In September, however, volunteers began to arrive in increasing numbers. On the sixth of that month Parliament had declared that all men who did not support it were ‘delinquents’ and that their property was to be handed over to sequestration committees. This meant that many of those who would have been happy to remain neutral were virtually obliged to fight in their own defence; it meant, as the Parlimentarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes admitted, that ‘not only particular persons of the nobility’, but ‘whole counties’ became ‘desperate’. Men who feared that their fortunes might well be lost if Parliament won now undertook to fight for the King, in whose victory their own salvation might be secured; while gentry, whose income from land was declining and whose fortunes depended upon the rich perquisites which only the court could offer, needed no further persuasion to fight.
Well-to-do landowners, having made up their minds to support the Royalist cause, raised troops at their own expense, sometimes going so far as to threaten tenants with eviction if they did not come forward, while the promise of money in the King’s own Commission of Array encouraged others to join his side. Many of those who offered their services were obviously incapable of controlling a horse in battle and had to be enlisted as infantrymen. For the most part they looked unpromising material. But the cavalry seemed sound enough, and in the opinion of at least one captain of a Parliamentary troop of horse, they were certainly superior to those on his own side. They were, he said, ‘gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality’, rather than the kind of troopers being enlisted in the Parliamentary cause who were mostly ‘old decayed serving-men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows’. ‘Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows,’ he asked, ‘will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them?’
By the end of the second week in September two thousand horsemen and about 1,200 infantry had been enlisted by the King’s officers. Many of these had come down from Yorkshire and some were described as ‘the scum’ of that county; but those who had more recently joined were considered of better mettle, and their commanders capable men.
Chief of the infantry commanders was Jacob Astley, a sixty-three-year-old soldier from Norfolk who had had much experience of Continental warfare and was deemed as fit for the office of Major-General of the Foot as ‘any man Christendom yielded’. Also with the King at Nottingham, as his Colonel-General of Dragoons, was Sir Arthur Aston, a Roman Catholic from ‘an ancient and knightly family’ who, like Astley, had seen much service abroad in the service of the Kings of Poland and of Sweden. These two officers were soon to be joined by another senior professional soldier who had served on the Continent, Patrick Ruthven, recently created Earl of Forth, a Scotsman almost seventy years old, gouty, hard-drinking and deaf, who had won the respect of the King of Sweden, in whose army he had served, by being able ‘to drink immeasurably and preserve his understanding to the last’. He had also preserved into old age his quickness of perception and strategic skill.
Respected as Forth was, however, his fame was shortly to be eclipsed by a man a third his age. This was the King’s nephew, Prince Rupert, the twenty-three-year-old son of the King’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, one of the leading Protestant princes of Germany. Born in Prague in 1619, Prince Rupert had entered the University of Leyden at the age of ten, already familiar with the pikeman’s eighteen postures and the musketeer’s thirty-four, and recognized as a rider of marvellous accomplishment. When he was barely fourteen he had gone off to join the armies in the Low Countries and although his mother had summoned him back on that occasion, he had ridden off again in 1637 as commander of a cavalry regiment to fight the Holy Roman Emperor in the Thirty Years’ War. Within a few months he had been taken prisoner at Lemgo, but by then he had impressed all who came into contact with him with his bravery and resource. He had trained his men to understand that a good regiment of cavalry was not a mere collection of individual horsemen, able to go through the parade-ground movements of thrusting, guarding and parrying with chosen rivals in single combat, but a kind of battering-ram that should thunder down upon its opponents in a powerful mass, overthrowing them and driving them back by the sudden, irresistible force of its impact.
To many who met Prince Rupert for the first time he seemed an intolerable youth. Arrogant, ill-tempered and boorish, he appeared to have no manners and no taste. Before he had left Holland for England he had quarrelled with both Henry Jermyn and George Digby and most of the Queen’s other friends who were in exile with her. Henrietta Maria herself wrote to warn Charles: ‘He should have someone to advise him for believe me he is yet very young and self-willed… He is a person capable of doing anything he is ordered, but his is not to be trusted to take a single step of his own head.’
It was true that he was impulsive and impatient; it was true, too, that his innate reserve and sensitivity led him to hide behind a mask of dismissive hauteur, that his irritation with the mannered politesse of court behaviour induced him to adopt the manners of the tough sailors and dockers with whom, disguised in old canvas clothes, he had chosen to mix as a student in the taverns of The Hague. As Sir Philip Warwick said of him, ‘a sharpness of temper and uncommunicableness in society or council (by seeming with a pish to neglect all another said and he approved not), made him less grateful than his friends wished; and this humour soured him towards Counsellors of Civil Affairs who were necessary to intermix with him in Martiall Councils. All these great men often distrusted such downright soldiers, as the Prince was, tho’ a Prince of the Blood, lest he should be too apt to prolong the warr, and to obtain that by a pure victory, which they wished to be got by a dutiful submission upon modest, speedy and peaceable terms.’
Yet Rupert was far more than a rough, handsome soldier of fortune with a taste for fancy clothes, fringed boots, feathered hats, scarlet sashes and long curled hair; he was more than a cavalry leader of undeniable skill and courage. He was highly intelligent, a remarkable linguist, an artist of uncommon merit, a man with an inventive skill and curiosity of mind that was to give as much pleasure to his later years of sickness and premature old age as the several mistresses who visited him in his rooms at Windsor Castle. Above all, he was a commander whose men obeyed and trusted him. If he was apt to be reckless in the heat of battle, he was ‘as capable of planning a campaign as he was of conducting a charge’.
Henrietta Maria had exaggerated his failings: he may have been far less capable of directing a full-scale battle than leading a cavalry charge; he was certainly incapable of restraining his own excited enthusiasm after an initial success; but he was an inspiring leader of men and the King’s trust in him was not misplaced. His tall, thin figure, ‘clad in scarlet very richly laid in silver lace and mounted on a very gallant Barbary horse’, became as inspiring a sight to his own cavalry as it was alarming to his enemies. His life seemed charmed; pistols were fired in his face, but he escaped with powder marks; when his horse was killed under him he walked away ‘leisurely without so much as mending his pace’ and no harm came to him. The Roundheads accused him of being protected by the devil. They said that the white poodle – which accompanied him everywhere, which would jump in the air at the word ‘Charles’, and cock his leg when his master said ‘Pym’ – was a little demon that could make itself invisible, pass through their lines and report their strength and dispositions to its master.
Although there were capable officers in the King’s army more than twice Prince Rupert’s age and with far greater experience, he was immediately appointed his Majesty’s Lieutenant-General of Horse, a demonstration of royal favour and trust which, combined with his arrogant manner and foreign birth, discountenanced the King’s civilian advisers and his military commanders alike. Prince Rupert did not get on well with either Sir Edward Hyde, now largely responsible for writing the King’s speeches, or with Hyde’s friend Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, who had been appointed Secretary of State a few months before. Nor were Rupert’s relations easy with the haughty, able though unreliable Lord Digby, who was as ambitious to be recognized as a fine general as he was to be seen as an astute statesman. Rupert’s arrival at Nottingham