A History of Britain, Volume 2 (19 page)

From his position in the valley, at the parliamentary centre, Denzil Holles, one of the five ‘birds' of January, Dorchester's own MP in arms, would have had a good view of the formidable array of royal forces mustering on the ridge. From among the trained bands and apprentices in London he, like so many of his friends and colleagues, had raised his own troop of foot soldiers and had dressed them also in red coats, that being the cheapest of the available dyes. (One of the hoariest myths of the civil war is that there were no coloured uniforms. Lord Brooke's men were outfitted in bright purple!) John Hampden was supposed be
en route,
and Arthur Haselrig, he knew, had barely eluded capture by the king's army in the east Midlands. Of what lay in store for him should the parliamentary cause collapse on the battlefield, Holles could have no doubt. On their marches back and forth through the West Country these soldiers had already established a kind of brutal routine: taking what they could get when and as they needed it, abusing any church or priest or village they decided was ‘papist', smashing and burning communion table rails, occasionally saying their prayers. Fortunately, it was harvest time and they were marching through the prolific west Midlands. ‘Our food was fruit for those that could get it,' wrote one apprentice turned soldier, Nehemiah Wharton, in Worcestershire. ‘Our drink was water; our beds the earth; our canopy the clouds, but we pulled up hedges, pales and gates and made good fires; his Excellency [Essex] promising us that, if the country relieved us not the day following, he would fire their towns.'

Their panicky encounters with Prince Rupert's cavalry along the way could not have done much for the morale of the foot soldiers, and there they were again on the brow of the hill. At least, now there were some guns. Scattered amid the lines of cumbersome 16-foot pikes were musketeers, busy now checking the tarred rope that would act as a fuse for their weapons, knocking firmly into place the forked and grooved supports on which the muskets and arquebuses had to rest before they had any chance at all of hitting their target. Some field guns were deployed in front of the centre, but firing upwards, against the bias of the hill, was not exactly going to be easy.

So indeed it proved. Around three o'clock Essex thought to compensate for his topographical disadvantage by cannonading the royalist infantry centre. Most of the replying cannonade came from guns
positioned too far down the slope to get much ricochet effect, and it may have been the disappointing performance of the king's artillery, together with the sudden appearance of a parliamentary officer, Sir Faithful Fortescue, tearing off his orange scarf in a dramatic gesture of defection, that persuaded Rupert to begin his cavalry attack. For the parliamentary forces, sitting on their horses or standing with their long pikes in front of them, watching a trot become a canter and seeing the fire of their own muskets and carbines apparently having no effect on the advancing horsemen, the moment of truth had arrived and the reality of war slammed into them. Waves of horsemen came at the terrified parliamentary troops, cutting in at a sweeping angle, which ensured that they were completely unchecked by musket fire. Panic hit the parliamentary right. Their cavalry and some of the infantry broke and fled. Rupert's horsemen slashed a path right through and charged off in pursuit of the fleeing parliamentary troopers like so many huntsmen after the fox. Their chase was 3 miles all the way to the village of Kineton, where the parliamentary army had kept its baggage, now taken in a riotous triumph by Rupert's cavalry. A mile further on John Hampden, marching to the field with his own troops, collided with the runaways, heading for cover like rabbits.

Rupert and his horsemen supposed the battle already won. Prepare the libations. At some point the prince decided he had better return to Edgehill, if only to help with the mopping up. What he found was carnage. The royalist army had been left completely unprotected when, against orders, the cavalry reserve stationed behind Rupert, its blood maddened by contempt for the runaway enemy, had joined the pursuit. Tally-ho!

It was a catastrophic mistake. By no means all the infantry in the parliamentary centre had disintegrated, although it was a close thing. Again it was the Scots or at least one old Covenanter, Sir William Balfour, who made the difference to the destiny of England. While Colonel Thomas Ballard plugged the infantry gap, Balfour rallied his cavalry reserve amid the flying mêlée. They charged the royalist foot soldiers, whom Sir Jacob Astley had led into the fight prefaced by a prayer: ‘O Lord! Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not thou forget me.' A stand was made long enough and firmly enough for the shaken troops, including Holles' London apprentices, to begin to close and mount a gradual, slogging advance up the hill towards the unprotected royalist left flank. Further royalist charges impaled themselves on masses of pikemen. The two forces of pikemen and musketeers met, hand-to-hand, like two lumbering, predatory monsters caught in each other's bristling spikes. And they went at it, hour after hour. The little Duke of York, who had been moved further back for safety by his father, could still see the terrible
slaughter below, and all his life he marvelled at the memory, neither side giving ground except to exhaustion. ‘The foot being thus ingaged in such warm and close service,' he wrote later, ‘it were reasonable to imagine that one side should run and be disorder'd; but it happen'd otherwise, for each as if by mutuall consent retired some few paces, and they stuck down their coulours, continuing to fire at one another even till night; a thing so very extraordinary that nothing less than so many witnesses as there were present, could make it credible.'

In the midst of all this push of pike, smoke and fire and banging of metal was Sir Edmund Verney. The flag gripped in his hand had, of course, made him the most obvious target of all. His eulogists would say that he cut down sixteen soldiers before seeing his own servant Jason die in front of him and then disappearing himself into a mass of oncoming troopers. The flag was carried off but then recaptured by a Life Guard, who disguised himself with the orange scarf of the parliamentarians and brought it back to the king.

