Battles and Battlefields in England ... Illustrated by the author. With an introduction by H. D. Traill

Introduction

. "This England," exclaims Shakspeare's Faulconbridge in that stirring boast which will ring for ever in the ears of Englishmen, " never did nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror But when it first did help to wound itself.'" The Bastard generalised from a single instance ; for only once, from the time when the Angles gave the island its name down to King John's day, or for that matter down to our own, has England undergone a " conquest " in the strict sense of the term, and no doubt on that one occasion it had first helped in the person of its ill-fated ruler to wound itself. But in the strife of "malice domestic" as distinguished from " foreign levy," — in the civil broils which have led to no conquests save those of political factions, and have left behind them no conquerors save the English prince who vanquished a kinsman, or the English rebel leader who overthrew his king, " this England " has given itself many a wound.

One wonders whether those who have made no reckoning of their own will be prepared for or surprised by Mr. Barrett's statistics of English battles — that is to say, battles of the first rank in military or political importance — from Fulford to Sedgemoor. Fulford, the first in his list, was fought on September 20, 1066, and Sedgemoor, fought on July 6, 1685, is the thirty-seventh. That means an average of one battle about every seventeen years for a period of a little over six centuries. It is a pretty long and a fairly lively tale, and it seems to show that even a country with no foreign enemy, save on a few occasions, to repel, no invader aiming at the position of proud-footed conqueror to defeat, may yet, by the healthy play of its own internal passions or political activities, make shift to accumulate as goodly an array of historic battlefields as can be found in lands divided from their neighbours by frontiers of field and hedgerow instead of being "compassed by the inviolate sea."

INTRODUCTION.

. XII The " silver streak," however, did not of course encircle one united island until the conjunction of the two Crowns, and thus on five at least of these foughten fields our English forefathers were actually paying the penalties of the field-and-hedgerow frontier, or at any rate of the hill-and-river boundary which divided them from what was then a separate kingdom. Northallerton (the Battle of the Standard), Neville's Cross, Otterburn, immortal in the ballad of Chevy Chase, Homildon Hill and Flodden, most famous of them all, were fought to beat back incursions of the Scots. At Fulford and Stamford Bridge the Saxon was at hand-grips with a Danish or Norwegian invader, and at Hastings he was vainly struggling to save his country from the grasp of a yet more formidable foreign foe. This however leaves, from Lewes in the thirteenth century to Sedgemoor in the seventeenth, a balance of twenty-nine battles of a strictly " civil " description ; and, considering that for the whole of one of these four centuries the English were strewing French battlefields with their dead, and for the best part of another hundred years were buccaneering and filibustering their lives away in the New World, their military record seems a pretty full one for a nation of shopkeepers.

Had fate distributed our historic battles equally over England there would have been almost enough to " go round," and nearly every English county would have had its battlefield to show. But they have not been allocated on so equitable a principle. The north of England has had to pay the penalty of its proximity to the per fervid Scot ; and it is partly in consequence of this that Northumber land, Durham, and Yorkshire account among them for more than one-third of the total. Three times in the first named of these counties, once in the second and once in the last, have Scotch and English closed in deadly conflict. Twice in Northumberland and twice in Yorkshire did the Red and White Roses set the battle in array against each other, and on the last occasion at Towton, for one of the fiercest and bloodiest of all the fights that ever were fought on English soil.

But next to keeping the northern marches of the kingdom, or lying adjacent to one of the warden shires, contiguity to and command of the capital was the surest claim on the attentions of contending armies ; and Hertfordshire, that cockpit of Yorkists and Lancastrians, comes next with its two battles of St. Albans and its epoch-making field of Barnet. No other county has attained to the honours of more than two, and out of the whole forty as many as two - and - twenty contain no historic battlefield at all. Fate and the fortune of war, the accident of geographical position, or of the territorial distribution of the power of the great feudal lords

INTRODUCTION.

. XIII have combined to hold them scathless. The long, confused, and desolating struggle of the rival Plantagenets swept over the fair face of England from south to north and back again, from within a few score miles of the English Channel to the near neighbourhood of the Scottish border. The Northumberland dalesmen watched their charging hosts at Hexham ; the thunder of their rude artillery was heard in the capital on the eve of Barnet. Between these two latitudes, along a comparatively narrow north and southward -stretching zone, the country is dotted with their battlefields. But east and south-west and furthest west escaped. Margaret of Anjou landed at Weymouth for her last struggle with the Yorkists. Devon and Cornwall were raised by her followers, Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts were traversed by her forces, but it was in Gloucestershire that the decisive battle was fought.

