Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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catholic prelates and Ormond came to the boil when the bishops met at

Jamestown in August 1650 and published a declaration that the catholics of

Ireland could no longer accept him as their leader. They released the people

from their obedience to him as Lord Lieutenant, called upon him to resign his

authority and leave for France, and proposed in effect to take over political

authority themselves until a General Assembly could be called and the Con-

federation revived. They prepared a formal excommunication of all Ormond’s

supporters, but held it in suspension pending his reply. They appealed to the

commissioners of trust to depose him. Predictably, he told their envoys that

he had no intention of leaving and bade the bishops to stop wrangling and

support the war. Thereupon they published their excommunication, not

knowing that Charles himself had just totally repudiated them and simul-

taneously cut the ground from under Ormond’s feet.

The king had been in Scotland since June, and more will be said shortly

about the humiliating declaration that he was induced to publish on

16 August, as a condition of receiving Scottish armed support; but among

other things he was made to revoke the peace that he himself had instructed

Ormond to conclude with the Confederates in 1649, and to acknowledge the

‘exceeding great sinfulness and unlawfulness’ of treating with ‘the bloody

Irish rebels’.

There was no more for Ormond to do in Ireland; indeed Charles

himself advised him to leave the country. With the grudging agreement of the

catholic bishops he appointed Clanricard as Lord Deputy, and in December

he sailed for France. With him went Inchiquin, Daniel O’Neill, and other

pillars of Old English royalism. Most of the bishops, for their part, were no

longer greatly interested in the king’s cause, for they doubted whether he

would ever give their church the rights and powers that they thought

belonged to it. Their ﬁrst loyalty was to international catholicism, and they

were placing their hopes now in military aid from abroad. They were in nego-

tiation with Charles, Duke of Lorraine, who had long ago been expelled from

his duchy by the French, and had since been a mercenary commander in the

imperial service. But it was most unlikely that either Spain or the papacy

would back him with the necessary ﬁnancial and logistical aid, and many of

the old confederates, especially among the laity, remained loyal in their hearts

to Ormond and the crown.

It is difﬁcult to set a ﬁrm date to the end of the Irish rebellion and the com-

pletion of the reconquest. Both were assured by the time Cromwell sailed

home, and after Coote took Galway in April 1651 virtually all the garrisons

and forts in the country—over 350 of them—were subjected to the English

Commonwealth. But there was little peace outside them, and though there

was no further prospect of mounting an army that could challenge the

478 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Stuarts (3 vols., 1906–16), II, 239.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 478

English in battle, royalist commanders could still muster considerable num-

bers of soldiers on a local basis, even though an estimated 34,000 Irishmen

enlisted in continental armies during the early 1650s. The remnants of the Irish

armies in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught made their formal surrenders

between March and June 1652, but that did not spell an end to resistance. It

took over 33,000 English troops to man the garrisons in Ulster, Leinster, and

Munster, and mortality was so high among them that they needed to be con-

stantly reinforced. Even so the peace that they maintained was precarious.

Large numbers of dispossessed small landholders were living in the bogs and

woods and mountains and subsisting by armed raids. These tories, as they

were called, drove off so many cattle that few were left to their rightful

owners, and they made cultivation so hazardous that four-ﬁfths of the fertile

land lay fallow and uninhabited. The process of depopulation and impover-

ishment was compounded when garrison commanders responded to tory

raids and larger-scale military activity by laying waste the territory on which

their tormenters subsisted. Dearth ensued; whereas even in 1650 food prices

were lower in Ireland than in England, by the end of 1651 bread was much

dearer. Actual starvation became common over large areas, and a serious vis-

itation of plague followed in 1652. Accurate ﬁgures for population are not to

be had, but Sir William Petty estimated that the total fell from 1,500,000 in

1641 to 850,000 in 1652, and the steepest decline came towards the end of

that period.