Only the October nightfall and sheer dead-dog exhaustion ended the battle. The royalist army held the field. Essex, who thought he should keep together what remained of his force for a possible second engagement should the king decide to move on towards London, fell back on the security of Lord Brooke's Warwick Castle. But the royalist army, although attempting to celebrate a technical victory, was, in fact, torn to pieces. If it wasn't exactly a retreat neither was it a gesture of self-confidence. About 3000 lay dead in the Warwickshire valley, countless more were grievously wounded. The cold was bitter, so sharp that the few who were discovered alive the next morning owed their survival to the freezing temperatures, which had cold-staunched their wounds. The commanders of both armies, especially those who had not seen the bloodshed in Europe, were in shock. The tally-ho war was over.

Little help could be expected for the royalists from a countryside filled with the tenant farmers of Lord Brooke and Viscount Saye and Sele. Although Charles might have seized the moment and attempted a quick march to London, his depleted and mutilated army needed recuperation and reinforcement. So the king made for Banbury, whose garrison surrendered without a fight, then staunchly royalist Oxford, which was to be his capital for the duration of the war, and finally Reading.

In the House of Commons Ralph Verney had to sit through a reading of Lord General Essex's dispatch, which claimed optimistically that Edgehill (then known as the Kineton fight) had been a ‘blessed Victory which God hath given us upon the Army of the Cavaliers, and of those Evil Persons, who upon Sunday the 23rd of this Instant, engaged his
Majesty in a dangerous and bloody Fight against his faithful Subjects'. But Ralph was lost in a maelstrom of sorrow. His father, the enemy, had fallen holding the king's flag. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened to him or where his body could be found. Lady Sussex wrote to Ralph in condolence: ‘I have the saddest heart and deepest wounded soul that ever creature had, he being, I confess to you, the greatest comfort of my life.' Ralph replied:

Sir Edmund Verney did appear again – but only to the villagers (including a minister and a justice of the peace) who some months later swore they beheld a vision of a terrible engagement of phantom armies contending in the night sky, and there in the middle was the standard-bearer, holding fast to his king's flag. Others claimed that someone, somewhere had found Sir Edmund's severed hand, with the portrait ring of the king on his finger, still clutching a piece of the pole.

None of this was any consolation to Ralph Verney. His father's death shook his faith in the war. In the following year, 1643, he was among many (including Denzil Holles) who tried to find some way out of it, if necessary by putting out feelers to the king. After the collapse of tentative negotiation with the court at Oxford, signatures were demanded for the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, an alliance committed to pursuing the war to total victory. Ralph Verney could not bring himself to sign. Instead he disappeared and took his family with him into exile in France.

That the war was to be a long, grim, grinding business had already been apparent when the king's attempt to smash parliament by taking
London stalled at Turnham Green, on the western outskirts of the capital, in November 1642. A week before the royalist army, now somewhat depleted by leaving garrisons at Reading and Oxford, had been confronted with trained bands at Brentford, including Denzil Holles' redcoats. Another of Rupert's cavalry charges had cut through their lines, however, and pushed the troopers stumbling back into the Thames, where many of them floundered and drowned, weighed down by their armour. But the fear that gripped London also produced an immense outpouring of volunteers, determined to stand in the way of the Cavaliers' retribution. On Sunday, 12 November, 24,000 of them, plus hordes of women and civilians supplying them with food and encouragement, faced 12,000 soldiers of the royalist army. Many of the defenders were armed with nothing better than cudgels or pitchforks, but there were a lot of them. And after a day-long, nervous stand-off at Turnham Green Charles decided against risking his army and took it back to Oxford.

Edgehill had taught Charles that the conflict would not be settled by a single, epic battle. Turnham Green taught him that, however disorganized and amateurish, parliament was capable of mobilizing resources that could equal or outgun his own. It was crucial, then, to husband and strengthen his own assets in regions of the country where he could depend on a solid base of gentry support and where the population might be more receptive to the heavy taxation needed to fund the war effort. This boiled down, essentially, to the west and northeast and Wales. Once his military power base was solid, he could move from the periphery of the country towards the strategic centre, gradually drawing a noose around the neck of London. Parliament, on the other hand, knew that as its core supply areas in eastern and southeastern England were held secure, the capital would be fed and armed. Preventing the royalist army from making inroads into East Anglia and the east Midlands, lying as they did between the king's northern and western power bases, became crucial for parliament. In 1643 the establishment of an Eastern Association, linking the county defence committees under the unified command of Lord Mandeville, now the Earl of Manchester and one of the few peers to remain with parliament, was meant to make the rapid deployment of Cromwell's foot soldiers, guns and horse, when and where they were needed, more efficient.

The war that year broke down into regional theatres of conflict, especially in Yorkshire and the West Country. They were no less nasty or bloody, and no less ruinous to the towns and country that felt their shock, for being such local events. And they were both very unpredictable. The size of the forces waxed and waned with the enthusiasm and loyalty of the
gentry who brought them into the war, and they were constantly plagued by defections of common foot soldiers and troopers who deserted in large numbers after battles, whether victorious or defeated. (‘Home, home' was the repeated cry of London apprentices in Devon and Cornwall, who knew they were very far away from Cheapside and Southwark.) But then, after all, their gentlemen officers seemed to change sides with dismaying regularity, at least during 1643, and mostly in one direction – towards the king, whose fortunes were certainly in the ascendant that year. In Yorkshire Sir John Hotham, who had turned the king away from Hull, and Sir Hugh Cholmley, a ship-money resister, both switched sides. In Cornwall Sir Alexander Carew, who had been so implacably determined to see Strafford beheaded, plotted to hand over Plymouth to the royalists, was exposed by one of his servants, arrested, taken to London and summarily tried and executed. With things definitely not going according to plan in the western campaign, Sir Richard Grenville, the brother of Sir Bevil, suddenly discovered that, after all, religion had been ‘a cloke for rebellion' and changed his allegiance, becoming one of the most ruthlessly cold-blooded of all the royalist generals.