The Battle of Marston Moor 1644 E-Book

John Barratt

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

On 2 July 1644, six miles from York, 18,000 Royalists led by Prince Rupert, the nephew of King Charles I, fought 27,000 Parliamentarians in an attempt to relieve the Royalist force besieged at York. He failed. The defeat was catastrophic and the North was lost to Parliamentarian troops. John Barratt looks afresh at the battle and explores the disagreements among the Royalist leaders that had a devastating effect on the outcome of the battle.

Leseprobe

THE BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR

1644

About the Author

John Barratt is an acknowledged expert on the English Civil War. His other books include The Siege of Chester, The First Battle of Newbury, Battles for the Three Kingdoms, Cromwell’s Wars at Sea, The Civil War in South-West England 1642-1646 and Cavalier Generals. He lectures regulary at the National Army Museum and the Royal Armouries and lives in Denbighshire.

THE BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR 1644

John Barratt

This edition first published 2008

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© John Barratt, 2002, 2008, 2013

The right of John Barratt to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9637 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

1

Winter of Discontent,

September 1643–January 1644

2

The Scots Invasion and the Siege of York,

January–July 1644

3

‘Yorke March’ – Prince Rupert’s Campaign,

February–1 July 1644

4

Marston Moor: Opening Moves,

1 July–Noon 2 July 1644

5

Marston Moor: Prelude to Battle,

Afternoon 2 July

6

Marston Moor: Phase One,

7 P.M.–8.30 P.M

7

Marston Moor: Phase Two,

8.30 P.M.–Midnight

8

Aftermath

Chronology

Appendix: Orders of Battle, 2 July 1644

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Preface

The city of York, for centuries England’s ‘northern capital’, has witnessed more battles in its immediate vicinity than any other English city. Early encounters between the English and Norse invaders climaxed in 1066 with two major engagements: the defeat of the Northumbrians outside the gates of York at Fulford; and King Harold’s speedily reversed, costly victory at Stamford Bridge.

During the 600 years which followed, the area around York witnessed bloody encounters between a variety of opponents. English fought Scots, rebels engaged loyalists, and, on a snowy March day in 1461 during the struggle between the rival Houses of York and Lancaster popularly known as the Wars of the Roses, the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil took place southwest of the city at Towton.

It was virtually inevitable, therefore, that, when in the summer of 1642 civil war erupted between the forces of King and Parliament, York, of key strategic importance to both sides, would once again be in the forefront of the conflict.

The first six months of 1644 witnessed arguably the most critical and decisive phase of the war. Seemingly faced by deadlock after more than a year of bitter fighting, both King and Parliament sought to obtain a decision in their favour by means of outside intervention. Until early July 1644, it hung in the balance whether the King’s English troops from Ireland or the invasion by Parliament’s new Scottish allies would prevail, firstly in the bitter struggle for northern England, and then in the outcome of the war as a whole.

For it was increasingly apparent to both sides that whoever gained control of the north, with its resources of manpower, ports and links with the Continent, would gain a probably overwhelming advantage. By the early summer, with York under close siege from the allied armies of Parliament and the Scots, King Charles’ nephew, Prince Rupert, staked his army and reputation on relieving the Marquis of Newcastle’s northern Royalist forces holding the city and defeating the Allies in a decisive battle.

In an eight-day campaign during late June and early July, the prince came within an ace of stunning success. The climax came on 2 July, on the expanse of Marston Moor, six miles west of York, when between 40,000 and 50,000 men clashed in the largest battle of the English Civil Wars. By the end of the day at least one in ten of them were dead, with many more maimed and wounded. The Royalist cause in the north of England lay in ruins, together with Prince Rupert’s legend of invincibility. For his victorious opponents, Marston Moor was a giant step on the road to total victory, and for Oliver Cromwell, one of their principal commanders, the battle was a major milestone on his path to greatness.

Although confusion is an inherent part of the story of any battle, Marston Moor is one of the more perplexing engagements for the historian to reconstruct. It was an unexpected encounter, fought partly in conditions of near-darkness, and few if any of its participants had a clear impression of the exact course of events during the three or four hours of that July evening – or of its outcome until long after the fighting ended. The majority of the senior commanders on both sides had little influence on the conduct of the battle once fighting had begun, and, almost uniquely, most of them would end the night as fugitives. Only two of them, the Marquis of Newcastle and Sir Thomas Fairfax, left detailed accounts, and these relate more to their personal experiences than to the battle as a whole. As is frequently the case in battles of the period, relatively few other detailed eyewitness accounts survive.

