Clan Leslie · 1650
David Leslie at Dunbar
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.
It is twenty past nine on the night of the second of September 1650, in the upper barn of the farm of Cockburnspath, on the south-eastern shoulder of Doon Hill, two miles south of the town of Dunbar, in heavy rain. He is forty-nine years old. He is Lieutenant-General David Leslie of Pitcairlie, formerly colonel in the Swedish service under his cousin Alexander, formerly second-in-command of the Scottish army at Marston Moor in 1644 (where his cavalry charge had broken Rupert), commander of the Covenanting army in the field for the past three months. He is in a coat of buff leather over a sword and a brace of pistols, with the strategic situation laid out on the stable-floor in pewter cups for landscape and a candle at the high point.
Below him on the ground, between the burn and the shore, is Cromwell's New Model Army, about eleven thousand strong, in the state by which the regiments of foot have not had a hot meal in three days and the cavalry horse have not been groomed in five. The fleet has come up the coast and is at Dunbar, but the supply has not been able to land in the weather. Cromwell, by the report of Leslie's scouts an hour ago, has the army's heavy guns embarked again on the ships against the fear of having to break west into Lothian.
Around the table in the upper barn are the four Kirk commissioners of the Committee of Estates: the Earl of Cassillis, Lord Wariston (the same Archibald Johnston who drafted the National Covenant twelve years before), and the ministers James Guthrie and Patrick Gillespie. They have been in the army these last six weeks under instructions from the General Assembly to purge the ranks of any officer whose godliness is in doubt. They have, in the past three weeks, removed four hundred and ninety-eight officers from the Engagement Lord, who fought for the King in 1648. The army standing on the high ground tonight is the Covenanting remnant after that purge.
The commissioners have, this evening, formally and in writing, instructed Leslie that he is to come down off the high ground tomorrow morning and engage the enemy. The instruction has been put in his hand on a sheet of paper at half past eight. The instruction reads that Cromwell's army is the army of sectaries that the Lord has delivered into our hands. The instruction is signed by all four. The instruction is not, in form, a request.
Leslie thinks: I have him. I have him on the strand below me. I have his ships of supply that cannot land. I have his army in fevered camp. I have him, in the language of soldiers, ready to die of his own dysentery in three days.
Leslie thinks: if I come off this hill tomorrow morning I lose the position. If I lose the position the open ground at the burn cannot be held against his cavalry on the right.
Leslie thinks: Cromwell will see us coming down at first light. Cromwell will time the attack on the right flank to the moment our regiments are unsteady on the ground.
Leslie thinks: I will lose the army.
Leslie thinks: the commissioners are not soldiers. The commissioners have not been on a field of battle in this country in this century. The commissioners are reading their instructions out of the prophet Joel.
Leslie thinks: I have, by the Articles of War of this army, the right to disregard a Civil instruction in the field. I have done so once before. I will lose my command for it.
Leslie thinks: I will lose the army either way. If I disregard the instruction I lose the command and the country splits and the western Whigs come into Edinburgh in November. If I obey I lose the army.
Leslie thinks: I will obey. The blood is on the commissioners.
He folds the paper. He puts it in his coat. He gives the order to the colonels at ten o'clock that the army will 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 says, in a low voice that does not carry: the Lord goes with the godly army. Leslie does not answer. He goes out of the barn into the rain and walks the line of his pickets for an hour.
Cromwell saw the Scots coming off the hill at three in the morning by the moonlight on the wet stone of the descent. He told Lambert at four, by Hodgson's later account: the Lord hath delivered them into our hands. He timed the dawn attack on the Scottish right at four-fifty, with the sun coming up off the sea. The right wing under Lambert engaged the right of Leslie's foot before they had completed forming, broke the centre by six, and the Scots regiments at the Brox Burn dissolved into a long retreat back to the Lammermuir line by mid-morning. Three thousand Scots dead. Ten thousand prisoners taken, of whom fifteen hundred would die on the long forced march to Newcastle and a further two thousand would die in Durham Cathedral, where the surviving prisoners were locked up through the autumn of 1650 and the winter following. The fortunes of the prisoners are commemorated by the modern Durham Cathedral memorial, put up after the mass grave of the Dunbar Scots was excavated in 2013.
David Leslie himself escaped with the regiments of Holburn and Strachan back to Edinburgh, then to Stirling. The army was rebuilt over the autumn of 1650 and the spring of 1651, and Leslie commanded the campaign that took Charles II's Scottish army into England in August 1651, ending at Worcester on the third of September 1651, exactly one year after Dunbar, in another decisive Cromwellian victory. Leslie was captured at Worcester and was held in the Tower of London for nine years. He was released at the Restoration in 1660 and made Lord Newark. He died in 1682, eighty-one years old. By his own private testimony years after the events, the order to come off Doon Hill was the worst military decision he had been compelled to obey in fifty years of service. The order itself, in Wariston's hand, is in the National Records of Scotland today. The Brox Burn runs across the field at Dunbar where the line broke. The site has, since 1950, been crossed by a stretch of the A1.