by Simon Schama
Presbyterians, like Manchester, Essex and Harley, and ‘Independents’, as those who took the more inclusive and tolerant line on worship called themselves, could at least agree that the war needed to be brought to the king with maximum force in 1645. To that end, parliament attempted to separate politics from the military command by enacting a Self-Denying Ordinance, which required all members of the Lords and Commons to resign their military posts, or vice versa. This effectively removed most of the principal protagonists – Essex, Manchester and Waller – while creating a unified New Model Army under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the only senior general for whom no one (yet) had a bad word and who made a point of being politically neutral. Apolitical though he was, Fairfax did share with Cromwell a sense of how this core parliamentary army ought to be run. It was to be zealous and godly (a lot more psalm-singing), and it was to be exemplary in its discipline. The standard unwinding techniques for soldiers – drink, cursing and whoring – were to be replaced by quiet sessions with The Souldiers Catechisme. Plunder would be savagely punished. (That, at any rate, was the idea: all very nice and Christian in principle but suicidal to enforce in the aftermath of a particularly hideous and prolonged siege.) In return for their sobriety and enthusiastic self-sacrifice, the soldiers were to be made to feel that their generals – all their officers, in fact – genuinely cared for their welfare, that they would be provided with boots, food and shelter, and that when they were lying screaming as their arm was being sawn off they would know there had been a point to it all. Cromwell and Fairfax were in absolutely no doubt of the point to it all.
Translating that certainty into total victory was another matter. Although by the spring of 1645 it looked unlikely (if not impossible) that Charles could win in England, he was now fighting for, and in, Britain. A setback in one of his kingdoms might always be compensated by success in another, and to the wearied and vexed parliamentary generals it seemed that he could go on playing this military shell game indefinitely, until his enemies were all at each other’s throats. For there were now internal civil wars in all four of the British nations. They were not taking place in discrete theatres of conflict but were all tangled up in each other’s fate. Because Charles could thank his remote Plantagenet ancestors for the most indestructible of his fortresses in Wales, what happened there, especially in the Marches, at castles like Chepstow and Monmouth, would ultimately affect the course of the war in England. Welsh soldiers were already making up a significant part of the royalist armies fighting in the west. Scottish Covenanter troops were stuck in Ireland protecting Presbyterian Ulster against the Gaelic Confederacy, which, given the central importance of the papacy and Owen Roe O’Neill, they believed was the same thing as protecting Scotland and England from impending invasion by the Antichrist. That eventuality seemed much closer in June 1646 when Monro lost a crucial battle at Benburb in County Tyrone against Owen Roe O’Neill.
And in the autumn of 1644, the Covenanter-Catholic, Scots-Irish war came back to Scotland itself, when Alasdair MacColla landed in the western Highlands with a force of 2000 Irish, supplied by his Clan Donald kinsman, the Earl of Antrim, and drawn almost exclusively from Catholic Ulster. It linked up with the even smaller army of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, whose ambition was to open a second front for Charles in northern and western Scotland. With the bulk of the Covenanter army still in England (from which the English parliamentary command could certainly not afford to release it), Montrose was gambling that he could open a back door to power, rally the Highlands and islands, cut through the weakened Lowlands and go all the way to Edinburgh, where he would overthrow the Covenant and establish a Scottish royalist regime. With that army, he would then invade England and turn the tide there as well.
That was the plan, at any rate – a pan-British, anti-Covenanter solution for the whole country – and it was blessed initially with a spectacular series of military successes against the weakened Covenanter-Lowland armies. But the reason Montrose and MacColla were winning in the autumn and winter of 1644–5 had almost nothing to do with the Marquis’ British strategy or his personal alienation from the Covenanters and everything to do with two ancient Scottish feuds. The first was the relentless war between the Calvinist Lowlands and the largely Catholic northwestern Highlands. But even within the Highlands, the obscene slaughters of the Scottish wars were powered by the visceral, unforgiving hatred between Clan Donald (both its Irish and Scots branches) and the Campbells of Argyll. The further away from the killing hills the campaign went, the harder it was for Montrose to keep his army together, although the lure of sacking cities like Perth and Aberdeen helped. The butchery at Aberdeen was especially sadistic, lasting over three days and involving the cold-blooded murder of anyone thought to exercise any sort of public office or authority – advocates, merchants, the masters of the hospitals and almshouses, and scores of other civilians – and leaving a deep legacy of enmity between Irish and Scots. There was, said a contemporary Aberdonian: ‘killing, robbing and plunder of this town at their pleasure. And nothing hard bot pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning through all the streets. Som women they preseet to defloir and uther sum they took perforce to serve them in the camp.’
