In the west Sir Ralph Hopton and his friends, having obtained a true bill from the grand jury against the Parliamentary disturbers of the peace, placed themselves at the head of the county militia and drove the rebels from Cornwall, after which they raised a small force for general service and invaded Devonshire (November 1642). Subsequently a Parliamentary army under the earl of Stamford was withdrawn from south Wales to engage Hopton, who had to retire into Cornwall. There, however, the Royalist general was free to employ the militia again, and thus reinforced he won a victory over a part of Stamford’s forces at Bradock Down near Liskeard (January 19, 1643) and resumed the offensive. About the same time Hertford, no longer opposed by Stamford, brought over the South Wales Royalists to Oxford, and the fortified area around that place was widened by the capture of Cirencester on the 2nd of February. Gloucester and Bristol were now the only important garrisons of the Roundheads in the west. In the midlands, in spite of a Parliamentary victory won by Sir William Brereton at Nantwich on the 28th of January, the Royalists of Shropshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire soon extended their influence through Ashby-de-la-Zouch into Nottinghamshire and joined hands with their friends at Newark. Further, around Chester a new Royalist army was being formed under Lord Byron, and all the efforts of Brereton and of Sir John Gell, the leading supporter of the Parliament in Derbyshire, were required to hold their own, even before Newcastle’s army was added to the list of their enemies. Lord Brooke, who commanded for the Parliament in Warwickshire and Staffordshire and was looked on by many as Essex’s eventual successor, was killed in besieging Lichfield cathedral on the 2nd of March, and, though the cathedral soon capitulated, Gell and Brereton were severely handled in the indecisive battle of Hopton Heath near Stafford on the 19th of March, and Prince Rupert, after an abortive raid on Bristol (March 7), marched rapidly northward, storming Birmingham en route, and recaptured Lichfield cathedral. He was, however, soon recalled to Oxford to take part in the main campaign. The position of affairs for the Parliament was perhaps at its worst in January. The Royalist successes of November and December, the ever-present dread of foreign intervention, and the burden of new taxation which the Parliament now found itself compelled to impose, disheartened its supporters. Disorders broke out in London, and, while the more determined of the rebels began thus early to think of calling in the military assistance of the Scots, the majority were for peace on any conditions. But soon the position improved somewhat; Stamford in the west and Brereton and Gell in the midlands, though hard pressed, were at any rate in arms and undefeated, Newcastle had failed to conquer the West Riding, and Sir William Waller, who had cleared Hampshire and Wiltshire of “malignants,” entered Gloucestershire early in March, destroyed a small Royalist force at Highnam (March 24), and secured Bristol and Gloucester for the Parliament. Finally, some of Charles’s own intrigues opportunely coming to light, the waverers, seeing the impossibility of plain dealing with the court, rallied again to the party of resistance, and the series of negotiations called by the name of the Treaty of Oxford closed in April with no more result than those which had preceded Edgehill and Turnham Green. About this time too, following and improving upon the example of Newcastle in the north, Parliament ordered the formation of the celebrated “associations” or groups of counties banded together by mutual consent for defence. The most powerful and best organized of these was that of the eastern counties (headquarters Cambridge), where the danger of attack from the north was near enough to induce great energy in the preparations for meeting it, and at the same time too distant effectively to interfere with these preparations. Above all, the Eastern Association was from the first guided and inspired by Colonel Cromwell.
