For educational purposes
The Battle of Marston Moor on July 2nd 1644 was one of the most important of the entire English Civil War.
It was here that a force of some 27,000 Parlamentarian and Scottish troops routed an army of just 18,000 Royalists.
Crucially the Royalist stronghold of York was lost and King Charles' cause in the north virtually collapsed. It was a defeat from which the King would never recover.
The Battle of Marston Moor on July 2nd 1644 was one of the most important of the entire English Civil War.
It was here that a force of some 27,000 Parlamentarian and Scottish troops routed an army of just 18,000 Royalists.
Crucially the Royalist stronghold of York was lost and King Charles' cause in the north virtually collapsed. It was a defeat from which the King would never recover.
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LearningTranscript
00:30During the course of one summer afternoon, the fate of the royalist cause in the north
00:52of England was decided by the twists of fate here at the field of Marston Moor.
01:07There is no clear answer to what caused the English Civil War.
01:10Contemporaries and later historians have disagreed greatly about the causation.
01:15The fashion now is to emphasise short-term causes and mainly political and religious.
01:21Things like the policies of Charles I, his fiscal policies, his religious policies, indeed
01:26historians nowadays would stress the religious element to causing and motivating people to
01:31fight the Civil War.
01:35At the end of 1643, the fate of England lay poised in the balance.
01:42After over a year of bloody civil war, King Charles I and his royalist army were clearly
01:48on the defensive.
01:56Now was the moment for the roundheads to strike a decisive blow.
02:01But Parliament's armies were split by internal strife and ravaged by typhus.
02:08The situation in 1643 is essentially a fairly simple one.
02:12The royalists, or the cavaliers if you like, and the parliamentarians, the roundheads,
02:18have been at each other's throats for a year and a half without a strategic victory on either side.
02:30There had been a battle between the two sides, the royalists and the parliamentarians, at
02:35Edge Hill in October 1642.
02:37Effectively this was a draw.
02:40There was a lot of attempts to seize territory, take a town here, put a garrison there, but
02:47nothing that was particularly conclusive.
02:50And as 1643 came to an end, each side could think that they'd really made very little
02:55progress in terms of fighting the war effectively.
02:59In the south it was a wave of royalist victories, coming to a stop at Chariton.
03:04In the Midlands it was to and fro, and here in the north it was to and fro.
03:08The war, until Marston Moor, hung in the balance.
03:14One thing alone could now bring victory to either side.
03:18Foreign intervention.
03:22Foreign help was important because of this difficulty of mobilising support effectively
03:27in England.
03:28There hadn't been any widespread fighting in England for about a century and a half.
03:33There was not much in the way of supply of arms in the country, and there was very little
03:37tradition of fighting, or experience of fighting.
03:42The King looks to Ireland in the hope that he's going to get Irish reinforcements to
03:48help his cavaliers, as they're frequently called.
03:52The Roundheads, on the other hand, look to Scotland because that's their best hope of
03:57gaining some real intervention into the Civil War.
04:04While the King's Irish reinforcements arrived piecemeal in dribs and drabs, Parliament won
04:10the wholehearted support of Scotland.
04:13That support brought with it a fresh National Army, 20,000 strong.
04:21Unless this mighty army could be destroyed, the King's war was all but lost.
04:28In recent years there's been a stress on the British aspect of the war, a recognition that
04:32the English Civil War can't be seen in isolation, that it was part of a broader conflict that
04:37engaged the whole of Britain and Ireland, and that the English Civil War is just one
04:41aspect of a war in the Three Kingdoms, or alternatively, a British war.
04:47The English Parliament wanted to gain the Scots Army, which was then in Ulster.
04:53The army had been sent there in 1641 and 1642, after the outbreak of the Catholic Uprising,
05:00to protect Scottish settlers.
05:04The English negotiators soon discovered that this wasn't going to be possible.
05:09The Scots already have an army who are fighting in Ireland, but as is very typical in those
05:15days, they haven't actually been paid a penny for something like three years.
05:21So they're on the verge of mutiny and they're obviously not going to provide the decisive
05:26intervention.
