Cromwell Against the Scots E-Book

John D. Grainger

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

After an introduction establishing Cromwell's war against the Scots from July 1650 to May 1652, this book discusses Charles' landing and Fairfax's resignation as commander-in-chief of the English Republican Army, both events occurred on the same day. It then addresses the causes of the war, Charles II's landing in Northern Scotland from the Continent. The story continues chronologically, from Cromwell's invasion of Scotland, through the Battle of Dunbar, and the slow establishment of the king's power over the Scottish government. The end came with the fall of the last of the Scottish castles, Dunnottar, to English conquest. The Scots enjoyed a distinct military recovery after the Dunbar defeat, but their aims and those of the king were always at cross purposes: the king was intent on the invasion of England, the Scots on resistance to English conquest. Finally, Cromwell's manoeuvres in the summer of 1651, and the English victory at Inverkeithing, allowed the king to invade England. This ended in another Scots defeat at Worcester. The removal of the Scots Army to England meanwhile allowed the English under Monck to complete their conquest of Scotland. Throughout, the political dimension, particularly in Scotland, is kept in view. At the end, the author comments on the relevance of these events to the present Scottish situation.

Leseprobe

CROMWELL

AGAINST THE SCOTS

CROMWELL

AGAINST THE SCOTS

The Last Anglo-Scottish War

1650–1652

John D. Grainger

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Tuckwell Press

Copyright © John D. Grainger, 1997

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 407 8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The right of John D. Grainger to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988

CONTENTS

Illustrations and maps

INTRODUCTION

1. GARMOUTH AND WHITEHALL

2. THE INVASION OF SCOTLAND

3. DUNBAR

4. A REARRANGEMENT OF PARTIES

5. THE SCOTTISH RECOVERY

6. TORWOOD AND INVERKEITHING

7. THE INVASION OF ENGLAND

8. WORCESTER

9. STIRLING AND DUNDEE

10. THE FINAL CONQUEST

CONCLUSION

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Charles II

2. Cromwell in 1649

3. Cromwell as ruler, on horseback

4. The crowning of Charles II at Scone

5. English cartoon of Charles II and the Scots

6. Dunbar victory medal, depicting Cromwell

7. The Battle of Dunbar

8. Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, Scottish Commander-in-Chief

9. View of Edinburgh, 1690s

10. View of Stirling, 1690s

11. General George Monck

12. General John Lambert

13. Neidpath Castle

14. Tantallon Castle

15. Dirleton Castle

16. Dunnottar Castle

17. The Honours of Scotland

MAPS

1. The English Invasion, 22–29 July

2. The Campaign Around Edinburgh

3. Dunbar, September 2–3, 1650

4. Central Scotland, Sep-Dec 1650

5. The Deadlock Broken, Jun-July 1651

6. The Invasion of England

7. Worcester

8. Scotland: The Final Conquest

INTRODUCTION

AFRIEND of mine, when I mentioned that I was writing a book about the ‘last war’ between England and Scotland, frowned momentarily, then grinned knowingly and muttered: ‘Jacobites, of course’; a sideways look informed me that my title was too clever by half. Another friend, rather better informed, dismissed the Jacobites and thought I was studying the Tudor wars. Children at the school I was teaching in glazed over completely: a war between English and Scots was outside their comprehension; the class wiseacre commented audibly on sports; for all of them, their history was almost purely social and economic.

I also thought I was cheating to ignore the various Jacobite problems – surely Bonnie Prince Charlie at Derby constituted a real war? A little consideration convinced me that the ’15 and the ’45 (not to mention the ’08 and the ’19) were not wars on an international scale – though they occurred during such wars – but internal rebellions, and minor ones at that, on a level with the French Frondes, perhaps, or the IRA in Northern Ireland: destructive but futile. With those out of the way (and, all the more, such minor internal incidents as the Glencoe massacre in 1692 and the Covenanters of the 1670s) I was vindicated: the last Anglo-Scots war was the one which began in 1650 and petered out late in 1651 or early in 1652.

The need to justify a title is not a particularly good way to begin a book, but I want my readers to be under no misapprehension. This is not a romantic or a debunking account of the Jacobite failures: it is an account of a serious and thoroughly unpleasant international conflict, which resulted in the complete defeat of the Scots and their total subjugation by their ruthless neighbours.

