A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  The fact that, especially in the early years of the war, many of the generals on either side were so alike in their social and cultural personality, indeed had often known each other well, either in parliament or in the country, and spoke the same kind of language of patriotic disinterest, must also have weakened, or at least constantly tested, their allegiance. The two generals who faced each other in the murderous little war in the West Country, Sir William Waller and Sir Ralph Hopton, respectively from Gloucestershire and Somerset, and both professional soldiers, were virtually interchangeable types, even in religion, where Hopton the royalist was as much of a sober Puritan as Waller and had voted not only for Strafford’s attainder but even for that bugbear of the royalist cause, the Grand Remonstrance. It had only been when parliament arrogated to itself power over the militia that Hopton had changed allegiance. He was, then, as close as possible to the mind-set of his adversaries. During a brief lull in their campaign, Hopton wrote to Waller asking for a meeting. Waller had to turn him down but in terms that suggest just how deeply the distress of their broken friendship went.

  To my noble frend, Sr Ralphe Hopton at Wells

  Sr

  The experience I have had of your worth, and the happiness I have enjoyed in your freindshipp, are wounding considerations to me when I looke upon this present distance between us. Certainly my affections to you are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my freindshipp to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The ould limitation usque ad aras holds still, and where my conscience is interested all other obligations are swallowed upp. I should most gladly waite upon you, according to your desire, but that I looke upon you as you are ingaged in that party, beyond the possibility of a retreat and consequently uncapable of being wrought upon by any persuasions. And I know the conference could never be so close between us, but that it would take winde and receive a construction to my dishonour. That great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knowes with what a sad sence I go on upon this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this warr without an ennemy. But I looke upon it as Opus Domini, and that is enough to silence all passion in mee. The God of Peace in his good time send us the blessing of peace and in the meane time fitt us to receive itt. Wee are both upon the stage, and must act those parts that are assigned us in this Tragedy. Lett us do itt in a way of honour, and without personall animosities. Whatsoever the issue be, I shall never relinquish the dear title of

  Your most affectionated friend

  and faithfull servant

  Wm Waller

  Three weeks later at Lansdown, near Bath, Hopton’s army charged Waller’s hilltop position and captured it, along with guns and prisoners but at savage cost to himself. Of the 2000 who had ridden up the hill, only 600 were left alive in the pyrrhic victory. Among the 200 infantry who had died in the same attack was Sir Bevil Grenville, another friend of Waller’s, pole-axed at the summit. Hopton himself had been badly slashed in the arm. Inspecting prisoners the next day an ammunition wagon exploded, burning and temporarily blinding him, so that he needed to be carried in a litter, knowing that at any time Waller’s troops, defeated but rested at Bath, might swoop down on his battered and bedraggled army. On Roundway Down outside Devizes a week later, Hopton’s army, despite its general being more or less unable to see or ride, again triumphed, this time overwhelmingly. Two weeks later, on 26 July, the walls of Bristol, thought to be impregnable, were stormed by Hopton’s Cornish army and the city, under the command of Saye and Sele’s son Nathaniel, surrendered to Prince Rupert.

  The fall of Bristol sent shock waves through all the godly hold-outs in the southwest. To the godliest of them all, Dorchester, William Strode brought disturbing news of Cavalier besiegers who had thought nothing of climbing up 20-foot walls. In his view Dorchester’s defences would keep the town safe for about half an hour. Those who had vowed to live and die with their Covenant now had a sudden change of heart. John White fled to London; William Whiteway tried to take ship out of Weymouth and was intercepted by a royalist patrol. On 2 August, having been assured that a quick surrender would guarantee them against plunder, the citizens of Dorchester opened the town to Cavalier troops. They were plundered anyway.

