By Dennis Bell - Sept. 20, 1998
email: dennis@cafe.net
It was a time when rational men thought nothing of splitting religious
hairs with cannonballs. It was the era of the English Civil Wars, 1642 to
1651 -- an historical misnomer, since most of the carnage in those wars
was in fact suffered by Ireland and Scotland rather than England. Almost
every student in the English-speaking world has learned the details of the
Battle of Naseby, and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent execution of King
Charles I. But few of us were taught anything about the Battle of Dunbar,
September 3, 1650, where Scotland squandered an incredible opportunity to
defeat Cromwell and change the course of British history. It was
Scotland's best and last realistic chance to chart its own political and
religious destiny. That chance was wasted by a committee of Presbyterian
ministers, blinkered by religious fanaticism. And the fiasco ended in an
English-controlled death march of 5,000 Scottish prisoners of war, one of
the most unsavory pages in British history.
The Dunbar Golf Club is located where the Firth of Forth runs into the
North Sea below the Lammermuir Hills. It is one of Scotland's best kept
golfing secrets, a beautiful 6,426-yard course of exasperating fairways,
maddening traps and infuriating hazards. The greens are often coated white
with ocean spray when golfers arrive at the crack of dawn to begin an
always blustery and frequently rain-soaked round of 18 holes. The course
occupies a slim stretch of relatively flat estuary terrain between the
Firth of Forth and Doon Hill, the easternmost summit in the Lammermuirs.
Scots have been golfing there since at least 1616, when two duffers from
the neighboring parish of Tyninghame were censured by the Church of
Scotland for "playing gouff on the Lord's Day." In 1640, a Presbyterian
minister was disgraced when he was caught committing the unpardonable sin
of "playing at gouff."
Ten years later, on September 1, 1650, Lord-General Oliver Cromwell
camped on the soggy course with 11,000 exhausted and sick New Model Army
soldiers, beating a hasty retreat out of Scotland for England. He must
have wondered if he was about to be disgraced by his old comrade, Scottish
General David Leslie, and defrocked as Lord-General by Parliament for
merely playing at a war rather than winning it. Cromwell had hightailed it
to Dunbar after failing in an attempt to seize Edinburgh, defended by
Leslie and 23,000 Scottish soldiers now pursuing the English army down the
east coast towards the border. Just five years earlier, Leslie had won the
day for a wounded Cromwell, leading a cavalry charge that defeated the
Royalist Cavaliers at the critical Battle of Marston Moore, west of York.
But on this day, the Scots had switched sides again, fighting now on
behalf of the Royalists of Charles II, who had succeeded his father
executed by Cromwell and the Roundheads on January 30, 1649. Leslie's Army
of the Covenant was poised to elevate the House of Stuart back to the
British throne, and Presbyterianism to the altars of Westminster Abbey and
Canterbury Cathedral.
At Dunbar, the Scottish field commander had bits and pieces of about 40
regiments under his command, cobbled into 10 brigades commanded by some of
Scotland's best and bravest military leaders. A Scottish army composed
largely of Highlanders had been defeated by Cromwell a few months earlier
at the Battle of Preston. Most of those who joined Leslie's new army were
Lowlanders, from Glasgow, Ayrshire, Edinburgh and Fife. At the start of
the civil wars, a brigade usually consisted of two full-strength
regiments. However, by 1650, casualties, sickness, and desertions had cut
most Scottish regiments down to half or even a quarter of their original
strength. As a result, most brigades were composed of the remainder of
three, four or sometimes more regiments.
Leslie specialized in cavalry. An average Scottish cavalry regiment
usually consisted of a colonel commanding eight troops of 60 men, plus
four officers below the colonel in each troop: a captain, lieutenant,
commissioned quartermaster and a cornet who carried the troop's cornet
standard into battle. The troops had no sergeants -- just two or three
corporals, one or two trumpeters and a large complement of lowly privates.
Scottish officers were almost invariably from the wealthy upper class.
They were expected to provide their own clothing, which was rather dashing
and very expensive during the civil war period. Scarlet and black were the
most popular officers' colors. Black was a very difficult color to
manufacture with the vegetable dyes available to tailors during the 1600s.
