Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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258 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
headed by the former Lord Mayor Gardiner to organize an armed rising in the
city on his behalf. He did not activate the commission immediately, but at the
beginning of May he sent it to London with instructions to his agents to enlist
as many as possible of the peace party in both Houses. The chief conspirator
was the MP and poet Edmund Waller, who had just been one of parliament’s
commissioners in the Oxford treaty. Waller’s contacts included the Eart of
Northumberland and other peers, and in the Commons John Selden, Bul-
strode Whitelocke, and the diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes, though the degree of
their implication varied, and stopped short of treachery. At the end of May,
however, the Commons discovered the commission and exposed the plot.
Two prominent conspirators, one of them Waller’s brother-in-law, were
hanged in front of their own houses, but Waller himself, who was rich as well
as treacherous, saved his life by a combination of bribery and informing on
his contacts. He got off with a £10,000 fine and banishment.
The king in fact had a stronger will for victory at this stage than the parlia-
ment collectively was displaying. He also had more positive plans for achiev-
ing it, for the direction of parliament’s war effort lay in the hands of an
unwieldy Committee of Safety, and Essex was continuing to show himself a
rather supine general, in imperfect control of various nominally subordinate
forces and in no hurry to take the field with his main army, despite repeated
pleas to do so from the parliamentary activists. His sympathies were with the
peace party, and while he wintered at Windsor his army shrank to about a
third of its original size, partly because parliament was not providing enough
money to pay his men, and partly because many of them just melted away
while their colonels and other commanders went home for a prolonged win-
ter’s leave. He did not march out of Windsor until 13 April, the day that par-
liament recalled its commissioners from Oxford.
The royalists meanwhile were far more active. Charles had three concen-
trations of forces large enough to be called armies: his own, based in Oxford,
Newcastle’s in the north, and Hopton’s in the south-west. He has often been
credited with a grand strategy involving them in a three-pronged attack on
London, but there is no documentary evidence of such a co-ordinated plan.
Judging from his military decisions month by month, his main concern was to
extend the territory under his control, and that made sense in the circum-
stances, for the only way he could pay his men was by levying contributions
wherever he held sway. The more territory, the more revenue; and the same
went for recruits, for from May 1643 onward his commanders were raising
men by impressment. Should he have gone for the jugular and banked every-
thing on a swift concerted attack on London? This has been suggested, on the
grounds that time was ultimately against him and that his enemies were
almost bound to grow stronger, especially when the Scots came in on the par-
liament’s side. But the risks would have been enormous, and in military terms
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The Blast of War 259
the tide was not really to turn against him until 1645. Parliament had quite
sizeable local forces in Yorkshire, the Midlands, East Anglia and Devon, and
it is more than doubtful whether Newcastle and Hopton could have fought
their way through to the capital, even if they had been able to hold their
troops together so far from home. London had the will to defend itself when
really threatened, as Turnham Green had shown, and if the king’s army had
met with a decisive defeat, he might have been left without the territorial
resources to raise another before parliament established an overwhelming
advantage. As it turned out, he and his commanders did so well in 1643 that
it must be doubted whether a more grandiose strategy would have served him
as well.
During the early part of the year Charles appointed three more regional
commanders, in addition to Newcastle and Hopton: the Marquis of Hertford
in Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and south-east Wales, the Earl of Carbery
in south-west Wales, and Lord Capel in Cheshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire
and north Wales. During March and April he sent Prince Maurice, Rupert’s
younger brother, with a detachment of his main Oxford-based army to meet
the threat that Sir William Waller’s force was posing in the Severn valley, in
company with Sir Edward Massey, the parliamentarian governor of Glouces-
ter. Before Maurice arrived, however, Waller defeated Herbert’s Welshmen
at Highnam on 24 March, and then went on to take Monmouth and Chep-
stow, while Massey at his direction seized Tewkesbury. Maurice checked
Waller’s further advance towards Worcester with a clear victory at Ripple
Field on 13 April, but he was then recalled to Oxford. Waller went on to cap-
ture Hereford on the 25th, together with a whole clutch of local
royalist leaders, and he could reckon that for the present his battle for the
Severn valley was won.