  With the royalists now in command of most of the strongholds and towns of the west, Lady Brilliana Harley, locked up in Brampton Bryan, braced herself for the worst. She was in dire peril. Sir Robert (who belatedly had reconsidered his advice that she should remain in Herefordshire) was still in London without any way to reach home. Her sons Ned and Robert were in Waller’s army and, she hoped, safe. Most of the godly clergy and families had long since fled, many to Gloucester, which was holding out against a royalist siege. Her friends’ abandoned houses had been gutted and vandalized, their livestock taken and slaughtered, the tenant farmers and labourers terrorized, and the lands themselves forfeit to the king. Defending Brampton behind its fourteenth-century gatehouse were fifty musketeers, attempting to protect another fifty civilians, including her family physician, a few of her godly lady friends and her three youngest children, Thomas, Dorothy and Margaret. By late July, 700 foot soldiers and horse troopers were camped around Brampton, building breastworks close to her garden from which they could fire cannonballs and musket shot at the house. There was nothing much that Brilliana could do except pray, wait and inspect her own defensive works. The siege, when it began in earnest, went on for six and a half weeks. There were daily bombardments, the defenders reduced to using hand-mills to grind their grain into flour for bread. The roof of the hall was smashed in, but despite the relentless regularity of the fire surprisingly few were killed, except Brilliana’s cook, another servant and one of her woman friends. Priam Davies, a parliamentarian captain present throughout the siege, claimed, not implausibly, that Brilliana was most upset by the perpetual and noisy enemy cursing coming from the ‘breast works in our gardens and walks, where their rotten and poisoned language annoyed us more than their poisoned bullets’.

  Throughout the siege Brilliana remained in regular contact with the besiegers, who themselves hoped for a negotiated end rather than having to storm the house, and kept them talking as a ploy, while hoping for some relief from parliamentary troops. Eventually, in September, the royalists were called away to reinforce the siege of Gloucester and left her still the mistress of Brampton Bryan. She set about levelling the earthworks and replanting her garden and orchards. She also badly needed to restock the estate with cattle and took them from neighbours who had become enemies. Brilliana the pious had become Brilliana the plunderer, but God, she knew, understood the compulsion of her plight.

  God, in fact, had other plans for Brilliana Harley. In October, apparently quite suddenly she fell into a ‘defluxion’ of the lungs, convulsed with terrible bloody coughing, and on Sunday 31 October 1643, to general shock and grief, she died. When Sir Robert got the news, like the Calvinist he was, he bent before the inscrutable design of the Almighty: ‘having received the sad news that the Lord has taken from me my dear wife, to whose wise hand of providence I desire with a heart of resignation humbly to submit’. Stirred by Brilliana’s example, the defenders of Brampton Bryan continued to hold out against further attacks until April 1644, when they finally gave up the house to troops acting in the name of the governor of Hereford, Barnabas Scudamore, the viscount’s brother.

  The autumn of 1643 was perhaps the time of greatest gloom for the parliamentary cause. The ‘birds’ of 1642 had been plucked by defections and death. In June 1643 Hampden had been mortally wounded at the battle of Chalgrove Field. Denzil Holles had been so shaken by the adversities of the year that he was among the most conspicuous of those who were trying to reach a negotiated peace with the king. Haselrig’s troop of cuirassiers, known from their armour and red coats as the ‘lobsterbacks’, were among those destroyed in Hopton’s great victory at Roundway Down in July, although Haselrig himself lived to fight many more political battles. John Pym was dying, horribly, of intestinal cancer, b
ut not before he had put together the alliance that, more than any other single event, would rescue the parliamentary position and determine the eventual outcome of the war: the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots.

  In 1637 Scotland had begun the resistance to the absolutism of Charles I, and seven years later the Covenant would all but finish him off. Only the obstinately anglocentric need for home-grown heroes can explain the general impression that Oliver Cromwell was somehow single-handedly responsible for defeating Charles I in the first civil war, when his role was late and limited (although often decisive and invariably successful). Without the intervention of the great Covenanter general, Alexander Leslie (at the Scottish parliament’s request elevated by Charles to be Earl of Leven in 1641), Cromwell might never have had a chance to celebrate those victories. Ironically, the League between the Covenanters and the English parliament, which delivered a huge army to the critical campaign in Yorkshire, was the first concerted attempt to make a British union since the abortive efforts of James VI and I. To seal the alliance, Pym and the godly party in the Lords and Commons had, in effect, to promise that there would be a Presbyterian concordance among the Churches of England, Scotland and Wales. Since there was a Scots army under Monro vigorously (not to say brutally) campaigning there, it seemed only a matter of time before Ireland, too, was brought into the fold. So when the Lords and Commons gathered on 25 September 1643 to take the oath of loyalty to the Solemn League and Covenant in St Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster, an astoundingly inverted version of the Stuart dream of union – a godly Great Britain – seemed wondrously within reach.