Even the tactical style of the Irish-Highland army defied expectations of modern warfare. Like its English counterpart, the Covenanter infantry had at its heart six-deep platoons of musketeers who, to be effective, were supposed to execute a ‘countermarch’. This involved the first line filing to the back of the six once its weapons had been fired, with the next line replacing them. By the time the original row returned to the front they were supposed to have completed a flawless and extremely rapid reloading. But without intensive drill practice the movement was, in fact, seldom either flawless or swift, and it was precisely at that moment that the Highland and Irish soldiers dropped their own muskets and charged with sword and shield, cutting a bloody route through the floundering musketeers and pikemen. The ‘Highland’ charge (already much used in the Irish war by the Gaelic-Catholic soldiers) was primitive but astonishingly effective. And there were other ways in which the armies of Montrose and MacColla inconveniently refused to abide by the rules, continuing their campaign into the deep Highland winter, especially in the Campbell lands, where villages were devastated, and (as would remain the practice all through 1645 and into 1646) indiscriminately killing any men or boys who might one day serve as soldiers. After a while, strategy simply dissolved into clan cleansing. For MacColla killing as many Campbells as possible became the main point of the campaign, while for Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, counter-killing as many of the Clan Donald and their allies, the MacLean, was equally satisfying. And so the carnage went on and on and on, indifferent to seasons or landscape: blood in the snow, blood in the heather, blood in the pinewoods. In one particularly gruesome atrocity, some hundreds of Campbell men, women and children were herded into a barn, which was then burned to the ground.
Montrose did, in the end, succeed in reaching deep into the Covenanter Lowlands, establishing himself not at Edinburgh, then in the grip of a terrible wave of the plague, but at Glasgow. At Philiphaugh in 1645 his army suffered its first serious defeat, but by early 1646 he was still in a position to do great damage in Scotland on behalf of the royalist cause. So it must have been a shock when, at the beginning of May 1646, Charles himself went to the Covenanter army then besieging the town of Newark and put himself in the hands of the Scots.
But then Montrose’s campaign (and the battle of Benburb in Ireland) had been the only thing that had gone right for the king in 1645 and early 1646. By the time the New Model Army was deployed in April 1645, parliament, together with its Scots allies, could put 50,000 men in the field and had perhaps the same number in garrisons – much the biggest military force ever to be seen in Britain. The king could field half that number at most. Penned up in Oxford, he had few choices. The first was to cut his losses and respond positively to peace terms set at Uxbridge earlier in the year. But th
e Solemn League and Covenant had required the king to accept a bishopless Presbyterian regime along with the new Directory of Worship, already distributed in place of the Book of Common Prayer, and this Charles found just as repugnant as he always had. Fighting on, unless he just sat in Oxford waiting for the inevitable siege, meant choosing between moving west or north.
A second option for Charles, recommended by Prince Rupert, was to play to his strengths by moving west and maintaining his military power base along a line of strongholds from Exeter through Bristol and Cardiff to Carlisle, to join with the still undefeated army of General Goring, drawing the parliamentary army into deeply hostile territory and keeping the crucial seaways open to Ireland from whence cometh, it was hoped, some help. Alternatively, a third choice would be to move north towards Montrose, hoping his victories would prove contagious and uniting their armies. After a good deal of dithering, mesmerized by Montrose’s success and by an understandable feeling that everything decisive that happened in his reign happened in Scotland, Charles chose the northern option. At the end of May 1645 his army took and sacked Leicester and was moving northeast. Its break-out had the effect, as intended, of drawing Fairfax away from the siege of Oxford and hastening Cromwell eastwards to protect East Anglia. But it also had the undesired effect of bringing those two armies together to face the king in what was obviously going to be a decisive battle, near the Northamptonshire village of Naseby.