Meanwhile Hopton and his Cornishmen continued to wage a minor cam-
paign against the parliamentarians of Devon under the Earl of Stamford. His
second attempt to strike into Devon ended in a defeat at Modbury on 21 Feb-
ruary, and it suited both sides to agree on a forty-day cessation of hostilities.
When this ran out, Stamford had a slight superiority with about 3,500 foot
and 8 troops of horse, but Hopton’s nucleus of 3,000 infantry was reinforced
by many volunteers. The parliamentarians made the first move, led by the
25-year-old Major-General James Chudleigh, Stamford being laid low by the
gout. They struck at Launceston and gave Hopton a hard time holding it, but
a day-long fight on Beacon Hill on 23 April turned in his favour when badly
needed reinforcements reached him during the course of it. Chudleigh was
eventually forced to withdraw to Okehampton, but when Hopton pursued
him into Devon he set a skilful ambush at Sourton Down, where he got rather
the better of a confused night action on the 25th. The royalists retreated into
Cornwall in disorder, leaving 1,000 muskets, 100 horses, 5 precious barrels
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260 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
of powder, and all Hopton’s own papers behind them. From the latter, Stam-
ford learned that the king had ordered Hopton to lead his Cornishmen into
Somerset and join Prince Maurice’s forces, so he decided to foil this by a pre-
emptive strike into Cornwall while Hopton’s men were still shaken by their
recent defeat. He had a two to one advantage when he posted his army for
battle on Stamford Hill—a lucky name, did he think?—just north of Stratton
on 15 May. But Hopton’s little army was in good heart again, and he resolved
to attack next morning. The battle of Stamford began at 5 a.m. with the Cor-
nish foot charging uphill in four columns, and after many repeated assaults it
was still undecided eight hours later, by which time their powder was almost
spent. But these tired brave men made one final effort, holding their fire until
they faced the enemy on the level top of the hill, where they put them to total
rout. Stamford, who had committed his few cavalry elsewhere, lost about
300 dead, 1,700 prisoners, all his guns and powder, and all his baggage and
treasure.
Hopton never won a finer victory, and thanks to it he duly joined up with
Maurice’s and Hertford’s forces at Chard on 4 June, even though he had to
leave Plymouth and Exeter in parliamentarian hands in his rear. This con-
junction gave the king a sizeable army in the west, though not a harmonious
one. There was rivalry among the commanders and friction in the ranks, with
no love lost between Hopton’s foot and Maurice’s favoured cavalry, who
jibbed in turn at the Cornishmen’s lack of discipline when not in action. But
the royalists’ strength in Somerset drew Waller off from Worcester, which he
had been besieging, and when they took Taunton and threatened Wells he fol-
lowed after them. Waller had the better of a heavy cavalry skirmish at Chew-
ton Mendip on 10 June, which gave him a much needed breathing-space in
which to build up his depleted army. With about 2,500 horse he was strong
enough in that arm but seriously short of infantry, for most of Stamford’s
Devonians had gone off home. He was now directly opposed to his old friend
Hopton, who despite Hertford’s superior rank was really the effective com-
mander of their combined forces. The war in the West was entering a new
phase, but before recounting its dramatic course in July we must catch up
with what had been happening in central and northern England.
