A nephew of Charles I, the son of the king’s sister Queen
Elizabeth of Bohemia, Rupert served in the Protestant forces in Europe in the
1630s and was captured at the Battle of Eiberg in 1638. He spent three years in
prison before being ransomed by Charles I. In 1642 he arrived in England with
his younger brother, Prince Maurice. Charles I appointed him general of Horse
and in this role the prince was in action from mid-August onwards. During
September Rupert and the Horse patrolled the Midlands between the king’s forces
and those of the earl of Essex’s parliamentarian army. On 23 September 1642 the
first major clash between the two armies at the Battle of Powick Bridge was won
by Rupert. At the Battle of Edgehill Rupert’s devastating charge drove the
parliamentarian left flank from the field. A flaw in Rupert’s tactics was
revealed, however: his own forces became so disordered by such a charge that
they too took some time to be reorganised and useful again.
Rupert played an important role in many of the major battles
of the First Civil War, including the Battle of Chalgrove Field, the First
Battle of Newbury, and the Battle of Newark in 1644. In May of that year he
left his base in the Marcher counties, where he had been reorganising the
royalist war effort to launch a campaign to rescue the marquis of Newcastle,
who was trapped in York. This latter campaign ended in Rupert’s defeat at the
Battle of Marston Moor. In the late summer Rupert was appointed
commander-in-chief of the king’s army but set about strengthening the royalist
hold on Bristol and the west.
In 1645 Rupert, Prince Maurice, and Lord Loughborough worked
to try and regain control of the northern Wales marches south of Cheshire, a
campaign they were all deflected from when the king marched out of Oxford to
mount an attack on the forces besieging Chester. After the siege of Chester
ended as the king marched in its direction, the army turned on Leicester, which
was captured at the end of May. A bare fortnight later, Rupert, as commander of
the army, was defeated at the Battle of Naseby by Sir Thomas Fairfax and the
New Model Army (qq.v.). In the wake of this defeat Rupert returned to Bristol,
but surrendered the port in September. For this defeat the king dismissed him,
although a court-martial cleared Rupert of any wrong-doing. Rupert and Maurice
went into exile in Europe.
During the Second Civil War Rupert served in the small
royalist fleet, a role that he was to continue into the 1650s. Rupert returned
to England at the Restoration. He did not become involved in government,
although he was a stockholder in colonial ventures, especially the Hudson’s Bay
Company, which took over land named after the prince. Rupert also became an
experimental scientist, a member of the Royal Society, the inventor of an early
form of bullet-proof glass, and a developer of surgical instruments.
The Cavalry Leader
The royalists may have wrecked the taverns, but the
parliamentarians desecrated the churches. The climate of war turns men into
animals. It was said that, when troops were quartered in a church or hall, the
smell they left behind was frightful. They pissed and defecated in corners.
They often brought with them contagious diseases that became known as ‘camp
fever’.
Many of the soldiers had of course volunteered out of
genuine conviction. The parliamentary soldiers often chanted psalms as they
marched, and the ministers preached to them upon such texts as the sixty-eighth
psalm, ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered . . .’ More secular rivalries
also animated them; it was reported that the men of Herefordshire fought
against the men of Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians against the Northumbrians.
The men carried pikes or muskets, but some were still armed
with bows and arrows in the old fashion. The pike itself was supposed to be 18
feet long, with a steel head, but many of the soldiers cut it down as too
cumbersome; the pikemen were also armed with a short sword. The muskets were
charged with weak gunpowder and the men were advised to shoot only when the
weapon was close up against the body of the enemy; since there were no
cartridges, the musketeer held two or three bullets in his mouth or in his
belt. They had to load and then fire with a lighted cord known as a ‘match’.
Others preferred to shoot arrows from their guns. They wore leather doublets
and helmets that looked like iron pots.
Not all of the troops, however, were untrained or
ill-prepared. There were professional soldiers among them who had fought in
France, Spain and the Low Countries. Mercenaries were also used on both sides.
Many of the commanders had seen service on the European mainland. These were
men who had perused such manuals as Warlike Directions or Instructions for
Musters and Arms; they were the leaders who would have to give basic training
to their troops. ‘Turn the butt ends of your muskets to the right . . . Lay
your muskets properly on your shoulders . . . Take forth your match. Blow off
your coal. Cock your match . . . Present. Give fire.’
A first skirmish or encounter took place near Worcester.
Essex had moved his army towards the town and, on hearing the news, the king
sent Prince Rupert to support the royalist stronghold. Rupert of the Rhine was
the king’s nephew and, at the age of twenty-three, had already enjoyed great
success as a military commander. His expertise, and his experience, were
considered to be invaluable. He was high-spirited and fearless; he was also
rash and impatient. Yet on this occasion, in a limited engagement, he routed
the parliamentary cavalry and killed most of its officers.
