Royalist Langdale's unhappy and mutinous Northern Horse. Slowly at first, but then with greater momentum, Cromwell beat a way through. Watching from among his Lifeguards on the ridge, the King correctly assessed that Langdale's units were about to break. Once flight began, panic would rip through them, until men and horses chased from the field, wild with terror. Some at the rear of the Royalist left wing were already retreating, with groups of Parliamentary cavalry swooping in pursuit. The King prepared to lead a rescue mission. 'Face about once, and give one charge and save the day!' cried Charles with spirit.
His decision to ride into danger horrified his Lifeguards. The King might have saved the day in person. Equally, he might have perished, yet saved his cause heroically. Instead, a Scots nobleman grabbed at his horse's reins and turned its head, swearing at the King as he shouted: 'Will you go to your death?' Charles floundered. He let himself be dissuaded. Seeing his mount turning aside, the Royalist reserves were thrown into confusion. They lost heart. Control failed. Interpreting the movement as a sign that it was every man for himself, the Royalist reserves bolted from the field, without a shot fired.
Activity against Sulby Hedges was faltering. The dragoons now had no one in particular to shoot at. Colonel Okey perceived that on the far wing, some of the New Model cavalry were chasing Royalists. The rest, under Cromwell himself, had wheeled towards the centre, taking on the Royalist foot.
'Saddle up!'
His men raced for their horses. Defying standard practice, Okey then raised his sword and led out his dragoons in a charge.
Kicking up his mount with his short boots, Gideon was thrilled. Jostling uncomfortably knee-to-knee, the dragoons careered into battle on their reviled cheap nags, clods of earth kicking up behind them, their colours streaming. Gideon's mouth opened in a wordless yell that vanished in his wake as the regiment's surprised horses carried them in an unprecedented stampede right across their now deserted left wing and into action.
They bore down on the Royalist infantry just as Cromwell attacked from the opposite side. At the same time, blocks of Parliamentary infantry stormed the centre. The dragoons piled in cheerfully, raining blows from their musket butts and slashing with their long swords at the enemy's heads and shoulders. This threefold onslaught was too much.
There was no fight to the last man here, as there had been at Marston Moor; at Naseby, even the King's hardbitten Welsh footmen gave up en masse and miserably laid down their arms. From the royal infantry reserves, Prince Rupert's Bluecoats made a brief stand while the King's Lifeguards were sent against Okey's dragoons, but a cavalry charge led by Fairfax ended the last resistance. Fairfax, who had seemed like a dead man in the tension before battle, became a whirlwind once the action started. Fighting was said to make him 'raised, elevated, and transported'. Bare-headed after losing his helmet, his inspired presence rallied the faltering Parliamentary infantry. He personally killed a Royalist ensign, as colour upon colour from the surrendering infantry regiments was scooped up for Parliament. Almost the entire body of Royalist foot had been killed or were now taken prisoner.
Fairfax ordered a new line of battle to be drawn up. Gideon gathered his men into formation with the regiment. For Fairfax to achieve this — to reassemble his army under the gunsmoke in battle lines, ready to charge or be charged by the enemy — after two hours of hot fighting, was a measure of entrenched discipline, only forty- one days after the New Model was formed. They were proud, even before they saw the results.
Prince Rupert had finally rounded up some cavaliers and dragged them back. They came too late. He could not save the infantry. Langdale's cavalry had scattered. The royal reserves were out of hand. Rupert's own men, surly and discouraged by heavy losses, could not be put in order to face the controlled new line of battle that Fairfax had established. Nothing could be done. The Royalists gave in to defeat.
Okey's dragoons saw the enemy wavering at the last. One last resounding volley from them convinced the surviving Royalist cavalry to flee the field. The King, the prince and the poor remnants of their horse rode rapidly away towards Leicester. They must have known the royal cause was lost.
As the enemy straggled and fled, Gideon Jukes felt a huge flood of gratitude that he had managed to bring himself here, where he had seen this victory. Then, in almost the last moments of fighting, calamity struck. His mare was shot, perhaps by a stray bullet from his own side. So great had been his relief at this tremendous day, he was unaware what was happening. He heard one of his men shout a warning, but when the horse fell, he had no idea why she was depositing him groundwards.
