Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

His sixteen thousand men were reduced now to eleven thousand, and some officers proposed that the foot should be shipped on the fleet, while the horse endeavoured to cut their way through the enemy. But their General remained, as he expressed it, “comfortable in spirit and having much hope in the Lord.”

Leslie’s original plan was to fall on Cromwell’s rear as he tried to force his way along the road to Berwick, but the parliamentary committee in his camp ordered him to descend the hill and bar Cromwell’s route. Seeing that Cromwell did not continue his march, he believed he was shipping his guns, and perhaps part of his infantry, and thought all he had to do was to prevent the escape of the enemy. Accordingly, on September 2nd, Leslie moved his army from the Doon hill to the gentle slopes at its foot, intending to attack the next day. His left was covered in flank, and to some extent in front too, by the steep ravine of the Brock burn, which ran obliquely from the hill to the sea and separated the positions of the two armies. His infantry were posted in the centre, with their backs to the hillside. On the right, where the ground was more level and open, he had massed two-thirds of his cavalry. Leslie had twenty-two thousand men to Cromwell’s eleven thousand, and told his soldiers they would have the English army, alive or dead, by seven next morning.

When Cromwell examined the new position of the Scots, he saw that his opportunity had come at last. Leslie’s left, shut in between the hill and the ravine, was practically useless, and his centre, cramped by the hill in its rear, had too little room to manœuvre. Both Cromwell and Major-General Lambert agreed that if the Scottish right were beaten their whole army would be endangered.

That evening, in answer to Leslie’s movement, Cromwell drew up his forces along the line of the ravine and about Broxmouth House, as if his sole purpose was to stand on the defensive. The night was stormy and wet, and after one or two alarms the Scots were convinced that he did not mean to attack. Just before dawn Cromwell pushed a strong body of horse and foot across the ravine, and under cover of a false attack on their left massed all the troops he could against their right and their centre. Lambert and Fleetwood, with six regiments of horse, attacked the Scottish right, while Monck, with about three thousand or four thousand foot, engaged their centre, supported by the fire of Cromwell’s guns from the other side of the ravine. The Scots were taken unprepared, but as soon as they could get into battle order numbers told. Charging, with the slope in their favour, the Scottish lancers broke one of Lambert’s regiments, and Monk’s division was repulsed and forced to give ground. At this critical moment, Cromwell himself came up with the reserve, consisting of three regiments of foot and one of horse. His own regiment of horse fell on the flank of the Scottish cavalry, Lambert’s troopers charged again, and after a short, sharp struggle the Scottish right wing was broken through and through. Simultaneously Cromwell’s and Pride’s foot regiments furiously assailed the advancing Scottish infantry, and “at push of pike did repel the stoutest regiment the enemy had,” while all along the line the English foot, once more advancing, drove back the Scots. Some of Leslie’s infantry stood stubbornly, but a cavalry charge on their exposed flank completed their discomfiture. At Cromwell’s direction, the flank attack became more and more pronounced, till the Scottish centre was rolled up from right to left; and, penned in the triangle between the hill and the ravine, the Scottish infantry became a helpless mob, unable either to fight or fly.

“Horse and foot,” says one of Cromwell’s officers, “were engaged all over the field and the Scots all in confusion. The sun appearing upon the sea I heard Noll say, ‘Now let God arise, and His enemies shall be scattered,’ and following us as we slowly marched I heard him say, ‘I profess they run,’ and then was the Scots army all in disorder and running, both right wing and left and main battle. They routed one another after we had done their work on their right wing.”

Three thousand men fell in the battle, and ten thousand were taken prisoners. While Leslie collected the shattered remnant of his army at Stirling, Cromwell occupied Edinburgh and Leith, and all the eastern portion of the Scottish Lowlands. Edinburgh Castle held out, and the south-west was still in arms.

After Dunbar, as before it, Cromwell’s strongest wish was not a conquest but an agreement which would restore peace between the two nations.

“Give the State of England,” he wrote to the Committee of Estates, “that satisfaction and security for their peaceable and quiet living beside you, which may in justice be demanded from those who have, as you, taken their enemy into their bosom, whilst he was in hostility against them.”

He had opened his campaign with manifestos protesting the affection of England for the Scots, and demonstrating their error in supporting the Stuarts. These overtures the leaders of the Independents urged him to renew. They regarded it as a fratricidal war. The grim Ireton expressed the fear that Cromwell had not been sufficiently forbearing and long-suffering. Subtle St. John drew a distinction between Scots and Irish, reminding him that although the Irish were atheists and papists to be ruled with a rod of iron, the Scots were truly children of God, and he must still endeavour to heap coals of fire on their heads. Cromwell, whose heart “yearned after the godly in Scotland,” began now a new set of expostulations, directed particularly to the ministers whose influence had frustrated his appeals to the nation. He charged them with pretending a reformation and laying the foundation of it in getting worldly power for themselves; with perverting the Covenant to serve secular ends; with claiming infallibility for their doctrine just as the Pope did. Their claim to control the civil government he dismissed with few words. “We look on ministers as helpers of, not lords over, God’s people.” Then he refuted with like vigour the claim of the Kirk to prohibit dissent in order to prevent heresy.