Even without the New Model Army forces, Charles was outnumbered by Fairfax. But again over-ruling Rupert’s caution, he decided to give battle anyway. By the time they deployed on two facing hilltops with a marshy little vale between them, the two forces were massively disproportionate. Cromwell and Fairfax had about 14,000 men, the king only half that number. And numbers counted. Remembering his mistake in waiting at Marston Moor, Rupert took the initiative, charged right away down his hill and, carried by the momentum up the facing slope, sliced through the cavalry on the left flank, commanded by Cromwell’s future son-in-law, Henry Ireton, who was wounded in the onslaught. But only about half of Ireton’s cavalry strength broke from this initial hit. Yet again, Rupert’s horse was soon off plundering the baggage train, leaving the royalist infantry in the centre to push pikes with Fairfax’s foot soldiers and the Scots. At just the moment when it looked as though Fairfax’s numbers would inevitably take their toll, Cromwell charged, his tight lines of horses crashing into the royalist cavalry that remained on the left flank. At the critical moment Charles, dressed in a gilt suit of armour, tried to charge Cromwell’s victorious troopers with his Life Guard. Horrified aides took the reins of his Flemish horse and led it away, a move that was misread in the field as a command for tactical withdrawal. The crumbling became a collapse. In two hours it was all over. Seeing his men exposed to a slaughter, Astley surrendered 4000 foot and 500 officers, as well as the complete royalist artillery train and thousands of muskets and arquebuses. Virtually nothing was left of the royalist army except its dead on the field of Naseby. In the captured baggage train were the king’s correspondence, personal and military, as well as £100,000 worth of jewels, coaches and plate. A troop of Welsh women, called ‘Irish whores’ by the victorious troopers, were, needless to say, mercilessly butchered or mutilated.
Within a month or two there was almost nothing left of the royalist war machine in England. Another decisive victory by Fairfax over Lord Goring at Langport in Somerset destroyed its surviving western command. One by one the major centres – Bristol, Cardiff, Carlisle – fell. Garrisons that held out were besieged with the utmost ferocity. When, after a massive siege in October, Cromwell’s army finally took the heavily fortified Basing House built by the Catholic Marquis of Winchester (Mary Tudor’s Lord Treasurer) and still owned by his heir, they were convinced they were rooting out a nest of filthy idolatry and put to the sword everyone they could find in the burning ruins, civilians as well as soldiers, women as well if they offered any resistance. The great architect and orchestrator of the court masques, Inigo Jones, fled with only a rough blanket to protect him from naked indignity. Paintings and books were taken to London to be burned in a great public bonfire, and whatever was left of the furniture or jewels found there was the soldiers’ to sell.
On 26 April 1646 Charles left Oxford. He had cut his hair; wore a false beard and was dressed without any of the trappings of a gentleman, much less those of a king. Only his chaplain and a single manservant went with him. For a while he hid in disguise in Norfolk, hoping he might yet escape by sea and perhaps join the queen in France. But this was the heart of Cromwell country, and the ports were being watched. His better chance lay with the Scots, even the Covenanter Scots, for he knew that, Presbyterian though they were, their vision of the future assumed the continuing presence of a king. Exactly what sort of king, however, was evidently open to dispute.
And dispute the nations of Britain did, in words and fire for another three years, which were almost as ruinous and certainly as divisive as the previous three. For if peace had broken out in 1646, it was only in the sense that sieges and battles had, for the time being, ended.