One would have thought, as I did when I began wondering about it, that such an event would have attracted scholarly or popular attention long ago. Yet there is no account of the war. There partial accounts, which are contained in books on other subjects. For example, biographies of Oliver Cromwell have chapters, usually, on the war, but their interest ceases when Cromwell came south in August of 1651. The war went on a good deal longer than that. The only military history, by W. S. Douglas, is Cromwell’s Scotch Campaigns. It is out of print, was published at the end of the last century and is almost unreadable, so littered are its pages with footnotes of immense length. It also stops in August 1651. Histories of Scotland concentrate on a slightly earlier period, the revolutions of the 1630s and 1640s. So David Stevenson’s Revolution and Counter Revolution, covering events between 1644 and 1651, largely ignores the military aspect of affairs to concentrate on internal politics, and stops without seriously considering the invasion of England or the rule of the English; that rule is considered by F. D. Dow in Cromwellian Scotland but without a serious look at the preliminary war. And English histories are even more myopic: the battle of Worcester is regarded as part of the English Civil War, whereas the great majority of the men in the king’s army were actually Scots, and the English army was enthused at the prospect of beating out a foreign invasion. To regard the battle as part of the English Civil War is to distort the events of the whole previous year, and the course of the battle itself.

To some extent this is a justifiable position. The two countries had been part of the same monarchy for nearly half a century, and in a sense the war was the product of the preceding civil wars (in both England and Scotland), but they were two separate states (just as now they are distinct countries), with separate governments, and separate histories. Their joint monarchy, and earlier mutual interferences in each other’s internal affairs, only blurs the outline of this separateness, it does not remove it. This war was a conflict between independent states.

The various accounts largely combine to allow the war to vanish, dropping between several historical stools, and so to deny the international aspect of this war – as well as failing to provide an adequate account of it. For the Scots it is a part of the failure of their Covenanting revolution, for the English it is an appendage to their civil war. The succeeding period of political union with England and Ireland, forged by the English on the anvil of Scots misery, is largely dismissed from consideration, an unsuccessful union prematurely born, which did not – could not – survive because of the violence of its origins, a child of rape. The real union came in 1707, a true marriage of willing partners. So goes the tradition ironically known as the ‘Whig’ interpretation, though some Scots might jib at the implication that the nation willingly sank its independence into a larger union in 1707.

So I present here an account, in narrative form, of a war between two independent states, both of whose governments were revolutionary in origin, though that was only a secondary element in the causes of the war. But it does mean that underlying the political surface there was, among many, even most, of the people in each country, a powerful feeling of alienation from the ruling groups. Those rulers were the men who had come out on top in the warfare and violence of the preceding decade and a half, and they were both few and deeply apprehensive of those they ruled. There were Royalists in England and anti-Kirkmen in Scotland, both of whom longed to displace their enemies from power, and it might be thought that a foreign invasion would provide an opportunity for a counter-revolution. Yet in neither country were there enough of these anti-government plotters willing to combine with the invader to overthrow the government in power. So when Cromwell invaded Scotland he could get no Scots help of any significance, and Charles II got little English help when he brought his Scots army south. The Bromsgrove blacksmith who commented to the fugitive king that he blamed Charles for bringing in the Scots invaders spoke for the vast majority of people, of all ranks, in both countries. No matter who ruled, the popular reaction was detestation of the foreigner.

This war is not, that is to say, a civil war, but a clear international conflict between sovereign states. It is the result of preceding events and attitudes, and it is made more difficult and complex than usual by the previous relationships between the two revolutionary governments. In the event, though, it was the more basic, visceral reactions of nationalism which prevailed on both sides, if with other ideological overtones. That both governments knew full well that their own existence, and in the case of the men themselves their very lives, were at stake on the outcome, added a powerful personal element, spiced as it also was by personal relationships reaching across the conflict. A Scots soldier at the Corstorphine confrontation recognised Cromwell, shouting that they had been on the same side at Marston Moor. He and the Bromsgrove blacksmith epitomised necessary elements in the story.

CHAPTER ONE

GARMOUTH AND WHITEHALL

June 24, 1650

THE war between England and Scotland which began in July 1650 was made as nearly inevitable as anything human can be by two events at opposite ends of their common island on the same day, June 24. In the north, at the small fishing village of Garmouth, at the mouth of the River Spey on the Moray Firth, King Charles II landed from the Dutch ship Skidam, setting foot for the first time in his kingdom of Scotland. On the same day, in Whitehall Palace, London, an English committee met, and their discussion centred on the reasons for the English invasion of Scotland which they had planned.

The king had had a hard voyage, rough physically and tough mentally. It had begun, in effect, back in January of the previous year, 1649, when his father, King Charles I, had been executed by his subjects for making war on them. The new king – as he claimed to be – had two overriding ambitions from then on: to avenge his father, and to secure possession of his empty throne. After seventeen months, the Garmouth landing was the first major step along that road. The road itself had already been difficult and unpleasant, and it would continue to be rocky, painful, long, and dangerous for the king; for many thousands of his subjects it was to prove fatal.