Given the relative paucity of contemporary accounts, it is not surprising that over the years a number of sharply differing reconstructions have been made of the course of the battle of Marston Moor. Most are worthy of serious consideration. Recent research, however, into the nature, training, organisation and tactics of the armies of the Civil War, when applied to available contemporary sources and the battlefield itself, have made a new examination of the battle, and especially its place in the northern campaign as a whole, timely and worthwhile.

I owe a considerable debt to the researches of many students in the fascinating field of seventeenth-century military history and the Civil Wars, whose work over the last fifteen years or more has done so much to revolutionise our knowledge of this period. They are numerous, and, though I would mention in particular such names as David Blackmore, Dave Cooke, David Evans, Les Prince, Stuart Reid, Keith Roberts and John Tincey, both they and many other scholars, both past and present, have provided me with invaluable help. As ever, however, any omissions and errors are entirely my own. The last word on Marston Moor has not been, and probably never will be, said.

I would like to thank the patient and ever-helpful staff of various libraries, including the University of Liverpool Library, the British Library and the Bodleian Library for their unfailing assistance. At Tempus Publishing, Jonathan Reeve, Joanna Lincoln and the team have been constantly helpful, patient and encouraging.

I dedicate this book to two who are close to me: my wife Helen, whose forbearance and encouragement belie her almost total lack of interest in all things military, and to my little dog, Muffin, whose enthusiastic explorations of the field of Marston Moor happily did not culminate in his suffering the same sad fate as Prince Rupert’s ‘Boye’.

1

Winter of Discontent, September 1643–January 1644

Throughout the early hours of 21 September 1643, weary columns of Royalist troops trudged along the muddy roads heading north out of the town of Newbury towards King Charles I’s temporary capital at Oxford. Throughout the previous day, in bitter fighting outside the town, successive Royalist attacks had failed to dislodge the Parliamentarian army under the Earl of Essex, brought to bay when its communications with its base at London had been severed.

But when the Royalists, suffering from an ammunition shortage, were forced to quit the field, the road home was open again to Essex. The tottering Parliamentarian cause had survived its most serious crisis.

For much of 1643 it seemed to many observers that the English Civil War would end in victory for King Charles. From early summer onwards, a string of Royalist victories, at Adwalton Moor, Roundway Down and Bristol, had left the Cavaliers in control of most of the west of England, Wales, much of the Midlands and virtually all of the north apart from Lancashire and the port of Hull. Pushed back towards their heartlands of the Eastern Association of East Anglia, the southeast and London, the Parliamentarians appeared to be at bay.

But in September the Royalist tide faltered with the King’s unsuccessful siege of Gloucester, the Northern Royalists’ check before Hull, and, above all, after the failure to destroy Essex at Newbury. A quick victory no longer seemed likely for either side, and instead there was a real danger of the war developing into the kind of bloody stalemate which had devastated so much of Europe during the preceding decades. Only outside support seemed likely to tilt the balance in favour of one side or the other.

For the King, apart from the slim chance of intervention in his favour by a European power, the most likely source of aid was represented by the English forces in Ireland. Parliament, however, turned its eyes towards Charles’ long-standing opponents, the Presbyterian regime in Scotland, whom the King had failed to subdue in the Bishop’s Wars of 1638 and ’39.

From the beginning of 1643 the Scots had been offering to mediate in the English conflict, but on terms which would have brought the church in England into line with the religious establishment in Scotland. Unsurprisingly, the King rejected the offer, but this refusal raised the spectre of a Scottish-Parliamentarian alliance. Unwisely, as it turned out, Charles heeded the advice of the Scottish Duke of Hamilton, who claimed that he could contain by political means the advance of the Presbyterian party headed by the Earl of Argyle, and that Scotland would remain neutral.1 The King ignored the pleas of the Scots Royalist James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who urged that he and his supporters should stage a military uprising in Scotland before the Covenanting regime could enter the war.

By the time that Charles realised his mistake, it was too late.

