The Prince's Gambit: Major Stryker and the the Relief of Newark

by Michael Arnold

  ‘It is not,’ Stryker said, uncurling his fingers from the shark-skin sword grip. He could just make out the speaker as a round-faced, thin-haired man in his fifties, with a clean chin and lips pressed into a thin, anxious line. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘North Muskham, sir. St Wilfrid’s.’

  ‘We would rest for a time, Father…?’

  ‘Bertram,’ the round face replied, hauling the door back further. He stepped aside to allow them into the nave. ‘Come. I have bread and some ale. A poor offering, but welcome by the looks of you.’ The priest swept along the nave, stopping before an impressively large chancel. He placed his hand on the wooden bar that separated the altar from the rest of the church. ‘You have not made to slight my Romish rail, sir. You are king’s men, then?’

  Stryker hesitated, eventually deciding to take the risk. ‘Aye, Father, we are.’

  Bertram nodded, the muscles at his jaw visibly relaxing. ‘Then you are all the more welcome. The rebels have many of the Puritan persuasion in their ranks. Men who would take hammers to the more beautiful aspects of this place. Your name, sir?’

  ‘Major Stryker.’

  ‘A major?’ Bertram echoed. He glanced pointedly at the three men in their wake. ‘And where are the rest of your fighters?’

  ‘I am a reformado,’ Stryker explained. ‘An officer who has lost his regiment.’

  The priest’s eyebrows twitched upwards. ‘Lost?’

  Stryker shook his head. The shipwreck that had seen half his company lost off the Isles of Scilly was too painful to discuss with a stranger. ‘Lost, Father Bertram. My commission had been with Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Foot, but no longer.’

  Bertram offered a kindly smile. ‘If you have no regiment, Major, then to whom do you report?’

  ‘My duties are of a detached nature,’ Stryker answered. In truth, he was not entirely sure how best to describe his current fortunes. The loss of his company had been hard to accept, not least because he suspected the grandees of the Royalist cause had engineered his freedom from regimental duty for their own ends. Prince Rupert now commanded his every move. The king’s nephew – and His Majesty’s greatest warrior – had long meddled in Stryker’s affairs, often dispatching him on clandestine duties in the face of Sir Edmund’s understandable chagrin. Now Stryker had no colonel to tie him down. He was the prince’s creature; his personal attack-dog, intelligencer and assassin.

  ‘Detached and dangerous,’ Bertram said, letting his gaze dart between the soldiers, ‘by my reckoning.’

  ‘You’ve nothing to fear from we four, Father,’ Stryker said. He indicated his comrades with a nod. ‘This is Lieutenant Hood, and this pair may look of the rough sort,’ he added, seeing Bertram’s eyes rest a moment upon the thickly mottled band of skin around Barkworth’s throat where once a noose had so nearly ended his life, ‘but they are good men.’

  The corner of Bertram’s eye flickered. ‘And what of you, Major?’

  ‘I claim nothing for myself,’ Stryker said brusquely.

  Bertram led them past the chancel, to an antechamber set into the outer wall. ‘You met Meldrum’s soldiers?’

  ‘Meldrum?’

  ‘The Parliament commander hereabouts. It is from him you hide, yes?’

  ‘We came by chance upon a small rebel force to the south of here. If Meldrum has troops hereabouts, then aye, I believe you’d be right. I was under the mistaken belief that Sir Richard Byron held the region for the king by means of the Newark garrison.’

  ‘Oh, he does yet, Major,’ Bertram said, drawing up five stools and perching on the edge of one. He waited for his guests to sit. ‘The crown’s colours flutter high above Newark castle, have no doubt, but outside? Sir John Meldrum arrived more than a week ago, at the head of more than seven thousand men.’

  ‘Christ,’ Stryker hissed, immediately regretting the outburst as his blasphemy echoed around the small room.

  Thomas Hood asked, ‘They lay siege to Newark, then?’

  ‘Indeed,’ the priest confirmed. ‘You stumbled not upon a fallen town, but the siege-works around it. Meldrum marched thither from Lincoln. He has with him ordnance too. You were unaware?’

  ‘We have been in the hills to the north, pursuing a most deadly quarry.’

  ‘Roundhead?’