Wessex, however, had its share of fighting in the Civil War, when East Anglia again escaped. From Stratton in Cornwall to Lansdown, that airy plateau overlooking Bath, whereon a monument still records the scene of stout old Sir Bevil Grenvil's death, Roundhead and Cavalier gave and took many a hard knock. The whole west country, indeed, from Bristol to Launceston, had lively times throughout the greater part of the war, as also had the mid land and northern shires. Thanks to the " Association," the eastern counties once more succeeded in damming back the tide of battle from their fields and homesteads. There is perhaps no other district of England which has been held so scathless from the hand of war throughout the eight hundred years of our history since the Con quest as that tract of country within which is included the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Essex.

This area excepted, it may be safely said that, taking one period with another, there is hardly any part of the country which has not seen its share of fighting. Mr. Barrett, of course, gives only the greater battles ; indeed it is only these which ever attain to the dignity of a name. The countless skirmishes of the Civil War, and, more important still, the captures of towns — even great and important military centres — enter only by way of reference into his pages. Could we recover and record all the nameless conflicts between Parliament's men and King's men ; could we represent all the casual bloodshed on one side or the other in an appropriate colour on the map of England, we should probably find, with the exception above referred to, no county without its spots of red. Only it would then appear that for some reason or other the majority of the larger stains were to be found in the midland and northern shires. Hastings only excepted — for the work of Barnet was not complete till after Tewkesbury — there has been

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. XIV no decisive battle fought in this country anywhere within a hundred miles of the capital. Evesham, Towton, Bosworth, Flodden, Marston Moor, Naseby, and— to end with the county we began with— the scene' of the " crowning niercy," Worcester itself, are all either in the Midlands or in the North. Not that the decisive are necessarily the romantic battles of our history. Flodden is so, but that is due to peculiar circumstances — to the personal chivalry of the skilless and dauntless King of Scots, to the splendid devotion of the Scottish chiefs who fell in such numbers round their sovereign, and indeed to the unconquerable courage and fidelity of the whole of that ill-fated host, in whose ranks " Groom fought like noble, squire like knight. As fearlessly and well." Flodden could not but be romantic even if it had not inspired the finest poetic battle-piece in the English language.

It was not often, even in times nearer the heroic age than ours, that a king fell fighting at the head of his army, and never before, perhaps, after staking the whole fortunes of his kingdom, like the luckless James IV., upon one desperate hazard. But, after all, it is in most cases the bard who makes the battle. It is not its heaps of slain, nor its master-strokes of strategy, nor even the mighty political issues that hang upon its fortunes — not these is it, but its vates sacer, that keeps its story fresh in the memory of men, and the figures of its fighters vivid in the imagi nation of future ages. The nameless Scottish balladist who sang — It fell about the Lammas tide, When the muir-men win their hay, The doughty Earl of Douglas rode Into England to catch a prey," — he and his equally unknown English rival, who flung across the Border that exulting answer, "The child that is unborn shall rue The hunting of that day," have made the Battle of Otterburn and the name of Chevy Chase mean more to the lover of romance than many a field which has decided the fate of a dynasty.

It is interesting to trace in Mr. Barrett's careful and strictly sifted account of this battle the clear historic outlines of the chivalrous story— a perfect mediæval epic— which

INTRODUCTION.

. XV chronicler and ballad-singer have left us, and of which Douglas and Percy are respectively the Hector and Achilles. The Scottish earl, crossing the Border at the head of 3,000 men, has raided the " English side " right up to the Tyne, when the first " fytte " of the Homeric tale begins.' In a skirmish under the walls of Newcastle the two leaders came into actual hand-to-hand conflict, and Percy, the renowned Hotspur, was borne to earth by his adversary, who seized the lance and pennon of his unhorsed foe, and vowed, shaking it aloft, that he would plant it on his castle of Dalkeith. "That," answered 'Percy, "shalt thou never"; and having raised a levy of the Marches to a strength equal, or (according to the Scottish chroniclers) much superior to Douglas's force, he followed in their retreating footsteps, and overtaking them at Otterburn, after an extraordinary march, gave battle by moonlight, as related in the text.

The prose chronicler does not vouch, it is true, for the balladist's duel between Percy and Douglas, wherein the Scottish earl, entering unhelmeted into the encounter, was struck on the brow by the " good broad sword " of the English knight, and so slain. More authentic history relates that Douglas, plunging into the thickest of the English battalions attended only by his chaplain, Richard Lundie, " afterwards Archdean of Aberdeen" (how quaint a touch is that!), and by two squires of his body, Robert Hart and Simon Glendenning, was surrounded by the enemy before his followers could come up, and was found by them stretched on the ground with three mortal wounds, his two squires dead beside him, and the future Archdean standing over his prostrate patron and defending him with a lance. " I die like my forefathers," said the earl, according to Godscroft, "on a field of battle, and not on a bed of sickness.

