish
attack continued pressing on toward the wall, pushing carts into the moat to use as a makeshift
fascine. The Cornish foot suffered especially heavy
casualties attempting to scale the city walls, with many senior officers being killed or
wounded. Colonel Brutus Buck, at the head of his column,
managed to escape the ramparts before he received a blow from a halberd, which knocked him back
into the ditch and fatally wounded him. Sir Nicholas Slanning and Colonel John Trevannion
were shot dead, and many other senior field officers were badly wounded. To the north, Wentworth’s brigade was joined
by Belasye, and their two units pushed onwards against the city defenses supported by Major-General
Sir Arthur Aston’s horse detachment. The Royalists were soon upon the inner fortifications
of Bristol, with combat focusing around the Frome Gate. The Cavaliers tried desperately to force it
open against determined Roundhead resistance. Among the Parliamentary defenders at the Frome
Gate was a group of women led by Dorothy Hazzard. These women vigorously worked to reinforce
the gate with woolsacks and earth to keep the Royalists out. Rupert sent a message to Maurice asking for
1,000 Cornish foot to reinforce the assault on the Frome Gate. As these troops made their way around the
walls at 2:00 PM, Colonel Fiennes opened up a parley talk with Prince Rupert, seeking
terms to open the city to the Royalists. Rupert immediately took up Fiennes’ offer
of parley, hoping to avoid even greater losses with a renewed assault. Meeting with Rupert, Fiennes came to an agreement
to surrender Bristol at 10:00 PM that night, by which time the Royalists held much of the
city anyway. The Parliamentary garrison, under the terms
of the articles of war, were allowed to march out of Bristol with the officers and cavalry
allowed to keep their horses and swords, and all ranks were permitted to keep their personal
belongings. However, the terms of the surrender agreement
were soon broken, and the Roundheads soon found their belongings ransacked and plundered,
stripped of all they could carry by the victorious Royalist troops as they departed Bristol. The capitulation of Bristol was
a coup for the royalist forces in both morale and materiel. Around 80 guns were seized, along with 1,700
barrels of gunpowder and 6,000 muskets. But the manpower cost had been a high one
- as many as 500 royalists were killed in the attack. With the gathered momentum, a royalist war
council convened on August 4th and agreed that the next target would be Gloucester itself. With a population of 5,000, it controlled
the Severn river and communications from Oxford to south Wales. By the 10th royalist armies completely surrounded
the city, but instead of the surrender of its governor - Edward Massey, they were met
with fierce resistance. Now facing an extensive siege, Charles’
siege commander, the Earl of Forth, began a bombardment on the 13th. When news arrived of Gloucester’s situation,
total alarm struck parliament due to fear that its loss might mean total collapse. To remedy the situation, Essex’s main army
near London was swiftly reinforced with an influx of fresh troops and the trained bands
of the city proper. At about this time, Edward Montagu - Earl
of Manchester, was given command of the newly formed Eastern Association parliamentarian
army. He appointed an almost unknown cavalry commander
- a certain Oliver Cromwell, as his second in command. On August 25th, Essex’s enlarged main army
marched to save the beleaguered parliamentarian bastion in the west. Despite suffering multiple royalist attempts
to hinder his army’s progress, Essex reached Prestbury Hill, from which he could see the
spires of Gloucester’s great cathedral, on September 5th. From there, the Thames army fired off a number
of cannons to alert the city garrison that relief was close at hand. On the same day, Charles’ almost month-long
investment of Gloucester came to an end with total failure, his army withdrawing to Bristol2. Nevertheless, Essex’s now vulnerable position
provided the royalists with a great opportunity to win the war anyway. The presence of London’s trained bands in
the field army meant that if the cavaliers could bring Essex to battle and defeat him,
a significant part of the capital’s defenders would be lost with the army’s destruction. Realising the danger, the Lord General tried
to trick his cavalier opponents by moving up to Tewkesbury, feinting as if he was either
going to march in a wide arc back to London using the northern route, or intended to invade
Wales. When this ruse failed, Essex boldly made a
run for safety via the southern route3 on September 15th. He almost succeeded, but Prince Rupert’s
scouts detected the movement, caught up with the parliamentarians via a more direct route
and savaged their dangerously overextended army at Aldbourne Chase. This forced Essex to delay his march and allowed
Charles’ army to overtake his own. The royalists occupied the town of Newbury
on the gloomy afternoon of September 19th, thereby putting themselves in a superior position
between London and Essex, forcing the latter to rest on high ground south of Enborne village. Defying his usually cautious nature and unwilling
to stay on the back foot, the Earl of Essex roused his army, composed of 8,000 infantry
and 6,000 cavalry, just before dawn. The general rallied his vanguard, asked whether
they were willing to fight, and was met with the reply: “Let us fall upon them! We will, by God’s assistance, beat it from
them all.” With that Essex led his vanguard of 4,000
infantry and a small number of mounted men out at 6am, towards the strategic height of
Round Hill. The royalist forces hadn’t properly reconnoitered
the battlefield and thus hadn’t realised the escarpment’s importance. So, with relative ease, the parliamentarians
took the defensible position4. The cavalier army, made up of 7,000 infantry
and a formidable 7,500 cavalry, began filing out of Newbury a few hours after the parliamentarians
assembled. While the main force organised itself, the
energetic Prince Rupert rode out with 900 musketeers and some cavalry to take Round
Hill himself. However, he was shocked to discover that the
strategic high point was strongly defended by around 2,500 parliamentarian soldiers,
whose presence blocked the royalists. Realising he couldn’t make progress with
his current strength, Rupert left the infantry there under Colonel George Lisle and rode
back to Newbury. News of Round Hill’s capture by the roundheads
alarmed the cavalier leadership, but a swiftly organised war council quickly decided what
the objectives and deployment for the day would be. With their plans finalised, Charles I’s
royalist army began deploying on a north-south Axis in three main sections. A relatively small number of troops under
William Vavasour’s overall command were stationed on the right wing - in the enclosed
Kennet river valley. In the centre - attacking Round Hill, were
placed Sir Nicholas and John Byron. Prince Rupert and the majority of royalist
cavalry arrayed on an open area called Wash Common on the left, closer to the Enborne
river. England’s second Stuart king raised his
royal banner on a hill in the northern Kennet valley area of the battlefield. It was on this front that the day’s first
action took place, provoked by parliamentarian artillery fire raining down from Round Hill. Vavasour’s royal regiments advanced in the
valley’s enclosed terrain and amidst dense hedgerows, moving forward on land which was
far better suited for defence rather than attack. After a brief, terse clash on this northern
flank, the royalist foot was easily blunted with heavy losses. However, sensing an opportunity, the triumphant
parliamentarian foot launched an attack of their own. This thrust gained some ground and managed
to unbalance Vavasour’s ranks, but the intervention of Charles’ life guard cavalry blocked it. For the remainder of September 20th, both
sides avoided closing with one another on the northern front. On the approaches to Round Hill, the two Byrons
and their respective infantry and cavalry units advanced up the slope in an attempt
to dislodge the parliamentarians on top. However, their march was spotted and they
were met with fierce resistance from ranks of musketeers and emplaced culverins. During the vicious fighting which broke out
on the hill, an intellectual and anti-war aristocrat known as Lord Falkland, who fought
for the royalists, was killed by a musket ball. Soon after, cavalier horsemen managed to rout
a section of the parliamentarian centre and were close to securing Round Hill. However, professional officers in Essex’s
reserve saw the danger, plugged the gap and used disciplined volley fire from muskets
to repel the horsemen. The king’s forces were stuck in a stalemate
here as well. As brutal close quarters fighting was taking
place on Round Hill, Prince Rupert was busy organising 6,000 royalist horses on Wash Common. When the first line of cavalry was ready,
it charged into Sir Philip Stapleton’s parliamentarian horse, who hadn’t fully formed up on the
opposite side of the common. Stapleton managed to put together a defence
in time, using new delayed, close range volley tactics to drive the royalist cavalry back
twice. However, amidst the crack of carbines and
clang of poleaxes on plate, Prince Rupert managed to turn the parliamentarian cavalry’s
flank on the third charge, driving them back to Skinner’s Green Lane. In the afternoon, reserve units of the London
Trained Bands strode into the breach on Wash Common left by the cavalry, repulsing a probing
charge by Rupert’s horse. Instead, the royalists resorted to a massive
artillery barrage aimed at breaking the final parliamentarian ranks. However the supposedly inferior Trained Bands,
who had no cover on the open plain, defied all expectations and stood stalwartly, maintaining
their formation for many hours even in the face of massed but inaccurate culverin fire. Nevertheless, this constant shelling eventually
weakened the gallant parliamentarian reserves. When Prince Rupert then led a thunderous mounted
charge across the common’s northern sector at around 4pm, Essex’s trained bands began
to break, tearing open his line and threatening to scythe the entire army in two. At precisely that moment, the Earl of Essex
bravely galloped to the scene, riding among his retreating troops and inspiring them to
turn around and fight. In one account, a cannonball is said to have
landed only a yard from the Lord General, but his personal intervention was necessary. The trained bands, particularly their Red
and Blue units turned around and charged at the royalists, reforming their formation and
stabilising the front. After some subsequent lighter combat, both
armies began disengaging at 7pm after a ruthless fourteen-hour stalemate. Charles’ forces retreated all the way to
Newbury, where they stayed the night and conferred about what to do. The next morning, the royalists chose not
to re-engage, either because of depleted gunpowder supplies or because the high command simply
lost its nerve. Both armies lost about the same number of
troops at 1,300 each and, even though Rupert had come close to victory, Essex escaped back
to London in the aftermath. Newbury was just as tactically inconclusive
as Edgehill had been the year before. Nevertheless, the battle would have far-reaching
consequences. Although the king’s armies were dominant
in every theatre as 1643 came to an end, parliamentarian allies in the far north were about to change
the nature of the entire war. The royalist summer had ended. By the time October of 1643 came around, the
two kingdoms of Charles I had been embroiled in a bitter civil war for well over a year. The grave consequences of this violence slowly
began to reveal themselves as the months went on, as atrocities against one’s fellow countrymen
became even more common on both sides, while the ‘gentlemanly warfare’ of the early
war faded away. As the Earl of Essex and his royalist enemies
were locked in the bloody First Battle of Newbury, political dealings between parliament
and the Scottish Covenanter government were reaching a conclusion which would intensify
the war to an even greater degree1. The parliamentarians needed a strong military
ally to win the war, and the Covenanters possessed an army ready to march. In return for a promise to implement the Presbyterian
religious system in England, Scotland would help to crush Charles’ royalists2. After months of back and forth negotiation,
the so-called ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ was finalised on September 25th 1643. Meanwhile, the king was bolstering his forces
for the next confrontation, as royalist soldiers, previously tied down in Ireland, began returning
home. As 1644 began, the north of England came under
decisive royalist control by the efforts of William Cavendish - Earl of Newcastle. This all changed on January 19th when the
Covenanter army, made up of 18,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry, 600 dragoons and 120 cannons crossed
the River Tweed and invaded English territory4, entering the war on parliament’s side. It was led by the illustrious veteran of Lutzen
- Alexander Leslie, the Earl of Leven. Leven’s advance towards Newcastle was almost
unopposed, but Cavendish5 quickly received word of the invasion and managed to beat the
Scots to the city, mainly because Leven had to wait for his heavy cannons to arrive by
ship. When he finally arrived before the city walls
on February 3rd, he found many of the suburbs burned to the ground by Cavendish’s defending
force, who were now reinforced by 5,000 men. Nevertheless, the Tyneside city was put under
siege. However, constant harassment of Scottish supply
lines by veteran royalist cavalry and lack of shelter provoked by the defender’s scorched
earth tactics forced Leven to depart with most of his army on the 22nd. Only six regiments of the Covenanter army
remained to continue the siege. Unwilling to let his enemy escape unhindered,
Cavendish set out in pursuit with most of his own troops. Over the next few weeks, Leven and Cavendish
maneuvered around one another, unwilling to engage because of the unfavourable terrain
and bad weather. Finally, in late March, Leven engaged and
defeated his foe in a close battle near Sunderland, forcing him to flee in the direction of York. By this loss, the Northern forces of the king
needed help immediately, and their main hope for such assistance rested with Prince Rupert6,
who set off towards Yorkshire to relieve Cavendish’ battered host. In a brilliantly executed campaign, Rupert’s
meagre army broke a siege at the strategically crucial royalist stronghold of Newark on March
22nd, with the prince almost losing his life in the attempt. Instead of continuing his march, the dashing
cavalier withdrew to his base at Shrewsbury to raise more men, but barely had time to
relax before terrible news came from the south. A week after Rupert’s triumph in Nottinghamshire,
William Waller got his revenge for Roundway Down by defeating Hopton’s royalist army
at the Battle of Cheriton, a defeat which ended any prospect of royalist victory in
the south. Royalist fortunes had even begun to sour in
Yorkshire, when on April 12th, the army of Sir Thomas Fairfax defeated John Belasye at
the town of Selby and routed a significant portion of York’s intended garrison. After receiving word of the unfolding disaster,
the Earl of Newcastle’s force marched his army for the second time in just under half
a year, hoping to reinforce York’s defenses before the parliamentarians could get there. Once again he succeeded, despite losing many
stragglers and deserters along the way, reaching the northern royalist bastion on April 15th. Three days later, the Covenanter army closed
in on Wetherby and rendezvoused with the parliamentary army of Sir Thomas Fairfax, fresh from its
victory at Selby. Together, starting on the 22nd, the allies
put England’s great northern city to siege. Charles I knew that if York fell, the north
