Fairfax raised his sword hand in acknowledgement, his gaze never leaving the enemy ranks below him. ‘Understood.’ And as the youngster wheeled his horse and crashed off again through the trampled rye, he sent his own gallopers back with the same order to the waiting Colonels of his regiments behind him. ‘Sir Thomas’s compliments to Colonel Lambert — Colonel Bright — Colonel Eglinton — General Advance at sound of trumpets —’
They were scarcely returned to him when the long awaited moment came. From Lord Leven’s position on the rising ground behind his Centre, small with distance, but thinly clear, the trumpets were sounding the General Advance. Before the last note died, it was caught up by trumpet after trumpet to the outermost ends of the great spread wings, while all along the Centre the drums took up the order and turned it into thunder. There was one moment of inertia, a gathering inertia like that of a wave in the moment that it hangs immobile, gathering power into itself before it breaks. Then Fairfax’s sword was out, and touching his heel to White Surrey’s flank, he felt the great brute break forward under him as the long lines quickened into life.
The whole vast battle line was rolling forward. The standards and colours that had hung so close and heavy on the still air were alive, lifting back on the first wind of their going; and Black Tom’s heart, that had hung as close and heavy, seemed to lift and spread wing as the colours spread. ‘Oh God of battles, if we fight in thy Cause, be thou with us this day!’ He heard the drumming hooves of the squadrons coming down behind him. Forward and down at a trot; no chance for a sweeping charge, here on the Right, where the ground broke up into furze and warren, and the narrow maze of lanes and dykes and driftways about Long Marston. The lines wavered like weed in running water, then straightened again. There were musketeers behind the hedges as there had been at Wakefield. He saw the evening light glint blue-purple on their musket barrels. Now they needed the shock, the gathering impetus of the charge that they had known then. He shouted, for such of his men as had known it with him, ‘Cum on, lads! Remember Wakefield!’ He flashed up his sword, and as it caught the westering light in a narrow leaping flame, heard the trumpets of his own troops, riding close behind him, sound the charge.
On the Left Wing, Cromwell also had given the order. His Cavalry were thundering down the slopes by Tockwith village, crossing the ditch in open order; they had closed up on the far side, charged the enemy line, and broken it back. Now they were stayed by Rupert’s counter charge, and the thing swung the other way; and a great furious cry went through them. ‘Cromwell’s down! Old Noll’s down!’ Cromwell was down indeed, only grazed in the neck by a musket ball, but for the moment blinded and half stunned; and for that moment the whole fate of his Wing hung in the balance. Then David Leslie, who had been held in reserve because his little Scots ponies were not up to the work of the day, saved the situation, and in the long run the day itself, with a crazily valiant attack on Rupert’s flank that gained Cromwell the time to remount, and rally both himself and his troops. A close and desperate mêlée of hand-to-hand fighting followed, until superior discipline, as well as superior numbers began to tell, and with a hoarse triumphant cheer, the Ironsides broke through, sending the Royalists streaming before them like cloud before a storm wind.
But on the rest of the front, things were going ill for Parliament. Manchester’s Infantry under Lawrence Crawford were across the ditch, and helped by the rout on their left, had thrown back the opposing Foot and turned the flank of their first line. But Lord Fairfax, coming against Newcastle’s Whitecoats, had been checked, counter attacked, and routed in his turn. Baillie’s left flank was hopelessly exposed, Buccleuch and Loudoun broke; but on the right, in the hottest place of all, Lindsey and Maitland still stood like rocks, unbroken and seemingly unbreakable, Maitland superbly making good his boast of yesterday, that he had not crossed the Tweed to fall back at the first sight of the enemy.
