Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

  In place of the serried ranks of victory-drunk New Model troopers came the black coated companies which accompanied the army as a flock of crows follows the plough.

  Commissioners, ministers and secretaries of indeterminate role. A shadow army whose brooding presence turned the beasts and killers back to God fearing men.

  The King had brought a force of tinkers, thieves, whores and bandits with his army. Parliament drew a rather more sober band, but none the less dangerous.

  The Royalist baggage drew them as surely as the New Model Army’s camp had drawn Rupert. But instead of being greeted by a storm of well aimed shot from the firelock-armed guards the camp had been defended by dagger wielding witches, Irish savages who boiled and ate their prisoners.

  Red handed soldiers swore they had caught them in the act.

  They had to say something to try and save face now their blood had cooled, their victims’ congealed.

  In truth the commissioners couldn’t have cared less for a few camp followers, no matter the senseless mutilations inflicted.

  They stepped over the dead, had the bawling wounded driven off along with hundreds of bewildered children who had lost their mothers in all the ruin.

  Several waggonloads of cheese and biscuit had diverted the worst offenders. Eager to satisfy other hungers they had left their bewildered victims to clutch what remained of their clothing and joined the queues to collect the King’s provender.

  With the troops munching mouthfuls of looted Royalist rations the commissioners had moved on to richer prizes. A mountain of loot – Leicester must have been emptied of every stick of furniture from dresser to chamber pot.

  A dozen and more cannon in their limbers. One of them a massive 24 pounder. The draft horses necessary to drag it had been promptly collected up by the commissariat department – but not before the soldiers had rounded up the best of them, set up impromptu auctions to sell the beasts on to likely officers. Prices were not as promising as they might have expected – in truth there were hundreds of horses either snagged in the lanes, standing quietly in the traces or wandering over the battlefield. Good chargers changed hands for a few shillings. But changed hands nevertheless.

  There were a dozen cart loads full of powder and shot – more than enough to replace all they had fired off that day. At a rough guess they had seized enough arms to re-equip another four regiments.

  Plate, jewels, gowns and clothing. Richly worked doublets and fur lined cloaks. Fine swords and chests of coin.

  Pens scratched furiously across new pages of their ledgers. The plunder itemised like groceries on a goodwife’s shopping list.

  And trapped in the middle of that lobster pot of a lane, the King’s own coach. Gleaming, magnificent, the Royal coats of arms hacked by blunt swords. Velvet ripped and torn, hanging from splintered doors.

  It was clear they had tried to haul the massive carriage clear, but in throwing up an impromptu barricade of carts and wardrobes, tables and chairs the Royalist defenders had sealed the polished and painted grub in a cocoon of smashed furniture and riddled corpses.

  Beyond the barricade a stretch of lane had been cleared of larger obstacles, a path shouldered open to a muddy gateway. A heap of bodies in many coloured coats had been dragged to the verge.

  One musketeer appeared to have been ridden over, his bare legs bloodied at impossible angles.

  Smears of blood and trampled pools, dark trails where some unfortunate had been dragged clear. The heavily rutted gateway suggested at least two or three well-laden carriages had been pulled free of the chaos in the lane. Parallel lines of mud and gore etched into the grass. A fan of bodies moorside as if the defenders had gotten off one good volley at least. It was impossible to tell the identity of the corpses – red and blue coat alike had been stripped and thrust into the baskets hauled by suddenly empowered womenfolk.

  Maybe hearing of the vicious slaughter and deliberate mutilations in the Royalist camp, they had returned to revenge themselves on the menfolk.

  The first intruders had snatched what they could, looting fine clothing, silver goblets and paired pistols. Hats, scarves and cloaks belonging to the King or his sons.

  The portmanteau, many-drawered closets and well-travelled trunks had been rifled and overturned, full of useless papers and rolled orders.

  The soldiers had had a bellyful of them already.

  By the time the first cavalry troops had arrived to restore order with pistol and blade the coach had been stripped of anything of worth.

  Apart from the King’s correspondence.

