Civil War: The History of England Volume III

by Ackroyd, Peter

  On 9 September the earl of Essex rode out to his army at Northampton. He took with him a coffin and a winding sheet as a token of his fidelity to the end. He commanded an army of 20,000 men and it was widely believed that he would defeat the king with ease. Clarendon wrote of him that ‘his pride supplied his want of ambition, and he was angry to see any other man respected more than himself, because he thought he deserved it more, and did better requite it’. He was a man of great wealth and power. He liked to be known as ‘his excellence’, and was considered to have no equal but the king. He had the habits, and the manners, of a great lord like those of the Wars of the Roses. But it was not yet clear that he was a great commander. His reserve and his aloof manner were perhaps mistaken for wisdom. He was not a natural rebel, in any case, and his position at the head of the parliamentary forces rendered him deeply uneasy. It seems that his ultimate purpose was to detach the king from his ‘evil councillors’ and bring him back to London in the role of a constitutional monarch working alongside parliament. That is not what his parliamentary allies required.

  In the course of this autumn some 40,000 men were gathered, and by the summer of 1643 the number had risen to 100,000. The armies were in many respects equally matched. They contained many men who believed that the war would be a short one, and that they would return to their fields in time for the next harvest; it was widely considered that one great battle would decide the issue. Many of them were poor and had been pressed into service by their landlords or employers.

  From one Shropshire village, in the army of the king, were a farmer in debt, the son of a man who had been hanged for horse-stealing, a decayed weaver, a vagrant tailor and a family of father and three sons who lived in a cave. The soldiers on both sides were sometimes scorned as ‘the off-scourings of the nation’. Men were released from prison and pressed into service. It was said that some of the best trainees were butchers, because they were used to the sight of blood. For some the war came as a welcome relief from more mundane suffering, and such men eagerly sought the opportunity to seize money or goods. One veteran, Colonel Birch, recalled that ‘when I was in the army some said, “Let us not go this way, lest the war be ended too soon”’. They were also given provisions that were more plentiful than their food at home; the normal ration was supposed to be 2 pounds of bread or biscuit and 1 pound of meat or cheese each day. They were allowed one bottle of wine or two bottles of beer.

  The royalist troops in particular were accused of drunkenness and lechery, and in the early months of the war it was reported that a group of them had murdered an eight-months pregnant woman in Leicestershire. Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan artisan from Eastcheap, wrote that ‘they swagger, roar, swear, and domineer, plundering, pillaging or doing any other kind of wrong’.

  Yet the abuses were not reserved to one side. The royalists may have wrecked the taverns, but the parliamentarians desecrated the churches. The climate of war turns men into animals. It was said that, when troops were quartered in a church or hall, the smell they left behind was frightful. They pissed and defecated in corners. They often brought with them contagious diseases that became known as ‘camp fever’.

  Many of the soldiers had of course volunteered out of genuine conviction. The parliamentary soldiers often chanted psalms as they marched, and the ministers preached to them upon such texts as the sixty-eighth psalm, ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered . . .’ More secular rivalries also animated them; it was reported that the men of Herefordshire fought against the men of Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians against the Northumbrians.

  The men carried pikes or muskets, but some were still armed with bows and arrows in the old fashion. The pike itself was supposed to be 18 feet long, with a steel head, but many of the soldiers cut it down as too cumbersome; the pikemen were also armed with a short sword. The muskets were charged with weak gunpowder and the men were advised to shoot only when the weapon was close up against the body of the enemy; since there were no cartridges, the musketeer held two or three bullets in his mouth or in his belt. They had to load and then fire with a lighted cord known as a ‘match’. Others preferred to shoot arrows from their guns. They wore leather doublets and helmets that looked like iron pots.

