Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

  Well, at least something was happening. Spurred into action by the plain fact they had been unable to bring their virtually limitless economic and military strength to bear, Parliament had acted at last. The last frenzied few months had made a mockery of the previous thirty six.

  The bumblers and fumblers who had puffed and prevaricated these last three years had gone. Parliament had purged the fine lords and lazybones’ who had bumped along in the army’s wake since the war began.

  Essex? His finest moment relieving Gloucester must have gone to his head. McNabb had told him all about it. Old Robin had marched a confident, well equipped and eminently able army into the furthest reaches of enemy held Cornwall - into the biggest ambush since Hannibal had routed the Romans at Cannae by all accounts.

  The horse had broken out and ridden for home. The Earl had been carried off in a fishing smack. But the long suffering foot had been beaten, looted, robbed and beaten some more. Preyed on from Cornwall to the temporary sanctuary of Portsmouth. Hundreds had been lost, thousands had simply gone home.

  Manchester? Even worse. Sparrow heard he had confounded his own commanders with his bland assertion that even if they had beaten the King, he was king still. They said Cromwell had wept into clenched fists with frustration, demanding to know why, if that were so, had they gone to war in the first place?

  And then another bloody draw at Newbury. Parliament’s armies, unable to coordinate operations to the most childishly straightforward plan, unwilling to press the most glaringly obvious advantage, had recoiled in frustration. To be disbanded during a winter of simmering discontent which had seen former friends and allies on the verge of switching their allegiance.

  It was peace or war that winter, and war won.

  Now the armies of the Earl of Manchester, Essex and Waller had been stripped back to the bones and reformed into a simple standing army. England’s first.

  Parliament’s Army New Modelled, to give the new formation its proper name.

  Twelve regiments of foot, eleven of horse, one of dragoons. Sparrow liked the sheer simplicity of it. Maybe with officers of the stamp of that fellow earlier in the afternoon, they might be able to achieve something.

  The order books were filled across London and the South East. New coats and kit, new muskets and guns, new socks and sacks and match and powder. A shipment of cloth in Venetian red was handily made available by a sympathetic merchant, otherwise the New Model might have gone to war in clerical coal black as the cloth, being plentiful, was cheaper by the yard.

  The infantry from the three disbanded armies distributed evenly around new field commanders. The horse, a rather more select crew, taken over whole troops at a time.

  Cromwell’s veterans, ironsided template for the entire army, numerous enough to form two new regiments in the New Model.

  The foot, though, the foot was another matter. The twelve neatly mapped regiments were still thousands of men short. Drafts from the veteran field armies found themselves promoted to Corporal and sergeant, taking charge of an influx of new troops scraped from every corner of Parliament’s increasingly extensive empire.

  Royalist prisoners, offered a hot meal and a steady shilling had enlisted in their hundreds. Press gangs raided farm and ale house to bring in hundreds more. Smooth-cheeked sixteen and seventeen year olds eager for a jape had come in from London, Kent and the South East. A smattering of Scots who hadn’t drifted north to join their friends outside Carlisle.

  In truth, the New Model’s infantry were a ripe old crew, and nobody, least of all William Sparrow, could imagine how they would perform when finally, accidentally, incrementally brought to the field.

  Naseby field.

  By Guilsborough and Broad Moor, near Naseby, June 14 1645

  After weeks of fruitless marching the marching armies fell arse over tit into one another, tangled in each other’s horselines and triggering a series of panic-stricken counter marches through the long summer evening.

  Maybe he’d missed something with all the damned manoeuvring, but Sparrow was sure a piss-your-breeches alarm in the dead of night had no place in a carefully thought out battle plan.

  Strategy? What a load of horse shit.

  “Have a care! Stand to your arms!”

  If the generals were so sure of their fine strategies, they wouldn’t have needed to dispatch their lackeys on wild roundups around the camp, bringing in the scattered regiments of horse and dragoons like so many lost sheep.

  They had dashed up and down the sleeping, squatting, snoring troops, rousing the New Model from its well earned slumbers and shooing them out into the enfolding darkness. Company by company, troop by troop. Bewildered captains had been told just enough to get their men moving. Blinking ensigns did what they were bid. At the double.

  Sparrow made his own mind up about the last minute change of plan.

  Strategy? Strategy implied a plan and Sparrow was buggered if he’d seen any evidence anybody had intended this.

  Blind chance had brought the two armies within shooting distance. If their approach march had been planned, how come they had dispersed to their billets for their supper? Cavalry regiments spread in the villages and hamlets in a twenty mile arc about the footsore infantry. Drum and trumpet had brought them in twice as quick as they’d ridden out.

  Hardress Waller’s had been booted and hollered awake, shoved into their ranks and files by their yawning sergeants. All the officers above the rank of captain had hurried away to Skippon’s tent to pick up their orders.

  Raw energy fed on their fear, energised the drummers’ furious tattoos.

  Dum-dudaludum-duduludum-dum duduldum.

  From the campfire tittle-tattle down the horselines it seemed the scouts had dropped yet another prize bollock.

  They painted a different story of course, claiming they had caught the King’s men on the hop in the village up the Harborough road.

