Marston Moor (53 page)

He had come to warn them of the enemy cavalry advance, but they could see the Earl of Manchester’s horsemen bearing down upon the centre of the moor for themselves, and had shifted into their hackled formation without delay. They were unwilling to part for three unknown riders, so Stryker and his men were forced to linger on the outside. He kept Vos under tight control, holding the jittery animal in sway by granite thighs and fists. He searched for Strickland, could not find him, and shrank low as a fierce volley of shot rent the air all around. The enemy infantry had extra impetus now, for they must have seen their cavalry begin its move, seen too the torpor that would result in their opponents’ hunkering into the solid but static hedgehog, and the air seemed suddenly closer, hotter, as the Parliament ranks laid down renewed fire.

‘Keep form!’ Stryker screamed into the pike forest. ‘Keep the shape! They will not charge circle!’

But that all depended upon the circle remaining intact.

Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell had begun the day with four thousand horse. Now, with a portion of his cavalry riding into the country to hunt down the routed enemy, he rode at the head of just over two thousand, made up of his own troopers of the Eastern Association and of David Leslie’s Scots. The English units thudded gauntleted fists upon shining breastplates, the clang echoing over the hills, while the Scots chanted a war-cry in their exotic tongue. The lancers of Balgonie, on their spry mounts, lofted the long, sharp spears that had already put paid to Prince Rupert’s highly experienced regiment. They were a deadly battle line, forged together in the blood of the shattered enemy wing, and now they went towards the fulcrum of the day’s encounter.

The English harquebusiers of the front line drew the first of their two firearms, for some a carbine, for others a pistol, and carefully looped the leather reins about the free hand.

Cromwell, out in front, fastened his helm and lowered the face guard. He raised a gloved hand, held it like the sword of Damocles, and waited for a new shiver of pain to trace its way over his injured neck. Then he swept it down, slapping his thigh.

The horses went to the trot. They swept across the moor, splitting line only to skirt the detritus of battle, reforming as soon as they could to present an unbroken front of steel and malevolence. As they rode they chanted psalms, shouted prayers, and felt their hearts hammer against the Bibles that were held fast against their ribs. The rain had gone but the wind was up, and their cornets fluttered and snapped as they bore down on the flank of the enemy infantry, who would be hesitant to form the spiny defensive perimeter because they would be easy prey for the muskets of Crawford’s foot brigade.

They were a hundred yards out. The earth shuddered beneath their hooves. They could hear the frightened shouts coming from the Royalist divisions, but knew nothing could stop their assault. They raised their voices, praising God in the highest, but always, always keeping to the steady trot their dour general insisted upon.

‘God with us!’ Cromwell called, his throat suddenly arid.

They swarmed over the moor, sweeping from west to east in a wave that would roll over the human shore, drowning everything in its path. Infantry could stand against cavalry. Men could huddle behind a breastwork made of ash poles and entrust their survival to a horse’s fear of sharpened steel. But they could not achieve such a feat if its other flanks were raked at the same moment by cannon balls and bullets. Lord Lindsay’s hard-nosed Covenanters had done it, but they had faced only a small number of Goring’s original complement. Now the malignant brigades would shudder under Cromwell’s well-ordered wing, and their fortunes would not turn so favourably.

When they were fifty yards out they levelled their firearms. The pikes fell to the charge position, ready to impale any man or beast foolish enough to risk contact.

Thirty yards and still at the trot. They pulled their triggers. Smoke crashed around the riders’ heads. The Royalist blocks visibly shivered. They thrust home the flintlocks and drew their swords.

And the first of the enemy ranks fell apart.

Stryker felt Vos shake. At first it was a tremor, as though the creature was cold, but then the great Dutch stallion stumbled. He fell forwards slowly, and Stryker slid on to the horse’s granite-hard neck. He felt the blood, slick on his gloves, and knew there was too much. Then Vos was down, slumped on his fore-knees, his breathing a gargled rasp like an iron file on a grate, and Stryker jerked his boots from the stirrups, rolling to his right as the beast collapsed in the opposite direction. He scrambled up, throwing himself over Vos and dropping his sword so that he could cradle the heavy head. The beast’s breaths were unfathomably fast and pathetically shallow. Stryker counted five bullet holes in his neck, ragged and black and gleaming.