would fall. To deal with the sudden strategic crisis that
their war effort now faced, leading royalist commanders assembled at Oxford on April 25th
for a council of war. After vigorous debate, Prince Rupert gained
the upper hand. It was decided that the remnant of Hopton’s
defeated army would be absorbed into Charles’ central army at Oxford, and this newly bolstered
force would stay on the defensive. Meanwhile, Rupert himself would raise several
thousand troops and go north to relieve York. With that decided, Rupert arrived back in
Shrewsbury on May 6th to begin mustering his own men. On that same day at the other side of England,
the Eastern Association Army under Manchester and Cromwell took Lincoln, freeing them up
to start marching to Yorkshire as well. Rupert’s march began later in the month
with an attempt to reassert royalist authority in Lancashire. He first bypassed the firmly parliamentarian
town of Manchester, but subsequently seized and ravaged nearby Bolton. After fighting for the town came to an end,
no mercy was given and up to 1,000 soldiers and civilians were slaughtered. This massacre helped bolster parliamentarian
propaganda. After all, if the king was relying on such
butchery of English people to win this war, was he truly their king? In Bolton, Rupert also received a welcome
surprise when 5,000 royalist cavalry joined his army from the northeast8. These were the Earl of Newcastle’s horsemen
who had been prudently sent away before the siege began, as cavalry would be useless in
such a situation. As Rupert secured Liverpool7 and cemented
royalist control of Lancashire, the king disregarded the southern defensive strategy and embarked
on a military campaign in the region. It was a disaster, leading to the breach of
Oxford’s defensive ring of garrisons and forcing Charles to flee to Worcester with
Essex and Waller hot on his heels. At this point the king, realising Prince Rupert’s
advice to only consolidate and defend in the south should not have been ignored, sent a
set of ambiguous orders9 which essentially left Rupert to make his own mind up. We’ll talk about this theatre more down
the line. Upon receiving the communique, the cavalier
general interpreted the unclear command in his own way - he would relieve York as well
as destroy the parliamentarians and their Scottish allies before victoriously marching
south to save the king. After the campaign that was about to happen,
he would carry that letter from the king for the rest of his life. Prince Rupert’s relief army, now about 14,000
strong, set off to relieve York. News that the prince’s army was only a day
away caused the allies to hastily lift their siege. They withdrew to proactively meet the royalist
army, moving their large, combined force onto a ridge near a village five miles southwest
of York, known as Long Marston. The Knaresborough Road, which Rupert was using
to march his army, crossed immediately in front of this ridge with the River Nidd behind
it. This rendered the direct route to York almost
impossible to navigate for the royalists without having a dangerous enemy army threatening
their flank. Rather than risk such an attack, the wily
prince resorted to deception. Just before dawn on July 1st, royalist horsemen
were spotted advancing up the Knaresborough Road. To the parliamentarians and Scots, it was
apparent that this force of cavalry were Rupert’s vanguard, with the obvious implication that
his main army was only a short while away. Accordingly, they drew up their men in battle
formation and waited for the bulk of Rupert’s army to arrive. However, the royalist ‘vanguard’ was just
an illusion, luring Leven, Fairfax and the others into a false sense of security. While it did everything that a normal vanguard
was expected to do, Charles’ illustrious nephew swung the majority of his army north
at Knaresborough town, crossed the Ouse at Boroughbridge and was uncamped in Galtres
Forest by nightfall. Then his forces advanced even further, scattering
a small detachment of enemy dragoons at Nether Poppleton and securing a boat bridge there10. Realising they had been outwitted11 and fearing
Rupert would be able to cut their supply lines to the south if he gave them the slip again,
most of parliament’s combined army began marching south to Tadcaster, while its cavalry
remained at Marston Moor, covering the retreat. At about the same time the royalist cavalry,
which had previously been ordered to leave the city by Newcastle, strode back into York
under Lord George Goring and formally relieved the city. In a brilliant maneuver which was arguably
one of his greatest in the entire civil war, Rupert had saved old Roman Eboracum without
firing a shot. Obeying what he thought to be the king’s
command to relieve York, then defeat parliament’s army and then come south urgently, Prince
Rupert almost immediately gathered his own and Newcastle’s men. Bolstered by the reluctant York garrison and
their even more reluctant commanders, the prince marched to Marston Moor and visibly
challenged the enemy to a pitched battle12. By early evening on July 2nd 1644, two of
the civil war’s largest armies so far were lining up against one another across Marston
Moor. The battlefield was bounded in the east by
Long Marston village, and in the west by Tockwith. The 28,000 strong parliamentarian army took
position on a high ridge, which Rupert’s significantly outnumbered 18,000 royalists
were forced to occupy a lower section of moorland to the north. Their position was fronted by an irregular
irrigation ditch which would function as a useful defensive equaliser. On each of the roundhead flanks, 3,000 English
parliamentarian cavalry and 1,000 Scottish troopers were arrayed in three lines of battle,
supported by interspersed musketeers on foot. The right wing, closer to Long Marston, was
led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, while the left was under the command of Oliver Cromwell,
accompanied by his increasingly lethal unit of mounted troops - the Ironsides. Forming the mass of parliament’s army were
20,000 infantry in the centre of the battle line. In the vanguard were units from Lord Ferdinando
Fairfax’s army of Yorkshiremen in the centre, Eastern Association Army troops of Manchester’s
on the left13 and a brigade of Scots on the right14. Behind them in the second line were more of
Manchester’s infantry and Leven’s Scots and even more Covenanters were in reserve. The Supreme command of the entire Army of
Both Kingdoms lay with the Earl of Leven. Down the slope, Prince Rupert’s feared royalist
cavalry matched their opposite numbers man for man and horse for horse, possessing about
4,000 on both the left and right under Lords John Byron and George Goring respectively. Each of these divisions were also accompanied
by musketeer units. However the cavalier army only had 10,000
to 11,000 foot in the centre. It was drawn up in the Swedish style that
Rupert had witnessed first hand during his service on the continent, and was led by the
Earl of Newcastle, Prince Rupert himself and a number of brigade commanders. After a wait of several hours, the battle
finally began at about 7:30PM with an artillery duel on the western side of the field. Parliamentarian guns began blasting Byron’s
cavalry, causing a number of casualties15 and provoking a response from some royalist
cannons which had been placed on an area of high ground just in front. This shelling caused some chaos in Cromwell’s
own ranks, the death of his own nephew. The roundhead commander kept his cool, responding
by ordering his guns to advance with two infantry regiments as backup. Foot regiments of Prince Rupert and Lord Byron
marched out to meet them and a short firefight took place, badly mauling the royalist units
and forcing them into retreat. This triumph heralded an all-out parliamentarian
infantry ‘running march’ down the ridge slope, as thunder began to crack and lightning
flashed from above. In the centre, the brigades of Lord Fairfax
and Crawford made good progress, managing to push over the defensive ditch and even
capturing four royalist ‘drake’-class cannons. However, not all was going the Parliamentarians’
way, for the Scottish infantry under Baillie had a more difficult time breaking through
the enemy’s ranks, bogged down by the cavalry action taking place next to them. On the battlefield’s eastern wing, Sir Thomas
Fairfax opened the fighting by charging 400 mounted vanguard under his personal command
against a similarly sized unit of royalist cavalry opposite him. The result was a swift rout of the cavalier
horsemen in the direction of York, followed by Fairfax and his horse. However, this left most of the parliamentary
forces without an overall commander and they quickly became bogged down during the advance. Uneven terrain, bracken, hedges and constant
musketry volleys16 caused disarray among the leaderless horsemen, and at the moment they
were at their most vulnerable, Lord Goring’s troopers launched a thunderous charge, driving
them from the field of battle. Just like at Edgehill two years before, most
royalist horsemen broke ranks to chase their defeated enemy, cutting many fleeing soldiers
down and plundering the allies’ baggage train beyond the ridge. Though they had won their engagement, Goring’s
cavalry had also left the battle. As the parliamentarian cavalry on the right
was being run off the field by Goring, Oliver Cromwell rode out at the head of his first
line of Ironsides and charged headlong at Lord Byron’s royalist horse opposite, who
countercharged across the moor to meet them. Both sets of horsemen fired their pistol carbines
until they were exhausted before wheeling around, unsheathing their sabers for a second
charge. In this initial disorderly clash, it was Cromwell’s
horse who came off better, inflicting some casualties and slowly driving Byron back. The situation became even more serious when
Colonel Vermuyden’s second line rode forward to join their commander, and for a few moments
it seemed as though the royalists might buckle. However they didn’t break under the pressure,
allowing time for their own second line to join the fray and stabilise what was quickly
becoming the largest cavalry engagement of the war. Somewhere in the chaotic fray Oliver Cromwell
suffered a blade slash to his neck, but carried on fighting nevertheless amidst his men. Witnessing the seemingly decisive clash which
was taking place near Tockwith, Prince Rupert rallied his army’s cavalry reserve in addition
to his personal lifeguard, feeding those units into the engagement as well. His hope was to tip the scales in favour of
Charles’ forces by hitting Cromwell’s unit in the front and sides. When almost all firearms had been discharged
and the cavalry battle had become a grinding contest of sword against sword, the parliamentarian
reserve of 1,000 Scottish troopers under David Leslie came forward and swept into both of
Rupert’s exposed flanks. Attacked from the front by Cromwell and from
the sides by his Scottish allies, the royalist front line was scythed apart and broken with
heavy losses. Witnessing the ensuing massacre their comrades
in the rear broke and ran, with Rupert himself shamefully caught up in the rout. Unlike Goring’s men on the other side of
the field, Oliver Cromwell and his capable officers kept full control of their own highly-disciplined
mounted troops. Immediately bringing the pursuit to a stop
before it began, they began to regroup and take stock of the strategic situation. In the centre, Lord Fairfax’s initially
victorious foot brigade was countercharged by Newcastle. Though this wasn’t in itself critical, the
shock of Newcastle’s push also drove the first and second line Scottish infantry into
retreat, opening a gap in the parliamentarian line. Led by Sir William Blakiston, another small
royalist cavalry reserve nearby took the opportunity and charged into the gulf which the Scots
had left, carving through the allies’ vulnerable underbelly and even breaking through their
final line. However, indiscipline once again proved fatal
and Blakiston’s men too rode off the field to plunder the enemy baggage. The only section of Goring’s cavalry to
have remained on the field then attacked the infantry units in parliament’s right-centre,
causing significant damage and even frightening Leven, Lord Fairfax and Manchester into fleeing
the field. The combined army’s foot was now in almost
total disarray. Sir Thomas Fairfax returned to the field with
a few hundred horses at that moment. Riding all the way across to Cromwell’s
position, he supposedly asked: “Major general, what shall I do?” In response, Fairfax said “Sir, if you charge,
not all is lost.” Cromwell’s cavalry looped around the rear
of the royalist line, scattered Goring’s hastily returned cavalry and then turned on
the cavalier infantry. This marked the end of the battle. Hundreds of fleeing royalists were slain and
only Newcastle’s so-called ‘lambs’ - elite troops clad in white woolen uniforms, refused
to flee and died to a man. After a battle lasting several hours, 4,000
men of the king’s army lay strewn across the bloody battlefield of Marston Moor, at
the cost of only about 300 parliamentarians. After being routed by Cromwell and the Scots,
Prince Rupert retreated in shame with his surviving cavalry. He would obsessively keep the king’s ambiguous
order on his person for the rest of his life, ready to excuse his defeat if challenged. The great Earl of Newcastle, whose talents
initially secured northern England for the royalists, could not handle the embarrassment. He abandoned Charles’ cause completely,
fleeing first to Scarborough and then across the sea to a self-imposed exile in Hamburg. With this disaster, the parliamentarians gained
complete control of the north. As Rupert’s Marston Moor campaign was starting
up in Northern England, maneuvers of equal consequence were taking place in the south. When we last caught up with Charles he was
escaping from Oxford to Worcester, being pursued by the parliamentarian armies of William Waller
and the Earl of Essex. In a move which has since been regarded as
a strategic blunder, parliament’s Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered the Thames armies
to split up. Essex marched off to relieve the royalist
Siege of Lyme, while Waller’s cavalry-heavy force continued to pursue the king with diminished
strength. Unfortunately for the latter, Charles used
the opportunity to go on the offensive again, luring Waller into a trap and defeating him
at Cropredy Bridge on June 29th. Even worse than this were events taking place
in the far southwest. After parting from Waller, Essex relieved
Lyme and then even briefly managed to lift the long-running siege of Plymouth2. In the process, however, Essex’s reckless
western march into a firmly royalist Cornwall left his forces trapped between Charles’
reinforced army and the sea. Isolated from help, Essex marched south to
Lostiwthiel, where he would be able to make contact with the Parliamentarian fleet under
the Earl of Warwick from the port of Fowey. The Parliamentary army deployed for battle
around Lostwithiel, with Essex sending a foot detachment to hold Fowey Town and await the
arrival of Warwick’s fleet. Essex then stationed the remainder of his
foot regiments on the east side of the Fowey River, mostly around the high ground of Beacon
Hill, and at Restormel Castle on the west side of the river further north. The Parliamentarian horse squadrons covered
the flanks of the army while also patrolling the areas between the two main foot detachments. On August 11th, the Royalist commander Sir
Richard Grenville occupied Bodmin before moving south to seize the Respryn Bridge, which would
allow him to establish immediate contact with the King’s army on the east bank. Grenville then moved on to Lanhydrock. Two days later, Lord Goring and Sir Jacob
Astley moved south along the east bank towards the coast, and occupied Polruan fort the next
morning with 200 foot and some cannon. By seizing the fort, they effectively closed
any sea access to the Fowey Estuary for Warwick’s fleet, leaving detachments to guard Bodinnick
