Marston Moor (25 page)

Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, supreme commander of His Majesty’s forces in Lancashire, glowered from up in the saddle as his fiery-eyed mount clattered on to the open ground. There were shouts from within the castle, the Scots defenders no doubt discussing the merits of shooting the prince there and then, but none took the chance. Instead they waited, as Stryker’s men waited, as the tall man with the flowing black locks and predatory stare wheeled his horse in a tight, high-stepping circle beneath the collective gaze of his enemy. Screams drifted on the wind, the smell of burning thatch mingled with the egg-stink of powder smoke, and they all knew that Liverpool was being sacked. But Prince Rupert did not flinch, sparing only a glance down at his beloved dog, Boye, who came to sit, tongue lolling, at the horse’s side. Rupert was straight-backed and unruffled, a lone island in a sea of violence. He wore a dark green hat, matching the cloth of his coat, and plucked it free, holding it high for the Scots to witness.

‘Enough!’ he bellowed.

‘No surrender!’ shouted the reply. All Royalist eyes went up to the crenellated rampart cresting the fortress like a cockerel’s comb. There were perhaps a dozen men on that high place, all – except one – dressed in the ubiquitous Hodden grey of Scottish regiments, blue bonnets capping their heads. The figure who alone wore civilian garb, made martial by a sword held aloft and a heavy-looking gorget at his throat, was evidently the officer in command of this defiant last stand. ‘Dash yourse’n against our walls, sir!’

Prince Rupert replaced his hat and pursed his lips. He turned the snorting but compliant stallion again, this time reviewing his own strength. On the second tight circle he caught Stryker’s eye and held the beast still without so much as a touch to rein or stirrup. ‘What say you, Sergeant-Major?’

Stryker bowed low. ‘Highness?’

‘Have you the stomach for another fight?’

‘We will fight, Highness.’

Rupert’s handsome face creased, thin lips peeling back in a grin that revealed brilliantly white teeth. ‘But do you yearn for Scots blood, sirrah?’

‘Nay, Highness,’ Stryker replied, looking up at the forbidding castle. He had no idea how they would find a way over those walls without first enduring a hail of lead. ‘I do not.’

Rupert nodded and turned back to address the enemy officer. ‘Terms, sirrah! Free quarter to you and your men, should you have the wisdom to offer me your sword!’

‘And if not?’ the man called from his soaring vantage.

‘Then you will not live to regret your foolishness!’

The men on the rampart vanished. There was a lull. Prince Rupert, Stryker and the others waited in the cold dawn. And then, even as musketry and pistol shots crackled through the roads and alleyways of the walled port, the gates of its ancient castle groaned open.

Liverpool had fallen.

Chapter 11

York, 14 June 1644

‘Four shillings. Not a penny more.’

The butcher wrinkled his nose as he leaned out from the hatch. It was a timber platform, hanging on strained hinges, over which was draped a relatively clean cloth and various cuts of meat. He sucked at his wiry moustache as if mulling over the offer. ‘Five.’

The customer, a chubby soldier in a red coat and wide-brimmed hat, rested one hand on the hilt of his sword and jangled his leather purse in the other. ‘Five, then. You will require the extra shilling for physic.’

The butcher frowned. ‘I do not need phy—’ he began, but his wife, plucking a scrawny bird on one of the tables in the main shop behind him, cleared her throat. The butcher glanced over his shoulder, then at the customer, his face draining of colour. ‘Four it is.’

Captain Lancelot Forrester offered his sweetest smile as he handed over the coins. ‘Pleasure.’

‘The making of a deal with menaces,’ Forrester’s companion muttered as the captain picked up the limp carcass of the chicken he had purchased, ‘is hardly Christlike.’

Forrester shrugged. ‘The only menace was that blackguard’s greed. The common rate is four shillings for a hen, and he damned well knows it.’

Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner spat into the mud as they paced down the road. ‘I suppose it matters not, boy, for soon we will have none such trouble.’

‘They have us well strangled,’ Forrester agreed. ‘Still, we have supplies for the time being, and negotiations continue.’

‘Do you hear this fool, Lord?’ Gardner screeched at the grubby-looking sky. ‘He believes our grandees negotiate!’

Indeed, Forrester had suspected a tentative conversation had been conducted for several days now, for the furious activity of the Allied gunners had diminished markedly. He suspected, though official hostility continued, that offer and counter-offer had somehow been conveyed between the opposing lines, culminating in the official ceasefire that had been initiated earlier in the day. The guns had been silent for several hours now, precipitating the bustling market that had sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere.

‘The parley is not scheduled until eight of the clock,’ Forrester said. ‘We will know more after that hour.’

‘Parley,’ Gardner scoffed. ‘It is pomp and lies. Piss and wind. Dung and dishonour.’

‘The commissioners are out there this very moment,’ Forrester retorted in exasperation, waving the flaccid hen in the vague direction of Micklegate Bar. ‘A tent has been erected for the sole purpose of agreeing terms.’

‘Newcastle dallies,’ Gardner replied derisively, ‘in the hope of divine intervention. The devil’s alliance discuss terms while they dig their cursed tunnels. Duplicity on all sides.’

‘I suppose God has told you this?’

‘Common sense tells me this, you bloody beef-witted Cavalier.’ The priest ferreted in his filthy coat, finding a hunk of bread that looked dubious at best. He tore into it, offering half to Forrester. ‘It’ll all come to nothing.’

The bread looked to have more grit than grain, but Forrester took it with thanks. ‘Mother would make paste of apricot,’ he said, suddenly wistful. ‘We’d spread lashings of the stuff on a fresh crust.’

