A Sword for Christ

The Republican Era in Great Britain and Ireland

Jonathan Cobb

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788854733
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The fifteen-year period between 1645 and 1660 was one of the most dynamic in British history, during which the republican Commonwealth and Cromwellian Protectorate attempted to create a new type of ‘Godly’ state after the execution of Charles I. Drawing on the latest research and established sources, as well as the works and diaries of contemporaries such as John Evelyn, Lucy Hutchinson and Samuel Pepys, A Sword for Christoffers a new and stimulating perspective on these extraordinary years. Key personalities such as Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Marquis of Argyll, Charles II and, of course, Oliver Cromwell himself – one of the most contentious figures in history – are re-appraised and brought vividly to life. In addition to exploring the religious and political debates which shaped the era and the military culture which defined it, the book also considers how society was profoundly affected by the upheaval caused by the civil wars; the relations between what was essentially an English republic and its Irish and Scottish neighbours; and the ethos of the New Model Army and the navy.

1

‘To fight against the King’

Naseby

The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Psalm 46

Shortly after first light on the morning of 14 June 1645 a small group of mounted officers and dragoons rode along a ridge about three-quarters of a mile to the north of an English Midlands hamlet called Naseby. A thick early morning mist had not yet cleared and in the limited visibility the soldiers’ faces displayed anxious impatience. In the still air they could hear the faint but unmistakable rumbling of thousands of hooves and feet drumming the ground with their movement. The most senior in the group was Sir Thomas Fairfax, a thirty-three-year-old Yorkshire gentleman who had been appointed to overall command of parliament’s largest force in the field. This had recently been reorganised as a professional fighting unit that became known to posterity as the New Model Army; the day ahead was to be the first real test of its worth. To the south of the little group, a force of about 14,000 men had been on the march towards them for over three hours, having been galvanised by regimental chaplains with prayers and psalms. Sir Thomas’s reconnaissance party was looking for the main body of the royalist army, the pickets of which his scouts had discovered the day before.

In fact, he was better informed about the relative positions of the two groups of forces than were his opponents; the night before, a council-of-war had taken place between the king and his senior officers and advisers at Market Harborough, at which there was some debate about how they should respond to the likely positions and intentions of the parliamentary army in their vicinity. Charles had already asked for reinforcement from the West Country but the royalist commander there, the argumentative and bibulous Lord Goring, had demurred. The king’s army numbered some 9,000 men, over half of which were cavalry under the command of his talented and opinionated nephew, Prince Rupert. Suspecting they might be outnumbered, the royalists faced an unpalatable choice: they could either withdraw northward and risk attack and defeat whilst on the move, or they could force an engagement against a potentially superior force in the hope of outmanoeuvring their opponents.

However, morale in the royalist lines was good. In one of the biggest royalist successes of the war so far, the town of Leicester had recently been invested and captured. Leicester had a thriving commercial economy based on the finishing of primary goods and it had provided a good weight of resource to the parliamentary side. In the aftermath of the siege, Charles’s victorious soldiers had enthusiastically plundered the traumatised civilian population on the losing side. Furthermore, their triumph was seen to have induced a sense of alarm amongst the more excitable in the parliamentary opposition in London, and Fairfax had been ordered to break off his own siege of the royalist capital at Oxford to engage with the threat. Yet the royalist commanders considered the formation that they were to face as unproven, and there had already been much scoffing about the ‘New Noddle’ army.

Indeed, a certain de haut en bas attitude towards the opposition had been one of the undisguised prejudices of the royalist side throughout the war. Deprecating the perceived pretensions of those rebels who lacked ‘quality’ the royalist balladeer John Taylor (who was himself from a modest background) wrote:

A preacher’s work is not to geld a sow
Unseemly ’tis that a judge should milk a cow
A cobbler to a pulpit should not mount
Nor can an ass cast up a true account.¹

The belief that they were defending the social order and the erroneous sense that the king’s army contained a preponderance of proper gentlemen gave its senior ranks a high degree of self-esteem, which was not always matched by military aptitude. They felt entitled to victory. Thus emboldened and in perhaps the most momentous military decision of the civil wars, the order was given by the king to give battle.

