The White King Read online

  That night, as his men tasted their success, ‘swearing most hellishly’, Rupert wrote to Parliament’s general, the Earl of Essex, and challenged him to duel or battle. Parliament’s official orders were for Essex to seize Charles from his evil councillors. Rupert accused the earl of an ambition instead to usurp the throne. ‘I need not fear, for what I do is agreeable both to the law of God and man, in defence of true religion [Rupert was a Calvinist], a king’s prerogative, an uncle’s right, a kingdom’s safety.’ Justice would be ‘delivered in a larger field than this small piece of paper, and that by my sword, not by my pen’.5

  Brave words. But without good maps both armies were moving blind. Slipping and sliding over the wet rutted roads of the Midlands, ‘neither army knew where the other was’ and they ‘gave not the least disquiet… to each another’.6

  Meanwhile both Roundheads and Cavaliers were hungry and tired, each soldier carrying up to sixty pounds of armour, helmets, swords and knapsacks. The musketeers had their guns, slung off one shoulder, and bandoliers of gunpowder chargers. The pikemen stood out for the size and strength they needed to carry weapons sixteen feet long that juddered as they marched.7 Royalists were here to fight the tyranny of the Junto and for the king as the protector of the law; Roundheads to fight the tyranny of the king and for Parliament to preserve their just liberties. Essex had brought his coffin with him, to show his men he was ready to die amongst them. There were, however, many on both sides who were ready to fight for the pay, the plunder and the adventure. ‘I will learn to swear and drink and roar / and (gallant like) I will keep a whore’, hoped the ploughman of one contemporary ballad. Such a man could earn more in a day robbing a dead gentleman than he could earn in a year on the farm. Very few had any experience of soldiering and some had friends or family on the other side.

  On the evening of 22 October Rupert and his men ran into a party of Essex’s quartermasters looking for billets for their troops at the Warwickshire village of Wormleighton. It was the kind of luck that would make the Roundheads begin to wonder if Rupert had magical powers. Having taken the Roundheads prisoner, Rupert sent out a patrol to find the main body of their army. It was spotted seven miles to the west, camped at Kineton. Rupert dispatched a message to Charles advising that Essex be intercepted at a 300-foot escarpment called Edgehill. Stretching north from the high ground there was a meadow known locally as the Vale of the Red Horse. It was perfect ground for Rupert’s cavalry, but the request triggered a row with Charles’s Lord General, the fifty-nine-year-old Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey. When the king backed Rupert, Lindsey resigned. Since he was not considered fit to lead the army, he would, he declared, ‘die a colonel at the head of his regiment’.*

  It was four in the morning when Rupert at last received Charles’s reply: ‘Nephew, I have given order as you have desired.’8

  Charles’s army immediately began moving onto the ridge. Come the morning, their conspicuous position offered a direct challenge to Essex and his forces. By noon Essex had deployed his men in response. He chose his ground on a small rise in the ground facing Edgehill just to the south of Kineton. His was the better-equipped army. He had all the supplies from Hull, and had made good use of the wealth and munitions industry of London and the south-east. Warwick’s navy had, furthermore, captured several ships filled with munitions that Henrietta Maria had sent for Charles from Holland. Some of Charles’s foot soldiers were armed only with cudgels and the cavalrymen were lucky if they had ‘pistols or carbines for their two or three front ranks, and swords for the rest’.9 The major advantage the Royalists had was psychological: the presence of the king himself amongst his troops.

  Essex had to try to keep his men from seeing that they were taking up arms directly against their king–and that wasn’t easy. It was ‘as fair a day as that season of the year could yield’.10 Charles could be seen clearly in the brilliant sunshine riding his charger ‘up to the forefront of the head of his army’. There he addressed his men. ‘Friends and soldiers, I look upon you with joy to behold so great an army as ever King of England had.’ He thanked them for standing by him, ‘with high and full resolution to defend your king, the parliament, and all my loyal subjects’.

