David Leslie at Dunbar

A battle is sometimes lost not on the ground where it is fought but in a room above the ground, where a soldier who knows the country is handed a sheet of paper by men who have read the prophets and not the weather. The professional then has a choice between the army he has built and the command he has been given. He can keep one. He cannot keep both.

THE SOLDIER ON THE HILL

David Leslie of Pitcairlie was forty-nine years old in the September of 1650 and had been a soldier since he was a boy. He had taken his trade under Gustavus Adolphus in the German wars, learned the Swedish horse on the plains around Lützen, come home in 1640 to fight for the Covenant, and in July 1644 at Marston Moor had led the cavalry charge on the left wing that broke Prince Rupert and gave the Parliament its first great field. He was a small, dark, careful man, not given to speech. He was, by the testimony of every officer who served under him, the best handler of horse in either kingdom. He was also, on this night, the commander of an army that was no longer entirely his own.

Six weeks earlier the General Assembly of the Kirk had sent its commissioners into his camp to purge the ranks of any officer whose godliness was in doubt. Four hundred and ninety-eight officers of the Engagement, men who had fought for the King in 1648, had been struck from the rolls. The regiments that stood on Doon Hill on the second of September were the remnant after that sifting, and the men around the table in the upper barn at Cockburnspath, the Earl of Cassillis, Lord Wariston, the ministers Guthrie and Gillespie, were the four who had done the sifting. They were the conscience of the army. They were not its soldiers.

THE GROUND AT DUNBAR

It had rained for three days. The Scots regiments lay along the ridge of Doon Hill above the coast road, with the sea on their left hand and the Lammermuirs at their back. Below them, between the burn and the strand, was Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, about eleven thousand strong, in the state by which the foot had not had a hot meal in three days and the cavalry horse had not been groomed in five. The fleet had come up the coast and was at Dunbar, but the supply had not been able to land in the weather. Cromwell, by the report of Leslie's scouts an hour before sundown, had the heavy guns embarked again on the ships against the fear of having to break west into Lothian.

The arithmetic was a soldier's arithmetic and Leslie had done it twice. He had twenty-three thousand on the high ground. Cromwell had eleven thousand on the wet strand, with dysentery in the foot and the supply offshore. The road south to Berwick was held. The road west to Edinburgh was held. The English were in a sack, and the sack was closing of its own accord. To hold the position was to win the war in a week without firing a gun.

THE INSTRUCTION

The instruction came in on a sheet of paper at half past eight. He was in a coat of buff leather over a sword and a brace of pistols, with the landscape laid out on the stable-floor of the upper barn in pewter cups for the high ground and a candle at the crown of the hill. The paper read that Cromwell's army was the army of sectaries that the Lord hath delivered into our hands, and that the Scots army was to come off the high ground at first light and engage. It was signed by all four commissioners. In form it was not a request.

He read it once. He read it again. Outside the rain was coming heavier off the sea, and he could hear the pickets calling along the ridge. He had him. He had Cromwell on the strand below, had his ships that could not land, had his army in fevered camp, had him ready, in the soldier's phrase, to die of his own dysentery within the week. If he came off this hill tomorrow morning he lost the position; if he lost the position the open ground at the foot of the Brox Burn could not be held against the English horse on the right. Cromwell would see the regiments coming down at first light, and Cromwell, who had been at Marston Moor on the other wing of the same field, would time the attack on the right flank to the moment when the foot were unsteady on the ground. He would lose the army.

The commissioners were not soldiers. The commissioners had not stood on a field of battle in this country in this century. The commissioners were reading their instructions out of the prophet Joel. By the Articles of War he had the right to disregard a civil instruction in the field. He had done so once before, in 1648. He would lose the command for it, and if he lost the command the country would split, and the western Whigs would come into Edinburgh in November, and there would be no Covenant left to fight for. If he obeyed he would lose the army. He would lose the army either way. He folded the paper along its crease and put it in his coat. The blood, he thought, is on the commissioners. He gave the order to the colonels at ten o'clock that the army would come off the high ground at first light and form up in line of battle on the open ground at the foot of the Brox Burn. The Earl of Cassillis said, in a low voice that did not carry, the Lord goes with the godly army. Leslie did not answer. He went out into the rain and walked the line of his pickets for an hour.

THE DAWN ATTACK

Cromwell saw the Scots coming off the hill at three in the morning by the moonlight on the wet stone of the descent. He turned to Lambert and said, by Hodgson's later account, the Lord hath delivered them into our hands. He timed the attack on the Scottish right at ten minutes to five, with the first edge of the sun coming up off the sea behind his own line. The right wing under Lambert engaged the right of Leslie's foot before they had completed forming. By six the centre was broken. By mid-morning the Scots regiments at the Brox Burn had dissolved into a long retreat back along the Lammermuir line. Three thousand dead on the field. Ten thousand prisoners taken, of whom fifteen hundred would die on the forced march to Newcastle and two thousand more in Durham Cathedral through the autumn and winter following. The whole of it took two hours.

THE PRISONERS

In the cathedral at Durham, on the night the doors were locked on them, the surviving Scots, country boys most of them out of Fife and the Lothians, broke up the wooden screens for fuel against the cold. There was no food. There were no fires permitted but the ones they made of the choir stalls. They died through October and November of dysentery, of typhus, of the wet wool that would not dry on their backs. They were buried in a pit beside the cathedral and forgotten for three hundred and sixty-three years, until in 2013 the bones were turned up under a paving slab during building work for a coffee shop in the precincts. The skeletons were the skeletons of farm boys, with the teeth worn from a diet of oats and the leg bones thickened by walking. They were given a service and a memorial in 2018.

THE ROOM IN EDINBURGH

Leslie himself escaped with the regiments of Holburn and Strachan back to Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh to Stirling. He rebuilt the army over the winter and the spring, and in August 1651 he marched it into England behind Charles II. On the third of September 1651, one year to the day after Dunbar, the army was destroyed at Worcester by Cromwell in another open-field action. Leslie was taken in the rout and carried south to the Tower of London, where he was held for nine years. He was released at the Restoration in 1660 and made Lord Newark of St Monans, in Fife. He sat in the Scottish Parliament. He did not write his memoirs. By his own private testimony, given years after to a kinsman, the order to come off Doon Hill was the worst military decision he had ever been compelled to obey in fifty years of service. He had not, he said, been wrong about the ground.

THE RETURN

The order itself, in Wariston's hand, is in the National Records of Scotland. Wariston was executed at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh in 1663 for his part in the Covenanting government. Guthrie was hanged in 1661. Cassillis lived quietly and died in his bed. Cromwell occupied Edinburgh ten days after Dunbar, held Scotland by military government for nine years, and is buried, after a fashion, beneath the floor of Westminster Abbey, his head having gone separately on a pike at Tyburn after 1660. David Leslie, first Lord Newark, died in 1682, eighty-one years old, and was buried in the kirk at Newark on the Fife coast.

A general who keeps his command keeps it by knowing which order, of the orders given him, is the one his country will remember. Leslie kept his command. He lost his army. The field at Dunbar is crossed today by a stretch of the A1, and the Brox Burn still runs across the line where the right flank broke in the dawn of the third of September 1650; in the cathedral at Durham, set into the wall above the place where the bones were laid, there is a small slab of pale Scottish sandstone with the names of the parishes the dead were from.