Ferry and the ground opposite Golant. Essex had been hoping for support from his
old Parliamentary rival, Sir William Waller. Waller had sent General Sir John Middleton
with a contingent of horse and dragoon regiments from his own army to reinforce Essex, but
at Bridgwater, they were driven back by Royalists under Sir Francis Doddington. After its defeat at Cropredy Bridge, the rest
of Waller’s army could not be relied upon to provide Essex any support. Setting up his headquarters at Boconnoc just
to the northeast of Lostwithiel, on August 17th, Charles rode down the causeway along
the east bank of the river at Bodinnick Ferry, where he scouted the Parliamentary positions
on the opposite side. Parliamentary guns opened fire but did little
damage to the King’s retinue. On August 21st, Charles’ army launched its
attack on the Parliamentarian positions at Beacon Hill. In the early morning mists, the attack commenced
at 7:00 AM. Sir Richard Grenville’s force advanced on
the west bank against the Parliamentary position at Restormel Castle, but Colonel John Weare’s
Devonshire Regiment of Foot hastily abandoned the castle to the Royalists. Back on the east bank, the Royalists assaulted
Beacon and Druid hills, taking both positions by storm. Advancing with a column across the Liskeard
Road, Prince Maurice’s forces captured the prominent hill on the far side. By the end of the day, the Royalists were
firmly established on the hillsides overlooking Lostwithiel. That night, the Royalists constructed a redoubt
on Beacon Hill, brought up their cannons and began firing on the town from the earthworks. Over the next few days, the Parliamentarians
did very little in response to the Royalist threat across the river. This led the Royalists to believe that Essex
had in fact withdrawn towards Fowey Town. With this assumption in mind, Charles sent
half his mounted force across the Respryn Bridge to make contact with and support Grenville’s
advance on Lostwithiel down the west bank of the river. On August 26th, Lord Goring’s 2,000 horse
and Sir Thomas Bassett’s command of foot marched to the southwest towards St. Blazey
in order to cut off Essex’s route of escape, and to prevent supplies from reaching the
Roundheads via the coast. Royalist detachments took St. Austell and
the coastal village of Par, just four miles from Fowey Town. Essex’s army was now effectively trapped
within the strip of land between Lostwithiel along the river to Fowey - a frontage of only
two miles long and wide. Meanwhile, a large Royalist supply train reached
Charles from Dartmouth, replenishing its stores of munitions with 1,000 barrels of gunpowder. In contrast, Essex’s army was starving and
short of ammunition, desperately clinging to its position at Lostwithiel. Warwick’s fleet had been prevented from
sailing into the estuary by persistent westerly winds. Time was running short for Essex’s army,
and the general knew it. Going off intelligence gained from Parliamentary
deserters, on August 30th, Grenville informed the King that Essex was planning to make a
breakout to the east with his cavalry while his foot and cannons, with a small escort
of cavalry, withdrew to Fowey Town. The King immediately sprang into action, giving
orders to his regiments to attack any Parliamentary troops attempting to break out of the encirclement. They fortified a cottage on the Lostwithiel-Liskeard
Road and garrisoned it with fifty Royalist musketeers in order to halt the passage of
any Parliamentarian cavalry moving down the road to the east. Elsewhere, Royalist horse squadrons broke
down the bridge over the Tamar River. At three o’clock on the morning of August
31st, Sir William Balfour led the majority of his Parliamentarian cavalry - around 2,000
troopers - in a breakout from Lostwithiel. The musketeers at the cottage didn’t fire
a shot. Balfour’s horsemen galloped across the Fowey
River bridge and set off on the road for Liskeard. By day’s end, Balfour succeeded in crossing
the Tamar by ferry, reaching Plymouth with his command largely intact. The Earl of Cleveland soon set off in pursuit
the next morning with his 500-man brigade but was unable to catch the Parliamentarian
troopers. On September 2nd, Parliamentary foot and cannon
marched out of Lostwithiel to the south, commencing their part of the escape. Major-General Philip Skippon led the Parliamentarian
rearguard, whose colours King Charles could spot from the high ground atop Beacon Hill. The King ordered his army to advance and catch
the Roundheads. At 7:00 AM, 1,000 musketeers stormed across
the bridge over the Fowey River into Lostwithiel, preventing a Parliamentarian demolition party
from destroying the town and driving the remaining Roundheads out. The Royalists brought up their cannon through
Lostwithiel and opened fire on the Roundheads’ rearguard. Under pressure from the heavy cannonade as
well as Royalist foot assaults, Skippon’s troops fell back. While the main body of the Royalist army fell
upon the Parliamentarian rearguard south of Lostwithiel, King Charles led his Regiment
of Life Guards from Beacon Hill to the river and forded the west bank south of the town. Here, he met Grenville’s Cornish force leading
the Royalist advance. Lieutenant-Colonel William Leighton of the
King’s Regiment of Life Guard of Foot rallied the Royalist foot regiments and led them into
the fields west of Trebathevy Farm. Simultaneously, Charles launched his own mounted
Life Guard in a counterattack, forcing back the Parliamentary foot through several fields
and hedgerows. At about 2:00 PM, the Royalist foot managed
to catch up with their cavalry counterparts, and the rest of the day was spent fighting
smaller, quick skirmishes. Sir Thomas Basset, coming up from St. Blazey,
attacked the Parliamentary left flank, whilst Colonel Appleyard led the vanguard of the
main Royalist army in their assault from Lostwithiel, pressing back the Parliamentary foot regiments
towards Fowey Town. At 4:00 PM, Essex launched his remaining mounted
squadrons with the support of his own regiment of foot in a desperate counterattack, managing
to push back the Royalists and capture two of their banners in the action. But the King’s Life Guard soon arrived and
smashed into the Roundheads, forcing them back once again. Lord Goring then arrived with his retinue
of horse from St. Blazey and was given orders to continue across the battlefield and join
the pursuit of Balfour’s Parliamentary horse squadrons to the east. Skippon launched one last effort to stem the
Royalist pursuit in the early evening with a counterattack from Castle Dore. For another hour, the Royalists were driven
back through two fields but then rallied and pushed back the Parliamentarians to Castle
Dore. The Earl of Northampton’s Brigade of Horse
arrived and joined in the assault, but darkness ended the pursuit and the battle. Essex himself had to flee in a small fishing
boat and despite the fact his cavalry managed to escape, 6,000 footmen were forced to surrender
at Lostwithiel. Alarmed at the sudden reversals of fortune
so close to London, parliament ordered Waller and the Eastern Association Army under Manchester
to reinforce the west. When the king subsequently attempted to raise
a parliamentarian siege on Basing House in late October, he was blocked and forced to
fight the Second Battle of Newbury against an army twice the size of his own. Charles refused to withdraw and avoid a pitched
battle with the approaching Parliamentarian army. The Royalist army formed up in order of battle
to the north of Newbury, with its right flank resting on the Kennet River, its center strengthened
by the fortified position of the Shaw House, and its left anchored by Donnington Castle. On October 26th, the Parliamentary army initiated
contact with the Royalists, probing their lines against the backdrop of small-scale
skirmishing. On Clay Hill, Parliamentarian cannons opened
a heavy bombardment against the Royalists in the Shaw House. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary senior generals
convened for a council of war. Probably at the behest of Waller, the Parliamentarians
adopted an attack plan in which their army would conduct a circuitous march to the north
around the Royalist lines, then assault their extreme left flank through Speen Village. A simultaneous attack would be launched against
the eastern end of the Royalist line at the Shaw House. The flanking columns would have to march a
distance of thirteen miles, moving through villages and across the Lambourn before turning
east across Wickham Heath to Speen. Instructions were given out that a cannon
shot would signal the commencement of the attack by the flanking force, while Manchester
began his own assault on the Shaw House. Gathering intelligence on the Roundheads’
intentions, the King shifted Prince Maurice’s Cornish foot regiments and horse squadrons
to Speen, where they set to work building a sturdy redoubt armed with several cannon. Three brigades of foot occupied the ground
around Shaw Village, while Sir Humphrey Bennet’s brigade of horses held the army’s center
with detachments further south at Newbury and the crossing points of the Lambourn at
Bangor, and on the route of the enemy’s flanking march at Boxford. In the early morning hours of October 27th,
the Parliamentarian flanking force began its march. Before it could cross the Lambourn, it was
spotted by the Royalists in Donnington Castle. The Royalist horse detachment at Boxford was
driven off by the Roundheads in the late morning, and soon the Parliamentarians were crossing
Wickham Heath and approaching Speen. Rather than wait for Waller’s cannon signal,
Manchester opened his attack on the Royalist right at the Shaw House and in Shaw Village. Despite initially gaining success in their
attacks, the Parliamentarians under the slow-moving Manchester were driven back in disarray and
confusion. Waller’s flanking columns reached their
attack positions at 3:00 PM, but they came under a heavy artillery barrage by guns in
Prince Maurice’s redoubt and from the four guns in Donnington Castle. Eight hundred musketeers from Essex’s army,
supported by a brigade of horse, assaulted the redoubt while the remaining Parliamentary
forces surged into Speen Village, clashing with Maurice’s Cornish infantry inside the
town. Within an hour, the redoubt and Speen Village
had both fallen into Parliamentary hands, forcing Maurice’s regiments back in a confused
retreat. Following up the success, Balfour led his
horse squadrons in pursuit of Maurice’s Cornishmen, but found themselves slamming
against a reserve line outside Speen commanded in person by the King. Through the efforts of the King’s Life Guard,
Charles was prevented from being captured by Balfour’s troopers. As the daylight hours waned into the evening,
Cromwell brought up a reserve retinue of cavalry, but apparently failed to seize the initiative
and promptly attack the collapsing Royalist line. Lord Goring’s horse charged Cromwell’s
own cavalry, and before long, Cromwell was being driven back. Meanwhile, Balfour’s horse were coming under
fire from companies of musketeers posted in the ditches and around the hedges on the outskirts
of Speen. Balfour’s troopers were swiftly counterattacked
and driven back by a rallied brigade of Royalist horsemen under Sir Humphrey Bennet. Back on the Royalist right flank, Manchester
began his second assault around 4:30, with daylight fast fading away. He dispatched two columns from Clay Hill,
the right-hand column engaging the Shaw House while the larger left-hand column moved into
Shaw Village. However, both these attacks were halted by
stubborn Royalist resistance and pushed back with severe losses. Before the Parliamentarian advance could continue
on either end of the battlefield, darkness fell on the beleaguered troops, promptly ending
the engagement. Against all odds and despite the near capture
of the king, Charles’ army managed to retreat unimpeded, partially because of Manchester’s
reluctance to press the attack. The king’s final campaigns of the year were
similarly successful. Manchester once again failed to decisively
attack the royalists on November 9th at Speenhamland and a week later was unable to stop Charles’
relieving Banbury. On the 23rd, relative optimism pervaded the
king’s camp as the soldiers went into winter quarters. Parliament’s failure to successfully end
the war in late 1644 prompted recriminations and blame among the increasingly factionalised
set of MPs during the winter of 44/45. More consequentially, it led radicals such
as Oliver Cromwell and William Waller to begin speaking in favour of establishing a completely
different style of military. It would be, as Trevor Royle put it: “a
professional and disciplined regular force, well paid and well equipped, under the control
of an independent commander in chief.” In short, it would be a permanent army staffed
by dedicated experts, detached from the politicking of parliament, and whose sole aim was to gain
victory over the king. After weeks of enquiry and debate, this ‘New
Model Army’ finally came to be on January 11th 1645, when the Commons passed the New
Model Ordinance, and began mustering 12 regiments of 1,200 footmen each, 10 regiments of cavalry
- each numbering 600 troopers, and one regiment of 1,000 dragoons. Ten days later, supreme command of the New
Model Army was granted to Sir Thomas Fairfax, due to a combination of extensive military
experience, and because although he was unquestionably loyal to the parliamentarian cause, he was
not a member of parliament3. Henceforth, members of parliament were largely
barred from holding commands, ending the military careers of the Earls of Manchester and Essex. Though the embryonic New Model Army would
become immensely formidable in the course of months and years, it needed time to fill
its ranks and become an effective fighting force. This necessity determined a measured parliamentary
offensive strategy in the early months of 1645, and also made the continued cooperation
of Leven’s Scots very valuable. However, the Covenanters were becoming wary
of providing too much assistance to their English ‘allies’. This was partly because the Scots feared radicals
such as Cromwell would renege on the Solemn League, and partly because in Charles’ northern
kingdom, royalist allies were causing utter chaos... Back in September 1643, the warring factions
in Ireland signed a peace which freed up English royalist soldiers to be sent over to assist
the king. The agreement also allowed the Irish Confederates,
whose alliances were constantly shifting, to renew their war against the Presbyterian
Scots and parliamentarians. Therefore, at the end of June 1644 therefore,
2,000 Irish mercenaries raised by the royalist Earl of Antrim sailed to Ardnamurchan in Scotland
under Scotsman Alasdair MacColla. Upon landing, MacColla immediately began rallying
highland chiefs who were bitterly hostile to the Covenanter Campbell clan, such as leaders
of the Macphersons and MacDonalds, to war. Meanwhile, in Oxford, James Graham, otherwise
known as the Marquis of Montrose, had defected from the Covenanters before the civil war
began. With the threat of his countryman’s pro-parliamentarian
intervention at the forefront, Charles appointed Montrose his Lord Lieutenant in Scotland and
sent him north with only two loyal companions. When Montrose arrived, he joined with MacColla
at Blair Atholl and the two immediately made common cause. This was convenient for both men because,
as Stuart Reid points out “Montrose was in need of an army and MacColla was just as
desperately in need of an employer.” This ragtag army of unlikely Celtic allies
and even unlikelier royalists moved south to Perth. Outside of the city on the plains of Tippermuir,
Montrose and MacColla defeated a Covenanter army about the same size as their own, whose
infantry was primarily made up of raw recruits. Soon, they learned that a larger Covenanter
force was assembling at Stirling. Seeking to get clear of it and to raise local
