The King turned his head and gave him a dazed look, whereon in a trice the Scots lord seized the King's foam-flecked bridle, and turned about his horse.
"This was a fight for all in all, and it is lost!" cried Charles.
Seeing the King turn from the battlefield, his cavalry turned about too as one man, and galloped after him on the spur, without waiting for the third charge of Cromwell's Ironsides, who chased them through Harborough, from whence the Queen, on news of how the day was going, had an hour before fled, and along the Leicester road.
The regiments that remained took possession of the King's baggage, his guns and wagons, his standards and colours, his carriages, including the royal coach, and made prisoner every man left alive on the field.
In the carriages were many ladies of quality, sickened and maddened, shrieking and desperate, who were seized and hurried away in their fine embroidered clothes and fallen hair—calling on the God who had deserted them—carried across the field strewn with their slain kinsmen to what rude place of safety might be devised.
Nor was any roughness exercised against them, for they were English and defenceless.
The Irish camp followers were neither English nor defenceless, even the most wretched tattered woman of them had a skean knife at her belt, and used it with yelling violence.
What mercy for such as these, accursed of God and man—the same breed as those who rose and murdered the English in Ulster?
"What of these vermin?" asked an officer of Cromwell, when he galloped past in pursuit of the royalists.