Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ were, however, not always given for the provisions taken: and, when given, were not always honoured. Civilian people consequently ‘carried away or hid all their provisions, insomuch as there was neither meat for man or horse: and the very smiths hid themselves, that they might not be compelled to shoe the horses, of which in those stony ways there was great need’.

      A sergeant recorded at about this time, ‘At Aynhoe we were very scanted for victuals; at Chipping Norton our regiment stood in the open field all night having neither bread nor water to refresh ourselves, having also marched the day before without any sustenance.’ Outside Swindon his regiment came upon some thousand sheep and sixty head of cattle. Persuading themselves that they belonged to ‘malignants and papists’, they immediately rounded them all up. Such behaviour was common enough in both armies.

      

      Warned of Essex’s approach towards Worcester, the King ordered Prince Rupert to take half the cavalry which had so far assembled under the royal standard to intercept him. By 23 September, the Prince’s horse were about two miles south of Worcester near the village of Powick where the river Teme flows into the Severn. As he approached the Severn he was told that a body of Parliamentary horse, some thousand strong, had crossed the Teme at Powick Bridge behind him. They were advancing up a narrow lane between thick hedges which gave them no room to manoeuvre. Prince Rupert immediately saw his opportunity. Drawing his men up in the open field at the end of the lane, he prepared to charge as soon as the enemies’ leading horsemen had emerged from it. Waiting until a goodly number had appeared from behind the hedge, the Cavaliers galloped forward at their commanders’ order, overthrowing those Parliamentary horsemen who had come out into the field and throwing the rest into the utmost confusion as they rode this way and that, incapable of understanding, still less of carrying out, such orders as were given them. ‘Our wounded men they brought into the city,’ so Nehemiah Wharton recorded, ‘and stripped, and stabbed and slashed their bodies in a most barbarous manner and imbrued their hands in their blood. They also met a young gentleman, a Parliament man – his name I cannot learn – and stabbed him on horseback with many wounds, and trampled upon him, and also most maliciously shot his horse…All night we had small comfort, for it rained hard. Our food was fruit, for those who could get it; our drink, water; our beds, the earth; but we pulled up hedges, pales and gates and made good fires…Thus we continued singing of psalms until the morning. Saturday morning we marched to Worcester [which Prince Rupert had abandoned as being indefensible] the rain continuing the whole day, and the way so base that we went up to the ancles in thick clay; and, about four of the clock after noon, entered the city where we found twenty-eight dead men, which we buried…We shortly expect a pitched battle, which, if the Cavaliers will but stand, will be very hot; for we are all much enraged against them for their barbarisms, and shall show them little mercy.’

      

      The Royalists claimed a great victory at Powick Bridge. So also did the Parliamentarians, who were in the habit of claiming victory even in battles which had never been fought. But Essex recognized that his cavalry would have to be far better trained before they engaged the Cavaliers again. They must, he instructed, practise the ceremonious forms of military discipline so that in future they would know how to ‘fall on with descretion and retreat with care’.

      Encouraged by this victory and by the reputation which his nephew had gained from it, the King welcomed the recruits, who continued to come to him at Shrewsbury from the surrounding areas, in much improved spirits. By the beginning of October he had six thousand foot soldiers at his command, in addition to the horsemen whom Prince Rupert was training as assiduously as were Essex’s officers the Parliamentary cavalry; and by the middle of the month he was ready to march upon his recently abandoned capital, convinced, as Edward Hyde said, that it was owing to ‘the wonderful providence of God that from the low despised condition [he] was in at Nottingham, after the setting up of his standard there, he should be able to get men, money and arms and, within twenty days of his coming to Shrewsbury, to march, in despite of the enemy, even towards London’.

      The King set out for London on 12 October, following the course of the Severn down to Bridgnorth, where the people came out into the streets to cheer him on his way, then turning east for Kenilworth, gathering more recruits en route until he had over fifteen thousand infantry and some eight thousand horsemen, more troops than he was ever to command again. They were not as well armed as his officers would have liked, some of the Welshmen who had joined him at Wolverhampton having to be content with pitchforks and even scythes and sickles; but he had twenty field guns and the men appeared to be in as good spirits as he was himself. They had been much encouraged by their cavalry’s victory at Powick Bridge and were already congratulating each other upon the superior merits of the young commander, Prince Rupert, who, for all his squabbles with his fellow-commanders, had undoubtedly instilled confidence into their men. He had found a ‘very thin and small army’ at Nottingham, as Sir Philip Warwick, one of his officers said, ‘and the Foot very meanly armed’. But he had soon ‘ranged and disciplined them’ and ‘put such spirit into the King’s army that all men seem’d resolved’.

      The Earl of Essex, impeded by a large artillery train which he always insisted upon, marched slowly towards Warwick, a coffin and a winding sheet packed amongst the baggage in his wagons. When he reached the village of Kineton, intent upon intercepting the King’s march on London, his guns were a day’s march behind him on the road from Worcester. It was the late afternoon of 22 October when he rode into Kineton. The next day was a Sunday; and as he was on his way to matins that morning at the parish church of St Peter, he was told that the Royalist army had been sighted less than three miles away, across the road to London on the rising ground of Edgehill above the little village of Radway.

      Prince Rupert had occupied this ground with his cavalry the night before, and had waited there for the infantry to join him. As soon as they did so there was trouble once more between the commanders, who had already differed as to the route the army had followed from Shrewsbury. Prince Rupert, whose commission exempted him from receiving orders from anyone other than the King, laid down in his most high-handed manner a plan of battle for the infantry as well as the horse. The Earl of Lindsey objected to it. They quarrelled, too, about the disposition of the pikemen and musketeers; and when the King came down on his nephew’s side, Lindsey lost his temper, hurled his baton to the ground and, declaring that if he was ‘not fit to be a general he would die a colonel at the head of his regiment’, he stormed off to the troops he had raised in Lincolnshire. The King asked the old Earl of Forth to take over the command from him.

      The army was then drawn up in line of battle largely as Prince Rupert had proposed, the infantry in the centre, three brigades in the front rank, two in the second, pikemen in the middle, musketeers on the wings. Prince Rupert’s brigade of horse was on the right wing, with Sir John Byron’s horse in reserve. Beside them were the King’s Life Guard of cavalry under his cousin, Lord Bernard Stuart. The King’s standard was held by Sir Edmtmd Verney, still unwilling to desert the King but reluctant to fight for him. In command of the cavalry on the left, with Lord Grandison, Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon and Lord Digby, was Prince Rupert’s second-in-command and rival, Henry Wilmot. On either flank were the dragoons, support troops riding horses much inferior to those of the cavalry and, at £4 each, costing less than half the price commanded by cavalry horses. When engaging the enemy, dragoons dismounted to fire their muskets and carbines on foot.

      Behind the lines of musketeers and pikemen were the heavy guns waiting to fire over their heads; while the lighter guns were placed between the infantry brigades in the front rank. To the rear of the fighting men stood the surgeons, four or five of them attached to headquarters, the rest regimental surgeons, assisted by surgeons’ mates, few of them qualified, most as inexpert in the use of their crude instruments as those who tended the wounded knights at Agincourt in 1415.

      Facing the Royalists the Parliamentary army was drawn up on the lower ground in a similar manner, infantry brigades in the centre, cavalry on either wing, Sir James Ramsay’s brigade on the left, with a reserve commanded СКАЧАТЬ