The Naseby campaign

The opening of the 1645 campaigning season was a period of great uncertainty for both king and Parliament. Although the king’s prospects in the south of England had revived very significantly in the second half of 1644, it had not been possible to keep up the momentum over the winter. Elsewhere it was a similar story, if not worse. Langdale’s ride had done nothing to recover lost ground in Yorkshire and the northeast; there were no troops in the field and the few garrisons that remained were closely besieged. In the northwest of England and the northern part of the Welsh borderland, the situation had deteriorated. With the surrender of Liverpool in November, the Royalist position in Lancashire had reverted to what it had been before Prince Rupert’s arrival in May 1644. Further south, the king’s supporters had lost territory that had been theirs since the start of the war. Shrewsbury had been captured, Chester was under siege, and the enemy controlled a belt of country stretching across north Shropshire almost as far as Cardigan Bay, separating Royalist North Wales from the Severn valley and Oxford. Only in the southern borderland had the tide of conquests been pushed back with the reconquest of parts of Gwent, but the gains were not strategically significant. Not surprisingly, there was an air of despondency among the king’s advisers, which even Prince Rupert felt at times, despite his promotion. ¹ However, there were several important rays of hope. Digby and his supporters at court firmly believed that the balance of military resources would tip in the king’s favour during 1645 as developments in Charles’s other kingdoms impacted on the war in England. The Marquis of Montrose’s string of victories should weaken the resolve of the Scottish army if not cause it to go home, while a peace treaty with the Irish rebels would allow the king for the first time to recruit troops systematically in the parts of that country they controlled. Moderates among the king’s advisers, on the other hand, had great faith in reviving popular royalism via new associations of counties raising forces under civilian control pledged to fight for a negotiated peace. To this end the Prince of Wales, supported by a sub-committee of the Privy Council consisting of moderates, had moved in March from Oxford to Bristol to breathe new life into the Western Association. However, success in this endeavour was dependent on bringing the siege of Taunton to a successful conclusion. Finally, there were great hopes that cracks in the enemy coalition apparent in the autumn of 1644 in the quarrels between the supporters of Manchester and Cromwell would open up once more, which, if they did not cause the coalition to disintegrate, could well limit its military effectiveness. Parallel with this ran the conviction that the ‘New Noddle’ would be fatally flawed as a fighting machine due to tensions associated with the traumas of its birth. Such sentiments caused the king to enter into the new campaigning season in an optimistic frame of mind, which it is easy to dismiss as self-delusion or whistling in the wind. ² However, it is important that hindsight and determinist views of the war do not obscure the real possibility that, if things had gone differently, the field army might have benefited, as in 1644, from enemy mistakes and this time achieved a favourable peace, or even outright victory.