Marston Moor (29 page)

Someone hissed irritably for silence nearby, and they bowed their heads.

‘And, Lord, we beseech thee,’ Bramhall went on. ‘Preserve us from the violence of the wicked.’

‘Preserve us,’ Forrester said.

‘Preserve us,’ Killigrew echoed.

And in that moment the world erupted.

Forrester pushed his way along the nave as the Minster’s very foundations shook. He burst out into daylight smudged by gritty miasma, at its thickest to the north and west, where the Manor compound abutted the main city wall. It projected precariously into the siege-lines of the Eastern Association, and it hardly surprised him that the area was under attack once more. But this was different. The Manor sat in the shadow of York Minster, and even from the cathedral’s grounds he could see that St Mary’s Tower, the proud sentinel marking the north-eastern corner of the compound, was now little more than a pile of jumbled stone.

Musket fire, furious and thick, erupted from the direction of the Manor. Forrester ran, clamping down his hat with one hand and drawing his pistol with the other. He weaved through the tide of terrified folk as they fled towards the safety of the Minster. He reached one of the gates leading through the main wall into the Manor and paused, loading the pistol with fumbling fingers. When it was done, he shouldered the gate open, wincing in expectation of a hail of lead, but none came. The fight was to the north, along the wall. The Manor grounds formed, he guessed, all of ten acres, walled entirely except for the western flank, which was protected by the river as it entered the city. That side had been shielded from marksmen by an earthen rampart, and he could see garrison men crouching on the muddy palisade as they gave fire across the water. On the compound’s right flank, beyond its own wall, was Bootham Bar, one of York’s great gates, and he imagined no serious threat was posed to so sturdy a barbican. But up ahead, over the open terrain of bowling green and orchard, was the long stretch of wall that ended with the crumbling remains of St Mary’s Tower, and there Parliamentarian soldiers streamed over the battlements almost unopposed.

‘Christ,’ Forrester hissed. He thumbed back his pistol’s hammer. The enemy had already made a breach in the battered wall, between the tower and what remained of a cannon-smashed church, but the garrison had plugged the gap with rubble and sods. Yet now, with the tower sliding into the abyss on the outer face of the defences, the Parliament men were climbing unopposed to drop on to the inner face of the Manor grounds.

Forrester swore again. The smoke was clearing. He could see more men hauling themselves over the wall on either side of the breach, and knew that this was a well-planned assault.

Nearby, at the old abbott’s residence, the Manor House, doors flew open. Men ran out on to the gardens. They wore white coats and they brandished muskets and blades, halberds and axes. Forrester ran to them, noting the red scarf at the waist of one grey-whiskered officer. ‘Captain Forrester,’ he panted, ‘Mowbray’s Foot.’

The officer offered a curt nod. ‘Where is your unit?’

‘I was at worship, sir.’

‘Then you’ll have to do.’ The officer was tall and elegant. His coat was white like that of his men, but trimmed with exquisite lace and slashed at the sleeves to reveal a lining of red silk. ‘Sir Phillip Byron,’ he added, ‘colonel in this sector. Rogues have sprung a mine under St Mary’s. They’re coming in.’ He drew a swept-hilt rapier, kissed the blade tenderly, and pointed it at the tower. ‘I mean to stop them.’

With that, Byron broke into a charge. His men, numbering no more than fifty, jostled past Forrester, who followed them through the gardens and the orchard. They reached the bowling green quickly, and there they ran into four times their number.

The Parliamentarian troops had been massing on the neatly trimmed green. They were not ready to repel a concerted counter-attack, which is what saved Forrester and most of Byron’s men, for the majority were engaged in loading and priming their muskets before the next phase of the assault. The Royalists ran headlong into the enemy’s foremost lines, discharging their weapons and then flipping them over to present their heavy wooden stocks. But there were simply too many to fight, and by the time Forrester reached the fray they were already overwhelmed, falling back across the green beneath the crushing blows of the butt ends of muskets. All the while more and more Roundhead troops swarmed through the breach, over the undefended wall and up through the ragged fissure that had been the corner tower.