The tragedy of so much suffering lies partly in the role that sheer misfor-

tune played in bringing it about. It was a misfortune that the Irish rebellion

was launched shortly before English military power was increased, for rea-

sons scarcely connected with Ireland, to a degree that left the Irish with no

chance of winning. It was rather more than misfortune that the rebellion was

stained by atrocities which, when magniﬁed by propaganda beyond all meas-

ure, encouraged those who suppressed it to reply in kind. It is interesting to

speculate on what might have happened if the Irish rebellion had preceded the

Scottish, and if those who launched it had controlled it more ﬁrmly. Might the

Stuart monarchy, weak as it was in the late 1630s, have had to concede what

both Old English and Old Irish leaders then most reasonably wanted, includ-

ing an assured place in the constitution for an Irish parliament, ﬁrm titles

for Irish landowners, and at least a de facto toleration of the religion of the

great majority of the Irish people? Enough has been said of the ways in which

the Irish weakened their cause by their quarrels among themselves, and of

Ormond’s shortcomings as a military commander, and of the difﬁculties that

both Charles I and Charles II made for their loyal servant; once the rebels

were up against the undistracted military and naval power of the English

Commonwealth defeat was surely inevitable. Yet the real curse of Ireland

was not Cromwell but a conjunction of attitudes, largely shared by both

The Commonwealth at War 479

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 479

English and Scots, which went back to before Cromwell’s lifetime: attitudes

which assumed Ireland to be a depedent kingdom, looked greedily upon her

land as a ﬁeld wide open for colonization, and equated popery with idolatry.

England was already committed to a huge conﬁscation of Irish land before

Cromwell set foot in the country, and the Act for Settling Ireland of 1652,

which set that conﬁscation in motion and rendered around 80,000 Irishmen

subject (on paper) to the death penalty, was the collective responsibility of the

Rump Parliament, and passed at a time when Cromwell, far from dominating

it, was seriously at odds with it. It will be described later in the context of the

so-called Cromwellian settlement, taken as a whole.

The reason why the Rump had been anxious from January 16 onward to call

Cromwell home lay in their growing fear that the Scots were about to take up

arms again for their king. Charles II had been in Jersey since the previous

September, but in mid-February he sailed for France and spent three weeks

conferring with his mother at Beauvais before going on to Breda to treat with

commissioners from the Scottish parliament. That body was divided between

representatives of the strict Kirk party, who were doubtful about negotiating

with him at all, and the more ﬂexible politicians like Argyll who saw the

advantage of having him in Scotland, at least as a ﬁgurehead. The young king

found that the price of Scotland’s armed support was to be far higher than his

father had paid in the Engagement. He was required to sign both the Scottish

National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, as well as to repu-

diate the treaty concluded on his behalf with the Irish. A still harder demand

was that he should order Montrose to lay down his arms and leave Scotland,

seeing that he had so recently commissioned his father’s old champion to

embark on his last and fatal enterprise. Montrose had raised about 1,200

men, mainly Danish, Swedish, and German mercenaries, and had landed with

them in Orkney in the middle of March. There he found waiting for him a

letter from the king, written in January, directing him to go ahead with his

campaign, despite his (Charles’s) negotiations with the Covenanters, in order

to help him wring concessions from the Kirk party. Montrose accordingly

landed his small force on the mainland in mid-April, hoping to recruit an

army from the Highland clans that had fought with him before, but their

morale had been so sapped by the years of defeat that very few came in. David

Leslie marched against him, and on 27 April Montrose advanced into a trap

skilfully set near Carbisdale by Archibald Strachan and the Covenanting cav-

alry. Nearly all his men were killed or captured or drowned in trying to

escape, and though he himself got away he was caught a week later. He was

treated ignominiously on his long journey south to Edinburgh, where the

480 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

See below, pp. 573–9.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 480

public hangman conducted him to the Tolbooth tied to a cart. On 21 May he

was publicly hanged and quartered, dying with a bravery that moved the

onlookers. Five of his leading ofﬁcers were executed in the course of the next

month.

Meanwhile Charles came to terms with the commissioners at Breda on

1 May, not knowing yet of Montrose’s defeat, but without obtaining any guar-

antee of his safety. He wrote him a public letter on 3 May, ordering him to lay

down arms and leave Scotland, and a private one two days later, promising to

protect his interests and hoping to employ him again soon. He wrote to the

Scottish parliament on the 8th, saying that Montrose had been ordered to dis-

band and asking that he and his forces should be allowed to leave Scotland

unharmed, but next day he sent privately to him (still not knowing of his

defeat), telling him to remain in arms in case his treaty with the Scottish par-

liament should fall through. There are still some puzzles concerning his deal-

ings with Montrose and the parliament, which were too complex to be

recounted here in full, but it is clear that to some extent he publicly disowned

responsibility for Montrose’s efforts on his behalf, after so strongly encourag-

ing them. There is no need to detail the other terms agreed in the so-called

Treaty of Breda, because the Scottish parliament was not satisﬁed with them,

but before he was admitted to Scotland Charles did sign both Covenants, rec-

ognized the supreme authority of the Kirk in spiritual matters and of the par-

liament in secular, and agreed to disown Ormond’s Irish treaty if and when the

parliament should so require. He set sail early in June before he knew of Mon-

trose’s execution in a warship provided by the Prince of Orange, and he only

signed the ﬁnal concessions just before his little ﬂotilla, which had been

hunted by the English ﬂeet, arrived in the Moray Firth on Midsummer’s Eve.

