Crown, Covenant and Cromwell by Stuart Reid

Author:Stuart Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783469390
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2013-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

With his front line overwhelmed by the rebel infantry, and Lindsay’s and Lauderdale’s regiments seemingly dispersed by the rebel cavalry, Baillie and Holburne ‘galloped through the inclosures’ to find the reserves only to discover that they too were gone. So swift was the collapse that one of the charges afterwards levelled against Baillie was that his men were so unprepared they had not yet lit the slow-match for their muskets, to which he responded that: ‘The fire given by the first five regiments will sufficiently answer what concerns them: and for the other three (the Fife levies), I humbly intreat your Honours to inform yourselves of Generall-Major Leslie, the adjutant, and the chief officers of these severall regiments: if they doe not satisfie yow therein, then I shall answer for myself.’

Fire they might well have done, but it can have been no more than a token volley, and with the Royalist cavalry all engaged on the northern side of the battlefield and MacColla’s Highlanders fully occupied in dealing with Baillie’s regulars it must have been the Gordon foot under Farquharson of Inverey and Laghtnan and O’Cahan’s Irish mercenaries which routed Leslie’s Fife Brigade. At any rate it was all over very quickly, and the whole army completely disintegrated. Baillie and some of his officers tried to rally the fugitives at ‘the brook’, presumably where the road crosses a stream at Auchincloch a kilometre or more east of the battlefield, ‘bot all in vaine’, so they made their way up to Stirling where they were eventually joined by the cavalry, who were badly shaken but otherwise largely unscathed.

In fact Baillie’s regular infantry units may also have held together fairly well in the retreat and were consequently left well alone, for even the ‘three that were joyned in one’ survived to have their ranks filled out again with new recruits and sent into England. It was a very different story with the three Fife regiments. Dissolving into a panic-stricken rabble they were pursued for kilometres by the exultant clansmen, and hundreds were ruthlessly cut down. Ruthven provides a curiously precise figure of 5,469 buried afterwards, but as this exceeds the number of soldiers brought into the field by a very large margin there must have been a considerable element of double counting somewhere, and no doubt a fair number of non-combatants and innocent countrymen included in the dead as well. Materially, the Royalists also got ‘there whole stuffe, the baggage, and thrie piece of ordinance, one whereof they called Prince Robert, because it was taken from him at the battell of Yorke, and they ware in wse to shoote this at there solemnities’.9

Royalist casualties are unknown. Ruthven states that: ‘the [Royalist] foot armie had gotten little to doe, being last in coming vp, and therefore they did most of the execution [in the pursuit]’, which would certainly suggest they had few casualties. Whether he was including the western clans in this is uncertain. Although pinned down for a time they were also

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