Clarendon wrote that the incident ‘gave his troops great
courage and rendered the name of Prince Rupert very terrible, and exceedingly
appalled the adversary’; he added that ‘from this time the Parliament began to
be apprehensive that the business would not be as easily ended as it was
begun’. Oliver Cromwell himself had grave reservations about the conduct of the
parliamentary army. He told his cousin, John Hampden, that ‘your troopers are
most of them decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and
their [royalist] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of
quality’. Cromwell believed that if parliament were to prevail, a new and more
glorious force should be formed.
There was perhaps still one way to avert the conflict. The
parliamentarian grandee of Worcestershire, Lord Brooke, declared that he wished
‘to avoid the profusion of blood’. So he offered his royalist counterpart in
the county, the earl of Northampton, to ‘try the quarrel by sword in single
combat’. A duel might therefore have decided the course of the civil war. It
was a medieval expedient but it emphasizes the extent to which this war was
essentially still seen as a baronial combat. Yet the political and social world
had changed since the fifteenth century.
The king moved with his army to Shrewsbury, only 50 miles
away from the parliamentary forces. For three weeks both sides remained close
to one another, but neither made any move. No one was eager for battle. Charles
decided to press the issue and advance towards London. Essex was obliged to
prevent him. The earl also wished to present a petition to the king, but
Charles refused to see him. Why should he parley with a traitor?
The king moved forward slowly towards London, but Essex
remained on his trail. The first battle of the civil war took place at
Edgehill, in southern Warwickshire, where the royalist forces had rested on the
evening of 22 October; the parliamentary army was only a short distance away
and Charles had decided to attack from the summit of a range of hills that gave
him the advantage. It was an uncertain struggle, with Rupert’s cavalry for a
while in the ascendant but the parliamentary infantry holding its own. Both
sides claimed the victory, when in truth neither prevailed. The number of the
dead amounted to a little over 1,000. A trooper wrote to his mother that ‘there
was a great deal of fear and misery about that field that night’.
It was the first experience of battle for most of the
participants, and it came as a salutary shock. The soldiers had been badly
organized and Rupert’s cavalry, in particular, had run out of control. Many of
the men and some of the commanders, weary and disgusted at the slaughter, fled
for their homes. The king, never before in a war, was himself horrified by the
death of some of his most loyal commanders. He seems also to have been alarmed
by the extent of the enemy, and murmured before the battle that he did not
expect to see so many arrayed against him. The earl of Essex was equally
dismayed. He had hoped that one great battle would resolve the issue, but the
result had been bloody and uncertain. Might this be a harbinger of the whole
war? He had raised his standard against his sovereign, however, and there was
no easy way forward.
The king was urged by Rupert immediately to march upon
London, but instead Charles rode with his men 20 miles south to Oxford, where
he had determined to establish his headquarters. It was from here, at the
beginning of November, that he once more set out for the capital. On the news
of his approach the terrified citizens took up whatever weapons they possessed;
parliament sent a delegation to the royal camp to open negotiations but the
king, while giving gracious words, still pressed forward. Prince Rupert
attacked a parliamentary force at Brentford, 8 miles out of London, and then
proceeded to fire some of the houses in the town; the word ‘plunder’ now
entered the English vocabulary. It was to be the prince’s method throughout the
war.
The citizens of London decided, under the direction of their
parliamentary masters, to make a stand. The apprentices and trained bands, to
the number of 6,000, were assembled in Chelsea Field near the village of
Turnham Green in Chiswick. The earl of Essex went into the city and pleaded for
more men, until eventually a ragged army of 24,000 Londoners advanced to
Turnham Green close to the royalist army. On Sunday 13 November, the two forces
stood face to face without giving way. The king, fearing any grievous loss of
life, withdrew to Hounslow. Even his most ardent supporters would have
hesitated before launching a general assault upon the city itself. Yet he had
lost his best, and last, chance to defeat his enemies. He was not given the
credit for his mercy, however, and his withdrawal at the last minute was
considered to be a public humiliation. Thus it was presented, at least, in the
printing presses controlled by parliament.
A pause in hostilities prompted calls from some quarters for
peace and accommodation. Parliament raised four proposals for the attention of
the king; it already knew that he would reject them. A crowd of Londoners
approached the common council calling for ‘Peace and truth!’ whereupon someone
shouted out, ‘Hang truth! We want peace at any price!’ Demands for an end to
hostilities were frequent throughout the course of the war but, at each stage
of the process, the activists won their cause over their more diffident
colleagues. The more combative members of parliament, for example, believed
that a peace with the king would amount to capitulation. Instead they began to
make approaches to Scotland in an attempt to gain military aid.
