Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

  His secretary coughed, pen poised above paper.

  “Your Highness has ever been particularly attentive to the captain in question,” he observed. Rupert mistook his sympathy.

  “Attentive?” he snarled.

  Maurice looked up from the table where he had fallen asleep, wide eyed and drowsy.

  “Your concern for Captain Telling’s wellbeing,” the secretary explained, “Was noted by all.”

  God’s bones had he been as transparent as that? The talk of the entire camp?

  “My intentions towards Captain Telling were…”

  “Completely understandable, given the fact the captain in question brought you a horse when you were temporarily discomfited at Marston field,” the secretary reminded him, anxious to calm his master’s dangerously frayed nerves.

  It was plain to see the mighty Rupert was near cracking up with the pressures of holding his majesty’s tattered armies together. His fine features lined with care now, red eyes underscored by dark wrinkles. Unshaven, staring, on edge and barely managing more than an hour or two’s sleep a day.

  He looked nearer fifty than twenty four.

  “He brought me a horse, in that beanfield,” Rupert agreed woodenly. True enough. Telling had brought him a blood-flecked stray from the chaotic rout.

  Thank God it had been getting close to dark by then and the fugitives had managed to gallop off the damned moor in the moonlight.

  “And your highness had rewarded his bravery, looked to spare him from the most dangerous service. Nobody could have imagined his station at the head of his majesty’s baggage would have proved more perilous than his rightful post in your lifeguard.”

  Rupert analysed the secretary’s interpretations. Was he attempting to disguise knowing sarcasm?

  “I posted him to the baggage,” Rupert said carefully. At the table, Maurice’s head dropped back on his arm.

  “Meaning to prevent him from further harm, on account of his previous good service to your person,” the secretary agreed.

  Rather than deny the upstart an opportunity to reap any further glory on Naseby field, as had been Rupert’s vindictive intention all the while.

  The misunderstanding might serve him well.

  “Have we any confirmation of young Winter’s report?”

  “None. He is not on the list sent by…”

  “But he was not at roll call at Ashby?”

  “No my lord.”

  “So we may presume he is either deserted or deceased.”

  “Deserted? Captain Telling was a…

  “And the girl…his wife…has been informed of his death?” Rupert inquired.

  “I have no word as to the widow Telling’s whereabouts.”

  “It is important she is traced and told the grievous news,” The Prince said stiffly. “See to it yourself.”

  “My Lord.”

  Rupert rubbed his eyes, exhaustion gnawing at his very bones.

  But…surely there was more here than met the eye.

  Winter the last man to see Telling alive? Surely that was stretching coincidence.

  He closed his eyes, concentrated on the devils in the detail.

  It occurred to him that Telling and Winter had crossed swords the year before, during his lightning march to Newark. He cast his mind back, ground out the details despite the nervous exhaustion which threatened to topple him from his chair.

  Details coagulated.

  The King’s army had been unable to maintain a garrison at Sir George Winter’s home, so he had ordered the hall burnt to the ground. Telling had drawn the duty that day and Winter hadn’t taken kindly to the ruthless destruction.

  Would have taken it further if it hadn’t been for Rupert’s unexpected arrival.

  He had ordered the hall burnt, watched it burn with Telling twitching and snivelling beside him.

  But Sir George’s son, he could be hardly more than a boy at best. Could they be one and the same?

  “How old is this Thomas Winter?” he inquired. The secretary turned his note over, scanned the barely legible handwriting.

  “Seventeen your highness. He has served for three years with his father’s regiment.”

  Try fifteen and served one, Rupert thought. He paused, forcing himself to think it through.

  The Winters bore a grudge against Telling for burning down their home the previous summer.

  Telling, adrift and alone as the Royalist battle plan shivered in pieces. Could it be that he was spotted by the resentful Winters, making his own escape to the north.

  The only witness to Telling’s sorry end? A teenaged boy bearing a burning grudge against him.

  Perhaps you didn’t need a perspective glass to see to the bottom of this riddle.

  God’s wounds, he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear young Winter had dealt the fatal blow himself. In fact he’d wager his purse on it.

  Not that there was much in that.

  “Find and bring the girl to my quarters.”

  “And what of young Winter?”

  “Give him his commission,” Rupert said gravely.

  *************************

  Thomas Winter didn’t know whether to spur out of their impromptu camp and head for home while he could - or risk all within Rupert’s baleful reach.

  He went over every particle of the rout in his mind’s eye, as sure as he could be nobody had witnessed that final confrontation in the dead-end village.

  The fifty or so Royalist horsemen who had escaped hadn’t known him or Telling. Nobody has spotted him cut the rogue down beside that wall, trotting along like a wounded hare. Thomas had closed that final few yards in one deranged moment, ducked down low over his horse’s neck with his sabre braced, gleaming tip down.

  He had barely felt any resistance as he struck home, imagining for a second his blade had caught up in Telling’s shirt.

  The rogue had gone down and Winter hadn’t dared examine his handywork any further.

  Not with the Roundhead horse pouring into the field behind him.

  He had recovered the sabre, kept low and angled his horse towards the kitchen gardens and simple enclosures to his right, clearing a timber fence and crashing through a patch of nettles before skittering out onto the lane.

