Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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second Civil War—and beat them soundly; but it required larger forces than

his to retake Pembroke Castle and subdue south Wales. Cromwell was

already on the way to join him with three regiments of foot and two of horse.

By this time there were abundant signs that the Scots were preparing to

raise an army, and the northern royalists’ seizure of Berwick and Carlisle con-

ﬁrmed that an invasion was not far off. The reaction to the threat in many

parts of England was a spate of petitions from counties and other commun-

ities, from late April to early June, calling upon parliament to admit the king

to a personal treaty. This was understandable but unrealistic, since Charles

had never been serious about negotiating when a chance remained of regain-

ing what he had lost by force, and the momentum of war had already gath-

ered too much strength to be checked. The Commons did however seek to

reassure conservative spirits by voting on 28 April, by 165 to 99, that they

would ‘not alter the fundamental government of the kingdom, by King, Lords

and Commons’. Vane voted with the majority, and Cromwell would prob-

ably have done so too, though perhaps with a mental reservation that Charles

might have to be replaced by his youngest son the Duke of Gloucester. On the

previous day Cromwell had moved, and Vane had seconded, that the House

should grant the City’s petition to restore the control of its trained bands to

its own Militia Committee. The conciliatory gesture could safely be made,

since the faithful Skippon had been chosen to command them. That was

probably Cromwell’s last appearance in the House until after Pride’s Purge

had changed the whole face of politics.

Just before he set off for south Wales, he joined a large body of ofﬁcers who

gathered in Windsor Castle to seek God’s guidance in prayer before they took

the ﬁeld again. Their meetings lasted through 28 and 29 April and 1 May, and

he was certainly present on the 29th, when he reportedly pressed them very

urgently to search their hearts as to whether the army was guilty of any ini-

quity that could have caused God to withdraw his presence from it. On the

third day came news that Fleming, who was a much liked ofﬁcer, had been

killed in south Wales. It hardened a feeling among the assembled ofﬁcers that

the army had drawn down God’s rebukes by seeking to patch up a peace with

the king and his party. Lieutenant-Colonel Goffe, who had harped on that

theme in the Putney debates, had them all in tears with a homily on the text of

Proverbs 1: 23: ‘Turn you at my reproof : behold, I will pour my spirit unto

you.’ They were all ﬁred with a resolve to go out and ﬁght the enemies that

threatened them: ‘and if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call

Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed,

and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people

in these poor nations.’

‘That man of blood’: the emotive scriptural image had

408 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

William Allen, A Faithful Memorial of that remarkable Meeting . . . at Windsor Castle

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been evoked before at Putney, and now that the king had clearly opted for a

renewal of war its potency was all the greater.

One should be wary, however, of taking this episode, as some writers have

done, as evidence that the army ofﬁcers in general, Cromwell included,

embarked on the second Civil War with a settled intention to put the king on

trial for his life. The Windsor prayer meeting restored their solidarity and

strengthened their will to ﬁght, but we know that in the following November,

long after the ﬁghting was over, many ofﬁcers including Cromwell needed a

lot of persuading that to proceed against the king was the right course. Call-

ing him to account, moreover, did not necessarily mean pursuing capital

charges against him, and as for Cromwell there is no evidence that he was pres-

ent on 1 May; he was more probably preparing for his imminent expedition

into south Wales. We do not know when Cromwell made up his mind that

Charles was unﬁt to be king, but it was almost certainly not yet. The republi-

can soldier and MP Edmund Ludlow has an account of a conference that

Cromwell called at his London lodging ‘between those called the grandees of

the House and army’, probably not long before his Welsh campaign.

Cromwell and his fellow-ofﬁcers, according to Ludlow (if his often corrupt

text can be trusted), ‘kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare

their judgements either for a monarchical, aristocratical or democratical gov-

ernment; maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us,

according as providence should direct us’.

It would have been unlike

Cromwell to presume to judge the intentions of providence until after the out-

come of the war that lay ahead. The only full account that we have of the

Windsor prayer meetings was written eleven years after the event by the

former agitator William Allen, who rose to become adjutant-general of horse

and had his own republican axe to grind in 1659. He conveys the mood of a

particular gathering of ofﬁcers under the impact of what seemed a wanton

renewal of war, and of the death of a popular comrade-in-arms, but just as he

exaggerates in describing the army as hitherto ‘in a low, weak, divided,

perplexed condition’, he overstates the unanimity that the religious exercises

at Windsor restored to it.