The Admiral
In March 1673, the Commons passed a measure that became
known as the Test Act. All aspirants to office or to a place of trust were to
swear the oath of royal supremacy as well as the oath of allegiance, thus
placing king before pope; they were also obliged to take the sacrament
according to the rite of the Church of England and to swear that ‘I declare
that I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the
consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’. This struck at the heart of
Catholic belief. When the king gave his assent to the Test Act a ‘great hum’ of
approval arose in parliament. Charles was heard to say that he would now purge
his court of all Catholics except his barber, ‘whom he mean[s] to keep in
despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The
remark had a point; the king trusted the Catholic who put a razor to his
throat.
The first casualty was James, duke of York, who was obliged
to retire from public life. He resigned as lord high admiral and command of the
fleet was entrusted to Prince Rupert, who last appeared in these pages as the
leader of the royalist cavalry during the Civil War. It was therefore
advertised to the world that the king’s brother and heir apparent was a Roman Catholic;
immediately rumour and innuendo began to surround him. It was widely believed,
for example, that the lord chancellor himself, the earl of Shaftesbury, was
plotting against him in an effort to exclude him from the throne. When James
did not receive communion with his brother in the royal chapel John Evelyn
wrote in his diary that it ‘gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole
nation, that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant
religion, should apostatize. What the consequence of this will be, God only
knows, and wise men dread.’
One of the king’s principal councillors and one of the
original ‘cabal’, Thomas Clifford, also resigned all of his posts. He was a
secret Catholic, and it had been suggested that the Test Act was in part
formulated by his rivals precisely in order to remove him from office. He died
soon after. Confidence now flowed to yet another of Charles’s ministers. Thomas
Osborne, soon to become the earl of Danby, was a staunch Anglican who had
opposed the Dutch war; he had also been a signal success as an administrator
and, on Clifford’s resignation, he was appointed to be lord treasurer.
The preparation for another year of hostilities with the
Dutch was not undertaken with any great enthusiasm; the discovery of James’s
Catholicism called into further question the alliance with papist France and
the attack upon a fellow Protestant state. The king himself is reported to have
been vacillating and inconsistent, ready to prosecute war on one day and ready
to retire from conflict on the next. Shaftesbury said of his master that ‘there
is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any
confidence in his word or friendship’.
In July Charles ordered Rupert to avoid any naval
confrontation unless he could be sure to win it decisively. He had already
returned to negotiations with the Dutch, and simply wished to apply pressure
upon them. No such clear outcome emerged from the last sea battle of the war,
the battle of the Texel, when the Dutch and English vessels fought a long and
inconclusive struggle that left the waters filled with wreckage and floating
bodies. It was notable, also, for the inactivity of the French fleet that
simply stood apart and watched. Prince Rupert wrote later of the French admiral’s
reluctance to become involved that ‘it wanted neither signal nor instruction to
tell him what he should then have done; the case was so plain to every man’s
eye in the whole fleet’. It was now believed by many that Louis XIV was happy
to watch the two maritime nations destroy one another’s navies, thus adding
more fire to the anger of the English against their nominal allies.
THE ROYALIST CAVALRY
Cavalrymen were organised first and foremost into troops,
which like infantry companies were led by a captain and generally mustered
anything between thirty and a hundred men. Although many operated as
independent formations, it was normal for them to be brigaded together to form
regiments ideally comprising about six troops. The Royalists certainly appear
to have aimed at such an establishment with three of the troops commanded by
field officers; colonel, lieutenant colonel and major, and three or sometimes
four captains commanding the others. For example at Cropredy Bridge on 29 June
1644 Lord Wilmot’s Brigade comprised four regiments, the Lord General’s and
Prince Maurice’s, each mustering seven troops, Colonel Thomas Howard’s with
eight and Colonel Gerard Croker’s with only two. Parliamentarian units were
similarly organised save that their establishment included a colonel and major,
but no lieutenant colonel.
John Cruso, in his magisterial Militarie Instructions for
the Cavallrie divided that arm into two classes, heavy cavalry which comprised
lancers and cuirassiers, and light cavalry which comprised harquebusiers,
carbines and dragooners. Both of the former wore three-quarter armour, while
the latter were much more lightly mounted and equipped. While Cruso’s book
certainly appears to have been used by the Parliamentarians at least as an
unofficial manual – it was reprinted at Cambridge in 1644 – there was
inevitably perhaps some considerable divergence from his ideal. There were, for
example, no lancers. Although they had appeared in comparatively large numbers
at Trained Band musters as recently as 1637, the anonymous ‘J.B.’ who
contributed a supplement on cavalry to the 1661 edition of Barriffe dismissed
lancers with the comment that they were not used at all. Fully equipped
cuirassiers were nearly as scarce, and most Civil War cavalrymen probably
looked like harquebusiers or carbines. In theory the two should have been
distinguished by the first wearing a corselet while the latter relied upon his
buff-coat alone, but in practice no such distinction was possible and many a
harquebusier rode forth protected only by a buff-coat.