05:27So what Scotland does is to raise a new army, the Army of the Covenant, and it's that army
05:32which is used to decisively intervene in the Civil War in the North.
05:45The infantry regiments of the Civil War period were organised in a unique way.
05:52Side by side in each regiment, there were to be found two quite different kinds of soldiers,
05:58musketeers and pikemen.
06:08By 1644, the musket had become the supreme weapon of the English Civil Wars.
06:14Although it had become a lot lighter than its use on the continent and the rest had
06:18been discarded, it was still fairly slow to reload.
06:22Consequently, whilst the musketeers were reloading, they were prone to attack by cavalry and to
06:26defend them from cavalry, they used the 16-foot ash, steel-tipped pike.
06:37Most armies would wish in their infantry regiments to have a majority of musketeers to pikemen,
06:45perhaps three to two or two to one, though that wasn't always possible and some Civil
06:50War regiments actually had roughly equal numbers of pikemen and musketeers.
07:01The musketeers were armed with matchlock muskets. These were simple muzzle-loading weapons,
07:09fired by means of a piece of match or slow-burning fuse.
07:17The muskets were really quite deadly at reasonably close range, but the great problem with them
07:25is that they took a good deal of time to reload. They took two to three minutes and in this
07:30time the musketeer was of course in grave peril of attack from cavalrymen.
07:38On 19th January 1644, Alexander Leslie, the Earl of Leaven, led his blue-bonneted army
07:53across the River Tweed into the north of England.
07:57The north of England had been won for the King by the Marquess of Newcastle's victory
08:02over the northern parliamentarians at Adwilton Moor. Since then, it had been a secure rear
08:09area for the Royalists.
08:12These were the recruiting grounds, the great landed estates from where many of the Royalist
08:16gentry could draw support. It was also for taxation purposes, huge areas and small towns
08:23from which you could raise the sinews of war.
08:29Freed from parliamentarian interference, this area not only provided recruits for the Royalist
08:35armies, but coal, the chief product of the region, was shipped out from the Tyne to pay
08:41for the arms and ammunition.
08:45These munitions were landed by blockade runners who slipped past the stronger parliamentarian
08:50navy. Twice so far, Newcastle had supplied convoys of imported ammunition to the King
08:58at critical moments, and without these crucial supplies, the war in the south might already
09:04have been lost.
09:08Now the Scots' invasion threatened to choke off this vital supply route, and simultaneously
09:15to destroy one of the King's most important source of recruits.
09:21If you wanted to draw a parallel, one of the best parallels you could probably draw is
09:25with World War II, just before the Normandy battles emerged with the second front in World
09:31War II. The King's a bit like the German forces. He's on the back foot, he's just managing
09:36to hold his own, but the emergence of this new army and this second front, if you like,
09:42decisively tips the balance.
09:46All that stood in Leslie's path was the bad weather and a bare handful of untrained and
09:52poorly equipped militia units.
09:58Responding at once to the danger, the Marcus of Newcastle raced northwards in a desperate
10:04attempt to at least hold the line of the River Tyne against the invading army.
10:14William Cavendish, the Marcus of Newcastle, was a fabulously wealthy landowner who had
10:20spent an enormous portion of his own personal wealth on the King's war. He was, however,
10:27to prove a less than effective commander when the occasion really demanded.
10:33Now a fresh disaster struck. Emboldened by Newcastle's absence in the north, the Yorkshire
10:40Parliamentarians, led by Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax, fell upon his
10:47rear. Storming the market town of Selby on the 11th of April, they destroyed the field
10:53army left by the Marcus to cover the city of York. York was the royalist northern capital
11:02and was now in grave danger.
11:06If the Marcus of Newcastle had not been in the far north by the River Tyne attempting
11:13to organise a defence against the Scots, and if he had therefore been available at York
11:19with his forces, it seems most unlikely that Fairfax would have succeeded in taking Selby.
11:27All hope of halting the Scots' advance was abandoned and Newcastle rushed southwards
11:32to save York. At this point, Alexander Leslie, the Earl of Leaven, revealed his true worth
11:40as a strategist.
