[00.07]
The last major battle of the British Civil Wars was fought out in and around the city of Worcester on 3 September 1651. With the 375th anniversary of this momentous event now upon us, we felt that the time was right to ask for a succinct reappraisal of the campaign and battle for our listeners.
To do this, we have approached a distinguished military historian of the Civil Wars. Peter Gaunt is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chester and a former President of the Cromwell Association. In this, the first of two fascinating episodes, Professor Gaunt explains to us the prelude to the Battle of Worcester, within the wider context of what historians call the Third Civil War. He discusses why it was that a Scottish Army crossed the border to invade England for the fourth time in eleven years.
[01.12]
Mike Gibbs: Peter, thank you very much indeed for joining us as we approach the 375th anniversary of the battle of Worcester. Can I begin by asking you to tell us about the eve of the battle – paint us a picture of what was going on at that time.
Peter Gaunt: On 2 September, the eve of the looming contest with the Scottish Royalist army, the Parliamentarian Lord General and Commander-in-chief gathered his thoughts in a letter to the military governor of the next significant town and garrison to the south. Cromwell was a worried man and admitted to doubts and uncertainties. ‘Dear Sir, we are upon an Engagement very difficult’, he wrote, confessing that only a ‘miracle’, that’s Cromwell’s word, ‘only a miracle’ could save his Army. Fearing defeat at the hands of the Scottish Royalist army on the morrow, he urged the governor to look to his own defences and to summon reinforcements.
In places Cromwell’s letter of 2 September becomes a series of staccato and rather disjointed sentences, revealing the writer’s uncharacteristic unease. But in a more coherent and lyrical passage, Cromwell turned for support, encouragement and reassurance to the one source he was confident would not abandon him in battle.
“The only wise God knows what is best. All shall work for good. Our spirits are comfortable, praise be the Lord, though our present condition be as it is. And indeed we have much hope in the Lord, of whose mercy we have had large experience”.
But the mortal and military odds were stacked against Cromwell and his Parliamentarian Army, and the Lord General was nervous. There is a story, perhaps true, perhaps apocryphal, that Cromwell toured his regiments on the evening of 2 September, repeatedly chewing his lower lip nervously, such that by the end of the evening blood was streaming down his chin.
[03.28]
Mike Gibbs: What actually happened the following day, in the battle of 3 September? Was Cromwell right to be so fearful?
Peter Gaunt: Well, with the confidence of God’s support to bolster him and drawing on nearly a decade’s experience of fighting, during which he had never lost a field Engagement in which he held command, the battle on the morrow was not the defeat Cromwell had clearly feared. Against the odds, he threw his weakened, sickly and heavily outnumbered Army against the Scottish royalist forces ranged against him, attacking a little before dawn, up a steep hillside, and engaging the generally fitter, better supplied and much larger Scottish army. In little more than an hour, he had secured a stunning victory, perhaps the greatest and most unexpected of the entire Civil Wars. As dawn broke and the sun rose out of the North Sea, Cromwell was heard to exclaim ‘Now let God arise and his enemies shall be scattered’, and they were.
Shortly after, with the Scottish Royalist army broken, Cromwell halted his entire frontline so that they could sing together Psalm 117 – ‘All ye nations praise ye the Lord; all ye people praise him’ – before continuing the pursuit of what remained of his enemies. Having been hemmed in by, and forced to engage, an army which outnumbered his own fit troops by perhaps two to one, Cromwell had caught them by surprise in the half light of early morning and had secured a stunning victory. Around 10,000 Scots were killed or captured. Cromwell lost just forty dead. In the wake of the victory, there were reports that Cromwell’s eyes sparkled and that he could not refrain from laughter. He had gained a huge and unexpected victory in the battle of 3 September 1650.
[05.36]
Mike Gibbs: But Peter, hang on – that doesn’t sound much like the battle of Worcester, and wasn’t that battle fought on 3 September 1651, not 1650?