Scotland had been outraged that the privilege of executing its king had been usurped by its neighbour. That Charles I had been king of England (and Ireland) as well as Scotland, that the major share in the war against him had been borne by the English, that the Scots had had the man in their own hands and had sold him to the English – all this became irrelevant. As soon as the news of his execution reached Edinburgh his eldest son had been proclaimed king of ‘Great Britain, France, and Ireland’, on February 5, 1649.1

The title was characteristically eccentric and needlessly provocative. There was no country called ‘Great Britain’: Charles I had been, separately but in his one person, king of Scots and king of England. No king of England had ruled any part of France (except the Channel Islands) for a century. And Ireland was never visited by any English or Scots king as its king between Richard II in 1398 and Dutch William in 1690. The collection of kingdoms the new king was credited with was a nonsense; it was also unnecessarily provocative to the English, for ‘Great Britain’ could only be interpreted as including England, and so the Scots seemed to be claiming the right to decide who should rule in England. It could be said that the last Anglo-Scots war began then, declared by the Scots on the English on behalf of an absent king whom they had never seen, and whom the revolutionary government never trusted.

Being proclaimed king did not, however, either make Charles II into a king or give him any power. The Scots attached conditions, in particular insisting that he had to subscribe to their Covenant, the religiously motivated revolutionary government which had been in power in varying combinations and factions since the 1630s. That was where the seventeen months between proclamation and landing had gone, into long, painful, and mutually deceitful negotiations. As Charles moved in slow stages from Paris to Scotland during that time, he was made to jump through ever more theologically strict hoops in a process he found intensely humiliating. Agreement after agreement he made with the Scots negotiators turned out to be no more than yet another step along the road to his complete submission. His personal habits, his amusements, his religious beliefs, his parentage, his father’s conduct, his mother’s Catholicism, were all criticised to his face.2

The voyage from Holland had seen the process continue. He was travelling in a Dutch ship loaned to him by the Prince of Orange, his brother-in-law, and he was cooped up in it with the Scots commissioners, who prayed at him interminably given half a chance, and indulged in minute criticism of his social, political and religious conduct. The ship was stormbound in the Heligoland Bight for a week, and during that week yet another negotiating screw was tightened. Then they crossed the stormy North Sea, making landfall at Orkney. As they came south they headed into yet another storm.3 This was June, in a year whose weather was worse than even the wet and cold seventeenth century could easily recall. The new king could call nothing his own, not the ship he travelled in, nor the kingdom he was going to, and even his chosen companions were objected to by the sharp-tongued and insolent ‘subjects’ who laid down conditions for his rule which he had grudgingly to accept.

But this king was a lucky man. All his life he escaped the worst consequences of his extravagance and hotheadedness. He was sexually promiscuous in a time of widespread venereal disease, and escaped infection; he was hunted by a hostile English government in 1651, and escaped to safety overseas; he was saddled in 1660 with a new English constitution designed to hamper him with a perpetual Parliament, and escaped from it by the 1680s, despite being hampered by a family divided between Catholics and Calvinists. And now, the tempest which he encountered coming south from Orkney drove away a powerful English fleet under Admiral Popham which had been waiting for him in the Moray Firth. People on shore saw both fleets heading away from each other; Scotch mist ensured that neither fleet saw the other. Luck indeed.4

Before he landed, Charles at last signed the Scots Covenant, another turn of the screw, at the Commissioners’ insistance.5 But even that was not the end of the matter. In effect, neither Charles nor the Scots trusted each other, and in this they were both quite correct. Charles signed and swore to successive agreements with such strong mental reservations that he convinced himself he was only acting under duress; the Scots negotiators insisted on repeatedly tightening up the agreements because they could sense this reluctance in the king. The net result was that when he reached Scotland none of those in power would permit their new king to exercise any power.

On the other hand, he was personally popular. From the time of his landing he was welcomed, fêted, feasted, all the way south. He travelled from Garmouth by way of castles and cities, staying at the Gordon castle at Bog of Gight, the city of Aberdeen, the powerful Dunnottar castle, the cities of Dundee, Perth, and Stirling, and in the end was lodged at Falkland Palace in Fife. Quaint customs dotted his route, like the doch and dorris the earl of Southesk made him drink, his leg hooked over the bolt of the doorway, at Southesk.6

