His mind went off at a tangent to Noll Cromwell riding in with his Ironsides in mid May ahead of Manchester and the Eastern Association force; Noll Cromwell with his strong heavy face scarred deep with grief for his second son, Oliver, dead of fever in camp at Newport Pagnell. Tom had wrung his hand and tried to tell the older man how much he felt for him in that bitter loss; but his accursed stammer had choked him so that he could scarcely get out a word; and in the end, Cromwell had been the calmer of the two. ‘It is God’s will,’ he had said. ‘And if sometimes God’s will is hard to bear, that is because we are less strong than we should be, and not any unmercy of the Lord’s.’
And he had gone clattering off with his Ironsides and David Leslie with a detachment of Scottish Horse to form a Cavalry screen from Wakefield to Knaresborough, across the expected line of Prince Rupert’s advance from the west.
For if there was anything certain in this world, it was that Prince Rupert must come to the relief of York. The King could not afford to lose the second city of his kingdom. And nor could Parliament.
Tom Fairfax returned to his surroundings and the present moment with a jolting suddenness; and to the possible reasons for this urgently called Council.
Most probably it was news of Prince Rupert’s movements; Prince Rupert who for weeks now had been harrying his way up through Lancashire with the bright inhuman fury of a forest fire. Eh well, he had relieved Latham House, thereby setting William free to bring in his few troops to join the main armies here before York; and for that Thomas Fairfax found himself heartily grateful to the Prince. It was almost his only cheerful reflection for the day.
He turned down a lane not far from Micklegate Bar, and came to a once prosperous looking tavern, with its shutters hanging askew against blackened walls, but its fallen sign propped up beside the starkly gaping doorway. Soldiers were coming and going about the place, and the usual knot of gallopers always to be found about headquarters were kicking their heels before the door. He spoke to the sentry leaning on his pike in the doorway, and went in.
The scene was very familiar; two or three tables had been dragged together to form one in the midst of the long room, and round it several men were already gathered with a blue haze of the inevitable tobacco smoke hanging above their heads. He saw his father’s long anxious face; Lord Leven’s that was like an angry eagle’s; the heavy and rather vacant features of Lord Manchester. He saw their senior officers grouped about them; General Crawford, to judge by the way he lolled in his chair, quite unabashed by the affair of the orchard wall: and noticed the usual undue preponderance from north of the Border. That was the price to be paid for Scottish intervention — one of the prices. Baillie and Buccleuch and Loudoun; Lindsey, that staunch and uncompromising Covenanter, with his plaid flung about him like dark wings; raw-boned red-headed young Maitland, with a tongue too big for his mouth, as they said the old King’s had been.
Black Tom murmured a greeting, and with a bow that took in all three Commanders, folded into the nearest vacant chair. He saw that there was a great map of the district spread on the makeshift table, and weighted down with ink horns and sand boxes to keep it from rolling up again. A long curl of the River Ouse flowed just beside his hand, and in the loop of it, named in fine spiky script, stood Nun Appleton. He looked at it, remembering suddenly that Anne’s Provence roses would be in their fullest glory now.
More men came in. The Council was complete and Lord Manchester, who it seemed was to act as spokesman for the triumvirate, rose to address them as though they were a public meeting, or maybe because he felt more master of the situation on his feet.
‘Gentlemen, I will give you as quickly as may be, my own, Lord Leven’s and Lord Fairfax’s reason for summoning you thus hurriedly.’ He was breathing quickly, as though he himself had been hurrying, his eyes under their sleepy lids bulging a little. ‘News has within the hour come in from General Cromwell that Prince Rupert, having advanced down Wharfedale, is now at Knaresborough.’
A careful silence followed his words, and he looked round at the men gathered about the table, hammering home the point in case they had not understood. ‘In another twenty-four hours at most, he will be here to raise the siege of York.’
But they understood well enough. Lord Fairfax was the first to speak, brushing the dry tips of his fingers together, as he leaned forward, elbows on the table. He glanced at the map before him, then round at the watching faces. ‘Therefore — I do not know how it appears to you, Gentlemen — it appears to me that we have no choice but to be beforehand with his Royal Highness, and raise the siege ourselves.’
An angry muttering that spirted into small fierce jets of denial all round the table greeted his words; to raise the siege — to tamely yield up the second city in the kingdom ... ‘It was not to fall back at first sight of the enemy that we crossed the Tweed,’ young Maitland said, his red hair turned to fiery feathers in the sunset light that streamed through the broken window behind them. And a clamour of agreement rose from the younger and more hot-headed of the Council.
Lord Leven quelled them in a harsh, unemotional Scots voice. ‘Na na, my braw young fighting cocks; a high stomach is a high stomach but hard facts are hard facts; and to be caught between the Prince and the York garrison would be a fatal thing. The choice lies between launching an all-out assault tonight, to enter York at whatever cost, before the relief arrives, and raising the siege as Lord Fairfax advocates.’
But they had no choice, they knew that; no more hope of entering York that night than of entering the New Jerusalem in their earthly bodies.