By eight o’clock in the morning the bulk of the royal army had taken up position on a small ridge to the north of the one on which Fairfax had earlier cantered. Today, a view of this position shows it barely distinguished by a small wood and clusters of farm buildings. On the king’s right flank stood cavalry under the command of Prince Rupert, while the centre of the line comprised infantry under Sir Jacob Astley, a large number of which were Welsh levies. The left flank of the royalist line consisted of another, but less dense, formation of cavalry recruited from the north country and commanded by Sir Marmaduke Langdale, an enormous man for his times, who stood over six feet tall. About 700 yards to their south, the larger mass of the New Model Army was laboriously drawing-up into battle formation. Fairfax had originally intended that his force should occupy the highest ground to the north of Naseby but had been dissuaded by his subordinate, and commander of the horse, Oliver Cromwell, who argued that such a commanding position would deter the enemy and thus deny the opportunity for a decisive encounter. Instead, the New Model Army drew up on slightly lower ground, in lines that extended for nearly a mile, although they still overlooked the royal formation further to their north.

By ten o’clock, the cavalry on the king’s right could barely contain their impatience. Men were starting to dismount to relieve themselves. The horses were padding the rough turf and to Prince Rupert’s subordinates the crab-like movements of their opponents seemed an opportunity, although they belied a larger force that they could not see in the folds of ground to the south-east. The order was given for the cavalry to advance. They did so, gathering speed as they started to gallop downhill across the pot-holed and fallow ground towards the cavalry that faced them on the New Model’s left wing. There was some irritating but largely ineffective flanking fire from dragoons that Cromwell had ordered to occupy hedgerows on the western side of the field of battle. Slowed by the uphill slope, the sweating mounts nonetheless crashed into the opposing formation of cavalry under the command of Cromwell’s future son-in-law, the lawyer Henry Ireton.

It was a powerful and determined assault and within half-an-hour, it looked as if the king’s army was about to bring off an improbable victory. In the slashing melee, Prince Rupert’s cavalry had the momentum; the New Model wing broke off and Ireton himself was briefly made a prisoner. Meanwhile, the royalist centre had advanced and was beginning to successfully engage the opposing infantry under the command of Philip Skippon, an experienced soldier who had cut his teeth in the war on the Continent between the Dutch and the Spanish. After an initial exchange of fire from cumbersome matchlock muskets that were as much a menace to friend as to foe, the perspiring hordes in their heavy wool, stiff leather and ironclad uniforms came together in a vicious press of pikes, swords and firearms swung as lethal clubs. Skippon was shot and wounded, but retained his power of command. The smell of sweat, dung and smoke rose above the ringing tumult of oaths, yells and the heavy breathing of adrenaline-fuelled exertion as the numerically inferior army of the king pressed its advantage.

Having broken Ireton’s cavalry, the royalist troopers then found themselves faced by those packed formations of New Model infantry which until now had been unobserved in the folds of ground behind Fairfax’s front line. Deterred by the dense mass of bristling and deadly pikes, Prince Rupert’s horsemen succumbed to the indiscipline they had shown at Marston Moor the previous year (a battle, the largest of the civil war to date, in which the royalists had been thoroughly worsted by a superior and better-led force). Instead of turning to support the royalist infantry on their now exposed flank, they galloped on in pursuit of the fleeing enemy cavalry that they could still see. Soon they were amongst the New Model Army’s rear echelon, whose baggage train provided another tempting distraction. With his elite cavalry out of command and over the horizon, the king was forced to watch as the army of Fairfax seized the initiative in a stunning counterattack led by Cromwell from the army’s right wing.

Taking full advantage of the downhill slope, Cromwell’s cavalry unit, his experienced ‘Ironsides’, gathered momentum before charging into the weaker body of cavalry commanded by the doughty Langdale. Having shot and cut their way through, they shortly began to invest the infantry in the royalist centre and completed an encirclement as Ireton’s residual troops pressed from the other flank. By the time that Prince Rupert’s exhausted trumpeters had recalled his exuberant troops to the main point of action, it was nearly over. The king, perhaps recalling the heroism of his royal predecessor at Bosworth, made to charge with his Life Guard to rally his surrounded troops but was roughly reined-in by a member of his entourage. The surviving members of his cavalry escaped, leaving the exhausted foot soldiers to fend for themselves. The last sight of the fight that Charles had was of his infantry crying for quarter in the middle of a blood-soaked Northamptonshire landscape.