11:43Rather than being distracted by long sieges further north, rather than dividing his army
11:49significantly, he kept the main body intact and he moved south at speed, brushing aside
11:54the royalists, clearly aiming at the royalist northern capital of York to apply as much
11:59pressure as quickly as possible on the royalist cause in the north of England.
12:04Leaven, despite the fact that his supply lines were endangered by royalists behind
12:09him, took the correct decision. He moved south to threaten the real base of royalist power
12:16and to lay siege to York.
12:19This meant that Leaven was now free to join with Manchester and join with the Fairfaxes
12:26in order to besiege York. It united the three armies together. It forced the Battle of Marston
12:32Moor and, consequently, that decision to come south was critical to the whole progress
12:38of the war.
12:42By the 22nd of April, he was united with the English parliamentarian forces led by Fairfax.
12:49They met outside York and Newcastle's army was promptly besieged within the ancient walls.
12:57Unless relief could come soon, the royalists would be starved into submission, at which
13:04point the north, and ultimately perhaps the fortunes of the king himself, would be ended.
13:12Royalist reserves, by this stage of the war, were practically non-existent. The only quarter
13:19from which aid could realistically be expected to come to the relief of York was from the
13:25king's own Oxford army.
13:28Unfortunately, just at that particular moment, the king's Oxford army had its eyes set on
13:36Unfortunately, just at that particular moment, the king's Oxford army had its own problems
13:42and was in no condition to assist anyone.
13:47At the end of March 1643, a royalist thrust towards London had been heavily defeated at
13:53the Battle of Cheriton, and ever since then, the king had been forced onto the defensive,
13:59with the increasingly feeble royalist forces entrapped around Oxford held by far superior
14:05parliamentary forces.
14:08If you look for a parallel, the situation of the king is very much like that of the
14:14German forces in World War II, where the Germans looked for miracle weapons to try and resolve
14:21their position. King Charles too had a miracle weapon, and it came in the form, he felt,
14:26of Prince Rupert. Prince Rupert was his most trusted and able and decisive general, and
14:33he now desperately needed to come up with a quick and imaginative solution.
14:39So Charles ordered his nephew, Prince Rupert, to break out from Oxford and head northwards
14:45to relieve the city of York.
14:49As the situation in the south was so critical, only Prince Rupert's own regiments of infantry
14:56and cavalry could be spared from the main field army. Rupert was therefore to assemble
15:02his relief army as best he could from the scattered royalist forces he met en route
15:07to York.
15:11The army gained strength, but even with the aid of other locally raised units, there still
15:23were not nearly enough men available to attempt to march on York. Undaunted, Rupert then hatched
15:31an ambitious plan. At the beginning of the war, much of Lancashire declared for the king,
15:39but in the spring of 1643, Parliament gained the upper hand after the Battle of Wally Ridge.
15:47Rupert now reasoned that if he could retake Lancashire for the king, he would then be
15:52able to recruit the additional men he needed for the relief of York.
15:58Prince Rupert started out on his way to York with 8,000 people and he stopped off in Stockport
16:09where he got the Lancashire Royalists to join him. Along his way to York he made a stop
16:14in Liverpool and he made a stop here and there and all along the way his charisma and the
16:20fact that he was the effective royalist leader moving through the countryside, the fact that
16:27he was able to take parliamentary held towns in the north, meant that people flocked to join him.
16:35On the other hand, it is to be said that even when he arrived at York and even with the
16:40addition of the York garrison, his forces were inferior to those on the parliamentary side.
16:46One of the problems was that many of his troops were untrained and they were not used to fighting together.
16:51One commentator has called it a patchwork army.
16:55Meanwhile, back in Oxford, in Rupert's absence, the war was going very badly for the king.
17:02With two parliamentarian armies led by the Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller operating
17:08against him, he was very hard pressed indeed.
17:13In his desperation, the king decided to concentrate the royalist forces at the loyal town of Worcester.
17:21He wrote to Rupert in an attempt to recall his forces for that rendezvous.
17:27The disastrous thing, of course, is the communication between King Charles and Prince Rupert.
17:33Now, Charles sends him this letter which is so ambiguous and couched in these terms that
17:39you probably need a lawyer to try and unravel.