Sir Phillip Byron – yet another member of the great dynasty so entwined with the King’s cause - held his elegant rapier high, slashed it down at a tawny-scarfed officer with purple lips and a milky eye, and sneered as his blow was barely parried. Then he was down. Forrester was behind him, shouting at Byron to get up, but he saw the rapier lying in the grass, saw the colonel’s hands clutching at his belly, gut-shot by some unseen assassin. The milky-eyed Parliamentarian needed no encouragement. His blade went hard and deep, crunching up through the colonel’s neck until it jarred on bone. Forrester screamed the retreat, and in seconds the Royalists were bolting across the open ground towards the Manor House.

A huge cheer went up. Forrester swore viciously, wondering how they could possibly mount an effective defence with so few men. It was only when the cheer was repeated that he realized it had come from behind rather than in front. He looked back towards the gate leading through the city wall. Hundreds of men in suits of white were flooding into the compound. They were grim-faced, chanting war-cries, a huge red banner swaying on its pole at their head, cutting through the smoke like the prow of a ship.

Beneath that banner was a man dressed in blue and silver, his chest encased in iron, his hat adorned with huge, white feathers. William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, general of Royalist forces north of the River Trent, looked like a man possessed. His teeth shone white as he screamed encouragement to his white-coated men, his Lambs, eyes blazing through the powder cloud.

‘On me! On me!’ Newcastle was bellowing. ‘I am with you, my lads! And God is with me!’

Forrester ran to him as the veteran units of Newcastle’s army fanned out across the orchard. ‘Where else do they threaten, my lord?’

Newcastle seemed nonplussed for a heartbeat. ‘Nowhere, Captain, thank the Lord. I bring two thousand brave men. I mean to purge the Manor clean of rebel stink!’

Forrester could hardly believe his ears. ‘Nowhere, my lord?’ It was almost beyond comprehension that the escalade would be attempted at a single point, given the formidable garrison available to repel it. ‘They will surely stretch us, will they not?’

‘Satan gives them arrogance,’ Newcastle said. ‘They will learn.’

Forrester glanced back at the breach, at the foot of which the massed ranks of the storming party were edging forth, firing by volley across the bowling green. Bullets whined and whistled over his head. One of the marquis’s officers went down, shot through the face. Forrester made to leave, but the marquis grasped his elbow with an angry glare.

‘You mean to run, sir?’

‘I mean to trap them, sir!’ Forrester replied. ‘I must get out of the city!’

‘Out?’ Newcastle was bewildered. He shook his head. ‘Bootham Bar is barricaded.’

‘A postern then?’

Newcastle glanced at an aide, who stepped forwards with a nod. ‘Private sally port on t’other side of Bootham, sir.’

Forrester took Sir Phillip Byron’s men. He had around thirty in all, for the unit had abandoned several dead and wounded on the overgrown lawn. They went out of the Manor complex, beyond Bootham Bar, and through the tiny door set into the thick city wall nearby. They were outside in moments, exposed to the fury of the Army of Both Kingdoms, the huge barbican immediately on their left, with the carcass of St Mary’s Tower teetering above. Forrester ran towards the sound of musketry and clanging steel, a din growing more furious with each passing second as the whitecoats advanced behind their blood-red colour.