The land he now ruled, at least in name, was governed by a revolutionary party, and it was their conditions he now had to meet. The Kirk party, as they were called, was a narrow group hoisted into power at the failure of the last party in power, the Engagers, who had led an unsuccessful invasion of England two years before, in 1648. The extremists, the Kirk party, had seized power by means of an armed uprising in the west of Scotland (the ‘Whiggamore Raid’ – the origin of the party term ‘Whig’). With the main Scots army away in England the Kirkmen had seized Edinburgh and installed their own government in the capital. A purge had followed, and a compliant Scots Parliament had dutifully passed the Act of Classes, which provided the legal basis for the exclusion of the members of previous governments. These two parties were both opposed by the out-and-out Royalists, whose champion had been the marquis of Montrose. He had been the king’s champion too, and had led an invasion of Scotland from the continent earlier in 1650. He had failed. His small army had been intercepted at Carbisdale in Sutherland by an even smaller force of the Kirkmen’s troops, and totally destroyed. Montrose was captured and rapidly executed. As King Charles travelled south from Garmouth, he saw sections of Montrose’s dismembered body displayed on spikes at Aberdeen and Dundee. This was a grisly reminder to Charles of his most devoted champion, and of his own responsibility – for Charles had failed to support Montrose, and had done nothing to save him.7

The continuing power in the Scottish government was located in the Committee of Estates, technically a standing committee of the Scots Parliament. It was composed of selected Members from the three estates of the Parliament: nobles, lairds, and burgesses. The Committee was the one permanent deliberative body in the kingdom’s government, and it was wholly in the hands of the Kirkmen. The main offices were in their hands as well. The Lord Chancellor was John Campbell, earl of Loudoun, a skilful politician who had held the office since 1641, surviving all the twists of Scottish covenanting politics. Another Campbell, Archibald, marquis of Argyll, had also survived all along, but was no longer trusted by his fellows, though his chieftainship of the great Campbell clan gave him independent power. Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston was the Clerk Register, ambitious but fearful, whose diary reveals the state a man can get into when he takes his religion too seriously, and loses his common sense.

It was with these leaders of the Committee that the king had to deal, and all power was in their hands. Charles had no hand in appointing office holders, and, distrusted, he was to be regularly subjected to further humiliations. The Scots Parliament was now a purged and obedient instrument of the Committee, whose only effective critic was the Kirk itself, in the form of the General Assembly and the Commission of the Kirk, a sort of ecclesiastical version of the Parliament/Committee system. But the Commission of the Kirk was more kirkly than the Kirk party. There was to be no hope for the king there.

In England, the English Parliament was also a purged body, but was somewhat less obedient to its Council of State – in effect the English version of the Committee of Estates. The Council was too large to work effectively, being about forty strong, though attendance was variable. It therefore operated through committees, some permanent, some ad hoc, and the recommendations of such committees were rarely questioned. The man with a foot in all these camps was Oliver Cromwell: M.P., General of the Army, member of the Council of State, and frequently appointed to the more important of its committees. His agility – political, military, rhetorical, religious – enabled him to dominate all these, though his control was never total. For, unlike Charles II, he was burdened with an active conscience.

On June 24, as Charles approached and landed on the Scottish mainland, the latest committee of the Council, of which Cromwell was a member, met. This was in fact a committee which Cromwell himself had suggested, and it consisted of himself and four other men, in all a conspectus of the new power which was ruling in England. Besides Cromwell, a country squire who had risen to power by his military and political ability, but basically a moderate conservative in politics, there were two other soldiers: John Lambert, a young Yorkshireman with a genius for generalship probably greater than Cromwell’s, and Thomas Harrison, a former clerk and a Fifth Monarchist, both of these men being strong republicans. There were also two lawyer-politicians, Oliver St John, an opponent of Charles I ever since the quarrel in the 1630s over Ship Money, and Bulstrode Whitelocke, a lifetime moderate. Collectively these men were the most powerful group in England. They had come to meet the Lord General, the commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, another Yorkshireman, ‘Black Tom’, Lord Fairfax.

Fairfax had told the Council of State two days before that he would not lead his army in the invasion of Scotland which the Council planned.8 This was not wholly unexpected news: issues of conscience tended to be very publicly known amongst this group of men, and Fairfax’s conscience was more active than most. He had not made any decisive move until then, even though the invasion of Scotland had been planned for six weeks or more, but as the day of action approached, so did the need for him to make his decision. It was clearly painful for him. He was reputed to be under pressure from his wife, a notoriously outspoken lady, and from Presbyterian ministers in London,9 with whom he and his wife sympathised, and who were vehemently opposed to an attack on their ideological brothers in the north. Despite the pressure, Fairfax was a man who made up his own mind, even if he took a long while to do so. When he did announce his decision to the Council of State, on June 22, Cromwell proposed his little committee to discuss it all with Fairfax in private.

They met in a room in Whitehall Palace, surely sitting round a table, a group of men who were personal and political friends, and who respected each other’s qualms of conscience. Cromwell opened proceedings with a prayer, and Whitelocke made extensive notes.10 Cromwell then began by inviting Fairfax to state his grounds for refusing to command. Fairfax replied in general terms, and the other four, one by one, asked him to be specific. So he was. ‘We are joined with them [the Scots] in a solemn league and covenant,’ Whitelocke recorded him as saying, ‘and now for us … to enter into their country with an army and make war upon them is what I cannot see the justice of.’