And on the Right Wing? An hour after the first advance, the Right Wing had virtually ceased to exist. Black Tom had contrived somehow to get them across the furze and warren, sweeping back the musketeers behind every hedge, to reach the clear ground at last and drive home his charge even in the face of that appalling concentration of Horse and Musketry. And then, perfectly timed in the uncertain moment of rallying after the charge was spent, down upon him had come the full shock of Lord Goring’s reserves. His raw Yorkshire and Lancashire levies had broken, and though his Scots reserves, charging to his support with their Borderer’s lances, had fought like fiends and heroes, they could do no more than check for the moment the flood of disaster. The squadrons crumbled and streamed away and were trampled down. The Wing was going. The whole Wing. Black Tom Fairfax, with a sense of nightmare in him, was standing in his stirrups as he fought to rally his men; he heard the ragged garboil of a running fight swelling on his left, beyond the brazen yelping of his own troop trumpets: ‘Alla standarda! To the standard! Rally rally rally!’ Some of his own regiment were still with him; a gallant war-band of the Scots that had lost all likeness to a regiment and were fighting as their warriors had fought when the world was young. He saw a wild Highlander swoop from the saddle, dragging a Royalist trooper down with him under the horses’ hooves, another using the stock of a captured musket for a club ... For the rest — he felt them crumble and fly hurly-burly back like leaves before a squall, like his own soul disintegrating within him.
If he could get word to Cromwell. No, no mere sent word would be urgent enough. He shouted to Major Ledgard still beside him, scarcely able to force his voice above the tumult, ‘Take over, Ledgard. I’m going to try to get through to Cromwell.’
He saw the look on his Major’s face, and it struck him as almost ludicrous in its desperate protest. ‘It is madness — you’ve no chance! For God’s sake, Sir —’
‘I’ve a chance, and it’s our only one, the only one for this whole damned army.’ In a moment’s hush that fell across the roaring battlefield, he said quite quietly, ‘I’ll be back. Goodbye, Ledgard.’ Afterwards he was glad that he had said goodbye. He felt for the white kerchief in his helmet, tore it out and tossed it away. Then patting White Surrey’s neck in reassurance and encouragement, he rode straight for Lucas’s Horse.
How he carried out his mad intention he never knew. He was aware of chaos of struggling figures all around him, masses of Horse that swept this way and that, musket smoke choking him, yelling distorted faces and wild-eyed upreared horses’ heads, the smell of burned powder and blood and sweating horseflesh; a raving, roaring turmoil that seemed to engulf him like a sea. But it was all no more than a fevered background to the supreme necessity for reaching Cromwell which was the focal point of his whole being. So, because he must, he rode right through the battle of Marston Moor, and emerged at last beside the standard where Cromwell, himself drawn clear of the main battle mass, sat his horse with his staff about him, directing his part of the action.
Cromwell wrenched round in the saddle, clearly not recognizing him for an instant as he reined in beneath the standard. ‘Yes — what? Fairfax! Good God, man, your face!’
Tom put up a fumbling hand to his cheek, some part of himself registering the fact that his fingers came away dripping crimson even as he stammered out his news. ‘The Right Wing’s broken. There isn’t a Right Wing any more, and the Centre’s going. B-Buccleuch and Loudoun are broken. Maitland’s lot are standing like heroes, and so are Lindsey’s, but they can’t last.’
Cromwell listened to him, his eyes blazing alive with a furious confidence in a face turned to grey iron. ‘By God’s help we are not yet beaten!’ he said, and wheeled his horse to gain the advantage of higher ground for a viewpoint.
Black Tom was not with him. His mission safely carried through he was content to leave their salvation in Cromwell’s strong blunt hands. He turned White Surrey about to ride back through the battle to his own men — if he still had any men.
The entire pattern of the battlefield had turned itself inside out; the Parliamentary forces
now facing roughly south and the Royalists north; Cromwell and his Horse were where Rupert had been at the outset, and Crawford’s Infantry almost level with them. In front of them Newcastle’s Whitecoats, and beyond them the remains of Baillie’s forces standing desperately amid the engulfing waves of Goring’s Horse.
Lord Fairfax was in full retreat towards Hull, Lord Leven towards Leeds. It was for Cromwell to take the whole command, and Cromwell took it. Within half an hour the fortunes of war had been turned as completely inside out as the pattern of Marston Moor had been. For the army as a whole, he had ordered a wheel in line eastward across the moor. For himself; with a troop of sixty Ironsides, followed by David Leslie and his Scots on their shaggy ponies, he had flung himself upon Goring’s Horse and driven them from the field; then with Manchester’s Infantry and Baillie’s grim Scots, he turned on the last of Newcastle’s Lambs. It was past dusk by now, but the moon was up in a clearing sky, watering the darkness with a wash of silver light; and the battle, for all its uproar, for all the yellow flame-flare of musketry, had become a struggling of shadows under the moon. The Whitecoats retreated step by step to the old cattle enclosure on the moor behind them, as good a place as any other for a last stand. And there, an hour after, the Cause was lost; asking no quarter, the last stubborn pikeman went down fighting.