He prayed aloud as he ran, begging God to cloak them from enemy sharpshooters, and wondering how on earth they would be able to skirt the outer face of the wall without being cut to shreds. The Manor wall was not covered by an outer ditch, but it was surrounded by siegeworks, and they leapt, one by one, into the first trench they reached. They scuttled along it, fetid brown water splashing all around, keeping their heads down until they reached a dead end. They clambered up and out, rolling over the lip of the trench and scrambling in amongst a nest of gabions for protection. Forrester risked a peek over the top of one of the large baskets. Nothing stirred in the lines. He looked out over the network of excavations. The besiegers had burrowed right around the city so that the entire circuit of walls was edged by a warren of gun emplacements and zig-zagging saps, and he knew that if he led his troop north, away from the battle, he would eventually stumble into the Eastern Association’s main army. He took his time, scanning each gully until he found the right one, the most advanced trench the Earl of Manchester’s sappers had dug: it was a passageway, five-feet deep, that ran flush with the Manor wall. Calling for the sally party to follow, he jumped in.

On they went, working their way around the corner of the compound. Forrester poked his head above the edge of the trench to see what was left of St Mary’s Tower. Half of it had collapsed into the ground around Bootham Bar, and a vast crater had cored the earth at its foot. Above them, smoke-wreathed and jagged, was the breach. They waited, scanned the terrain on all sides, but no soldiers lined the siegeworks, no engineers waded through the filth in their heavy iron suits, no artillery pieces were being hauled up to play upon other sections of the wall. It was as if every man available for the escalade had already hurled himself over the ladder or through the breach. Did the rest of the army even know what transpired? Forrester laughed. He was terrified. His guts turned like a mill wheel and he could feel his breakfast inching its way up towards his mouth, and yet he laughed, because there was no one to stop him. So he climbed.

The sally party scrambled up the slope of rubble and soil in Forrester’s wake. There was a crude palisade of stakes and wicker baskets at the top, and his men pushed through until they were on the inner face. Now shots rang out behind, for someone in the siege-lines had noticed their action, but it was all too late. Forrester turned his heels outwards, sliding on the filthy glacis until he was halfway down and well out of sight of anyone outside the city. There he halted, planting his feet hard so that there would be no slippage, and barked orders for his men to prepare their weapons as he drew his own blade.

He stared down into the compound. Immediately below, the Roundheads were in trouble. Plenty had come to the attack, perhaps as many as six hundred, but with no additional explosions, no extra breaches, nor even feinted assaults at other places on the wall, the Marquis of Newcastle had a large proportion of his garrison to spare. Now Forrester reckoned there were as many as two thousand Royalists in the Manor grounds, advancing by well-timed volley fire against a far inferior force. The Parliamentarians had captured the Manor for a matter of minutes, but now it had been violently wrested back into Cavalier hands.

Forrester waited until the first of the enemy officers called a full-scale retreat before he snapped the order for his men to present their muskets. The muzzles came down as one, a complete cordon stretching across the breach. There followed a terrible moment, for the Roundheads had seen them now, and they knew they would have to fight their way through, so that Forrester feared his thin line would be punctured by desperate fugitives. But they veered away in their fear, making instead for the chasm beside the collapsed tower. Scores made it through, but many were shot in their flight, and eventually that escape route was blocked too, so that they had nowhere to go. They threw down their arms, the swords of their officers clattering at the feet of Newcastle’s senior men, and the Royalists cheered. It was over. York was safe.

Chapter 13

Outside York, 18 June 1644

The dappled grey gelding heaved its filth-spattered legs up the gentle incline, each hoof sucking as it was plucked from the mire. Its rider called encouragement into a flattened ear as he clung on against the rolling motion, knuckles white where they gripped the reins. Up ahead, a wagon was being loaded with what looked to be heavy sacks. The air suddenly carried the tang of putrefaction. He looked round at the man mounted on a big bay just behind. ‘We brought everything on this cursed expedition, Davey. Everything but a supply of pomanders.’

David Leslie, Lieutenant-General of the Scots in England, did not look up into the seething rain. ‘There’s always somethin’!’ he called.

Leven held a gloved knuckle to his nose as they skirted the wagon. He could feel the eyes of the local labourers, forced to collect the corpses under duress, bore into him, and refused to meet their collective gaze. He wondered how bountiful today’s bitter harvest had been.