Dismay at the terms he agreed to was not conﬁned to the old royalists such as

Hyde, Hopton, Nicholas, and Cottington, for his mother (who had been so

keen on a Scottish alliance) and Rupert’s circle felt it too. Whether, when he

entered Edinburgh, he observed Montrose’s severed head impaled on a spike

on the Tolbooth is not recorded. He received a genuinely warm welcome from

the common people of Scotland, but he was soon in bitter dispute with the par-

liament and the Kirk over the many old royalists he had brought with him as

part of his household, and he was eventually forced to dismiss them. The

crowning humiliation was the public declaration that he was forced to issue on

16 August, as a condition of Scottish support, in which he not only bound him-

self to a church he did not believe in and renounced the Irish who had fought

for him, but humbled himself before God for his mother’s idolatory and his

father’s sin in opposing the Covenant. Charles I may have been less than

fastidious at times over the means of recovering his throne, but his son left him

standing. To do the young king justice, his concessions left him very wretched,

and he wrote to Secretary Nicholas on 3 September, asking through him that

The Commonwealth at War 481

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 481

the Prince of Orange should have a boat lying ready off the nearest Scottish

shore, in case he should decide to throw up the whole adventure.

By that time, however, the Scots were seriously at war for him. In England

the Rump had long seen it coming; hence their increasingly urgent efforts to

call Cromwell home. He landed at Bristol late in May, and parliament greeted

his arrival with a grant of lands worth £2,500 a year, having already given

him the use of St James’s House, the Cockpit, and Spring Gardens. Many MPs,

councillors, and ofﬁcers came out to meet him at Windsor and many volleys

were ﬁred in his honour, but this company was nothing to the great crowds

that gathered on Hounslow Heath to welcome him next day. Fairfax was

among those who greeted him, and few of those present were probably glad-

der to see him home. The mutual warmth and regard born of long comrade-

ship in arms were still undimmed, but Fairfax had still stronger reasons for

welcoming him. Leading politicians were already persuaded that the safest

way of countering the threat from Scotland was to strike ﬁrst, and the obvi-

ous person to command an invading army was the Lord General. An army

had to be sent north anyway, to meet a possible invasion from Scotland, and

on 12 June Fairfax accepted the command of it, with Cromwell as his lieu-

tenant-general. But in Fairfax’s mind it was one thing to defend English terri-

tory and quite another to take the initiative in attacking an old ally, and when

the Council of State formally voted on the 20th to invade Scotland he de-

cided, after forty-eight hours’ thought, to resign his commission. He took the

view that England and Scotland were still mutually bound in alliance by the

Solemn League and Covenant, and he met the objection that Scotland had

cancelled the bond by invading England in 1648 by pointing out that a Scot-

tish parliament had subsequently disowned and condemned Hamilton’s

enterprise. But his commitment to the Commonwealth was open to doubt on

other counts, and his formidable wife’s disaffection towards it was notorious.

He had still not formally taken the Engagement, and though he attended the

Council of State sporadically he seems never to have taken the seat in parlia-

ment to which he was elected early in 1649. The House appointed a powerful

committee consisting of Cromwell, St John, Whitelocke, Lambert, and Harri-

son to try to overcome his scruples about carrying the war to Scotland, and

Cromwell strove as sincerely as any of them to persuade him to accept the

command. But though Fairfax treated the committee members as the old

friends they were, and afﬁrmed his continuing ‘duty and affection’ to the par-

liament, he resisted their arguments through almost a whole night. Pleading

his ‘debilities both in body and mind, occasioned by former actions and busi-

nesses’,

he insisted on resigning. Charles II had tried, quite in vain, to tempt

482 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

On Fairfax’s resignation see Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, I, 287–96, and

John Wilson, Fairfax (1985), pp. 158–62. Fairfax’s own account in his autobiographical Short

Memoirs reﬂects his political views after the Restoration rather than those he held at the time.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 482

him with the earldom of Essex, £10,000 a year in land, and whatever ofﬁce

he might choose, but Fairfax was not to take up the king’s cause until the

Commonwealth was collapsing from within. Still only thirty-eight, he retired

to Nun Appleton and cultivated his garden, whose beauties Andrew Marvell,

his small daughter’s tutor, celebrated in a memorable poem.

