Cromwell Against the Scots: The Last Anglo-Scottish War, 1650–1652

By John D. Grainger

Although also known as the Third English Civil War, the author makes it clear that this was the last war between the Scots and English as separate states. He narrates in detail the the events following the exiled King Charles II’s landing in Scotland and his alliance with the Scots Covenanters, erstwhile allies of the English Parliamentarians. Cromwell’s preemptive invasion of Scotland led to the Battle of Dunbar, a crushing defeat for the Scots under David Leslie, though this only unified the Scottish cause and led to the levying of the Army of the Kingdom under Charles II himself. Charles II led a desperate counter-invasion over the border, hoping to raise a royalist rebellion and forcing Cromwell to follow him, though he left Monck to complete the pacification of Scotland. Cromwell caught up with Charles II at Worcester, where the Scots/Royalist army was decisively defeated and destroyed, thousands of the prisoners being sold into slavery in the West Indies and the American colonies. This revised and updated edition contains an expanded chapter on the aftermath of the war and the fate of the POWs, drawing on major new archaeological evidence, as well as an expanded Conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526786517

John D. Grainger

John D. Grainger is a former teacher turned professional historian. He has over thirty books to his name, divided between classical history and modern British political and military history. His previous books for Pen & Sword are Hellenistic and Roman Naval Wars; Wars of the Maccabees; Traditional Enemies: Britain’s War with Vichy France 1940-42; Roman Conquests: Egypt and Judaea; Rome, Parthia and India: The Violent Emergence of a New World Order: 150-140 BC; a three-volume history of the Seleukid Empire and British Campaigns in the South Atlantic 1805-1807.

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Cromwell Against the Scots

Cromwell Against the Scots

The Last Anglo-Scottish War 1650–1652

Revised Edition

John D Grainger

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by

Tuckwell Press Ltd.

First published in this format in Great Britain in 2021 by

Pen & Sword Military

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © John D Grainger 2021

ISBN 978 1 52678 6 500

The right of John D Grainger to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Illustrations and Maps

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

Glossary

Chapter 1 Garmouth and Whitehall

Chapter 2 The Invasion of Scotland

Chapter 3 Dunbar

Chapter 4 A Rearrangement of Parties

Chapter 5 The Scottish Recovery

Chapter 6 Torwood and Inverkeithing

Chapter 7 The Invasion of England

Chapter 8 Worcester

Chapter 9 Stirling and Dundee

Chapter 10 The Final Conquest

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Abbreviated References

Bibliography

Maps

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this book was published in 1997 by the Tuckwell Press of East Linton, Scotland, with the subtitle The Last Anglo-Scots War, 1650–1652. That edition has sold out, but has continued to be borrowed, according to the statistics from the Public Lending Right, at a curiously high rate; curious because I imagine that most of those who read the book will be Scots, suffering from the usual inferiority complex, and it is unlikely that many copies will be available in English libraries.

Since then there have appeared several accounts of the major battles, of Dunbar and Worcester, though none, so far as I can find, of the war as whole. Further, new information has emerged since the book was published, particularly concerning the destination of the prisoners taken at the Battle of Dunbar and the fate of those imprisoned in Durham Castle; a recent archaeological discovery near Worcester has also thrown some light on that battle.

I have concluded that there is still an interest in the book’s subject. Since this new edition is to be produced by a different publisher, I have taken the opportunity to revise the whole of the contents thoroughly, to include the new material which has emerged and to expand certain areas which have been dealt with rather summarily in the first version.

Introduction

Afriend of mine, when I mentioned that I was writing a book about the ‘last war’ between England and Scotland, frowned momentarily, then grinned knowingly and muttered: ‘Jacobites, of course’; a sideways look informed me that my title was too clever by half. Another friend, rather better informed, dismissed the Jacobites and thought I was studying the Tudor wars. Children at the school in which I was teaching glazed over completely: war between English and Scots was outside their comprehension; one of the class’s wiseacres commented audibly on sports, and for all of them their history was almost purely social and economic.