While Essex lay inactive all through the Treaty of Oxford, Charles’s local
commanders secured Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Tamworth, Lichfield, Stafford, and
Stratford-on-Avon for him. The queen had landed at Bridlington on 22 Feb-
ruary with several ships carrying munitions and money, and after surviving a
frightening bombardment she had, under Newcastle’s protecting forces, car-
ried these welcome supplies to York. One object of the fighting in the Mid-
lands during the spring was to clear her further passage to Oxford, for she
brought not only arms but a considerable body of troops that she had recent-
ly raised herself. The main resistance came from Lord Brooke, who was
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The Blast of War 261
commissioned under Essex to command the counties of Warwick, Stafford,
Leicester, and Derby. He recaptured Stratford by storm, secured all Warwick-
shire for the parliament, and went on to attack Lichfield, but there a defend-
er’s bullet struck him in the eye and killed him instantly. His death was a
serious political loss to the parliament, and a worse was soon to follow. Lich-
field fell soon after to Sir John Gell, the parliamentary governor of Derby,
whose troops were as notorious for plundering as he was for womanizing (it is
well to be reminded that neither activity was confined to the side which
became most notorious for it). Gell, however, was challenged by Northamp-
ton’s forces, now near Stafford, having lately been strengthened by several
cavalry regiments under Henry Hastings, the king’s Colonel-General of
Leicestershire. Gell planned to make a rendezvous with Brereton’s Cheshire
troops on 19 March on Hopton Heath, three miles from Stafford, prior to
attacking that town. But Brereton arrived late, and before his and Gell’s men
had effected a proper junction they were furiously attacked by Northamp-
ton’s cavalry. The result of this fierce little action was a decided royalist vic-
tory, in which the parliamentarians lost all their guns and about 500 men.
The victors lost fewer than fifty, but one of them was Northampton, who was
unhorsed in a rash charge and slain after refusing quarter.
Charles now sent Rupert to secure his corridor to the north. On the way,
the prince was resisted for two hours by the citizens and tiny garrison of Birm-
ingham, for which insolence he fired the town and give it over to plunder. This
was a whiff of the continental wars in which he had learnt his trade, and it
earned him a mild rebuke from the king. He went on to recapture Lichfield on
21 April, after a two-week siege, but at that point Charles recalled him and
his brigade to Oxford, to counter a threat from the parliament’s main army.
Essex was on the move at last, and heading towards Oxford. He took
Reading on 26 April after a short siege, but with his army struck by an epi-
demic and further thinned by desertions he advanced no further for six more
weeks. On 10 June he occupied Thame, only ten miles from Oxford, and he
posted some of his units even closer, but he was not prepared either to assault
or to besiege the city, and by dispersing his forces over a wide area he made
them vulnerable. Colonel John Urry here made the first of his three changes of
side and carried full information of Essex’s dispositions to royal headquar-
ters, along with intelligence that a convoy was on its way to him with £21,000
for his soldiers’ pay. Rupert set out to intercept it with some 1,350 horse and
dragoons and 500 picked infantrymen, but a countryman gave the parlia-
mentarians warning of his approach, and their nearest units tried to cut off his
retreat to Oxford. These included John Hampden’s own foot regiment, and
in a minor cavalry action on Chalgrove Field Hampden exposed himself far
beyond the call of duty and was mortally wounded. He died six days later.
Only Pym would be missed more among the parliamentary leaders, and his
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262 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
days too were numbered. Essex got no further in his sluggish moves against
Oxford, for during July a series of disasters in the west forced parliament
upon the defensive. But it was not only there that the war was going badly
for it.
In the north, the Fairfaxes’ hold on the West Riding had been secured by Sir
Thomas’s capture of Leeds in January, but their position in the rest of York-
shire was precarious at best. The Hothams had not yet betrayed Hull, though
they were wobbling, but Scarborough was lost when its governor Sir Hugh
Cholmley MP, who had fought at the head of his own regiment at Edgehill,
went over to the king soon after the queen had landed in the country. New-
castle’s forces dominated the north-east, and southward in Nottinghamshire
there was a strong royalist garrison in Newark, which beat off a large-scale
attack on 27 February with heavy losses to the assailants. Late in March the
Fairfaxes decided to abandon their headquarters at Selby and fall back on
Leeds; Sir Thomas occupied Tadcaster to cover their withdrawal. Newcastle
sent George Goring with a strong body of horse and dragoons to retake the
town, and on the 30th Goring struck at the retreating Yorkshiremen on
Seacroft Moor near Leeds, killing 200 of them and taking 800 prisoners.
By late April the concentration of royalist forces around Newark was rais-
ing serious fears in parliament that they intended to advance southward
through its heartland in eastern England and threaten London itself. To
defend it, an Eastern Association had been formed in December, embracing
Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, and Hertfordshire (Lincolnshire
was later added), and at parliament’s direction Essex had commissioned Lord
Grey of Warke as its Major-General. In February 1643, however, Grey and
most of his forces were sent to reinforce Essex’s shrunken army in the Thames
valley, leaving Colonel Cromwell (as he now was) with his own regiment of
horse and a small scratch body of foot to guard the territory on its threatened
Lincolnshire frontier.