Peter Gaunt: Yes, of course, you are right, and I have been a bit artful there! That was the story of the battle of Dunbar, fought on the Lothian coast, in the eastern lowlands of Scotland, in September 1650, shortly after the start of Cromwell’s Scottish campaign of 1650-51, and it was an account of Cromwell’s stupendous victory there. But there is a good reason to start with the battle of Dunbar, because I think there are links to be made between Dunbar and Worcester, and I want to argue that we cannot fully understand the campaign and battle of Worcester of August and early September 1651, that we cannot put Cromwell’s crowning mercy at Worcester in its proper context, without understanding the broader Scottish campaign which preceded it, looked at from both an English parliamentarian and a Scottish royalist perspective.
[06.46]
Mike Gibbs: Why were the Scots supporting the Royalist cause and why in 1650-51 were they seeking to restore Charles Stuart, the son and heir of the late Charles I, to power in England as well as Scotland? After all, hadn’t they allied with and supported the English parliamentarians in the main Civil War of 1642-46?
Peter Gaunt: Yes, indeed, they had. Via a treaty signed in summer 1643, the Solemn League and Covenant, the Scottish army had agreed to enter England and fight alongside Parliament’s armies against Charles I’s Royalist forces. They had done so in part because they feared that a king triumphant in England would turn his attention back to Scotland and seek, not only to reimpose his royal secular power there, but also to resume his attempts to meddle with the Scottish Presbyterian Church and impose a more Anglicised form of religion north of the border. But they had also allied with Parliament in return for a pledge that, once the Civil War had been won, Parliament would impose a Presbyterian style religious settlement in England and Wales.
The Scots had kept their side of the bargain, committing an army of 20,000 men south of the border, which had turned the tide of the Civil War decisively in Parliament’s favour in northern England in 1644, even if the Scots’ direct military contribution in the Midlands and the south had been rather more muted in 1645-6. But they became aware that many English parliamentarians, army officers and senior politicians, were antipathetic to their new Scottish allies and downright hostile to the prospect of Scottish style Presbyterianism being imposed in England and Wales.
The main Civil War won, the Long Parliament had dragged its feet, and although legislation was passed authorising a Presbyterian Church settlement in England and Wales in the latter half of the 1640s, it was never fully enforced and in practice was established only in some areas, and then alongside other non-Presbyterian churches and congregations which continued to flourish. The Scots felt let down and that led some, but by no means all of them, to reach and then to support a deal with the defeated Charles I signed at the end of 1647, termed the Engagement, via which those Scots who signed up and became Engagers pledged to return Charles to freedom and full power in England with Scottish military backing, in return for Charles pledging then to establish a Scottish style Presbyterian Church in England and Wales for an experimental period of three years. Many in Scotland felt that this was a lousy deal or that the King could not be trusted to honour it, but it got sufficient support in Scotland for a Scottish Royalist army to be raised in spring 1648, which then crossed the border and invaded England in the King’s name. Supported only by some Scots, badly led and beset by dreadful weather, it struggled through Cumberland and entered Lancashire, only to be destroyed by a New Model Army brigade led by Cromwell around and south of Preston in August 1648.
[10.38]
Mike Gibbs: Given that Scottish support for the Royalist cause and for the Stuarts had been so divided and had ended so badly, with crushing military defeat, in the late 1640s, why did many Scots go down the same path again in the early 1650s and on to Worcester?