  Although the opposing army became known as the ‘Parliamentarians’, nearly half of those originally selected as members of the Commons for the Long Parliament had taken the king’s side, as did most of the House of Lords.11 Charles would always claim that he was the true defender of Parliament. ‘Heaven make you victorious,’ the king prayed. The last preparations for battle then began.12

  On the cusp of 3 p.m. Essex ordered the opening salvos of artillery. ‘Go in the name of God,’ he reassured his men, ‘and I’ll lay my bones with yours.’13 His men, most of whom were unused to any loud noise beyond the peal of church bells, now heard ‘the cannon’s thundering voice’. The shot exploded in the Royalist ranks.14 It was ‘dreadful’, one recalled, as ‘brains and bowels blew in our faces’.15 When the king’s artillery returned fire the first shots fell short in ploughed fields.16 Rupert, however, was now preparing the first great cavalry charge England had seen since the Middle Ages. Riding from one wing of the army to the other he gave orders to the horsemen to ride ‘as close as was possible, keeping their ranks with sword in hand, to receive the enemy’s shot without firing either carbine or pistol’. Only when he gave the word could they return fire. The cavalry advanced slowly before breaking into a canter. Facing the remorseless drum of horses’ hooves and the war cries of their riders as they began a headlong gallop, the untested Parliamentarian troops broke in terror. A few fired off their pistols before fleeing, while one brigade of foot ‘wholly disbanded and ran away, without ever striking stroke, or so much as being charged by the enemy’.17

  It was now the turn of the Royalist infantry to move forward. One commander knelt and prayed, ‘Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee do not thou forget me.’ Then he got up and shouted, ‘March on, boys.’18 James, Duke of York, just a few days past his ninth birthday, watched fascinated as the men walked towards the enemy with ‘a slow steady space and a daring resolution’. Only the centre of Essex’s army was still holding. Essex himself dismounted his horse. He later described to Lucy Carlisle how he ‘put himself at the head of his regiment of foot, with a pike in his hand’ like an ordinary soldier.19 He expected to fight to his death. But the Royalist cavalry, which should have helped their infantry finish the job they had started, continued to rush blindly forward. They were joined by the king’s reserve horse ‘with spurs and loose reins’, out of the control of their commanders.20 This was Charles’s first battle, and he could not stop even his own mounted bodyguard, the scarlet-clad Life Guard of Horse, getting caught up in the thrill of victory and galloping in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. Amongst them were his Stuart cousins, the thirty-year-old Duke of Richmond and his young brothers, Lord Bernard Stuart, Lord John Stuart and Lord Aubigny.

  As the infantry from both sides collided, Essex deployed his own cavalry to join the melee. Orange scarves distinguished many Roundheads, red the Cavaliers. Pressed between the heaving masses of friends behind them, and the slashing ranks of enemy opposing them, men fired off pistols, sending up blinding clouds of smoke, while others hacked with swords or struck out with clubs.* Strange sights confused and dismayed, with the smoke playing tricks, making the enemy seem bigger than they were, like ghouls rising from the fog of a nightmare. In the Royalist ranks, those without proper weapons stepped on the bodies of the fallen and ‘took up the arms which their slaughtered neighbours left them’.21

  On the Parliamentarian side chaplains ‘rode up and down the army, through the thickest dangers… exhorting the soldiers to fight valiantly and not to fly’.22 The Life Guard of Foot, protecting the royal standard, faltered under their intense assault. The standard-bearer Sir Edmund Verney killed the Parliamentarian soldier who cut down his bodyguard, but Verney was in turn killed. He ‘would not put on armour or buff coat’ that m
orning: he had prepared to meet the enemy dressed as if he were greeting family–which in a way he was. His eldest boy was in the opposing army. Verney’s body was left so badly mutilated that it would never be found. The standard was taken, fought over ferociously for six minutes and retrieved by a Captain Smith.

  Elsewhere in the battle another old soldier, the former commander the Earl of Lindsey, was shot in the thigh. He was carried from the field a prisoner, bleeding heavily. His son, Lord Willoughby, dashed to help his father and was taken prisoner with him.