Much later, the moon, riding high in a harebell sky washed clear of all the day’s thunder, shone down on the bodies of men and horses sprawled uncouthly among the furze and heather and the trampled rye that would never come to harvest.
The whole village, and the hamlet of Tockwith were alive with a great coming and going; lanterns under the remote uncaring moon, men billeted in every byre and barn and cottage, horses picketed line on line in the home fields. They were still bringing in the wounded; little weary knots of men with comrades helped or carried among them lurched past the General where he stood drooping against the massive side timbers of the wagon entrance. Behind him the tithe barn, vast as the nave of a cathedral, was full of wounded, and the surgeons and women moving among them; pooled with smoky lantern light, while in the shadows overhead the swallows who nested in the rafters swooped and darted to and fro.
They had brought in Major Ledgard with thirty wounds on him and death in his face. Will Hill was dead. So many of his own men ... Black Tom felt stripped and lonely, desolate with the desolation of personal loss. Away over in the Scottish camp, a piper had begun to play, raising, doubtless, some ancient triumph song for Buccleuch or Maitland or Leven. Too far away to catch more than the faint heart-stirring drone and wail without form or pattern, but in his ears it was transmuted into the lament that was old Davey Morrison’s one tune. ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ wailed the pipes, lamenting for the young men who would never grow old, for the lost and broken men. ‘The Flowers of the Forest are a’waed away ...’
The pipes were still wailing, thin and far off, as he set his face towards headquarters.
A couple of nights later two men faced each other in the back room of a fisherman’s cottage on the coast of Holderness. Two men waiting for the tide, with a rushlight glimmering star-small on a shelf to light their waiting. Lord Newcastle sat at the table, his fine head bowed between his hands. Sir Charles Cavendish, who two days before had served as his equerry, stood leaning an elbow on the narrow window sill, and gazing out into the night.
‘My Whitecoats always swore to dye them red in the blood of the King’s enemies,’ Lord Newcastle said, as though to himself rather than his brother. ‘They were dyed red enough at the last — but the blood was their own ... Life is disgracefully sweet, even when it lies in ruins, and I do not suppose that the sentiment will last indefinitely, but tonight I wish before God that Newcastle had died with Newcastle’s Lambs!’
His brother made no reply, and after a few moments, his fingers working and working into the ashy hair at his temples, he began again, as though he could not keep silent but must talk for the relief of some unbearable pressure within him. ‘What possessed Rupert to force battle at this time? Those mad orders of His Majesty’s ...’ Then with a groan, ‘And oh God! How low am I sunk that I must whimper for a scape-goat! Ne’er-the-less, his decision has lost the north for the King, and with the north ...’ He raised a haggard and sweat-streaked face and bloodshot eyes to the quiet man in the window. ‘And so here I sit, waiting for the tide, and a little boat to carry me to France.’
‘We,’ said Cavendish, still looking out of the window. ‘It’s not such a little boat; she’ll carry two passengers.’
‘Not necessary, my dear fellow; carry your sword to the Prince; he will take you.’
‘No, I thank you, William.’
In the silence that followed, both men heard very clearly the wash of the tide on the shingle beach. Then Lord Newcastle said, ‘That is not like you, Charles.’
‘What is not like me?’
‘To abandon your loyalty. Your code of honour is more unyielding than mine.’
Charles Cavendish relinquished the night outside the window, and turned slowly to face his brother. The criss-cross shadows of a half-made net, cast across his features by the rushlight, added to his grotesqueness a suggestion of scales; a suggestion of Caliban. ‘I suppose it amounts to this; that in the final instant, when I must choose to abide by one and forgo the other, my loyalty to you, William, takes precedence over my loyalty to the King’s Majesty.’