One continuing difference was as to whether it was the army’s business to

promote a just secular settlement of the kingdom and leave matters of religion

to the individual conscience, or whether its primary mission was to advance

the interests of the people of God. The Levellers were of course among those

who sought to prescribe a political role for it, and though Fairfax’s triumph

at the three rendezvous in November had checked their inﬂuence it had

not erased it. During the winter and early spring they continued to direct

The Second Civil War 409

(1659), reprinted in Somers Tracts (1809–15), VI, 498–504, and discussed in Woolrych, Soldiers

and Statesmen, pp. 332–5.

Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C. H. Firth, I, 184–5.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 409

their propaganda at the soldiery, and they were striving to revive their

organization among the soldiers right up to the outbreak of the new war. In

this period they were approaching their peak of organization and activity,

with a central committee meeting regularly and drawing funds from cells in

each City ward and in the principal suburbs. Each cell had its chosen tavern

where members met and planned. The Levellers’ clandestine printing presses

continued to be busy, and from June onward a weekly paper called The Mod-

erate regularly supported their cause. John Lilburne had been freed on bail on

9 November, and at some meetings he provocatively wore the red coat of a

lieutenant-colonel of dragoons, four years after he had left the service. He and

his friends were trying to organize a petition to parliament with 100,000 sig-

natures, but he was summoned to the bar of the Commons on 19 February,

and despite one of his ﬁnest rhetorical performances he was recommitted to the

Tower. Wildman was imprisoned in the Fleet; besides being active with

Lilburne, he had hurled more bolts of invective against Cromwell and Ireton

under the pseudonym John Lawmind in Putney Projects. He renewed his attack

on them in March in The Law’s Subversion under another nom de guerre.

In April the Levellers made a serious attempt to reinstitute the election of

agitators in the army. The soldiery were urged to this in a tract entitled The

Army’s Petition: or, a New Engagement of Many in the Army Who Are Yet

Faithful to the People, which viliﬁed the grandees and lauded as heroes the

‘honest soldiers’ who had stood up to them in November. A meeting of agit-

ators from several cavalry regiments, who were gathered to organize a peti-

tion to parliament in support of the Agreement of the People, was uncovered

at St Albans on 24 April. Chief among them was Captain John Reynolds, a

young lawyer of knightly family and a troop commander in Cromwell’s own

regiment who had been prominent in the agitator movement since its begin-

nings a year earlier. He and other ringleaders were court-martialled at Wind-

sor while the prayer meetings were in progress; Reynolds was cashiered and

imprisoned, and the rest were lucky to get off with a reprimand. Even

Reynolds’s disgrace was short-lived, for Cromwell had always thought high-

ly of him, and in October he was made colonel of a new cavalry regiment that

was to be raised for Ireland. At any rate, the combination of mutual exhort-

ation and ﬁrm discipline sent the army into the ﬁeld with its solidarity

strengthened and with a ﬁrm resolve to defeat the common enemy. Its morale

was to be more severely tested in the next four months than ever before, part-

ly because the tide of popular feeling was running for the king in many areas

where it fought, partly because it could never be quite sure of parliament’s

whole-hearted support, but most of all because it was to be physically div-

ided as it had never previously been in time of war. Fairfax and Cromwell

were never again to draw sword on the same ﬁeld.

Kent, Surrey, and Essex were in an explosive condition as Cromwell

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headed for south Wales. From Essex, 2,000 men marched to Westminster on

4 May with a petition bearing ten times their number of signatures, calling for

the king to be admitted to a personal treaty and the army disbanded. But the

spark which lit the powder barrel was struck in Kent by a special commission

which sat at Canterbury on 10 and 11 May to try the Christmas rioters. Legal

process required that they should be indicted by the county’s grand jury, but

that body declined to ﬁnd a case for them to answer and drew up a petition simi-

lar to the one just presented from Essex. The judges in the commission refused

to accept the grand jury’s verdict and reimprisoned the accused, and the

county committee, anxious to suppress such a petition, supported them.

There was a furious popular reaction, which gathered further force when

3,000 armed men from Surrey brought up another such petition on the 16th and

invaded Westminster Hall. Fairfax still had two regiments in the capital to guard

the parliament, and they were called in. The result was a violent encounter

in which half a dozen petitioners were killed and many more wounded.

Popular risings followed in town after town in Kent, and the Derby House

committee ordered Fairfax into the county with all the force he could muster.

