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Over the next ten days there were further manoeuvres, particularly concerned with Donnington Castle. It was summoned to surrender on 31 October and refused to do so. Charles and Rupert set out to relieve it on 7 November and succeeded two days later. Passing through Newbury once again the parliamentary forces refused battle, a decision that again lay with Manchester and enraged a number of men under his command. At a council of war, Manchester famously made the case for limited war: ‘The king cares not how of the fights but it concerns us to be wary, for in fighting we venture all to nothing’. By this he meant: ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times yet he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves’. Cromwell spoke equally famously on the other side: ‘My lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never so base’.28

After the Lostwithiel and Newbury campaigns Parliament’s position was far worse than would have been predicted after the great victory at Marston Moor (see Map 3). Reasons were easy to enumerate: the Essex debacle; the immobility of Parliament’s forces prior to the Newbury campaign; and also, perhaps, hesitations and misjudgements during and after the battle. Although parliamentary forces enjoyed some successes in some of the local struggles in the period after Newbury, overall strategic weaknesses had been revealed. Charles, by contrast, and despite a failed attempt to lift the siege of Basing House, was able to enter Oxford in triumph on 23 November. His position was much better than could have been hoped after Marston Moor. The royalists now set about a reconstruction of their forces, integrating the survivors of Marston Moor with the royal army under Charles’s personal command, undertaking a recruitment drive and encouraging the formation of auxiliary regiments for local defence.29

His position had been further improved by the formation of an armed royalist party in Scotland, which served as a significant distraction for the Covenanting forces in England. An obvious response to the intervention of the Covenanters was to open up a front in Scotland, and this is what Charles chose to do. In March/April he switched his support away from those who had sought to promote a moderate royalist coalition in Scotland to the more confrontational policies advocated by Montrose and Antrim. All Scots who did not support the King were now regarded as his enemies and Montrose began to plan a war against Argyll using Irish soldiers. Antrim was sent to Ireland to negotiate for the service of Irish Catholics in Scotland. Montrose’s scheme for an invasion of Scotland achieved little and on 6 May he was forced to retreat to England.30

Nonetheless, Montrose’s view of Scottish affairs was to triumph, with very bloody results, later in the year. Shortly after Marston Moor, he met Rupert to discuss the continuing difficulty of securing a commission to promote a royalist rising in Scotland. As far as Montrose knew, troops were not arriving from Ulster, but he set off regardless, to try to open up a new front in Scotland. As it turned out, two days after his meeting with Rupert, men did arrive on the west coast of Scotland, and this allowed Montrose to raise forces among the Highlanders. It was the prelude to a dramatically successful campaign in the Highlands through the autumn of 1644 and into 1645.31

Montrose arrived in Perth on 22 August in disguise, with the aim of rousing Highland opponents of the Covenanters and of Argyll. By 1 September he had mustered sufficient strength of Irish and Highland troops to win a major victory at Tippermuir against the hastily assembled Covenanting force. The campaign was bloodier than the English wars, and Highland bands fought for plunder so that each victory was followed by what would in England have been considered