The Making Of The British Army Read Free Page B

his left flank. It was about three o’clock, the sun was already low in the sky, and the Royalist right had little difficulty seeing them off. It was not exactly the opportunity Rupert had hoped for, but at this hour it was his best chance. He gave the order, and both wings of his cavalry began to advance, the plumed host surging forward at first in an amiable trot, for all the world like gentlemen taking their sport.
There was a tactic much favoured by Spanish cavalry, the
caracole
, in which successive lines of horse would canter elegantly up to the enemy line, wheel to the left and discharge their pistols. But Rupert was having none of this: he would have his men go at a gallop, firing as they collided with the enemy horse. Then, seizing sword from scabbard, they would forge a path through the mass of horse by sheer momentum. It was how Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes had borne down on so many of their German opponents. And there was only one way to deal with it – a counter-charge. 6
Essex’s cavalry, trained (in so far as they were trained) after theDutch model, awaited the attack with pistol and carbine rather than preparing for a counter-charge. But Rupert’s cavalry, confident men on powerful horses, with the hill giving impetus to their advance, were a terrifying sight to men who might ride to church of a Sunday, or drive a plough in spring and autumn, but had never heard the thunder of so many unfriendly hooves. They fired an ineffective volley, turned and fled the field.
Rupert’s men spurred after them, quickly overrunning the cannon and muskets on both flanks of the Parliamentary line. Without cavalry to cover them, the line might indeed have been rolled up from end to end, but the Cavaliers, high on the thrill of the chase, instead galloped on in pursuit of the fleeing Roundheads until, some miles on, they came upon their baggage train, where in time-honoured fashion they fell out to loot. A century and a half later the duke of Wellington would still be complaining about the cavalry’s ‘habit of galloping at everything’.
Seeing the collapse of the Parliamentarian flanks, the Royalist infantry now advanced boldly. But in the centre of the Parliamentarian line two brigades had stood firm, and with no Royalist cavalry in sight to oppose them, Essex counter-attacked with the two regiments of cavalry he had posted behind these stalwarts in the centre.
The situation suddenly looked dangerous for the King’s side, for there was no mounted reserve, Charles having allowed his Life Guard to join Rupert’s charge. But ‘the foot soldiers stood their ground with great courage,’ as one chronicler wrote, ‘and though many of the King’s soldiers were unarmed and had only cudgels, they kept their ranks, and took up the arms which their slaughtered neighbours left to them’. 7
In the ensuing ‘push of pikes’, a cosy term to describe brutish hand-to-hand fighting, the Parliamentarians were just too strong, and at length the Royalist centre gave way. Indeed for a time it looked as if Charles would have to concede, but both sides had been badly shaken by their crude initiation to battle, and were rapidly exhausted by the close fighting. At the last minute some of Rupert’s men came cantering back to put heart into the Royalists, and the earl of Essex prudently broke off battle. Neither side had achieved a decisive advantage. It was the dead and dying who were left in possession of the field.
It had been during this last desperate push of pikes that the earl of Lindsey was shot through the thigh. The veteran of the Prince of Orange’s service, who in vain had advocated the more compact battle line of the Dutch infantry (just as he had used Dutch engineers to drain the Lincolnshire fens to which he gave his name), now cursed in the bitter cold of the night. Why had the King not heeded his counsel, taking instead that of a 23-year-old thruster? ‘If it please God I should survive,’ he declared to his son, ‘I