Battle of Naseby War Walks

*

This ceiling at the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall

was created by Rubens to celebrate the majesty of monarchy.

A little after 2pm on the 30th of January 1649, Charles I walked through this room.

As he went, he must have reflected on the irony of the image above him.

He descended these stairs,

then walked through a hole cut in the wall just there

onto a scaffold draped in black.

After making a short speech which few could hear, he prayed,

then fell to the ground and put his head on the block.

The headsman's axe severed it with a single blow.

18 miles north of London,

in a Northamptonshire field,

Mike Westaway and Peter Burton are tracking the distribution of lead musket balls.

This is the battlefield of Naseby,

the Civil War's decisive clash.

-HOOT!

-Got a signal, Pete!

It was here on the 14th of June, 1645, that Charles lost the war

and began his long downward slide that ended on a scaffold in Whitehall.

300 years later, the land yields up its secrets.

-Mike, you'll have to pinpoint this one.

-I'm not entirely convinced.

-Oh, it's there.

-HOOTING

-It'll be THERE. Right?

Ah, here we are!

-You're the first man to touch that since 1645.

-Remarkable!

Absolutely remarkable! Goodness me... Look at that.

The war may seem remote to us now, but that musket ball is a reminder that men fought and died here

in a struggle that was to decide who was to rule the country -

King or Parliament.

The campaign that ended on Naseby field began 100 miles to the south.

Oxford has been called "the home of lost causes".

During the Civil War, it was the Royalist capital

and Charles's Parliament, set up in opposition to the rather larger one at Westminster,

met here in the Hall at Christchurch.

By the spring of 1645, the war had been going on for almost three years.

It was a deeply divisive conflict,

pitting family against family, father against son, brother against brother.

Men fought one another with the firm conviction that God was on their side -

none more so than Charles himself.

But the tide of war was running hard against the King.

Many of his advisors believed that now was the time

to gain a military advantage which might turn into a compromise peace.

His nephew, Prince Rupert, a distinguished soldier at 26, commanded the Royalist forces.

But a recent defeat convinced him that peace must be sought.

George, Lord Digby, courtier and amateur soldier,

was for engaging the enemy with the help of troops from Ireland.

Charles himself - chilly, easily influenced, yet immovable on the issue of Royal power -

continuously wavered.

With the King's advisors divided,

we shouldn't be surprised that the 1645 campaign began in an air of uncertainty.

But it soon developed into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

One May morning, this quadrangle bustled with the activity that precedes a campaign.

Charles left his quarters over there, mounted his horse, and, leaving Oxford well garrisoned,

set off north with his army, perhaps to join his Scots supporters.

It was a fateful decision.

Hardly had he left than the Parliamentarians arrived in hot pursuit

and laid siege to the city.

They dug gun positions up here on Headington Hill,

with its commanding view of Oxford,

and prepared to bombard the city.

In command was Sir Thomas Fairfax,

a 33-year-old peer's son from Yorkshire,

whose dark hair and swarthy features earned him the nickname Black Tom.

Fairfax needed to test Parliament's recently formed New Model Army.

Its soldiers, many of them conscripts, were promised regular pay and a decent uniform.

The New Model was untried in battle.

The Royalists were anxious to draw Fairfax away from Oxford

and they decided that the best way of doing so would be to fall upon some place possessed by Parliament.

They chose Leicester.

The castle and newarke retained their mediaeval stone walls

and the rest of the town had earth and timber defences.

On the 30th of May, Rupert ordered it to surrender.

When it refused, the batteries up here opened fire.

By nightfall, they had blown a breach in the walls and Rupert assaulted the city.

Some of the defenders of Leicester

fired their guns through loop holes cut in the old town walls.

But the attackers had surprises of their own.

Grenados, grenades made of pottery,

were filled with black powder, with powder running down a wooden fuse.

You lit the fuse from a length of slow-burning cord

and then threw them over the walls

to cause consternation amongst the inexperienced defenders on the far side.