By now though a battle-lust gripped the New Model soldiers who had come so close to death and defeat in the mid-morning, and with inhibitions released a vicious rampage ensued as they attacked the royalist baggage train gathered behind the lines to the rear. There were many women present among the wagons: wives, lovers, other camp followers and spectators. Amidst a terrible din of screaming, many were murdered or brutally mutilated by having their cheeks slashed and their noses cut. Shrieks in native Welsh were mistaken for the cries of the hated ‘popish’ Irish as the heavily armed soldiers scythed about them. As well as over 4,000 prisoners, a large quantity of cannon, powder, provisions and other valuables were captured, including the king’s gilded carriage. Inside was discovered a heap of his correspondence which his enemies wasted no time in publishing. Propaganda in the form of pamphlets was rapidly becoming one of the defining features of the era and The Kings Cabinet Opened glossed the apparent depths of the king’s perfidy against his subjects whilst adding another layer of angry righteousness to the cause of his opponents.

For the relieved and delighted commanders of the New Model Army, the battle was both a vindication of its existence and, they hoped, a turning point. In the twelve months before the battle, the royalist forces had faced ever mounting odds, yet had shown a surprising resilience. After the heavy defeat at Marston Moor, Charles’s forces had sprung back with the king himself leading his troops to victory and his opponent, the Earl of Essex, to total embarrassment at the battle of Lostwithiel in Cornwall in late August 1644. A royalist army also survived a mauling by a force twice its size at the second battle of Newbury in the autumn of the same year. Whilst parliament had the support of the most economically dominant towns and regions of the realm, and had almost complete control of the nation’s coastline, the king could still count on resources in the Midlands, Lancashire, Wales and the West Country, and a large army in Ireland. He also held the port of Bristol and the strategically important town of Chester.

Thus by the end of the year, serious dissensions were breaking out in the parliamentary ranks about the conduct of the war and the inability of their side to land the decisive blow. With victory seemingly out of reach, those who favoured a negotiated settlement were far more persuasive; even those militants who had been at the genesis of the dispute with the king had come around to this point of view. These included Sir Arthur Hesilrige, a survivor of a group of five MPs whose attempted arrest by the king in person had provided some useful kindling for the conflagration of war in England. Yet safely installed behind his fortifications at Oxford, the king’s responses to peace terms, discussed over a period of desultory negotiation at Uxbridge, offered little hope of a settlement. Meanwhile, against a background of increasing rates of desertion and instances of mutiny at places such as Leatherhead and Henley, the parliamentary high command came under mounting criticism for its apparent lack of zeal in closing out the struggle against the royalists in the field.

On the parliamentary side, the strategic direction of the war was in the hands of the Committee of Both Kingdoms. This was an Anglo-Scottish body composed of seven noblemen, fourteen English MPs and four representatives from north of the border. It had been formed in the wake of the Solemn League and Covenant, the formal compact made between Charles’s opponents in the two realms in the autumn of 1643. A number of its members also held commands in the field, which meant that the Committee found it difficult to provide a consistent level of dispassionate oversight and co-ordination of the campaign against the king. Operationally, the conduct of parliament’s military initiatives were in the hands of the commanders on the ground, the most senior of whom was Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. A somewhat prickly old Etonian of stout appearance and an alumnus of Oxford University, Essex was the heir to his treasonable father, who had been executed for rebellion against Elizabeth I. It was perhaps this legacy and his keen awareness of his rank that informed the earl’s understanding of his political responsibilities during the civil war in England that broke out in the summer of 1642. Whatever his limitations as a commander however, he enjoyed immense prestige. In the opinion of the chronicler and royal counsellor Edward Hyde, by no means an unbiased judge, Essex had been so central to the opposition to the king ‘that they owed not more to the power and reputation of parliament than to his sole name and credit: the being able to raise an army, and conducting it to fight against the King, was purely due to him, and the effect of his power’.²

