The New Model originally consisted of 14,400 foot and 7700 horse and dragoons. Of the infantry only 6000 came from the combined armies, the rest being new recruits furnished by the press.[6] Thus there was considerable trouble during the first months of Fairfax’s command, and discipline had to be enforced with unusual sternness. As for the enemy, Oxford was openly contemptuous of “the rebels’ new brutish general” and his men, who seemed hardly likely to succeed where Essex and Waller had failed. But the effect of the Parliament’s having “an army all its own” was soon to be apparent.

28. First Operations of 1645.—On the Royalist side the campaign of 1645 opened in the west, whither the young prince of Wales (Charles II.) was sent with Hyde (later earl of Clarendon), Hopton and others as his advisers. General (Lord) Goring, however, now in command of the Royalist field forces in this quarter, was truculent, insubordinate and dissolute, though on the rare occasions when he did his duty he displayed a certain degree of skill and leadership, and the influence of the prince’s counsellors was but small. As usual, operations began with the sieges necessary to conciliate local feeling. Plymouth and Lyme were blocked up, and Taunton again invested. The reinforcement thrown into the last place by Waller and Cromwell was dismissed by Blake (then a colonel in command of the fortress and afterwards the great admiral of the Commonwealth), and after many adventures rejoined Waller and Cromwell. The latter generals, who had not yet laid down their commissions, then engaged Goring for some weeks, but neither side having infantry or artillery, and both finding subsistence difficult in February and March and in country that had been fought over for two years past, no results were to be expected. Taunton still remained unrelieved, and Goring’s horse still rode all over Dorsetshire when the New Model at last took the field.

29. Rupert’s Northern March.—In the midlands and Lancashire the Royalist horse, as ill-behaved even as Goring’s men, were directly responsible for the ignominious failure with which the king’s main army began its year’s work. Prince Maurice was joined at Ludlow by Rupert and part of his Oxford army early in March, and the brothers drove off Brereton from the siege of Beeston Castle and relieved the pressure on Lord Byron in Cheshire. So great was the danger of Rupert’s again invading Lancashire and Yorkshire that all available forces in the north, English and Scots, were ordered to march against him. But at this moment the prince was called back to clear his line of retreat on Oxford. The Herefordshire and Worcestershire peasantry, weary of military exactions, were in arms, and though they would not join the Parliament, and for the most part dispersed after stating their grievances, the main enterprise was wrecked. This was but one of many ill-armed crowds—“Clubmen” as they were called—that assembled to enforce peace on both parties. A few regular soldiers were sufficient to disperse them in all cases, but their attempt to establish a third party in England was morally as significant as it was materially futile. The Royalists were now fighting with the courage of despair, those who still fought against Charles did so with the full determination to ensure the triumph of their cause, and with the conviction that the only possible way was the annihilation of the enemy’s armed forces, but the majority were so weary of the war that the earl of Manchester’s Presbyterian royalism—which had contributed so materially to the prolongation of the struggle—would probably have been accepted by four-fifths of all England as the basis of a peace. It was, in fact, in the face of almost universal opposition that Fairfax and Cromwell and their friends at Westminster guided the cause of their weaker comrades to complete victory.

30. Cromwell’s Raid.—Having without difficulty rid himself of the Clubmen, Rupert was eager to resume his march into the north. It is unlikely that he wished to join Montrose, though Charles himself favoured that plan, but he certainly intended to fight the Scottish army, more especially as after Inverlochy it had been called upon to detach a large force to deal with Montrose. But this time there was no Royalist army in the north to provide infantry and guns for a pitched battle, and Rupert had perforce to wait near Hereford till the main body, and in particular the artillery train, could come from Oxford and join him. It was on the march of the artillery train to Hereford that the first operations of the New Model centred. The infantry was not yet ready to move, in spite of all Fairfax’s and Skippon’s efforts, and it became necessary to send the cavalry by itself to prevent Rupert from gaining a start. Cromwell, then under Waller’s command, had come to Windsor to resign his commission as required by the Self-denying Ordinance. Instead, he was placed at the head of a brigade of his own old soldiers, with orders to stop the march of the artillery train. On the 23rd of April he started from Watlington north-westward. At dawn on the 24th he routed a detachment of Royalist horse at Islip. On the same day, though he had no guns and only a few firearms in the whole force, he terrified the governor of Bletchingdon House into surrender. Riding thence to Witney, Cromwell won another cavalry fight at Bampton-in-the-Bush on the 27th, and attacked Faringdon House, though without success, on the 29th. Thence he marched at leisure to Newbury. He had done his work thoroughly. He had demoralized the Royalist cavalry, and, above all, had carried off every horse on the countryside. To all Rupert’s entreaties Charles could only reply that the guns could not be moved till the 7th of May, and he even summoned Goring’s cavalry from the west to make good his losses.