  Not all of the troops, however, were untrained or ill-prepared. There were professional soldiers among them who had fought in France, Spain and the Low Countries. Mercenaries were also used on both sides. Many of the commanders had seen service on the European mainland. These were men who had perused such manuals as Warlike Directions or Instructions for Musters and Arms; they were the leaders who would have to give basic training to their troops. ‘Turn the butt ends of your muskets to the right . . . Lay your muskets properly on your shoulders . . . Take forth your match. Blow off your coal. Cock your match . . . Present. Give fire.’

  A first skirmish or encounter took place near Worcester. Essex had moved his army towards the town and, on hearing the news, the king sent Prince Rupert to support the royalist stronghold. Rupert of the Rhine was the king’s nephew and, at the age of twenty-three, had already enjoyed great success as a military commander. His expertise, and his experience, were considered to be invaluable. He was high-spirited and fearless; he was also rash and impatient. Yet on this occasion, in a limited engagement, he routed the parliamentary cavalry and killed most of its officers.

  Clarendon wrote that the incident ‘gave his troops great courage and rendered the name of Prince Rupert very terrible, and exceedingly appalled the adversary’; he added that ‘from this time the Parliament began to be apprehensive that the business would not be as easily ended as it was begun’. Oliver Cromwell himself had grave reservations about the conduct of the parliamentary army. He told his cousin, John Hampden, that ‘your troopers are most of them decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their [royalist] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality’. Cromwell believed that if parliament were to prevail, a new and more glorious force should be formed.

  There was perhaps still one way to avert the conflict. The parliamentarian grandee of Worcestershire, Lord Brooke, declared that he wished ‘to avoid the profusion of blood’. So he offered his royalist counterpart in the county, the earl of Northampton, to ‘try the quarrel by sword in single combat’. A duel might therefore have decided the course of the civil war. It was a medieval expedient but it emphasizes the extent to which this war was essentially still seen as a baronial combat. Yet the political and social world had changed since the fifteenth century.

  The king moved with his army to Shrewsbury, only 50 miles away from the parliamentary forces. For three weeks both sides remained close to one another, but neither made any move. No one was eager for battle. Charles decided to press the issue and advance towards London. Essex was obliged to prevent him. The earl also wished to present a petition to the king, but Charles refused to see him. Why should he parley with a traitor?

  The king moved forward slowly towards London, but Essex remained on his trail. The first battle of the civil war took place at Edgehill, in southern Warwickshire, where the royalist forces had rested on the evening of 22 October; the parliamentary army was only a short distance away and Charles had decided to attack from the summit of a range of hills that gave him the advantage. It was an uncertain struggle, with Rupert’s cavalry for a while in the ascendant but the parliamentary infantry holding its own. Both sides claimed the victory, when in truth neither prevailed. The number of the dead amounted to a little over 1,000. A trooper wrote to his mother that ‘there was a great deal of fear and misery about that field that night’.

  It was the first experience of battle for most of the participants, and it came as a salutary shock. The soldiers had been badly organized and Rupert’s cavalry, in particular, had run out of control. Many of the men and some of the commanders, weary and disgusted at the slaughter, fled for their homes. The king, never before in a war, was himself horrified by the death of some of his most loyal commande
rs. He seems also to have been alarmed by the extent of the enemy, and murmured before the battle that he did not expect to see so many arrayed against him. The earl of Essex was equally dismayed. He had hoped that one great battle would resolve the issue, but the result had been bloody and uncertain. Might this be a harbinger of the whole war? He had raised his standard against his sovereign, however, and there was no easy way forward.

  The king was urged by Rupert immediately to march upon London, but instead Charles rode with his men 20 miles south to Oxford, where he had determined to establish his headquarters. It was from here, at the beginning of November, that he once more set out for the capital. On the news of his approach the terrified citizens took up whatever weapons they possessed; parliament sent a delegation to the royal camp to open negotiations but the king, while giving gracious words, still pressed forward. Prince Rupert attacked a parliamentary force at Brentford, 8 miles out of London, and then proceeded to fire some of the houses in the town; the word ‘plunder’ now entered the English vocabulary. It was to be the prince’s method throughout the war.