He had been intending to march north against the expected Scottish invasion,

but he promptly complied and many of the less determined insurgents went

home. Nevertheless, the bolder spirits held a large meeting at Rochester on the

22nd, to which they drew in many of the local gentry. Together they appointed

a general rendezvous of the king’s supporters at Blackheath on the 30th,

hoping to be joined there by equal numbers from Essex. They were hugely

encouraged when most of the warships in the Downs joined them in declaring

for the king. Many of their crews were Kentishmen and shared the feelings of

their fellow-countrymen on land, but their defection was also inspired by a

general disgust, especially among the ofﬁcers, at Rainborough’s appointment

as vice-admiral. Cromwell was well vindicated for having opposed it.

Rainborough’s earlier naval service was not remembered kindly, but it was his

association with the Levellers that made him most disliked. His predecessor

Vice-Admiral Batten had been popular, but he had been dismissed for assist-

ing the escape overseas of ﬁve of the impeached presbyterian MPs, and he was

soon to go over to the king. The crew of Rainborough’s ﬂagship mutinied

while he was ashore, and when he tried to come aboard they sent him and his

family ignominiously packing on a small boat bound for London. Nine ships

were defying parliament within days of the outbreak of rebellion, and the

number grew thereafter. Their help enabled the Kentishmen to secure all the

maritime castles and their magazines with the exception of Dover.

The insurgents lacked as yet an authorized military leader, and since the

king was a captive it fell to the exiled court of the queen and the Prince of

The Second Civil War 411

Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford, 1992), pp. 16–21.

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Wales to commission one. Their unhappy choice, as commander of all the

king’s forces in England, was the Earl of Holland, a courtier who had changed

sides twice but was still a favourite of Henrietta Maria. Holland appointed

the veteran Earl of Norwich, Goring’s father, to command the Kentish forces.

He was hardly the ideal man to reconcile the divergent aspirations of the old

cavaliers and of the majority who had risen primarily to reassert the rights

and interests of their county community, but his leadership was accepted and

he exercised it vigorously. By the end of May he had about 11,000 men under

arms, and there was a great fear in London of a concerted attack from north

and south of the Thames. But Norwich’s forces were widely scattered, and

Fairfax frustrated their planned rendezvous by occupying Blackheath him-

self. Thence he advanced with about 4,000 men against Maidstone, where

Norwich found himself decidedly outnumbered. But he and the defenders

were well posted and barricaded, and they had with them many determined

seamen, watermen, and apprentices, as well as seasoned royalist ofﬁcers.

Fairfax’s advance guard attacked them impetuously on the evening of

31 May, and he had a tough ﬁght before he dislodged them, but by one in the

morning his victory was complete. Many countrymen went home after that.

Norwich tried to maintain his advance to Blackheath, but ﬁnding his further

way to London ﬁrmly blocked, and with his total forces shrunk to about

3,000, he ferried all he could of them over the Thames into Essex and set

about raising that county. Within the next week Fairfax’s regiments reduced

all of Kent except the castles of Deal, Walmer, and Sandown.

Essex was the main theatre of war during June, but rebellion threatened

from so many quarters from mid-May onward that Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s

forces were stretched, and it was well for parliament that their loyalty was

unassailable. In Bury St Edmunds there was a riot when some revellers tried

to set up a maypole, after which 600 armed men took over the town on

13 May, shouting ‘For God and King Charles’. The trained bands dispersed

them next day, but Colonel Whalley was sent down with a foot regiment to

keep the country quiet. Meetings of old royalists at nearby Rusbrooke Hall,

and at Newmarket, continued to arouse anxiety. There was another scare in

May over a royalist design in western Norfolk, centred on King’s Lynn, and

reports in June of widespread disaffection in the Fens. These were old parlia-

mentarian heartlands, but as in Essex most of the gentry had been dismayed

by the rise of independency, and felt equivocal if not hostile towards the

parliament.

Royalism of an older, simpler strain was raising its head in Devon and

Cornwall; Fairfax had wisely sent Sir Hardress Waller there, and he had to

suppress hostile tumults in both counties during June. The king’s friends in

Herefordshire were preparing to rise in support of the expected Scottish inva-

sion, and some northern royalists under Langdale’s orders seized Pontefract

412 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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Castle on 1 June. There was more disaffection in Shropshire, Cheshire, and

north Wales, but Cromwell was able to send some small detachments to deal

with it. He could spare them after he took the surrender of Chepstow Castle

on 25 May and of Tenby Castle six days later, but because he lacked siege

guns Pembroke Castle held out against him until 11 July. When it ﬁnally

yielded Poyer, Laugharne, and Powel were sent up to London for trial.