Peter Gaunt: That’s a good question, all the more so as in 1649 the new English republican government seemed to offer Scotland a chance to go its own way. Just after the Regicide, the English Parliament, the Rump, passed an Act abolishing monarchy in England and Wales and in Ireland, but it said nothing about Scotland. In theory, that left Scotland free to keep a king, presumably in the person of the executed monarch’s eldest son. After all, Scotland was an independent kingdom, over which England had no strong historical claims. Having the late King’s son ruling Scotland as its new monarch would have been uncomfortable for the new English republic, but might have been workable, so long as the Scots maintained good and peaceful relations with their southern neighbours. But the Scottish government decided otherwise. Despite having fingers burnt when they flirted with royalism in 1648, and perhaps offended by the manner in which in winter 1648-9 the English government had gone ahead and tried and executed the man who was also King of Scotland without any Scottish consultation, in February 1649 the Scottish government decided to proclaim Charles Stuart, not as King of Scotland alone, but as King of Great Britain and thus by definition King of England too. The English republican government quite rightly saw this as a direct threat and a statement of hostile intent.
[12.50]
Mike Gibbs: But there was no military action and no open conflict for another 18 months or more, until the latter half of 1650. Why was there that delay?
Peter Gaunt: On the Scottish side, renewed support for Stuart royalism continued to be divisive and many Scots held aloof or dragged their feet. Even those inclined to support the Stuart cause held off until they could pin Charles Stuart down and get him to agree terms. Initially the young Prince himself held aloof and, from exile on the continent, he looked to other means and another route to regaining power in England, hoping that supporters in Ireland might provide a path back to England. Only once that hope had been firmly dashed, did he rather reluctantly look to Scotland.
In summer 1650, he swallowed his pride, took the Scottish Covenant and thereby apparently committed himself to the Scottish Presbyterian Church, and he landed in Scotland in mid-June 1650. It is a sign of remaining uncertainties and continuing misgivings that several months passed before he went through a Scottish coronation ceremony.
On the English side, although well aware of the looming threat posed by the Scottish proclamation of Charles as King of Great Britain in February 1649, intelligence reports made it clear that the Scots were in no position to enforce that claim militarily until summer 1650, when they did set about fresh recruitment and greatly expanding their existing army. In the interim, the English republican government prioritised Ireland, seeing greater urgency in reversing the Irish Rebellion of 1641, committing a large part of the New Model Army to breaking Catholic control over the island and undertaking a military campaign there to nullify the danger of the Stuarts returning to England with Irish Catholic backing and perhaps via Ireland. For very different though in some respects connected reasons, it therefore suited both sides, the English and the Scots, to hold off and to wait before committing to open warfare.
[15.30]
Mike Gibbs: How did the campaign begin in summer 1650?
Peter Gaunt: In 1648, a Scottish Royalist army had been able to cross the border and invade northern England, even though in the end it had only got as far as central Lancashire, where it was destroyed by the New Model Army. In 1650, the Rump and the New Model Army decided to respond to the clear renewed threat from the north by mounting a military expedition into Scotland, hoping to defeat and eliminate the new Scottish Royalist army in its own homeland – in other words, the best form of defence was deemed to be attack.
Thus Cromwell, newly recalled from Ireland and newly promoted to be the Lord general and Commander-in-Chief, was given command of a 16,000-strong New Model Army brigade which he led into the Scottish lowlands. He left London at the end of June, led his Army northwards along the east coast route via York and Durham, Newcastle and Berwick, and entered Scotland at the head of his Army in the last week of July.
By that stage the Scottish Royalist army was probably around the same size or a little bigger – perhaps 18,000 men and growing. Well aware of Cromwell’s approach, the Scottish generals, notably the very experienced David Leslie, had decided not to defend the border or to seek to prevent the English forces from entering the lowlands. Instead, following something of a scorched earth policy, they had stripped the southern lowlands of most of the agricultural supplies and resources which might maintain Cromwell’s advancing Army and they had instead stationed themselves in Edinburgh and its neighbouring and linked port of Leith. Edinburgh and Leith were very strongly fortified with formidable defences and the Scots had taken the decision to sit back, reckoning themselves secure there, and frustrate Cromwell and the New Model.