Vos meant ‘fox’ in the Dutch – he had named him thus for his red coat – yet that magnificent pelt was now dyed from ear to shoulder in a deeper, darker hue. Stryker held the horse, his companion through so many fights, as the animal gave a final, violent shake and fell still. He dropped the head, muzzle sinking into the gore, and scrambled for the saddle, hands plunging into the bags, ripping the straps, gutting the innards as blood smeared. His pipe came away, dropping into the mud at his knees, and a wooden bowl, a tinder box and a length of match. Skellen was above him, on foot, shouting at him to get up, and Hood was there too, grasping at his shoulders, but he shrugged the lieutenant away. Then he found what he was looking for: Faith Helly’s Bible. Hate-Evil Sydall’s cipher. He tore it free of the bag, taking his pistols too, and snatched up his sword. Hood and Skellen took him, dragging him physically upwards so that he slid clumsily to his feet. There was no time to return to their own mounts, so the trio pushed their way into the hedgehog as the cavalry of the Eastern Association crashed home. The pikes jutted out to block them, and they veered away, seeking easier quarry, but that was not the end of the danger. Stryker was safe behind the pikemen now, sheltered against the storm, but he knew it was an illusion. Strickland’s men muttered, as they witnessed the grinning harquebusiers roll down through the Royalist lines to pick off the weakest units. And quietly, so quietly, they questioned whether this was their fight at all. Because the enemy raiders were numerous and confident, and they all knew that between those spiteful horsemen and the mighty tide of Allied foot, they would stand scanty chance without the support of their own cavalry.

‘Hold!’ Stryker brayed, though none seemed to heed the call. They were frightened, tempted to break cover and run, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.

He tucked the Bible into his breast pocket and peered through the gaps between the heads of the pikemen and musketeers. The adjacent brigade was in trouble. Like wolves sensing the weakest heifer in a herd, the tawny-scarfed troopers had swirled around its perimeter, maintaining and prolonging their attack because the circle had not been fully formed. Perhaps some of their officers were dead, or simply too frozen by fear to give the right orders, but their manoeuvre to shield against horse had stalled and now they were caught between charging their pikes and presenting their muskets. Holes had opened up, like fissures in a dam, and the horsemen lunged into them; soon the brigade that hitherto had been so well ordered and expertly drilled melted away. In the end, the only thing left to do was run, and so they ran.

‘Hold the circle!’ Stryker bawled to Strickland’s brigade, but he could barely hear his own voice. He could sense men filtering out to the rear, hear the clatter as pikes were discarded, and knew that the formation was beginning to fracture as its neighbour had done.

A massive volley of muskets boomed from the south. Men fell all around. The rebel foot were crossing the ditch now, pressing their advantage as Cromwell’s crowing horsemen were unleashed to carve deep furrows into the staggering Royalist blocks. It was too much. Strickland’s brigade collapsed, jettisoning weapons and scarves and hats and snapsacks in their desperation to be free of the killing ground. They were making for Wilstrop Wood, but there was at least a hundred paces to cover before reaching the tree line, and there was no chance the fugitives would make it before the rebel cavalry hunted them down.

Stryker, Hood and Skellen bunched back to back. Stryker’s pistols were in his belt, for there was no time to load them, and he held his sword out straight, challenging any who might make sport of his slaughter. The rout raged everywhere as the enemy cavalry spurred into the fleeing throng to slash at backs and skulls. Their infantry were on the march now, coming up to support their shattering success. More Royalist brigades were imploding with every moment.

‘The wood?’ Hood called.

Stryker flinched as a pistol ball whipped between them. ‘No! We’ll never make it!’

