Marston Moor (49 page)

The Royalists surged into a new charge. They must have known, as Lindsay knew, that if they could break the stubborn brigade, the rest of the Allied infantry would be fatally exposed, and so they came at the gallop, slashing madly at their steeds, their war-cries shrill and piercing.

But the Scots were good. The muskets gathered within the hedgehog were deployed behind the pikes, forming a third rank, their weapons trained between the heads of the men in front. The men on the north face, opposite the ditch, fired upon the infantry looking to cross, while those on the eastern side looked to halt the charge. At this distance they aimed low, targeting the horses, which were easier to hit than the men bobbing above, and they poured their rage into the Cavalier line, causing fractures to open as the first enemy riders fell. The musketeers retired to reload, replaced, man for man, by their waiting comrades, but this time they changed their tactic. The Scots knew that a heavy destrier killed at close range would keep going, would stumble and tumble and then slide in the mud, and the sheer momentum of the huge form would take it straight through the outer ranks of the pike ring, holing it as sure as any cannon ball. So the blue-capped musketeers lifted their muzzles as the Royalist horsemen drew closer, picking at the bodies and faces of the riders themselves in the hope that, without the commands, a horse would veer away from the pike points.

The second volley ripped through Lucas’s harquebusiers, tearing their line to pieces, but still they came on, just yards from the braced ring. The musketeers revolved again, more coming up to the kill, but this third volley was not commanded to wait. They let loose, firing at will as the Royalist horsemen reached the steel hedge. Faces of men and horses leered through the powder smoke, glowering apparitions looming above the pike points, and the outermost pikemen cringed under the expected impact. But none came. The horses veered away at the last moment, frightened by the crackling shots and unwilling to leap so lethal a fence. The enemy swirled around the flame-lit circle, in and out of the skeining mist, slapping at the pikes with swords and shooting down into the thickly arrayed bodies with their pistols. But the men of Fife and Midlothian did not give way. They took the punishment with challenges of their own, the saltires swept high and defiant in the stinking fog, and the Royalists could find no chink in their armour. Somehow, miraculously, the Allied front line, teetering on the brink of oblivion, managed to cling on.

Oliver Cromwell read his soldiers’ pocket Bible as the chirurgeon tied off the dressing. The bandage was thick, winding thrice round his neck, but the pain had ebbed and the bleeding was staunched. The lieutenant-general’s survival was nothing short of the will of God.

‘You will not be able to fasten your collar,’ the chirurgeon said, standing back to admire his work, ‘nor hang a gorget at your throat.’

‘No matter.’ Cromwell closed the pamphlet and kissed the cover, putting it into its pocket beside his heart. He stood and gathered up the rest of his clothes. ‘If King Jesus had wanted me dead, it would be so. I am to live, it is ordained.’

The crows-feet at the chirurgeon’s eyes deepened. ‘You must rest now, sir.’ He wiped crimson palms on the crusty apron that stretched tight across his belly. ‘The blade cut is deep.’

‘Did you not hear me, sirrah?’ Cromwell snapped. He looked around the room. They were in Tockwith, in the home of an evicted Royalist. It was a substantial building, with a great parlour in which the floor space had been draped with sheets, and it was on those sheets that the wounded from the fight below Bilton Bream were tended. The lieutenant-general stepped over a prone body and made for the door. He stepped by a large hearth, noticing the kettle and skillet had been thrust aside, their places in the lambent flames taken by a sawbones’ tools. He stifled a shudder, thanking God for His deliverance from such torture. ‘Where is my horse? My armour?’

‘General,’ the chirurgeon bleated as he pushed open the door, ‘you will reopen that wound if you take no care of it. I must protest.’

The air stank of sulphur. It was not yet dark, but the dusk was gathering apace. He turned back. ‘No, fellow, you must not. God preserves my life for His purpose.’ He stalked from the house, spotting the huge black destrier waiting across the street. ‘Ah, Blackjack, my old friend,’ he said, crossing quickly and taking the reins from a trooper. He leaned into the beast’s ear. ‘We are to fight again this evening. Praise God for your loyalty, old boy, for it is cherished.’

‘General Cromwell, sir,’ a trooper greeted him. The man had been invalided from the fight by a smashed ankle.

Cromwell nodded. ‘My plate, my weapons.’

The trooper pointed at a bulging sack. ‘Clean and ready for you, sir.’

‘You have my thanks. In what manner will I discover my men?’

‘They hold the left flank, sir.’

Cromwell frowned. ‘Hold? They have not attacked Byron again?’

The trooper winced. ‘All is not well, sir, I regret to report. A large part of foot has routed, the rest under mortal threat. General Leslie maintains his position lest the malignants make play to encircle the infantry.’

‘Our right flank? Fairfax?’

‘I know not, sir.’

‘What says Leven in this?’

‘My lord Leven has departed, sir.’

‘Expired?’

The trooper scratched his chin awkwardly. ‘Fled, sir. As have my lords Fairfax and—’ He hesitated, studying his boots: ‘and Manchester.’