Conceal my death, defend my standard, and avenge my fall ! It is an old prophesy that a dead man shall gain a field, and I hope it will be accomplished this night." It was the " dreary dream " of Douglas in the Scottish ballad— I saw a dead man win a fight, and I think that man was I It would have been dramatically fitter that he should have fallen by the hand of Percy, but considering that the artless old ballad weaver represents Percy a few stanzas later as unaware that Douglas has been killed, we must reluctantly conclude that Godscroft's version of the affair is the correct one. It is with still greater unwillingness that we give up the legendary burial-place of the Scottish earl. He was not " buried at the bracken bush " that he chooses in the ballad as his last resting-place. A spot

INTRODUCTION.

. XVI near which he is supposed to have fallen is still marked by a cross ; but the hero himself was carried home over the Border and buried at Melrose Abbey, where his tomb is still shown. The dead man, however, won his fight, for the English were soundly beaten, and " the Percy," as the balladist avers, redeeming his reputation for veracity in the last line, was, in fact, " led captive away." He surrendered to Sir Robert Montgomery, ancestor of the present Earl of Eglinton, on whose barony of Eaglesham stands (or stood) the castle of Penoon, built by the captive as his ransom. Hotspur, thanks to Shakspeare, carries romance with him wherever he goes, and it accompanies him when, fifteen years after Otterburn, he crossed into Cheshire with the 4th Earl of Douglas (the same whom he had taken prisoner but a few months before at Homildon Hill), and began that spirited race with Prince Hal for Shrewsbury, which the latter only won by a few hours.

Falstaff, it will be remembered, was at the same time advancing northward from his base at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, though by more leisurely stages, and rendered more deliberate in his movements by a certain disinclination to march through Coventry. We get a glimpse of the breathless haste of the Royalists in the dialogue between Sir John and West moreland. " My Lord of Westmoreland, I cry you mercy. I thought your honour had already been at Shrewsbury." To which the answer is, " Faith, Sir John, 'tis more than time that I were there and you too. . . . The King, I can tell you, looks for us all ; we must away all night." Falstaff's reply was slightly evasive ; but, as we all know, he arrived in time to take part in the engagement, and even to cross swords with no less doughty a warrior than the Douglas.

One may speak of this famous passage of arms, terminated by a stratagem on the part of the English champion, as though it were historical, for in truth it is not more mythical than the Homeric duel between Prince Hal and Hotspur, in which the youth of fifteen fighting his maiden battle is represented as slaying a seasoned soldier of exactly twice his age. Shakspeare, however, like the ballad-maker who sano of Otterburn, gives the poetic truth of a battle in which the stripling Prince stood, far more than his gloomy and conscience-stricken father", for the strength and hopes of the new dynasty, while the warlike Percy was the life and soul of the rebellion. It is these two who dominate the scene, and the attention is not distracted from them even by the spirited Shakspearean sketch of the reckless and luckless Douglas— the "tyneman," or "lose-man," as his countrymen called him —whose life was a succession of failures, who was defeated, lost an eye and was taken prisoner at Homildon Hill, was beaten again at Shrews-

INTRODUCTION.

. XVII bury, where he fell over a precipice, and was once more taken a prisoner, in attempting to escape, and finally perished on a French battlefield. After Shrewsbury the land had rest for over fifty years — its longest interval of repose since that which Prince Edward won for it on the field of Evesham. English blood flowed freely enough during the half-century that elapsed between the suppression of the Glyndwr rebellion and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, but it sank into a foreign soil. France took toll of our dead in many a battle of those three-and-fifty years, from Agincourt to Formigny ; and when at last the weary struggle of the French wars was brought to an end, and the nation was able, for the first time in the course of a century, to draw back its outstretched hand, to stanch the exhausting flux which had been steadily draining its life-blood since the days of Edward III., and to concentrate its strength within its own four seas, it was only to find itself called upon to submit for another sixteen years to the ordeal of the most cruel and desolating struggle by which our island has ever been laid waste.

