Marston Moor (50 page)

‘How, sir?’

‘Guile.’

Cromwell laughed too, a deep, guttural storm. ‘God hath truly granted you great favour, Sir Thomas.’

Sir Thomas forced himself upright. The horse, pistol ball still lodged in its rump, skittered sideways a yard. ‘You must take the flank, sir. Give our infantry succour, for our fortunes will fall as the moon rises. We are defeated in every quarter, save this.’

Cromwell glanced again at the hundred newcomers. ‘That is my intent. And I will use these troopers for His purpose.’

Sir Thomas made to argue, but his face throbbed an acute prompt. ‘I fear I am no use, Master Cromwell.’

‘No, Sir Thomas,’ Cromwell agreed. ‘But your gallantry will be forever praised. Give me your men. I will use them well, you have my word.’ He looked at a couple of Sir Thomas’s troopers. ‘Get him from the field.’

As the troopers tugged at his wounded mount’s head collar, Fairfax glimpsed the approach of the man who commanded Cromwell’s third line of horsemen, Lieutenant-General David Leslie. ‘A charge?’ the Scot asked.

‘My men will tackle them head-on,’ Cromwell answered. He gazed back at his line of horsemen. ‘At the trot! Keep tight and the fight will be ours!’

Leslie’s face grew taut. ‘I would use my men, General. They are keen to fight.’

‘With respect, General Leslie,’ Cromwell said firmly, ‘your men may be keen, but your steeds are too small and weak to break the malignant line.’

Leslie bridled. ‘I have some of Balgonie’s regiment. Their lances are long, Cromwell.’ His voice was suddenly caustic: ‘Of great range, compared to a Cavalier sword.’

Cromwell’s brow furrowed for a second, but then he nodded. ‘You take the flank. At the gallop. Use your lances, sir, for God will sharpen their points.’

David Leslie offered a tight bow and turned his mount. ‘To work, gentlemen!’

Cromwell bellowed, his voice unwavering: ‘To work, I say, for it is upon the left flank that this battle shall turn!’

Stryker only realized that the troops moving at their rear were not friendly when they circled completely round to the front and parleyed with a group of riders below Parliamentarian banners.

The horsemen of the Eastern Association formed two lines and turned their walk into a trot. There was something unnerving about the advance. The core of the king’s cavalry were the gentry. Young, brash, arrogant men, born to the saddle, raised to the hunt and instilled with a reckless superiority that made them courageous and skilled. The Parliament men, by contrast, had none of this. They had required teaching, training, and, after too many defeats to count, they had come upon a system of warfare that suited their more pragmatic sensibilities. Where the Cavaliers favoured speed, the Roundheads favoured order, relying on organization and discipline to overcome the dashing opposition. As they crossed the ditch in good order, presenting a slow, measured approach, so the Royalist line, Stryker included, seemed uncertain of how to engage an enemy that seemed to deliberately dawdle.

‘
Charge
!’ Lord Molyneux screamed, just as Stryker was wondering whether the order would come at all. The Royalist line burst forth straight into the gallop, discharging pistols as they did so. But the enemy did not break, did not even falter, and then their own volley erupted, flashing bright in the encroaching gloom.

Stryker shrank low, straightened when the immediate danger had passed, and dragged his sword free. The first Parliamentarian line struck home.