That turned out to be the Scottish approach through most of the Scottish campaign of 1650 and 1651 in fact – hold tight in strongly-defended positions which Cromwell dare not assault, bog down the English Army and hope that a mixture of shortage of supplies, disease and the Scottish climate would demoralise and wear down their English opponents. As we will see, it was a ploy which generally worked very well for the Scots.
[18.20]
Mike Gibbs: At this time, what was Cromwell’s attitude towards the Scots?
Peter Gaunt: When Cromwell had campaigned in Ireland in 1649-50, he had had few qualms about engaging and seeking to destroy his opponents. In the main, they were Irish Catholics, the majority population of the island, who had risen up against English and Protestant rule in autumn 1641 and who in the course of the Irish Rebellion had killed thousands of Protestant settlers in Ireland. Thus Cromwell saw his role in Ireland as delivering just and Godly vengeance against religious enemies, and he had few reservations about trying to crush them, often with considerable brutality.
But the Scots were different. For one thing, they had been the first of the British peoples to take up arms against Charles I in the late 1630s, and they had then been useful allies of the English Parliamentarians during the main Civil War. For another, they were solid fellow Protestants, albeit following a brand of Protestantism, Presbyterianism, which had only minority support in England. Cromwell had strongly opposed the proposal to impose Scottish Presbyterianism as the sole form of religion in England and Wales in the 1640s, but he was not opposed to Presbyterianism per se – indeed, later on during his time in Scotland he very visibly attended several Presbyterian services in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Cromwell believed that, in supporting the Stuart cause in the early 1650s, the Scots had misinterpreted God’s will. Several times in the opening weeks of his Scottish campaign Cromwell wrote to the Scottish Royalist leaders, trying to persuade them that they had misread God’s will, had failed to understand that the Lord had supported both the Regicide and the abolition of monarchy, and that on religious as well as political and moral grounds they were wrong now to be supporting Charles Stuart. In a string of declarations and letters in July and August 1650, Cromwell tried to drive this message home, stressing both his willingness to accept Presbyterianism continuing in Scotland –
“We do and are ready to embrace so much as doth or shall be made to appear to us to be according to the word of God. Are we to be dealt with as enemies because we come not to your way?” “It is no part of our business to hinder any Scots from worshipping God in that way they are satisfied in their conscience by the word of God they ought, though different from us”
– and at the same time trying to persuade the Scottish leaders that they were misinterpreting God’s will in supporting the Stuart cause –
“Your own guilt is too much for you to bear; bring not therefore on yourselves the blood of innocent men, deceived with pretences of King and covenant…Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the word of God, all that you say? I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
[21.48]
Mike Gibbs: Did that tactic work and how did the Scottish campaign unfold?
Peter Gaunt: No, the tactic did not work, for the Scottish Royalist army and its political backers remained fairly united and committed to the cause of Charles Stuart pretty well to the end. Cromwell failed to get them to change their minds and he was unable to open up any significant divisions amongst his opponents. He continued those attempts throughout his time in Scotland, but they continued to fall on stony ground. Cromwell several times also expressed regrets at having to fight and to kill misled Scottish troops and fellow Protestants.
In another letter to the Scottish political leadership early in the campaign he lamented
“the daily sense we have of the calamity of war lying upon the poor people of this nation, and the sad consequences of blood and famine likely to come upon them”,
while towards the end of 1650s in a letter to the Speaker of the Rump, he commented that
“those religious people of Scotland that fall in this cause, we cannot but pity and mourn for them.”
However, Cromwell was the military general tasked with neutralising the Scottish Royalist threat, and in late summer 1650 he set about doing so militarily. Advancing unopposed through the eastern lowlands during August, several times he and his Army approached the formidable Scottish defensive position in Edinburgh and Leith, but he was unable to tempt David Leslie and the Scottish army out to offer and give battle in the open field – that was not the Scottish plan – and Cromwell judged that a frontal attack on the formidable and well-prepared defensive line would be suicidal. Instead, he found himself dancing to the Scots’ tune in late summer and was increasingly frustrated.