17:43If York be lost, I shall esteem my crown little less, unless supported by your sudden march to me
17:50and miraculous conquest in the south, before the effects of their northern power can be found here.
17:57But, if York be relieved, and you beat the rebel's army of both kingdoms, which are before it,
18:04then, but otherwise not, I may possibly make a shift upon the defensive,
18:10to spin out time until you come to assist me.
18:14But, if that be either lost, or have freed themselves from the besiegers,
18:20or that, from want of powder, you cannot undertake that work,
18:24that you immediately march with your whole strength directly to Worcester to assist me and my army.
18:34Essentially, what Charles is saying to Rupert, it would appear,
18:38is that he should try his best and relieve the pressure in the north,
18:43but, come what may, he must appear with his forces at Worcester.
18:50Weighing up all the options, Rupert quickly came to a decision.
18:55If he marched at once to rejoin the king, York would certainly be lost.
19:01On the other hand, the king's letter hinted that he still had a few days' grace.
19:07So, once again displaying the single-minded determination which is so typical of him,
19:12Rupert decided to chance his luck and relieve York first.
19:18Prince Rupert knew that he only had a limited time
19:24in which to use his newly-gathered large force to good effect in the north.
19:31He knew he had to get down to Worcester to rejoin the main army.
19:35He also knew that there was a parliamentary force on its way to help out old man Fairfax,
19:42who was running the parliamentary siege around York.
19:46So, Rupert wanted to get Fairfax away from York before Fairfax was reinforced.
19:55So, in a sense, there was no doubt that Rupert was doing the right thing,
19:58both by himself and by the king.
20:05Setting off across the Pennines, he reached the small market town of Knaresborough on 30th June.
20:12The very fact that Rupert was on his way to York with about 14,000 men
20:18actually caused the abandonment of the siege.
20:21The parliamentarian forces gave up and endeavoured to stop him.
20:26They could not risk having one force attack them from one side
20:30and the Yorkist garrison to come out and attack them from the other.
20:34So, they gave up the siege and retired up the Tadcaster Road to vaguely the Marston Moor area.
20:44To their surprise, however, there was no sign of the Royalists that day.
20:49Instead of marching due eastwards from Knaresborough, Rupert had struck northwards.
20:56He crossed one tributary of the River Ouse at Burra Bridge and then another at Thornton Bridge,
21:02before turning south again, having completely outflanked the Allies.
21:11That night, as his weary infantry flung themselves down to rest,
21:16Rupert's cavalry pushed on to York and relieved the city to the untrammelled joy of its weary defenders.
21:24Initially, it looked as if Rupert had succeeded brilliantly in the campaign.
21:31He'd achieved what he'd set out to do.
21:34He'd gone on a very vigorous and bold thrust up through Liverpool.
21:40He'd freed besieged towns, he'd increased the strength of his army and he'd relieved York.
21:48So at the time when he arrived there, it looked like it was a spectacular success for the Royalist strategy.
21:55But the relief of York was not decisive while there was a very strong parliamentary and Scottish army in the north of England.
22:05It was the destruction of that army that was the key to the north.
22:11Together, the two Royalist armies now mustered a total of 6,000 cavalry and 11,000 infantry.
22:19Although he was still slightly outnumbered by the Allies, Rupert now had enough men to fight his battle on roughly equal terms.
22:28Or so he thought.
22:30Although he was still slightly outnumbered by the Allies, Rupert now had enough men to fight his battle on roughly equal terms.
22:38Or so he thought.
22:41The problem was that the troops in York did not share his martial enthusiasm.
22:47Having just weathered a long siege, the men of the Marcus of Newcastle's army were in no mood for a fight.
22:55And crucially, neither was his Scottish Chief of Staff.
22:59Lord Aithen.
23:04Aithen's basic problem was that while he had been happy enough to fight against the English parliamentarians,
23:11he was less than happy at the prospect of fighting against his own fellow countrymen.
23:17Indeed, many of Newcastle's men were Scots, and they had already abandoned him to rejoin their country's army.