  The citizens of London decided, under the direction of their parliamentary masters, to make a stand. The apprentices and trained bands, to the number of 6,000, were assembled in Chelsea Field near the village of Turnham Green in Chiswick. The earl of Essex went into the city and pleaded for more men, until eventually a ragged army of 24,000 Londoners advanced to Turnham Green close to the royalist army. On Sunday 13 November, the two forces stood face to face without giving way. The king, fearing any grievous loss of life, withdrew to Hounslow. Even his most ardent supporters would have hesitated before launching a general assault upon the city itself. Yet he had lost his best, and last, chance to defeat his enemies. He was not given the credit for his mercy, however, and his withdrawal at the last minute was considered to be a public humiliation. Thus it was presented, at least, in the printing presses controlled by parliament.

  A pause in hostilities prompted calls from some quarters for peace and accommodation. Parliament raised four proposals for the attention of the king; it already knew that he would reject them. A crowd of Londoners approached the common council calling for ‘Peace and truth!’ whereupon someone shouted out, ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price!’ Demands for an end to hostilities were frequent throughout the course of the war but, at each stage of the process, the activists won their cause over their more diffident colleagues. The more combative members of parliament, for example, believed that a peace with the king would amount to capitulation. Instead they began to make approaches to Scotland in an attempt to gain military aid.

  It was also important that more money should be raised. On 25 November it was agreed that an assessment should be levied upon London, but that was only the beginning. In the next few weeks and months John Pym worked to pass legislation concerning land taxes, general assessments, confiscations, property taxes and rises in excise duty. All men of property were obliged to make contributions to the public funds, on the understanding that the money would eventually be repaid by ‘public faith’, an obscure and possibly meaningless phrase. The levies were excused on the familiar grounds of necessity and imminent danger. In the following year an order went out that those who had not voluntarily contributed would be fined one fifth of their income from land and one twentieth of the value of their personal property.

  The king now established his household and himself in Christ Church, Oxford, while Prince Rupert moved into St John’s College. All Souls became an arsenal while the king’s council assembled at Oriel. A strange change came over the face of the university. The main quadrangle of Christ Church was turned into a cattle-pen. It became a substitute court, also, with satires and love poems circulating from hand to hand.

  Both sides now considered their strategies for the conflict to come. The royalist plan was slowly to descend on London from the north and the west, with Prince Rupert and his cavalry offering assistance from Oxford. The ports of Plymouth and Bristol in the west, and Hull in the north-east, were to be seized from parliament so that they could not become a menace to the flanks of any advancing armies. Parliament in turn already held London as well as the counties of the south-east and the midlands; it had determined to form them into ‘associations’ so that they could more easily combine and co-operate in the face of the enemy.

  Oliver Cromwell held true to his intention, expressed to his cousin, John Hampden, of creating a regiment that would be a match for ‘the gentlemen’ of the other side; he picked industrious and active men from a range of occupations whom Richard Baxter, a leader of the puritans, considered to be ‘of greater understanding than common soldiers’. If any of them swore he was fined a shilling; if he became drunk, he was set in the stocks. They became known, sometimes in praise and sometimes in irony, as ‘godly’ or ‘precious’ men.

  The first news was kind to Charles and his forces. One of his commanders, the earl of Newcastle, took York and seemed firmly in command of the northern counties. The king himself stormed Marlborough and seized it from a parliamentary force; he was, according to the French ambassador, ‘prodigal oi his exertions . . . more frequently on his horse than in his coach, from morning till night marching with his infantry’. Parliamentary prisoners were often sent to Coventry under armed guard; hence the familiar expression.