By late August, as the Scots had hoped, shortages of supplies, bad weather and disease and desertion were taking their toll on Cromwell’s Army – morale was dropping and the number of fit and active men available to him was falling significantly. At the end of August, now with just 11,000 fit and operational troops, Cromwell decided to fall back and retreat – how often in his illustrious military career can we say that of Cromwell? – retracing his steps along the east Lothian coast, perhaps aiming to get back to Berwick where his Army could be refreshed as well as resupplied and reinforced by sea.
The Scots saw their chance and at this point they surged out of Edinburgh and Leith in pursuit of their much weakened and retreating enemies. By 2 September, the Scottish army, now numbering perhaps 22,000, had caught what remained of Cromwell’s army at Dunbar, occupying Doon Hill above the town and hopeful of killing off the English threat. But, as we have seen, they badly miscalculated, and instead early on 3 September Cromwell achieved a stunning victory against the odds on the hillside above Dunbar.
[25.23]
Mike Gibbs: Given that decisive victory of the English Parliamentarians at Dunbar, surely that should have been the end of Cromwell’s campaign against the Scots? Why did it continue for another year, before culminating in England and at Worcester almost a year later?
Peter Gaunt: Dunbar changed the physical setting of the stand-off between the English and the Scots, but it did not end the stalemate. What was left of the Scottish Royalist army scuttled back north, to the town of Stirling, where Leslie and others began rebuilding their army and recruiting afresh. In the weeks after Dunbar, Cromwell and the New Model Army were able to mop up the rest of the lowlands and the central belt without significant resistance, taking Edinburgh and Leith as well as Glasgow without a fight – though Edinburgh Castle, perched high on its rock, continued to resist for a while, until the governor was persuaded to surrender.
But advances on Stirling by the English army during the autumn failed to tempt the Scots out to give battle in the field, and Cromwell once again judged that a frontal attack on a well-defended Scottish position would be too difficult. In any case, both the onset of autumn and winter and the deteriorating Scottish weather, together with Cromwell’s own health issues, curtailed further military action.
Writing to his wife shortly after Dunbar, Cromwell had told her the good news, recounting how
“The Lord hath showed us an exceeding mercy; who can tell how great it is. My weak faith hath been upheld. I have been in my inward man marvellously supported.”
But in the same letter, Cromwell went on to strike a rather more downbeat personal note:
“I assure thee I grow an old man and feel infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me. Would my corruptions did as fast decrease. Pray on my behalf in the latter respect.”
Although only just turned fifty, Cromwell had suffered poor health during his Irish campaign of 1649-50, catching a form of malaria then prevalent in low-lying and marshy land, such as the bogs of southern Ireland. Although Cromwell’s health had held up fairly well in the early months of Scottish campaign, while in Edinburgh in winter 1650-51, he was laid low with a serious and prolonged illness. At times he seemed to be recovering, only to relapse with the onset of further fevers and dysentery-type symptoms. Doctors were dispatched from London to attend him. Later, once recovery was properly underway, Cromwell wrote that ‘I thought I should have died of this fit of sickness’ and that only God had saved him – ‘He hath plucked me out of the grave’. Not until late June 1651 was Cromwell fully recovered and able once more to resume active campaigning against the Scots, now with a reinforced and fit Army of over 20,000 New Model troops at his disposal.
[29.05]
Mike Gibbs: Why in summer 1651 didn’t Cromwell lead the Army to attack the new Scottish Royalist base at Stirling in summer 1651? Why was he reluctant cautious?
Peter Gaunt: Cromwell was a brilliant military leader in battle, in the field. He never lost a battle in which he held command, and overall he was the most successful general on either side in the course of the Civil Wars. However, siege operations were not his forte. Perhaps he was temperamentally ill-suited to playing the patient, long game which besieging and eventually capturing a strongly fortified enemy base required. Other Parliamentarian generals were more patient and more adept at this aspect of warfare, notably Sir Thomas Fairfax, who oversaw a string of successful sieges, particularly of Raglan Castle in summer 1646 and of Colchester in summer 1648, in both cases isolating and starving out the enemy forces and thus ending with the orderly surrender of those strongholds.