  On 19 January Leven crossed the Tweed with 18,000 foot soldiers, 3000 horse, 500 dragoons and 16 cannon. For the second time in five years Northumberland was under Scottish occupation. To defend the Tyne, Newcastle had 500 foot and 300 horse. A royalist disaster was obviously looming. Troops were hastily rushed from wherever Charles could get them, especially from the south and west, but Waller’s victory in the next round of his war games with Hopton, at Cheriton in March 1644, took one of those resources away.

  York, which for so long had seemed impregnable as the king’s capital of the north, found itself the target of a huge eleven-week siege, the city surrounded on all sides by parliamentary and Scottish troops. Its outlying villages were laid to waste, and everything in the farms was taken and used by the besiegers. An observer of the destruction inside the city, Simeon Ashe, wrote: ‘Had thine eyes yesternight with me seen York burning thy heart would have been heavye. The Lord affect us with the sad fruits of wasting warres and speedily and mercifully end our combustions which are carried on with high sinnes and heavy desolations. Truly my heart sometimes is ready to breake with what I see here.’

  Gradually, the fate of York and with it the north of England came to be seen, by both sides, as the fulcrum on which the fate of the entire war would turn. The king kept just enough of his army in the southwest to keep the Earl of Essex and Waller detained, while, with an immense effort, the Duke of Newcastle and Prince Rupert assembled an army large enough to break the siege and compete on equal terms with the combined forces of the Covenant and parliament. Early on a sultry 2 July, 40,000 men faced each other on Marston Moor, a few miles from the city. It was neither a good place nor a good time for a battle. There had been a violent rainstorm, making the Yorkshire heath boggy, and there was a wide ditch separating the two armies, which stood a half mile from each other, sweating into their armour. For once Rupert was not especially anxious to begin the proceedings – not even, for that matter, to give battle. The afternoon wore on, a long cat-and-mouse game, with Rupert waiting for a premature cavalry attack to stumble over the ditch and be ready to be picked off. But before he knew it, Cromwell’s horse, on the parliamentary left, was charging over the ditch and on to his soldiers, slashing its way through to the rear. In the furiousness of the charge Cromwell took a wound to the neck and head and had to leave the field, which, since the royalist left had badly beaten Sir Thomas Fairfax’s troops, should have given them their opportunity, with the pikemen and musketeers as usual pushing and firing at the centre. But, at the defining moment of his career, Cromwell came back into the fray, along with the Covenanter general David Leslie. Cromwell had become justly famous for the battlefield discipline of his horse, and instead of letting them waste precious time and energy rampaging through the enemy’s baggage train, he wheeled his troopers round to the now unprotected rear of the royalist right flank. It was this fast-moving parliamentary cavalry that had the advantage of the lie of the land and rode down on the virtually surrounded royalist centre, folding in on itself.

  After three hours, there were 6000 dead on Marston Moor. The cream of the king’s infantry had been wiped out. The Duke of Newcastle, who had emptied his own coffers to supply Charles with an army, had witnessed its complete destruction and had nothing left to finance another. He would not, he said, remain to hear the laughter of the court, preferring instead to go into exile with just £90 to his name. For Oliver Cromwell, though, the victory was an unmistakable sign that the Lord of Hosts was fighting alongside his godly soldiers. Writing to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton, he declared that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords’, before going on to darken the rejoicing by telling Walton: ‘Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my trials this way [Cromwell had lost his own son, Oliver junior, to sickness while he was serving in the army]; but the Lord supported me with this: that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant after and live for. There is your precious child full of glory, not to know sin nor sorrow any more.’