  Charles, despite the bullets flying over his head, and with his men falling around him, refused to leave the fray, showing ‘as much dexterity, presence of mind and personal courage as any’. His visibility shored up morale and another witness believed that ‘had he not been in the field we might have suffered’.23

  He needed, however, to ensure that his young sons Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York, would not be harmed or taken prisoner. They were already under fire when he ordered his personal escort and a few other trusted soldiers to take his children and ‘withdraw to the top of the hill’.

  Dusk was falling when the boys saw a body of horse moving towards them. It was unclear if they were friend or foe. An equerry rode ahead to check. The Prince of Wales saw the equerry beaten off his horse, left for dead and stripped. Their small party promptly changed course.24 ‘We drew behind a little barn not distant from them, which was encompassed by a hedge,’ James later recalled, and ‘several of the king’s wounded were there’. It was a grim spectacle for a child, with the cries of the dying. He also realised that if they were attacked they would be overrun. Charles understood that too and had ordered for his sons to be moved to nearby Edgecote. Before these orders could be carried out, however, James witnessed the battle’s conclusion.

  It seemed incredible to James that the exhausted and frightened men on either side still stood their ground, blacksmiths and dyers, gentlemen and lords, all ‘continuing to fire at one another even unto night’.25 At last, however, darkness ended the fighting. The icy weather finished off many of the wounded that night. Yet the cold saved at least two severely injured officers. They had been robbed and stripped, and their surgeons believed the chill had ‘stopped their blood better than all their skill and medications could have done’. The Royalist physician William Harvey, who was at the battle, confirmed their hypothesis after he discovered the circulation of the blood.26

  The old general, Lindsey, protected from the cold in the ‘poor house’ where he was prisoner, was less fortunate. He died of shock and blood loss from his wounded leg. His fellow Royalists had suffered the heavier casualties, especially amongst the higher ranks. Lord Bernard Stuart estimated ‘what is killed and run away I think is about 2,500’. Perhaps the most tragic death to him was that of his twenty-four-year-old elder brother, Aubigny. A young man ‘of gentle and winning disposition’, he was shot in the back by a Dutch mercenary he had punished earlier for poor discipline.27

  Charles stayed out on the hill that night, by a fire. He could hear the groans of those still dying and ‘bemoaned the loss of so much blood’.28 ‘There was a great deal of fear and misery about the field that night,’ a trooper wrote to his mother. Another soldier, suffering post-combat shock, found that although he was hungry, his jaws were clenched so tight he could barely eat. An MP on the Parliamentarian side found the same. As a result, ‘We almost starved,’ he remembered.29 When the sun came up on the Monday the traumatised men of two armies remained in a state of stupefaction.

  Edgehill, with graves looked white,

  With blood looked red

  Maz’d at the numbers of the dead.

  So wrote the Cavalier poet Edward Benlowes.

  Hours passed as the soldiers stared at each other across the field, unmoving. In the Roundhead camp, it was said there was ‘much trouble and disorder in the faces of the Earl of Essex and the principal officers about him, and so much dejection in the common soldiers, that they looked like men who had no further ambition than to keep what they had left’.30 Both sides had believed this one battle would end the war, but now it was obvious there was no clear victor.

  Essex was on the point of breakdown. Instead of writing the official report of the battle that evening, as was customary, he did nothing. Six junior officers took it upon themselves to fulfil the task. Only the young Prince Rupert recognised the danger of post-battlefield lethargy, arguing that Charles should press on to London immediately. Others thought it inadvisable to take London ‘by conquest’, fearing Rupert might even ‘fire the town’, as the Habsburgs were reputed to have done at Magdeburg in 1631.

  Charles decided to push for peace, but prepare for war.