So when Fairfax set about reducing Essex in June he had units of his army

operating in six widely separated parts of England and Wales, and there was a

serious danger of the conﬂagration spreading far into East Anglia if he did not

scotch it. The Essex rising got under way when some of the county militia, led

by a crypto-royalist colonel, seized all the members of the county committee

as hostages, whereupon the grand jury publicly pledged its support for the

king. Sir Charles Lucas was appointed to command the gathering royal

forces, and Norwich joined him at Chelmsford with what were left of his

Kentishmen. With them too were Lord Capel, Sir John Lisle, and the Tuscan

Bernardo Guascone, better known as Sir Bernard Gascoigne, all seasoned sol-

diers. Together they made for Colchester, the county town, and set about

organizing its defences. Fairfax appeared before it late on 12 June and sum-

moned it to surrender the next day. The defenders refused, and he tried to

storm it; but they withstood his assault through a ﬁerce ﬁght that lasted until

midnight, with considerable losses on both sides. There was nothing for it but

a long siege, for Fairfax’s superiority in numbers was not overwhelming. He

had about 9,000 against 4,000 or so defenders, but his troops included local

forces from Essex and Suffolk. They had a miserable time of it, camping in the

open through eleven weeks of an exceptionally wet and chilly summer, but it

was nothing to the suffering of the inhabitants and the garrison as food and

other necessities grew ever shorter. The siege was conducted with unusual

harshness, and with a mutual bitterness between the two sides that was

almost without precedent in the ﬁrst Civil War. The whole experience of it

heightened the feeling in the army that the king had wilfully renewed the

shedding of blood, in the teeth of God’s judgement. They saw him as what the

modern world would call a war criminal.

Colchester was only ﬁfty miles from London, and one reason for the hard-

ening of the army’s temper lay in its sense that its ostensible masters were not

wholly behind it. Skippon could be counted on to hold the trained bands ﬁrm,

but the City government was downright unfriendly, the Lords were equivocal

and the Commons were wavering. Early in June the latter revoked their votes

expelling the eleven impeached members, some of whom resumed their seats.

The Tower and its garrison were now under presbyterian command, and on

19 June a train of wagons carrying munitions for the army through London

was attacked and overturned by gangs of apprentices. Holland and the Duke

of Buckingham were mustering the royalists of Surrey close to the capital, as

The Second Civil War 413

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part of an ambitious plan in which the warships which had gone over to the

king were to sail up the Thames with the Prince of Wales and troops and

munitions from France on board. But Sir Michael Livesey fell on them at

Kingston on 5 July with a mixed force of Kentish levies and regulars and put

them to rout, killing Buckingham’s son and taking Holland prisoner. The

Commons ordered Fairfax to hold Holland captive in Warwick Castle, pend-

ing trial, which he duly did; but it is typical of the Lords’ attitude at this dan-

gerous juncture that they ordered him, through their Speaker Manchester, to

surrender Holland to their gentleman usher. Needless to say Fairfax did noth-

ing of the kind, which so incensed the peers that they actually entertained a

motion to revoke his commission, though they did not pass it.

Three key events in the war, the entry of the Scottish army into England, the

surrender of the leaders of the insurrection in south Wales and the bottling up

of the remaining royalists of the south-east in Colchester, all occurred within

the span of six days. Hamilton’s crossing of the border on 8 July was actually

the ﬁrst of them, but his army was in no condition to ﬁght yet, and before it had

spent a week on English soil every effective royalist movement south of York-

shire and Lancashire had been crushed or contained. Hamilton had raised

only about 9,000 of the projected 30,000 and more men, and most of them

still needed basic training in handling their pikes and muskets. Even that many

had been hard to muster, for the general levy which the Edinburgh parliament

imposed on all Lowlands Scotland was resisted to the point of near-rebellion,

not least because the Kirk continued to denounce the whole enterprise. In

order to maintain the alliance between Engagers and royalists, Hamilton had

had to accept the Earl of Callander as his second-in-command, and he could

hardly have had a more difﬁcult colleague. Callander, who had professional-

ly commanded Scottish troops in the Dutch service, had much more military

experience than Hamilton and thought he should have been made general.

But he was not as good a soldier as he thought he was, and the arrogance with

which he constantly disputed Hamilton’s decisions weakened the latter’s

authority without contributing much to the army’s efﬁciency. When it set out

it had no guns, not nearly enough ammunition, and far too few horses for its

wagons. The soldiers’ morale was low and their discipline deplorable.