  ‘Of a kind. A Scot. The Covenanters crossed the Tweed some weeks back.’

  ‘Been a slog for ’em,’ Skellen said, ‘as luck would have it.’

  ‘No luck,’ Bertram chided the sergeant. ‘It is our Lord’s hand. The Solemn League and Covenant is Satan’s work. It is God who slows their insidious spread.’

  Stryker’s gaze had fallen upon too many slaughters to contemplate any great benevolence behind the world’s workings, but it was true that the weather had badly hindered the invaders’ progress. ‘It snows hard in the north, then it thaws apace. The roads are akin to rivers, the rivers are lakes.’

  ‘How far have they striven?’ Bertram asked.

  ‘Sunderland, last we heard.’

  Bertram blew out his fleshy cheeks. ‘Then His Majesty may no longer starve London of its coal.’

  Stryker was impressed by the priest’s grasp of the situation. London, the centre of the rebellion, had endured a bitter winter, with fuel prices climbing by the day. Now that Sunderland and its rich reserves of coal had been taken by their new Scots allies, Parliament’s fortunes would doubtless rise. ‘Quite, Father. It is a bitter blow. Their presence on English soil does great mischief without the need for battle. And mark my words, they will move south when the moment is opportune. The man we hunted was an agent for those very Covenanters. He passed messages between the Scots and Westminster.’

  ‘A man of import,’ Bertram said.

  ‘Why Newark, sir?’ Hood ventured. ‘Why does the enemy not move north upon our more powerful garrisons? Lord Newcastle’s bastions like York or Durham?’

  ‘They have the Scottish army now to clear him out of Yorkshire and Northumberland,’ Stryker said. ‘Besides, Newark is small, but significant for all that. She controls the River Trent, and stands astride the junction of the Great North Road and the Fosse Way.’

  ‘The latter,’ Bertram added, ‘being the only major route between the king’s western territories and those in the north.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘More crucially still, without the great roads by which he might move his forces, my lord Newcastle could not move against Parliament’s Eastern Association, should he manage to defeat the Covenanters in battle.’

  ‘So that bugger McCroskey,’ Barkworth rasped, ‘found his saviour by chance. Meldrum’s rat-humping scouts.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Forgive me, Father.’

  It started raining, the patter of heavy droplets thrumming about the high rafters like an orchestra of tiny drums. Bertram rose to his feet, rubbing white palms against the cold. ‘We are for the cause of the Stuarts, hereabouts, Major Stryker. You may have whatever assistance I can offer.’

  Stryker smiled. ‘You have my deepest thanks, Father, and whatever coin we four might muster. We will be no trouble, and I mean to move on as soon as the time is right.’

  ‘Where will you go?’ Bertram asked. ‘Back to the king at Oxford?’

  ‘Without McCroskey?’ replied Stryker. He glanced at Hood, at Skellen and at Barkworth. He shook his head. ‘No, Father. We go to Newark.’

  11 March 1644

  Sir John Meldrum was not a satisfied man. It was an unnatural temper. Indeed, for one often chided by his peers for possessing a disposition akin to a cold trout, he felt quite giddy.

  After almost two weeks of watching Newark’s smoke trails meander skyward from behind thick defences, his army had achieved precious little. Meldrum had arrived at Newark on the final day of the old month, with two thousand horse and five thousand foot. The ordnance had lumbered up at the rear to the coarse tune of drivers’ bellows and braying oxen, but eventually they had taken up position; a pair of black-mouthed mortars and eleven substantial cannon. A formidabl
e sight they must have made from high up on Newark castle’s rampart, and Meldrum had taken pleasure in imagining Sir Richard Byron pacing the corridors of the ancient fortress at night, unable to sleep. Meldrum had been confident that the town would not take long to capitulate.

  ‘Yet here we are,’ he muttered, plucking a handkerchief from his sleeve. He was standing beside a mound of earth that was screened across its front edge by half a dozen wicker gabions, each one filled to the brim with soil and rubble. It was one of his new redoubts, positioned just off the Fosse Way to pound the town, and he absently watched the men working in tireless repetition about the gun that perched behind the shield.

  ‘Sir John?’ An aide wearing a silver-threaded coat appeared.