The outnumbered defenders fought like tigers

and many townspeople joined in.

This enraged the attackers, who fell upon soldiers and civilians alike.

One Royalist says, "They fired upon our men out of their windows and from the tops of their houses,

"and threw tiles down upon their heads.

"Finding one house better manned than ordinary and many shots fired at us,

"we resolved to make them an example, which they did -

"breaking the doors, they killed all they found without distinction."

Once taken, the town was remorselessly pillaged.

When the Mayor turned out to welcome Charles's formal entry, his silver mace was snatched as he waited.

So great was the carnage

that it is said Charles wept, and ordered a stop to the killing.

Though the fate of Leicester was harsh by the standards of the Civil War,

the line between discipline and obedience was always pretty thin.

Soldiers carried a snapsack - we'd now call it a knapsack - in which to put their daily ration:

two pounds of bread, a pound of meat or cheese,

a bottle of wine or two bottles of beer.

Yet the sudden arrival of an army often exhausted local foodstocks.

Since soldiers were paid late, if at all, they sometimes existed simply by marauding.

They even ran out of clothes.

A Parliamentarian officer complained that his men had one pair of trousers between two.

When one was on duty, decency compelled the other to remain in bed.

Small wonder that men looted when they got the chance.

After Leicester, the Royalists drifted southward to Daventry, not knowing if their strategy had worked.

They spread out over the surrounding area, living off the country.

On the evening the 12th of June, the King was hunting deer in the park, when he heard good news and bad.

The good news was that the New Model had given up the siege at Oxford.

The bad news was that it was only a few miles away. His strategy had worked all too well.

Fairfax had been told to abandon the siege of Oxford on the 2nd of June.

He came pounding up here, well aware that the King's Field Army was his real target for the campaign.

He spent the night watching the Royalists,

but when he got back to headquarters, he'd forgotten the password

and the sentry kept him outside until the Captain of the Guard came to identify him.

And it's a measure of Fairfax that he gave the sentry a coin for his soldierly honesty.

On the night of June 13th, 1645,

some Royalist cavalrymen, dining at this table in Shuckborough Hall in Naseby,

were surprised and captured.

A few got away and galloped off north to Market Harborough -

Prince Rupert's headquarters after the long day's march from Daventry.

The Royalists held a Council of War there in the small hours.

Rupert and most senior officers probably advised marching north.

They knew they were outnumbered and they had a healthy respect for the New Model,

which Digby and his cronies scornfully called "The New Noddle".

The King, as usual, was undecided, but eventually he sided with Digby.

His army would offer battle.

The Royalists left Market Harborough - behind me - at dawn on the 14th.

They marched up here to take position on what one officer called "rising ground of great advantage"

and waited for the New Model to appear from the direction of Naseby.

Unfortunately, it didn't.

And Francis Ruce, the Scoutmaster-General, was sent off in search of it.

He was soon back with the news that it was nowhere to be found.

Rupert was unimpressed. If the New Model wasn't about, who pushed in his patrols last night?

So he set off down there, with a strong advance guard, to find it.

Rupert was right. The Parliamentarians had not gone away.

From their vantage point to the north-east of Naseby, they watched the Royalist column move off

and shadowed it across a landscape of unenclosed expanses of rough grassland,

interspersed with gorse and boggy ground.

Like two wrestlers, circling,

looking for an advantage,

the armies moved westwards, seeking better ground.

The Royalists marched between Sibbertoft and Clipston

onto Dust Hill, where the Royal Standard now flies.

The New Model had less far to come

and it finished up on Mill Hill, behind me.

Between the two armies lay Broad Moor, a great open plain.

This near-contemporary engraving gives a very good view of the opposing forces.

In the 17th century, armies faced each other in strict formation -

cavalry opposite cavalry on the wings,

and infantry, made up of blocks of pike and musket, in the middle.