Lanark had advised delaying the invasion until the army was in a ﬁtter con-

dition to ﬁght, but Lauderdale had helped to persuade Hamilton to answer

the urgent calls of the royalists in northern England without delay. Yet

Hamilton could not move fast, partly because of his transport problems and

his need to train his men, but also because of the relentless rain and biting

winds of that dreadful summer. Roads turned into quagmires, and streams

that in a normal July were easily fordable became dangerous torrents. Hamil-

ton dreaded the toll in sickness if he made his men sleep in the open. They had

moreover large numbers of their womenfolk with them. On reaching Carlisle

414 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

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he paused there for six days, during which he received the welcome rein-

forcement of about 3,000 foot and some hundreds of horse that Langdale had

raised in northern England. He was also expecting some 2,100 foot and 1,200

horse from the seasoned Scottish army in Ulster, under Colonel Robert

Monro’s son Sir George, but these never caught up with him. Shadowed by

parliamentarian warships, they had to cross the rough Irish sea in little boats

by night, and after they landed in Galloway they found themselves cursed by

the ministers, cold-shouldered by the lairds, and refused quarters by the coun-

trymen.

Since Fairfax was fully engaged in the south-east, it fell to Cromwell to

command the forces sent against Hamilton. He set out from Pembroke on

14 July with 3,000 foot and 1,200 horse, having sent much of his cavalry on

ahead of him. But there was already a small but efﬁcient force in the north

which Major-General Lambert (as he now was) had built up out of the

remains of Poyntz’s Northern Association army, and it was strengthened by

some very useful Lancashire levies under Colonel Ralph Ashton. Lambert,

however, had had to detach some troops to besiege Pontefract, whose royal-

ist garrison had been harrying the surrounding country, and with only about

3,000 men in all he could not engage Hamilton in battle. But he could and did

watch his movements and harass his advance guards, and he gave time to

Cromwell to get his expedition into shape. After their long marches

Cromwell’s infantrymen badly needed shoes from Northampton and stock-

ings from Coventry, and these he collected as he passed through Leicester and

Nottingham early in August. If such an eastward route seems strange in a

campaign that reached its climax at Preston, neither Cromwell nor Lambert

expected Hamilton to take the western way south. They thought he would

want to relieve Pontefract and ultimately Colchester, so as to strengthen him-

self with their garrisons, and they expected him to try and make a junction

with the Prince of Wales and his ships, who were off Yarmouth by 22 July.

There was a danger that Hamilton would attack and destroy Lambert’s

small force before Cromwell could join up with it, and a better general with a

better army might well have done so. But Lambert was adept at checking the

Scots’ advance while avoiding a full engagement, and Hamilton was in no

hurry. He paused for a whole week in Kendal, from 2 to 9 August, and before

he moved further Cromwell had reached Doncaster. Hamilton rested for

another ﬁve days at Hornby, eight miles up the River Lune from Lancaster,

and while he was there Cromwell and Lambert joined forces at Ripon. It was

only at Hornby, in a typically bad-tempered council of war, that Hamilton

ﬁnally decided to continue southward through Lancashire rather than cross

the Pennines and strike for London by the faster eastern route. One reason was

that he hoped to recruit more royalists in Lancashire and Cheshire, but how-

ever the gentry may have viewed his approach the appalling conduct of his

The Second Civil War 415

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troops was arousing a general loathing among the countryfolk. Having had a

bad harvest in 1647, and now facing a ruinous one, they were already suffer-

ing from a serious dearth. Now the Scottish soldiers stripped the houses

where they quartered of all they could carry, drove off the sheep and cattle,

and sometimes seized the children and ransomed them at sword’s point.

Many poor Cumbrians were driven to ﬂee their own homes.

Back in London, parliament and the City continued to give Cromwell’s and

Fairfax’s ofﬁcers and men cause to wonder what they were ﬁghting for. On

receiving the news that the Scots had invaded England, the Commons at least

declared them to be enemies, but the Lords refused to concur. Ten days later

the Commons consented to the king’s persistent request for a negotiation

without prior conditions, though they stipulated that it should take place on

the Isle of Wight and not in the capital. Some City merchants suffered

because the Prince of Wales, having no money to pay the crews of his war-

ships, took to piracy; he seized merchant vessels passing through the Downs

as prizes, and coolly wrote to the Common Council demanding ransom-

money for their release. The City corporation’s response was to petition par-

liament for an immediate armistice and for the freeing of the king. Meanwhile

in the north-east the governor of Scarborough declared for King Charles late

in July, and so on 9 August did the ofﬁcer commanding Tynemouth Castle,

who was none other than Henry Lilburne, brother of Freeborn John and

Colonel Robert. Haselrig at once sent a detachment from Newcastle to re-

cover the fortress, and in defending it Henry was killed. A few days earlier

John Lilburne, who had just been unexpectedly released by parliament from

the Tower, wrote to Cromwell to assure him of his support while the whole

cause was under threat from the Scots and the king. He at least had the sense

and magnanimity to recognize who were the real enemies of what they had

once fought for together.