It may seem odd that armoured harquebusiers should have been
regarded as light cavalry, but appreciation of this point is necessary to
understand why the Royalist horse should at first have been so very much
superior to their Parliamentarian opponents. According to Cruso and the other
contemporary authorities, the cuirassier was regarded as the heavy,
battle-winning cavalryman. His function, in brutally simple terms, was to ride
down the opposition by locking up knee to knee and charging ‘in full career’.
Harquebusiers on the other hand, as light cavalry, were expected to guard the
flanks and rear of the cuirassier formations. Consequently, they were primarily
armed with carbines and pistols and expected to use them rather than emulating
their heavier comrades by charging home.
Conventionally, the initial superiority of the Royalist
horse is attributed to Prince Rupert’s introduction of Swedish tactical
doctrines, which supposedly emphasised the use of shock tactics rather than
firepower, but the truth of the matter is that they were being employed as
cuirassiers, or at least as heavy rather than light cavalry. The Cavalier horse
might not have been equipped as cuirassiers, but just as a lack of corselets
did not prevent either side from fielding pikemen, a similar shortage of
cuirassier arms did not deter the Royalists from fielding heavy cavalry trained
to charge home. Parliamentarian officers took rather longer to appreciate that
the outward appearance of a trooper need not dictate his role, and at the
outset their troops of harquebusiers and carbines tried (with a marked lack of
success) to shoot it out instead of charging, but they did come around to it at
least by 1644 and Cromwell’s famous Ironsides were certainly cuirassiers in all
but name.
Dragoons were neither fish nor fowl in that they were
expected to ride to the battlefield and dismount to fight. Consequently, some
units were organised in the same manner as infantry regiments, while others
adopted a cavalry-based organisation. At the outset of the war they represented
a considerable proportion of the cavalry arm on both sides amounting to between
a quarter and a third of those taking part in the Edgehill campaign. However,
regimental-sized battle-groups were soon recognised to be too unwieldy, and the
practice grew up of attaching a small troop of dragooners to some of the larger
regiments of horse. Such a troop could provide some local fire-support as and
when required, and more prosaically could also act as sentries for the
regiment’s quarters and horse-lines. Although at the outset they were intended
to serve simply as mounted infantry rather than troopers, having once got on
horseback they grew increasingly reluctant to get off again, and while the
expedient of attaching a troop of dragooners to a cavalry regiment may have had
its advantages, in the long run it served only to blur the distinction between
the two.
This gradual alteration in role, which ended with their
almost complete assimilation into the horse, was also reflected in their
equipment. ‘J.B.’ writing in 1661 declared that:
The other Arming of the Cavalry used in these Modern
times, known by the Name of Dragoones, (being only Foot mounted) is a Sword
(all) and some Musquets, and some Pikes, both having Leather Thongs fixed to
them, whereby they may be the easier carried; his lighted Match and Bridle in
his Left hand, having his Right hand at Liberty for the better ordering of his
Pike or Musket in their March, as occasion shall require. Yet in these English
Wars, it was observed that the Dragoones seldom used any Pikes, and of late
times most Snap-haunce Locks.
PRINCE MAURICE, (1621–1652). Younger brother [often forgotten]
of Prince Rupert, Maurice accompanied his brother to England in 1642, having
likewise served in Protestant forces in Europe. He raised a regiment of Horse
for Charles I and fought at the Battles of Powick Bridge and Edgehill. Maurice
led a small army in the West Midlands in the spring of 1643 and defeated Sir
William Waller at the Battle of Ripple Field on 13 April. Later that year he
fought alongside Ralph, Lord Hopton at the Battle of Lansdown and was
instrumental in the royalist victory at the Battle of Roundway Down.
Prince Maurice served in the west for the rest of that year,
capturing Exeter and Dartmouth, but failed to make inroads against Lyme. In
1644 he was at the Battle of Lostwithiel and fought at the Second Battle of
Newbury. In 1645 he commanded the Marcher Association counties and had
important success in restoring royalist positions there. He fought at the siege
of Leicester and the Battle of Naseby in the summer, and remained with the
king’s army that year. After his brother’s surrender of Bristol, Maurice took
his part and went into exile with him. In the Second Civil War Maurice embarked
on a naval career, continuing into the early 1650s with the royalist fleet,
such as it was. He was drowned when his ship sank in 1652.