Fairfax had about 16,000 men -

some in the infantry, a bit shaky,

others very good - especially the cavalry, under Cromwell.

There were about 12,000 Royalists on the ridge opposite.

Sir Marmaduke Langdale -

a Yorkshireman so dour that when he was at the point of death, nobody dared tell him -

commanded the cavalry on the Royalist left.

In the centre, Lord Astley, a professional soldier in his sixties, commanded the Royalist infantry.

Very good, this - the King's old foot, with a high proportion of experienced officers.

On the right was Prince Rupert with some of his best cavalry regiments.

And it was on this flank that the first of the action took place.

Colonel John Okey was one of the New Model's new men.

He was a stocky, tough soldier with a taste for Republican politics, and a devout Puritan.

He was issuing ammunition

when Cromwell ordered him forward to secure the hedges on the New Model's left flank.

Okey's men lined these at right angles to Rupert's cavalry.

The Royalists saw that they were in a position to do great damage to their horse as they passed by

so they strived to flush them out.

At this period, dragoons were really mounted infantry.

They could fight on horseback if they had to,

but their mounts were cheap nags, smaller than proper cavalry chargers.

They carried a flintlock musket, and when they dismounted, they left one man in ten to hold the horses.

The Battle of Naseby began just here,

with the Royalists hemming Okey in on three sides.

He received them, as he put it, "with shooting and rejoicing,

"but it pleased God that we beat them off, both horse and foot, and kept our ground."

It wasn't really in Rupert's interests to attack first.

He'd have to come past Okey's dragoons and then up a slope to get at Ireton's men.

But he wasn't one to hang about.

When the armies were formed up, he led his cavalry forward, past the dragoons, who hit him in the flank.

He paused briefly about here - probably a combination of a parish hedge and boggy ground -

and then he was off.

Rupert's men would have ridden three-deep, knee to knee.

They'd have started at a walk, then broken into a trot,

and at about 60 paces from the enemy line, into a gallop.

Fairfax's cavalry came down the slope to meet him and fought hard.

But before long, Rupert was through, riding with loose rein and bloody spur

into the open country beyond.

At the same moment as Rupert charged, the Royalist Infantry advanced.

They came up this slope, as Cromwell admitted, "in gallant order"

and as they crested the rise, they saw the New Model's infantry drawn up just in front of them.

It must have been an unnerving sight, but these were hard men.

Present! Your places! Cock your match!

First to engage were the musketeers.

There was an exchange of volley fire

at close range.

Aim... Fire!

-Mick, this is the matchlock musket used by the foot on both sides.

-Yes.

By Naseby, two-thirds of the foot on both sides had matchlock muskets.

-How do you work it?

-Well, we open the pan, take the priming flask...

we prime the pan, we close the pan,

shake off loose powder, blow off loose powder...

-take a measured charge out of one of these holders...

-How much powder?

About three drams. We take some wadding...

We draw the scouring stick...

ram home the wad,

replace the scouring stick...

take a ball, put a ball in...

We then mount the match,

blow on your coals...

test the match...

adjust it to fall in the pan.

Then we present and give fire.

-Recover.

-How many could you fire in a minute?

-Two to three rounds.

-A good musketeer might manage three.

-You had to know your business.

-Absolutely.

The musket was a grubby affair, with plenty of opportunities for burnt fingers and a singed moustache.

Men also needed to master collective drills.

"Firing by introduction" allowed them to achieve a continuous fire.

As the line advanced, the front rank fired, to be immediately replaced by a succession of ranks from the rear.

Mike and Peter's harvest is a poignant one.

Here's a good cross-section of artefacts from Naseby field.

A belt buckle,

that's a spur buckle

and these are various strap buckles.

A horse harness buckle, found in a concentration of bullets,

and of course bullets themselves.

That bullet obviously hit something very hard

and one would assume it was armour.

-And flattened right out.

-Yes. Indeed.

-This really enables you to touch the past, doesn't it?

-It's real history.

A third of the infantry carried the pike.