He was referring to the alliance made back in the dark days of 1643, when the Scots had come south to help the English Parliament in its hour of need. The Scots’ price had been English adhesion to their Covenant, and an English promise to institute Presbyterian forms of worship in the Church of England. Fairfax’s words conjured up the memories of those days, and of the alliance which had been the foundation of the English Parliament’s eventual victory. He was also implicitly calling up a threat, that a new conflict might break out in England, between the Presbyterians, led by Fairfax, and the rest. Such a conflict could only chill the hearts of all of them.

Cromwell smoothly agreed that ‘if they have given us no cause to invade them, it will not be justifiable for us to do it’. Then he pointed out that the Scots themselves had already invaded England, meaning the Engagers’ invasion which he and Lambert had defeated at Preston two years before. He went on to point out that the Scots were ‘very busy at this present in raising forces and money’. What else, he was asking, were these forces for but to attack England? ‘That there will be war between us, I fear, is unavoidable.’ Better it were fought, in that case, in Scotland than in England.

Fairfax was unconvinced. He quite agreed that war was ‘probable’, but then he came to the heart of the matter. ‘Whether we should begin this war and be on the offensive part,’ he said, ‘or only stand upon our own defence is what I scruple.’ And he pointed out, accurately, that the new Scots regime of the Kirkmen had disowned the Engagers, and had deprived them of political rights. Politely, he did not mention that it had been Cromwell’s own looming and forceful presence in Edinburgh which had helped the Kirk party reach that decision.

The confrontation between Fairfax and the committee was total. Fairfax insisted on the primacy of his conscience, the others on their right to invade Scotland. The discussion went on somewhat longer, but both sides were immoveable. Fairfax at last, in his fair and decent way, offered to resign his commission as Lord General. At that point there may well have been sighs of relief from the rest. Fairfax was not going to take the conflict in this committee outside. He was not prepared to invade Scotland, but neither was he prepared to stand in the way of the others doing so.

This was the crucial decision, but the argument went on, as such arguments do, for some time yet. The five tried to persuade Fairfax to stay, for he was immensely popular in the army, and his going might well cause divisions, even if he went quietly. It was suggested that he remain in nominal chief command while the invasion force would be commanded by Cromwell, but he would not. ‘Everyone must stand or fall by his own conscience,’ he said. The new English republic had lost the services of its most eminent and popular soldier. He attended the Council of State next day, to hear the committee’s report, tendered his resignation, then returned to Yorkshire. His fundamental decency prevented him from taking the quarrel further. This made the war with Scotland, as Cromwell had said, ‘unavoidable’.

Fairfax’s resignation from the command-in-chief led to the appointment of Cromwell as Lord General. Heads immediately wagged at this. It was widely assumed that this had been Cromwell’s aim from the start, and that all his arguments to Fairfax were therefore insincere.11 Reading Whitelocke’s notes, however, that is not the impression one gets. Cromwell was eloquent, and all five of the committee pressed Fairfax to stay. Of course, an imputation of insincerity can never be disproved, and it is certain that Cromwell must have known that, if Fairfax did go, he himself would be made Lord General in his place. But his reluctance looks genuine, as does his eloquence and his argument. He had just returned from a difficult and nasty campaign in Ireland, and one into Scotland would be as difficult, if not more so. There is little doubt, however, that Cromwell was the better man for the job. Fairfax had a tendency to berserker frenzy in battle, to revel in the fight for its own sake, whereas Cromwell was more thoughtful, and immensely more careful of his soldiers’ lives. A half-hearted Fairfax fighting in Scotland against a skilled Scots army and commander would have been a recipe for an English disaster. For the Scots, on the other hand, Cromwell spelt political as well as military defeat. It took much more than mere military competence to conduct the Scottish campaign: it needed the ability to argue, to persuade, to intrigue – to be a politician as well as a commander – and these were abilities which Cromwell possessed, and Fairfax did not.

The six men knew each other well. As MPs, as soldiers, as neighbours, as lawyers, as in-laws – St John was married to Cromwell’s cousin – they had worked together for years. There was much in a discussion such as theirs which they did not need to say to each other. And the most glaring omission was any mention of Charles II, who was, at that very moment, landing in Garmouth.

For it has to be said that, by the standards of normal international behaviour, Fairfax was largely correct. England and Scotland were allies; the Scottish Parliament had disavowed the Engagers’ invasion of two years before; war was only ‘probable’ – it only became ‘unavoidable’ once the English government decided to invade Scotland. All the arguments of the committee were irrelevant beside these solid facts. In all this, there was no cause for war, despite the military build-up on both sides.