23:25Realising that the city had been relieved, the Allies abandoned any plans for a further siege
23:32and instead moved southwards in the hope of trapping Rupert once he moved south himself.
23:42Aithen, with the city relieved, argued that there was no need whatever to rush into a battle immediately.
23:50Both of the Royalist armies were exhausted,
23:53and it would be much better to rest them for a few days before moving out to fight the Allies.
24:01On the other hand, Rupert still had the King's letter summoning him urgently to that rendezvous at Worcester.
24:10Rupert carried the letter that Charles had written him on his person to his dying day.
24:17He constantly sought to try and vindicate his actions at Marston Moor,
24:22and he used that letter as the means by which to try and do so.
24:29There was no alternative, he argued, but to fight and to fight now.
24:34Reluctantly, Newcastle and Aithen bowed to his wishes.
24:39Whether or not Aithen was right in wanting to rest the York garrison before making a sally out to fight on Marston Moor
24:49is one of the great debates of this campaign.
24:53They, in fact, proved their ability by doing exactly what Rupert wanted.
24:58Although they arrived, according to Rupert, drunk and in a truculent mood, they fought very well.
25:05So, consequently, one is tempted to ask, well, would they have fought any better, or could they have fought any better,
25:11had they been rested? Personally, I doubt it.
25:15By the time Rupert's troops arrived in and around York, they had undergone a long march.
25:20They were clearly tired, and therefore may have needed time to rest and recuperate.
25:27Had Rupert delayed giving battle, he could also have better welded his troops with the new reinforcements,
25:34the foot of Newcastle, that he picked up in York,
25:37instead of what actually happened, the rather messy arrangement that occurred on the 2nd of July.
25:46What Prince Rupert could not know, however, was that just three days earlier,
25:51the king had actually defeated the army of Sir William Waller at Cropreadie Bridge.
26:00The pressure was relieved, and he no longer needed Rupert's assistance in the south.
26:06With the primitive communications of the day, Rupert could not know of this good news.
26:12Still thinking that he had to move fast, he set off in pursuit of the retreating allies early next morning,
26:19and he soon caught up with their rearguard on Marston Moor.
26:26We're now up on Cromwell's Plump, or Cromwell's Clump, depending on which sources you look at,
26:31and this is where, supposedly, the parliamentary command met and controlled the battle.
26:39Marston Moor was initially an ideal battlefield, especially as far as the parliamentarians were concerned.
26:46This line of hills stretches like a giant bar right across the Great Yorkshire Plain,
26:52and from up here you could actually see the Royalist army coming out of York to attack.
26:58And in order to defend their rear, this line of hills,
27:03Now, to counter that, Rupert had to use the open moorland in front of us.
27:22From here, you can actually see the high ground.
27:26And you can begin to appreciate just why Prince Rupert wasn't anxious to attack,
27:31why he chose to make this a defensive battle.
27:35To attack that ridge with an inferior force would have been virtually to commit suicide.
27:41He had to fight a defensive battle down here, on the flat,
27:46and to get Parliament to come off that ridge and attack the Royalist army.
27:51The cavalry regiments making up the parliamentarian rearguard were positioned on a low ridge,
27:57stretching from east to west, overlooking Marston Moor.
28:02But there was still no sign of the roundhead infantry.
28:07The fiery Prince Rupert would certainly have attacked before the Allied foot returned,
28:13but he was not able to.
28:16The fiery Prince Rupert would certainly have attacked before the Allied foot returned,
28:21if he had been given a chance.
28:23But the operation was already beginning to go badly wrong for Rupert.
28:32Although Rupert's cavalry had reached York the previous night,
28:36and so had only a short distance to march on to the moor,
28:40his infantry were still camped some miles back up the road at Tollerton,
28:45and had not even reached York as yet.
28:48As a result, it was some hours before they reached the battlefield.
28:53By the same token, there was no sign at all of the white-coated infantrymen belonging to Newcastle's army.
29:01We know that the Royalists had problems in deploying on the 2nd of July.
29:06Rupert's men deployed on the battlefield quite early in the day, in the morning and the early afternoon,
29:12but then he was kept waiting. He was waiting for Newcastle's infantry to come out of York, and there were problems there.
