A Scottish invasion of England took place near Carlisle on 8 July 1648 as part of the Second English Civil War. The First English Civil War between Royalist supporters of Charles I and an alliance of Parliamentarian and Scottish forces had ended in 1646 with Charles defeated and imprisoned. He continued to negotiate with several factions among his opponents and this sparked the Second English Civil War in 1648. It began with a series of mutinies and Royalist uprisings in England and Wales. A Scottish faction which supported Charles, known as the Engagers, raised an army under the command of James Hamilton, Duke of Hamilton. This marched south to support the uprisings; crossing into England it combined with English Royalists under Marmaduke Langdale and continued along the west coast road some 24,000 strong. Much smaller Parliamentarian forces commanded by Major General John Lambert fell back in front of it.
Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell concentrated 9,000 men in north Yorkshire on 12 August. They crossed the Pennines to fall on the flank of the much larger Royalist army at Preston on 17 August. Not contemplating that Cromwell would act so recklessly, Hamilton was caught with his army on the march and with large detachments too far away to intervene. A blocking force of about 3,000 English Royalist infantry, many ill-armed and inadequately trained, proved no match for the Parliamentarians, most of whom were well-trained veterans from the New Model Army. After a ferocious hour-long fight these Royalists broke and fled. A second round of prolonged infantry hand-to-hand fighting took place for control of a bridge over the River Ribble immediately south of Preston; the Parliamentarians were again victorious, fighting their way across as night fell.
Most of the survivors, nearly all Scottish, were to the south of Preston and had not been engaged. Although still at least as strong as the whole Parliamentarian army they fled towards Wigan in a night march. They were hotly pursued and on 19 August, hungry, cold, soaking wet, exhausted and short of dry powder turned to fight at Winwick. After more than three hours of furious but indecisive close-quarters fighting the Parliamentarians fell back. They carried out a flank march and when the Scots saw this force appear they routed. Parliamentarian cavalry pursued, killing many. All of the surviving Scots surrendered: their infantry either at Winwick church or in Warrington, their cavalry on 24 August at Uttoxeter. Winwick was the final battle of the war. In its aftermath Charles was beheaded on 30 January 1649 and England became a republic on 19 May.
Sources
Written Campaign There are five useful accounts of the short campaign. Oliver Cromwell, commander of the Parliamentarian army, wrote a series of long formal letters in the days after the battles, recounting events. They are considered to form, broadly, an accurate record and to be largely free of bias. The experienced soldier Marmaduke Langdale, commander of the English Royalists who bore the brunt of the fighting at Preston wrote an account shortly after the campaign: Impartial Relation. Several versions of this account exist, largely in agreement with each other, but with several discrepancies. John Hodgson, a captain in a Parliamentarian infantry regiment wrote his memoirs in 1683. Two partial accounts of the campaign were written by senior Scottish commanders in the 1670s.
Preston There is a limited range of sources for the battle of Preston. There are no contemporary images nor illustrations of the battle other than two maps which concentrate on the layout of the town rather than the battle. There are three relatively full accounts of the battle written from a Royalist perspective. Langdale's account includes most aspects of the fighting at Preston. Another account was written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, a senior Royalist politician, more than 30 years after the battle. His main source is Langdale, although he puts the fighting more in context, and pins most of the blame for the Royalist defeat on Scottish ineptitude. Letter from Holland was written by an English volunteer who served in the Scottish army, possibly in the bodyguard of Hamilton, the Scottish commander. The unnamed author evinces a considerable dislike for his Scottish allies.
There are two equivalent accounts from the Parliamentarian side: Cromwell's letters and Hodgson's memoirs. Two briefer accounts by participants of parts of the campaign or battle are the diary entries of Captain Samuel Birch and two pages in the memoirs of Major Edward Robinson. The Bloody Battle of Preston is an imaginative and bogus contemporary account with several demonstrably false statements.
Winwick Cromwell was present at Winwick and his account includes the battle there. There is also a letter by the Parliamentarian cavalry officer Major John Sanderson giving details of his participation in the battle, and an account of it written by the Royalist James Heath in 1661.
Archaeology Several small cannonballs have been recovered from the site of the battle of Winwick. These are housed at Warrington Museum and are probably from horse-portable frame guns. Historic England states that "Winwick is the only battlefield from the English Second Civil War which appears to survive in a good state of preservation", but none of the site has been formally excavated. Few archaeological finds tied to the battle of Preston have been recovered and there is little prospect of any more being unearthed as most of the areas around the town where fighting took place have since been built over.