allies, Montrose marched north and bypassed Dundee on the way to Aberdeen, where another
enemy army awaited him. Despite facing an army that outnumbered his
own and which had taken a strong position, Montrose and his Irish colleague smashed the
Covenanter loyalists again, inflicting 520 casualties and suffering only minimal losses
of their own. Due to the death of his favourite drummer
boy, who was shot in cold blood during pre-battle negotiations, Montrose let his troops viciously
sack Aberdeen for four days on September 13th, 1644. This event, fueled by generations-long blood
feuds and sectarian hatred, would become known as Black Friday. In October 1644, Montrose campaigned throughout
Aberdeenshire against his Covenanter rival - the Earl of Argyll, meeting his numerically
superior forces in battle at Fyvie, where neither side was able to gain an advantage. When winter drew in, Argyll went back to Strathbogie
and Montrose marched back over the hills to Blair Atholl. Far more consequential than simply beating
a few small Scottish armies, Montrose’s actions were beginning to affect the war’s
greater strategic situation. The Covenanter government, growing concerned
with royalist success in their backyard, ordered Leven to detach 9 regiments of his own army,
led by Marston Moor veteran William Baillie, to stop Montrose. Argyll and Baillie managed to unite their
forces, but constant disagreement led to the two men parting company soon after. Montrose, unwilling to give his rivals a moment
to relax, undertook a perilous march and descended on Argyll’s 3,000-strong army with 1,500
of his own at Inverlochy on February 2nd. Again, the Marquess won a complete victory
against a vastly superior force. These events ensured that Covenanter priorities
would be directed away from winning the war in England and diverted the attention of Leven’s
army away from the brewing campaign of 1645. Instead, they remained in the Scottish Marches
to prevent Montrose from receiving reinforcements from Charles. The Parliamentarians were on their own. With the royalists lacking any real strategic
direction and parliament waiting for its new army to sharpen its claws, campaigning in
the south began in a disjointed manner. In the west, an array of the king’s commanders
attempted to secure the Welsh marches and take pressure off Chester. In the far south, Lord Goring ravaged Hampshire
before retreating to Salisbury at the end of January. Hundreds of miles north, Marmaduke Langdale’s
northern horse managed to relieve Pontefract in early March, and was back in the royalist
stronghold of Newark by March 4th. The Committee of Both Kingdoms fired the opening
shot in parliament’s 1645 campaign by ordering Cromwell, who had returned from sparring with
Goring’s forces in the west country just east of Oxford on April 21st. Meanwhile, Fairfax led the bulk of the New
Model Army from Windsor to Reading, where he and his 10,000 were resupplied. While the now fully-supplied Fairfax set about
marching west to save Taunton from siege4, Cromwell repeatedly harassed Charles’ forces
near their capital, brazenly seizing all the carthorses which would be needed to transport
artillery and preventing the royal army from leaving. However, when Goring and his 4,000 returning
cavalry encountered Cromwell at Radcot Bridge on May 3rd, the parliamentarian horse retreated
south5 into friendly territory. With the troublesome parliamentary cavalry
commander out of the way, Charles marched from Oxford to Stow-on-the-Wold with his troops,
where he conferred with prominent royalist leaders including Goring, Rupert, and others. Once again, the council of war argued about
the correct course to take, eventually concluding that Goring and 3,000 horse would split off
west and bring Taunton into royalist hands, while the main royalist army would go north. Reacting to the enemy’s movement, the Committee
changed its mind about the New Model Army’s goals and sent its leader new orders. Reluctantly obeying, Fairfax sent four regiments
to Taunton and turned most of his soldiers back with the aim of an eventual rendezvous
with Cromwell. The latter shadowed Charles’ army from afar
as it marched toward Chester, but was unable to prevent the royalists from lifting the
siege there6. Parliament sent messages asking Leven for
aid, but Montrose’s continuing success in Scotland left the Covenanters unable and unwilling
to divert resources south. Partially because the Committee believed that
Oxford would surrender without a fight due to bad information, Fairfax was ordered to
besiege the city beginning May 21st, news which reached the royalists only a few days
later. In response, Charles’ field army unexpectedly
pivoted and began marching southeast towards Leicester, an important parliamentary garrison
which was reached just over a week later. Aiming to distract the New Model Army besieging
their increasingly food-deprived capital, the royalists attacked. A savage two-day clash over the town’s defences
and a veritable ‘violent storme’ of cannon shot followed, after which Leicester’s garrison
was overwhelmed, and the city stormed and looted. However, 400 royalist troops were dead and
many times more wounded, depleting the king’s strength severely. Seeing the danger of continuing the fight
and having gained much plunder, soldiers began to desert Charles’ and head home. His remaining army stayed in and around Leicester
until June 4th when it moved on to Daventry. Meanwhile, the fall of such an important midlands
garrison prompted the Committee’s order for Fairfax to raise the Siege of Oxford and
go bring Charles to battle. On June 9th 1645, two key decisions were made
by parliament. Firstly, Fairfax was given ‘strategic independence’
from the Committee. Secondly Oliver Cromwell, parliament’s rising
star, was confirmed in his assignment to the heretofore vacant position of Lieutenant-General
of Horse in the New Model Army. Realising that a fight might be on the horizon,
Prince Rupert ordered an increasingly lethargic Lord Goring to return from the west county. However Goring’s response letter, which
reiterated his temporary inability to return and pleaded the king not to fight until he
did, was intercepted by the New Model Army. This intelligence coup had two-fold consequences. It alerted Fairfax that he didn’t have to
worry about Goring reinforcing the king, while also depriving the king of any knowledge that
he was not going to be reinforced. Now confident about their chances, Fairfax
and Cromwell moved closer to the royalist position, which the efficient scouts of the
New Model Army reported to be close by. The royalists attempted a retreat north to
recruit more troops, but as they did their rear-guard was constantly harassed by parliamentarian
cavalry attacks. It became clear near the Northamptonshire
town of Naseby that a key decision had to be made: Prince Rupert uncharacteristically
ordered a further withdrawal and avoidance of battle, but his advice was not heeded. The king would stand and fight. At this point it’s worth examining the armies
which faced off on that historic day in summer 1645. Deprived of its northern manpower base, the
royalist force deploying on Dust Hill near Naseby was far diminished from that which
had done battle at Marston Moor the year before. Its core infantry brigades in the first and
second lines numbered 3,500 veteran soldiers comprising 2,925 musketeers and 575 pikemen. In the left centre were the regiments of Sir
George Lisle and to his right were arrayed units under Henry Bard as well as the Queen’s
personal Lifeguard. In the right centre were regiments under the
command of Sir Edward Hopton on the inside and the Duke of York on the outside. Three further regiments of foot drew up in
the second line while Prince Rupert, King Charles and a mixed reserve stayed in the
rear, made up of the king’s personal lifeguard horse and foot, in addition to Prince Rupert’s
‘Bluecoats’. Interspersed between the ranks of infantry
were three small divisions of cavalry - two behind the vanguard and one more behind the
second line. On the royalist left flank were roughly 1,700
horse in three divisions, including Marmaduke Langdale’s northern troopers. They were drawn up in the Swedish manner,
with 200 musketeers lined up between each unit. Charles’ other wing, anchored on a series
of hedges, mirrored its counterpart in strength, and was under Prince Maurice’s authority. This gathering of cavalry comprised Rupert’s
most elite units and lifeguard divisions, revered units which had served with distinction
since Edgehill. They also had musketeers accompanying them. Overall, the royalist army at Naseby counted
among their ranks about 10,000 to 10,500 soldiers, just over half of them mounted troops. After some prompting from Cromwell, the numerically
superior New Model Army took up a position on the opposing Closter Hill, the red and
blue uniforms of its soldiers making it stand out on the verdant landscape. Its pike and musketeer infantry in the middle
probably numbered around 8,500 in three lines of battle - five regiments were in the first,
three manned the second and half-a-regiment was in the third. The foot was led on the tactical level by
Philip Skippon, one of parliament's most veteran infantry commanders, while Lord General Sir
Thomas Fairfax was with his reserve, overseeing the battle from a strategic distance. On the wings, Lieutenant-General of Horse
Cromwell commanded 4,000 mounted troops on the right, including the now-infamous Ironsides. On the other wing was Henry Ireton - Cromwell’s
son-in-law, who opposed Maurice with about 2,500 on the parliamentarian left. At around 9:30 in the morning on June 14th,
Cromwell surveyed the situation from his elevated position8 on Mill Hill. He became determined to exploit a potential
opportunity in a feature which anchored the western side of the parliamentarian formation
- the Sulby hedges. The Lieutenant-General energetically rode
away to the rear and arrived, half a mile later, in the presence of a dragoon contingent
under Colonel John Okey. At Cromwell’s direct instruction, the Colonel’s
dragoons mounted their horses, moved out beyond the hedgeline and ascended the slope beyond. After riding west of the bushes for a short
while, fully visible to the royalist army, the dragoons approached Maurice’s right
side cavalry. There, they were met by volley after volley
of musketry from units who had prepared in advance for their arrival, and were forced
to withdraw down a small slope for cover. From their now-superior position, Okey’s
dragoons laid down a withering fire on the royal cavalry from beyond Sulby hedge, disordering
their formation and causing significant losses… Receiving reports of a developing situation
of the right wing which required attention, Prince Rupert moved out from his position
behind the royalist foot to appraise the situation. Upon arriving, it was immediately clear that
Maurice’s horse could not withstand such harassment in their current position, and
so were ordered to advance immediately. After moving out of range, the royalist cavalry
took a moment to halt, reordering themselves before launching a thunderous charge. Opposite them, Henry Ireton’s horse returned
the gesture, galloping down Sulby Hill and meeting their foe at its base in a fierce
clash. On the inside, closer to the infantry, Vermuyden
and Ireton’s units were incredibly effective, routing three cavalry divisions opposite them
and then moving to wheel on the royalist center. This proved to be a mistake. Rupert’s units on the outside decisively
swept the parliamentarian horse arrayed against them off the field and then turned to crash
into the now-distracted Ireton. The latter’s forces completely collapsed
at being hit in the rear and were routed from the field, pursued towards the artillery train
by the victorious units under Rupert. Once again, the Prince had failed to press
his advantage. At this point - about 11am, Charles’ infantry
vanguard began a forward march with its right side angled slightly ahead of the rest. Unfortunately for the New Model Army, both
their muskets and heavy guns fired too high, barely inflicting any damage on the advancing
veterans. Upon contact, they drove through the central
first line of roundhead foot amidst brutal close quarters combat9, in which muskets were
commonly used as clubs. All of this fighting resulted in the creation
of a deep semicircular salient around the victorious infantry brigades. Despite their initial success, the king’s
centre hadn’t yet made a decisive breakthrough and were now attacked by new parliamentarian
reserves from the front and flanks of the bulge. As the clash of pike and musket continued,
Sir Marmaduke Langdale’s northern horse on Dust Hill’s eastern edge launched their
own charge. Cromwell’s own first rank of cavalry mirrored
their movements and prepared for the engagement. The stalwart parliamentary horse almost immediately
slowed the progress of Langdale’s attack, but nevertheless the royalists fought doggedly,
gradually pushing Cromwell’s first line back through the rough, narrow terrain made
up of rabbit warrens and small hills. However, the northern cavalry was incredibly
fatigued at this point, exhausted by the heavy fighting against the Ironsides. Although the king sent his reserve lifeguard
into the fray, they stood no chance of resisting when Cromwell called forward his second line
and were routed to the rear, where they sheltered near Rupert’s unengaged ‘blue coat’
regiment. Having trounced the royalists standing in
his way, Oliver Cromwell commanded an immediate halt of all his troops on the right wing,
displaying phenomenal authority by maintaining order and discipline where lesser leaders
would have faltered. The Lieutenant-General took a few minutes
to put his troopers back into a proper formation, during which he was joined by Fairfax and
the remnant of Ireton’s horse10, before embarking on a final cavalry charge into the
left flank of Charles’ now struggling infantry11. Pinned as they were from the front and sides,
the struggling royalist foot stood no chance of withstanding Cromwell’s attack. As the king’s army began to disintegrate,
Fairfax, who was now up front, noticed that Prince Rupert’s Bluecoats were still unbroken
and refused to flee. The New Model Army’s commander led his personal
guard around the Bluecoats’ rear, while another parliamentarian foot regiment attacked
it in the front. Rupert’s guard did not retreat and died
to a man. In the middle of the slaughter, it is reported
that one of the parliamentarian soldiers managed to seize the Bluecoats’ regimental colours
and boasted about doing so. When he was reprimanded for doing so by an
officer, Fairfax personally intervened saying “I have honour enough, let him take that
to himself.” Naseby finally shattered the royalist war
machine. At the cost of only a few hundred casualties,
Fairfax’s New Model Army had killed around a thousand royalist soldiers, injured many
more and captured about 5,000 infantry, most of whom were Charles’ battle-hardened core
of veterans. Rather than pursuing his shattered enemy any
further, Fairfax immediately set about recovering Leicester, which was taken by June 18th. After its crushing defeat at Parliamentarian
hands in Northamptonshire, the royalist cause in England began spinning into complete freefall. Although the king realised that his prospects
were grim, he still had a few thousand good cavalry with which he quickly traveled to
the Welsh border, where there was the faint hope of reinforcement. Back in the midlands and fresh from recapturing
Leicester on June 18th, Fairfax didn’t bother pursuing Charles, instead marching towards
Taunton. There, the last fully constituted royalist
field army - about 9,000 strong and under Goring’s command, was besieging the city. Receiving word that he was about to be attacked
by the superior New Model Army, Goring lifted the siege and attempted to withdraw towards
Bridgewater. Unfortunately for this ardent kingsman, Fairfax
was too quick, and engaged him at Langport on July 10th, destroying the final royalist