  Nosegay? Naseby.

  They’d stumbled into the King’s quartermasters - or the king’s quartermasters had stumbled into them. Plain fact of it was the King imagined Fairfax was twenty miles away and marching in a different direction. Fairfax imagined the King was marching in a different direction twenty miles away.

  “Get on with it! Untangle those pikes, this isn’t a damned knitting circle! Hurry man!”

  They’d tripped over one another like drunks leaving an alehouse, feeling their way home along an alley until their senseless feet had tangled and tripped, measuring their length in the cobbles. Now they had come to, nose to nose with their former drinking partner.

  And nose to nose, they would come to blows.

  Sparrow sensed the urgency, recognised the subtle change in the army’s mood as it rose from its crowded encampments, trampled watch fires and formed up in line of march.

  “Advance, advance your pikes!”

  He watched glow-worms of nervous expectation leap from the firelit general’s marquee to colonel’s tent and captain’s billet. Plain old pikeman and whistling musketeers picking up the scent, shouldering their arms and straightening their backs without being ordered.

  His gut soured and churned, recognising the rising excitement pulsing from every rank and file, realising they were but a few hours away from battle.

  The reason this fine new modelled army had been brought into existence in the first place, bare weeks before.

  Too soon. They needed more time.

  They needed time to drill and manoeuvre. Wheeling by divisions? God help them if some fool risked that in this damned gloom, Sparrow thought darkly.

  “Prepare to march, march on!”

  They marched out, half a dozen columns following the deserted tracks north, long files of horsemen out on the flanks, weary artillery bringing up the rear with the waggons and surgeons, preachermen and commissioners.

  “Rendezvous at the windmill,” the order was passed along man to man in case anybody took it into their head to veer off into the darkness.

  Windmill, how on
earth would they spot a windmill at what, three in the morning?

  A mile or so further on a runty village materialised from the gloom, outriders and officers picketing the narrow lanes and ushering the troops on. Hurry up! March on!

  Walls and windows formed ranks left and right, taking the place of the torch-lit hedgerows they had followed since leaving camp a couple of hours earlier.

  Naseby. They stumbled and bumped into one another along the main street, peering into people’s windows, trying hastily barred doors.

  Didn’t look much. Nothing to eat. Dingy hovels lit by feeble flame. Village children peering out at the marching mass until dragged back inside by mortified parents. More men and more horses than they could count, streams of steaming horseflesh flowing past their village like meltwater around a fallen log, dividing and combining and dividing all over again. Finding its own way. Because that’s what armies did. They found a way.

  They hurried on following the road to the right, finding a way around the narrow cottage gardens and stringy vegetable plots, out onto the open moor. You could tell it was a moor because the going had gotten easier. The dawn hush trampled and cracked by hissed orders and muffled curses.

  “Is that it?”

  “Church spire.”

  “It’s the windmill,” Butcher called from the rear. He could see like a hawk, even in this pre-dawn gloom.

  “It’s the windmill, Will,” Muffet repeated helpfully.

  “Right. We’re here,” Sparrow reported to the pikemen shuffling along behind him. An army of the night clutching their long spears, the dull points lost in the darkness above their heads.

  “Stand.”

  He’d barely scratched his arse before one of the officers strode up out of the murk.

  “Why have you stopped? Move on! What are you waiting for, somebody to hold your hand? Christ’s bones you’ve blocked the lane for half the brigade! Hurry up!”

  Sparrow showed his teeth. Jumped up candle wasting whoreson transferred in from the all conquering Eastern Association.

  “March on!

  The dim lights of Naseby winked and went out, swallowed in the noisy, jostling jingling gloom. More damned hedgerows.

  Sparrow remembered that night before Cheriton, marching up hill and down dale as Sir William Waller tried to make up his mind whether to turn and fight or cut and run.

  As if the generals could limit the damage their armies were capable of inflicting on one another by shagging them out marching twenty miles in every direction before they decided to risk a round or two.

  William sighed, loathing the nerve-stretching delays, the pointless counter marching and ridiculous about-faces.

  Pick a bloody spot and have done with it. Didn’t Naseby have a common, a moor, a dirty great plain like Newbury where the armies could find themselves some elbow room?

  Well they’d be lucky to find it now at what, four in the morning? In the pitch dark?

  Maybe the armies would blunder on through the small hours, lose themselves all over again in the dawn mists? Fat chance. They were too close now.

  Old hands like Muffet and Sparrow had feigned nonchalance to calm the nerves of the new lads, blinking like owls in the firelight. But they were as rattled as the new drafts, truth be told.

  Another halt in the dark. Minutes stretched by, increasing the odds half the new drafts would bugger off while they could.

  The major rode up, peering about trying to recognise his men in the flickering torchlight.

  “Smith’s?”

  “No sir. Sparrow’s, that is...” William offered, lifting his helmet. Habit. It wasn’t his company, not any more. The bastards had only gone and given it to…ah, he couldn’t even say his bloody name.

  “Never mind that now. Who told you to wait around here? The rest of the regiment’s half way down the lane.”

  What bloody lane?

  “Crack ’em on or Rupert’ll be charging through the gaps like shit through a goose!”