Cromwell’s skin grew cold. ‘My own general.’ If all three rebel commanders had abandoned the field, then surely the end was near, and yet something nagged in the back of his mind. He had lived, miraculously, and nothing transpired without reason. ‘Help me,’ he said suddenly, going to retrieve his armour.

‘Sir, I—’

Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell waved him away, ignoring the pain in his neck as he hefted the sack. He instinctively slid a hand to his heart, feeling the straight edges of the pocket Bible through his buff-coat. One of the section headings branded itself upon his mind, and he closed his eyes as he recited it. ‘
A Soldier must consider that sometimes God’s people have the worst in battle as well as God’s enemies.
’ He opened his eyes, fixing them on the trooper. ‘God’s plan is all laid out before us. We have had the worst. Now it is time to have the best.’

Stryker watched the battle raging away to his left. The infantry fight that was consuming the centre of Marston Moor ebbed and flowed along the line of the ditch, and it looked as though the king’s men had the best of it, but still the two edges of the rebel front line, Manchester’s men nearest, Covenanters on the far side, were holding their ground, and it was a rallying cry for the waning spirits of the Army of Both Kingdoms. He wanted to be there, with the Royalist foot, to lend his steel and complete the victory, but knew he could not. His troop needed him, for, though they had repulsed the Parliamentarian cavalry, their wing remained precariously weak. Byron had vanished, caught up in his front line’s destruction, so that Lord Molyneux commanded the remnant, but already the opposing force of cavalry, two bodies of Eastern Association horse and a third made up of Scots, were edging across the moor for a renewed assault.

‘Keep the line!’ Molyneux shouted as he took up position on the rightmost periphery of the horse and steel blockade. Byron’s folly had been negated by Goring on the far side, and all that was required was a cool head and a steady nerve. They would be a barricade against the Earl of Manchester’s horsemen, who would be naturally reticent after the wounding – perhaps death – of their general, Cromwell, and as long as the flank held firm, the Royalist foot would roll over the fracturing rebel divisions, and the encroaching night would fall upon a great victory.

‘Keep the line!’ Stryker repeated the call. He was with his men, Brownell’s old command, at the centre of the line. On his right were the regiments belonging to Molyneux himself, and those of Tyldesley and Leveson, while on the left, most reassuringly, he saw the banners of Prince Rupert’s Regiment of Horse, the most fearsome cavalry in the land. The line was outnumbered by those that now rose to a slow walk towards them, but they were not deterred. ‘Keep the line!’ Stryker called again. ‘Pistols!’

He loaded his own twin flintlocks, then slid his sword in and out of its scabbard to ensure the blood of Cromwell had not glued it fast. He was vaguely aware of more horsemen rumbling a few hundred yards to the rear, tracing the line of Wilstrop Wood, but he put them to the back of his mind. All that mattered was the charge that he knew they would soon face.

The horsemen skirting Wilstrop Wood behind the expectant Royalist line wore no field sign, but they were not Cavaliers. Sir Thomas Fairfax stared straight ahead. His men, the human debris of a collapsed wing of horse, kept their gaze on him, though each of them prayed harder than ever they had before. Sir Thomas had made it through the enemy cavalry, leaving it to attack the Allied foot brigades, knowing that his failure had left those poor infantrymen so exposed. He had ridden hard, passing by the southern edge of the forest, the battle raging to his left, always watchful for enemy units hidden in the trees. There had been troopers haunting those ancient trunks, but they had been the flotsam of his own command, the very men smashed to smithereens by Goring, and they had emerged, little by little, from their hiding places, hoping that he would lead them to safety. Except that Sir Thomas Fairfax was not looking for safety; he was spoiling for a fight.

The fugitive Roundheads, perhaps a hundred out of the original three thousand, formed line behind their general, tearing away their white handkerchiefs and cantering from one side of the blood-streaked moor to the other, crossing the ground immediately behind the Royalist horsemen preparing to face the Eastern Association riders. Sir Thomas gazed ruefully down at the line of the trench as his mount crossed it without breaking stride. Here the obstacle was barely a feature in the landscape, the depth shallow, the hedges low and sparse. If they only knew how difficult the crossing had been at the far side of the moor. As a lieutenant spurred ahead to explain their presence to the men riding beneath the cornets of the Earl of Manchester, Sir Thomas slumped in the saddle. He was half blind, his eye congealed with the blood from the wound in his cheek, and exhausted.

Out of the blurry near distance cantered a man wrapped in leather and plate. Even through his dizzy reeling, Sir Thomas recognized the prominent nose, the wide mouth and the wart above the right eye. He noticed, too, heavy bandaging at the man’s neck. ‘You are hurt?’

Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell seemed not to hear. ‘What news?’

‘My flank was routed,’ Sir Thomas said. He forced himself to stay in the saddle. ‘I am ashamed to report.’

Cromwell looked past him. ‘These men you bring?’

‘Mine,’ Sir Thomas heard himself say. ‘Gathered from defeat.’

Cromwell’s gaze narrowed. ‘And you have ridden here?’

Sir Thomas gave a bark of laughter that hurt his chest. ‘All the way through the enemy.’