31. Civilian Strategy.—Cromwell’s success thus forced the king to concentrate his various armies in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and the New Model had, so Fairfax and Cromwell hoped, found its target. But the Committee of Both Kingdoms on the one side, and Charles, Rupert and Goring on the other, held different views. On the 1st of May Fairfax, having been ordered to relieve Taunton, set out from Windsor for the long march to that place; meeting Cromwell at Newbury on the 2nd, he directed the lieutenant-general to watch the movements of the king’s army, and himself marched on to Blandford, which he reached on the 7th of May. Thus Fairfax and the main army of the Parliament were marching away in the west while Cromwell’s detachment was left, as Waller had been left the previous year, to hold the king as best he could. On the very evening that Cromwell’s raid ended, the leading troops of Goring’s command destroyed part of Cromwell’s own regiment near Faringdon, and on the 3rd Rupert and Maurice appeared with a force of all arms at Burford. Yet the Committee of Both Kingdoms, though aware on the 29th of Goring’s move, only made up its mind to stop Fairfax on the 3rd, and did not send off orders till the 5th. These orders were to the effect that a detachment was to be sent to the relief of Taunton, and that the main army was to return. Fairfax gladly obeyed, even though a siege of Oxford and not the enemy’s field army was the objective assigned him. But long before he came up to the Thames valley the situation was again changed. Rupert, now in possession of the guns and their teams, urged upon his uncle the resumption of the northern enterprise, calculating that with Fairfax in Somersetshire, Oxford was safe. Charles accordingly marched out of Oxford on the 7th towards Stow-on-the-Wold, on the very day, as it chanced, that Fairfax began his return march from Blandford. But Goring and most of the other generals were for a march into the west, in the hope of dealing with Fairfax as they had dealt with Essex in 1644. The armies therefore parted as Essex and Waller had parted at the same place in 1644, Rupert and the king to march northward, Goring to return to his independent command in the west. Rupert, not unnaturally wishing to keep his influence with the king and his authority as general of the king’s army unimpaired by Goring’s notorious indiscipline, made no attempt to prevent the separation, which in the event proved wholly unprofitable. The flying column from Blandford relieved Taunton long before Goring’s return to the west, and Colonel Weldon and Colonel Graves, its commanders, set him at defiance even in the open country. As for Fairfax, he was out of Goring’s reach preparing for the siege of Oxford.

32. Charles in the Midlands.—On the other side also the generals were working by data that had ceased to have any value. Fairfax’s siege of Oxford, ordered by the Committee on the 10th of May, and persisted in after it was known that the king was on the move, was the second great blunder of the year and was hardly redeemed, as a military measure, by the visionary scheme of assembling the Scots, the Yorkshiremen, and the midland forces to oppose the king. It is hard to understand how, having created a new model army “all its own” for general service, the Parliament at once tied it down to a local enterprise, and trusted an improvised army of local troops to fight the enemy’s main army. In reality the Committee seems to have been misled by false information to the effect that Goring and the governor of Oxford were about to declare for the Parliament, but had they not despatched Fairfax to the relief of Taunton in the first instance the necessity for such intrigues would not have arisen. However, Fairfax obeyed orders, invested Oxford, and, so far as he was able without a proper siege train, besieged it for two weeks, while Charles and Rupert ranged the midlands unopposed. At the end of that time came news so alarming that the Committee hastily abdicated their control over military operations and gave Fairfax a free hand. “Black Tom” gladly and instantly abandoned the siege and marched northward to give battle to the king.

Meanwhile Charles and Rupert were moving northward. On the 11th of May they reached Droitwich, whence after two days’ rest they marched against Brereton. The latter hurriedly raised the sieges he had on hand, and called upon Yorkshire and the Scottish army there for aid. But only the old Lord Fairfax and the Yorkshiremen responded. Leven had just heard of new victories won by Montrose, and could do no more than draw his army and his guns over the Pennine chain into Westmorland in the hope of being in time to bar the king’s march on Scotland via Carlisle.