By and large, that wasn’t Cromwell’s way. His approach from the outset, from his campaign as a newly promoted colonel in East Anglia and the East Midlands in 1643, was to bombard the enemy stronghold for a few hours and then try to storm it without delay. That generally worked well and led to a swift and successful conclusion of the operation, at Burley House and Crowland in 1643, at Basing House in 1645, at Drogheda and Wexford in Ireland in autumn 1649, where his enemies paid a very high price when his Army stormed those towns. But at times that approach did not work so well and proved costly.
In summer 1648, Cromwell and part of the New Model Army besieged Pembroke in south-west Wales; anxious to wrap up the operation quickly, twice Cromwell ordered his men to attack, prematurely as it turned out, and the Royalist defenders were able to repulse his troops.
Worse still, just a few weeks before leading an army into Scotland, in May 1650 Cromwell’s Irish campaign had ended with an assault on the well-defended Catholic held town of Clonmel. As at Pembroke, Cromwell miscalculated and ordered his men to attack the stronghold too soon and with the defenders ready and waiting. His guns had opened up breaches in the stone walls of the town, which he ordered his men to storm, but the defenders had thrown up a second line of defence, building formidable barricades behind those breaches, and the Parliamentarians found themselves trapped in killing zones.
Cromwell took too long to react to the deteriorating position, at first ordering more of his men into the town to their doom. It was probably the blackest, deadliest day that the New Model Army ever suffered, probably losing more than 1000 men dead, perhaps many more than a thousand. Cromwell was remarkably quiet about what had occurred at Clonmel and gave few details of the operation in his subsequent letters. It is conceivable that that chastening experience led him to be much, much more cautious when he encountered formidably defended Scottish Royalist positions at Edinburgh and Leith at the start of the Scottish campaign, and at Stirling in late 1650 and again in summer 1651. As Cromwell himself wrote,
“The enemy…lyeth in and near Stirling, where we cannot come to fight him, except he please, or so go upon too, too manifest hazards; he having very strongly laid himself and having a very great advantage there.”
[33.21]
Mike Gibbs: Are there any other reasons why Cromwell held back from launching an attack on Stirling?
Peter Gaunt: Yes, I think that there may have been. Cromwell had spent much of the main Civil War fighting in East Anglia and the East Midlands, and then in southern and more briefly in south-western England. Apart from his role during the Marston Moor campaign in the vale of York in 1644, he played no part in the fighting in the North during the main Civil War; he had no part in the war in Wales and the Welsh Marches in 1642-46. His campaign in Ireland in 1649-50 was similarly limited, for he spent most of his time in a fairly confined area of southern Leinster and eastern Munster and generally kept quite close to the coast, never moving deeply inland.
There and elsewhere, he rarely crossed or campaigned in upland zones. He kept well away from the hills and mountains of the Welsh heartlands and the Marches, apart from crossing the Pennines twice in quick succession in summer 1648, he did not campaign in the uplands of northern England, nor did he play any part in the fighting in and around the Peak District and the higher ground of Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
In Ireland, he kept well away from the hills and mountains of the west and south-west and the far north. Cromwell was very much a lowlander, born and brought up in the wetlands of the Fens and the flat expanses of East Anglia. That was the sort of landscape he knew well and had ridden over, and perhaps, when it came to war, that was also the sort of landscape that suited him best.
In contrast, Stirling was the gateway to the Scottish Highlands, it was protected by and itself protected the highland zone of lofty mountains and narrow valleys and mountain passes. Cromwell had no experience of living, of campaigning or of fighting in such terrain. I think that was another reason why he fought shy of attacking Stirling or of contemplating venturing into the mountains to its north and west.