  Meldrum dabbed his right eye, inspecting the cloth for a speck of grit. ‘I said here we are,’ he repeated, turning to the aide. ‘Our efforts have come to nothing, and the enemy have plenty of supplies. It will take time to break their resolve.’

  ‘Time we have, Colonel,’ the aide chirped happily. ‘The Scotch army keeps Lord Newcastle tied in knots, so says our new friend.’ He glanced up at the redoubt. ‘And Sweet Lips will do her duty.’

  Meldrum followed the younger man’s gaze. ‘She has pocked their defences already,’ he conceded, noting the blackened hands of the mattrosses as they scuttled about the vast piece, the gun captain snapping orders as though they were errant schoolboys. She was certainly an impressive sight. The heaviest of his heavy guns, a mighty thirty-two pounder, known as Sweet Lips to the men. She had been named by her founder in Hull, so the rumour went, after a local harlot, and the bawdy sort in his ranks had propagated the tradition with unseemly relish. Meldrum was content for the name to persist, though he suspected the more puritanical sections under his command would snuff it out given the chance. If you get us in, he thought, eyeing her sleek barrel, they may call you what they wish.

  But impressive size did not equal swift success. He breathed out through his long, sharp nose, the air tickling the grey bristles of his moustache, and stared at the Newark skyline. ‘If she had only her decrepit walls, Sweet Lips and her kin would have reduced them to dust by now.’ The old town walls remained, of course, but they had been rendered almost obsolete by a circuit of robust earthen defences, punctuated by large, spiked bastions from where artillery could be deployed. Newark’s previous leader, a professional soldier named Henderson, had brought technical know-how from his service in Africa and the Low Countries. But it was more than that, Meldrum suspected. At the first rattle of scabbards, towns and cities across the land had been unprepared for this bitter conflict. Their aldermen had clutched purse-strings tight, baulked at requests for storm-poles and axes, carts and shovels, and feared the necessary influx of soldiery that a siege would bring. Now things were different. All across the nation, from Basing House in the south, to Gloucester and Bristol in the west, and Hull in the north, armies surrounded the garrisoned communities of their enemies and worked to bombard, undermine, storm or starve them out. And with each new siege, the citizens of those beleaguered places would recall the events of the last, eliminating the mistakes and refining the successes. ‘Newark has learnt well,’ Meldrum said bleakly, studying the distant figures of men as they walked along the new rampart, their very presence a challenge to Parliament’s supremacy in the region. A dark cloud descended over his mood again, and he turned his back on the town. His temples ached. ‘Did you know, Matthew, that I trained as an engineer back home in Scotland? Before the war, I built lighthouses for the king.’

  Meldrum made to walk away, striding back up the road towards the jagged and flame-scorched ruins of a once grand building. The ruins, named locally as the Spittal, had been turned into his headquarters. He slipped a hand into his pocket, letting his fingers snake around the smooth lump of North Foreland chalk he kept always about his person, a keepsake of happier times.

  ‘Those new earthworks are nought but heaped mud,’ the aide said with a derisive sniff, as he struggled to keep up. ‘No stone therein. They will not stand.’

  ‘And what of the ditch?’ Meldrum retorted, feeling the irritation rise again. ‘It is deep and wide, with sheer slopes made of timber-faced spoil.’ He rounded on the aide. ‘You volunteer to lead a forlorn hope across?’

  The aide stepped nimbly back, his reedy throat convulsing as he swallowed. ‘My duties are better acquitted here, Sir John. In the role of assisting your person.’

  Meldrum grunted. ‘I thought as much.’

  The road was filthy. It had rained incessantly during the march down from Lincoln, a bitter, driving rain that stung eyes and turned the earth to a morass. The rivers that spread like veins from the main course of the Trent had swollen alarmingly, and many had burst their banks to fill every hole and ditch along the road, flooding the furrows ploughed by the artillery train and turning every infantryman’s pace into a cloying, sucking fight for momentum. But Meldrum had driven them on. They had been happy in their billets, warm beside the hearths of commandeered homes and packed taverns, and he was not deaf to their grumbling as they trudged south and west, but trudge they would. Newark was key. Parliament wanted it captured as a matter of priority, and Sir John Meldrum was honoured to have been chosen to execute the task. The men could gripe all they wanted.