Lord Fairfax got up, glancing with deference at his fellow Commanders. ‘As the one among us who best knows this countryside, I would suggest that we withdraw our whole force from about York, and make for this point, here —’ He leaned forward to point to a spot on the map, ‘Seven miles out on the road to Knaresborough, in the hope that we may thereby cut the Prince off from York and bring him to action in open country.’
Thomas, leaning forward a little also to see where the thin finger pointed, saw the name upside down and righted it carefully in his mind. Marston Moor.
Chapter 22 - The Flowers of the Forest
So it was over; the sheer chaos of the past forty-eight hours since Cromwell’s report had come in.
Prince Rupert had by-passed them very neatly by getting his troops across the Ouse and coming down the east bank, and last night, even as the Parliamentary forces were bivouac-ing on Long Marston Moor, had ridden triumphantly into York with his Cavalry. At dawn it looked as though the Royalists intended marching south. It had been meant to look like that — a vast hoodwink, and brilliantly handled, thought General Sir Thomas Fairfax, sitting White Surrey with his staff about him on the right of the waiting battle line, and brilliantly it had almost succeeded; for the triple command, fearing for the Eastern Association Counties, had dispatched the best part of their forces under Lord Leven towards Tadcaster to head them off, whereupon young Rupert had flung his men across the bridge of boats at Poppleton, and by nine o’clock his advance Horse had been on the moor.
Black Tom, who, with Cromwell and David Leslie, had been left to guard the ridge southward, had sent gallopers after Lord Leven; and the Scots Commander had in due course turned round and come haring back; a blundering, undignified, and somewhat ludicrous affair of orders and counter orders, and elderly Generals panting in several different directions at top speed and the same time. And to Black Tom, the son of one of the elderly Generals, the whole proceeding tasted somewhat sour in the mouth.
But none the less, they had been in time, and now, at five o’clock on a summer evening, the second evening of July, two armies, greater than any that had faced each other on English soil since the battles of the Roses, stood opposing each other across Long Marston Ditch.
And it had begun to look as though they might continue to stand so until the end of time.
From his place in command of the Right Wing, the main part of both battle li
nes lay clear to Sir Thomas Fairfax, together with the country round. The armies of Parliament marshalled on the gently rising ground that swept up southward behind them to a low wooded crest; the forces of the King drawn up on the moor below. And between them that choked and boggy ditch running almost from the village of Long Marston at his right front, to the tiny hamlet of Tockwith more than a mile away, and dividing the wild moor from the cultivated land where the rye was paling towards harvest.
His gaze, questing, considering, passed over his own Wing, and following along the great shallow curve of the battle line, checked on the massed Foot of the Centre; Lindsey’s Regiment and Maitland’s, the Highland troops in their plaids making blocks of darker colour among the buff and russet of the Lowlanders and the English troops under his father and Lord Manchester. William would be somewhere there, among the buff and russet. He wished that old William had not thrown in his lot with the Foot; it would have been good to have had him here on his own Wing. His gaze lingered frowningly on those ordered ranks. In Manchester he had no great faith, in Crawford who ruled him none at all; and even Lord Leven in overall command, despite his undoubted gifts as a soldier, had no originality, he fought by the book, and it was an old book. And Black Tom had an uneasy feeling that, though they considerably outnumbered the enemy, in the coming engagement originality was going to count. His dubious gaze relinquished the Centre, and thrust on again to where, too far off to make out anything but a kind of ordered starling-speckle of darkness among the palour of the rye, Major-General Oliver Cromwell held the Horse of the Left Wing like hounds in leash. No need there for doubts.
His attention moved out across the ditch, to a smaller army, a thinner and lighter battle line, but one which he knew to be more finely tempered, strung across the dun and grey and purple of the moor. A slow blur of sunshine drifted across the scene, and among the Cavalry of the Royalist Right Wing, a sudden flame-point of burning colour sprang to life; and Black Tom, seeing it, wondered if it was Prince Rupert’s great red cross standard, marking the point of command, not only for the Right Wing but for the whole Royalist battle line. Wondered, as he had not had time to do before, why Prince Rupert, outnumbered as he was, had been so determined to force this fight. Sheer recklessness? Faith in the superior quality of his own troops? Orders from the King that the northern armies were to be dealt with at whatever cost? ... The Centre was of Infantry under Lord Newcastle; Tom Fairfax abandoned them in their turn, and fixed his attention on the Left Wing under Lord Goring; the Wing with which he himself would presently have to do.
Beyond the maze of furze and rabbit warren and inter-weaving dykes and driftways in which the ditch ended, the whole section was drawn up in a formation that was new to him, the Horse in blocks, with the intervals between filled with musketeers. He spoke quietly, without looking round, to Major Ledgard half a length behind him, who would virtually command Fairfax’s Horse that day. ‘I don’t like the look of that formation, Ledgard; I don’t like it in the smallest degree. A murderous formation to charge against.’
‘If it ever comes to charging, Sir,’ Major Ledgard said as quietly. ‘If we’re not doomed to sit our horses here until they take root beneath us.’