Newcastle was searching his face. After a few moments he demanded, as though startled at what he found there, ‘In Heaven’s name, why?’
All at once the merest glimmer of a smile was hovering behind his brother’s eyes. ‘I suppose because never in more than forty years — I speak as from the time when one begins to notice these things — have you appeared to feel any ill-convenience or embarrassment attached to the possession of a brother such as — I am.’
Lord Newcastle sat perfectly still, an oddly outraged stillness, and looked at him. And as he looked, a slow, painful tide of crimson flooded up over his grey face, as though at some unbearable nakedness that the other had laid before him. Then it ebbed away, and abruptly he got up, his haggard gaze clinging to that of the stronger man. ‘Never for a moment! I swear it before God! If you are coming with me, you must believe that, Charlie.’
‘Oh I do,’ Cavendish said, and the smile that had been hovering, sprang up, lighting his marred mobile jester’s face with an extraordinary warmth. ‘If I did not, I should feel myself obliged to be grateful. And I assure you, old lad, I should not fly the country with you out of a barren sense of gratitude.’
Footsteps and a growl of voices sounded at the cottage door, and in the next room; and a figure in rough seaman’s clothes loomed into the doorway. ‘If tha’t ready, Gentlemen, t’tide’ll serve us now.’
*
On the morning after Marston Moor, Prince Rupert abandoned York to its fate, and marched into Lancashire again, leaving the Fairfax’s old enemy Sir Thomas Glamham with a thousand half-mutinous troops to defend the place. The Parliamentary Armies rested one day after the battle, then resumed their old positions round the city. Next day Glamham capitulated, and the garrison marched out with full honours of war — those honours which Black Tom had claimed in vain for his Bradford garrison — and the three Allied Commanders went to the Minister, where Thanksgiving was offered up by Lord Leven’s Chaplains.
Black Tom of necessity attended the service in the Minster that he had known and loved since he was a boy, but he had little thought to spare for prayer or praise, being too worried as to what the troops would be up to in his absence. He had already had to strain every nerve to save the Minster library from destruction and much of the city from going up in flames to the Glory of God.
And indeed it seemed that the Thanksgiving was premature after all, for what had been gained in the north seemed all too likely to be lost again in the south, where the King, striking from Oxford, had got between Essex’s army and London, driving them back towards Cornwall. And a week after Marston M
oor, Sir William Waller had taken up again the old cry, ‘Sirs, if you do not have care enough to make a properly unified army, you will not win this war!’
The Committee of Both Kingdoms was not listening. Not that it could have saved Essex’s Army in any case. Essex’s Army was doomed; driven back into Cornwall and destroyed. On the second of September, the whole of his Foot, guns and stores were captured at Lostwithiel, and Essex himself escaped to sea, leaving his Lieutenant, Sir Philip Skippon to lay down his arms. Only the Horse got away, and that because Lord Goring was too drunk to hold them. And soon after that, the second battle of Newbury was lost to Parliament because Lord Manchester, who had by then led the Eastern Association Armies south, had failed to press his attack.
Marston Moor was, in fact, almost exactly cancelled out. But Newbury and Lostwithiel still lay some weeks in the future, when on a very peaceful summer evening, Thomas and William wandered out into the Bishophill garden after supper to smoke a parting pipe together. The forces that had been concentrated on York were breaking apart again, scattering to the four winds. The Scots turning north once more to besiege Newcastle town; Lord Manchester marching his troops south; while Lord Fairfax, now appointed Governor of York, was left to deal with the few remaining Royalist strongholds in the county; and in the morning, they themselves would be marching also, William with Sir John Meldrum to join the Lancashire forces, Thomas to besiege Helmsley Castle on his father’s behalf.
Now, William lounged on the turf seat under the walnut tree, his beaver hat on the back of his head, and puffed contentedly at his long-stemmed pipe, the fronds of blue smoke curling upward to lose themselves among the many-layered shadows of the leaves. Tom beside him had remained standing, one arm curved over a great low-hanging branch as though it had been the neck of a horse. He also had been smoking, but as often happened with him, he had let his pipe go out.
The Rider of the White Horse Page 27