And yet, above all the argument, and despite its not being mentioned, there was the problem of the king. Charles I had been mainly and above all else a king of England. His eldest son could not rest until he had regained that throne, and had avenged his father’s death. For Charles II, his accession to the Scottish throne was only one more step on the way to those English goals, no matter how the Kirkmen might delude themselves that he was being made purely a king of Scots. The Council of State had decided that the invasion should be undertaken back in March.12 They had information that the Scots were negotiating seriously to bring their king across from the continent, and that the Scots had made provision to recruit a new army of 5,440 horse and 13,400 foot.13 It only needed suspicious minds, battered by years of civil war and rebellion, betrayal and conspiracy, and a memory of the Scots invasion of England in 1648, to put these facts together and conclude that the Scots’ intention was for their king to lead that army in an invasion of England in order to put him on the empty throne.

To such men, habituated to the dangers of war over the past eight years, the obvious answer to such a threat was a pre-emptive strike. And it must be said that they were probably not wholly wrong. Invasion was surely Charles’ aim, though the Kirk party, aware of their precarious position in Scotland, always denied that they harboured any ill will towards England. But they had protested at the execution of Charles I, they had proclaimed his son as king of ‘Great Britain’, they had brought his son to their kingdom and made him their king. They may well have done all these things for their own internal purposes: the Kirk party’s position was known to be precarious, and it had been briefly propped up by English pikes at its inception, and this meant that it might not take much to overthrow it. And its enemies were the king’s men, Royalists – what the Kirkmen called ‘Malignants’ – and Engagers. Annexing the new king to the Kirk looked to be good politics. But controlling him might be more difficult – hence the screw-tightening on the voyage. What was quite certain was that if the Kirkmen’s Scots enemies gained power they would have no scruples about an invasion of England for their king.

Both sides had misconceptions about the other. The Scots had made provision to recruit an army partly in response to the threat of Montrose’s invasion earlier in the year, and they hadn’t done a great deal to recruit those numbers when the threat vanished. Both sides feared that the other would invade, and so prepared for defence. But such preparations can easily seem threatening – and both sides knew full well that the best defence is usually attack. Therefore they both feared a sudden attack. But both sides were also fundamentally hostile to one another for other reasons than fear. The Scots aim throughout the civil wars, since 1637, was to install a Presbyterian regime in England. This was still their aim. But the winners in the English civil war had been the Independents, represented above all by Cromwell, who were as unwilling to accept the Presbyterian straitjacket as they were to return to control by bishops. And, of course, at bottom, at the root of all this argument and dispute, there were the rival national feelings. The English soldiers who were stationed in Edinburgh in 1648 to support the newly installed Kirkmen’s regime (commanded, as it happened, by Lambert) had been subjected to much hostility in the streets, their horses and equipment had been stolen, and they had been very glad to leave. The mutual dislike, mixed with contempt, which was a permanent feature of Anglo-Scots relations, rapidly rose to outright hostility at close contact.

All this, however, does not bring war unless both sides will it. The various elements in the crisis all came together in mid-1650. And the basic problem was that everyone in the dispute saw right on his side. Fairfax was right, and Cromwell and his committee were right; Charles II was right, and the Kirkmen were right. All appealed to God. The big battalions would decide.

CHAPTER TWO

THE INVASION OF SCOTLAND

July 22 – August 27, 1650

THE governments of both countries had made preparations for the war. Fairfax’s resignation did not delay the English in the slightest. Parliament accepted his resignation, appointed Cromwell as his successor as Lord General, and accepted the declaration by the Council of State that the invasion was justified, all in a day. The declaration was published on July 4. Cromwell’s lieutenant-general – second-in-command – was Charles Fleetwood, and the commissary-general was to be Edward Whalley. Both of these were relations of Cromwell, but he had numerous cousins, and nepotism was not involved. John Lambert was appointed major-general, and Thomas Harrison became major-general in command of the forces left in England.1

The invasion force had been listed for a month, and those not already at Newcastle were now ordered there.2 It consisted of six regiments of horse and five of foot, a small force for the task, but it amounted to a good half of the forces available in England. Other forces were still tied up in the conquest of the last corners of Ireland.