  They entered the Spittal, stony-faced halberdiers doffing caps as their commander moved across the planks spanning a fresh ditch, and between the rows of spiked poles that bristled at its perimeter. They snaked their way through the lanes of cleared rubble to one of the few robust rooms left in the place. The ancient hospice had been destroyed during an abortive attack by local Parliamentarians the previous year, and was little more than a charred shell, but its position just to the north-east of the town placed it close to the Trent and to the Great North Road, and it virtually straddled the Fosse Way. It was an ideal base, and Meldrum had spent several days fortifying the grounds so that it was now a fully functioning military leaguer.

  His boots crunched as he went to a modest campaign table that was almost completely covered in stacks of paper, ink and quills. At its centre a cloth had been draped to protect the map beneath. ‘Have the mortars been moved?’ he said without looking up.

  ‘They have, Sir John,’ the aide answered, though his own attention was fixed firmly upon the ceiling. Its beams creaked and groaned, debris skittering down the walls in sporadic flurries to pile like tiny snowdrifts at the edges of the floor’s smashed tiles. ‘They will be ready by nightfall.’

  Meldrum traced the route the mortars would have taken with a grimy finger. From his main redoubt to the south of the Spittal, arcing north and west around the town, before crossing the Trent over the new bridge he had ordered constructed. Newark’s west flank was protected by the river. Moreover, the Trent split just to the south of the town, so that its two branches had formed a double barrier when first Meldrum had arrived. The land between those watercourses was known as the Island, and it had been yet another obstacle for his freshly raised army to surmount, for Muskham Bridge, the only crossing onto that flat pasture, had been garrisoned by a strong body of infantry and a small sconce. Eventually they had stormed Muskham Bridge and taken control of the Island, cutting off Byron’s contact with the outside world, and providing Meldrum with the perfect platform from which to bombard that side of the town. The castle played the part of the main bastion on that flank, while no earthworks had been thrown up on that side at all. It should have been so simple. And yet, he thought, it was all taking too damned long. His guts felt suddenly queasy.

  Meldrum plucked one of the quills from a wooden pot and dipped it into the inkwell. He let the nib hover above the page, glancing up quickly. ‘And you, sir?’

  A man rose from a low stool in the corner of the room. ‘Me, sir?’

  Meldrum fixed his gaze on the man. ‘You will remain?’

  He was perhaps two decades younger than Meldrum’s half-century, with clean-shaven face, closely cropped hair that was the colour of hay, and
light blue eyes. He was sturdily built, but moved stiffly, keeping his arms fixed firmly at his sides. ‘I am grievous hurt, Sir John.’

  ‘God smiled on you, Master McCroskey,’ Meldrum said.

  ‘It does not feel that way, I can assure you,’ McCroskey answered.

  Meldrum stifled a smile. In some ways it was pleasant – comforting, even – to hear another voice from his homeland, but the man was an intelligencer, and Meldrum had an innate antipathy to such men. Especially as this one was arrogant as a cockerel. McCroskey had been rescued out to the north by a troop of dragoons he had subsequently commandeered as his personal bodyguards, ordering them to convey him safely to the nearest Parliamentarian unit. Such an assumption of authority, especially from one without so much as a recognised commission, stuck hard and sharp in Meldrum’s throat.

  McCroskey sidled awkwardly to the table. ‘I will write to my masters at the Committee. Inform them of my current difficulty. I will join them in due course.’

  Meldrum looked back down at the map. He drew a line across the Trent, to the north-east of the smudge denoting Newark, to mark the position of the new bridge. It was a temporary structure in truth, made of lighters – flat-bottomed barges – tethered tightly together and capped by a runway of stout planks, but it would make life far easier for the besieging force, providing a second crossing onto the Island. ‘My sympathies.’

  ‘No matter,’ McCroskey replied, wincing. ‘I am free. The villainous malignant who had me captured would surely have seen me hanged. Here I will recover and then I will return to my work.’ He perused the map. ‘Still, I am afforded the opportunity to witness this Cavalier town fall. A good day, that will be, and no mistake.’

  Meldrum was not listening. He was wondering how long he had left before the enemy would rouse themselves to Newark’s aid.