Yet it is strange how faint an impression this terrible if tedious dynastic duel of the Two Roses has left upon the imagination of the English of later days. One may almost fancy that the weariness of the distracted and impoverished nation had descended as a legacy of indifference and almost of disgust to its posterity, and that it is the unhappiness of these "old unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago," which leaves even a remote generation insensible to such romantic appeal as they make. Yet savage and selfish as was this struggle between York and Lancaster, it was undoubtedly signalised by notable feats of arms, and produced or brought to maturity more than one illustrious man. The heroic figure of the king-maker looms large in our history ; and though it is difficult to recognise the statesman and warrior in the silken voluptuary who ruled England for the twelve years which followed Barnet and Tewkesbury — a Byronic Sardanapalus, alike in his courtly vices and his soldierly virtues, though without the atonement of the Assyrian's heroic death — yet it is beyond dispute that from the furnace of war and the icy waters of political adversity Edward IV. came out hardened and tempered into the astutest ruler and the greatest captain of his age.

To have crushed the armies of Warwick and Oueen Margaret within three weeks of each other, and the latter on the morrow of a forced march of forty odd miles, was a memorable exploit, and well worthy of a Prince who had never throughout the whole war lost a battle in which he personally commanded. The rush by which the Yorkists carried St. Albans in the opening fight of the

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. XVIII war was a brilliant and dashing exploit. The desperate valour of both victors and vanquished during the ten hours' struggle on the dreadful Palm Sunday of Towton, won the unstinted praise of Froissart. But romance is somehow wanting to the long-drawn struggle — a want which not even the genius of Shakspeare has been able to supply. He who could so kindle our enthusiasm with his presentment of a warrior and stir our pulses with a warrior's voice, imprints on our minds no vivid image of a martial presence throughout the three Histories of Henry VI., save that of Talbot ; and Talbot himself seems tame beside the splendid figure of Hotspur, the true hero of " Henry IV.," or of that of Henry's gallant gasconading son in the History that bears his name. There is no soldier-hero in the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI.

The eye glances indifferently over the fierce Princes of the House of York, and even the mighty baron who by turns exalted and abased them, to rest upon the pathetic shadow of the meek and nerveless king as he muses yearningly on the shepherd's lot within earshot of the most famous fight and deadly battle of the war. Even the great historic issues which hung upon the fate of individual combatants seem unable to hold our interest, and the death of Warwick and of the baronial power that perished with him hardly affect us like the fate of Douglas in the mere border foray of Otterburn, or like that of Hotspur at Shrewsbury, of Falkland at Newbury, of John Hampden at Chalgrove Field. The whole period of the Wars of the Roses seems less like a stage of real, if violent, national development, than a mere confused, bloody and irrelevant interlude in the national life.

England — the true England of our filial devotion, the England great in arms and jurisprudence, as we knew her under Edward I., the England illustrious in poesy and adventure as we are again to know her under Elizabeth, seems, as it were, to be standing sullenly at gaze amid her crippled commerce and her ruined fields, and waiting until a fratricidal conflict in which she has no part or lot, shall wear itself to an end. No wonder she was ripe for the New Monarchy, that whole some despotism of the Tudors which rescued the nation from the alter nating grasp of savagely warring factions, to place it under the firm and steadying pressure of a single masterful hand. Very different, however, is the feeling with which we look back on the struggle of the great Civil War. If Red Rose and White Rose knights and men-at-arms have become shadows for us, Cavalier and Roundhead are flesh and blood enough.

Their spiritual heirs indeed are with us to this day, with unmistakable ancestral lineaments to keep the faces of their forefathers fresh in our minds ; and as has been well said, it is one of the few historical instances of a civil combat in which the combatants

INTRODUCTION.

. XIX possess almost equally balanced claims on the sympathy and admiration of posterity. If, moreover, they are not both equally picturesque in point of externals, the very contrast between them is of that dramatically striking type which enhances the picturesqueness of the general effect. For never, perhaps, was a more pregnant and a more stimulating contrast ever arrayed by Fate between two such conspicuous groups of actors on so admirably suitable a stage. On the one side chivalry, brilliancy, gallantry, gaiety, recklessness — all the qualities that appeal to the eye and inspirit the imagination ; on the other side fortitude, tenacity, enthusiasm, stern devotion to duty, unshakable religious faith, inextinguishable religious ardour — all the qualities that impress the mind and touch the deeper emotions.

The glow of romance illumines both ; for though the Puritan in times of peace as we see him to-day is not outwardly a romantic figure, we are or should be conscious of that inner and ideal side of him which great cases of action have never failed to bring out — as in our Havelocks, and Lawrences, and Gordons, and all those other " fighting and praying soldiers " who are in fact our Ironsides of to-day. It is indeed characteristic of these great but latent qualities that they were developed among the mass of the Roundhead army in the seventeenth century under stress of the same forces as are required in our day to evoke them in the individual ; and it is their gradual growth into overwhelming potency which makes the history of the Civil War as interesting as a great romance. It had its opening chap ter in that memorable conversation between Cromwell and Hampden which took place on the morrow of the wild and indecisive struggle of Edgehill, and which he afterwards related as Lord Protector in a speech to his second Parliament.