I also thought I was cheating to ignore the various Jacobite problems; surely Bonnie Prince Charlie at Derby constituted a real war? A little consideration convinced me that the ’15 and the ’45 (not to mention the ’08 and the ’19) were not wars on an international scale – though they occurred during such wars – but internal rebellions, and minor ones at that, on a level of the French Fronde, perhaps, or the IRA in Northern Ireland: destructive but futile. With those out of the way (and, all the more, ignoring such minor internal incidents as the Glencoe Massacre in 1692 and the Covenanters of the 1670s), I was vindicated: the last Anglo-Scots war was the one that began in 1650 and petered out late in 1651 or early in 1652.

The need to justify a title is not a particularly good way to begin a book, but I want my readers to be under no misapprehension. This is not a romantic or a debunking account of the Jacobite failures: it is an account of a serious and thoroughly unpleasant international conflict that resulted in the complete defeat of the Scots and their total subjugation by their neighbour, who was in a particularly ruthless mood at the time.

One would have thought, as I did when I began wondering about it, that such an event would have attracted scholarly or popular attention long ago. Yet there is no account of the war. There are partial accounts that are contained in books on other subjects. The two great battles of Dunbar and Worcester have, of course, received the usual military history treatment, usually with some preliminary account of earlier events. Biographies of Oliver Cromwell have chapters, usually, on the war, but their interest in Scotland ceases when Cromwell came south in August of 1651. The war went on a good deal longer than that. The only military history, by W.S. Douglas, is Cromwell’s Scotch Campaigns. It is out of print, was published in the last century and is almost unreadable, so littered are its pages with footnotes of immense length. It also stops in August 1651. Histories of Scotland concentrate on a slightly earlier period: the revolutions of the 1630s and 1640s. So David Stevenson’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution, covering the events between 1644 and 1651, largely ignores the military aspect of affairs to concentrate on internal politics and stops without seriously considering the invasion of England or the subsequent rule of the English; that rule is considered by F.D. Dow in Cromwellian Scotland but without a serious look at the preliminary war. English histories are even more myopic: the Battle of Worcester is regarded as part of the English Civil War (or in some accounts the ‘Third Civil War’, which is a complete misnomer), whereas the great majority of the men in the king’s army were actually Scots, and the English army was enthused at the prospect of beating out a foreign invasion. To regard the battle as part of the sequence of English Civil Wars is to distort the events of the previous year and the course of the battle itself.

To some extent, however, this conflation of the English and Scottish conflicts is a justifiable position. The two countries had been parts of the same monarchy for nearly half a century, and in a sense the war was the product of the preceding civil wars (in both England and Scotland), but they remained two separate states (just as now they are distinct countries), with separate governments and separate histories. Their joint monarchy, and earlier mutual interferences in each other’s internal affairs, only blurs the outline of this separateness, it does not remove it; the persons of the kings since 1603 was the only formal link between the two countries. This war was a conflict between independent states.

The various accounts thus largely combine to allow the war to vanish, dropping between several historical stools, and this denies the international aspect of this war, as well as failing to provide an adequate account of it. For the Scots it is a part of the failure of their Covenanting revolution; for the English it is an awkward appendage to their civil war. The succeeding period of political union with England and Ireland, forged by the English on the anvil of Scots misery, is largely dismissed from consideration, an unsuccessful union prematurely born, which did not – could not – survive because of the violence of its origins, a child of rape. The real union came in 1707: a true marriage of willing partners. So goes the tradition ironically known as the ‘Whig’ interpretation, though some Scots might jib at the implication that the nation willingly sank its independence into a larger union in 1707.¹