Inevitably, Cromwell succeeded to his ofﬁce of Lord General, and so

became commander-in-chief of all the parliament’s land forces for the ﬁrst

time. He set out for Scotland on 28 June, the day on which he received his

formal commission. It was less than a month since he had arrived back in

London, and not many days since the king had set foot on Scottish soil. The

Scottish parliament had only just passed an act of levy for the recruiting of its

army by over 36,000 men, in addition to the few thousands that David Leslie

already had under arms. It was a huge target for a small nation, and nothing

like it was ever achieved. Cromwell’s attacking force consisted of eight regi-

ments apiece of cavalry and infantry, totalling over 16,000 men. By the time

it crossed the Tweed on 22 July, Leslie had already raised his army to almost

that number, and recruitment was still in full swing. Many of his levies were

still raw and untrained, but their morale was much higher than that of the last

Scottish army Cromwell had fought, and Leslie was a vastly better general

than Hamilton—probably the best that Cromwell was ever up against.

Though Leven, now about seventy, was still nominally commander-in-chief,

Leslie was in actual control of operations. For all the English parliament’s

superior resources, they were severely stretched, since ﬁghting was still con-

tinuing in Ireland, where garrisons were making mounting demands on man-

power, and the danger of English royalists rising in response to the Scots’

efforts necessitated the upkeep of considerable forces at home. A very testing

time lay ahead for Cromwell. Faced with Leslie’s rapidly increasing strength,

he pressed to have his own army augmented to 25,000, but it was well into

1651 before it reached 20,000.

Leslie had fortiﬁed a line between Edinburgh and Leith, and his strategy

was to leave Cromwell free to advance to it unopposed, having stripped the

intervening territory of all provisions that his troops might need. This

scorched earth policy, coming on top of the impressment of all men of mili-

tary age, inﬂicted great hardship on the Lowlands countryfolk, and made

them doubly hostile to the invaders; nor were they molliﬁed by Cromwell’s

repeated proclamations forbidding his men to lay hands on their persons or

property. He was forced to rely on seaborne supplies landed at Dunbar, but

these brought him less than he needed, and their transport from the coast was

impeded by persistently wet weather. Exposure to this caused much sickness

in his army, reducing it to not much more than half the strength of Leslie’s

constantly reinforced opposing force. Nevertheless he tried hard to bring the

Scots to battle. He advanced against Leslie’s lines on 29 July, bombarded

The Commonwealth at War 483

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 483

Leith furiously, and even temporarily captured Arthur’s Seat, but after his

wet and weary men had stood in battle order all night he withdrew them to

their camp at Musselburgh. Their ﬁrst night’s rest there was broken by a bold

attack by ﬁfteen troops of Scottish horse, which were beaten off with some

difﬁculty.

Cromwell’s attitude towards his Scottish opponents was markedly differ-

ent from the one he had shown to the Irish. The Scots were fellow-protestants,

if of a bigoted kind, and he and Leslie had fought side by side at Marston

Moor. But in his mind the two peoples had one thing in common: both were

being driven to ﬁght for a bad cause by their clergy. In a war of words with the

kirkmen which had begun with a long manifesto in the name of his army

when it ﬁrst crossed the border, he published a famous address to the Gen-

eral Assembly of the Kirk from Musselburgh on 3 August. He accused the

ministers of claiming infallibility in interpreting the word of God, and

teaching the people that the Covenant bound them to ﬁght on their side in the

present war. It was of course a highly partisan document, but it is expressive

of his own convictions:

Your own guilt is too much for you to bear: bring not therefore upon yourselves the

blood of innocent men, deceived with pretences of king and Covenant, from whose

eyes you hide a better knowledge . . . Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of

God, all that you say? I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may

be mistaken . . . There may be . . . a carnal conﬁdence upon mistaken and misapplied

concepts, which may be called spiritual drunkenness. There may be a Covenant made

with death and hell.

The suggestion that they might be mistaken hit the kirkmen on the raw. In a

reply that smouldered with indignation they asked: ‘Would you have us to be

sceptics in our religion?’ Their view, repeated again and again, was simply

that Cromwell had signed the Covenant and was now breaking it.