Background
In 1639, and again in 1640, Charles I, who was king of both Scotland and England in a personal union, went to war with his Scottish subjects in the Bishops' Wars. These had arisen from the Scots' refusal to accept Charles's attempts to reform the Scottish Kirk to bring it into line with English religious practices. Charles was not successful in these endeavours, and the ensuing settlement required all civil office-holders, parliamentarians and clerics to sign the National Covenant and give the Scottish Parliament the authority to approve all the king's councillors in Scotland. After years of rising tensions the relationship between Charles and his English Parliament broke down, starting the First English Civil War in 1642. In England Charles's supporters, the Royalists, were opposed by the combined forces of the Parliamentarians and the Scots. After four years of war the Royalists were defeated and Charles surrendered to the Scots. After nine months of fruitless negotiations with Charles the Scots handed him over to the English Parliamentary forces in exchange for a financial settlement and left England on 3 February 1647.
Charles then engaged in separate negotiations with different factions. In December 1647 he reached an agreement with the Scots, known as the Engagement, on religious matters, in return for their assistance in enforcing his claim to the English throne. The Engagement bitterly divided the Scots. The Kirk went so far as to issue a declaration condemning it as a breach of God's law. After a protracted political struggle the Engagers gained a majority in the Scottish Parliament and on 11 April 1648 repudiated the 1643 treaty with the Parliamentarians.
War
In 1648 the coalition of interests which had cohered on the Parliamentarian side during the first war fractured. There were risings in support of the Royalist cause in England and Wales and mutinies by Parliamentarian garrisons. These were especially serious in Kent, Essex and South Wales and marked the start of the Second English Civil War. On 29 April 1648 sixteen English Royalists seized the border town of Carlisle. By 1 May they had grown to a strength of 150 and had sent out patrols as far as Appleby. Six English warships defected to the Royalists. The most reliable military force the Parliamentarian leaders had at their disposal was the New Model Army. This was a standing army formed in 1645 by the Parliamentarians with an establishment of 22,000. It was a permanent and fully professional force, and commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax it gained a formidable reputation during the last two years of the First English Civil War. It had been split into garrisons across the country.
Fairfax, based in London, put down the revolt in Kent on 1 June at the fiercely fought Battle of Maidstone. He then moved into Essex and began an eleven-week siege of Colchester. In South Wales the Parliamentarians faced mutinous garrisons in Chepstow, Tenby and Pembroke Castle as well as Royalist risings. Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell arrived in South Wales on 11 May with 5,000 men of the New Model Army and found the local Parliamentarian forces gaining control. He besieged Pembroke Castle in the far south west on 31 May, hampered by a lack of artillery.
Major General John Lambert was in charge of Parliamentarian forces in the north of England. By mid-June he could muster fewer than 3,000 men; 1,700 from the Northern Association Army and 1,300 Lancashire militia. Marmaduke Langdale, who had fought as a cavalry commander in the First Civil War, raised 4,200 English Royalists in northern England. Pontefract Castle also went over to the Royalists, although the size of its garrison is uncertain. Lambert's men harassed the Royalist force around Carlisle, gathered information and besieged Pontefract Castle from early June. The summer of 1648 was extremely wet and stormy, causing both sides to be hampered by the weather.
The Scots raised an army under the command of the Duke of Hamilton to send into England to fight on behalf of Charles. As the situation with regards to the siege of Pembroke Castle and the restiveness of the local populace improved, Cromwell despatched regiments one at a time to march north and reinforce Lambert. Siege guns arrived on 1 July and the castle surrendered on the 11th. Cromwell mopped up and was marching east with more than 4,000 men within a week.
Invasion
Hamilton crossed the border into England on 8 July and joined with Langdale's force at Carlisle on the 9th. Lambert's smaller parliamentarian force withdrew, concentrating around Barnard Castle, to the east of the Pennines. Over the following five weeks the Scots besieged and captured Appleby Castle, then moved south to Hornby, with Langdale's 4,000 men acting as an advance guard. Lambert, despite being steadily reinforced, acted on Cromwell's orders and stood on the defensive. The Scots had sent a force to Ulster in 1642 and this was recalled to join the invasion of England. It totalled round 2,800all of them experienced veterans. They were commanded by Major General George Munro, who refused to accept any subordination to Hamilton. This led to Munro's corps manoeuvring as an independent force.
Rather than take the shortest route to intercept the Royalist army, north along the west-coast road, Cromwell swung well to the east, reaching Leicester on 1 August. By this time many of the Parliamentarian infantry were barefoot and happy that 2,500 pairs of shoes were waiting for them. Prisoners from Wales were left in Nottingham and ammunition and recruits to bring the infantry regiments up to strength were available at Doncaster. On 2 August Lambert took his corps south and joined up with Cromwell and his accompanying infantry at Wetherby on 12 August. These infantry had marched in thirteen days. Cromwell took command of the combined force.