Clan Leslie

On the morning of the third of September 1650, on the open coastal ground south-east of Dunbar in East Lothian, David Leslie's Scottish Covenanting army of about twenty-three thousand was broken in two hours by Oliver Cromwell's English New Model Army of about eleven thousand, in what stands as Cromwell's most decisive open-field victory of the British civil wars. Leslie had Cromwell trapped against the sea and the supply line back to England, with starvation and dysentery running through the New Model camp; he had only to hold the high ground at Doon Hill and wait. The civilian commissioners of the Kirk attached to his army, on the night of the second, ordered him down off the high ground to engage the enemy, on the theological judgment that Cromwell's army was an army of sectaries and the Scots ought not to wait. Leslie obeyed. The deployment in low ground at the Brox Burn opened his right flank to a dawn attack which Cromwell timed to the rising of the sun off the sea. Three thousand Scots dead, ten thousand prisoners. Leslie himself escaped with the regiments of Holburn and Strachan back to Edinburgh, but the Covenanted army of the Engagement was finished. Cromwell occupied Edinburgh ten days later. The Battle of Dunbar is, by the careful judgment of the New Model's chronicler John Hodgson and of every later military historian, the single most consequential English victory in Scotland between Flodden and Culloden.

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