It would be too much to say that they were ﬁghting a war on two fronts, but

Cromwell was not their only problem. His challenge to battle on 29 July coin-

cided with an unofﬁcial visit to the Scottish army by the king himself. Charles

was joyously welcomed by both ofﬁcers and men, so warmly indeed that

Wariston and others of the Kirk party were thoroughly dismayed. They

feared that a war for God and the Covenant would degenerate into a secular

war for the king, with of course a consequent diminution in their own inﬂu-

ence. They warned Charles that his continuing presence would discourage the

godly and incur the wrath of God, who was jealous of any rivalry to his

own glory. They put strong pressure on him to leave, which he reluctantly did

on 2 August, and then, concluding that there were too many malignants

(i.e. royalists) in Leslie’s camp, they persuaded the Committee of Estates to

484 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 303, see p. 305 for the Scots’ reply.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 484

carry out a purge which rapidly removed about 80 ofﬁcers and 4,000 men.

This was folly on at least three counts: it damaged the morale of the Scottish

army as well as reducing its strength, it roused the young king’s deep resent-

ment, and it widened the rift in the Covenanters’ ranks between the fanatical

clergy-dominated wing and the moderate and aristocratic one led by Argyll.

Between Argyll and Cromwell a certain wary rapport persisted, despite

the war.

Throughout August Cromwell tried intermittently to bring Leslie to a deci-

sive engagement, but he always failed. Leslie was under frequent pressure to

give battle, both from the politicians in Edinburgh and those precursors of

modern political commissars, the ministers attendant on the army, but he

steadily resisted them. He was justiﬁed, and in the complex tactical man-

oeuvres that he and Cromwell executed his generalship was arguably the

better. He reckoned that the toll that dysentery and camp fever were taking of

the English army, joined to the problems of supplying it by sea in continuingly

atrocious weather, would force Cromwell to withdraw it across the border

before winter set in, and it was not an unreasonable judgement. Although

Cromwell had been reinforced, sickness and desertion had reduced his effect-

ive strength to about 11,000 by the end of August, and despite the continuing

purge of malignants Leslie had at least twice as many in the ﬁeld by then.

During 31 August and 1 September, with the Scots harassing his rearguard,

Cromwell fell back on Dunbar, whither his seaborne supplies and recruits

were shipped from Berwick, and where his many sick soldiers could ﬁnd some

shelter. Leslie believed he had him cornered. He took up a strong position on

Doon Hill, overlooking the town, and occupied a vital deﬁle at Cock-

burnspath on the road to Berwick, so cutting off the English army’s retreat by

land. On the 2nd Cromwell wrote to Haselrig, who was still governor of

Newcastle, plainly facing the possibility of defeat and warning him to muster

all the forces he could against a possible Scottish invasion:

We are here upon an engagement very difﬁcult. The enemy hath blocked up our way

at the pass at Copperspath [Cockburnspath], through which we cannot get without

almost a miracle. He lieth so upon the hills that we know not how to come that way

without great difﬁculty; and our lying here daily consumeth our men who fall sick

beyond imagination.

But though defeat was a contingency against which it was his duty to pro-

vide, Cromwell’s mind was all on battle, and he never despaired of victory.

Leslie, with his two to one superiority (slightly more than that in infantry,

slightly less in cavalry), did not conceive that the English would attempt

any more than to make their escape with as few losses as possible, and he was

The Commonwealth at War 485

Ibid., p. 314.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 485

conﬁrmed in this expectation when Cromwell put 500 of his sickest men on

shipboard; he thought the English were evacuating all their infantry. He came

down from Doon Hill on 2 September and formed a battle-front about a mile

long, mostly behind the shallow ravine of the Spott Burn (then called Brock’s

Burn), but stretching right across the Berwick road. Some sources state that

he moved his army against his better judgement, under pressure from the

Committee of Estates, who kept urging him to fall on his weakened enemy.

But he needed no persuading to give battle now, and the decision may well

have had his full concurrence, if it was not entirely his own. His move brought

the English lines within range of his artillery, and gave his men some relief

from the bitter winds and rain that swept Doon Hill.