Cromwell was forty-four and had no military experience whatever when
he first raised a troop of horse at the outbreak of war, but by the spring of
1643 the troop had grown to a full regiment—about half of the eventual
double regiment of fourteen troops that was to become famous as the Iron-
sides. It already had a special character, for he had sought from the start to
enlist, not only as officers but as troopers too, ‘such men as had the fear of God
before them, and made some conscience of what they did’. Especially after
witnessing the superior mettle of the royalist cavalry at Edgehill, he looked for
‘men of a spirit that is like to go as far as a gentleman will go’.
18
When the
Suffolk county committee cavilled at the modest birth of one of his troop
commanders, he replied: ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that
18
Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 471.
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The Blast of War 263
knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a
gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’
19
His
method of defending the Eastern Association was to attack those who threat-
ened it. He occupied Peterborough, then bombarded Crowland into submis-
sion on 28 April. He joined up with Sir John Hotham and Lord Willoughby
of Parham, with their forces from Hull and Lincolnshire respectively, intend-
ing a combined attack on Newark. That did not materialize, but on 13 May
he and his own cavalry routed a body of royalist horse at Grantham. It was a
minor action and his subsequent career has inflated its reputation, but it was
the first to be fought under his command and it staked his Ironsides’ claim to
meet the cavaliers on more than equal terms. More might have been achieved
if he and Hotham and Willoughby had all been of the same purpose, but
between them they failed to prevent the queen from taking two successive
convoys of munitions from Newark to Oxford. Cromwell and Hotham were
‘ready to cut each others’ throats’,
20
and no wonder, since Hotham and his
son were just waiting for their chance to betray Hull, and Lincoln too if they
could, to the king. Their treachery was discovered in time, however, and both
were captured, tried, and executed. How far it was due to a genuine revulsion
against the parliament’s proceedings, and how far to frustrated ambition and
jealousy of the Fairfaxes, it is difficult to say.
Once the queen was safe in Oxford, Newcastle moved against the Fair-
faxes with the intention of mastering the whole of Yorkshire. He had about
10,000 men, they about 4,000, plus an uncertain number of untrained coun-
trymen with improvised weapons. They appealed to Hotham, Willoughby,
and Cromwell to come to their aid with their combined forces, but Cromwell
had his own territory to defend and Hotham’s heart was on the other side.
Unsupported, they gave battle to Newcastle on Adwalton Moor near Leeds
on 30 June, and at the end of a hard-fought action, in which the cavalry on
both sides distinguished themselves, the larger forces won. Bradford and
Leeds defended themselves with Sir Thomas’s help for as long as they could
but had finally to yield, and the Fairfaxes retreated first to Selby and then to
Hull. It was the nadir of parliament’s fortunes in the north.
July was a month of royalist victories, and the most striking were in the
west. When it began, Waller was defending Bath and Hopton was advancing
against him. On the 4th Waller took up a strong position on Lansdowne Hill,
north-west of the city, and Hopton attacked it next day. In the bitter battle
that ensued the royalist cavalry were repelled and suffered heavy casualties,
but the hill was eventually won by the heroic Cornish infantry. They were still
19
Ibid., I, 256.
20
Quoted in Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge,
1974), p. 74.
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264 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
unsure of their success when night fell, but the lighted matches and bristling
pikes which Waller left on his last position proved to be feints to cover his
withdrawal. It was an inconclusive victory, however, and a costly one, for Sir
Bevil Grenville, Hopton’s loyalest and most popular commander, was killed
as he led the Cornish foot in their final triumphant assault. Next day Hopton
himself was badly burnt and injured when a powder-wagon blew up very
close to him. Temporarily blinded and paralysed, he insisted on being carried
to councils of war, for he would not leave his post while the royalist forces
remained threatened by Waller’s still unbroken army.
