No Quarter! by Mayne Reid

Author:Mayne Reid [Reid, Mayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-25T13:26:11+00:00

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Chapter Thirty Six.

After Roundway Down.

An hundred horsemen riding at their hardest—not in any military formation, but strung out in a straggled ruck—horsemen steel-clad from crown to hip, some with helmets battered; others bare-headed, the head-piece gone; cuirasses showing dints, as from stroke of halberd or thrust of pike; on back and breastplate blood splashes, dried and turned purple-black; boots, mud-bespattered and délabré—this damaged cohort all that remained of “William the Conqueror’s” army!

They were the remnant of Hesselrig’s Horse, the “Lobsters” in retreat from Roundway Down, where the chivalrous, but too reckless, too confident Waller, had given battle to the outnumbering enemy under Byron and Wilmot; been defeated, and put to utter rout.

It was the wind up of a series of sanguinary engagements with the Marquis of Hertford and Prince Maurice, commencing with an encounter on the low-wooded bottom between Tog and Friznoll hills, so hotly contested that veterans there engaged, who had gone through all the Low Country and German campaigns, declared the most furious fights they ever had abroad were but sport to it.

Carried up to the adjacent height of Lansdown, from which, after another fierce conflict, the Parliamentarians were forced to retire, the two armies—what remained of them—again came face to face on the elevated plateau of Roundway Down; the final scene of the struggle and Waller’s discomfiture.

Hesselrig’s Cuirassiers had especially suffered. With ranks broken, and many of them unhorsed, they were all but helpless in their unwieldy armour, and scores got tumbled over the cliffs of the Down. Of a well-appointed regiment, over five hundred strong, which but a few days before had filed out through the gates of Bristol, only this straggling troop—less than a fifth of the force, still kept the saddle.

Waller was himself along with it—for the “Lobsters” formed his body-guard—so too Hesselrig, severely wounded. Crestfallen both—it could not be otherwise—but with no cowed or craven look. The blood upon their gauntlets and sword-hilts, on their blades still unwiped, told both had been where cowards would not be—in the thick of the fight. Only to superior numbers had they yielded, and were now retiring sullenly as disabled lions. If they rode hard and fast it was through the urgency of their followers, who feared pursuit behind with the fiendish cry, “No Quarter!”

Morn was just dawning as the retreating troop caught sight of Bristol’s towers—glad to their eyes, giving promise of refuge and rest. This last they needed as much as the first. For days and nights they had scarce ever been out of the saddle; looked wan for the want of sleep, and were weak from fatigue and hunger. Their horses blown and dead-beat, many of them staggering in their gait. No wonder the sight of that city was welcome to them.

But what a spectacle they themselves to those inside it, to the hundreds, nay thousands, who gazed off and out from turret, wall, and window! The first glimpse got of them was by the warder in the Castle’s keep, just as the brightening sky enabled him to descry objects at a distance.

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