Nonetheless, Essex became strongly associated with that cadre in the parliamentary ranks that wanted to come to terms with the monarch, and his undistinguished record in the field was further highlighted by the reversals received by his army in the West Country in the autumn of 1644. His apparent want of energy and enthusiasm in a conflict that was turning by degrees bitter and vicious, was critically noted. His fellow nobleman and commander of parliamentary forces from London to the Wash, Edward Montagu, the Earl of Manchester, came in for similar disapprobation. Hyde noted, perhaps by way of contrast to Essex, that Manchester was of a gentle and generous nature, and had clear reverence for the person of the king. For critics however, the war effort against the royalists was led by men whose hearts were not really in it.

In contrast to its later period, the military operations of the first years of the civil wars were conducted in an atmosphere of relative diffidence by the protagonists. One reason was the complementary social rank and assumptions of the leading members of each side. The names of commoners such as Pym and Hampden have come down in history and lore as prime movers in the clash between absolute and representative rule, between king and Commons and between autocracy and the Common Law. In fact, it was the noble grandees (particularly those of a strong religious conviction), fulfilling what they regarded as their ancient role as restraints on the monarch, who were the vanguard of the initial resistance to Charles I in both England and Scotland. This is unsurprising given their prestige, wealth and powers of patronage both at court and in the composition of the representative assemblies of each country. The Scottish nobility had been the first signatories of the Covenant (which bound its adherents to defend what was asserted as the ‘true’ Protestant faith) in 1638. In England, it was the Earl of Essex, together with the Earls of Northumberland, Pembroke, Holland and Viscount Saye and Sele, who were appointed to lead parliament’s Committee of Safety formed in the summer of 1642 when a peaceful accommodation with His Majesty was still earnestly desired.³ Amongst the elites there was little desire to remove the king, still less the institution of monarchy or the hierarchical nature of a polity based on social rank. In Behemoth, his history of the Long Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes pithily described the stand-off: ‘there was no blood shed: they shot at one another nothing but paper’.⁴ But then the king raised his standard at Nottingham, thereby formally declaring war on all his subjects.

Yet the prosecution of a successful modern war of manoeuvre using firearms and artillery was hampered by the quasi-medieval methods of raising and sustaining an army in the field. The private and mercenary armies of the feudal period had given way to a system of militia, whereby localities that roughly corresponded to modern county boundaries took responsibility for the raising of forces in times of national danger. Controlled by civilians, these were complemented by levies raised from the larger towns, of which the most important by far was London. The urban and county militias were often referred to as ‘trained bands’, a somewhat misleading title given they were mostly composed of unenthusiastic amateurs who preferred to make a living rather than make history. It was the ultimate control of these militias that formed one of the biggest bones of contention between the king and parliament, and which frustrated attempts at reconciliation between them.

However, the poor potential of the militia was rapidly revealed by the exigencies of civil war. It proved hard for each side to deploy locally raised troops in a national campaign for a sustained period, although in this regard parliament was to gain a decisive adv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 To fight against the King – Naseby
• 2 There is no probability but of my ruin – Selkirk
• 3 We are here by the King’s madness – Newcastle
• 4 Against all arbitrary power, violence and oppression – Holdenby House
• 5 For the common good of man – Putney
• 6 To struggle with inevitable fate – Preston
• 7 In the name of the people of England’– Westminster Hall
• 8 The restitution of our shaking Freedom – Salisbury
• 9 The righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches – Drogheda
• 10 Think it possible you may be mistaken? – Dunbar
• 11 The pure light of God dwelling within you – Worcester
• 12 Winning all by fight – Dover
• 13 I say you are no Parliament – Westminster
• 14 The inhabitants perishing daily from want – Galway and Edinburgh
• 15 Oh ye tyrants, who shall be your lord protector?’– Whitehall
• 16 A man whom pride hath overcome – Oundle
• 17 I feare little will be done for the future – Bristol
• 18 A feather in a hat – Hampton Court
• 19 Whatever whimsey breezes in the brains of the officers – London
• 20 Everything is uncertain in this inconstant country – Coldstream
• 21 The ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom – Blackheath
• Epilogue: Chepstow Castle
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Plates