The army the Scots had voted to raise back in February – nearly 19,000 men – had never actually been fully recruited, particularly among the foot, but the Act permitting the levy still existed; another Act was passed on June 25, so that in theory an army of 36,000 was authorised.3 This was an enormous number for a state of Scotland’s size and general poverty of resources, and nothing like that number was ever raised. The date is instructive, for the Act was passed before news of the king’s landing or of Cromwell’s appointment had reached Edinburgh. The Scots, like the English, already saw the war as ‘unavoidable’. The war’s ideological – as distinct from its nationalist – causes were also recognised, for the soldiers actually embodied were now to be subjected to an ideological test: a committee for purging the army had been set up on June 21, even before the new enlistments were agreed. The Kirk party was as scared of a hostile Scots army as the Parliament of England had been of their own; with the example of Pride’s Purge of the Westminster Parliament before them, and of their own purging of their Parliament and the Committee of Estates, the Scots politicians in power voted to ensure that their army was to be rendered obedient to them and no-one else. And that included the king.

The commander-in-chief was Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, but he was too old, he said – he was about seventy – and too infirm for active command. He was left in place, but the command in the field went to his nephew, David Leslie, as lieutenant-general, a man who was just as ideologically correct. A thorough and intelligent professional soldier, the victor over Montrose at Philiphaugh, and joint-victor, with Cromwell, at Marston Moor, Leslie’s preferred strategy was to let Cromwell’s army come to him. He organised the fortification, with trenches and guns and forts, of a line from the sea at the fortified town of Leith on the Firth of Forth, to the fortified city of Edinburgh, with Edinburgh Castle as the impregnable anchor on the landward side. All men aged between sixteen and sixty in the counties along the North Sea coast between Leith and Berwick were ordered to be evacuated; all supplies were requisitioned. The English were supposed to march through a deserted land, inhabited only by a mob of women and children demanding to be fed.

Cromwell and the Scots spent a month longer in mutual preparation, starting at rumours of the other side’s moves, and bombarding each other with declarations of intent and of righteousness. The Scots Parliament had already written to its English counterpart, naively asking whether invasion was intended, but not seriously expecting this to delay matters.4 Now Cromwell wrote to the Scots to give reasons for his projected invasion, and he also set to work on a declaration of justification designed for publication.

This took some composing, it seems. One officer, Cornet John Baynes, a Yorkshireman, wrote on July 11 to his uncle, Captain John Baynes, that the general and other officers had been striving mightily with the text for two days, but then, four days later, he commented that the first drafts, already printed, were burnt, and a new one prepared.5 It appeared over the name of the Secretary of the Army, John Rushworth, in London on July 19, as ‘A Declaration of the Army of England upon their march into Scotland, to all that are Saints, and partakers of the Faith of God’s Elect in Scotland’. In nearly 4,000 words, much of it frothy religious rhetoric, there is a single sentence which refers to the English civil wars, but which is precisely apposite once more: ‘We were engaged in a war with the … king for the defence of our religion and liberties’. Now, having removed that threat, the Declaration says, here is the same threat recurring, in a new king and a new religion, and so the English must engage in war once more.6

The war had already begun at sea. The English Parliament had decided to prohibit trade with Scotland during the war, but it took some time to get around to the details. As early as July 1, Captain Edward Hall, commanding the English squadron off the North Sea coast of Scotland, told the Council that he had captured a Scots ship out of Rotterdam, full of goods and carrying numbers of men and officers to Scotland. He had sent it into Newcastle, where Sir Arthur Haselrig, the governor, was to dispose of it. Two days later he reported chasing a group of five ships, capturing three, and driving the other two aground. One of them, a Dutch ship, was released after a search, and the others were sent once again into Newcastle. Two more were taken in the next few days by other ships of the English squadron. This activity, however, did not prevent one of Hall’s ships sending a party ashore in the Firth of Forth for water. They were captured, and made to kneel and drink to the health of the king.7

Other English ships were employed to bring up supplies for the army. The Admiralty Committee of the Council of State was told that the fleet’s victuallers had hired twenty-three ships in July to carry provisions north, and on August 1 the Council told the Navy Commissioners to hire as many as were necessary. Colonel Deane was asked to send more warships up from Plymouth to help in the blockade. Meanwhile, any Scots who were in England were sought out and investigated. A Scottish colonel, James Grey, was caught in London and brought before the Council of State, before being sent off to Cromwell.8

Cromwell had travelled north as soon as he received his commission as Lord General, being welcomed generously by the mayors and aldermen at Northampton, Leicester, and York, and at Durham he was entertained by the colonels of his allotted regiments and Haselrig from Newcastle.9 He was now informed of the condition of Scotland, and it became clear that extensive preparations were under way. Early rumours of a pre-emptive Scots invasion had vanished, to be replaced by a more accurate appreciation of Leslie’s intentions. Cromwell knew what they were, certainly by July 10 at Newcastle, and the Scots strategy of retreat and devastation was even known in London soon after. A Scots force, rumoured to be three regiments of horse under a Colonel Douglas, had been spotted at Coldstream, a border village on the Tweed fifteen miles inland from Berwick, and the Scots levy was known to be going well. On the arrival of the full English force, the regiments withdrew, having covered the levy and the evacuation along the invasion route. The English claimed they had fled.10

All this made the English expedition much more difficult than had been expected. Cromwell’s force had risen already to eighteen regiments, but the Scots levy meant that he was still outnumbered. The Council of State in London, perhaps warned by Cromwell of the mounting difficulties, sent him a small battering train, and made arrangements for a regiment to march north through Lancashire to improve the garrison, of Carlisle.11 Leslie’s strategy was already having its effect even before the English had reached the border. What had seemed straightforward in London had become a daunting problem in Newcastle.

