Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [482]
It was in Cromwell’s first charge that Nathaniel found himself driven off towards the centre. Ten minutes later both he and young Moody found themselves unhorsed and faced with a line of approaching infantry. The battle continued around them furiously.
“God our strength.” It seemed to Edmund that there was dust everywhere. Dust covered the men, the horses; dust on every helmet so that they did not flash in the sun but glowed in an orange haze; dust on the colours they proudly carried; dust on his sword. Dust and blood. The smell of powder. The crash of steel and muskets behind him. No one fired a musket here, at close quarters. You seized the barrel and swung it like a club.
Half a dozen Royalists were in front of him in a whirling mêlée. He went towards them.
The nearest had his back turned: a Roundhead, one of God’s soldiers, had fallen in front of him. With a rush Edmund came up to the Royalist, his sword and his arm pointed in a dead straight line at the kidney; the perfect attack from the rear: he thrust, deep, felt the blade burst through the leather and pass through, all the way through. The man sank. Quickly, his boot was on the man’s side, dragging the long strong blade out again as the flesh gripped upon it.
Nathaniel, the colour draining from him, looked up at his brother, and recognised him.
Edmund saw nothing but his face. He did not see the Royalists close by; he did not see them falling back; was not aware of his own companions driving them before their pikes.
He did not pause to see him die, nor to speak a word, nor even look at him. “God our strength,” someone was shouting. He strode away, his sword useless in his hand, and in a daze made his way, he did not know where or how, through the battle.
1646: JUNE
She was glad to have Edmund home. After the death of Nathaniel at Naseby, she had felt a terrible emptiness and in part he filled it.
It was a relief, too, to have his quiet presence there when her strident brother Obadiah came on one of his occasional visits from London. At such times he protected her, and she almost felt that he and she made a team as she and Nathaniel had done before.
Edmund had changed. There was a new gentleness about him. Every day, hand in hand, he would walk out with young Samuel; sometimes he would spend hours quietly playing with the boy on the grassy bank beside the house.
Edmund’s presence seemed also to underline that a new era had begun.
For the war had been effectively won at Naseby. It was not only a military victory over the king: in his hurried departure Charles had left not only baggage but caskets of correspondence, which proved beyond a doubt that even then, he was secretly negotiating to bring a Catholic army from overseas to subdue the island. It was just what Parliament needed. The letters were published at once. And thanks to this Charles Stuart lost the equally important battle for his subjects’ minds. For if there had been waverers there could be no doubt in any Protestant Englishman’s mind now: treacherous, papist Charles Stuart and his rule must be crushed.
In the months that followed Naseby, Parliamentary troops had taken siege train and cannon from one Royal stronghold to another in a long mopping-up operation that destroyed many a fine Royalist house. The royal garrison near Clarendon had fallen the previous October, when Cromwell himself had come through Salisbury. In April that year, Lord Pembroke kept the king’s daughter, Princess Henrietta, at Wilton while Fairfax prepared to take Charles’s last stronghold at Oxford. Now Oxford had fallen and the king fled.
Everywhere the triumphant party was taking authority. In Salisbury a good parliament man, Dove, friend of Ivie, sat as Member instead of Robert