He struck the bloody turf so hard he was seriously winded. Stars spun in his sight, then in sudden pain all over his body, he lay helpless while the regiment moved over him and passed on.
There were perhaps a thousand dead on the Royalist side. Their bodies lay thickest at the foot of the hill where their sovereign had watched his great defeat. Fairfax had lost not much more than a couple of hundred men. At the end of the day, despite the dragoons' significant service throughout, Okey had no fatalities at all, with only three wounded.
In the aftermath, it would take days to sort and count the prisoners, of whom there were nearly five thousand. The New Model had killed or captured all the King's experienced infantry. The list of Royalist officers who were taken ran to eight pages, while many more were dead — so many the King could never realistically re-create his army. All the Royalist bags and baggage were captured, with all their artillery, fifty-six standards, two hundred carriages, weapons, gunpowder and horses, carts laden with boats, royal servants, the Duke of York's Lifeguards, money and treasure and plunder the Royalists had with them, including some of the rich pickings from Leicester. Most important was a carriage containing the King's correspondence. It dealt him a devastating blow, because his letters revealed that Charles had been negotiating with Catholics and planning to bring an Irish Catholic army into the war on his side. This damning evidence of treasonous intentions would be published. Eventually, it would seal the King's fate.
Before the sad clear-up, the battlefield was filled with the terrible moans and screams of wounded and dying men, the wheezing death-throes of horses. The aftermath had the normal blood and terror. Royalists who escaped fled at least to Leicester, though Leicester was bound to be retaken by Parliament so some cavaliers kept going as far as their base at Newark, thirty miles distant. Fugitives were hunted and chopped down by cavalry, who rode up behind them and severed their necks with sword blows from above. A group of Royalist horse lost their way, were trapped by New Model pursuers in a dead end, butchered in a churchyard and their bodies tossed contemptuously into clay pits. One desperate fugitive ran for thirty miles, only to surprise a serving girl who was able to kill him with the dolly-stick she had been using to pound laundry.
Cromwell took his cavalry straight on to Leicester, Okey's dragoons with him. Much of the New Model had to stay at Naseby clearing up. The dead were stripped and buried; the wounded were collected. Prisoners were marched away. Various Royalist ladies of quality were found close to the battlefield and quietly returned to private life. Women of the lower orders fared much worse. A group of females were in an encampment, unaware of the battle's outcome. They were denounced as Irish, though they were more likely Welsh. Since they carried knives, whether for their own protection or merely for preparing dinner, they were violently attacked there among the smouldering campfires, denounced as whores, then mutilated by slashing their noses and faces. About a hundred, it was said, were murdered in cold blood.
Elsewhere, a large consignment of cheese and biscuit was discovered among the plunder. Parliament's weary soldiers devoured this, praising God.
Gideon Jukes did not know how long he lay semi-conscious. When he managed to crawl upright, he had been left behind by the dragoons. Now he was bemused. Standing among the littered carcases of men and horses, with his eyes still stinging from the sulphurous smoke of the gunpowder and every muscle aching, he wondered what he was supposed to do. He stumbled about, his booted feet unable to bear him straight. A little while later, he found himself close to where booty was being sorted. Someone handed him a share of the captured cheese and biscuit, which he ate mechanically. He was spent. He needed to be given orders. He felt lost without his regiment.
The field was said to be four miles broad, yet Gideon had a ridiculous chance encounter there. A familiar figure came along — wide-bodied, trailing a battered pike with its shaft bent, his blood-covered breastplate unbuckled so his tattered shirt hung out. It was unmistakably Lambert, who until that moment had had no inkling that Gideon was enlisted or present. His brother's helmet, his heavy iron pot, was missing, along with the soft Monmouth cap he usually wore under it. His tow-coloured hair was black with filth, his face streaked with blood and grime.
Coincidence never fazed Lambert. 'Trust you to sniff out the snap — '
Gideon tore in two the cheese he had been eating. Lambert took hold of the halves and measured them by eye, adjusting for fairness as if they were brothers squabbling at home; then both munched grimly in silence until
