convince us what different results might have followed if military tactics had been other than they were, or if religious quarrels had been less vivid and less stubborn. The general outline is fairly plain. As Ranke says, the struggle was not between two ordinary armies, but two politico-religious sects. On both sides they professed to be zealous protestants. On both sides they professed their conviction of the immediate intervention of Providence in their affairs. On both sides a savoury text made an unanswerable argument, and English and Scots in the seventeenth century of the Christian era found their morals and their politics in the tribal warfare of the Hebrews of the old dispensation. The English likened themselves to Israel against Benjamin; and then to Joshua against the Canaanites. The Scots repaid in the same scriptural coin. The quarrel was whether they should have a king or not, and whether there should be a ruling church or not. The rout of Leslie at Dunbar had thrown the second of these issues into a secondary place.

In vain did Cromwell, as his fashion was, appeal to the testimony of results. He could not comprehend how men worshipping the God of Israel, and thinking themselves the chosen people, could so perversely ignore the moral of Dunbar, and the yet more eminent witness of the Lord against the family of Charles for blood-guiltiness. The churchmen haughtily replied, they had not learned to hang the equity of their cause upon events. "Events, retorted Oliver, with a scorn more fervid than their own ; "what blindness on your eyes to all those marvellous dispensations lately wrought in England. But did you not solemnly appeal and pray? Did we not do so too? And ought not you and we to think with fear and trembling of the hand of the great God in this mighty and strange appearance of his, instead of slightly calling it an event'? Were not both your and our expectations renewed from time

CHAP. IV

ROYALISM IN SCOTLAND

285

to time, whilst we waited upon God, to see which way he would manifest himself upon our appeals ? And shall we after all these our prayers, fastings, tears, expectations, and solemn appeals, call these bare events'? The Lord pity you."

After bitter controversies that propagated themselves in Scotland for generations to come, after all the strife between Remonstrants, Resolutioners, and Protesters, and after a victory by Lambert over the zealots of the west, Scottish policy underwent a marked reaction. Argyle, the shifty and astute opportunist, who had attempted to combine fierce covenanters with moderate royalists, lost his game. The fanatical clergy had been brought down from the mastery which they had so arrogantly abused. The nobles and gentry regained their ascendancy. The king found a large force at last in line upon his side, and saw a chance of throwing off the yoke of his presbyterian tyrants. All the violent and confused issues, political and religious, had by the middle of 1651 become simplified into the one question of a royalist restoration to the throne of the two kingdoms.

The headquarters of the Scots were at Stirling, and here David Leslie repeated the tactics that had been so triumphant at Edinburgh. Well entrenched within a region of marsh and moorland, he baffled all Oliver's attempts to dislodge him or to open the way to Stirling. The English invaders were again to be steadily wearied out. Cromwell says: "We were gone as far as we could in our counsel and action, and we did say to one another, we knew not what to do." The enemy was at his "old lock," and with abundant supplies from the north. "It is our business still to wait upon God, to show us our way how to deal with this subtle enemy, which I hope he will." Meanwhile, like the diligent man of business that every good general must be, he sends to the Council of State for more arms, more spades

and tools, more saddles and provisions, and more men, especially volunteers rather than pressed men. His position was not so critical as on the eve of Dunbar, but it was vexatious. There was always the risk of the Scots retiring in detached parties to the Highlands and so prolonging the war. On the other hand, if he did not succeed in dislodging the king from Stirling, he must face another winter with all the difficulties of climate and health for his soldiers, and all the expense of English treasure for the government at Whitehall. For many weeks he had been revolving plans for outflanking Stirling by an expedition through Fife, and cutting the king off from his northern resources. In this plan also there was the risk that a march in force northward left the road to England open, if the Scots in their desperation and fear and inevitable necessity should try what they could do in this way. In July Cromwell came at length to a decision. He despatched Lambert with four thousand men across the Forth to the shores of Fife, and after Lambert had overcome the stout resistance of a force of Scots of about equal numbers at Inverkeithing (July 20), Cromwell transported the main body of his army on to the same ground, and the whole force passing Stirling on the left advanced north as far as Perth. Here Cromwell arrived on August 1, and the city was surrendered to him on the following day. This move placed the king and his force in the desperate dilemma that had been foreseen. Their supplies would be cut off, their men were beginning to desert, and the English were ready to close. Their only choice lay between a hopeless engagement in the open about Stirling, and a march to the south. "We must," said one of them, " either starve, disband, or go with a handful of men into England. This last seems to be the least ill, yet it appears very desperate." That was the way they chose: they started forth (July 31) for the invasion of England.

CHAP. IV

MILITARY OPERATIONS

287

Cromwell, hearing the momentous news, acted with even more than his usual swiftness, and having taken Perth on August 2, was back again at Leith two days later, and off from Leith in pursuit two days after his arrival there. The chase lasted a month. Charles and 20,000 Scots took the western road, as Hamilton had done in 1648. England was, in Cromwell's phrase, much more unsteady in Hamilton's time than now, and the Scots tramped south from Carlisle to Worcester without any signs of that eager rising against the Commonwealth on which they had professed to count. They found themselves foreigners among stolid and scowling natives. The Council of State responded to Cromwell's appeal with extraordinary vigilance, forethought, and energy. They despatched letters to the militia commissioners over England, urging them to collect forces and to have them in the right places. They dwelt on the king's mistaken calculations, how the counties, instead of assisting him everywhere with the cheerfulness on which he was reckoning, had united against him; and how, after all his long march, scarcely anybody joined him, except such whose other crimes seek shelter there, by the addition of that one more." The LordGeneral making his way south in hard marches by Berwick, York, Nottingham, was forced to leave not a few of his veterans on the way, worn out by sickness and the hardships of the last winter's campaign in Scotland. These the Council directed should be specially refreshed and tended.

66

Cromwell's march from Perth to Worcester, and the combinations incident to it, have excited the warm admiration of the military critics of our own time. The precision of his operations would be deemed remarkable even in the days of the telegraph, and their success testifies to Cromwell's extraordinary sureness in all that concerned the movements of horse, as well as to the extraordinary

military talent of Lambert, on which he knew that he could safely reckon. Harrison who had instantly started after the Scottish invaders upon their left flank, and Lambert whom Cromwell ordered to hang upon their rear, effected a junction on August 13. Cromwell marching steadily on a line to the east, and receiving recruits as he advanced (from Fairfax in Yorkshire among others), came up with Lambert's column on August 24. Fleetwood joined them with the forces of militia newly collected in the south. Thus three separate corps, starting from three different bases and marching at long distances from one another, converged at the right point, and four days later the whole army some 30,000 strong lay around Worcester. Not Napoleon, not Moltke, could have done better" (Hönig iii. p. 136). The energy of the Council of State, the skill of Lambert and Harrison, and above all the staunch aversion of the population from the invaders, had hardly less to do with the result than the strategy of Oliver.

66

It was indispensable that Cromwell's force should be able to operate at once on both banks of the Severn. Fleetwood succeeded in crossing Upton Bridge from the left bank to the right, seven miles below Worcester, thus securing access to both banks. About midway between Worcester and Upton, the tributary Teme flows into the Severn, and the decisive element in the struggle consisted in laying two bridges of boats, one across the Teme and the other across the Severn, both of them close to the junction of the broader stream with the less. This was the work of the afternoon of September 3, the anniversary of Dunbar, and it became possible for the Cromwellians to work freely with a concentrated force on either left bank or right. The battle was opened by Fleetwood after he had transported one of his wings by the bridge of boats over the Teme, and the other by Powick Bridge, a short distance up the stream on the left. As soon as