6. The Plan of Campaign, 1643.—The king’s plan of operations for the next campaign, which was perhaps inspired from abroad, was more elaborate than the simple “point” of 1642. The king’s army, based on the fortified area around Oxford, was counted sufficient to use up Essex’s forces. On either hand, therefore, in Yorkshire and in the west, the Royalist armies were to fight their way inwards towards London, after which all three armies, converging on that place in due season, were to cut off its supplies and its sea-borne revenue and to starve the rebellion into surrender. The condition of this threefold advance was of course that the enemy should not be able to defeat the armies in detail, i.e. that he should be fixed and held in the Thames valley; this secured, there was no purely military objection against operating in separate armies from the circumference towards the centre. It was on the rock of local feeling that the king’s plan came to grief. Even after the arrival of the queen and her convoy, Newcastle had to allow her to proceed with a small force, and to remain behind with the main body, because of Lancashire and the West Riding, and above all because the port of Hull, in the hands of the Fairfaxes, constituted a menace that the Royalists of the East Riding refused to ignore. Hopton’s advance too, undertaken without the Cornish levies, was checked in the action of Sourton Down (Dartmoor) on the 25th of April, and on the same day Waller captured Hereford. Essex had already left Windsor to undertake the siege of Reading, the most important point in the circle of fortresses round Oxford, which after a vain attempt at relief surrendered to him on the 26th of April. Thus the opening operations were unfavourable, not indeed so far as to require the scheme to be abandoned, but at least delaying the development until the campaigning season was far advanced.
7. Victories of Hopton.—But affairs improved in May. The queen’s long-expected convoy arrived at Woodstock on the 13th. The earl of Stamford’s army, which had again entered Cornwall, was attacked in its selected position at Stratton and practically annihilated by Hopton (May 16). This brilliant victory was due above all to Sir Bevil Grenville and the lithe Cornishmen, who, though but 2400 against 5400 and destitute of artillery, stormed “Stamford Hill,” killed 300 of the enemy, and captured 1700 more with all their guns, colours and baggage. Devon was at once overrun by the victors. Essex’s army, for want of material resources, had had to be content with the capture of Reading, and a Royalist force under Hertford and Prince Maurice (Rupert’s brother) moved out as far as Salisbury to hold out a hand to their friends in Devonshire, while Waller, the only Parliamentary commander left in the field in the west, had to abandon his conquests in the Severn valley to oppose the further progress of his intimate friend and present enemy, Hopton. Early in June Hertford and Hopton united at Chard and rapidly moved, with some cavalry skirmishing, towards Bath, where Waller’s army lay. Avoiding the barrier of the Mendips, they moved round via Frome to the Avon. But Waller, thus cut off from London and threatened with investment, acted with great skill, and some days of manœuvres and skirmishing followed, after which Hertford and Hopton found themselves on the north side of Bath facing Waller’s entrenched position on the top of Lansdown Hill. This position the Royalists stormed on the 5th of July. The battle of Lansdown was a second Stratton for the Cornishmen, but this time the enemy was of different quality and far differently led, and they had to mourn the loss of Sir Bevil Grenville and the greater part of their whole force. At dusk both sides stood on the flat summit of the hill, still firing into one another with such energy as was not yet expended, and in the night Waller drew off his men into Bath. “We were glad they were gone,” wrote a Royalist officer, “for if they had not, I know who had within the hour.” Next day Hopton was severely injured by the explosion of a wagon containing the reserve ammunition, and the Royalists, finding their victory profitless, moved eastward to Devizes, closely followed by the enemy. On the 10th of July Sir William Waller took post on Roundway Down, overlooking Devizes, and captured a Royalist ammunition column from Oxford. On the 11th he came down and invested Hopton’s foot in Devizes itself, while the Royalist cavalry, Hertford and Maurice with them, rode away towards Salisbury. But although the siege was pressed with such vigour that an assault was fixed for the evening of the 13th, the Cornishmen, Hopton directing the defence from his bed, held out stubbornly, and on the afternoon of July 13th Prince Maurice’s horsemen appeared on Roundway Down, having ridden to Oxford, picked up reinforcements there, and returned at full speed to save their comrades. Waller’s army tried its best, but some of its elements were of doubtful quality and the ground was all in Maurice’s favour. The battle did not last long. The combined attack of the Oxford force from Roundway and of Hopton’s men from the town practically annihilated Waller’s army. Very soon afterwards Rupert came up with fresh Royalist forces, and the combined armies moved westward. Bristol, the second port of the kingdom, was their objective, and in four days from the opening of the siege it was in their hands (July 26), Waller with the beaten remnant of his army at Bath being powerless to intervene. The effect of this blow was felt even in Dorsetshire. Within three weeks of the surrender Prince Maurice with a body of fast-moving cavalry overran that county almost unopposed.