29:18Had Newcastle's men been here, he might have launched a full-scale assault on this ridge,
29:24and actually then have been in a position to use the reverse slopes on the Tadcaster side as a defensive battle.
29:31The whole battle would have shifted over one valley,
29:34and whether or not Parliament would have attacked him, rather than continue their fall back,
29:39once again, we don't know.
29:47There's a fair amount of room for conjecture when we consider how the armies were drawn up on Marston Moor.
29:53Prince Rupert was having a terrible job in bringing together the garrison of York and getting them onto the field.
30:00At the same time, the Parliamentarian forces were still in the process of turning themselves around
30:06and marching back onto the battlefield, so it's possible that the armies drew up almost as they came onto the field.
30:17The delay had given the Roundheads the time they needed to regroup the three armies,
30:23and now they could count on a single force, 7,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry.
30:30On the left were the Eastern Association cavalry, led by one Oliver Cromwell, a lesser-known MP but a gifted commander.
30:42Behind Cromwell's men were a brigade of cavalry under a professional soldier named David Leslie.
30:49These soldiers were destined to play a crucial role in the battle.
30:54In the centre stood the combined allied infantry of the two armies,
30:59commanded by two more Scots professionals, Lawrence Crawford and Sir James Lumsden.
31:06On the right wing was Fairfax's cavalry and another Scots brigade.
31:13The Royalist dispositions left much to be desired.
31:16Rupert had intended that Newcastle's and his own should be drawn up side by side.
31:22However, the late appearance of the northern infantry meant that his own men had to be spread thinly across the front,
31:30while the late comers eventually grouped together at the rear.
31:35MUSIC
31:47Working from the Parliament right to left, you have Sir Thomas Fairfax with cavalry against Goring with cavalry.
31:55You have in the centre, Bailey and Crawford and Fairfax against Macworth and Ethyn with foot.
32:03And over on the extreme left, you have Cromwell and Leslie against Byron, once again with cavalry.
32:10The classic foot in the centre, wings of horse formation.
32:21Rupert assumed that it was too late in the day to fight.
32:25The battle would be fought on the morrow.
32:28But the Earl of Levin had other ideas.
32:32In the case of the Marquess of Newcastle's troops, they would probably have been in better shape had they had the benefit of a night's rest.
32:44Rupert's troops had been up since four o'clock in the morning and so they were rather weary by the end of the afternoon.
32:53But I think it should be noted that they didn't have the option of choosing when to strike the first blow.
33:00It was the Parliamentary forces who decided, quite remarkably, at seven o'clock in the evening to begin the battle.
33:08They're taking a gamble themselves, both armies are tired, but they have got the superior numbers and the other army is already beginning to ease off.
33:19You could call Marston Moor a showcase for a lot of the types of combat that one saw in battle in the English Civil War, as distinct from in siege and in raids.
33:31And in battle, one of the things we see at Marston Moor is action of light field guns against cavalry and against infantry.
33:39There had been an artillery duel before the battle proper started.
33:44There were about two dozen guns on each side, but they made very little impact on the outcome.
34:14The Allied army rolled down off the ridge and crossed the moor at a running march to attack the unsuspecting Royalists.
34:44On the left, Cromwell's men crashed into Lord Byron's cavaliers.
34:56Almost at once, Byron gave way.
34:59But then, Cromwell was counter-charged by the Royalists' second line, led by Prince Rupert himself.
35:07Undaunted, David Leslie brought up his brigade of lancers and, with the enthusiastic support of some Parliamentarian infantry, commanded by another Scots mercenary named Lawrence Crawford, he sent Rupert's cavaliers fleeing backwards towards York.
35:24As if to compensate for this reverse, however, on the other flank, disaster had struck the Roundheads.
35:33As Sir Thomas Fairfax led his cavalry forward across the ditch, he ran into a storm of musketry and was then charged by two Royalists' cavalry brigades under Lord Goring and the grim Sir Marmaduke Langdale.
35:49Rupert had stationed Goring over on his left and had cleverly made use of the terrain features.
35:55In order to get at him, Fairfax had to get through hedges, ditches and, essentially, up a narrow lane.