field force. If the destruction of Goring’s army and
parliament’s subsequent occupation of the west country wasn’t bad enough, Fairfax
then marched north to snare Bristol, the king’s last great manufacturing hub and prime gateway
to Ireland. In the aftermath of Naseby, Charles valued
the city’s security so much that the illustrious Prince Rupert, demoralized but still fiercely
loyal, was appointed its governor and ordered to keep it against the enemy at all costs1. So confident was he that assurances were given
to the king that Bristol could hold until at least Christmas. However, not even the man who was arguably
Charles’ foremost commander could withstand Fairfax’s momentum. After a miserable siege of just 18 days, a
hopeless Rupert surrendered Bristol on September 10th in return for mercy and an escort back
to Oxford. When the king got word of the prince’s abandonment
of Bristol he was utterly distraught. In response, a royal letter of condemnation
was penned containing, among others things - ‘What is to be done after one who is so
near me both in blood and friendship submits himself to so mean an action?’ For the royalists, the bad news just kept
on coming. Only three days after the ‘Betrayal of Bristol’,
as conspiratorial royalist courtiers dubbed it, news reached Oxford that the Marquis of
Montrose - Charles’ singular ray of hope in Scotland, had been defeated at Philiphaugh
with the loss of his entire army2. Although the marquis continued to cause trouble,
there would be no salvation from the north. Increasingly deprived of options, the king
marched north in an attempt to relieve Chester, the hypothetical landing point for any Irish
confederate soldiers who might come to aid him. He arrived on the 23rd, but was quickly bested
in battle and forced to withdraw back to Oxford via Newark. The following months were an extended litany
of bitter disappointment and failure among the royalist partisans. Though there were no major battles which took
place, garrisons fell one by one until by early 1646, parliament controlled most of
the country. Fearing for his son and heir’s safety, Charles
sent the Prince of Wales to France at around this time. The final act of the First Civil War played
out at Stow-on-the-Wold on March 21st, when New Model units under Richard Brereton intercepted
and defeated a 3,000 strong royalist contingent moving back south to reinforce Oxford’s
skeleton garrison. Some of the cavalry managed to break out of
the trap and reach Charles’ position, but the army’s commander Lord Astley and the
majority of its Welsh levies capitulated without much resistance. As he was led off the field, Astley turned
to his men and said “You have done your work, boys, and may go play, unless you will
fall out among yourselves.” With enemy armies closing in all around Oxford3,
Charles slipped out of the city with only two companions and went north. For months, covert negotiations under French
supervision4 had been taking place between the king and the Covenanters, who were deeply
unsatisfied with their treatment by parliament. Having received promises that he would be
treated honourably and would not be forced to do anything which ‘troubled his conscience’,
Charles entered Leven’s camp at Newark on May 5th and was taken prisoner. The king now had protection in custody, while
the Scots had an invaluable piece on the chessboard. Keen to keep him secure, they moved back to
Newcastle on the 13th. At about the same time, tension between the
king’s jailors and the English parliament were reaching a fever pitch. On August 12th, The Committee of Both Kingdoms’
Scottish Commissioners informed their counterparts that, although the war was won, they were
only prepared to withdraw their army from Northern England if the £1.8 million they
were owed as compensation was paid. The quickly splintering factions managed to
reach a financial settlement, but it was clear that, above even this, the Covenanters were
furious at parliament’s disregard of the Solemn League and Covenant. Rendering the Scots’ war aims even less
plausible was the failure to convert the captive king to Presbyterianism, or at least to agree
to impose it on his kingdom as parliament had promised before. The king’s sheer obstinance and repeated
plots to escape eventually made the Scots believe that he wasn’t worth the trouble. On January 28th 1647, they agreed to sell
Charles to the English parliament in return for installments of outstanding payments totalling
£400,000. With that done, the Scottish army began withdrawing
back into their own country and demobilising after almost half a decade at war. The king, meanwhile, was transported to house
arrest at Holdenby, repeatedly being met by cheering crowds on the way. In London, parliament was not the strong,
relatively united faction which had managed to win the civil war. Instead, without Charles as a strong enemy
to come together against, the rift between the ‘Presbytarian’ moderates and the more
radical ‘Independents’ grew dangerously wide. In late February and early March, Members
of the Presbytarian faction, who generally sought accomodation with the king, were busy
shooting themselves in the foot by unilaterally disbanding the New Model Army’s infantry
regiments, which were often led by Independents. To make the slight even more cutting, this
was to be done without payment of outstanding wages that the troops were owed. The army had a number of other motivations,
including the politics espoused by a group of aspiring egalitarians known as Levellers. They believed that the army’s anti-royalist
triumph was to herald a new age of equality and the elimination of wealth and privilege. Squabbling within parliament continued for
the next few months until the until-now relatively neutral Oliver Cromwell, who was both a prominent
MP and an equally prominent New Model Army commander, began realising his position was
unsustainable. Amidst rumours of a Presbytarian plot to seize
the king and use him for their own political ends, Cromwell probably condoned the dispatch
of an ‘arch-agitator’ known as George Joyce to Holdenby at the end of May, tasked
with taking the king into his own custody. On the morning of June 3rd, Charles I walked
out of Holdenby House and set off for Newmarket accompanied by Joyce’s troopers. There, the politically neutral Sir Thomas
Fairfax and his New Model Army were gathered, and the army’s mood was growing more restless. In London, the revelation of Charles’ military
apprehension gave Cromwell the excuse he needed to cross his own personal rubicon. Quitting parliament entirely, he rode north
to personally lead the New Model Army, with whom he was incredibly popular. When Cromwell and Charles first met for talks,
relations were actually quite cordial, contrary to what later events would imply. The parliamentary cavalry general even informed
a friend that the king was ‘the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms’. Behind the scenes however, Charles continued
his clandestine communications with the Scots, aiming to keep all his options open. For the time being, Cromwell and the army
had other problems to distract them. At the end of July 1647, riots, sparked by
the continuing wartime tax rate, spiraled out of control in the English capital. The violence led to a number of ‘Independent’
MPs fleeing to the army’s protection5, including the speaker of the house. Legitimised by the speaker’s presence in
their camp, Fairfax and Cromwell led the New Model Army into London and put it under military
occupation. When the situation was considered safe, the
king was escorted from Newmarket and installed at Hampton Court, where the imprisoned monarch
still doggedly refused any settlement which wasn’t entirely on his terms. Instead, Charles hoped that the obvious divisions
between the various parliamentary factions could be widened and exploited for his own
ends. That political strategy initially seemed to
be working well when, on October 18th, five Leveller officers presented the army ‘grandees’,
led by Lord General Fairfax, with The Case of the Army Truly Stated. This was a revolutionary manifesto calling
for radical reforms including, but not limited to: the dissolution of parliament and the
implementation of a new constitution which would give ‘all the free born’ the right
to vote. So that disruption in the New Model Army could
be avoided, Fairfax opened the so-called Putney Debates to address the issue. Although Cromwell’s rejection of such a
constitutional change decided the issue, the anti-monarchical nature of the discussion
reached and frightened the king. Fearing for his safety, or just sick of being
cooped up, Charles escaped in late November and eventually ended up at Carisbrooke Castle
on the Isle of Wight, in an even less favourable imprisonment than before. If this irritation wasn’t enough to harden
Cromwell’s attitude towards the king, the more severe intelligence that he was receiving
certainly was. Just after Christmas 1647, Charles I secretly
signed an agreement with the Scots known as the ‘Engagement’, a military alliance
between the king and his northern realm in return for state enforced Presbyterianism. After much debate at the Edinburgh assembly,
those royalists who became known as the ‘Engagers’ gained a majority and, on April 20th 1648,
issued a declaration which accused the English parliament of breaking the previously established
Solemn League and Covenant. It also demanded uniformity of religion and
the complete disbandment of the New Model Army, which the Scots considered to be the
most troublesome piece on the chessboard. This was completely impossible for the English
and so, only a week later, the Engagers began mobilising for war against their recently
dismissed ally. Bt this time, however, parliament and its
renegade army were already dealing with the embers of unrest in England. In late March, A spontaneous revolt in support
of the king had broken out in Wales led by Colonel John Poyer. However, it was quelled in short order by
the swiftly moving Cromwell. Meanwhile in the north of England, the efforts
of revanchist royalist commander Marmaduke Langdale were limited due to the intervention
of General John Lambert. This wasn’t the end of parliament’s troubles. In late May, an overly draconian parliamentary
commissioner in Kent provoked an uprising which, while enjoying some initial success,
was eventually confined within the city of Colchester, which was put under siege on June
12th. Although all of these revolts still posed
a threat on their own, everyone on parliament’s side knew that an invasion from Scotland was
imminent. As one of Charles’ allies stated “It is
Scotland, and Scotland only, can save the King and England. All others have their rise from the expectation
of Scotland.” The decisive campaign of the short Second
Civil War was about to take place. The royalist storm finally broke on July 8th,
when a roughly 10,000 strong Scottish army under the Duke of Hamilton crossed the border
into Northern England and linked up with Langdale’s 4,000 beleaguered rebels at Carlisle. With the tables turned by the presence of
this new enemy, Lambert obeyed Cromwell’s orders to withdraw to the safety of Barnard
Castle after suffering some minor losses. This would allow for the preservation of the
parliamentary army while reinforcements made their way north to deal with the problem6. Unfortunately for the royalists, Hamilton
was forced to call a stop to his offensive for two weeks while supplies and reinforcements
arrived from Scotland and Ireland. This gave Cromwell time to reach the area,
and allowed the two parliamentary generals to meet at Wetherby on August 12th, forming
a veteran army which totalled about 9,000 men. Unwilling to allow the invaders any opportunity
to move further into the country, Cromwell sped westwards into Lancashire and down the
Ribble Valley to intercept their southbound advance along England’s west coast. To increase his army’s marching pace, Cromwell
chose to leave the the parliamentarian artillery behind. Having decided on an advance deeper into Lancashire
to link up with potential allies in Wales, the bulk of Hamilton’s Scots came to a halt
atop Preston Moor at nightfall on August 16th. They set up for the night and prepared to
cross the Ribble River in the morning, while most of the Scottish cavalry was sent ahead
towards Wigan on a foraging mission. Langdale’s force of around 3,000 foot and
600 horse, functioning as a cavalry screen east of the main, coalesced about four miles
northeast of Preston at Longridge. Due to inadequate reconnaissance, the king’s
supporters completely unaware that Cromwell’s 9,000 were only a few miles away, encamped
at Stonyhurst Park. As the sun came above the horizon on August
17th, Hamilton ordered Baillie to begin marching the Scottish foot across the river7. Shortly after this, a small probing vanguard
from Cromwell’s army started skirmishing with Langdale’s surprised men on the road
from Clitheroe. Believing that the entire parliamentary force
was in the area, the royalist general rode to Hamilton personally and informed him of
the situation, but the latter was convinced to continue the river crossing by his officers. With minimal reinforcements to assist him,
Langdale rode back to his embattled contingent. After hours of light skirmishing, he was finally
attacked by the entirety of Cromwell’s army in mid-afternoon. The battlefield was a disconnected mosaic
of small fields, intersected by irrigation ditches, narrow lanes and high hedges in which
the crack New Model infantry units had a distinct advantage over the freshly mustered greenhorns
in the royalist force. Nevertheless, Langdale’s musketeers gave
a good account of themselves and, at first, managed to keep Cromwell’s army at bay and
avoid being outflanked. However, when fighting south of the Clitheroe
Road was at its height, Lambert threw his Lancashire regiment at the sector and sent
the royalist screen routing towards Preston. Accounts differ as to what happened next,
but all agree that the situation broke apart swiftly after Langdale’s defeat. Hamilton was trapped in Preston trying to
rally the last arrivals among his cavalry coming from the north, while the small earthwork
defence around the Ribble bridge was quickly taken after some New Model Army marksmen captured
an area of high ground overlooking it. Many Scots were killed before they could cross
the bridge, but Hamilton managed to cross the river on horseback and joined the majority
of his forces on the south bank. With Cromwell now blocking the road back to
Scotland, the exhausted royalists could only continue on south, where reinforcements would
hopefully reach them. Over the three days following the battle,
the Scots, forced to leave behind their ammunition, were harassed constantly by Cromwell’s Ironsides
until they reached Winwick. There, the Scottish infantry was engaged and
decimated by the veteran parliamentary footmen. Although the cavalry and leadership managed
to escape, what remained of Hamilton’s infantry surrendered on August 20th. At the other end of the country, an infuriated
Fairfax brought the rebels in famine and disease-stricken Colchester to the negotiating table on the
27th. He was not in a merciful mood, and had Sir
George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas, defiant royalists until the very end, executed for
bringing such unnecessary suffering onto the realm’s innocents. Charles I was still imprisoned at Carisbrooke,
but to the religious parliamentary soldiers their former king had unjustly brought strife
back to the land of England even after God's will had resulted in his defeat during the
first war. Therefore, Charles was guilty of disregarding
the lord’s will and deserved no mercy. For this crime against his own people, Charles
was dubbed the ‘Man of Blood’ and many radicals began to clamor for harsh punishment. A famous passage drawn from Numbers 35:33
in the King James Bible started being echoed as an example. ‘So ye shall not pollute the land wherein
ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that
is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it” Scotland’s fragile alliance with the king
utterly broke down as news of Hamilton’s defeat at Preston began filtering north. Sensing blood in the water, anti-engager factions
loyal to the ‘Kirk’, or ‘church’, struck out and plunged Scotland into a civil
war of its own. In early September, Stirling and Edinburgh
were taken by Kirk insurrectionists, but it became clear that they didn’t have the military
advantage when the Engagers took Stirling back soon after. However, the threat of Cromwellian intervention
on their border forced an agreement that formalised the anti-engager’s legitimacy. With peace in Scotland secured, for now, a
victorious Cromwell marched into the country and dined with friendly nobles in Edinburgh1. Meanwhile, in England, momentous events were
taking place. The viciousness and pointlessness of the Second
Civil War had widened the rift between parliament’s moderates, who desired an accommodation with
the king, and the radical New Model Army ‘independents’, who now wanted him gone. Charles’ continued refusal to budge on religious
issues during the subsequent negotiations infuriated the radicals even further throughout
the later part of 1648, and this led to a temporary alliance between the extreme Levellers
and the army grandees, led by Henry Ireton. The army officers’ patience finally ran
out on December 1st and they decided to act. Charles was forcibly returned to the mainland
and installed at Hurst Castle, while Fairfax and the main force occupied London the following
day. Acting on Ireton’s orders and without the
Lord General’s knowledge, Colonel Thomas Pride marched on parliament at dawn on the
6th and conducted what has become known as ‘Pride’s Purge’. MPs who voted for engagement with the king
were blocked from entering the commons or arrested, leaving a pliable Rump Parliament
of 156 members. From that point on, the military was in control
of the country, and it set about using its newfound authority to punish Charles I for
his crimes. On the first day of 1649, Ireton’s new puppet
parliament decreed the establishment of a High Court to charge the king. The captive monarch was taken from Hurst to
Windsor and then, a day later, to St James’ Palace in London, which parliament used as
the king’s jail. Before being parted from his son, Charles
told the boy that “The corn is in the ground; we expect the harvest.” He knew exactly what was coming. After a contentious, week-long trial, the
king was declared guilty and condemned to death on January 27th, 1649. Three days later, at about 2PM, King Charles
I of England was executed with a single axe blow to the neck, prompting a deathly groan
from the crowd. To his enemies, Charles I was an incompetent
king and an autocratic tyrant, unprepared for the burden of ruling his realm and unwilling
to concede anything meaningful. But he was also a devout Christian, a loving
father and a man who genuinely thought he was doing the best thing he could for England’s
people under the difficult circumstances of the seventeenth-century. Whichever of these perspectives rang truer,
the king was finally dead. On the same day, the army’s rump parliament
passed an act forbidding automatic succession by the late monarch’s son, the future Charles
II, who was an exile in the Netherlands at the time. Although he was crowned in mid-February by
royalist supporters, this essentially abolished the English monarchy, and with this lack of
a king, the Commonwealth of England effectively began. The death of Charles I and the conclusion
of the struggle for England didn’t mean everyone was at peace. Ireland had been in an intermittent state
of revolt since before the First Civil War broke out, and during the conflict had often
been a source of royalist soldiers. By early 1649, Irish Catholics were in an
alliance with the remnant of Charles’ supporters against the parliamentarians, and it was clear
that the situation there needed dealing with. To do so, the Commonwealth’s newly founded
executive body, the Council of State, appointed the always reliable Thomas Fairfax. Much to their dismay however, the Lord General
was weary of conflict and declined the foreign commission. With little other choice, the Council instead
appointed his deputy - Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell, to lead the Irish expedition. Unfortunately for them, Leveller mutinies
within some New Model Army regiments broke out during the spring and stalled preparations. Led by reformist figures such as John Lilburne,
the radical Levellers had become disillusioned by the lack of political change in England1
post-civil war, and had come to believe that the king’s tyranny had simply been exchanged
for the tyranny of an oligarchic parliament. In what would be Lord General Fairfax’s
swan song action as the army’s commander-in-chief, he and Cromwell rallied loyal forces against
the mutineers and crushed them in a night assault on May 13th near Burford. In the aftermath, many Leveller notables were
executed and the movement as a whole lost most of its political power. With the military’s internal unrest resolved
by early summer, Cromwell at last set off for his campaign in Ireland with 12,000 soldiers
and fervent protestant zeal against a people whom he would come to refer to as ‘barbarous
wretches’. Most of Cromwell’s fleet set sail on the
14th of August and arrived unopposed in the port of Dublin a day later. Ireland’s royalist leadership under the
Duke of Ormond believed that bleeding Cromwell dry of blood and money in prolonged sieges
was the best strategy after recent defeats. To that end, much of their manpower was redeployed
to strengthen strategic castles and towns on the invader’s route. One of these would-be fortresses was Drogheda,
a city located on the main road from Dublin to Belfast. It possessed large medieval walls and, to
make attacking it even harder, was bisected into northern and southern sections by the
Boyne river with only a drawbridge to cross between the two. However Ormond and Sir Arthur Aston - the
local commander, didn’t believe Drogheda would be a primary objective for Cromwell. Therefore, they were not prepared when, on
September 2nd, outriders under an officer called Michael Jones appeared on the northern
bank to cover the western approaches. Some minor skirmishing took place which didn’t
have much of an effect, but this vanguard’s arrival preceded the main parliamentary army
which marched into view on the following day. Immediately taking note of the city’s geography,
Cromwell concentrated his main army force south of the Boyne and left Jones’ cavalry
to split the defenders’ manpower. Things got worse for Irish-royalist defenders
when eight heavy parliamentarian siege cannons arrived by river on the 5th. After being unloaded slightly downstream,
the guns were organised into two batteries with converging fire, targeting the south
and southeastern walls where assault would be less costly. The plan was simple - smash two adjacent sections
of the wall, penetrate the separate but mutually supporting breaches and capture the Duleek
Gate and Boyne drawbridge. Cromwell sent demands for Aston’s surrender,
but the overtures were rejected, so the assault was on. On the 9th, Parliament’s cannons began a
bombardment which continued for two days, all the while Cromwell deployed his men to
be ready for an advance through the breach. Three regiments of infantry were placed at
the eastern wall under Colonel John Hewson, while Cromwell personally led the bulk of
his army and its reserve opposite the southern gate. Drogheda’s centuries-old fortifications
held firm against the cannonade until the 11th, when two holes were blown through both
axes of the walls' southeastern corner. Reacting to the danger, Aston moved his command
post to Mill Mount and ordered trenches to be dug around the breaches as a secondary
defence. With the city penetrated, Cromwell raised
a white flag of parley above his command tent to induce Aston to come and submit. When this failed, he even sent an officer
with direct orders. However, believing relief to be close at hand,
the royalist commander rejected for a second time. The Lord General intensified his eight gun
artillery barrage in response, each weapon firing formidable shots ranging from 12 to
30 pounds in weight. It was all too much. By midday, Drogheda’s walls were on the
verge of collapse and many more holes had been made. Cromwell readied his men for the attack. At 5PM, Colonels Castle and Hewson led their
frontline units into the city and initially managed to seize a foothold beyond the wall. However, a point-blank volley of royalist
musketry amidst the rubble-strewn streets pushed the parliamentarians out again. Among the casualties was Colonel Castle, whose
mortal wounding collapsed the vanguard’s morale. Seeing his troops faltering, Cromwell ordered
his reserve to advance and bolster the attack, personally taking command of a regiment and
fighting in the forward rank. Inspired by their general’s presence, the
parliamentarians outflanked and overwhelmed Drogheda’s outnumbered defenders and forced
Aston to send in his cavalry reserve. Doing so stripped the drawbridge of its defending
soldiers and allowed Cromwell’s men to storm the crucial crossing. Now surrounded and isolated on Mill Mount,
Aston and his small group of comrades allowed themselves to be taken into custody. But the quarter was not to be given on that
day. For a reason which has been a matter of debate
ever since, Cromwell’s soldiers began massacring the captured royalists with shot, club and
sword. Aston himself was reportedly bludgeoned to
death with his own wooden leg in the slaughter by men who believed rumours that he kept gold
inside it. With Drogheda south of the Boyne captured,
parliamentarian soldiers fueled by religious zeal and bloodlust swarmed across the undefended
drawbridge and into the northern section. Seemingly having lost control of his army
briefly, Cromwell was unable to reign in his men as they began indiscriminately slaying
any enemy soldier or civilian they came across. In short order, most of the city was under
their control, but a few bastions of resistance still remained. At some point, the Lord General was approached
by a group of officers who asked what should be done about a group of royalist soldiers
resisting inside the bell tower of St Peter’s Church. Cromwell had his men pile up the church’s
pews and set the alight to burn out the defenders. About 40 people perished in the dreadful inferno,
which was visible throughout the city. Overall, almost 3,000 defenders and a thousand
civilians were killed in Drogheda. Debate still rages as to whether the fervently
religious Cromwell condoned Drogheda’s bloody fate due to anti-Catholic hatred or whether
he was simply acting within the bounds of accepted laws of early-modern wartime conduct. The man himself stated of the act: “It will
tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.” A month after the slaughter at Drogheda, Cromwell
captured the crucial port of Wexford and put it to the sword in a similar manner. After this, the parliamentarians continued
campaigning in Ireland throughout winter and into the new year, stymying any hope the future
Charles II had of finding effective support there. Cromwell himself left his son-in-law to command
Ireland and finally departed for England in May 1650, for a new emergency had emerged
back home. Since mid-March, the dead king’s heir had
been playing two sides in a deft political game, both hoping to renew the royalist alliance
with Covenanter Scotland, controlled by a Kirk party who had come to believe parliament
would never hold to its oaths, whilst at the same time hedging his bets with their enemies. Even worse than the failure to impose Presbyterianism
was the commonly held fear among the Scots that England’s kingless New Model Army sought
to impose a similar Republicanism on them as well, a prospect which was completely anathema
to the Scottish nobility. All of this led to negotiations between the
Covenanters and Charles the younger, which began in March 1650 at the Dutch city of Breda2. When talks ground to a halt, the king-in-exile
placed a formidable and staunch royalist piece onto his side of the chessboard: the Marquis
of Montrose. Following his defeat at Philiphaugh, Montrose
had skipped between the courts of Europe attempting to gain support, and after Charles I’s execution
immediately offered his services to the late King’s son. Aiming to light a fire under the Covenanter’s
feet, Charles sent Montrose back to Scotland with a mercenary army in April. Unfortunately for the unreservedly loyal Marquis,
he was just a pawn in a merciless political game. His invasion had its hastening effect on the
Breda deliberations, but that didn’t stop his small army from being decisively defeated
on April 27th when it was ambushed at Carbisdale. Only a few days later, Charles and the Scots
signed the Treaty of Breda. In return for a sworn oath to institute Presbyterianism
throughout the British Isles and the disavowal of royalists in Ireland and Scotland, especially
the hated Montrose, Covenanter Scotland would grant Charles its support in restoring him
to the throne. After being captured in the aftermath of Carbisdale,
Montrose was taken to Edinburgh in chains where he was hung, drawn and quartered at
the end of May. The man who was among the dead monarch’s
most steadfast allies was cut off and left out to dry by his son. With the Breda agreement concluded, Charles
sailed from the Netherlands to Scotland, disembarking on June 23rd3. Parliament looked at the situation in the
far north with justified concern. A day later in London, 500 miles to the south,
a special committee appointed by the Council of State convened to decide who would lead
an upcoming preemptive invasion of Scotland. Their initial choice, Thomas Fairfax, declined
the commission in objection to an offensive war. So, having recently returned from Ireland,
Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord General in his place. Together with around 16,000 veterans and their
capable officers, the New Model Army went north and finally crossed the Scottish border
on July 22nd. Rather than facing one of the age’s greatest
generals with an unprepared and undermanned army, Covenanter general David Leslie fortified
a line of forts stretching from Leith to Canongate. Anchored by terrain features on both flanks,
Edinburgh’s defensive shield was a formidable obstacle which the Scottish army could safely
muster behind. Dunbar, a seaport crucial for the invasion’s
logistical links, was taken without significant resistance two days after the border crossing. Cromwell advanced even further along the Firth,
but he was forced to halt at Leith upon encountering Leslie’s defences. After a short attempt at breaking the line,
the Lord General realised it wouldn’t be possible before supplies ran dry. In terrible weather conditions5, the parliamentary
army retreated back towards the Tweed beginning on July 30th, but was harried by Leslie’s
Covenanter cavalry the entire way, suffering many losses. Slightly battered, Cromwell and his men reached
Dunbar again on August 5th. At about the same time, Charles arrived at
Leith. Parliament’s Lord General tried for a second
time to overcome the bulwark of forts by outflanking Edinburgh to the south, but failed again due
to an onset of dysentery and the wet summer weather. On August 31st, Cromwell pulled the attrition-sapped
army back to Dunbar, his strength now only 7,500 infantry and 3,500 cavalry. Perceiving a chance to cripple the already
weakened New Model Army, Leslie sent one of his infantry brigades around to take the pass
at Cockburnspath - beyond Dunbar, cutting Cromwell’s line of supply, reinforcement
and retreat. Meanwhile, the bulk of his army - about 14,000
men, secured the prominent Doon Hill, overlooking both Dunbar and the Berwick road. Such impregnable high ground would have usually
