Alexander Leslie(c. 1582–1661)

Alexander Leslie was born about 1582 in Fife, by tradition at Balgonie, the son of George Leslie, a captain in the Leslie family, and a mother of humble station; he made his own way in the world with nothing but his sword. Like many Scots of his generation he took service abroad, enlisting in the armies of the Protestant powers of northern Europe, and by the 1600s he was a soldier in the pay of Sweden, then under the greatest captain of the age, King Gustavus Adolphus. He rose through every grade by merit on campaign, learned the disciplined, mobile, hard-hitting Swedish way of war from the inside, and earned the king's complete confidence.

His most famous feat in Swedish service was the defence of Stralsund on the Baltic in 1628, when he held the city against the army of Wallenstein, the Emperor's great general, and kept the port out of imperial hands, a turning point in the northern war. Gustavus made him a field marshal, the highest rank in the Swedish army and an extraordinary honour for a foreign soldier of common birth. After the king's death in battle in 1632 Leslie served on for several more years, and when he finally came home to Scotland in the late 1630s he brought with him not only a fortune and a European reputation but a cadre of veteran Scots officers and the most modern military knowledge in Europe.

He came home at the moment his country needed him. When Scotland rose in defence of its Presbyterian Church against the religious policy of Charles I, Leslie was the obvious man to command, and in the campaigns of 1639 and 1640 he organised and led the Scottish army with such speed and competence that he secured the Scottish position almost without bloodshed, occupying Newcastle and bringing the king to terms. His prestige was enormous: the unbeatable old field marshal who had served Gustavus, now in command of his own nation's army. He was created Earl of Leven in 1641.

When civil war came in England, the Scots allied with the English Parliament, and Leslie led a Scottish army south in 1644 to join them. On 2 July 1644, on Marston Moor outside York, the combined armies of the Scots under Leslie and the English under Fairfax and Manchester met the main royalist field army under Prince Rupert and the Marquess of Newcastle in the largest battle ever fought on English soil. It was a hard, confused fight in the failing light of a summer evening, and at one point the royalist cavalry broke part of the allied line; but the discipline Leslie and his colleagues had built held the army together, the cavalry of the left under Cromwell turned the royalist flank, and by nightfall the king's northern army was destroyed. Marston Moor cost Charles I the whole of the north of England and was the heaviest single defeat of his cause.

Leslie continued to serve as the senior soldier of the Scottish nation through the troubled years that followed, an old professional trying to hold a steady course as the politics of three kingdoms pulled in every direction. He was twice taken prisoner in the wars of the next decade and was held for a time in the Tower, but lived to see the Restoration and died at Balgonie in Fife on 4 April 1661, full of years and honours. The Leslie name carries his memory as the Fife soldier of nothing who became a field marshal of Sweden and came home to command, at Marston Moor, the winning army of the greatest battle of the Civil War.