36:02By using commanded muskets, those are bodies of musketeers spread amongst the cavalry, they were able to shoot the Parliamentary cavalry before they got in.
36:12Consequently, once the cavalry arrived in front of Goring, they were broken, they were disorganised, they were disordered.
36:20And then Goring was able to charge into them and, in fact, to rout them.
36:24And he pursued through the hedges, through the ditches and into the plain beyond.
36:34It could be said that Lord Goring's cavalry almost won the battle for the Royalists.
36:39It was successful in first in driving off the Fairfax's cavalry on the Parliamentarian right.
36:44And this then brought them in on the flank of the Scottish infantry, who were in the centre of the Royalist line.
36:50On the field itself, you get this kind of big swing.
36:55On one side, the Royalists are victorious, and on the other side, the Parliamentarians.
37:01So the whole battlefield begins to pivot.
37:06Encouraged by the success of Langdale, Sir Charles Lucas then charged forward at the head of the Royalist reserves.
37:14The undefended flank of the Allied infantry had been exposed by the flight of Fairfax's men, and Lucas, with his fresh cavalry, carved deep into it.
37:27Regiment after regiment of Scots infantrymen took to its heels and ran.
37:33The Scottish forces who were supporting Sir Thomas Fairfax's cavalry didn't really have much of a chance,
37:41because the English cavalry in front of them broke and ran through them, and scattered and disorganised them,
37:49and told them that the game was lost and so forth.
37:52So you can't quite blame the Scots cavalry there for retreating.
37:56The Scottish infantry fought quite solidly for quite some time before the impact of Newcastle's infantry,
38:07together with some of the Royalist cavalry upon them, told.
38:12Cromwell in particular was very dismissive of the role of the Scots armies at Marston Moor.
38:20There's a fair amount of historical evidence to support at least that in part,
38:26because without a doubt some of the senior Scottish commanders fled the field and turned up 30 miles away,
38:33thinking that Parliament had lost.
38:35So you can understand some of Cromwell's attitude.
38:40Despite the flight of many of the Scots regiments,
38:44two Scots units, standing on the extreme right of the Allied front line,
38:49formed a hedgehog of pikes against the cavalry and stood like a rock,
38:54giving a trio of Scots officers the chance to turn the tide.
38:58First, Lieutenant General William Bailey rallied the four regiments in the crumbling centre,
39:06and as the cavalier assault broke upon the resolute sciltrons of pikemen,
39:11the crisis was averted almost as quickly as it had arisen.
39:19At much the same time, Cromwell judged it safe to rejoin David Leslie
39:24in a renewed attack upon the Royalists' right flank.
39:27Sir Thomas Tildesley struggled vainly to hold them
39:32as the combined Allied cavalry and infantry destroyed his Royalist regiment.
39:37Prince Rupert himself had been ignominiously chased into a bean field by the victorious Allied cavalry,
39:45and in his absence, with ammunition running low, a general retreat began.
39:54So far, Newcastle's white-coated infantry had played no real part in the battle,
40:00but now, when they tried to withdraw eastward in good order,
40:05they found their line of retreat blocked by the Atterwith enclosures.
40:10The Atterwith enclosures is really a grand name for what were probably a series of hedges,
40:16or at best stone walls, that were used for agricultural purposes,
40:21and it was this structure that the whitecoats fell back into in the tail end of the battle,
40:27and it was here that they made their famous last stand.
40:31As the Allies closed in, they turned at bay behind the ditches and hedges,
40:36and a fierce fight of renewed intensity began.
40:45The infantry of the Marquess of Newcastle partly undid some of the disproportionate disadvantage
40:52that Rupert had in infantry. He was heavily outnumbered in infantry.
40:55And thus they play a part in evening up the balance
40:59and enabling the royalist centre, the infantry, to hold the parliamentary infantry,
41:05and indeed for a time almost again the upper hand in that infantry fight in the centre of the battlefield.
41:11Near Longmaston, Lord Goring had gathered up his victorious cavaliers
41:17and was forming them up for another charge.
41:20A heavy royalist counterattack now could have devastating consequences.