served as a tactical benefit6, but never-ending wind and rain hammered Leslie’s exposed
troops stationed on the hilltop. That, in addition to a deteriorating supply
situation and Cromwell’s seeming weakness, prompted the Scots to descend Doon Hill at
dawn on September 2nd. There, in the cover on lower ground, they
deployed for battle just south of the Broxburn ravine, prompting the observing Cromwell to
declare “God is delivering them into our hands, they are coming down to us.” Brushing off concerns from some of his less
bold officers, Cromwell ordered his exhausted, hungry army forward, drawing it up in a conventional
battle line along the ravine and opposite the Scots. A minor skirmish between scout units took
place near brand hill, but the remaining daylight was mostly used for redeployment. At some point, Leslie ordered the majority
of his cavalry - about 18 regiments of it, to swap flanks and mass on the Berwick road
where the Broxburn was easier to cross. The unpassable inland flank was now guarded
mostly by the Scots infantry. Night fell with the parliamentary command
no less worried than they were before. The army was exhausted, its supply situation
was sketchy at best, and they were trapped in Scotland with an enemy army between them
and home. To decide what the best course of action would
be, Cromwell called a war council in the early hours of September 3rd. Most of the regimental colonels reiterated
a desire to ship the infantry away and break out with cavalry, but Major-General John Lambert
dismissed the prospect, inspirationally arguing for an attack. In his view, Leslie’s Scots sat in an incredibly
vulnerable position. Having descended from Doon Hill’s lofty
heights, their backs were now literally to a wall. With a bit of skill and luck, the Scottish
flank could be turned and they could be smashed against that very wall. Still somewhat nervous, Cromwell and the other
officers consented. Under the cover of darkness, the English began
breaking apart their conventional formation and drawing up in one single column on the
Berwick road, one brigade behind the other. The advance began at 4am with a cannonade
against the half-asleep Scottish left7 and the rapid seizure of crossing points across
the Broxburn by Monck’s infantry vanguard and some supporting cavalry. During a subsequent half hour lull in the
fighting, Leslie’s officers failed to shift their forces to effectively counter Cromwell’s
attack plan and were routed. Lambert crossed the ravine with his first
mounted line not long after and charged at his fellow Major-General Montgomerie’s Scottish
horsemen opposing him. Surprised by the New Model’s vicious dawn
assault, Leslie’s beleaguered trooper front line on the right wing was swept from the
field. At about the same time, Monck crossed the
Broxburn with his highly-trained infantry brigade just to Lambert’s right and marched
it straight at an opposing unit of newly-raised Scots recruits led by General Lumsden. It wasn’t even a challenge, for Monck ploughed
through his opposition with ease and broke the unit, injuring and capturing Lumsden in
the process. Despite their relatively swift collapse, Lumsden’s
greenhorns had held just long enough for reinforcements under Campbell of Lawer to come forward. They charged into and utterly smashed Monck’s
tired brigade in brutal sword-point fighting, knocking it totally out of the battle and
shoring up the line. That wasn’t the worst of parliament’s
troubles. While Lambert’s victorious cavalry was still
regrouping for another maneuver, Colonel Strachan’s second line of Scots troopers surged forward
and struck, throwing Lambert back across the Broxburn in retreat. Fortunately for the Major-General, he also
had a second line which he brought forward to reinforce the left wing, charging straight
into Strachan’s men and pinning them down in a head-on fight. While he did so, Cromwell steered his personal
mounted guard and swung around near the coast, careening into the Scottish wing. This was the final straw that broke the camel’s
back. All of the cavalry units on Leslie’s seaward
wing broke, either dying where they stood or routing. Some of them barrelled back down the road
to Cockburnspath, and others wheeled around towards Haddington. However, there was no pursuit. Discipline had always been one of the Ironsides’
greatest character traits and they showed it once again at Dunbar when Cromwell and
Lambert called an immediate halt. As they had at Marston Moor and Naseby, the
parliamentary horse regrouped in good order. Now exposed due to their cavalry being blown
away, the unengaged brigades of Leslie’s left-side infantry were totally unprepared
when the New Model infantry pivoted and began rolling up their line against the Doon Hill. Cromwell and Lambert delivered the coup de
grace by riding into the Scots’ rear, destroying Campbell of Lawers’ unit which fought to
the last man. There was nothing left for the Scots to do
but run. Those few who could ran away from the battlefield
in the same direction that their mounted comrades had, but hundreds were slaughtered. Stunningly, up to 6,000 of Leslie’s soldiers
were captured in the disaster at Dunbar. The general himself retreated to Stirling
castle with a few thousand escapees. With Scotland’s army shattered, Edinburgh
capitulated to English parliamentary forces on September 7th, but the ‘Third Civil War’
in Scotland and England would continue. The final campaign of Britain’s terrible
nine-year-long series of conflicts was fought in the late summer of 1651 when Cromwell lured
Charles into invading England from the north. Leaving Lieutenant-General George Monck behind
in Scotland to oversee a force of 6,000 of his worst soldiers, Cromwell gathered the
rest of his army and hurried south, marching twenty miles a day in some of the hottest
summer weather in recent memory. Within a week, Cromwell’s Puritans had reached
the River Tyne, entering the little border town of Ferrybridge on August 19th. From here, Cromwell instructed Lambert to
continue screening Charles’ army. Thanks to Lambert’s effective cavalry scouts,
Cromwell knew the Royalists’ every step. Cromwell was surprised, yet gratified, to
learn that the local population in Northern England still clung to the Puritan banner
rather than supporting the Royalist cause. The common folk here perceived Charles’
entry into Northern England as an outright invasion by Scottish brigands. All across Northern and Central England, county
militias were formed and moved into key positions to block any Royalist activities and defend
the capital of London. Although Cromwell held a deep disdain for
the militias, their sheer size and pool of available volunteers helped demoralize Charles
and his Scottish army, forcing them to halt and rethink their strategy. Sixteen miles east of Liverpool along the
River Mersey at Warrington, Charles’ army encountered a mixed contingent of Chesire
and Staffordshire militia companies augmented by Lambert’s veteran cavalry squadrons. The Royalists attacked on August 16th, forcing
the Puritans back from the bridge over the Mersey since the swampy terrain made mounted
combat by Lambert’s horse troops impossible. He was also under orders not to bring on a
general engagement. And so the cavalry withdrew, much to the joy
and delight of the Scots, who brandished their swords and taunted the retreating horsemen. Although Charles had won a nearly bloodless
victory at Warrington, his principal advisors were still deeply troubled. Leslie was the most concerned, noticing that
there was little evidence of large-scale defections to the Royalist cause. Faced with similar concerns from his other
advisors, Charles relented and gave up on his hopes of marching directly on London,
instead opting to move west into the Loyalist-leaning territories along the Welsh border. He believed that he could recruit more Royalists
to his cause in the Western counties, especially from the hard-fighting Welshmen. It also gave him an open line of retreat to
the coast if the situation made it necessary. Reluctantly, Charles ordered his army to shift
west, heading for the crossroads town of Worcester along the River Severn, which forms the eastern
border of Wales. The Royalists, weary and exhausted from their
march, arrived at Worcester on August 22nd and immediately began strengthening the town’s
defenses. Charles ordered all local males between the
ages of 16 and 60 to assemble in a field outside Worcester, where they listened to an impassioned
speech by the King, who implored the men to join the ranks, promising good pay and a pardon
to any who joined his cause. Just a few hundred recruits joined his army,
but it would not be enough to face the much larger Puritan army under Cromwell, which
scouts reported was closing on their position. Charles told one of his close confidants,
“For me, it is a crown or a coffin.” Two days later, on August 24th, Cromwell arrived
in Warwick, forty miles east of Worcester. Here, he combined his battle-hardened regular
regiments with a large contingent of volunteers to form a 27,000-strong army. Cromwell would now, for the first time in
his career, have a two-to-one advantage over his adversary. Charles attempted to even the odds against
Cromwell by sending Sir Edward Massey and 300 men to watch over the nearest crossing
point of the Severn nine miles south of Worcester at Upton. Massey was under orders from Charles to destroy
the lone bridge spanning across the river, but for some unknown reason, Massey delayed
in this action. Meanwhile, Lambert arrived on the scene with
his cavalry scouts, finding the bridge neither destroyed nor guarded. He sent a squadron of dragoons rushing across
the bridge in order to seize the high ground at Upton Church. Now alerted to the enemy threat, Massey counterattacked,
but Lambert sent in more reinforcements and forced the Royalists into a retreat. Massey was badly wounded during the skirmish,
needing to be carried off the field. With a secure foothold on both ends of the
river, Cromwell dispatched a column of regulars and militiamen under Lieutenant-General Charles
Fleetwood to reinforce Lambert’s position and widen the beachhead. Before long, 14,000 Parliamentary troops had
gathered on the western bank of the river, forcing Charles to divide his already badly
outnumbered garrison. Many of Charles’ senior officers were becoming
dispirited at the rapidly deteriorating situation in Worcester. In the meantime, Cromwell moved deliberately,
concentrating the bulk of his army on two hills, Red Hill and Perry Wood, to the east
of Worcester. He placed his batteries of heavy artillery
between the two hills but held off from firing to allow his men to build a pontoon bridge
across the Severn at its confluence with the shallower River Teme. Fleetwood would lead the crossings there,
while Colonel Richard Deane led a second column to assault Powick Bridge, just a few miles
west of the Severn. Opting not to attack Worcester head-on, Cromwell
wanted to maneuver his army to trap the Royalists in a tight noose around the city, forcing
Charles to abandon his favorable defensive position to attack Cromwell in a pitched battle
east of town. It was the same plan he had used at Dunbar
a year earlier. Just before 6:00 AM on September 3rd - one
year after Cromwell’s great victory at Dunbar - the Battle of Worcester began when the Puritans
launched their attack. The 5,000 men under Fleetwood moved west up
the banks of the Severn, slowing their movement to cover a 20-boat caravan heading towards
the pontoon bridge site further east. As Charles watched these developments through
his telescope in the tower of Worcester Cathedral, he dispatched two brigades under General Robert
Montgomerie to hold the line at the Teme. Colonel Sir William Keith’s brigade was
dispatched to hold the Powick Bridge, while Major-General Pitscottie’s Scottish Highlanders
were ordered to engage the Puritans in their bridge-crossing efforts at the river confluence. Most of the cavalry under Leslie moved north
of Worcester, where the nervous general kept his troopers out of the fight. The cavalier was already planning to cover
a retreat from the field. The Scottish defenders at the confluence,
rallied by a brief appearance from Charles to their post along the Teme, held their ground
firmly against stout Puritan assaults. The Highlanders even managed to beat back
several of the enemy’s attempts to cross the stream at Powick Bridge. Meanwhile, Fleetwood’s pontooning efforts
further east were meeting with little success. Seeing a lack of progress, Cromwell sent a
contingent of troops across the Severn by boat in order to guard the contested triangle
between the junction of the two rivers. He ordered the men to throw up pontoon bridges
“at pistol shot” - only 50 yards apart from the Royalists - in preparation for reinforcements
to exploit a breakthrough. Despite coming under heavy fire, the Puritan
pontooneers managed to build their bridges, and between 3:00 - 4:00 PM, Cromwell personally
led a handpicked retinue, including his own bodyguard and the veteran foot regiments of
Colonels Francis Hacker, Richard Ingoldsby, and Charles Fairfax, across the river. The Highlanders, meanwhile, were poorly led
by Pitscottie, and were too far away to fight off the growing Puritan beachhead. Puritan horse reinforcements managed to sweep
around the defenders’ flanks on the open ground west of the river. Now that pressure to his front had been partially
relieved, Fleetwood finally placed down his own pontoon bridge across the Teme to threaten
the Scottish flank at Powick Bridge. Colonel Keith led his troops in a strategic
withdrawal towards Worcester, fighting over every tree, bush, and hedgerow between the
bridge and the town. Finally running out of ammunition after hours
of combat, the Scots were routed, breaking ranks for refuge in Worcester while others
hurried to escape the Puritan trap around the town. In the midst of the growing confusion, Colonel
Keith was badly wounded, and Montgomerie was captured. Back at the cathedral in Worcester, Charles
decided he would lead his men out of the city, just as Cromwell was hoping, and oblige the
Puritans to a pitched battle east of the Severn at Red Hill. As more and more of Cromwell’s regiments
were pouring into the triangle west of the Severn, Charles believed that a sudden, spirited
counter-charge might break through the Puritan lines. Leading his men out of the city, Charles’
Royalists overran the poorly-trained militia and musketeer pickets behind a stand of hedgerows,
drove off a troop of Puritan horse, and even managed to capture Cromwell’s artillery. For a moment, the fate of the battle - and
the fates of both Cromwell and Charles - hung in the balance. The courageous charge by Charles, ably assisted
by the Duke of Hamilton, was on the verge of achieving a stunning triumph in the eleven-hour
battle. But the ever-dependable John Lambert stood
firm with his horse squadrons. With his own mount shot from under him, Lambert
assumed command of the untried militia companies, holding firm against Charles’ attacks until
Cromwell could hurry reinforcements back across the river. All the Royalists’ hopes for victory were
dashed as they launched desperate attacks against the stout Puritan line. By 5:00 PM, the battle was coming to an end,
although there were still small firefights and instances of last-minute actions erupting
across the lines. Among the dead was the Duke of Hamilton, whose
own father had been an earlier victim of Cromwell. Many of the Scots sought refuge in the earthwork
defenses of Fort Royal, a small redoubt overlooking Sidbury Gate. Despite a personal plea from Charles to come
out and fight, the Scots would have no more of it. The redoubt’s defenders would later refuse
a call of surrender from Cromwell, and 1,500 Scots would die fighting, cut down to the
last man by the Puritans. Defeated but not panicked, the young King
rushed through Worcester in an attempt to rally his men for another charge. Leslie was of no use to the beaten monarch. At the Sidbury Gate, Charles made one final