On 1 May 1643, John Pym, the enigmatic West Country lawyer who effectively headed the Parliamentarian opposition to the King at Westminster, proposed the start of negotiations for a Scottish alliance. There was a good deal of unease among many of his associates at the prospect of having another Scottish army on English soil so soon after the troops who had occupied parts of the north of England at the close of the Second Bishop’s War had gone home, and talks were slow in starting. The swelling tide of military defeat caused a change of heart, even among the least enthusiastic, however, whilst in Scotland Argyle’s influence, and reports of the King’s plans to reach an accommodation with the rebels in Ireland spurred the Convention of Estates (the effective ‘parliament’ of Scotland) into action. Summoned to meet on 22 June, the Estates were given details of Royalist plans to employ Catholic Irish and Highlanders against the Presbyterian government in Scotland, and this threat pushed opinion in favour of an alliance with the English Parliament.

Events now moved rapidly. With alarm among the King’s opponents in both England and Scotland heightened by his moves to reach a truce or ‘cessation’ with the Irish Confederates, on 19 July Parliament agreed to send commissioners, headed by Sir Henry Vane the Younger, a skilled political negotiator, to Edinburgh to settle the details of an alliance. The main obstacle to agreement was the religious question: ‘The English were for a civil league, we for a religious covenant’, wrote one of the Scottish Commissioners.2 But expediency to some extent overcame religious principals, and the Scots comforted themselves with the thought that events would prove the ‘rightness’ of their particular brand of Christianity. It was agreed that the eventual religious settlement of the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland would be decided according to the ‘Word of God’.

It was a fudged compromise ripe with the seeds of future dissension, but for the moment military matters were more pressing, and within ten days the outline of the alliance known as ‘the Solemn League and Covenant’ – ‘a treaty born of necessity and nourished by illusory hopes’3 – were agreed. Robert Baillie, a Scots Commissioner, pondered apprehensively: ‘The play is begun, the Good Lord give it a happy end.’4

On 17 August the treaty was ratified by the Scottish Estates, and the Scots, dubious about the willingness of Parliament to meet its pledges, informed the English Commissioners that they expected a monthly payment of £31,000 (£100,000 of it in advance) for the maintenance of the army which they now began to raise.5 Their deteriorating military position left the English Parliamentarians no option but to ratify the Covenant with only minor amendments on 25 September.

The Scots had already begun military preparations when on 28 July the Estates ordered the mustering of a small force which on 18 August secured the undefended English border town of Berwick-on-Tweed without opposition, and full mobilisation followed. Command of the Scots army was given to Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, a 63-year-old professional soldier of vast experience who had served for over thirty years in the Low Countries and with the great Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, before returning home to lead the Scottish forces in the Bishop’s Wars. Despite a poor education and sometimes being accused of over-caution, Leven was a canny, methodical soldier and a highly capable general. In Scotland his military abilities were held in high regard.

‘Such was the wisdom and authoritie of that old little, crooked souldier’, wrote Robert Bailie,6 ‘that all, with ane incredible submission, from the beginning to the end, gave themselves to be guided by him, as if he had been Great Solyman.’

The Bishop’s Wars had given the Scottish authorities useful experience of raising large numbers of troops at short notice. Although the majority of the population had little actual combat experience, there were a large number of Scottish mercenaries who had served in the Continental wars available both to train recruits and to provide useful officer material. During and since the Bishop’s Wars a great quantity of arms and military equipment had been imported from the Low Countries.

The mobilisation of the Scottish army was based upon the liability for military service of all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. They were required to provide themselves with stipulated arms and equipment, and appear as required at local musters or ‘wapinschaws’, where they were inspected and rolls compiled of those judged fit to bear arms.

The Committee of Estates used these rolls as the basis for deciding the numbers of troops to be provided by the shires. Each shire had its own committee responsible for fixing the quota for every burgh and parish within its boundaries, and the actual raising of the required men was carried out by local councils, gentry and ministers. In 1643, orders were given for every fourth and eighth man on the rolls to be levied.7

The quotas for each shire were fixed on 1 September, and the actual enlistments took place at a series of musters held 4–20 October.8 By these means it was planned to raise a total of 26,000 men, organised into twenty-one regiments of infantry, nine cavalry and one of dragoons, which, under the title of the ‘Army of the Solemn League and Covenant’, were to muster near Berwick on 29 December ready for the invasion of England.