Those forces took up a defensive position in Devizes. They were seriously
short of ammunition, and the council of war decided to send Hertford and
Maurice and their cavalry back to Oxford as fast as possible with an urgent
plea for reinforcements. It was promptly met, and by the morning of 13 July
Lord Wilmot (as he now was) was approaching Devizes with 1,500 horse
from the king’s main army. For two or three days Waller had been trying to
bombard Devizes Castle into submission, and he had his army drawn up for
battle on Roundway Down, just to the north of it. Wilmot attacked, expect-
ing Hopton’s infantry to come out of the town and support him. But they did
not do so until the battle was in its last stages, and the total rout of Waller’s
army in which it ended must be credited to Wilmot’s leadership and the
tremendous courage of his cavalry, which included Byron’s and Maurice’s
and the Earl of Crawford’s regiments as well as his own. Most of Waller’s
forces that escaped death or capture quietly melted away, many to their
homes, and he took the remnant first to Gloucester, then to Evesham, and
finally back to London.
Wilmot returned to Oxford after his victory, but as he did so Rupert set out
with a very substantial force to join the western army, which had already
occupied Bath. His objective was Bristol, and on 24 July he summoned the
city to surrender. Its governor, Saye’s son Nathaniel Fiennes, refused, though
his garrison of 1,500 foot and 300 horse was insufficient to man the three-
mile circumference of its defences. Rupert’s council of war was divided about
storming it, but he carried a decision in favour. The action began at 3 a.m. on
the 26th and was fought fiercely, with heavy losses, until Fiennes asked for
terms in the early evening. He had defended the city for as long as he reason-
ably could against very determined assailants, skilfully directed and greatly
superior in numbers. He did not deserve to be court-martialled and sentenced
to death, as he was on his return to London, but Essex to his honour secured
his reprieve. The loss of Bristol, however, was a very severe blow. After its
fall the Earl of Caernarvon set about reducing Dorset, while Maurice did the
same in Devon. Plymouth, Exeter, Lyme, and two or three smaller outposts
remained in parliamentarian hands, but almost all the rest of England to the
west and south of Gloucester lay under the king’s control. Charles appeared
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The Blast of War 265
in person to summon Gloucester itself on 10 August, but Massey defied
him. As the summer wore on, Gloucester’s precarious resistance to its
besiegers seemed the one bright spot in a bleak picture.
On the political front, the run of reverses was already serious enough by
mid-July to bring the Lords to agree to what the Commons had been urging
since May, namely to seek the support of a Scottish army. A convention of
estates, similar to a Scottish parliament in composition but with more limit-
ed powers, had assembled in Edinburgh on 22 June. The English parliament
sent commissioners to negotiate with it for a military alliance, but serious
doubts about its own will to continue the struggle began to arise before they
even arrived in Edinburgh. On 4 August the Lords gave their assent to a set of
propositions for peace which amounted to virtual surrender, and the Com-
mons voted two days later to take them into consideration. Many of the less
pusillanimous members were of course absent on active service, but the terms
proposed were abject, and a crowd of 5,000 demonstrated angrily against
them in Palace Yard. Essex refused to support them, and the Commons reject-
ed them on the 7th, though by only seven votes. It was a close thing, and
during the next two days crowds of women clamoured for peace outside the
House, pelting its guards with stones, and some shouting ‘Give us that dog
Pym!’ This was the context in which Henry Marten was expelled from par-
liament for suggesting that it should rid itself of the house of Stuart.
But the mood in the capital was not totally defeatist, and the City corpor-
ation remained staunch. Largely at its instigation, parliament was persuaded to
raise a new army of 11,000 under Waller’s command, with the remnants of his
western brigade as its nucleus and the defence of London as its main role. Essex,
whose dislike and resentment of Waller were strongly recriprocated, was
unwilling to grant him a commission, but under pressure from the Commons
and at the persuasion of Pym, to whose steady support he owed much, he did so
on 7 August. Five days later, again in compliance with directions given by par-
liament on Pym’s recommendation, Essex commissioned the Earl of Manches-
ter as Sergeant-Major-General of the Eastern Association in place of Grey of
Warke, who was ineffectual as a commander and suspect in his commitment to
the parliamentarian cause. Manchester was empowered to recruit up to 20,000
men, but though his army never achieved anything like that strength it was to
play a major part, with Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of the Horse, in the
campaigns of 1644. As for Essex himself, however much his sympathies lay
with the peace party his loyalty to parliament was never in doubt. With an army
reinforced from the London trained bands to 15,000 he set off resolutely on
26 August to relieve Gloucester. He swept aside an attempt by Rupert and a
cavalry force to check his progress near Stow-on-the-Wold on 4 September, and
then, when the Gloucester garrison was down to three barrels of powder, he
forced the royalists to raise the siege.