Cromwell of course had no doubts on the matter, and as soon as he and

Lambert had joined forces they set off across the Pennines to give battle to the

invaders, who were in the vicinity of Preston. The parliamentarians were out-

numbered; Cromwell estimated their total strength at 8,600, of whom nearly

a quarter were Ashton’s Lancashiremen. Hamilton’s army had been rein-

forced to about 10,000, not counting Langdale’s 3,600, and Monro’s Ulster

brigade was not very far behind.

But Cromwell’s conﬁdence in the superior

ﬁghting quality and morale of his ofﬁcers and men was not misplaced, and his

intelligence, unlike Hamilton’s, was excellent. He spent the last night before

the crucial battle of the war in the mansion that is now Stonyhurst College,

416 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Contemporary estimates vary widely. I have modiﬁed one that I gave in my Battles of the

English Civil War, p. 167, in the light of Gentles’s discussion in New Model Army, pp. 261, 513,

though I still think that the disparity between the two sides was probably greater than Gentles

suggests.

ch13.y8 27/9/02 11:30 AM Page 416

and set off early on 17 August. He caught Hamilton with his infantry drawn

up on Preston Moor, north of the River Ribble, and most of his cavalry (under

Middleton) sixteen miles to the south at Wigan. Langdale, whose brigade was

guarding Hamilton’s eastward ﬂank, had sent him a report of Cromwell’s

proximity the night before, but ‘an eminent person’ at his headquarters—

surely Callander—had discounted it.

Cromwell had to decide whether to cross the Ribble and block the Scots’

southward advance, or to strike at their infantry from north of the river. The

latter was the riskier tactic, since if it failed the enemy horse and foot would

recombine and resume their southward march unopposed. But if it succeed-

ed he would have them at mercy, cut off from their homeward escape route

and from the help of Monro’s brigade. That was the course he chose, and his

ﬁrst task was to dislodge Langdale’s men from the strong positions they had

taken up on Ribbleton Moor, across his approach route. Hamilton’s ﬁrst plan

was to draw up his infantry in battalia on Preston Moor, but Callander, prob-

ably wisely, talked him into getting them across the river so that they and

Middleton’s cavalry could rejoin before giving battle. The enclosures across

Cromwell’s line of approach helped Langdale’s infantry to hold out heroical-

ly for four hours or more, and by the time most of them had been killed or

captured the bulk of Hamilton’s foot had got safely across the river. About

600 tried to defend the vital Ribble Bridge, but it fell before nightfall. By then

the parliamentarians had captured the whole Scottish wagon train, along

with 4,000 arms and almost as many prisoners, but Hamilton’s troops prob-

ably still outnumbered Cromwell’s, and most of them had not fought yet.

At a council of war that evening Hamilton decided to march them south,

starting under cover of darkness, so as to bring his infantry and cavalry

together again. But there were two roads between Preston and Wigan, and

while the foot slogged southward through drenching rain down the westerly

one through Standish, the horse came north by the easterly one through

Chorley. Middleton’s ﬁrst contact therefore was not with his fellow-country-

men but with Cromwell’s forward units within a mile or two of Preston, and

they gave him a rough reception. He quickly retreated along the route taken

by the foot, but Cromwell was soon in hot pursuit, his cavalry skirmishing

with Middleton’s all the way and doing heavy execution on Hamilton’s

infantry. The Scots tried to turn and ﬁght on a height near Standish, but they

could not stay and defend it because the powder in their ﬂasks was soaked,

and their supplies of it had been captured along with all their ammunition in

Preston. Reaching Wigan that evening, Hamilton dared not let them rest but

set them off on another long night march, this time for Warrington. There the

Mersey might give him a line he could hold, and Byron, who had been raising

some royalists in north Wales, might bring him relief. But Cromwell’s pursuit

was relentless. Just north of Winwick the Scots made a last stand and fought

The Second Civil War 417

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