In the interim much would depend on the success of the King’s plans in Ireland. Here a major rebellion had broken out in 1641, and in the region of 40,000 troops, raised in Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland, were still engaged, generally with little success, in attempts to defeat the Confederates, as the rebels called themselves. As early as January 1643, King Charles authorised his Lord Deputy in Ireland, James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, to begin negotiations to reach a ‘cessation’, or truce for one year with the Confederates, and ‘bring over the English army to Chester’ as soon as terms were agreed.9

Ormonde was faced with a difficult task, made no easier by the opposition of significant numbers of his Council and the settlers of English origin, whilst continuing military success made the Confederates raise their own demands. On 15 September, however, agreement was reached, leaving only the areas around Dublin and Cork and various isolated garrisons in English hands. The Scots army in Ulster was left to fend for itself.

The Confederates hoped that a permanent political settlement, advantageous to themselves, would follow, but King Charles had more short-term objectives. It was for the moment sufficient for him that the Cessation released the bulk of the English troops serving in Ireland to be brought home to fight for the Royalist cause. In theory there were probably between 20,000 and 30,000 of them altogether,10 a mixture of veterans of the ‘Old Army’ in Ireland, and English and Welsh-raised units sent there since 1641. Since the start of the war a number of individual officers had already come over to fight in England. Most served the King, though a few enlisted with Parliament.

Some estimates of the number of troops who eventually crossed the Irish Sea in order to serve King Charles have been considerably inflated;11 the most likely total of arrivals by the end of 1644, after which crossings practically ceased, were 6,000 to 11,000 to England, and 2,000 reaching Scotland.12

The initial problem facing Ormonde and the Royalist leadership was how to transport the troops across waters dominated by the Parliamentarian navy. Fortunately most of the ships of the ‘Irish Guard’, based on Milford Haven and southern English ports, were diverted during the critical time by Cavalier successes in the south and southwest. A shortage of suitable Royalist transport was alleviated to some extent by ships captured at the fall of Bristol.

The first troops to reach England came from Munster, and landed in the southwest, where they were added to the army which Ralph Lord Hopton was raising to advance into southeast England. Hopton described them as:13

...bold, hardy men, and excellently well officer’d, but the common men were mutinous and shrewdly infected with the rebellious humour of England, being brought over merely by the vertue and loyalty of their officers, and large promises [of pay arrears] which there was then but smale meanes to perform.

After an initial mutiny was firmly suppressed, they performed creditably.

However, Royalist hopes rested mainly on the troops from Leinster (the area around Dublin). These were under Ormonde’s direct control, and faced a shorter sea crossing from Dublin to Chester and North Wales, against weaker naval opposition from Parliamentarian armed merchantmen based on Liverpool, than did the forces crossing to the southwestern ports from Munster. These relatively favourable conditions allowed 5,000 to 6,000 troops to be shipped over between November 1643 and February 1644, although shortage of transport meant that they had to be carried in several waves, lessening their intended impact.14

Unlike the smaller units which had landed in the southwest, it was planned to use the troops from Leinster in a unified force employing a long-term coherent strategy. The eventual aim was to use them to counter the Scots invasion. On 21 November, Ormonde’s agent in Oxford, Arthur Trevor, wrote to the earl:15

The expectation of English-Irish ayde is the dayly prayers, and almost the dayly bread of them that love the Kinge and his businesse, and is putt into the dispensary and medicine booke of state as a cure for the Scots.

Several alternative proposals were put forward for employing the troops from Ireland. One, particularly favoured by the King’s defeated local commander, James Stanley, Earl of Derby, was to use them to re-establish Royalist control of Lancashire and Cheshire.16 This achieved, the army could then in the spring march either to reinforce the King in the south or support the Earl of Newcastle against the Scots, whichever seemed most appropriate at the time.17 In the end, circumstances dictated that the immediate decision be left to the commander on the spot, originally intended to be Ormonde himself, although political considerations eventually prevented him from leaving Dublin.

It had been hoped that Ormonde’s presence would ensure the loyalty of his troops, for their reliability was a source of great concern to the Royalist high command. The King’s secretary of state, Lord George Digby, voiced their nightmare scenario:18

If the armye that is transporting hither, considered as fatall to the rebels here, in case it come over and continue with hearty and entire affections, but fully as fatall to his Majestic’s affaires in case it should revolt.

Ormonde hoped he had secured the loyalty of his officers by weeding some out and making the remainder swear oaths of allegiance to the King, but was concerned about the reliability of the rank and file. He expected Parliamentarian agents to attempt to suborn them with promises of their arrears of pay, and warned the authorities in Chester, tasked with the reception of the ‘Irish’ forces, that the troops,19 ‘would be apt to fall into disorders, and will think themselves delivered from prison, when they come to English ground, and they will make use of their libertie to go whither they will.’