It was not the melee Stryker had expected. When two forces met at the gallop, they scythed through one another, blades clashing as they crossed, only to wheel immediately about to engage in personal duels, intermingling so that field words and signs were the only way to differentiate friend from foe. But here there was no meld of man and horse, no crossing of the lines, no confusion. The Eastern Association troopers held their line together. Where the more advanced Cavaliers, those with the best steeds, smashed home, the rebel line parted, allowing the eager king’s men through in ones and twos, but then they came together once more, closing the gaps as if they had never opened. And the tactic was working precisely because the two forces were not evenly matched. There was a second line, more men from the Earl of Manchester’s pious army, and they isolated the overreaching Cavaliers, cutting them down as they crossed through the first line. Then the real fight began, and Stryker was there, his troops around him, slashing at whoever faced him. They were two masses of horsemen, like a pair of pike blocks at the press, each shoving and cleaving at the other, hoping their combined weight would cause the opposite wedge to splinter and collapse. It was a hard fight. A dirty, bloody, bitter fight. Skellen was near, for Stryker could hear the Gosport man’s filth-laced war-cry even though he could not see him. Hood would be somewhere in the line too, and Barkworth, and they snarled and smashed and hacked, aware that they were outnumbered but knowing that theirs was the force with the famed, seasoned regiments belonging to Prince Rupert of the Rhine. They would not, could not break, for Rupert’s Horse never lost a fight.

Then the trumpets blew.

David Leslie, Lieutenant-General of Horse, gritted his teeth and dipped his head as he steered his line to the right. They went east as soon as they crossed the ditch, peeling around the flank of the Royalist horsemen just as Cromwell led his first two lines directly into the enemy front rank. Leslie had the better part of a thousand men, and most were standard light cavalry, harquebusiers, who would do the work to which he set them without murmur of complaint. But it was the lancers he ordered into the vanguard.

It was a curiosity of war that brought lancers to Yorkshire. The English had no time for them, preferring the heavily armed, brute strength of the harquebusier, but equipping a man in helmet and plate, not to mention the array of weapons a cavalryman brought to bear, made it necessary to put him on a large, powerful horse. Such creatures were difficult to come by in England, but north of the border it was next to impossible. Lancers, however, required smaller, lighter steeds. Theirs was not the tactic of weight and muscle, but of speed and manoeuvrability. That was why the Scottish army had lancers, and now they would show the sneering English how vital their contribution could be.

Leslie tried to shout some encouragement, but found his dry tongue glued firm to his teeth, so he prayed silently, let his bowels open in his breeches, and slowed his horse to watch the lancers go to work.

Stryker felt the blow. It came from his left, where Prince Rupert’s Regiment of Horse made up the broad line, and at first he wondered if they had been impacted by a cannon ball. The force made the whole line shiver, like a wave crashing through a gorge, and he glanced in the direction of the left flank as Vos forced a Parliamentarian’s horse back a step with a hammering hoof.

The lancers had torn the Royalist flank ragged. He had not even seen them advance, too thick was the smoke from so many discharged pistols, but now he could not miss their horrific toll. The Scots pierced deep into Rupert’s prized troops, shredding their cohesion by surprise and by steel. Their long weapons snagged horse-flesh and punctured stomachs, crumpled breastplates and dented helms, the sheer speed of the charge propelling them into the heart of the Royalist block. And though they might have been driven out by cooler heads, they were met with pure, blind panic.

Stryker, mired in the press with the Earl of Manchester’s men, parried a wild sword slash, offered one of his own, and then found himself moving. He had given no command, but Vos was pulled by a tide that was not to be dammed. He braced, thighs burning, clinging for his life, and then, in a heartbeat, the Royalist formation was gone. The packed ranks disintegrated, cracking and scattering, turning their backs in terror, screaming at their own men to move aside so that they might flee. Terror-stricken faces leered at him in the chaos, the faces of king’s men, hitherto unbeatable, blanched to ghostly wisps in the smoke. It was a rout of the worst kind, complete and unstoppable, and its tremors shuddered from Molyneux’s troopers all the way to Rupert’s. Pressed at the front by Cromwell’s grim machine, and on the flank by skewering Scots lances, the entire Royalist right wing crumbled and fled. And Major Stryker, carried on the current, fled too.

Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, First Duke of Cumberland, First Earl of Holderness, President of Wales and supreme commander of Royalist forces on Marston Moor, rode his mighty black stallion at a furious gallop headlong into the flight of his very best cavalry. He did not realise at first, could not countenance anything but a victory by the cream of his army, but then he saw the red scarves intermingled with the shredded cornets of Lord Molyneux, of Thomas Leveson and of Thomas Tyldesley, and he knew that at least part of his second line had shattered. And then, as he weaved his way through the thundering stream of refugees, he glimpsed his own flag. A small, bullet-holed scrap of blue and black cloth, hanging limp from the staff gripped by an equally shot-through cornet of horse. He drew up hard, positioning himself in the midst of the routing horde, holding palms skyward.

‘S’wounds, do you run?’ he bellowed. ‘Follow me!’

Some reined in when they caught sight of their prince, though most did not so much as spare him a glance. In the eventide murk many would not discern him from any other rider, while most simply heard nothing but a panicked pulse in their ears.

The prince swore savagely, stared at the small group who had reformed with him, and saw a familiar face. It was one of scars, blackened by powder stains, with a single eye that glimmered quicksilver in the failing light.

‘Stryker!’ the prince snapped, kicking his stallion into the reclaimed party of troopers. ‘Speak to me!’

‘Manchester’s horse attacked, Highness,’ Stryker said rapidly. He knew how risible his explanation must be to the prince’s ears, and felt himself colour. In the end he simply shrugged. ‘The Scots swept our flank.’

Rupert’s fierce stare lingered for a second, then he twisted in the saddle, summoning Sir Richard Crane with a quick wave. ‘Get your men across this goddamned road, Sir Richard! Block the craven bastards!’

Prince Rupert drew his sword and kicked his black steed to face southwards. ‘Follow me, I say! We will unleash hell’s flames upon these upstart Roundheads!’

Stryker’s blade was already naked, smeared from hilt to tip in blood that streaked dark on the steel. He let Vos walk to take position a short way behind Rupert. Over the tall general’s shoulder he could see thousands of helmets bobbing towards them in a vast swathe, like a string of grey pearls on a black cloth. These were not the broken Royalists, but the victorious Parliamentarians and Scots. They had not been unleashed to seek easy kills and easier plunder, but kept together, disciplined in their original formation, and they came to win a battle.

‘With me!’ Rupert screamed, holding his blade high. Boye was barking at his stallion’s hind legs, as if cajoling the beast to the fight. ‘God and the King! God and the King!’

Stryker looked over his shoulder as the cry echoed again and again. He reckoned they had four hundred men, perhaps five; it was not nearly enough. In the gloom he saw Skellen’s laconic smile. The sergeant’s cap had been knocked away by a blade that had also scalped him, and rivulets of blood drew dark lines round his sepulchral eye-sockets and all the way down to his chin. Lieutenant Hood was at his side, breathing hard, and the feline gaze of Barkworth glowed a short way behind them. Stryker nodded to all three, and Prince Rupert ordered them to charge.

It was not even a fight.

The three tight-knit and slow-moving lines of rebel horsemen, made up of troopers loyal to the earls of Manchester and Leven, had received very few casualties, and they overran the Royalist counter-attack in seconds, their vast, deep line curving around the small body of Cavaliers, enfolding and swallowing them whole like the gaping maw of a ravenous monster.

Stryker was behind Prince Rupert, forming the point of what had become an arrow formation, and they hit the enemy first. He found himself parrying on both sides, offering almost nothing in reply, and streaks of crimson were opening along the line of Vos’s neck where steel tips nicked his flesh. There was no way out and no way to win. Stryker knew he would die. Then Simeon Barkworth was with him, forcing his mount to Vos’s right, and the two fought side by side, kneecaps thumping, each protecting the flank of the other. The tiny Scot, so strange to behold and so lethal in a fight, screamed his Gaelic war-cry that promised a thousand terrible deaths, and crowed to the dark skies.

It was a carbine ball that killed him. A trooper with a black moustache and a white horse shot him from no range at all, and the bullet caught Barkworth flush in the throat. His head snapped back. The scar tissue swathing his neck, burned there by a German noose, was spattered in blood. His yellow eyes dimmed; then he toppled sideways, gargling, and vanished amongst the churning hooves.