The latter, under David Lesley, had taken up a strong position on the
height of the Tor Wood, between Stirling and Falkirk, from which they
refused to be drawn out to battle; and Cromwell resolved to take up his
post on the other side of the Royalist army. Accordingly, he crossed the
Forth at Queensferry, and, after defeating an attempt to intercept him
at Inverkeithing, reached and occupied Perth. The way to England was now
open, and the Scottish army swiftly and silently entered upon it,
resolved to stake everything upon a great battle.
Sir Thomas Urquhart left his castle of Cromartie, and took part in this
expedition, though apparently he held no position of command in the
army, and was very much out of sympathy with many of those who journeyed
with him. Indeed, his unfortunate prejudices against the Presbyterian
and Covenanting party come out in the statement he makes, that many of
those who started out to smite "the Midianites and Philistines," when it
came to the push, managed to make their way home, "being loth to hazard
their precious persons, lest they should seem to trust to the arm of
flesh."[113] The mass of those, however, who formed the Scottish army
were of very different mettle, and the battle in which they staked and
lost everything was one of the fiercest in the whole of the great Civil
War.
The course of their journey southward was through Biggar and Carlisle,
and then through Lancashire. To their disappointment, they received no
great accession of Royalists, nor of any others who were inclined to
join them in the attempt to overthrow the Commonwealth. "They marched,"
says the historian, "under rigorous discipline, weary and uncheered,
south through Lancashire; had to dispute ... the Bridge of Warrington
with Lambert and Harrison, who attended them with horse-troops on the
left; Cromwell with the main army steadily advancing behind. They
carried the Bridge at Warrington; they summoned various Towns, but none
yielded; proclaimed their King, with all force of lungs and heraldry,
but none cried, God bless him. Summoning Shrewsbury, with the usual
negative response, they quitted the London road; bent southward towards
Worcester, a City of slight Garrison and loyal Mayor; there to entrench
themselves, and repose a little."[114] Yet but slight opportunity for
this was given them. The course taken by Cromwell was through York,
Nottingham, Coventry, and Stratford-on-Avon, and when he arrived at
Worcester with his army from Scotland, and with the county militias, who
had risen at his summons, his forces numbered over thirty thousand men
as against the enemy's sixteen thousand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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