At the opening of the campaign of 1643, the strength of the Royalists had greatly increased, and before its close the advantage had passed to the King. In almost every county, towns and castles were garrisoned, and rival leaders, raising troops for King or Parliament, waged war against each other with varying fortunes. In the north and in the west of England, the Royalists rapidly gained the upper hand, and these local successes exercised a decisive influence on the course of the general war.
In April, 1643, Essex with sixteen thousand foot to three thousand horse advanced towards Oxford and captured Reading (April 27th). Hampden urged him to follow up this advantage by besieging Oxford, which was weakly fortified and ill provisioned. But Essex’s army was mutinous for want of pay, and decimated by a great sickness which broke out in his camp after the fall of Reading. He did not resume the movement on Oxford till June, and in the meantime the King had been strongly reinforced. With his diminished numbers, Essex was unable to invest Oxford, and in the small encounters which took place round it his troops were generally worsted. At Chalgrove Field, on June 18th, Hampden was mortally wounded, and his death a week later was as great a blow to his party as the loss of a battle. “Every honest man,” wrote a fellow officer, “hath a share in the loss, and will likewise in the sorrow. He was a gallant man, an honest man, an able man, and, take all, I know not to any living man second.” In his short military career, he had shown an energy, a decision, and a strategic instinct which seemed to mark him out as a future general.
After Hampden’s death, Essex fell back from Oxford and remained inactive, permitting the King to effect a junction with the Royalists of the north and the west. In the north, the Marquis of Newcastle had overrun the greater part of Yorkshire and cooped up Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas in the West Riding. On June 30th, he routed the two Fairfaxes at Adwalton Moor, near Bradford, and forced them to take refuge in Hull—the only fortress which the Parliament now held in Yorkshire. The Queen had landed at Bridlington in February, and these successes enabled her to march south and join Charles at Oxford with arms, ammunition, and reinforcements.
In the west, during the same period, a little army of Cornishmen under Sir Ralph Hopton won victory after victory over the Parliamentarians. At Bradock Down, on January 19, 1643, Hopton defeated General Ruthven; at Stratton, on May 16th, he beat Lord Stamford. Then, joined by Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford, he advanced into Somersetshire and fought a drawn battle with Sir William Waller at Lansdown, near Bath, on July 5th. Followed by Waller, Hopton continued his march towards Oxford, and was blocked up in Devizes with his infantry by his pursuer. But the retreat of Essex had enabled the King to move freely, and had left Waller unsupported. On July 13th, the very day when the Queen reached Oxford, Wilmot and a body of horse sent from Oxford routed Waller’s army at Roundway Down, and rescued Hopton’s hard-pressed army.
Thus by the end of July the Royalists were masters in the field, and Charles could take the offensive. The King’s original plan had been that he should hold Essex in check, whilst Newcastle advanced from the north into Essex, and Hopton made his way through the southern counties toward Kent. All three were then to close in upon London, and strike down rebellion in its headquarters. But now Newcastle’s army refused to march southwards whilst Hull was uncaptured, and the western army hesitated to advance farther whilst Plymouth was not taken. Local feeling was too powerful to be neglected, and Charles was forced to complete the subjugation of the west instead of advancing upon London.
JOHN HAMPDEN.
(From Nugent’s “Life of Hampden.”)
On July 26th, Bristol, the second port in the kingdom, surrendered to Prince Rupert. Gloucester was besieged on August 10th, and though vigorously defended by Colonel Massey it seemed certain to fall, for the Parliament had no army available to relieve it. “Waller,” exulted the Royalists, “is extinct, and Essex cannot come.” Once more Pym and the Parliament appealed to the City, and London responded with a zeal which no disasters could chill. The citizens closed their shops, six regiments of London train-bands joined the shattered army of Essex, and with fifteen thousand men at his back the Earl marched for Gloucester. Vainly Rupert and the King’s horse strove to delay his progress; at his approach, the besiegers drew off their forces without fighting, and Gloucester was saved.
As the Parliamentarians returned to London, the King barred their way at Newbury, and forced them to cut their way through or perish (September 20th). This time the parliamentary horse fought well, but it was the firmness and courage of Essex’s infantry which preserved the army. The London train-bands, whom the Cavaliers had derided, “stood as a bulwark and rampire to defend the rest,” and received charge after charge of Rupert’s horse with their pikes as steadily as if they had been drilling on their parade ground. Long training in military exercises had given them a “readiness, order, and dexterity in the use of their arms,” which compensated for their inexperience of actual war. Step by step the parliamentary army gained ground, till the failure of the King’s ammunition obliged him to retreat and leave the passage free. Essex re-entered London in triumph. Gloucester was safe, and his army was safe, but Reading, the one trophy of his year’s fighting, was abandoned again to the Royalists.
The year 1643 closed gloomily for the Parliament. Except Gloucester, Plymouth, and a few ports in Dorsetshire, all the west was the King’s; the north was his except Hull and Lancashire, and in the midlands the Parliamentarians held their own with difficulty. Only in the eastern counties had the Parliament gained strength and territory, and it was to Cromwell more than any other man that this isolated success was due. At the close of 1642, Parliament had passed an ordinance associating the five counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, and Hertfordshire for the purpose of common defence (December 10, 1642). The Eastern Association, as it was termed, was completed by the accession of Huntingdonshire (May 26, 1643) and finally of Lincolnshire (September 20, 1643). Cambridge was its headquarters and Cromwell was from the first its guiding spirit. On his march from London in January, 1643, Cromwell seized the royalist high sheriff of Hertfordshire as he was proclaiming the King’s commission of array in the market-place of St. Albans, and sent him up to London (January 14th). In February, he was at Cambridge busily fortifying the town and collecting men to resist a threatened attack from Lord Capel. In March, he suppressed a royalist rising at Lowestoft, taking prisoners many gentlemen and “good store of pistols and other arms.” A few days later, he disarmed the Royalists of Lynn; in April, those of Huntingdonshire shared the same fate, and on April 28th he recaptured Crowland where the King’s party had established a garrison. Whenever royalist raiders made a dash into the Association, or disaffected gentry attempted a rising, Colonel Cromwell and his men were swift to suppress them. “It’s happy,” he wrote, “to resist such beginnings betimes,” and he never failed to do so.