New clothing, with pay and provisions, would have to be waiting for the arrivals, as well as a force of reliable troops to keep them ‘in awe’. In the previous July the neglected soldiers had been described as ‘being now so bare even to rags as doth much dishearten them’.20

The urgent need for the Leinster troops was underlined in late October when Cheshire and North Wales Parliamentarian forces under Sir William Brereton and Sir Thomas Myddleton launched a sudden offensive over the Dee into northeast Wales, aimed at forestalling the reinforcements from Ireland. Royalist resistance collapsed, and Chester itself was left dangerously isolated.

Fortunately for the Cavaliers, the first contingent of Ormonde’s men, 1,850 foot under Sir Michael Earnley, sailed from Dublin on 16 November, and safely disembarked at Mostyn in Flintshire five days later. 21 Brereton failed to persuade any significant numbers to defect, and had to beat a hasty retreat back over the Dee into Cheshire, leaving his isolated garrison at Hawarden Castle to be reduced by the new arrivals.

On the same day (21 November) that Earnley landed, John, Lord Byron, with 1,000 horse and 300 foot, set out from Oxford to take command of the Irish-Royalist forces. Byron, with the approval of Prince Rupert, had been appointed ‘Field-Marshal-General’ of Lancashire and ‘those parts’ on 6 November.22 He was intended to deputise pending the arrival of Ormonde, but circumstances would thrust him into a more prominent role.23

Byron was to play a major, and controversial, part in the Marston Moor campaign, and then and subsequently has been the subject of a great deal of criticism. An experienced soldier in his mid-forties, Byron was a member of a strongly Royalist Nottinghamshire family (six of his brothers and an uncle also served in the King’s armies), and had gained a fine reputation as a cavalry commander, playing a leading role at Edgehill and Roundway Down, and distinguishing himself in the bitter fighting at Newbury. An ambitious and self-confident man, Byron was eager to prove his mettle in independent command.

On 6 December the second contingent of Leinster troops, 1,250 foot and 140 dragoons, landed at Neston in Wirral.24 With the surrender of Hawarden Castle two days earlier, northeast Wales was clear of the enemy, and the combined ‘Irish’ force assembled at Chester. The citizens of that town were not greatly impressed by their arrival, seeing them:25 ‘in very evil equipage... and looked as if they had been used to hardship, not having either money, hose or shoes... faint weary and out of clothing.’

Some of the newcomers’ more urgent needs were eased by collections of surplus clothing made among the townspeople, and also an organised manufacture of items throughout northeast Wales. Such sympathy as the plight of the soldiers might have aroused, however, was quickly dampened by their alleged behaviour. Some of them promptly sold the clothing they had been given in order to obtain money for drink, and there were widespread complaints of their drunkenness, swearing, brawling, thieving and refusal to attend church on the Sabbath!26

Within a few days, disillusionment had become so great that the Chester Assembly offered the Royalist commanders what was in effect a bribe of £100 of the city plate to remove their by now unwelcome guests as quickly as possible.27

Byron was in any case anxious to take the field, despite increasingly adverse winter conditions. His aim was to clear Parliamentarian-controlled Cheshire, particularly to capture the enemy headquarters at Nantwich, and then move on into Lancashire. On 12 December, at the head of 4,000 foot and 1,000 horse, he set out from Chester on the first stage of his campaign.

The Royalists gained their first success next day, when a party of firelocks under the redoubtable Capt. Thomas Sanford surprised the enemy-held strongpoint of Beeston Castle in a daring operation which apparently involved scaling the nearly sheer northern face of Beeston Crag under cover of darkness.28 The Royalist forces spread out across the Cheshire countryside in a ruthless operation which seemed to confirm much of the Parliamentarian propaganda regarding the brutality of the troops from Ireland. The most notorious incident occurred on 26 December, when some armed civilians were smoked out of Bartholmley Church, and shot, allegedly after surrendering. Whilst responsibility seems to have rested with local Royalist troops rather than the soldiers from Ireland, a letter claimed to have been written by Byron and published in a Parliamentarian newsletter, saying that ‘I put them all to the sword... for mercy to them is cruelty’, gave further fuel to enemy propaganda.29