[35.47]
Mike Gibbs: So how did the campaign of summer 1651 unfold? How was this log-jam and stalemate broken and what precipitated the Worcester campaign?
Peter Gaunt: Having failed to tempt Leslie and the Scottish Royalist army out of Stirling to give battle, in mid-July Cromwell deployed part of his force, around 4,500 men led by Major General John Lambert, out from Leith, across the Firth of Forth, to force a landing on the southern shore of Fife. This Lambert achieved on 20 July, in battle against around 4,000 Scottish Royalist troops at Inverkeithing. That bridgehead secured, and leaving just eight New Model regiments in southern Scotland, Cromwell threw the greater part of his Army into Fife, advancing as far north as the Perth area. The New Model thereby occupied most of the county of Fife, including the rich agricultural land upon which the main Scottish Royalist army based at Stirling relied to keep itself fed and supplied.
As several English reports from Scotland reproduced in the London newspapers quickly noted, that changed the position significantly. It was reckoned that the Scottish army now faced a stark choice – either stay in their impregnable position at Stirling but starve, or come out and fight. The Scots chose the latter and a little over a week after Inverkeithing Charles Stuart, calling himself Charles II, and a clutch of Scottish generals led the Scottish Royalist army out from Stirling and away, initially westwards, but quickly turning south. They advanced rapidly and met no significant resistance in southern Scotland, such that they crossed the border and entered England at the start of August 1651.
[38.02]
Mike Gibbs: Why did the Scottish royalist army drive south and enter into England, rather than fight in Scotland, in summer 1651?
Peter Gaunt: If the Scottish supporters of Charles Stuart were to restore him to power in England, as was their plan, then that could probably only be achieved by entering and campaigning in England. Their ultimate goal – and the Parliamentarians’ worst nightmare – was to get as far as London. If they could capture the English capital and seat of government, occupy it militarily and take command there, then they would be in a position decisively to shift the balance of political power in England and restore the Stuart monarchy.
Additionally, the Scottish royalists probably hoped and expected that, in advancing southwards into and through England, they would gain support from English and Welsh Royalists and their Army would thereby grow substantially and perhaps unstoppably. Plus with Cromwell and so much of the New Model now to their north, and with southern Scotland quite thinly defended by the English by late July 1651, it was probably too tempting an opportunity to miss.
Charles Stuart himself may well have taken the lead in insisting that the army drive south into England. After their defeat at Worcester, a captured and imprisoned Scottish officer thought that employing a Scottish army to invade England had been Charles’s intention from the outset of his stay in Scotland, even if that move won far from universal support north of the border. Writing from Newcastle on 7 August, an English officer reported how Charles and his army had by then entered and were marching through northern England, adding a shrewd observation:
“The generality of the Scots were against the present attempt for England, but the King told them he would march with such as would follow him. He looks very despondingly, but must adventure all.”
That the Scottish royalist army made a move south into England was not a bolt from the blue or entirely unexpected or unforeseen. In the latter half of July, but apparently written before the Scots had actually quit Stirling and began moving south, a clutch of reports from Scotland, subsequently printed in London newspapers, had speculated that the Scottish army might follow this course. Thus a letter from Scotland dated 26 July – several days before the Scots left Stirling note – speculated that the Scottish royalist army
“may attempt for England, choosing rather to hazard all there, than to linger into ruin in their own wretched country.”
[41.06]
Mike Gibbs: Was this therefore part of Cromwell’s thinking and planning in summer 1651? Did he deliberately tempt the Scottish Royalist army to make a bolt south into England?
Peter Gaunt: That’s a difficult question to answer definitively and historians come to different conclusions. But I am one of those historians who think that he probably did.