It was meant to be 18 feet long,

but soldiers, understandably enough, often shortened it for convenience.

Pikemen would have advanced with their weapons at the shoulder

and then, before contact brought them down to the charge,

for that ghastly business called "push of pike".

-Pike!

-ARGGH!

After an hour of fighting, the Royalist infantry had the upper hand.

But victory proved elusive.

While Rupert won the cavalry battle on the New Model's left, Cromwell did exactly the same on the right.

Many of Rupert's men went in search of fleeing Parliamentarians,

while Cromwell swung his uncommitted regiments against the rear of the hitherto unbeaten Royalist Infantry.

It was the battle's decisive moment.

Vainly, the Royalists fought back.

But they must have been asking the question that we still ask today.

Where was Rupert?

The New Model's baggage train

stood somewhere here with its guard.

A party of cavalry approached, led by an officer in a red montero cap

just like the one that Fairfax had worn before he put his helmet on that morning.

Thinking it was his general, the Guard Commander approached, doffed his hat and asked how the day went.

He was shocked to be invited to surrender. It was Rupert himself.

The Guard fired and beat the Royalists off

but by the time Rupert got his men back to the battlefield, the day was lost.

Charles I was no coward.

On the chilly morning of his execution,

he deliberately donned two shirts lest any shivering be misunderstood.

As the tide of battle turned against him,

he prepared to lead his last reserve forward, into the valley down there.

However, the Earl of Carneth, who rode alongside him, uttered some Scots oaths and grabbed his bridle.

As the King's horse turned, there was something like a panic in the cavalry surrounding him.

The whole lot, we are told, "turned their horses and rode upon the spur

"as if they were, every man, to shift for himself."

The Parliamentarian propagandists were quick to talk of a Royalist rout,

but the new archaeological finds

suggest otherwise.

Historian Glenn Foard has reassessed the evidence.

Glenn, I always thought, once the King failed to lead that last charge,

-the battle was over very quickly.

-That has been the understanding.

But the new archaeological evidence has really turned the tables.

That low hill in the distance is the site where the King's infantry was destroyed.

That hill is LITTERED with musket balls.

That distance - two miles from the battlefield as we have known it -

made one ask some questions about the interpretation of the battle.

It's made me look back at the documentary evidence -

the accounts of the battle and the topography of the landscape.

And those accounts can be tied into this archaeological evidence,

suggesting the retreat was over two miles back to Wadborough Hill

and it's on that hill that the King's old infantry were destroyed.

The King himself perhaps stood even here, with his cavalry, watching that destruction,

-wondering how he would follow on.

-And knowing that it was the end of the war as far as he was concerned?

That really was the end of the war.

Although he was able to pull together most of his cavalry,

although they got back to Leicester from here in dribs and drabs,

the loss of his old Infantry on that hill was the end of the war.

The pursuing Parliamentarians weren't simply intent on plunder.

Hereabouts, they found some women from the Royalist baggage train.

Contemporaries called them "Irish women, wives of the bloody rebels in Ireland" and "common rabble."

Some carried long knives and spoke a language that the Parliamentarians couldn't understand.

About a hundred were killed,

and the rest marked as whores by having their faces slashed or their noses slit.

It's almost certain that the women were neither Irish nor whores,

but the wives of the King's Welsh Infantry.

There were fewer killed than we might expect for such a hard-fought battle, perhaps 1,500 in all.

Naseby destroyed the King's last good army.

Though the war went on, its issue was never again in doubt.

Almost as damaging was the capture of all Charles's private papers.

Amongst them was a letter to the Queen in which he describes a plan

to bring the Irish to fight for him.

It was damning evidence used against him at his trial.

After the war it was Cromwell, not Fairfax, who dominated the political scene.

But a long-term settlement eluded him

and in 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne.

Yet it wasn't his father's throne, built on divine right -

but a throne resting firmly on Parliament.

Naseby, in its way, had changed history.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 1997