stormed on the 5th of July. The battle of Lansdown was a second Stratton for the Cornishmen, but this time the enemy was of different quality and far differently led, and they had to mourn the loss of Sir Bevil Grenville and the greater part of their whole force. At dusk both sides stood on the flat summit of the hill, still firing into one another with such energy as was not yet expended, and in the night Waller drew off his men into Bath. “We were glad they were gone,” wrote a Royalist officer, “for if they had not, I know who had within the hour.” Next day Hopton was severely injured by the explosion of a wagon containing the reserve ammunition, and the Royalists, finding their victory profitless, moved eastward to Devizes, closely followed by the enemy. On the 10th of July Sir William Waller took post on Roundway Down, overlooking Devizes, and captured a Royalist ammunition column from Oxford. On the 11th he came down and invested Hopton’s foot in Devizes itself, while the Royalist cavalry, Hertford and Maurice with them, rode away towards Salisbury. But although the siege was pressed with such vigour that an assault was fixed for the evening of the 13th, the Cornishmen, Hopton directing the defence from his bed, held out stubbornly, and on the afternoon of July 13th Prince Maurice’s horsemen appeared on Roundway Down, having ridden to Oxford, picked up reinforcements there, and returned at full speed to save their comrades. Waller’s army tried its best, but some of its elements were of doubtful quality and the ground was all in Maurice’s favour. The battle did not last long. The combined attack of the Oxford force from Roundway and of Hopton’s men from the town practically annihilated Waller’s army. Very soon afterwards Rupert came up with fresh Royalist forces, and the combined armies moved westward. Bristol, the second port of the kingdom, was their objective, and in four days from the opening of the siege it was in their hands (July 26), Waller with the beaten remnant of his army at Bath being powerless to intervene. The effect of this blow was felt even in Dorsetshire. Within three weeks of the surrender Prince Maurice with a body of fast-moving cavalry overran that county almost unopposed.
8. Adwalton Moor.—Newcastle meanwhile had resumed operations against the clothing towns, this time with success. The Fairfaxes had been fighting in the West Riding since January with such troops from the Hull region as they had been able to bring across Newcastle’s lines. They and the townsmen together were too weak for Newcastle’s increasing forces, and an attempt was made to relieve them by bringing up the Parliament’s forces in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and the Eastern Association. But local interests prevailed again, in spite of Cromwell’s presence, and after assembling at Nottingham, the midland rebels quietly dispersed to their several counties (June 2). The Fairfaxes were left to their fate, and about the same time Hull itself narrowly escaped capture by the queen’s forces through the treachery of Sir John Hotham, the governor, and his son, the commander of the Lincolnshire Parliamentarians. The latter had been placed under arrest at the instance of Cromwell and of Colonel Hutchinson, the governor of Nottingham Castle; he escaped to Hull, but both father and son were seized by the citizens and afterwards executed. More serious than an isolated act of treachery was the far-reaching Royalist plot that had been detected in Parliament itself, for complicity in which Lord Conway, Edmund Waller the poet, and several members of both Houses were arrested. The safety of Hull was of no avail for the West Riding towns, and the Fairfaxes underwent a decisive defeat at Adwalton (Atherton) Moor near Bradford on the 30th of June. After this, by way of Lincolnshire, they escaped to Hull and reorganized the defence of that place. The West Riding perforce submitted.
The queen herself with a second convoy and a small army under Henry (Lord) Jermyn soon moved via Newark, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Lichfield and other Royalist garrisons to Oxford, where she joined her husband on the 14th of July. But Newcastle (now a marquis) was not yet ready for his part in the programme. The Yorkshire troops would not march on London while the enemy was master of Hull, and by this time there was a solid barrier between the royal army of the north and the capital. Roundway Down and Adwalton Moor were not after all destined to be fatal, though peace riots in London, dissensions in the Houses, and quarrels amongst the generals were their immediate consequences. A new factor had arisen in the war—the Eastern Association.
9. Cromwell and the Eastern Association.—This had already intervened to help in the siege of Reading and had sent troops to the abortive gathering at Nottingham, besides clearing its own ground of “malignants.” From the first Cromwell was the dominant influence. Fresh from Edgehill, he had told Hampden, “You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go,” not “old decayed serving-men, tapsters and such kind of fellows to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them,” and in January 1643 he had gone to his own county to “raise such men as had the fear of God before them and made some conscience of what they did.” These men, once found, were willing, for the cause, to submit to a rigorous training and an iron discipline such as other troops, fighting for honour only or for profit only, could not be brought to endure.[1] The result was soon apparent. As early as the 13th of May, Cromwell’s regiment of horse—recruited from the horse-loving yeomen of the eastern counties—demonstrated its superiority in the field in a skirmish near Grantham, and in the irregular fighting in Lincolnshire during June and July (which was on the whole unfavourable to the Parliament), as previously in pacifying the Eastern Association itself, these Puritan troopers distinguished themselves by long and rapid marches that may bear comparison with almost any in the history of the mounted arm. When Cromwell’s second opportunity came at Gainsborough on the 28th of July, the “Lincolneer” horse who were under his orders were fired by the example of Cromwell’s own regiment, and Cromwell, directing the whole with skill, and above all with energy, utterly routed the Royalist horse and killed their general, Charles Cavendish.
In the meantime the army of Essex had been inactive. After the fall of Reading a serious epidemic of sickness had reduced it to impotence. On the 18th of June the Parliamentary cavalry was routed and John Hampden mortally wounded at Chalgrove Field near Chiselhampton, and when at last Essex, having obtained the desired reinforcements, moved against Oxford from the Aylesbury side, he found his men demoralized by inaction, and before the menace of Rupert’s cavalry, to which he had nothing to oppose, he withdrew to Bedfordshire (July). He made no attempt to intercept the march of the queen’s convoys, he had permitted the Oxford army, which he should have held fast, to intervene effectually in the midlands, the west, and the south-west, and Waller might well complain that Essex, who still held Reading and the Chilterns, had given him neither active nor passive support in the critical days preceding Roundway Down. Still only a few voices were raised to demand his removal, and he was shortly to have an opportunity of proving his skill and devotion in a great campaign and a great battle. The centre and the right of the three Royalist armies had for a moment (Roundway to Bristol) united to crush Waller, but their concentration was short-lived. Plymouth was to Hopton’s men what Hull was to Newcastle’s—they would not march on London until the menace to their homes was removed. Further, there were dissensions among the generals which Charles was too weak to crush, and consequently the original plan reappears—the main Royalist army to operate in the centre, Hopton’s (now Maurice’s) on the right, Newcastle on the left towards London. While waiting for the fall of Hull and Plymouth, Charles naturally decided to make the best use of his time by reducing Gloucester, the one great fortress of the Parliament in the west.
10. Siege and Relief of Gloucester.—This decision quickly brought on a crisis. While the earl of Manchester (with Cromwell as his lieutenant-general) was appointed to head the forces of the Eastern Association against Newcastle, and Waller was
- ↑ “Making not money but that which they took to be the public felicity to be their end they were the more engaged to be valiant” (Baxter).