So I present here an account, in narrative form, of a war between two independent states, both of whose governments were revolutionary in origin, though that was only a secondary element in the causes of the war. However, it does mean that underlying the political surface there was, among many, even most, of the people in each country, a powerful feeling of alienation from the ruling groups. Those rulers were the men who had come out on top in the warfare and violence of the preceding decade and a half, and they were both few and deeply apprehensive of those they ruled. There were Royalists in England and anti-Kirkmen in Scotland, both of whom longed to displace their enemies from power, and it might be thought that a foreign invasion would provide an opportunity for a counter-revolution. Yet in neither country were there enough of these anti-government plotters willing to combine with the invader to overthrow the government in power. So when Cromwell invaded Scotland he could get no Scots help of any significance, and Charles II got little English help when he brought his Scots army south, and it is this division which is perhaps the most persuasive aspect of the war, emphasizing as it does the separation of the two countries and their mutual antagonism. The blacksmith who commented to the fugitive king, in the latter’s clandestine flight after the Battle of Worcester that he blamed Charles for bringing in the Scots invaders spoke for the vast majority of people, of all ranks, in both countries. No matter who ruled, the popular reaction was detestation of the foreigner.

This war is not, that is to say, a civil war, but a clear international conflict between sovereign states. It is the outgrowth of the preceding events and attitudes, and it is made more difficult and complex than usual by the previous relationships between the two revolutionary governments. In the event, it was the more basic, visceral reactions of nationalism which prevailed on both sides, if with other overtones of an ideological nature. That both governments knew full well that their own existence, and in the case of the leading men themselves their very lives, were at stake in the outcome, added a powerful personal element, spiced as it also was by personal relationships reaching across the conflict. A Scots soldier at the Corstorphine confrontation recognized Cromwell in his patrolling, shouting that they had been on the same side at Marston Moor. He and the blacksmith epitomize necessary elements in the story.

Glossary

ACT OF CLASSES: an Act of the Scottish Parliament that purged the Engagers, who were variously punished and purged by it.

COMMISSION OF THE KIRK: a permanent committee of the General Assembly that had authority in the intervals between assemblies.

COMMITTEE OF ESTATES: a committee of the Scottish Parliament consisting of twelve members from each estate – nobles, lairds and burgesses – with three lords of session; in effect, the Scottish revolutionary government.

COUNCIL OF STATE: a committee of the English Parliament; the effective government of England after the Civil Wars.

COVENANT (or Scottish National Covenant): the foundation document of the Scottish Revolution of 1637–44 to which Charles II had to assent in order to become king in Scotland.

ENGAGERS: the name given to a party in Scotland who had negotiated a treaty with Charles I in 1648 (the ‘Engagement’) which led to the disastrous invasion of England in that year; Presbyterian Royalists.

FIFTH MONARCHISTS: believers in the doctrine that the Fifth Monarchy will be that of God and that its establishment was imminent and would take place when the rule of saints was imposed; extremists.

GENERAL ASSEMBLY: the governing body of the Scottish Church.

INDEPENDENT: a term that is used in the English Revolution to describe those in favour of a degree of religious toleration (as opposed to the more dictatorial Presbyterians); the toleration was strictly limited, however, and largely the result of political necessity.

KIRK PARTY, KIRKMEN: the party in Scotland attached most firmly to the Covenant, which in effect delivered the government of the country into the hands of the church.

LORD GENERAL: the title given to the commander-in-chief of the English Republican army, sometimes used similarly for the commander of the Scots army.

MALIGNANTS: the name given by their opponents to Royalists, but often expanded to include any enemy of the party in power.

PRESBYTERIAN: the term for those, in England, who wished to replace the Episcopal Church of England with one without bishops; these were the nearest equivalent in England to the Scottish Covenanters.

PRIDE’S PURGE: the expulsion, by a detachment of the army under Colonel Thomas Pride, of English MPs unenthusiastic about the punishment of Charles I, 1648; the purge led directly to the trial and execution of the king.

PROTESTERS: see Remonstrants.

REMONSTRANTS: an extreme party of men who were unwilling to admit any authority in the king; also called Protesters; opposed by Resolutioners.

RESOLUTIONERS: a moderate party of Kirkmen, but whose moderation existed only after defeat by the English; opposed by the Remonstrants.