  Many still held to the belief that it would soon be over, their confidence strengthened by the opening of negotiations at Oxford between the two sides at the beginning of February 1643. Parliament had drafted some propositions for peace; in particular the king would be obliged to honour the bills already approved by parliament and allow the trial of certain ‘delinquents’. Although these terms were not to the king’s liking he maintained that ‘I shall do my part and take as much honey out of the gall as I can’. In a private communication, however, he wrote that God himself could not ‘draw peace out of these articles’. He replied with a list of conditions, the first of which was the return to him of his forts, revenues and ships. A few days later parliament voted that his answer was no answer at all. The hopes for peace were short-lived.

  The pace of the war was quickened with the return of the queen, Henrietta Maria, together with money and fresh arms from her brief exile. A severe and prolonged tempest kept her at sea. ‘Comfort yourselves, my dears,’ she told her attendants, ‘queens of England are never drowned.’ After she had landed at Bridlington in Yorkshire some ships in the service of parliament bombarded with cannon fire the house in which she lodged, forcing her to take refuge under a bank in a field. Parliament then destroyed her chapel in Somerset House, and a painting by Rubens that had been placed over the high altar was thrown into the Thames. Yet ‘Her She Majesty Generalissima’, as she styled herself, was not cowed. She travelled from York to her husband in Oxford with 3,000 infantry, thirty companies of horse and six cannon. In the early spring of 1643 John Evelyn recorded in his diary that the whole of southern England saw an apparition in the air; it was a shining cloud, in the shape of a sword with its point reaching towards the north ‘as bright as the moon’.

  The balance of the fighting in subsequent months seemed to be tilting towards the side of the royalists, but nothing was decided. The battles were small and often indecisive, but local victories were won on both sides. The best troops were those who fought for their own territories, naturally enough, but no large-scale engagement changed the fortunes of war.

  It was fought, piece by piece, across the nation without much central planning or control. Leeds had to be taken by the royalists, for example, to relieve the earl of Newcastle who might then go on to assist the earl of Derby who was hard-pressed in Lancashire. The king’s forces were besieging Gloucester but an army of Londoners under the command of Essex relieved it. The royalists were making gains in the north, but they lost the key town of Reading. Taunton fell to them, but Plymouth was saved by the parliamentary fleet. Small wars erupted in almost all of the counties. The citizens of one town might furnish a force for parliam
ent while the adjacent manor houses collected troops for the king. Very little of the action was co-ordinated properly. Opposing armies would come upon one another by chance. No one knew what was really happening.

  London was harassed by fears and rumours, its population swollen by refugees from the fighting elsewhere. In the spring of 1643 a great defensive earthwork began to rise around the city, and many houses in the suburbs were demolished to provide clean lines of fire from twenty-eight ‘works’ or forts that were ranged along it. Ramparts were constructed behind a ditch 3 yards wide, and the total height of the fortifications in some places reached 18 feet; the ‘wall’ surrounded the city in a circuit of 11 miles. Much of it was built within three months by the citizens themselves. The Venetian ambassador estimated that 20,000 men, women and children were engaged in the work; the ‘furious and zealous people’, as John Evelyn described them, were so enthusiastic that they even worked on Sundays. No trace of this great wall of London survives.

  The city also had to be defended from the enemy within. It was believed that one third of the population still supported the king, and that many royalists had infiltrated the trained bands. At the beginning of June a royalist plot was discovered to take over the city and to arrest the leading parliamentarians; loose talk by some of the conspirators led to their arrest and interrogation. There was another enemy inside the city. It was ordered that the Cheapside Cross should be removed from the site where it had stood for 350 years; all other ‘popish monuments’ were also to be destroyed.

  In May 1643 a small skirmish acquired, in retrospect, much significance. Oliver Cromwell was 2 miles outside Grantham with a small force of horsemen when he came across a division of royalists; they were twice the size of his company but at once he gave the signal to charge. Speed and surprise were always his favourite methods of warfare. The royalists broke ranks and fled from the scene or, as Cromwell himself put it, ‘with this handful it pleased God to cast the scale’. A number of ‘godly’ men, inspired by their commander, had defeated an apparently stronger enemy.