But the troops were cheerful. They gave Cromwell a rousing welcome when he inspected them at Newcastle, voting to ‘live and die’ with him. On the other hand, some officers were clearly unhappy, probably suffering the same qualms of conscience which had assailed Fairfax. Colonel Bright tried to escape by asking for leave, was refused, and resigned; other, more junior, officers were dismissed. Bright’s regiment were asked if they would accept Colonel George Monck as his replacement, but they refused, shouting that he had been their prisoner six years earlier, at Nantwich, before he changed sides to join Parliament. They did accept Lambert, however, who was Cromwell’s next suggestion. Monck, one of Cromwell’s favourites, was then given a new regiment, collected together from diverse companies in the Newcastle and Berwick garrisons. (Thus inauspiciously began the Coldstream Guards.) The temptation is very strong to see in all this an example of Cromwell’s deviousness. He had succeeded in giving his two favourite subordinates a new regiment each, had increased his force by a regiment, had rid himself of a number of disgruntled officers, and had gained a reputation for democratic conduct with the soldiers which was thoroughly misleading but nonetheless valuable. On the other hand, perhaps he simply made a mistake in offering Monck to the regiment.12 Monck may well already have been put in charge of the army’s artillery train, though the appointment was not made official for many months.13

Cromwell, awaiting supplies, moved the army gently forward the sixty miles to Berwick, and on July 19 he held a grand review in the grounds of Lord Grey’s Chillingham Castle. A muster revealed a strength of 16,354 men. Yet another ‘declaration’, this time directed to the ‘People of Scotland’, was published, to no discernible effect.14

What did have an effect were bloodthirsty remarks by the Scots, predicting what the English would do to any prisoners they caught. Folk memories in the borders and along the coast road to Edinburgh were powerful enough to make such predictions seem credible. Previous English invasions, and the behaviour of moss troopers who raided across the border in both directions, had been savage enough to sear local memories. A pained denunciation of such ‘groundless and unjust reproaches, and many false slanders’ was published by the English, and Cromwell issued a stern proclamation to his own army against violence and plundering. Having made a speech to his soldiers, warning of the difficulties ahead of them, he ordered his own regiment of horse to lead the march into Scotland. Colonel Pride’s foot regiment was next. That combination, of Cromwell and Pride, should have been warning enough.15

The English army took its time. After crossing the border, it camped at Ayton, four miles north. In front of it a line of beacons was successively fired, warning all Scotland of the invasion. Perhaps because of the implied threat in this the army camped at Ayton for three days, surely hoping for an immediate battle. But there were more resignations, by Major Barber, for one, as the army entered Scotland. However, nothing happened, and on the 25th the march was resumed, twelve miles to Cockburnspath. This was a narrow pass close to the coast, just the place for the Scots to make a stand. No doubt the three days had been partly occupied by a thorough reconnaissance of the whole area, not just the road ahead, but the inland territories as well. With the land stripped of its sustenance, one possible strategy for Leslie would be to hold his army inland, wait for Cromwell to push on north, and then march in behind him to cut his communications. Reassured, Cromwell could march on, and he went on to Dunbar, a useful, if small, port.16

Cromwell had left in Newcastle an agent, William Rowe, a former envoy of the Council of State to the Scots, as his Scoutmaster General, a combined intelligence officer and supply expediter. Rowe was busy about forwarding the laggard supply ships from Newcastle to wherever the army was, and he had his wife out searching Newcastle for materials for bedding for the army. He had a spy in Edinburgh to write to him, something presumably arranged while he was on the embassy there earlier in the year. Cromwell was thus not taken wholly by surprise at the actions of the Scots as the army approached Edinburgh.17

Some provision ships arrived at Dunbar, but provided no more than ‘a pittance’. Supplies were already a problem. The English troops were shocked at the emptiness of the land. Lieutenant Hodgson remembered the cattle being driven away, and a correspondent in Mercurius Politicus went further, as befitted a journalist: ‘though Scotland hath been often compared to a wilderness, yet it was never so like one as then’. So the English army had to rely on the supplies which could be shipped from England.18