8. Adwalton Moor.—Newcastle meanwhile had resumed operations against the clothing towns, this time with success. The Fairfaxes had been fighting in the West Riding since January with such troops from the Hull region as they had been able to bring across Newcastle’s lines. They and the townsmen together were too weak for Newcastle’s increasing forces, and an attempt was made to relieve them by bringing up the Parliament’s forces in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and the Eastern Association. But local interests prevailed again, in spite of Cromwell’s presence, and after assembling at Nottingham, the midland rebels quietly dispersed to their several counties (June 2). The Fairfaxes were left to their fate, and about the same time Hull itself narrowly escaped capture by the queen’s forces through the treachery of Sir John Hotham, the governor, and his son, the commander of the Lincolnshire Parliamentarians. The latter had been placed under arrest at the instance of Cromwell and of Colonel Hutchinson, the governor of Nottingham Castle; he escaped to Hull, but both father and son were seized by the citizens and afterwards executed. More serious than an isolated act of treachery was the far-reaching Royalist plot that had been detected in Parliament itself, for complicity in which Lord Conway, Edmund Waller the poet, and several members of both Houses were arrested. The safety of Hull was of no avail for the West Riding towns, and the Fairfaxes underwent a decisive defeat at Adwalton (Atherton) Moor near Bradford on the 30th of June. After this, by way of Lincolnshire, they escaped to Hull and reorganized the defence of that place. The West Riding perforce submitted.
The queen herself with a second convoy and a small army under Henry (Lord) Jermyn soon moved via Newark, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Lichfield and other Royalist garrisons to Oxford, where she joined her husband on the 14th of July. But Newcastle (now a marquis) was not yet ready for his part in the programme. The Yorkshire troops would not march on London while the enemy was master of Hull, and by this time there was a solid barrier between the royal army of the north and the capital. Roundway Down and Adwalton Moor were not after all destined to be fatal, though peace riots in London, dissensions in the Houses, and quarrels amongst the generals were their immediate consequences. A new factor had arisen in the war—the Eastern Association.
9. Cromwell and the Eastern Association.—This had already intervened to help in the siege of Reading and had sent troops to the abortive gathering at Nottingham, besides clearing its own ground of “malignants.” From the first Cromwell was the dominant influence. Fresh from Edgehill, he had told Hampden, “You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go,” not “old decayed serving-men, tapsters and such kind of fellows to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them,” and in January 1643 he had gone to his own county to “raise such men as had the fear of God before them and made some conscience of what they did.” These men, once found, were willing, for the cause, to submit to a rigorous training and an iron discipline such as other troops, fighting for honour only or for profit only, could not be brought to endure.[2] The result was soon apparent. As early as the 13th of May, Cromwell’s regiment of horse—recruited from the horse-loving yeomen of the eastern counties—demonstrated its superiority in the field in a skirmish near Grantham, and in the irregular fighting in Lincolnshire during June and July (which was on the whole unfavourable to the Parliament), as previously in pacifying the Eastern Association itself, these Puritan troopers distinguished themselves by long and rapid marches that may bear comparison with almost any in the history of the mounted arm. When Cromwell’s second opportunity came at Gainsborough on the 28th of July, the “Lincolneer” horse who were under his orders were fired by the example of Cromwell’s own regiment, and Cromwell, directing the whole with skill, and above all with energy, utterly routed the Royalist horse and killed their general, Charles Cavendish.