  He wrenched his reins about and spurred off back toward the village.

  Naseby. The straggling collection of cottages squatting around a box church over the rise, well behind them now. Sparrow noticed it wasn’t quite as dark. He could pick out the windmill on the ridge. Pale buildings. Hedgerows snaking away over the moors like veins on an old man’s hands.

  They seemed to have changed direction again, not that any of them had a clue in the pre-dawn blue gloom.

  “Where we going now?”

  “I thought the King’s men were over yonder?”

  “We’re marching around them, taking ’em in the flank.”

  Sparrow shook his head. Instant Caesars, no sooner signed on as bloody masters of the art of war.

  *************************

  The drummers were hammering away now the sun was up, drowning out the rather subdued dawn chorus. But he had to agree they had definitely changed direction. They had been heading north, now they seemed to be edging west, following the main ridge around to their left rather than marching up to the long slopes opposite.

  “Hardress Waller’s regiment will prepare to halt, halt!”

  Sparrow lowered his halberd into the trampled turf, checked over his shoulder for the thousandth time. Sixty and more pikemen, eyes wide beneath wide rimmed helmets. He recognised alarm, fear, even excitement.

  “Order your pikes,” he said from the side of his mouth.

  A familiar, reassuringly wooden clatter as the troops rolled their pikes from their shoulders, leaned on.

  Files of musketeers clanked and clattered to a halt, craning their necks to peer into the broad, shallow valley to their right. It was getting lighter now allright.

  Light enough to see the Royalist army appear out of the gloomy woods and hedgerows from the furthermost flank of the slopes opposite - at right angles to their line of march.

  “There they are,” Butcher added unnecessarily.

  Sparrow stared same as the rest of them. Curiously detached, as if the distant regiments and brigades couldn’t possibly harm them.

  Those few moments of calm before the storm, watching those smudged blocks of colour resolve themselves into units of pike and shot. Horsemen hurried on ahead, closing the angle between the grandstanding armies. Kingfisher coats and fluttering banners. Like the barely observed background of some old painting, hastily daubed detail.

  Sparrow could pick out blue and red flags above the marching men. Then blue and white flags with bold black bars. Green and gold. A gypsy’s washing line thrown out like so much bunting over the ridge.

  A noose to throttle the rebel army once and for all.

  “March on! We’re taking up new positions,” the major called, shooing the bewildered companies on down the ridge. Away from the only bit of high ground worth having, Sparrow thought gloomily.

  “March on!” he called, hoping their precious generals knew what they were doing.

  *************************

  Prince Rupert of the Rhine lowered his perspective glass, tapped the worn brass casing against his thigh in agitation. The ridge opposite was clear now. Either that or Fairfax had magicked his New Noddle into some unseen fold in the ground.

  He could make out the church spire but the bulk of the village was invisible behind the crest. Maybe the rebels had moved back and deployed behind it. Or marched east to secure the higher ground and launch a right hook on the King’s army, strung out like cheap pearls along the ridge between the mean hamlets of Farndon and Oxendon.

  A stratagem he might have tried himself, had the King trusted his counsel.

  He turned to the vagabond circus which had accompanied him to the western flank of the army, a multi-coloured scarf worked with buckled steel and stained leather.

  Captains and colonels who lacked the rank – or inclination – to accompany the king. Chancers, dicemen and whoresons he wouldn’t have trusted with a length of burnt match for the most part.

  He raised the glass and glowered again, as if he could
summon the offending Roundheads from their bewildering concealment. The New Model had either deployed to the eastern edge of the village or made off while the King’s army sat on its arse awaiting developments. Had Fairfax thought better of trying his untested army against the King’s veterans?

  Time to move.

  “Ruce,” he called from the side of his mouth, right eye glued to the damned heights. “Take a party forward into the valley there, I want to know what awaits us on that ridge.”

  The scoutmaster, a shifty looking fellow with a thin beard and over-large hat, turned in his saddle as if surprised his services might be called upon at all.

  The Prince didn’t trust him – the previous evening he’d assured anybody who cared to listen that the village on the ridge was deserted. Half an hour later the rogues that hadn’t been taken prisoner had galloped back the way they had come, their billeting mission ruined by New Model troopers on similar missions of their own.

  It wasn’t the first time it had happened and it probably wouldn’t be the last. The damned fools had joked and japed about their narrow escape as if their pitiful performance had been something to be proud of.

  The scoutmaster raised his chin, unwilling to do the mighty Rupert’s dirty work but not daring to contradict the notoriously prickly commander. He was as like to run you through as give you a thank you for your trouble.

  “Your Highness. It would seem the Roundheads have spied our advance and retired.”

  Rupert growled something, but his uncertain response encouraged the scoutmaster to elaborate.

  “He has either made off as fast as possible towards Northampton, or,” he gestured towards their left, “or is manoeuvring east, taking up the higher ground to the east of Naseby. He needs the Kelmarsh road to move his guns and waggons.”

  True enough. Higher ground, steeper slopes. Rupert could picture the topography. The main road inclined to the east, while the western ridge was criss-crossed with meandering farm tracks.