Cromwell led the senior ofﬁcers of his council of war on a mounted recon-

naissance of the Scottish position late in the afternoon before formally con-

sulting it, after sundown, as to what course to take. A number of colonels

were for shipping the infantry to safety while the cavalry tried to cut through

a path of escape, just as Leslie supposed would happen. But there were noth-

ing like enough vessels for that, and Lambert, whose own reconnoitring had

helped to discover a possibly fatal weakness in the Scottish position, gave

Cromwell the support he wanted by pressing for battle. The decision was

taken, not only to ﬁght but to attack ﬁrst.

Both armies spent a cold wet night in the ﬁeld, ranged in battle order. But

whereas most of the Scots were allowed to unsaddle their horses and extin-

guish their matches, and many of their ofﬁcers went off to houses or tents

behind the lines for a sleep, the English regiments stayed at the ready, and

Cromwell rode round them all night, checking their positions and giving

them encouragement. In his tense concentration he bit his lips until the blood

ran unnoticed down his chin. Well before daybreak, Lambert and a brigade

of horse opened the battle with an assault on the Scots holding the pass at

Cockburnspath, and despite a strong cavalry counter-attack they cleared it

after an hour’s ﬁghting. In the general engagement that followed, the infantry

battle played at least as critical a part in the day’s outcome as the initial cav-

alry action. Attacking against such heavy odds, the English foot were at ﬁrst

repulsed, but they rallied and drove the Scots back at push of pike over a dis-

tance of three quarters of a mile. When the Covenanters ﬁnally cracked and

began to throw down their arms, Cromwell’s cavalry inﬂicted a terrible

slaughter upon them; they were, in his words, ‘made by the Lord of Hosts as

stubble to their swords’. As the sun rose over the sea, he shouted ‘Now let

God arise, and his enemies shall be scattered’, and indeed they were soon in

full ﬂight. He never fought a ﬁner battle, though Lambert deserves his share

of the credit. Cromwell had faced possible destruction, but it was the

Covenanting army that was all but destroyed. He may have underestimated

his own casualties, which he variously put at twenty or thirty killed, but Leslie

486 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 486

lost over 3,000 dead and nearly 10,000 prisoners; only about 4,000 men,

mainly cavalry, subsequently rallied to him. For Cromwell, Dunbar was a very

special providence of God, and he was anxious that his masters at Westminster

should be worthy of it. In his dispatch to the Speaker next day he wrote:

We that serve you beg of you not to own us, but God alone; we pray you own his

people more and more, for they are the chariots and horsemen of Israel. Disown your-

selves, but own your authority, and improve it to curb the proud and the insolent . . .

relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England, be pleased to

reform the abuses of all professions; and if there be anyone that makes many poor to

make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.

The ofﬁcer entrusted with carrying this dispatch—one of those specially

named in it for his service in the battle—was the same Major White of the

General’s own regiment of horse who had been expelled from the General

Council for his Leveller opinions in 1647 and employed by Fairfax to negoti-

ate with the Leveller mutineers in 1647. The House heard his account of the

great victory with understandable enthusiasm and relief. It made some

response to Cromwell’s pleas, for it quickly passed an act repealing all laws

that penalized non-attendance at Sunday services in the parish church, pro-

viding that nonconformists engaged in some other form of worship on the

Lord’s Day. The Dunbar dispatch also probably prompted the setting up of a

committee to look into excessive expenses and delays in the courts of justice,

and a vote that henceforth all legal proceedings should be conducted solely in

the English language.

Edinburgh learned of the disaster at Dunbar from the ﬂeeing horsemen

who sought shelter within its walls, and it reacted with panic. Leslie, after

rallying what remnants of his army he could, withdrew with them to Stirling,

and old Leven went with him. Stirling also became a refuge for the Commit-

tee of Estates and the city fathers, besides very many burghers of Edinburgh

and nearly all its hitherto bellicose ministers. No marriages took place in the

capital for months, because there were no clergy to perform them. Cromwell

sent Lambert to secure the city while he himself took Leith, which despite its

strong walls and thirty-seven cannon offered no resistance. Leith was vital to

him for the safe landing of supplies and reinforcements, and among the booty

it yielded were three hundred tuns of French wine.

On arriving in Edinburgh Cromwell again sought to persuade the Scottish

people that his quarrel was not with them. By proclamation and by personal

assurances he promised them protection of their persons and property, and

freedom to come and go from Edinburgh and Leith to sell their wares and

hold markets. Edinburgh Castle still held out against him, but since its small

The Commonwealth at War 487

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 325; on the battle generally

see also pp. 321–30 and Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 392–8.

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