So it seemed like that to his Major, too. Fairfax glanced round quickly into the man’s square steady face, and his eyes were carried beyond him in a long, quiet, intent look that moved from face to face of his staff, Charles D’Oyley and Will Hill and the rest of his gallopers, and beyond again, rank on rank, squadron on squadron of his own Wing; his own regiment; Scots and English; faces wearing the peculiar and varied expressions that men wear in the time of going into battle; the warmth of crimson sash on russet coat, the teal and widgeon gleam of tartan, the dark glint of steel; the white kerchief that each man bore in his helmet as though the whole army wore a white rose in its hat. Black Tom loved his men, but never quite so much, even in the moment of victory, as in the time immediately before action; never so piercingly as before this action on which, he knew in his heart as all men on both sides of the ditch must know, hung the winning or losing of the north.
A little wind, hardly more than a ripple of air, stole along the gentle slope of the hill, stirring the silken folds of the standard of Fairfax’s Horse, and drew his attention to the young cornet who carried it. The boy was newly joined, like so many — too many — of the men behind him; Black Tom was not even sure of his name. He could not be more than sixteen or seventeen; his head was up, his eyes wide, his compressed lips looked uncomfortably dry. Dear God! How vulnerable the young were, and how they shone! The boy’s eyes came to meet his, bright, and deeply grave. Black Tom smiled at him as though for that moment they two stood alone on Marston Moor, before he turned face-forward again. And the boy would have died for him thereafter.
‘More rain,’ said Major Ledgard in disgust, hunching his already sodden shoulders against the spattering thunder shower. It had been raining off and on all day, with gleams of sun between. ‘If ever we do advance all this wet rye is going to hamper us damnably!’
Time passed. The Parliamentary soldiers, having marched all morning and had little chance of a meal, were weary of waiting. Fairfax could feel their impatient weariness behind him, tangible as the thick oppressiveness of thunder in the air. Through the sultry stillness he heard the sharply alien sounds of the battle line. A distant order, a dog’s bark, the jink of a bridle bit as a horse behind him flung up its head, each sound a little larger and more distinct than life. How pale the rye looked under the drifting sky of dark cloud and intense blue. The rain had passed again, and a gleam of acid sunshine caught the soldiers’ breastplates and the multitude of colours and standards. The clouds of dancing midges that had been making life a torment shone out suddenly transmuted into gold; and high overhead a hawk hung bivvering against the tumbled grey and blue.
In their long-drawn waiting, both armies appealed to their God. Now and then the quiet of the hill broke into a deep drone of sound, ragged and monotonous yet oddly moving, as English Parliamentarians and grim Scots Covenanters broke into a psalm. ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he bath chosen for his own inheritance ... Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy; to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine. Our soul waiteth for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in his holy name. Let thy mercy, Oh Lord, be upon us, according as we hope in thee.’
On the Royalist side of the ditch, Prince Rupert ordered a sermon, and listened to it without dismounting, his big white poodle, Boy, sitting at his horse’s forefoot and apparently listening also. And the Royalist Chaplain took for his text, ‘The Lord God of Gods. He knoweth, and Israel he shall know; if it be in rebellion or if in transgression against the Lord, save us not this day.’
More time passed. The shadows of horses and men began to lie long as giants across the moor; and on both sides of the ditch it seemed that there could be no action today. Lord Newcastle, who had come to the field of battle stately-wise in the great gilded coach in which, just a year ago, he had sent Lady Fairfax back to her husband in Hull, returned to it to smoke a pipe. Prince Rupert, in a reckless gesture of contempt for his enemy, dismounted and demanded his supper, sending orders for his men to do likewise. Black Tom Fairfax, though he caught the incongruous golden gleam of the coach among the furze bushes, could know nothing of all that, but he was aware none the less of some slackening of tension among the Royalist lines, a general atmosphere of ungirding, and, the decision having been taken to attack on the first sign of the enemy’s unpreparedness, he was already alert and tingling for the sound of trumpets before it came.
A clear, high challenge of trumpets ripped the stillness apart as though it were a curtain; and a kind of rustle, a sound like a deep breath rippled all along the battle line. ‘God!’ said Major Ledgard at half breath. ‘Here’s a fine time to set on! Be dusk in an hour.’
‘Hardly so soon,’ Fairfax said, his hand already tightening on White Surrey’s bridle, and quoted him Fuller’s proverb: ‘“A summer’s evening is as long as a winter’s day”. The skies are clearing, and we shall have a moon later.’
Activity was stirring all down the ranks, the horses beginning to dance, as though sensing that their moment was upon them. Sharp orders pricked the rising surf of sound; somewhere in the Centre the drums began to roll and were silent again. And now on the far side of the ditch, the Royalist trumpets also were sounding, urgent, warning trumpets, as men hurriedly swung back into the saddle or set pike at the ready. A swish and a drubbing of hooves came up behind Tom Fairfax, and one of Lord Leven’s gallopers reined in his snorting mount beneath the black lion standard. ‘Lord Leven’s compliments, Sir Thomas. Prepare for General Advance at sound of trumpets.’