Battle of St Fagans, 1648: the Welsh rising crushed in two hours

By 1648 Parliament had won the first civil war, but its own soldiers were restless. The British Civil Wars Project explains that in south Wales Parliamentarian troops mutinied against orders to disband before their arrears of pay were settled. When officers and the Royalist gentry of Pembrokeshire joined them, the mutiny became a rising.²

Early in March 1648 Colonel John Poyer, governor of Pembroke Castle, refused to hand it over to his successor, and on 23 March he declared for the king. Colonel Powell at Tenby and Sir Nicholas Kemoys at Chepstow followed. Then Major-General Rowland Laugharne, who had commanded for Parliament in south Wales during the first war, took command of the rebel army.³

John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org describes the rebels as Parliamentarians infuriated by the appointment of former Royalists to positions of power. By May they were advancing on Cardiff with about 8,000 men.⁴

Horton waits for Cromwell

To stop them, General Fairfax ordered Colonel Thomas Horton to secure south Wales. After an arduous campaign around Brecon, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales records, Horton's small force of about 3,000 reached St Fagans on 4 May and set up headquarters in a farmhouse called Pentrebane, to wait for reinforcements under Oliver Cromwell.⁵

Laugharne was anxious to beat Horton before Cromwell arrived. The BCW Project counts his army at about 500 horse and 7,500 foot, many of them local recruits; about half of Horton's 3,000 were horse and dragoons. On 7 May Laugharne feinted toward Cardiff, drawing Horton into a new position around the village, where the rebels hoped the enclosures would blunt his cavalry.⁶

Two hours on 8 May

The rebels attacked around seven in the morning on Monday 8 May. The BCW Project describes a surprise attack thrown back when fifty Parliamentarian horse and dragoons routed the rebel advance guard. Horton seized the initiative and sent Colonel John Okey's dragoons against the main rebel position while his foot and horse deployed for a general assault.⁷

Within two hours, the Royal Commission notes, the rebel army was almost completely surrounded, and it broke and ran. Laugharne was wounded leading a last desperate charge with his reserves. Rickard calls it a grim struggle, decided by the better quality of the Parliamentarian troops rather than by clever tactics.⁸

The Parliamentarian cavalry rounded up the fugitives. Of the roughly 8,000 men who began the battle, about 3,000 soldiers and upward of 400 officers were taken prisoner, the Commission records, along with more than 2,000 firearms. The Commission counts Laugharne among the prisoners; the BCW Project has him escaping to join Poyer at Pembroke.⁹

Where exactly?

The Royal Commission is candid about the gaps. Several Parliamentarian letters describe the battle, but almost no Royalist accounts survive, and no primary source names the exact spot. The armies seem to have deployed on either side of a stream, confidently identified as the Nant Dowlais, where a modern bridge stands on the site of the one fought over.¹⁰

Metal detector surveys by Archaeology Wales in 2012 and 2013 around that bridge turned up lead shot, buckles, buttons, cavalry equipment and personal items such as spoons and thimbles, with fewer finds farther away. A field behind the rectory in St Fagans, marked Cae Meirch, the Field of the Horses, on an 1839 tithe map, is traditionally where Horton gathered his cavalry.¹¹

The end of the rising

Cromwell had reached Gloucester when he heard the news. The surviving rebels shut themselves into Chepstow, Tenby and Pembroke. Chepstow was stormed on 25 May and Kemoys killed, Tenby surrendered on 31 May, and Pembroke held out until 11 July before Poyer and Laugharne gave up.¹²

The Commission calls St Fagans the last set-piece defeat of the Royalist forces, one that effectively ended any realistic attempt to restore the full authority of Charles I. In April 1649 Laugharne, Poyer and Powell were condemned to death by court martial, but only one was to die, chosen by lot. Poyer was shot at Covent Garden on 25 April.¹³