  Carefully filed reports and letters from every corner of the kingdom. Chests of carefully filed papers, elegant maps etched with dragon and serpents.

  Officers, commissioners and army secretaries lifted parchment and paper from the wreck, pieced torn sheets back together as if reluctant to believe their own eyes. Lips moving in frenzied silence as they digested letters, reports, tortured confessions, sorry explanations. Carefully dictated orders and requests, artfully framed invitations, grim dispatches.

  All annotated with that familiar spidery hand – aye, and another smaller, more purposeful script in French, sometimes latin.

  Fetch candles! Fetch lanterns! Their excitement turned the stranded coach to a faery cathedral, lit up like the nativity as word spread and attracted more black cloaked moths to the flame.

  The cavalry guard was re-doubled. Parties searched the lane for missing papers, recovered reams of precious paperwork which had been strewn beside hastily improvised latrines.

  The latecomers and lingerers were shooed away at gunpoint.

  Summer of 1645, and Christmas had come early for Parliament.

  *************************

  The first waggons had been brought up from the baggage train near Naseby village, prancing teams and jingling harness signalling the arrival of long hoped for succour. Surgeons’ mates hurried from one huddle of wounded to another. Servants and ladies examined the better class of corpse.

  Officers were carried in on their cloaks or held straight on their horses. Some could walk, some could only hop on their good leg, propped up by musket or broken pike.

  Skippon was carried in on a dog cart, blood splattered breastplate serving as a pillow. He’d been shot in the side in the thick of the fighting on the ridge but had refused to leave his post, aye, not while his men stood.

  The troops had parted for the improvised ambulance, a buff coated, red coated honour guard forming a silent avenue as the old soldier was carried off at last, ashen faced behind a mask of powder. The army gossips maintained the old warhorse had been shot by one of their own musketeers as they wheeled to their left by divisions.

  There was no mistaking their heartfelt concern.

  “Good on yer Phillip!”

  “Come back to us sir!”

  “Three cheers for General Skippon!”

  His homely, avuncular manner and faultless service had made Skippon the most popular commander in Parliament’s armies. He was renowned for falling asleep at counsel, for his reluctance to write anything down, to utter more than the odd grunt at whatever rotten job with which he had been tasked.

  Admirable qualities in an officer corps which frequently had way too much to say for itself.

  Skippon’s simple ‘march on boys’ had signalled a dozen brave advances, his easy call to arms had turned trembling recruits into fire-breathing gladiators, inspiring the newly forged army to halt the Royalist onslaught up Naseby ridge.

  His presence in the centre had somehow held the wavering line together when it seemed, against all odds, that the King’s men might push them off the hill altogether. His presence had welded pike and shot back into the fight and prevented a mass stampede to the rear. By feeding in units from the second line, the King’s army’s determined advance had been slowly but surely stopped in its tracks. And turned.

  Skippon had been loaded into a coach, biting his lip against the agonising wound below his ribs.

 
Wounded officers shared a cart, bumping over the trampled paths towards Northampton. Drivers flicking switches over their horses’ rumps.

  Others, too fragile to move, were being treated by lantern light beneath the eaves of a waggon or apothecary cart.

  An entire regiment of horse had escorted the Royalists that could still stand away towards Northampton. Hundreds more were being hauled in off the slopes, lain in rows beside the surgeons’ carts. An endless parade of carriages and waggons was taking off the men as could be saved. Gut shot musketeers or pikemen were waiting a turn they wouldn’t get.

  Extracted balls plopped into trays with a small tail of blood. The victim patched and sewn as best they could. Fifty-fifty the best odds they could hope for.

  They imagined Edward Telling was tending to the sick.

  Making his rounds and smoothing the way through St Peter’s yawning gates. Some of Parliament’s corps of preacher men had already been round assuring them of final victory and their place in heaven.

  Most of them simply wanted a lift off the damned moor.

  Telling strode down rows of wounded, peered under tent flaps, turned bodies on carts.