  On 24 October 1642, Henry Holland and his cousin Northumberland headed a delegation from Parliament to the City government in London, and gave ‘pithy and pathetical speeches’. Londoners had been pressing Parliament to make peace. Holland and Northumberland assured the City government that Parliament had ‘no evil intention to the king’, but, they warned, his councils would result in the destruction of true religion, and ‘he intended to expose the wealth of his good people, especially of London, to the rape and spoil of his cavaliers and soldiers’.31

  On 12 November Rupert crossed the Thames, sacked the Parliament garrison at Brentford and plundered the town. Frightened Londoners, fearing what Rupert might do next, readied themselves to defend their city. The king’s youngest children–Elizabeth aged six, and the two-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester–trapped in Parliament’s control since their mother had left for Holland, were moved from St James’s Palace to Lord Cottingham’s house on Broad Street, to be used as hostages or human shields.32 If Rupert fired London, his little cousins would die in the flames.

  The following day the opposing armies met on the west road from London, at the village of Turnham Green. Parliament’s forces now had the ‘trained bands’, London’s militia, formed in regiments and many thousands strong. It was an army double the size of that of the Royalists.

  Rupert’s advice to Charles was to avoid battle, march south, turn and attack London from Kent. Charles, anxious to avoid large numbers of civilian casualties, instead retreated up the Thames Valley to Oxford. London was spared violence, but a vital opportunity for Charles was lost.

  In the New Year, Charles’s sister Elizabeth in The Hague received the latest reports of the war from an old friend: ‘I wish I had nothing to write,’ he told her, ‘for no news is good news.’ The king was ‘at Oxford strongly quartered; the Earl of Essex at Windsor and both have flying armies like fiery dragons everywhere destroying’. In the west of England and south Wales a Royalist army was consolidating control of Cornwall, Wales and the border counties. In the north the forces of the Royalist Earl of Newcastle (soon to be made a marquess) were overrunning much of Yorkshire and establishing a bridgehead in the Midlands at Newark. Yet there seemed to be no part of England that did not also see Parliament’s troops. All hope that the war would be over soon was dashed.

  * Lindsey had already lost one argument with Charles’s Scottish field marshal, Patrick Ruthven, Earl of Forth, over whether or not to use a Swedish or Dutch deployment, with Charles ruling in favour of the former.

  * Two centuries later, in another civil war on the other side of the Atlantic, at the Battle of Gettysburg, it was noticed that the stress on the heart caused men to fall asleep in the middle of the fighting.

  16

  ‘TIGER’S HEART’

  SIXTEEN WARSHIPS HUNTED HENRIETTA MARIA THROUGH THE HIGH waves of the North Sea. It was February 1643 and Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, acting as Parliament’s High Admiral, wanted her captured or killed.1 The stormy weather helped her lose her pursuers and poor visibility cloaked her disembarkation at Bridlington Bay on the Yorkshire coast. She spent that night in a cottage on the pier. It was 5 a.m, and dark, when Warwick’s captains located her. Four of Parliament’s ships entered the bay and opened fire. Henrietta Maria was still in bed; ‘the bal
ls were whistling upon me’, she told Charles, and ‘you may easily believe I loved not such music’.2 She grabbed her clothes, and dashed with her ladies to the shelter of a ditch. In her arms she clutched her dog, an ugly little mutt called Mitte. The shot, ‘singing around us in fine style’, killed a sergeant only twenty paces from her. His body lay ‘torn and mangled with their great shot’ as the women lay in the ditch, ‘the balls passing over our heads and sometimes covering us with dust’. It was two hours before the tide turned and Warwick’s ships were forced back out to sea.

  Charles publicly condemned what he saw as Warwick’s attempt to kill his wife, complaining the cannon fire at Bridlington Bay was ‘not casually but purposely committed’.3 No other spoilt princess of Europe had to face such dangers. But Henrietta Maria was every inch the daughter of the great warrior king Henri IV, and she had risked her life to good purpose. As soon as the firing had stopped she ordered a guard for the munitions she had brought. ‘I must act the captain,’ she joked, even ‘though a little low in stature’.4 Her men, money and arms would now join her in Yorkshire where they would help the Royalists soon gain superiority in the county.