Prince Rupert had occupied this ground with his cavalry the night before, and had waited there for the infantry to join him. As soon as they did so there was trouble once more between the commanders, who had already differed as to the route the army had followed from Shrewsbury. Prince Rupert, whose commission exempted him from receiving orders from anyone other than the King, laid down in his most high-handed manner a plan of battle for the infantry as well as the horse. The Earl of Lindsey objected to it. They quarrelled, too, about the disposition of the pikemen and musketeers; and when the King came down on his nephew’s side, Lindsey lost his temper, hurled his baton to the ground and, declaring that if he was ‘not fit to be a general he would die a colonel at the head of his regiment’, he stormed off to the troops he had raised in Lincolnshire. The King asked the old Earl of Forth to take over the command from him.
The army was then drawn up in line of battle largely as Prince Rupert had proposed, the infantry in the centre, three brigades in the front rank, two in the second, pikemen in the middle, musketeers on the wings. Prince Rupert’s brigade of horse was on the right wing, with Sir John Byron’s horse in reserve. Beside them were the King’s Life Guard of cavalry under his cousin, Lord Bernard Stuart. The King’s standard was held by Sir Edmtmd Verney, still unwilling to desert the King but reluctant to fight for him. In command of the cavalry on the left, with Lord Grandison, Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon and Lord Digby, was Prince Rupert’s second-in-command and rival, Henry Wilmot. On either flank were the dragoons, support troops riding horses much inferior to those of the cavalry and, at £4 each, costing less than half the price commanded by cavalry horses. When engaging the enemy, dragoons dismounted to fire their muskets and carbines on foot.
Behind the lines of musketeers and pikemen were the heavy guns waiting to fire over their heads; while the lighter guns were placed between the infantry brigades in the front rank. To the rear of the fighting men stood the surgeons, four or five of them attached to headquarters, the rest regimental surgeons, assisted by surgeons’ mates, few of them qualified, most as inexpert in the use of their crude instruments as those who tended the wounded knights at Agincourt in 1415.
Facing the Royalists the Parliamentary army was drawn up on the lower ground in a similar manner, infantry brigades in the centre, cavalry on either wing, Sir James Ramsay’s brigade on the left, with a reserve commanded by Denzil Holles. Sir William Balfour and Sir Philip Stapleton, a Yorkshire gentleman of moderate estate, were on the right with Basil, Lord Feilding, whose old father, the first Earl of Denbigh, was serving as an ordinary soldier in the opposing army, ‘with unwearied pains and exact submission to discipline, engaging with singular courage in all enterprises of danger’, until he was mortally wounded the following year.
Both armies presented a colourful appearance, beneath the bright, emblazoned standards of their various troops. The men in some regiments were clothed in red coats, in others blue or green, grey or buff or russet. Officers and sergeants, who provided their own clothes, were dressed as their fancy dictated, in some cases more flamboyantly than was deemed appropriate by the more sober minded, with velvet hats, fringed silk scarves about their waists, and cloaks ‘laden with gold and silver lace’. ‘The daubing of a coat with lace of sundry colours, as some do use them,’ wrote one disapproving observer, ‘I do neither take to be soldierlike nor profitable for the coat.’
Several officers in Parliament’s army were quite as flamboyantly dressed and wore their hair quite as long as their Royalist counterparts, as luxuriantly indeed as the Parliamentary Colonel John Hutchinson who, as his wife proudly related, had ‘a very fine thicksett head of haire, a greate ornament to him’. Even Roundhead sergeants were not above dressing extravagantly. One of these was happy to make use of a gift of his ‘mistress’s scarfe and Mr Molloyne’s hatband, both of which came very seasonably for [he had just had made] a soldier’s sute for winter, edged with gold and silver lace’. Later in the war coats became even more showy, with linings of a contrasting colour, and crosses or swords embroidered in red or blue silk on white sleeves. Brightly coloured scarves and sashes also became commonplace, usually crimson silk for Cavaliers, orange silk for Roundheads; and men on both sides wore field-signs in their hats, bits of white paper or sprigs of oak, so that they could recognize each other in the confusion and smoke of battle.
In the best-equipped infantry companies the men were provided with outer coats of thick, buff-coloured leather and steel back and breast plates. They also had, as well as their beaver hats or monteros, steel helmets, known generally as ‘pots’ which they were all too ready to take off and throw away, together with their even heavier ‘backs’ and ‘breasts’, when on the march in hot summer weather. For carrying their provisions they were issued with what were known as ‘snapsacks’ of leather or canvas. They were also given bandoleers for their cartridges and, for their powder, bags to hang from their belts.
They were told to take good care of their powder. Much of it had to be imported; the rest came from powder mills in England which might fall into the hands of the enemy, as those at Chilworth in Surrey and Lydney in Gloucestershire subsequently did. Moreover, saltpetre, an essential ingredient, was never in large supply. It had been a royal monopoly before the war; and, since it was a byproduct of bird droppings and human urine, government officials had authority to enter any properties they chose to dig in henhouses and privies. In 1638 ‘saltpetre men’, as they were known, had sought permission to extend their activities to the floors of churches ‘because women pisse in their seats which causes excellent saltpetre’.
Most soldiers carried short swords or axes as well as matchlocks, clumsy firearms which were as difficult to load quickly as they were to fire accurately. Until paper cartridges came into more general use, the requisite amount of powder had to be poured down the barrel, then rammed home with a rod before the ball was inserted, followed by a wad to ensure that it did not fall out again. To light the powder, the musketeer carried his match, a length of flax impregnated with saltpetre or cord boiled in vinegar, and this he lit at both ends when the time for firing came. Accidents were common. It has been calculated that three hundred men were killed by accident before the war was over, and hundreds more were injured. A Royalist officer commented, ‘We bury more toes and fingers than we do men.’ The open flame of the match could not, of course, be tolerated near large stores of powder; so infantry guarding the artillery train were equipped with flintlock muskets, a far superior weapon which was too expensive to be supplied to the infantry generally. Nor were cavalry troops usually supplied with the flintlock carbines which later became standard equipment. A few had wheel-locks in which the powder was fired by the friction of a small clockwork wheel, wound up by a spanner, against a piece of iron pyrites. But most had to be content with a pair of flintlock pistols which were even less reliable than flintlock muskets. They also had swords, often none too sharp, and they wore the same back and breast plates as the infantry, as well as high boots of thick leather which offered some protection to their legs. One or two regiments were supplied at their commanders’ expense with the kind of articulated plate armour to be seen in Continental cavalry regiments and with helmets designed to protect the neck and nose as well as the skull. Sir Arthur Haselrig’s cuirassiers from Leicestershire were issued with such comprehensive armour that they were nicknamed ‘the Lobsters’.
Even the most sophisticated armour, however, offered little protection against a determined pikeman armed with a pike sixteen to eighteen feet long, the hilt of which he would hold firmly in the earth beside his instep while the sharp steel point was levelled at the chests of the oncoming horse.
Men who had served in armies on the Continent argued endlessly as to the merits of the cavalry tactics favoured in the contending armies. There was, for example, the tactic known as ‘the Dutch’, in which a troop of horsemen came on at a quickish trot in about