effort to rally his men, but it was too late. Frustrated, he shouted out, “I had rather
you would shoot me than let me live to see the consequences of this fatal day!” Instead, Royalist cavalry troopers led by
the Earl of Cleveland galloped down High Street to buy time for Charles to escape through
the northernmost St. Martin’s Gate. Overrun on three sides, the Royalist army
was completely destroyed, with 2,000 defenders in Worcester killed. The streets and gutters of Worcester ran red
with blood. Another 6 - 10,000 Royalists were captured
that day, including all the surviving Scottish commanders. The English captives would be conscripted
into the New Model Army and sent to Ireland for further service. The less-fortunate Scots were deported to
New England, Bermuda, and the West Indies to work a life of indentured servitude on
English plantations. Very few of the Scots who had invaded Northern
England that summer ever saw their homeland of Scotland again. The fighting had all but ended by nightfall. Cromwell announced that night the stunning
victory of Parliament over Charles. The would-be King Charles managed to escape
the battle, managing in one episode to elude Parliamentary patrols by hiding in an oak
tree on the grounds of the Boscobel House. He eventually reached the southern coast of
England and made his escape to Normandy. Charles would not return to his native country
for another nine years, living in exile in France, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Dutch
Republic during that time. The crushing defeat at Dunbar had dealt a
mortal blow to the Scottish cause and by 1652, the Kingdom was fully absorbed into the natal
Commonwealth of England. After this, Cromwell’s young regime had
assumed control over the whole isle of Great Britain, but there were still affairs of the
state beyond the islands’ shores for him to settle. The brutality of Cromwell’s army during
the Irish campaign that occurred between 1649 and 1650 is considered by many to be a black
stain on the career of an already controversial man, and his policies in Ireland in the years
that followed did little to improve his reputation among the denizens of the Emerald Isle both
past and present. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford had
only inflamed the Catholic Gaels’ resolve to push back against the Puritan tide, but
by the end of 1651, the last major native strongholds of Limerick and Galway had been
put under siege by Parliamentary forces and starved into submission. After this, the Irish no longer had the resources
or manpower to take the New Model Army head on, but they continued to fight on using asymmetrical
guerilla tactics. As many as 30,000 men went into hiding in
bogs, mountains and forests. Living as outlaws, they struck out against
isolated patrols and supply wagons, turning the entire countryside into a practical killzone
for any English soldier who dared step more than two miles beyond his military camp. Cromwell’s response was indiscriminately
brutal. Under his purview, Parliamentarian forces
systematically destroyed the food stocks of any counties suspected to be supplying the
rebels. This resulted in an island-wide famine, which
in turn facilitated an outbreak of bubonic plague. In total, the combination of warfare, famine
and disease took a catastrophic toll, killing anywhere between 20-40% of Ireland’s total
population. Additionally, another 50,000 or so Irish captives
were reduced to indentured servitude and shipped overseas to the English colonies in North
America and the Caribbean. In 1652, fueled by his disdain for the Catholic
faith and a desire to put an end to the unrest on the island once and for all, Cromwell instituted
a slew of openly discriminatory policies against the native population and its Church. All Catholics were banished from all major
Irish towns, which had been predominantly Anglo-Protestant in character since before
the war, while bounties were put on Catholic priests, who were hunted and executed. On top of all this, massive swathes of land
were seized from Catholic landowners, even those who had not taken part in the rebellion,
and given to Protestants; often veterans of the New Model Army. By 1652, Ireland was at England’s mercy,
and all three Kingdoms in the titular war of the Three Kingdoms were under the full
control of Oliver Cromwell’s regime. However, his English Commonwealth still had
one more war to fight. For decades, England and the Dutch Republic
had been chummy with one another, with the former supporting the latter in its war for
independence against the Spanish Empire. However, throughout the English civil war,
these relations had become increasingly strained, as both Royalists and Parliamentarians had
placed embargoes on Dutch merchant ships suspected of trading with the opposite side. This, in combination with a slew of other
trading disputes born from the consequences of wartime chaos, resulted in the outbreak
of open war between the two powers. Ultimately, neither side was able to decisively
crush the other in this conflict, which was overwhelmingly fought at sea. However, the English emerged with the upper
hand, with their freebooting privateers having invoked the spirit of Sir Francis Drake and
wreaked havoc among Dutch merchant shipping lanes, crippling the Hollanders’ economy. From the moment he had relieved King Charles’
royal neck from his royal shoulders, Cromwell’s natal commonwealth had been in an incredibly
precarious position. However, after his parade of military triumphs,
from the subjugation of Scotland and Ireland to the humbling of the Netherlands, his infantile
English Republic had gained international legitimacy, earning official recognition from
the French, Spanish, Dutch and Danes, asserting control over its New World colonies in Barbados
and North America, and nullifying any further threat of Royalist invasions. Although the military record of Cromwell's
Commonwealth was practically glowing, its domestic situation left much to be desired. By 1651, Parliament was essentially a skeleton
crew, down to half its original membership due to extensive purges during the civil war. This chronically understaffed body politic,
known as the Rump Parliament, proved itself utterly incompetent at composing legislation,
such when they passed the 1651 Navigation Act, an aggressively protectionist import
and export policy which directly led to the aforementioned war with the Dutch Republic. Following the deposition of their monarchy
and the dawn of a new age, the people of England, Cromwell included, were clamoring for extensive
reforms. In this, the Rump Parliament also consistently
failed to meet expectations, failing to address the religious and social issues of their day,
and in general just failing to get anything done except for the self-congratulatory re-election
of their own members. By the 20th of April, 1653, Cromwell had grown
fed up with this incompetency, and gathered his army to eject the MPs from Westminster
at gunpoint, temporarily eliminating all vestiges of civilian government in the Commonwealth
and putting the military back in charge of England. Thereafter, Cromwell and his high army command
took the formation of a new parliament into their own hands. By July 4th, they had appointed 140 new men
to Westminster. This new parliament, known as the Nominated
Parliament, was an unelected body, chosen not by the people but by a small group of
military elites. In theory, its members were supposed to represent
the diverse peoples of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in practice, the representatives
from Scotland and Ireland were English soldiers who had been appointed there after the English
Commonwealth’s subjugation of those two countries. Cromwell’s rationale was that, by handpicking
only people who were appropriately godly and sympathetic to religious reforms, that he
would form a state apparatus that was unified in purpose, and would actually get stuff done. Unfortunately, just being ‘godly’ and
generally open to change turned out to be too broad a qualification. Ultimately, the Nominated Parliament became
an eclectic mess of colliding worldviews, with pragmatic lawyers who wanted sensible
legal revisions clashing with doomsday preachers, esoteric mystics and all other manner of religious
zealots. This ideological schizophrenia ultimately
paralyzed any attempt at productive cooperation, and after five months of constant infighting,
the nominated parliament dissolved itself on December 12th, 1653 and returned power
back to Cromwell and the army. For the second time in eight months, the existing
government and constitution had collapsed and in the resulting power vacuum effective
governmental control had reverted to the military and its commander-in-chief. Cromwell is often portrayed as a power hungry
tyrant. But, to his credit, despite being given every
opportunity to become a military dictator, he consistently tried to make a representative
civilian government work. After the collapse of the Nominated Parliament,
he and his military elites went back to the drawing board. By the 16th of December, one of his most decorated
field commanders, Major General John Lambert, had come up with a new blueprint for governance. This was a document known as the Instrument
of Government, which holds the distinction of being the first sovereign codified and
written constitution in English history. The Instrument of Government proposed a government
of three tiers. The first tier would be a parliament of 400
men, who this time around would actually be elected by the constituents they represented. The second would be a 15-man council of state. The third tier would be the Lord Protector:
a single man who held supreme executive power, and would serve as the head of state. It should come as no surprise whatsoever which
man was assigned to take up this prestigious mantle. On the 16th of December, 1653, the new government
was put into place, and Cromwell was officially inaugurated as the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth
of England, Scotland and Ireland. Despite his new grandiose title, Lord Protector
Cromwell was not an absolute dictator by any means. All three branches of his new government had
checks upon each other, while the Lord Protector himself required the majority consent of his
Council of State before taking many actions, such as making use of the military when Parliament
was not sitting, or declaring war on foreign powers. Unfortunately, Cromwell’s lofty ideals of
a free and representative democracy did not survive the realities of what such a thing
entailed. Since elections for the First Protectorate
Parliament were held freely, it resulted in many of Cromwell’s enemies being sent to
Westminster, including Scottish Presbytarians, Royalists, fierce critics of the New Model
Army, and members of the old Rump Parliament who had a bone to pick with the Lord Protector
for having run them out of their previous job at gunpoint. It did not take long for Cromwell to become
fed up, as his political goals were consistently thwarted by his opponents in parliament, who
were constantly trying to limit the Lord Protector’s power and reduce the size of his army. Meanwhile, all the way over in the New World,
Cromwell’s navy captured the island of Santiago from the Spanish, which would become the English
Colony of Jamaica. In early 1655, Cromwell’s contentious relationship
with the First Protectorate Parliament came to a head when they tried to pass a radical
constitutional reform bill that would increase their power at Cromwell’s expense. The Lord Protector’s response was blunt
and authoritarian. On January 22nd, he dissolved parliament. There was a poetic irony in this action, for
it ultimately made Cromwell just as despotic as the late headless Charles I, who had been
equally happy to take the proverbial ball and go home whenever Parliament had not towed
his party line. Cromwell’s slide into authoritarianism continued
in March, when one Sir John Penruddock, a devout royalist, launched an uprising against
the Commonwealth to restore the Prince-in-Exile Charles II to the throne of England. This revolt was, to put it bluntly, pathetic. Penruddock was barely able to muster more
than 300 men to his cause, and the insurrection was put down within less than three days. Penruddock may have been as much of a threat
to Cromwell as an ant is to a boot, but his uprising gave the Lord Protector the excuse
he needed to scrap the Constitution and install a military dictatorship known as the “Rule
of the Major Generals.” In this new system, England and Wales were
split up into twelve districts, each ruled directly by titular Major General from Cromwell’s
army. In a reflection of Cromwell’s own religious
leanings, these military despots were often dour, joyless puritans who banned ‘ungodly’
behavior such as music, heavy drinking, dancing, fairs, and the celebration of Christmas. Unsurprisingly, these ‘no fun allowed’
generalissimos were extremely unpopular among the general population, and resulted in a
plummeting of public support for Lord Protector Cromwell and his regime. By 1656, Cromwell had buckled under public
pressure, thrown his Major Generals under the proverbial bus, and reconstituted Parliament. However, this Second Protectorate Parliament
was downright regressive compared to the first. For one thing, its members were no longer
democratically elected, but, like the Nominated Parliament, were hand-picked by Cromwell from
among his supporters. Any dissidents in the First Protectorate Parliament
who had opposed him had been purged. On the 26th of June, 1657, Oliver Cromwell
was ritually re-installed as Lord Protector in Westminster Hall. This lavish ceremony was a coronation in all
but name. Cromwell was sat upon King Edward’s chair,
invested with a purple ermine-lined robe, and bestowed upon with a sword of justice
and a sceptre. It should be noted that although Cromwell’s
toady Parliament had offered to crown him King, he adamantly refused, insisting on maintaining
the title of Lord Protector. However, with his slide into authoritarianism
and his utter contempt for dissenting political voices, it was clear that the firebrand general
who had deposed a tyrant on the principles of republican liberty was gone. Oliver Cromwell was now a monarch in all but
name. Seeing their once dogmatic and revolutionary
leader turn into the very thing they had fought to oppose, many of Cromwell’s closest supporters
began to turn on him. By the end of 1657, the Parliament which was
supposed to be stacked with his puppets had even begun to defy him, readmitting former
MPs from his previous political purges. By now, Cromwell was simply running out of
steam. In 1658, the Lord Protector’s health was
beginning to decline, and in August of that year, his daughter died of disease at the
age of 29. After that, Cromwell had more or less given
up. A lifetime of fighting, politicking and clinging
to power had taken its toll. God’s chosen Englishman had deposed the
monarchy, but ultimately failed to establish a stable government in its place. On the 3rd of September, 1658, Oliver Cromwell
died of sepsis following a urinary infection. His son, Richard Cromwell succeeded him as
Lord Protector, but Richard’s rule was dead on arrival. Unable to control either Parliament or the
Army, he was quickly deposed. In his place, the Rump Parliament that his
father had dissolved in 1653 resumed control over the country. In the ensuing political chaos, a Royalist
General, George Monck, seized control of the Rump Parliament, which ultimately facilitated
a royal restoration. On the 29th of May, 1660, Charles II entered
London after a ten year exile, and reclaimed the throne that his father had lost. The Royal House of Stuart was officially back
in power, and England’s republican experiment was officially over. We will talk about the history of Britain
and early modern history in general in the coming weeks and months, so make sure you
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