Even at that early date and from his observation of the very first encounter of the war, his instinct told him that, military capacity apart, the moral impulse which carries men to victory was on the Royalist side. " Your troops," said he to Hampden, "are most of them old decayed serving-men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their troops are gentlemen's sons, younger sons, and persons of quality. Do you think that the spirits of such base mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them ? " Men of a spirit as potent as that which animated the Royalists must be raised to combat them, and Cromwell knew of but one such animating and sustaining impulse. Piety must be matched against chivalry. To cope with men of honour they must have men of religion.

To this Mr. Hampden made cautious answer that, " it was a good notion if it could be executed " ; and executed it could be and was. " I raised such men as had the fear of God before them, as made some conscience of what they did ; and

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. XX from that day forward I must say to you they were never beaten, and whenever they were engaged against the enemy they beat con tinually." But this "little leaven" was slow in leavening the whole lump. The great soldier who spoke these words had yet to rise from command to command, to create first a troop then a regiment, to organise the Eastern Association and its forces, to develop these forces into the New Model army, and upon that model to reconstruct the entire military array of the Parliament before the crushing blow of Naseby could be delivered. And in the meantime, as though to sustain the interest of this great romance of history, the Parliamentary cause throughout this entire period of two years was almost uninter ruptedly losing ground. The Royal cause was triumphant in the north ; Waller was annihilated in the west ; the Fairfaxes were driven into Hull ; Bristol surrendered to Prince Rupert.

The only Parliamentary successes of the year 1643 — the relief of Gainsborough and later on of Hull, the clearance of the Royalists out of Lincolnshire, and the addition of that county to the Eastern Association — were all of Cromwell's winning. Elsewhere the King was carrying all before him ; and in the autumn of 1643 it looked as if the game of Parliament was up. It was at Marston Moor that the tide of warfare turned at last against the Royalists, and at Naseby a twelvemonth later that it reached its flood and swept the armies of the ill-fated King resistlessly before it. This is not the place to rehearse in detail the stirring story of that last great battle, and of the southern and western march of the victorious army during the months that followed it, when town after town and fortress after fortress fell before Cromwell and Fairfax until stout old Sir Jacob Astley, the last Royalist in the field, surrendered with his little force at Stow-in-the-Wold, remarking drily to his conquerors, " You have now done your work and may go play — unless you will fall out among yourselves."

Their falling out was to come promptly enough for Presbyterians and Independents ; and some of their work was still to do in Scotland, Ireland, and (biggest job of all) within thirty miles of the spot whereon the old Cavalier was standing as he spoke. But Worcester was really the finishing stroke of the war and since one cannot dignify by such a name the butchery of peasants in a hopeless cause at Sedgemoor — the last of the battles in the last as it was the greatest, of our civil quarrels to be fought out on English soil. More than two centuries and a half have passed since the first blood of that famous war was shed at Edgehill ; it is two hundred

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. XXI and forty-five years since its final blow was delivered at Worcester. Its battlefields dot the island from the North Cornish coast to the moors of Yorkshire, their peace unbroken, their scars long healed. Here and there, of course, their very sites are with difficulty traceable. Road and hedgerow parcel out and transfigure what once was open plain ; cornfield and garden, even sometimes street and suburb, cover the ground over which the waves of Rupert's horse dashed furiously on the breakwater of Roundhead pikes. Such a battlefield as that of Worcester, where the conflict raged at the very gates of the town itself, is naturally hard to decipher ; yet it is surprising how many points of attack are still to be identified even here, while on the breezy height of Lansdown, or on the mounded moorland of Naseby, man, at any rate, has little interfered with Nature, and the countryside lies broad and open and in its main features unchanged from the day when the smoke of the Ironside matchlocks floated thick above it, and its sweet green turf was ploughed by the hoofs of charging horses, and soaked with the blood of dying men.

The contrast between peace and war is among the tritest common places of human thought, and one of the most familiar topics of the sentimental rhapsodist. War with its cruel barbarities, its hideous and seemingly aimless waste, its outrage upon all the fair amenities of Nature, all the milder humanities of man, provokes so irresistibly, and is so constantly calling into articulate utterance, the indignant protest of the modern child of civilisation, that it needs exceptional originality and force of expression to denounce or to lament it other wise than in the most threadbare platitudes. And when here and there a prose-poet like Carlyle gives voice of passionate eloquence to this essentially modern feeling he is apt to run into exaggerations which the modern historical sense must discountenance.