Chapter One

Garmouth and Whitehall

The war between England and Scotland which began in July 1650 was made as nearly inevitable as anything human can be by two events at opposite ends of their common island on the same day, 24 June. In the north, at the small fishing village of Garmouth at the mouth of the River Spey on the Moray Firth, King Charles II landed from the Dutch ship Skidam, setting foot for the first time in his kingdom of Scotland, while in the south, in Whitehall Palace in London, an English committee of the Council of State met, and their discussion centred on the reasons for the English invasion of Scotland which they had already planned.

The king had had a hard voyage, rough physically and tough mentally. It had begun, in effect, back in January of the previous year, 1649, when his father, King Charles I, had been executed by his subjects for making war on them and for refusing to acknowledge that he had lost that war and should therefore accede to his subjects’ political demands. The new king – as he thereafter claimed to be – had two overriding ambitions from then on: to avenge his father, and to secure possession of his empty throne and he had taken to heart the lesson of his father’s failure. After seventeen months, the Garmouth Landing was the first major step along the road to occupying that vacant throne. The road itself had been difficult and unpleasant so far, and it would continue to be rocky, painful, long and dangerous for the king; for many thousands of his subjects it was to prove fatal.

Scotland had been outraged that the privilege of executing the king had been usurped by its English neighbour. That Charles I had been king of England (and Ireland) as well as Scotland, that the major share of the war against him had been borne by the English, that the Scots had had the man in their own hands and sold him to the English, all this became irrelevant. As soon as the news of his execution reached Edinburgh, his eldest son had been proclaimed king of ‘Great Britain, France and Ireland’ on 5 February 1649.¹

The title was characteristically eccentric and needlessly provocative. There was no country called ‘Great Britain’: Charles I had been separately but in his one person king of Scots and king of England. No king of England had ruled any part of France (except the Channel Islands) for a century, and Ireland was never visited by any English or Scots king between Richard II in 1398 and Dutch William in 1690. The collection of kingdoms with which the new king was credited was a nonsense, and it was also unnecessarily provocative to the English, for ‘Great Britain’ could only be interpreted as including England, and so the Scots seemed to be claiming the right to decide who should rule in England. It may have been a usurping reply to the usurpation that was the English execution of the new king’s father, each country usurping their neighbour’s right. It could be said that the last Anglo-Scots war began then, declared by the Scots on the English on behalf of an absent king who they had never seen and who the revolutionary government never trusted.

Being proclaimed king did not, however, make Charles II into a king or give him any power. The Scots attached conditions; in particular insisting that he had to subscribe to their Covenant, the religiously-motivated revolutionary government that had been in power in varying combinations and factions since the 1630s. That was where the seventeen months between proclamation and landing had gone: into long, painful and mutually deceitful negotiations. As Charles moved in slow stages from Paris to Scotland during that time, he was made to jump through ever more theologically strict hoops in a process that he found intensely humiliating. The Scots, of whatever party, knew perfectly well that it was necessary to reach a cast-iron enforceable political agreement with their new king, and knew equally well that whatever agreement they made with Charles II could be easily discarded by him. Their experience mirrored that of the English with Charles I, with the difference that the English lost patience when Charles I refused all compromise, while Charles II was very pliable and so not trustworthy. He made agreement after agreement with the Scots negotiators, and all turned out to be no more than yet another step along the road to his complete submission, because the Scots negotiators sensed that he would wriggle out of any agreement when he was strong enough to do so. His personal habits, his amusements, his religious beliefs, his parentage, his father’s conduct, his mother’s Catholicism and his choice of friends were all criticized to his face.²

The voyage from Holland had seen the process continue. He was travelling in a Dutch ship loaned to him by his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, and he was cooped up in it with the Scots commissioners, who prayed at him interminably given half a chance and indulged in minute criticism of his social, political and religious conduct. The ship was storm-bound in the Heligoland Bight for a week, and during that week yet another negotiating screw was tightened. Then they crossed the stormy North Sea, making landfall at Orkney. As their ship came south, they headed into yet another storm.³ This was June, in a year whose weather was worse than even the wet and cold seventeenth century could easily recall. The new king could call nothing his own: not the ship in which he travelled, the kingdom to which he was going, and even his chosen companions were objected to by the sharp-tongued and insolent ‘subjects’ who laid down conditions for his rule which he had grudgingly to accept. His basic political strength was untouched in all this. The Scots required that their political system be headed by a king: they had no wish to be a republic such as the English had become. So both king and subjects were tied to each other, and the subjects had the greatest of difficulties in forcing their chosen and proclaimed king into a political straitjacket.⁴

