Who won the Battle of Marston Moor?
Parliament and its Scottish allies won. On the evening of 2 July 1644 the armies of the Earl of Leven, the Earl of Manchester and the Fairfaxes attacked Prince Rupert and the Marquess of Newcastle west of York. Cromwell's and David Leslie's horse broke the Royalist right, about 4,000 Royalists died, and York surrendered two weeks later.1
Marston Moor was the largest battle of the English Civil War, and quite possibly the largest ever fought on English soil: some 46,000 men in five armies met on a summer evening outside York. It was also a British battle, part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, decided as much by a Scottish army as by Oliver Cromwell. This is the story of why the Scots came south, why Prince Rupert chose to fight, how both armies half lost the battle before one of them won it, and what it cost the King.2
Why was the Battle of Marston Moor fought?
By the end of 1643 the King was winning the war in the north. The Marquess of Newcastle had been victorious there, and the Royalists held most of northern England. What changed the balance was Scotland. The Covenanters who ruled Scotland agreed in 1643 to fight for the English Parliament, and in January 1644 an army of more than 20,000 men under Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, crossed the Tweed. Newcastle suddenly faced a war on two fronts, and by April the bulk of his field army was shut up in York.3
The Scots had their own reasons for marching. Their alliance with Parliament, the Solemn League and Covenant, bound both kingdoms to preserve the reformed Church of Scotland and to reform the Church of England “according to the Word of God and the example of the best reformed Churches,” which the Scots took to mean their own. Gardiner quotes the Scottish minister Robert Baillie on the difference between the two partners: “The English were for a civil league, we for a religious covenant.” For the Covenanters, a Royalist victory in England would sooner or later have meant a Royalist reckoning in Scotland, a story told in our history of Scotland's wars.4
Around York three allied armies gathered: Leven's Scots, the army of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester, with Oliver Cromwell as his lieutenant-general of horse, and the Yorkshire forces of Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas. If York fell, the King's cause in the north fell with it. Charles sent his nephew Prince Rupert, whose cavalry had not yet been beaten in a major battle, with a relieving army that marched out of Shropshire in May.5
Why did Prince Rupert fight at Marston Moor?
Rupert outmaneuvered the allies first. On 1 July, as he approached, the three generals left their siege works and drew up near Long Marston, on the road from Knaresborough, to bar his way. Rupert slipped round them instead and relieved York on 1 July without a fight. That might have been enough. English Heritage's report is blunt about what happened next: a battle was fought on 2 July “because Prince Rupert wished it,” since he believed he had orders from the King to bring the enemy to battle.6
The order Rupert relied on was a letter Charles wrote on 14 June, which Gardiner prints. “If York be lost,” the King wrote, “I shall esteem my crown little less,” and he commanded Rupert to relieve York by beating “the rebels' armies of both kingdoms.” Gardiner calls the sentences painfully involved, but argues that Rupert was not plainly wrong to fight: he had never yet met horsemen he could not scatter, and a Royalist victory in the north could have changed the whole war.7
Newcastle, who had held York since April, saw it differently and advised against a battle. When he rode out to the moor on the morning of 2 July, Rupert greeted him with the hope that “we shall have a glorious day.” Newcastle's infantry were slow to leave York, and when his professional adviser, James King, Lord Eythin, came up with them in the late afternoon, he disliked Rupert's dispositions. In Sir Hugh Cholmley's account, on which Gardiner draws, Rupert offered to draw the army back; Eythin answered that it was too late.8
How were the armies deployed at Marston Moor?
On the morning of 2 July the allies were already marching away toward Tadcaster, leaving their horse as a rearguard on the ridge above Long Marston. When Royalist cavalry appeared on the moor in strength, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell and David Leslie sent word to the generals, and the foot were hurriedly called back; the Scots in the van were within a mile of Tadcaster. By about two in the afternoon the allied army stood on the ridge in a field of rye, and an exchange of cannon fire produced little.9
The two lines faced each other across a ditch and hedge where the arable fields of Marston met the open moor, which was rough, sometimes boggy pasture with furze. The allied infantry of all three armies held the center under Leven's direction. Cromwell commanded the horse of the left wing, with Scottish horse under David Leslie in support; Sir Thomas Fairfax had the right. Facing them, Lord Byron led the Royalist right wing and Lord Goring the Northern Horse on the left. Newcastle's foot from York formed a second line behind the Royalist center, and Rupert kept a reserve of horse.10
The numbers were uneven. English Heritage and the Battlefields Trust give the allies about 28,000 men and the Royalists about 18,000. Britannica puts about 7,000 horse on each side but 20,000 allied foot against 11,000 Royalist. Colonel Ross's calculation, which Gardiner cites, gives 17,000 or 18,000 Royalists against 26,000 or 27,000 allies.11
The day dragged on in showers of rain. By evening Rupert concluded that there was no longer time to fight before dark. He called for provisions and sat down to eat at a distance from his troops, and many of his horsemen dismounted. Cholmley, the Royalist governor of Scarborough, recorded that the Prince “did not imagine the enemy durst make any attempt.”12
What happened when Cromwell met Rupert?