Just what the new England, what the new Britain, was supposed to be, what the prize was for which so many had laid down their life, was unresolved. So many of the principles for which parliament had gone to war in the first place in 1642 had been made redundant by the transforming brutality of the conflict. The one thing that had not changed was the conviction, shared by a majority of parliament, that they needed some sort of king, chastened, emasculated, restrained and reformed, but a king none the less, as an indispensable element in the constitution. So the traditional political fiction that the king had been ‘led astray’ into the war by wicked and malignant ‘men of blood’ was maintained, the better to cleanse the Crown of permanent, institutional guilt. By the same token, those held responsible for the crime of civil war and who were exempt from any kind of pardon and indemnity – and who therefore might well be brought to trial – were no fewer than seventy-three, starting with Prince Rupert. Equally, anyone who had fought for the royalist side or aided or abetted them in any identifiable way was to be excluded forever from holding any kind of local office or trust. This, in effect, was to perpetuate the painful division of the governing and law community that had opened up in 1642. And since the king had shown such contempt for what, in retrospect, seemed like the modest proposals for his restraint set out by parliament five years before, he now had to be fettered with bands of steel. Control of the militia and armed forces was to be transferred to parliament for twenty years, and it went without saying that neither high officers of state nor his council could be appointed without parliament’s consent, nor foreign policy action taken without its approval. While Presbyterianism was the order of the day, the eventual fate of England’s Church was left, for good political reasons, to future settlement.
What kind of Britain did this augur? The Marquis of Argyll, for one, believed that at last a ‘true union’ of Scotland and England – unforced, sympathetic in godly amity, the opposite of James VI and I’s marriage of high Churches, and certainly the opposite of Charles’s Arminian coercion – was now at hand. But then, of course, with the Clan Donald still torching his villages and murdering his clansmen, and with the Catholic-Irish Confederacy unsubdued and capable of supplying new armies to make his people wretched, Argyll had very practical reasons to sound so fraternal. The war that at the beginning had been fought to keep the several nations of the British archipelago apart was now pulling them together, although on terms that were often mutually at odds. Driven by the imperatives of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Irish revolt had now accepted a view of itself that had once been only the fantasy of its enemies: that the restoration of the old Church was the prelude to the destruction of heresy in England and Scotland. Conversely, the Presbyterians in Ulster now thought there would never be any peace or safety for themselves in Ireland without the active military involvement of the rest of Protestant Britain. We are still living
with the consequences of that assumption.
Oddly enough, in 1646–7 it was England that rather wanted to be left alone and paid the Scots army £400,000 to go away, leaving the king behind. (The Scots, Charles remarked with grim irony, had bartered him away rather cheaply.) To be left alone, though, was not the same as to be left in peace. Militarily pacified, politically England was a vacuum filled by an uproar. The old polite community of law and government that had ruled since the Reformation had been shattered, some thought (wrongly, as it would turn out) beyond repair. In counties ravaged by war, justices of the peace were partially replaced by county committees empowered to mobilize money and arms, while JPs survived to look after traditional administration and crime. The county committees were hated by civilians for billeting soldiers and levying taxes, and they were hated by the army for failing to pay them adequately and reducing them to either beggary or theft. By 1646–7, however, as parliamentarian control was established throughout England, JPs everywhere started making a comeback. The wielder of power in England now was not, as everyone had imagined when the war began, parliament, but the army: a massive military machine the likes of which had never before been seen in Britain. And when the fighting was more or less done, the men of this hungry, angry and poorly paid army were perfectly prepared to mutiny, seize their officers, march to new quarters without permission or refuse to decamp. In the last years of the war, the New Model Army at least had also been socially transformed, with the officer corps drawn from sections of society that were much broader and lower down in the pecking order than anything thought possible before 1645. This did not necessarily mean that its opinions were more radical – the startlingly proto-democratic Levellers, such as John Lilburne, were still an influential minority. But it did mean that something new had been unloosed on the English polity: a reading, debating soldiery with a burning desire to settle accounts with its parliamentary paymasters. And while they were at it, an extremely important element in the army, beginning with Cromwell and Ireton, was becoming increasingly hostile to the ‘Scottish’ Presbyterianism that had been imposed on England by the Solemn League and Covenant. Let the Scots have a Kirk, said the Independents, and let godly English congregations elect ministers according to their own understanding of faith and desired forms of worship.