  His horse was fresh - they’d barely moved from that bloody ridge - and there were few who catch the youngster in a straight race at the best of times.

  He’d cantered back through the gathering gloom, odd clumps of horsemen to either flank, most of them on blown horses. Uncaring whether he was a fellow fugitive or Cromwell himself.

  A few moments more and he had gotten clear - with nobody any the wiser.

  By Leicester and elsewhere, June 18, 1645

  The scorched and battered city fumed to itself away across the meadows. Quiet? Too damned quiet if you asked William Sparrow. His gimlet-eyed musketeers surveyed the pocked outworks for likely targets but found none.

  “They’ve jacked it in,” Muffet concluded, shifting his clay pipe from the gap between his remaining teeth and the fleshy side of his mouth.

  “They’ve what? We haven’t fired a bleedin’ shot yet,” Butcher replied, shielding his eyes and peering across the field towards the nearest battery.

  Rupert had prepared the ground the previous month, setting up his guns on the southern side of town with a fine field of fire over the meadows toward a decrepit fortification known as the Newarke.

  The King’s culverins had made short work of medieval brick and tile. But they might just as well as left the culverins and sakers where they were rather than go to the bother of dragging them down the road to Naseby.

  They hadn’t even fired a shot during the battle, jammed back with the bawds and barrage in the Clipson lane, silent witnesses to His Majesty’s folly.

  Captured with all the baggage and ball, they had been acquired by the New Model and turned on their previous owners with child-like glee.

  The New Model’s gunners had dragged their prizes back to Le
icester and rolled their pieces into the exact same positions as Rupert’s - with exactly the same intentions.

  The defenders had done what they could to shore up the breaches in the meantime, stacking turf and wool sacks across the broken-down masonry.

  “Those walls won’t stand,” one of the newly recruited pikemen remarked. “Packed out with wool and old laundry!”

  Muffet blew a smoke ring.

  “Wool and old laundry did well enough for us at Gloucester,” he countered. The new raised men hadn’t served at Gloucester. Many of the new London boys had hardly even heard of the place. It was just another of those pointless blood lettings which had characterised the early years of the war. Blood, pestilence, famine a plenty but no result either way.

  All they knew, the King had seemed to be winning the war up until then, and according to the veterans he had been losing ever since. Give or take the odd fuck-up.

  Cropredy, Lostwithiel.

  His Majesty had triumphed but somehow failed to collect his winnings. The battered Roundheads had marched off and reformed. The lost armies had been permitted, against all sense and reason, to march away only to take the field all over again.

  But those days had gone. This season, battles would bring results. Battles would bring an end another step closer.

  Nobody could mistake Parliament’s new-found, new-forged will.

  Whitehall had detached entire regiments of supporting troops - county levies and militia for the most part - to escort the best part of 5,000 Royalist prisoners back to London.

  The New Model Army would not be weakened or delayed shepherding the bewildered Royalists back to the temporary camps in the capital.

  Soldiers attempting to slip away had been shot.

  Rioting prisoners trying to set fire to the church in which they had been locked up overnight had been fired on, the ringleaders beaten to death with musket butt and club.

  The usual round of prisoner exchanges which followed the majority of battles and sieges had been forbidden. The King’s men who had thrown down their weapons at Naseby would not be permitted to find their way home to take up arms once again.

  Not in His Majesty’s name at any rate.

  Sparrow rolled the halberd in his fist, refusing to be drawn by the rumour-mongers. Surely the garrison would go through the preliminaries first. Observe the exact niceties of siege etiquette.

  They’d fire off a couple of shots, make a nice big hole in the crumbling brick and sod wall and honour would be satisfied.

  Talk around the camp that morning had been of the return of the King – a flying column of horse come to avenge themselves on the cocksure rebels – just as they had at Roundway Down going on two years previously.

  By God, Sparrow remembered that day well enough.

  But the king had failed to put in an appearance and the New Model had deployed outside Leicester in all its grimly efficient majesty.

  “Stow that clatter,” Sparrow growled without particularly caring whether any of the buggers took heed of his new-found wisdom.

  “No, look, they’re coming on out! Drums and colours the whole bloody shooting match!”

  The whole regiment staggered forward as the front ranks craned their necks to the right, toward the pile of rubble where the gate had been.

  A party of mounted officers trotted out of the East Gate and rode off between checkerboard formations of Roundhead horse.

  They could hear jeering, but muskets remained on shoulders and pistols on hips.

  “He’s right. By the saints, they’re marching out. Look at those buggers go!”

  “Already?”

  “You sound bloody disappointed Michael!”

  “Bastards are taking quarter! You know what that means boys?”

  Sparrow sighed. No bloody loot. That’s what it meant. If the garrison had pushed it, defied the Roundheads to do their worst, they would have forced the gates, rushed the walls and taken the casualties out on the sorry defenders as were left.

  Then they would have helped themselves.

  Army of the saints, they called it. There were few enough saints around here.

  The news of the capitulation – before a shot had been fired – swept through the army regiment by regiment. The sense of relief, even resentment, rolling like floodwater around every pair of boots.