At about seven o'clock, as a clap of thunder broke over the moor, the whole allied line came down the slope at a run. Lionel Watson, Manchester's scoutmaster, put the start at half past seven, and Britannica describes a thunderstorm. On the left Cromwell's horse, the cavalry of the Eastern Association, led the way over the ditch and fell on Byron's first line.13
Rupert left his supper, mounted and led his reserve against Cromwell. For a time Cromwell's division was hard pressed, and Cromwell himself was wounded, slightly, in the neck in Gardiner's account. David Leslie's Scots then came up to support him, and at last, in the words of Manchester's scoutmaster, Cromwell broke through, “scattering them before him like a little dust.”14
The Royalist right wing fled toward York. Here Cromwell made the choice that decided the day: he kept most of his horsemen in hand instead of chasing the beaten enemy off the field, while a detachment followed the fugitives.15
Why did half the allied army run away?
On the other wing the battle went the King's way. Sir Thomas Fairfax's horse had to attack through furze and ditches and along a narrow lane, now identified as Atterwith Lane, lined with Royalist musketeers. A Scottish officer's account says they could pass only three or four abreast and were met as they came out. Fairfax himself broke through with a few troops, but the rest of his wing was routed by Goring's Northern Horse and fled back through the Yorkshire and Scottish infantry behind them.16
Panic spread up the ridge. Royalist horse charged through part of the allied center to the top of the hill, and Cholmley wrote that Goring made the three generals, Leven, Manchester and Lord Fairfax, quit the field. Leven and Lord Fairfax were gone for the rest of the battle; Manchester came back. But many of Goring's troopers scattered in pursuit and plunder instead of finishing the battle.17
How did the Scots hold the center at Marston Moor?
The battle was saved in the middle by Scottish infantry. While whole regiments around them broke, the regiments of the Earl of Lindsay and Lord Maitland, with a reserve brought up by Lieutenant-General Baillie and General Major Lumsden, stood against repeated charges by Sir Charles Lucas's horse and Royalist foot. They had mixed their pikemen among the musketeers, threw back three attacks, killed Lucas's horse under him and took him prisoner.18
Meanwhile the infantry of the Eastern Association, under Manchester's Scottish major-general, Crawford, had found open ground where the ditch gave out on the allied left and turned on the flank of the Royalist foot. Scots also rode in Cromwell's victory: David Leslie and his horse fought beside the Eastern Association. The Battlefields Trust notes that the Scottish contribution to the victory was considerable, but that English Parliamentarian accounts presented it as a victory of the Eastern Association under Cromwell.19
What happened to Newcastle's Whitecoats?
The decisive move came next. Sir Thomas Fairfax, with a handful of troopers, made his way through the enemy to Cromwell's wing. Cromwell led his horse, with David Leslie's by a Scottish officer's account, across the rear of the Royalist position and charged Goring's returning cavalry on the ground where Fairfax had been beaten, with the two armies now facing the opposite way from the start of the battle. The Royalist horse broke, and the allied cavalry and infantry together rolled up the Royalist foot.20
Newcastle's own white-coated infantry, the Whitecoats, did not run. They fought on in an enclosure until, as the Scottish officer James Somerville described it, having refused quarter, “every man fell in the same order and rank wherein he had fought.” Gardiner writes that scarcely one of them left the field alive. Tradition placed their stand at White Sike Close; Peter Newman's research points instead to the old enclosures by Fox Covert.21
How many died at the Battle of Marston Moor?
Most accounts put the Royalist dead at about 4,000, and the Battlefields Trust adds about 1,500 prisoners. Allied losses were far lighter: 200 to 300 killed in the Battlefields Trust's estimate, about 300 in Newcastle University's. Britannica's totals, which count casualties of every kind, are about 2,000 for the allies and 4,150 for the Royalists. The battle itself lasted about two hours.22
Cromwell wrote to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton, three days later. “We never charged but we routed the enemy,” he wrote. “God made them as stubble to our swords.” In the same letter he told Walton that his eldest son had been killed by a cannon shot that broke his leg. The letter credits the left wing to “our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear,” and Gardiner sees in its tone Cromwell's growing dislike of the Scots, who had in fact done much of the fighting.23
Who won the Battle of Marston Moor, and why did it matter?
The allies won completely. Rupert gathered about 6,000 horse and rode away to rejoin the King; the story that he hid in a beanfield during the rout appears only in some accounts. Newcastle, his army destroyed, gave the war up as lost and left for exile on the Continent. York surrendered on 16 July, and the north of England was in Parliament's hands.24
The battle broke one reputation and made another. Rupert's cavalry lost its air of invincibility, and Cromwell's standing, military and political, rose sharply. The King's northern army, full of experienced soldiers, ceased to exist, and with it his hold on the north. Britannica calls the battle a turning point of the English Civil War.25
Marston Moor did not end the war. The rest of the story runs through the Second Battle of Newbury that autumn and Naseby in 1645, and the whole road from Edgehill to Worcester is told on our pages. Marston Moor holds a place among the greatest battles in British history and in Britain's military history.26
Where was the Battle of Marston Moor fought?
The battlefield lies between the villages of Long Marston and Tockwith in North Yorkshire, about five to seven miles west of York, and the road between them still crosses its center. The allies stood on the low ridge of Marston Hill, where the clump of trees called Cromwell's Plump now stands; the Royalists were on the moor below. The moor itself was enclosed and drained only after 1766.27
Marston Moor is on Historic England's Register of Historic Battlefields, and the Battlefields Trust counts it among the better preserved major battlefields in England. A monument with interpretation panels stands beside the Tockwith road, and a lane north from Long Marston follows the line of Sir Thomas Fairfax's attack.28