‘There!’ Skellen snapped. He unslung the halberd from his back, pointing it at a brigade fifty paces to the south-west of their position. ‘Lambs!’

Stryker nodded. ‘They’re standing firm!’ The first of the rebel foot were close to their position now, driving blades into the fallen wounded as they swept up the field. Soon their pikes would be jammed into whatever remained of the Royalist units. ‘We’ll take refuge with the whitecoats!’

‘But they will soon be alone!’ Hood shouted. ‘Stranded!’

Stryker glanced round. ‘You’re right, Tom, it is a terrible idea. Tell me yours.’

Hood opened his mouth, then hesitated. He did not have to see how many of their routed comrades were already being put to the sword by the exultant cavalry, for he could hear their tormented screams well enough. In the end he simply blew out his cheeks in resignation. ‘After you, sir!’

They bolted. Stryker jumped bodies and weaponry, fearing a slip or trip would be the end of him and all the while expecting the thunder of hooves at his back. A corporal ran past him, evidently resolved upon the same course, but the man, younger and fleeter of foot, went down in a welter of blood as a carbine ball shattered the back of his skull. Stryker did not look back. He kept running, sprinting until his legs burned and his chest felt as though it would explode. Up ahead were the whitecoats, Newcastle’s Regiment of Foot, and their formation had not been compromised. Their banners of rich red, adorned with the cross of Saint George and the white crosses of the Marquis of Newcastle, called to him, beckoning him to their protection.

He reached the brigade as Skellen bellowed a warning from behind. Stryker turned, just in time to see the flash of a blade stab down at him from the back of a snorting destrier, and he threw himself flat, fingers clawing the mud. He felt the heavy sword slice the air, heard the hiss but felt no pain, and he rolled to the side, scrabbling in the slick filth and pushing himself up as if the ground itself might swallow him.

Then the assailant was gone, too fearful of the poised pikes to linger, and Stryker, Skellen and Hood were hauled into the bristling circle as the rest of Prince Rupert’s grand army disintegrated around them.

As the vast Royalist battle line crumbled so the horsemen belonging to the Earl of Manchester and the Earl of Leven, commanded this day by Cromwell and Leslie, gave chase. They spurred into the fraught chaos, slashing at heads and spines, leaning low out of saddles to cleave a fleeing man’s neck or snatch the standard from an ensign’s desperate grip. And as the men loyal to the Crown – men who had marched all the way from the west coast, men who had held York for so long against such insurmountable odds – turned to run away, the Allied infantry, galvanised by the Earl of Manchester’s return and spearheaded by the rehabilitated Major-General Crawford, swarmed into them.

‘Parliament!’ Captain John Kendrick snarled as he whipped the top of a musketeer’s skull away with his sword as casually as if he shelled a boiled egg. ‘God with us!’ He did not believe in any deity, of course, and nor did he particularly care about any Parliament, but today he would indulge the whims of his new Puritan comrades. After all, he had not expected this. It was, he admitted, something of a miracle.

Kendrick was near Crawford as they advanced. Manchester’s Foot, on the extreme left of the rebel line, were already across the ditch when Cromwell struck, and now they wheeled right to come at the Royalists from the west. The huge Scots contingent, away to his right, clambered over the corpse-filled trench and pushed directly north, squeezing the enemy like dogs herding sheep, so that the twin armies of Prince Rupert and the Marquis of Newcastle were now just a single, throbbing multitude. The herd shunted backwards. They had not all capitulated, and those that were tempted quickly learnt that to run meant to be hunted and slaughtered by the whooping cavalry. So they gathered instinctively behind the only brigade that remained entirely intact, a stoically solid block of white-coated men who loaded and fired with impressive regularity from beneath a score of red banners. The whitecoats faced their persecutors as the broken Royalist horde edged north and east, step by anguished step, retiring towards the ancient road that would take them to York. Swarming after them, tramping in their blood-slick wake, was one of the largest armies to have ever been assembled in the three kingdoms.