  Sir Thomas Fairfax had calculated on the sheer size and magnificence of his new army rattling the Royalist garrison to its bones. Marching around the walls, tentacles of red-coated soldiery cutting the silent town off from any possible relief.

  Not that the King’s wretched forces could have mustered the energy for any kind of intervention. The last of the horsemen had barely stopped to water their horses before riding off to Ashby.

  Another Jericho, with bawled psalms serving in place of brazen trumpets.

  Drums thundered, dread tattoos rebounding off the walls and shattering the fragile nerves of the King’s men left behind. Ensigns hurling and lifting their battle flags, colour after colour swirling and blowing in the breeze - proclaiming the presence of a dozen and more New Model regiments.

  Sparrow surveyed the vast arc of troops Fairfax had thrown up around the town, unable to resist an unfamiliar but overwhelming sense of pride and satisfaction.

  Results. At last. Consequences. Thank God. An enemy beaten so soundly they might not re-appear the other side of the hill for another bout or two as they had the past two years.

  By the saints, he’d lined up with Waller’s and Essex’s armies often enough, but he’d never known anything approaching this. He’d made a point of refusing to get carried away with all the flags and drums and psalm singing in the past, but this, this was different.

  He found himself singing along with the rest, spit flying over his collar.

  A din to wake the dead. To shake the Kingdom’s creaking foundations.

  This was magnificent. No other word for it.

  Despite all the desertions, despite the battle casualties, there must have been the best part of fifteen thousand men stacked up in the water meadows from the Soar to the London Way, from thence to the East gate and the burnt-out suburbs beyond.

  Block after block of red coated foot. Troops of horse under fluttering guidons as far as you could see.

  The poor little town looked half swamped by the tramping, singing, surging red tide which was Parliament’s Army New Modelled.

  Fairfax may have lost hundreds of men, eager to stow their loot while they could, but the army remained the largest force the majority of the defenders had ever seen.

  The garrison had been left to defend what was left of the town – and that was precious little.

  The thought of handing over looted houses and gutted shops, burnt out streets and half demolished barricades, gardens and parks bearing the scars of mass graves hadn’t sat well with the Royalist defenders and they had been as relieved as the besieging Roundheads that the lords and generals had decided to parley rather than revisit the horrors of the storm.

  The sight of the ruined gates and cannon blasted walls had sobered the New Model troops selected to march in to Leicester to secure the town.

  “What are we waiting for, are we going in or not?”

  “Hold your horses. They’ll not let us all in, not yet.”

  Sparrow shielded his eyes, studied the ruined suburbs beyond the all too fragile wall.

  The streets nearest the gates had suffered the most. Thatch burnt black, windows sightless sockets in soot-streaked skulls. The townsfolk left peering out from their ruined homes, wondering if the new lot could be as bad as the old lot.

  There was nothing left to steal. Nothing left to fight about, that was for sure.

  *************************

  They hadn’t gone far before the bonfire crackle peace was shattered.

  Shouts. A shot, and the carnival parade shook itself out once again. The company ducked down, clattered left and right into what cover they could find. Sparrow cursed, eyes darting along
the surrounding windows. Muffet’s musket was off his shoulder and cocked before the loud report had quite died away.

  “Here we go,” Sparrow said quietly, peering down the smoked-out street. Smashed windows, broken down doors replaced by crudely tacked tarpaulins. Townsfolk fled past the cautiously advancing troops, hurrying back toward the gate they had forced.

  “Have a care,” Sparrow instructed. “Keep an eye on those windows.” The rat-trap alley reminded him of Bristol, the fire fight that had raged up and down the Christmas Steps. Lunsford, one of the Royalist commanders, had been brought down by sniping from the garrets above.

  A dozen and more musketeers fell out from the column, took cover in the gaps between the doors and lower floor windows.

  “Came from that inn Will,” Muffet called, jabbing the musket barrel toward a hastily boarded building standing squat on the street corner. A sign hung crooked from one swinging hinge. The Brewer’s Tipple, brick belly splayed out beneath half-burnt timbers and blackened tiles. Nobody at the windows.

  Sparrow trotted behind his vastly experienced skirmishers, ducking down beneath the window sills, peering around the corner.

  “Get out, out you fucking whoresons! Leave the bottle too, you damned rogues!” Muffled shouting from the inn’s scarred interior

  Sparrow and Muffet exchanged looks. Butcher raised his fowling piece as a trooper hurried out of the inn’s battered doorway. The startled soldier recoiled as he ran into the waiting musketeers.

  “Gawd help us, I’m on your side boys!” the dragoon explained, holding his hands up.

  “That’s right, get off out of it and leave me be!” the drunk roared. Butcher grabbed the dragoon by the lapels, hauled him out of the doorway and shoved him up against the wall.

  “Who’ve you got in there then matey?” Butcher inquired, sliding along the wall beside the wide-eyed soldier.

  More townsfolk hurried by. A bottle sailed out of an upstairs window and smashed on the cobbles, showering the musketeers with glass. Sparrow ducked, keeping an eye on the garrets.

  “Who is it, some bastard cavalier in his cups? They were ordered out hours ago!”