For the moment, however, the tide of events continued to favour Byron. On the same day as the Bartholmley ‘Massacre’, the Irish-Royalist army engaged the Cheshire Parliamentarians under Sir William Brereton at Middlewich. Brereton had been awaiting reinforcements from Lancashire, but was brought to battle before they arrived, and in a hard-fought action with Royalist troops spearheaded by the regiment commanded by Lord Byron’s brother Robert, suffered a serious reverse and was forced to retreat across the River Mersey to the refuge of Manchester.30

With no enemy left to oppose them in the field, Byron’s men closed in on the Cheshire Parliamentarian headquarters of Nantwich, held by a garrison of about 1,500 soldiers and townspeople under Sir George Booth. Since the outbreak of war Nantwich had been fairly well fortified with earthen walls and strong points, or ‘mounts’, and, once his initial summons to surrender was rejected, Byron was faced with the difficult task of mounting a siege in the depths of winter. He was short both of heavy siege guns and probably of gunpowder, after the capture of an ammunition convoy on its way to him, and, with bitter cold and snow affecting even his hardened veterans, attempted to bring matters to a quick conclusion by launching a general assault on Nantwich on 17 January 1644.

After fierce fighting, in which the women of Nantwich joined their menfolk on the barricades, the Royalists were thrown back with the loss of some 300 men. But despite this reverse, Byron remained justifiably confident of success within a short time. Nantwich was totally isolated, and its defenders believed to be running short of supplies. Unless relief arrived quickly, the town must fall. 31

At Westminster, the Parliamentarian leadership were keenly aware of the crisis in Cheshire. Their problem lay in finding troops to mount a relief operation. The choice fell on Sir Thomas Fairfax and his 1,800 horse and dragoons who were wintering in Lincolnshire, mainly because these were the only troops immediately available.

Sir Thomas Fairfax is another of the key figures in the story of the Marston Moor campaign. Aged thirty-two, Fairfax, with limited experience of war on the Continent, had served since the start of the war as second-in-command to his father, Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax, in the Yorkshire Parliamentarian forces. A fiery leader in battle, when his normally diffident personality was transformed, ‘Black Tom’ had won a number of notable successes, notably at Wakefield (21 May 1643) and with Cromwell at Winceby in October. He had, however, a tendency to rashness which on occasion caused him serious difficulties.

Fairfax was unenthusiastic about his new task:32 ‘I was the most unfit of all their forces, being the worst paid, my men sickly and almost naked, for want of clothes.’

Higher authority proving adamant, however, Fairfax remedied such deficiencies as he could from his own pocket, and set off through the Midlands, en route to Manchester, picking up a few reinforcements as he went. Byron was aware of Fairfax’s movements, which may have been an additional reason for his attempted assault on Nantwich on 17 January. Three days earlier, Byron’s cavalry, with 1,000 picked foot, had surprised Fairfax in his quarters at Newcastle-under-Lyme, and inflicted a severe mauling on him.33

It may be that Byron thought his opponent more badly damaged than was in fact the case, for Sir Thomas pushed on to Manchester, where he met with a luke-warm welcome from the Lancashire Parliamentarian leadership, more concerned about the threat from Newcastle’s forces across the Pennines than the fate of Nantwich. Fortunately some of the ‘inferior officers and common soldiers’ proved more co-operative, and within a few days Fairfax was able to muster a force consisting of his own men and some Lancashire and Cheshire troops totalling in all about 1,800 horse and dragoons and between 2,500 and 3,000 foot. On 21 January, not without considerable misgivings, Sir Thomas set out through the deep snow, bound for the relief of Nantwich.34

Fairfax had few illusions about the difficulties he faced, for he knew that Byron’s ‘Irish’ were:35

Men of great experience who had run through all sorts of services, and were not new to the Policies of Warre... acquainted with the greatest hardship, habituated to cold and want, and whatever suffereing a winter siege could require... They were put in heart by their former successes, and that would make them the more desperate, and they were valiant before, being used to nothing but conquests...

Byron would later cite problems which the hostility of the local population had posed for him when trying to obtain intelligence of enemy movements, and it is unclear how quickly he became aware of Fairfax’s march. However he was certainly aware of his approach no later than the afternoon of 24 January, when one of his cavalry patrols clashed with Fairfax’s men in Delamere Forest. The Parliamentarians halted for the night on Tilstone Heath, eight miles from Nantwich, knowing that they must fight next day.