‘Apricot?’ Gardner whistled. ‘And broke your fast on griddled swan and roasted crocodile, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Forrester ignored him. ‘Pear, if no apricots could be found. It was delicious.’

They walked on in the direction of the bar, its towers looming over the market. On its battlements, and along the walls to either side, soldiers waited, staring out at the siegeworks and the tent that hosted the meeting.

Gardner wiggled a bony finger in his face. ‘Your mind should be full of the Lord’s word, yet it is full of your belly’s demands. I shall preach on the subject.’

‘Not to me, Father,’
 
Forrester said as they skirted a particularly malodorous pile of horse manure. ‘I must attend the Minster on Sunday.’

Gardner cackled, patting Forrester’s right shoulder. ‘Aye, you’re his grace’s lapdog now, I forget!’

‘It is an honour to be noticed,’ Forrest replied dutifully. He looked down at the cross of red and blue that he had paid a seamstress to sew in place. It looked slightly out of kilter against the red of his coat, but he was proud nonetheless.

‘Remember, boy,’ the priest continued. ‘The Minster’s a grand enough pile o’ stone, but no man ever reached heaven by praying to gilt candlesticks and gaudy murals.’

‘If the way to heaven is to dress like a madman and rant at the clouds, I question whether it is there that I wish to go upon my demise.’

‘You blaspheme, you decadent English arsehole.’

‘And you stink, you mad Welsh—’

Gardner had reached out to grip Forrester’s elbow. He nodded towards the gate. ‘What d’you make of that, boy?’ Micklegate Bar had opened just enough for seven finely robed courtiers to push through. At their backs came a stream of blank-faced musketeers. ‘Parley’s over, by the looks o’ them.’

‘Jesu,’ Forrester muttered. He had no business asking anything directly of the marquis’s delegates, but, as soon as they had stormed past, he waylaid the captain commanding the honour guard of musketeers. ‘Well?’

‘The rebel commissioners demanded too much,’ the officer said, happy to be the source of news. ‘Our commissioners raged out of the tent without so much as receiving the enemy’s propositions.’

Forrester exchanged a glance with Gardner. ‘Then there will be no agreement.’

The officer shook his head. ‘And no surrender.’

Middlethorpe, near York, 15 June 1644

‘I understand their commissioners flounced home empty-handed, but a drummer was sent into the city with our propositions, was he not?’

The speaker was Sir Henry Vane; Harry to most, for his father went by the same name. He was a large man, powerfully built, with the same fierce eyes and bushy brows as Sir Henry the Elder. His face was lean, spare and without whisker or beard, so that he looked younger than his thirty-one years, yet his bearing was proud and his jaw angled prominently to give him a face that his wife often bemoaned was as belligerent as a bulldog with a bone. He liked the description, knew other men were intimidated by him, and thanked God daily, for life, faith and war had led him along a path that required such qualities in abundance. Providence had seen him shift from courtier to New World power-broker and back to the mother country, and now, as he clambered out of his father’s long shadow, he had found himself seated at a table with three of the greatest lords in the disputed realm.

Across from Vane sat Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven. The Scottish warlord smoothed down his sandy-grey moustache and leaned back in his creaking chair. He plucked the creased square of vellum from the ever-cluttered table in the centre of his campaign room, and handed it to an aide. ‘He has returned with this reply.’

The aide scuttled around the table’s perimeter, passing David Leslie, then both Fairfaxes, father and son, the Earl of Manchester and General Cromwell, eventually bowing and giving the letter to Vane, who unfolded it slowly.

‘Considering the way in which the negotiations crumbled,’ Vane said, ‘I will not hold my breath in expectation of capitulation.’

Leven gave a rueful snort. ‘Wise, Sir Harry.’

Vane cast his eye over the spidery black scrawl. ‘
I have perused the conditions and demands your lordship sent
,’ he read aloud, then scanned the next few lines until he reached the nub of the matter. ‘
I cannot suppose that your lordships do imagine that persons of honour can possibly condescend to any of these propositions
.’ He looked up. The moonlight streaming through the arched window made the paper appear translucent in his big hand. He was not a lord, nor a grand military leader, but that did not diminish his standing in such lofty company. Indeed, he was at ease with the half-dozen generals, confident in his mandate from Parliament and potent in his role as the mouthpiece of the Committee for Both Kingdoms. He had been sent here on behalf of the latter institution, the new body that represented the interests of Scots and English alike, and that wielded complete power over the alliance that converged against York. Vane’s task had been to report on the progress of the siege, and, as news of the destruction of Lancashire reached Westminster, the Committee had ordered him to persuade Leven, Manchester and Fairfax of the need to release troops from York to intercept Prince Rupert. But the generals had convinced him that such a course would be wrong, and that York’s capture was the greater mission. Now, with the parley finished and rumours rife of a possible relief force gathering on the far side of the Fells, he wondered whether they had committed a grave mistake. He stared at each man in turn. ‘The negotiations are truly done, gentlemen. The ceasefire is at an end.’

A vigorous rap on the door startled the room.

Leven looked round. ‘Come!’

A junior officer shuffled nervously in. ‘The malignants have lit a fire, my lord. Up on the Minster.’

Leven glanced around the table. ‘A signal?’

The messenger cleared his throat. ‘It is answered distantly, my lord.’

‘Answered?’

‘To the south-west.’

Leven caught the eye of the younger Fairfax. ‘What say you?’

‘Pontefract Castle,’ Sir Thomas answered. ‘Held for the King.’

‘A mark of solidarity,’ the Earl of Manchester ventured.