  Finally, he found her, crouched against a waggon wheel. The blue coat was gone, replaced by a shawl. Her face had been cleaned and daubed, her arm strapped up with a torn shift.

  Telling dropped to a knee, lifted the dozing girl by her chin.

  “Ouch! Ah…by the Chr..” Bella sat up, startled by his unexpected intervention. She recognised the burly minister, his coat too small as he crouched beside her, lifted strands of blood-twisted hair from her face.

  “Where did those rogues I set to guard you get to? I gave word…”

  “And whose word did you think to give?” Telling looked up, eye level with a finely dressed woman with a stand of crinkled red hair barely restrained by a grubby bonnet.

  “A friend Matty, the one I spoke of,” Bella said, thickly, her mouth swollen, lips peeling.

  The woman glared.

  “Where were you when those dogs got in amongst the camp?” the newcomer inquired, lively eyes playing over the minister’s unfamiliar features.

  Telling narrowed his eyes, climbed to his feet. The woman seemed unimpressed by either height or girth. Another ammunition whore, a year’s takings sewn into her underskirts and bonnet no doubt. She would certainly have caught the better class of eye, had she not chosen to accompany a bewitching child of the night like Bella. His brother’s wife.

  “Army of the Saints, they were more like drooling Saracens,” she accused. “None of your lot lifted a finger to stop it.”

  “He did Matty. I heard him,” Bella said weakly. Telling glanced around, their domestics had attracted the attention of leering wounded, bloodied servants and exhausted surgeons alike.

  “What business d’you have with her anyway?”

  “My business is my business,” Telling said coldly. “And you’ll kindly shut your mouth before I have you thrown back to the stockade you’ve crawled from.”

  The woman bristled.

  “Oh yes, you’re…”

  Telling’s backhand sent the woman sprawling. Wounded soldiers jeered or cheered.

  One of the surgeons, apron plastered as if he’d come straight from the shambles, held up his hand.

  “I can vouch for this woman,” he said. “She’s a captain’s wife.”

  “Ooh aye. Few of them about most likely.”

  “Show us your commission then gorgeous!”

  “Captain Telling, I made his acquaintance at Newark a year since.”

  “You know my brother?” The surgeon peered at him doubtfully, opened his mouth and closed I just as quickly. Giles Hale had survived scrapes of his own during a dangerous career path which had taken him from one army to the other.

  Aye, and back again.

  The younger Telling brother had been sorely wounded - near death. A handy ticket through the lines. He’d set him down ten miles north of Newark.

  To be truthful, the surgeon couldn’t recall whether he’d been dead or alive. The latter, he thought. Reason enough to watch his Ps and Qs in front of this black-clad lump of a brother.

  Bella’s guardian whispered under her breath. Telling watched Bella’s insolent companion climbed to her feet, examining the back of her hand.

  “”You’ll watch your tongue in this encampment or I will have it drilled through with a hot needle.”

  His tone suggested it wouldn’t be the first time he had imposed that particular sentence.

  Bella grimaced at her friend. “Matty, be a dear. Edward did his best to call them off.”

  Her friend glared, lip smudged with blood, but said nothing.

  Telling turned his attention to the surgeon.

  “You bound her arm sir?”

  “Badly bruised, possibly fractured. I splinted her foreman. I thought she’d broken her jaw but she, she seems well enough. Few stitches to that nasty gash below her ear. Swelling will go down eventually. She’s been in the wars, but…” It seemed the surgeon had not proved immune to Bella’s wayward charms, even if she did look as if she’d been trampled by a troop of horse.

  Their audience had fallen silent, mesmerised by the ill-assorted mummers.

  Minister-saviour, surgeon-spy, girl-soldier and defiant ammunition whore at bay and each others throats.

  Telling realised their corner of the camp was drawing unwelcome attention. He scrambled in his purse and drew out a few coins.

  “For your service,” he said shortly, rolling the coins into the surgeon’s bloody palm.

  “I am obliged,” Hale said, tucking the coins down the side of his shoe.

  Telling nodded. “I will be here, until we march.”