Yet this king was a lucky man. All his life he escaped the worst consequences of his extravagance and hot-headedness. He was sexually promiscuous in a time of widespread venereal disease and escaped infection; he was hunted by a hostile English government in 1651 and escaped to safety overseas; he was saddled in 1660 with a new English constitution designed to hamper him with a perpetual Parliament and escaped from it by the 1680s, despite being hampered by a family divided between Catholics and Calvinists. Now the tempest he encountered coming south from Orkney drove away a powerful English fleet under Admiral Popham which had been waiting for him in the Moray Firth. People on shore saw both fleets heading away from each other; Scotch mist ensured that neither fleet saw the other. Luck indeed, and how very appropriate.⁵

Just before he landed, Charles at last signed the Scots Covenant, another turn of the screw, at the Commission’s insistence.⁶ Yet even that was not the end of the matter. In effect, neither Charles nor the Scots trusted each other, and in the end they were both quite correct. Charles had signed and swore to successive agreements with such strong mental reservations that he convinced himself that he was only acting under duress; the Scots negotiators insisted on repeatedly tightening up the agreement because they could sense this reluctance in the king. The net result was that when he reached Scotland none of those in power would permit their new king to exercise any power at all; it became Charles’s constant effort to escape such constrictions.

On the other hand, he was personally popular. From the time of landing he was welcomed, feted and feasted all the way south; all in a clear display that the requirement for a king of Scots was understood by all. He travelled from Garmouth by way of castles and cities, staying at the Gordon castle at the Bog of Gight, the city of Aberdeen, the powerful Dunnottar Castle, the cities of Dundee, Perth and Stirling, and in the end was lodged at Falkland Palace in Fife. Quaint customs dotted his route, like the doch-an-dorris (a parting drink) the Earl of Southesk made him drink, his leg hooked over the bolt of the doorway at Southesk.⁷

The land he now ruled, at least in name, was governed by a revolutionary party, and it was its conditions he now had to meet. The Kirk Party was a narrow group hoisted into power at the failure of the last party in power, the Engagers, who had led an unsuccessful invasion of England two years before, in 1648, in an attempt to rescue Charles I from his English captors; it was this that finally convinced the English Parliament to put him on trial and arrange his execution. The defeat of the Engagers had allowed the extremists, the Kirk Party, to seize power by means of an armed uprising in the west of Scotland (the ‘Whiggamore raid’; the origin of the party term ‘Whig’). With the main Scots army away in England, the Kirkmen had seized Edinburgh and installed their own government. A purge had followed, helped by an English force at Edinburgh commanded by Cromwell, and a compliant Scots Parliament had dutifully passed the Act of Classes, which provided the legal basis for the exclusion of the members of previous governments. These two parties were both opposed by the out-and-out Royalists, whose champion had been the Marquis of Montrose. He had been the king’s champion too, and had led an invasion of Scotland from the continent earlier in 1650. He too had failed. His small army had been intercepted at Carbisdale in Sutherland and totally destroyed by an even smaller force of the Kirkmen’s troops commanded by Colonel Archibald Strachan. Montrose was captured and rapidly executed. As King Charles II travelled south from Garmouth, he saw sections of Montrose’s dismembered body displayed on spikes at Aberdeen and Dundee. This was a grisly reminder to Charles of his most devoted champion and his own responsibility, for Charles had failed to support Montrose and had done nothing to save him.⁸ At Falkland Palace he was provided with a lifeguard, consisting of men who had fought to defeat Montrose at Carbisdale.⁹ This was clearly not a coincidence; these men might well be immune to royal charisma, but it also