Having repeatedly tried, but failed, to tempt the Scottish army out of Stirling to engage him in battle, the position Cromwell faced in July 1651 was quite stark and was summed up in a number of reports from Scotland, not least an anonymous but well informed letter of 11 July clearly written from an English perspective and probably by an English officer. Having noted that the Scots’ position in Stirling was so strong as to be effectively impenetrable, the writer went on,
“I suppose this may put us on new resolutions. I am more and more persuaded that they intend to weary us out this summer and trifle away the time, not willing to put things to an issue; and when they have received the benefit of this harvest, they conceive that they shall be able to improve the winter season to better advantage against us, when we are enforced by the badness of the weather to retire into our quarters. But as in all things, so in this, they will find themselves befooled in their policies.”
That closing sentence suggests that plans were anticipated or were being laid on the English side to break the stalemate and to prevent the Scots trifling away time into another winter season.
Cromwell’s letters of the end of July and early August 1651, once the Scots were on the move southwards, are calm and measured and very relaxed about the Scottish Royalist drive southwards. In a letter of late July, he noted that he now had few troops south of the Firth of Forth and was alerting commanders of several English regiments based in northern England to be on their guard, but crucially he did not order those regiments to come north into Scotland to try to keep the Scottish army there.
Bottling up the Scottish army within Scotland did not seem to be his plan. In the same letter of late July, Cromwell lamented how the wet Scottish summer was already spreading disease amongst the regiments he had in Fife. A week or so later, in a letter of 4 August, Cromwell reported that Charles Stuart and the Scottish army were moving quite quickly southwards to England, but he went on with a supremely calm, relaxed paragraph:
“I do apprehend that if he goes for England, being some few days march before us, it will trouble some men’s thoughts and may occasion some inconveniencies; of which I hope we are as deeply sensible and have been, and I trust shall be, as diligent to prevent as any; and indeed, this is our comfort, that…we have done to the best of our judgements, knowing that if some other issue were not put to this business, it would occasion another winter’s war, to the ruin of your soldiery, for whom the Scots are too hard in respect of enduring the winter difficulties of this country”,
and would also lead, Cromwell noted, to
“the endless expense of the treasure of England in prosecuting this war.”
He concluded by admitting
“It may be supposed we might have kept the enemy from this, by interposing between him and England, which truly I believe we might; but how to remove him out of this place, without doing what we have done…is not clear to us….”
That the final campaign and battle of summer 1651 took place in England rather than Scotland was not due to oversight, accident, unexpected developments or unforeseen circumstances, I would contend. It was, I believe, the consequence of a clear and conscious decision of Cromwell, taken in the light of a number of factors – his inability either to mount a frontal attack on Stirling or to tempt the Scots out to engage his Army in the field nearby; his wish to fight his enemies somewhere in the open well away from their own strongholds and where they would not have the opportunity to scuttle back into the Highlands and regroup; and above all – as his letter of 4 August brings out clearly – his burning desire to avoid having to spend a second winter in Scotland, bringing suffering and disease to the English army there. The feared and anticipated disaster, miraculously avoided, at Dunbar in September 1650, reinforced by his own and his Army’s subsequent sufferings through the Scottish winter of 1650-51, had taught Cromwell a salutary lesson and they were experiences he was determined not to repeat.
If tempting and allowing the Scottish Royalist army to drive south into England would ‘trouble some men’s thoughts’, as he put it in his letter, and might lead to some ‘inconveniencies’ – Cromwell’s supremely understated word, used twice in his letter – that was, I believe, a price Cromwell judged worth paying in order to create an opportunity to end Scottish resistance and to snuff out the Scottish Royalist army. There is a discernible thread running from the Dunbar escapade, with which we began, through to the campaign and battle of Worcester the following summer, the subject of the next episode.
Mike Gibbs: Peter, thank you very much indeed, that was fascinating, and we’ll look forward to, as you say, the next episode.
[47.43]
You can listen to other programmes by Professor Gaunt including his six-part series on Revising the Military History of the British Civil Wars on our Spotify and Apple podcast channels, or on our website,www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk.
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