  “Very good sir.”

  Telling regarded the red-haired woman, still smarting from the blow and perhaps remembering she had gotten off lightly, compared to the unfortunates in the camp.

  “Get her on her feet. You will accompany my brother’s wife to my quarters.”

  Matilda Dawkins thrust out her chin but modified her response into some manner of nod.

  “She’s put in good words for me in the past, I’ll not leave her now.” She produced a bundle from beneath the waggon where Bella had rested, crossed to her right to lift her friend by her good arm. Bella winced but found her feet.

  “Very well then. Good night to you sir, and thank you for your kind treatment.”

  The surgeon nodded.

  *************************

  They had marched on after the cavalry, following the trail of broken kit and tumbled corpses, ending up a few miles short of Harborough before they had been ordered to fall out.

  Hardress Waller’s battered regiment had collapsed around whatever cover they could find. An old hen house. Pig pens. Hedges and blankets pressed into service as roof and walls.

  Evening now, and the last heat of the day was bleeding away. The company waggon had caught up with them half an hour before, bringing their rations - a barrel of cheese and a spread doublet heaped with biscuit for the hungry troopers.

  The meal had just about finished them off. Snoring and farting, faces smeared with crumbs and rinds they slept like red-coated hogs.

  They had hardly remembered to post guards, battle exhaustion having taken as grievous a toll as the ordeal on the moor.

  Musketeers dozed against walls, match cord glimmering like glow-worms in the gloom.

  The odd rider spurred down the lane, a rain of sparks dancing over boot-worn stones.

  Creaking waggons, shouted directions. The odd shot as outriders watched the verges for sack-toting scavengers.

  Despite appearances, the day wasn’t quite done yet.

  William Sparrow drew a deep breath, glared about the decrepit stable Gillingfeather had chosen as his field headquarters.

  Muffet and Butcher, Nicodemus Burke and Sergeant Jameson had also remained behind, yawning and blinking, in case their blood-streaked hero decided on further violence.

&nb
sp; Striking an officer would see a man hanged, good service or no.

  “Alright then,” Sparrow modified, “Permission to fall out, my lord.”

  Gillingfeather’s Punchinello features shrank about his skull as he studied his whoreson fornicator of a sergeant.

  “What do you think this is Sparrow, a mummer’s show? The entire King’s army brought to bay and you want to go trotting off looking for some camp doxie?” Gillingfeather demanded.

  Long Col took the pipe from the gap between his teeth.

  “Fair point Will.”

  Billy Butcher shifted his feet and tugged his nose, not sure whether to burst out laughing or pull the two men apart before things got out of hand.

  “Do you seriously expect to search the battlefield for some damned flirtgill? In pitch dark with looters and deserters and the Lord knows who else sneaking about?” Gillingfeather’s mad eyes flared in the glimmering candlelight.

  “Easy Gilly,” Long Col suggested.

  Gillingfeather eyed him, bright gimlet stare picking out the easy-going musketeer.

  “Permission to fall in and scout the field for some whore?” Gillingfeather crowed.

  Sparrow lurched forward, Muffet’s arm across his chest.

  “Easy now Will. That’s a fair point too, if you don’t mind me sayin’,” Muffet reasoned.

  “You’re serving in the wrong army Sparrow. The whoremongers have long gone, that way!”

  Sparrow pushed forward again but Billy Butcher and Nicodemus were quicker, inserting themselves between the fanatic captain and his furious sergeant.

  “Have a care Sparrow, strike an officer and you’ll be flogged through next Tuesday,” the captain threatened, taking a precautionary step back toward the back of the stable.

  Long Col held his hand up.

  “He means nothing by it Gilly,” the musketeer argued, recognising the officer’s bullet-brained determination.

  Sparrow had been a stone in his shoe since he’d taken over his company. Only the chronic shortage of trained men had stopped Gillingfeather having their old friend turned out of the regiment altogether. Fathering a bastard was no laughing matter in this army. There were rules. Laws. Punishments for all transgressors, male and female.