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 rebel army of both kingdoms, which are before it; then, but otherwise not, I may possibly make a shift upon the defensive to spin out time until you come to assist me.’ If York were lost, or if Rupert were unable to relieve it, he was charged to march at once to Worcester to join the king (, ii. 439). Whatever the precise meaning of the king's involved sentences may have been, Rupert, as it was predicted he would do, construed them as a command to fight. Marching by Skipton, Knaresborough, and Boroughbridge, he outmanœuvred the besieging army, and effected a junction with Newcastle without fighting (for a map of his march see, Great Civil War, i. 365). Rupert followed the retreating parliamentarians so closely that he forced them to turn and give battle at Marston Moor (2 July 1644). Newcastle was averse to fighting, and Newcastle's second in command, General King, criticised the prince's dispositions as faulty, but the prince himself was confident of victory. In the centre the battle was long and stubborn; on the left wing the royalist cavalry under Goring were victorious, but, on the right, Rupert's horse were routed by Cromwell, who then defeated Goring and crushed the royalist foot. Four thousand royalists were killed and fifteen hundred prisoners taken. Rupert himself, who seems to have commanded the right wing in person, narrowly escaped capture; his sumpter horse was taken, the white poodle which was his inseparable companion was killed, and it was reported by the parliamentary newspapers that the prince only escaped by hiding in a beanfield (, i. 371;, God's Ark, pp. 272, 274, 284). York surrendered a fortnight later (16 June), while Rupert, collecting about five thousand horse, made his way to Lancashire, and thence to Wales, where he endeavoured to raise fresh forces (, Civil War in Herefordshire, ii. 65, 71).

Until Marston Moor, Rupert's career had been one of almost uninterrupted success. The royalists had come to regard him as invincible. Thread the beads Of Cæsar's acts, great Pompey's, and the Swede's, And 'tis a bracelet fit for Rupert's hand, By which that vast triumvirate is spanned. (, ‘Rupertismus,’ Poems, p. 51, ed. 1687.) Even so great a reverse did not destroy his prestige. The king was so far from blaming Rupert that he resolved to appoint him commander-in-chief, in place of the Earl of Brentford, as soon as a convenient opportunity offered; while Goring was, at Rupert's request, made general of the horse in place of Wilmot (, iii. 12, 16;, Historical Discourses, p. 57). If he had lost the king the north of England in June, he retrieved the fortune of the campaign in the south in the following November. After his defeat at the second battle of Newbury, Charles, with about three hundred horse, joined Rupert at Bath on 28 Oct., and returned with the prince's northern and western forces to Oxford. On 6 Nov., at a general rendezvous of the royal army on Bullingdon Green, Rupert was declared general, and three days later he relieved Donington Castle, removed the artillery which Charles had left there, and offered battle to the parliamentary army (, Historical Discourses, pp. 114, 117, 119;, iii. 31; , Diary, pp. 147, 159).

The appointment of Rupert as commander-in-chief seems to have been popular with the professional soldiers, but distasteful to the nobles and officials who surrounded the king. The quarrel between the prince and the Marquis of Hertford about the government of Bristol, and the want of respect which Rupert had in other instances shown to the claims of the nobility, had produced considerable ill-feeling (, Rebellion, vii. 145, viii. 168;, Civil War in Herefordshire, ii. 10). He had throughout slighted the king's council, and was on bad terms with Lord Digby and Lord Colepeper, the two privy councillors most consulted by the king in military matters. When Rupert became general, the king effected a hollow reconciliation between the prince and Lord Digby; but their mutual animosity, and the divisions which it caused, exercised a fatal influence over the campaign of 1645 (, iii. 23, 25, 27). The independent command which Goring gradually succeeded in obtaining in the west further hampered Rupert's plans as general (ib. iii. 52). In February 1645 Rupert was recalled to Wales, by the necessity of suppressing a rising which his lieutenant, Maurice, was unable to quell (ib. iii. 63, 69;, ii. 141, 157, 178). The original plan of campaign was that the king should join Rupert at Hereford in April, and, marching north, relieve Chester and Pontefract and drive back the Scots. But Cromwell's activity delayed the intended junction, and obliged the king to summon Rupert and Goring to cover his march from Oxford (7 May). Their combined forces amounted to six thousand horse and over five thousand foot (, p. 125). The king's council now proposed to turn the army against Fairfax, who was just