41:26Realising the danger, David Leslie had now taken command of all the horse on the left wing,
41:33and he sent Oliver Cromwell to deal with Goring while he and his Scots took on the stubborn whitecoats.
41:44I believe Newcastle's famous whitecoats, rather than a last stand,
41:49which perhaps to Victorian writers owes more to Custer than to any English Civil War battlefield,
41:56is that you had a dogged fighting retreat, stopping at every hedgerow, every ditch to fire back,
42:03and that instead of dying to a man heroically grouped around a flag,
42:08they actually did fight a very clever and very hard-fought withdrawal slowly back into York.
42:17The long day was drawing on, but Cromwell had still time enough to see off Goring's remaining cavaliers.
42:30Cromwell was able to control his men after the charge, after they had broken the enemy,
42:35hoard them, dispatch troops to pursue the enemy,
42:39and he was then able to wheel with a body still intact and attack the infantry,
42:45which, of course, gave enormous weight to the infantry battle.
42:50And what happens, of course, is that the parliamentarians are much more effective at rallying their troops,
42:56and they're able to bring their men down and redress the balance,
43:00and it's that constant ability to rally cavalry and bring them back round that helps Cromwell to emerge victorious.
43:09As Fairfax rode round to Cromwell, Cromwell was able to intervene with intact cavalry.
43:19Cromwell more or less saved the day at Marston Moor, as he was later to do at Naseby.
43:28By now, the royalists must have already known that the battle was lost,
43:33and in the ensuing melee, they were routed just as swiftly and decisively as Fairfax was.
43:43The Battle of Marston Moor, like most of the key engagements in the Civil War,
43:48was ultimately determined, I believe, by the size of the armies.
43:52Almost always in a Civil War battle, the numerically superior army beats the numerically inferior army,
43:59and despite all the vicissitudes that we see in the course of the battle, in the two or three hours of that summer evening,
44:06eventually, I think, that told. That was the key point.
44:12Marston Moor was an utter disaster for the king.
44:16The royalists are now known to have lost no fewer than ten colonels and at least twenty-three captains.
44:24It is also the loss of four thousand men killed, one and a half thousand captured.
44:29It's the loss of arms and ammunition. Ten thousand stands of arms taken here.
44:35It's the loss of twenty, twenty-five guns taken here.
44:38The loss of the wagons. The whole plethora of war, the whole impedimenta had gone. The supply had gone.
44:46Weary and dispirited, Rupert led the survivors of his broken army north to Richmond,
44:53and then back across the Pennines to rejoin the king.
45:00After his defeat, Rupert could hardly scrape together six thousand men.
45:04That's about a third of the army he'd commanded the day before,
45:10and he was forced to march away from York, leaving a much depleted garrison to try and hold the city.
45:17York found itself besieged again and obviously didn't have the legs to undergo another siege,
45:24and effectively the whole of the north was lost to the king. It was a disastrous campaign in that respect.
45:32The Marquess of Newcastle, who was the man who held royalist forces together really in the north,
45:38was so depressed by the outcome that he took boat for the continent,
45:43and didn't in fact return to England until the Restoration in 1660.
45:48So Charles lost his most effective man, his most loyal subject, his most loyal wealthy subject in the north.
46:02The real spin-off from Marsden Moor was the freeing up of the Parliamentarian armies.
46:09The loss of the northern stronghold when York surrendered later,
46:13and the loss of the northern royalist army meant that the Scots under Leaven were free to go down into the Midlands,
46:21and that with Manchester, with Fairfax, they were able, because they were no longer engaged in serious fighting,
46:28they could now become the core that was the famous New Model.
46:33The New Model, it could be said, was born in blood on the fields behind me.
46:41The Civil War dragged on for two more years, but for the king, the end was now inevitable.
46:50The bloody battle of Marsden Moor had been the first major step on that bitter road to surrender.
47:00Marsden Moor wasn't decisive in terms of deciding the outcome of the Civil War,
47:06but it certainly was decisive in terms of the war in the north,
47:11and once the king had lost the war in the north,
47:15it was only a matter of time before he would lose the war as a whole.
47:45Thanks for watching!