  By the end of the month York had capitulated. The only bright spot for the king was Cornwall, where the Earl of Essex (who had insisted on taking command over Waller) had managed to get an army of 10,000 hopelessly trapped within a 5-mile strip of land between Lostwithiel and Fowey. Charles, who was personally commanding the campaign (and enjoying it), asked the earl if he would now consider joining him in a united campaign to clear the Scots from the north, but Essex declined, preferring to depart from his army by boat once he had seen the cavalry break through and escape. Philip Skippon (another who was offered a place in the royalist army by Charles and who rejected it) was left to deal with the débâcle at Fowey, negotiating for his foot soldiers an honourable retreat that turned into a logistical and human nightmare. One of the royalist soldiers who was watching the retreat saw a ‘rout of soldiers prest all of a heap like sheep . . . so dirty and dejected as was rare to see’. Stripped of food, clothes, boots and shelter, attacked by the country people (especially the women), Skippon’s men slept in soaking fields and drank from puddles and ditches. One of them remembered being ‘inhumanly dealt with, abused, reviled, scorned, torn, kicked, pillaged and many stript of all they had, quite contrary to the articles of war’. Disease, starvation and untended wounds made short shrift of the army, so that just 1000 of the 6000 who had left Fowey dragged themselves into Poole.

  By the end of the year parliament was in control of thirty-seven of the fifty-seven counties of England and Wales and the majority of the most populous and strategically important towns, with the exception of Bristol, Exeter and Chester. But the king was not yet defeated. At the second battle of Newbury in October he had managed to avoid a potentially lethal pincer movement by the armies of Waller and Essex and slugged out the day to an exhausted tie. The wear and tear of Newbury was enough to prevent Charles from breaking through, but not enough to finish him off. And Charles was aware, as much as parliament, of the increasingly acrimonious relations between Waller and Essex on the one hand and Manchester and Cromwell on the other, all of whom were barely on speaking terms, so much did they suspect and despise each other. Attempting to flatten the king was like trying to swat a particularly annoying and nimble housefly. And, although by all measure of the military arithmetic, Charles was losing ground, there was an ominous sense among
the military commanders on the parliamentary side that he was prevailing – at least politically – just by avoiding obliteration. As the Earl of Manchester put it: ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is a king still and so will his posterity be after him. But if the king beat us once we shall all be hanged and our posterity be made slaves.’ To which Oliver Cromwell, who was rapidly coming to despise what he thought was Manchester’s inertia and pusillanimity, retorted, pithily: ‘If this be so, why did we take up arms at first?’

  Manchester and Cromwell’s arguments over how best to use the now formidable army of the Eastern Association were much more than a tactical squabble. Cromwell suspected that what he said – in public – was Manchester’s reluctance to prosecute the war with all possible energy and severity resulted from a misguided anxiety not to destroy the king too completely lest a great void in the polity be opened up. For his part, Manchester accused Cromwell of filling his regiments with social inferiors of dangerously unorthodox religious opinions, who would be unlikely to subscribe to the Presbyterian rule they were all supposed to be fighting for, north and south of the Scottish border. Oliver Cromwell was, as time would show, no social leveller, nor did he see the army as a school of political radicalism. But he was a recognizably modern soldier in his belief that men fought better when officers and men had a common moral purpose, a bonding ideology. The old knightly ideal by which gentlemen would lead and their loyal men would follow was, he thought, no longer adequate for the times nor for their cause. It was necessarily the Cavalier ethos, not their own. This is what Cromwell meant after Edgehill when he had told Hampden, ‘Your troopers . . . are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and . . . their troopers are gentlemen’s sons . . . You must get men of a spirit . . . that is like to go as far as a gentleman will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still.’ And when he told the Suffolk committee that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else,’ he was not so much asking for a democratized army as for a morally and ideologically motivated godly army. In the bitter debate with Manchester, which lasted into the winter of 1645 and was aired in the House of Commons, Cromwell made it clear that a godly army need not (as the Covenanters assumed) be a rigidly Presbyterian one. More than once he came to the defence of a junior officer accused of being a Baptist or some other kind of unofficial Protestant, on the grounds that those who were prepared to die for the righteous cause should not be slighted to appease the Scots. Whatever Britain Cromwell thought he was fighting for, it was not a Presbyterian united kingdom.