33. Dundee.—After the destruction of the Campbells at Inverlochy, Montrose had cleared away the rest of his enemies without difficulty. He now gained a respectable force of cavalry by the adhesion of Lord Gordon and many of his clan, and this reinforcement was the more necessary as detachments from Leven’s army under Baillie and Hurry—disciplined infantry and cavalry—were on the march to meet him. The Royalists marched by Elgin and through the Gordon country to Aberdeen, and thence across the Esk to Coupar-Angus, where Baillie and Hurry were encountered. A war of manœuvre followed, in which they thwarted every effort of the Royalists to break through into the Lowlands, but in the end retired into Fife. Montrose thereupon marched into the hills with the intention of reaching the upper Forth and thence the Lowlands, for he did not disguise from himself the fact that there, and not in the Highlands, would the quarrel be decided, and was sanguine—over-sanguine, as the event proved—as to the support he would obtain from those who hated the kirk and its system. But he had called to his aid the semi-barbarous Highlanders, and however much the Lowlands resented a Presbyterian inquisition, they hated and feared the Highland clans beyond all else. He was equally disappointed in his own army. For a war of positions the Highlanders had neither aptitude nor inclination, and at Dunkeld the greater part of them went home. If the small remnant was to be kept to its duty, plunder must be found, and the best objective was the town of Dundee. With a small force of 750 foot and horse Montrose brilliantly surprised that place on the 4th of April, but Baillie and Hurry were not far distant, and before Montrose’s men had time to plunder the prize they were collected to face the enemy. His retreat from Dundee was considered a model operation by foreign students of the art of war (then almost as numerous as now), and what surprised them most was that Montrose could rally his men after a sack had begun. The retreat itself was remarkable enough. Baillie moved parallel to Montrose on his left flank towards Arbroath, constantly heading him off from the hills and attempting to pin him against the sea. Montrose, however, halted in the dark so as to let Baillie get ahead of him and then turned sharply back, crossed Baillie’s track, and made for the hills. Baillie soon realized what had happened and turned back also, but an hour too late. By the 6th the Royalists were again safe in the broken country of the Esk valley. But Montrose cherished no illusions as to joining the king at once; all he could do, he now wrote, was to neutralize as many of the enemy’s forces as possible.

34. Auldearn.—For a time he wandered in the Highlands seeking recruits. But soon he learned that Baillie and Hurry had divided their forces, the former remaining about Perth and Stirling to observe him, the latter going north to suppress the Gordons. Strategy and policy combined to make Hurry the objective of the next expedition. But the soldier of fortune who commanded the Covenanters at Aberdeen was no mean antagonist. Marching at once with a large army (formed on the nucleus of his own trained troops and for the rest composed of clansmen and volunteers) Hurry advanced to Elgin, took contact with Montrose there, and, gradually and skilfully retiring, drew him into the hostile country round Inverness. Montrose fell into the trap, and Hurry took his measures to surprise him at Auldearn so successfully that (May 9) Montrose, even though the indiscipline of some of Hurry’s young soldiers during the night march gave him the alarm, had barely time to form up before the enemy was upon him. But the best strategy is of no avail when the battle it produces goes against the strategist, and Montrose’s tactical skill was never more conspicuous than at Auldearn. Alastair Macdonald with most of the Royalist infantry and the Royal standard was posted to the right (north) of the village to draw upon himself the weight of Hurry’s attack; only enough men were posted in the village itself to show that it was occupied, and on the south side, out of sight, was Montrose himself with a body of foot and all the Gordon horse. It was the prototype, on a small scale, of Austerlitz. Macdonald resisted sturdily while Montrose edged away from the scene of action, and at the right moment and not before, though Macdonald had been driven back on the village and was fighting for life amongst the gardens and enclosures, Montrose let loose Lord Gordon’s cavalry. These, abandoning for once the pistol tactics of their time, charged home with the sword. The enemy’s right wing cavalry was scattered in an instant, the nearest infantry was promptly ridden down, and soon Hurry’s army had ceased to exist.

35. Campaign of Naseby.—If the news of Auldearn brought Leven to the region of Carlisle, it had little effect on his English allies. Fairfax was not yet released from the siege of Oxford, in spite of the protests of the Scottish representatives in London. Massey, the active and successful governor of Gloucester, was placed in command of a field force on the 25th of May, but he was to lead it against, not the king, but Goring. At that moment the military situation once more changed abruptly. Charles, instead of continuing his march on to Lancashire, turned due eastward towards Derbyshire. The alarm at Westminster when this new development was reported was such that Cromwell, in spite of the Self-Denying Ordinance, was sent to raise an army for the defence of the Eastern Association. Yet the Royalists had no intentions in that direction. Conflicting reports as to the condition of Oxford reached the royal headquarters in the last week of May, and the eastward march was made chiefly to “spin out time” until it could be known whether it would be necessary to return to Oxford, or whether it was still possible to fight Leven in Yorkshire—his move into Westmorland was not yet known—and invade Scotland by the easy east coast route.