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266 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
But even as he marched, Barnstaple and Bideford surrendered to the king’s
forces, and Maurice took the greater prize of Exeter on 4 September. Charles
was determined to bring Essex to battle, and sought to bar his passage back
to London. The two armies, both about 14,000 strong, shadowed each other
for days, in long marches through almost continuous rain. On 19 September
Essex found his way barred by the royalists at Newbury and was forced to
give battle. Charles and Rupert had high hopes that it would be a decisive one,
for they had the advantage in cavalry, and many of Essex’s foot were London
militiamen. But in the fierce fight that lasted all the next day these part-time
soldiers acquitted themselves heroically under Skippon’s leadership, and the
outcome was still undecided when darkness fell. Casualties were heavy, and
the saddest of all was Falkland, who felt such misery over the war that he rode
deliberately into a gap raked by musket fire. As Secretary of State he had no
call to be on the field at all, but he was riding in Byron’s own troop as a vol-
unteer. In the end the royal army, which was short of powder and shot, left
the field in the dark and retired to Oxford, leaving Essex a clear road to Read-
ing and London. The Lord General never fought a better campaign.
The remaining military actions of the autumn confirmed that the tide of
royalist victory was ebbing for the present, though they left the ultimate out-
come of the war still wide open. In the north Newcastle, whom the king had
just made a marquis, laid siege to Hull early in September with an army of
about 15,000, but he did not press it vigorously and he lost many men
through desertion. Sir Thomas Fairfax was able to get his cavalry out of the
city, and Manchester to reinforce its garrison with 500 Eastern Association
foot. Manchester himself took Lynn, which had declared for the king in
August, after a brief siege on 16 September. He and Cromwell and Sir
Thomas Fairfax then joined forces at Boston and advanced further north to
besiege Bolingbroke Castle. A strong force from the Newark garrison rode
out to challenge them, but it was routed with heavy losses in a brief but fierce
battle at Winceby on 11 October. It was mainly a cavalry action, and it is
memorable as the first in which Cromwell and Fairfax fought together. Fair-
fax played the greater part in it, for Cromwell’s horse was shot dead in the
first charge and fell with him beneath it, and though he got back into the
action on a trooper’s mount it is not clear how far he affected its outcome.
On the same day as the Winceby fight, the elder Fairfax’s garrison sallied
out of Hull and fought all day against its besiegers with such effect that New-
castle broke up the siege that night. Nine days later Lincoln surrendered to
Manchester, and all danger of a southward advance by the royalists through
eastern England now seemed past. The king was doing better in the south,
however, for units of his main army retook Reading on 3 October, and
others briefly occupied Newport Pagnell and Towcester, though they were
forced to abandon them before the month was out. Hopton was advancing
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eastward again, but he suffered two severe setbacks when Waller stormed
Alton on 13 December and captured Arundel Castle on 6 January, taking
large numbers of prisoners in both actions. Hundreds of them promptly
enlisted in the parliamentarian forces, a sign that war was already becoming a
way of life for many a common soldier.
By the turn of the year 1643 the prospect of an outright royalist victory,
which had looked bright in July, had dimmed, but it was uncertain whether
either side could win decisively with the forces at their disposal, and both
were looking outside England for allies. In December parliament lost the man
who more than any other had held it on course in adversity, piloted through
the measures needed for it to sustain a protracted war, and set up the vital
Scottish alliance. John Pym died of cancer, but being the consummate polit-
ician that he was, he probably sensed that he had done enough to ensure
ultimate victory for the cause he believed in.
The Blast of War 267
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