In the meantime the army of Essex had been inactive. After the fall of Reading a serious epidemic of sickness had reduced it to impotence. On the 18th of June the Parliamentary cavalry was routed and John Hampden mortally wounded at Chalgrove Field near Chiselhampton, and when at last Essex, having obtained the desired reinforcements, moved against Oxford from the Aylesbury side, he found his men demoralized by inaction, and before the menace of Rupert’s cavalry, to which he had nothing to oppose, he withdrew to Bedfordshire (July). He made no attempt to intercept the march of the queen’s convoys, he had permitted the Oxford army, which he should have held fast, to intervene effectually in the midlands, the west, and the south-west, and Waller might well complain that Essex, who still held Reading and the Chilterns, had given him neither active nor passive support in the critical days preceding Roundway Down. Still only a few voices were raised to demand his removal, and he was shortly to have an opportunity of proving his skill and devotion in a great campaign and a great battle. The centre and the right of the three Royalist armies had for a moment (Roundway to Bristol) united to crush Waller, but their concentration was short-lived. Plymouth was to Hopton’s men what Hull was to Newcastle’s—they would not march on London until the menace to their homes was removed. Further, there were dissensions among the generals which Charles was too weak to crush, and consequently the original plan reappears—the main Royalist army to operate in the centre, Hopton’s (now Maurice’s) on the right, Newcastle on the left towards London. While waiting for the fall of Hull and Plymouth, Charles naturally decided to make the best use of his time by reducing Gloucester, the one great fortress of the Parliament in the west.
10. Siege and Relief of Gloucester.—This decision quickly brought on a crisis. While the earl of Manchester (with Cromwell as his lieutenant-general) was appointed to head the forces of the Eastern Association against Newcastle, and Waller was given a new army wherewith again to engage Hopton and Maurice, the task of saving Gloucester from the king’s army fell to Essex, who was heavily reinforced and drew his army together for action in the last days of August. Resort was had to the press-gang to fill the ranks, recruiting for Waller’s new army was stopped, and London sent six regiments of trained bands to the front, closing the shops so that every man should be free to take his part in what was thought to be the supreme trial of strength.
On the 26th, all being ready, Essex started. Through Aylesbury and round the north side of Oxford to Stow-on-the-Wold the army moved resolutely, not deterred by want of food and rest, or by the attacks of Rupert’s and Wilmot’s horse on its flank. On the 5th of September, just as Gloucester was at the end of its resources, the siege was suddenly raised and the Royalists drew off to Painswick, for Essex had reached Cheltenham and the danger was over. Then, the field armies being again face to face and free to move, there followed a series of skilful manœuvres in the Severn and Avon valleys, at the end of which the Parliamentary army gained a long start on its homeward road via Cricklade, Hungerford and Reading. But the Royalist cavalry under Rupert, followed rapidly by Charles and the main body from Evesham, strained every nerve to head off Essex at Newbury, and after a sharp skirmish on Aldbourne Chase on the 18th of September succeeded in doing so. On the 19th the whole Royal army was drawn up, facing west, with its right on Newbury and its left on Enborne Heath. Essex’s men knew that evening that they would have to break through by force—there was no suggestion of surrender.
11. First Battle of Newbury, September 20, 1643.—The ground was densely intersected by hedges except in front of the Royalists’ left centre (Newbury Wash) and left (Enborne Heath), and, practically, Essex’s army was never formed in line of battle, for each unit was thrown into the fight as it came up its own road or lane. On the left wing, in spite of the Royalist counter-strokes, the attack had the best of it, capturing field after field, and thus gradually gaining ground to the front. Here Lord Falkland was killed. On the Reading road itself Essex did not succeed in deploying on to the open ground on Newbury Wash, but victoriously repelled the royal horse when it charged up to the lanes and hedges held by his foot. On the extreme right of the Parliamentary army, which stood in the open ground of Enborne Heath, took place a famous incident. Here two of the London regiments, fresh to war as they were, were exposed to a trial as severe as that which broke down the veteran Spanish infantry at Rocroi in this same year. Rupert and the Royalist horse again and again charged up to the squares of pikes, and between each charge his guns tried to disorder the Londoners, but it was not until the advance of the royal infantry that the trained bands retired, slowly and in magnificent order, to the edge of the heath. The result of it all was that Essex’s army had fought its hardest and failed to break the opposing line. But the Royalists had suffered so heavily, and above all the valour displayed by the rebels had so profoundly impressed them, that they were glad to give up the disputed road and withdraw into Newbury. Essex thereupon pursued his march, Reading was reached on the 22nd after a small rearguard skirmish at Aldermaston, and so ended one of the most dramatic episodes of English history.