The only officers dressed in black were usually very high in rank from
filthy rich baronial families. Scarlet was the cheaper color of choice for
most professional soldiers regardless of rank, their country of origin or
which side they were on, making for some rather confusing battles. Gold
and silver lace were quite common in army garb as were white lace collars
and cuffs. Hair was generally worn at shoulder length, parted in the
middle -- even by the strait-laced Presbyterian Covenanters. Blue woollen
brimmed hats and heavy steel helmets imported from the Continent were in
vogue with officers on both sides of the civil war.
The other main units of the Scottish armed forces in the 1600s
consisted of regiments of pike, about 1,000 men in each, armed with
Spanish-designed 13- to 16-foot-long poles with iron spearheads. They were
trained for close combat against infantry and cavalry charges. The
regiments of musket, each numbering 800 to 1,000 men, were the army's real
firepower. It's not known how much artillery the Scots had at their
disposal in 1650. Experts believe that General James Wemyss' artillery
regiment was probably able to deploy two or three dozen cannons of
relatively short range, accounting for another 250 to 300 soldiers. The
Scots also had regiments of "dragoones," about 400 mounted infantry
soldiers lightly armed with short-barrelled muskets or carbines -- or
weaponless except for lances and claymores in times of troubled army
finances. The highly mobile dragoons were an elite force, travelling on
horseback but generally fighting on foot. As mounted infantry, they often
fought in the vanguard of advancing armies, or held rearguard positions
when the main army was in retreat.
Scottish regiments were generally called into service by press and
levy. The lairds and clan chieftains raised their regiments by obliging
their tenants -- through feudal duty or coercion if necessary -- to send
their sons, brothers and husbands to follow the large blue Covenanters'
banner into battle. That battle flag bore the motto "For Christ's Crown
and Covenant" and first appeared in 1639 in front of the Covenanter army
commanded by General Alexander Leslie, first Earl of Leven, from Fife. He
passed it to General David Leslie's Army of The Covenant 11 years later.
Cromwell had returned from several months of drenching Ireland in blood
to take on Leslie with a new army of 16,000 men, which crossed the
Scottish border on July 22, 1650. He had eight regiments of cavalry and
eight regiments of foot. One of the latter had just been formed in
Coldstream near Newcastle -- the Coldstream Guards. English Scoutmaster
General William Rowe reported to Parliament that Cromwell's army was
stocked with "very well baked bread," virtually unbreakable and almost
everlasting. They marched into Scotland loaded down as well with cheese,
horseshoes, nails, and portable "biscuit ovens" in order to bake even more
unbreakable bread. There were promises of beans and oats to follow by sea
from Kent. What the New Model Army lacked was tents -- only 100 small ones
for officers were supplied -- and the soldiers in the ranks would pay a
terrible price for this oversight.
As the English marched toward Edinburgh, Leslie unleashed a classic
guerrilla war against them, perhaps the first army-sized guerrilla
campaign in history. The terrain was Leslie's personal backyard. He knew
every inch of it and used that knowledge mercilessly against the
frustrated New Model Army. The Scottish general's troops -- particularly
his dragoons -- ambushed the Roundheads in every mountain pass and glen.
Then they melted away, leaving the English with nothing but wounds to
treat and bodies to bury. English officer Charles Fleetwood wrote in
despair in August that the New Model Army's major problem was "the
impossibility of our forcing the Scots to fight -- the passes being so
many and so great that as soon as we go on the one side they go on the
other."
At one point, Cromwell took a small party of his top commanders out for
a first-hand look at the situation near Coltbridge. They ran into a hidden
group of Scottish pickets, one of whom stood up and fired a quick musket
round at Cromwell that just missed its mark. The startled Lord-General
cupped his hands and shouted with bravado across the glen that he would
have cashiered an English soldier for wasting a random shot from such a
long distance away. The Scot shouted back that it was no random shot at
all -- he had been at Marston Moor with Leslie and Cromwell and recognized
his one opportunity to kill the Lord General right off the bat. Then he
melted into the heather, to reload and fight again.
The English were running out of supplies. The Scots had stripped the
countryside bare as they carefully retreated, avoiding any sort of major
battle. The weather turned cold and wet, and disease began to take a heavy
toll of Cromwell's forces. More than 4,000 English soldiers were reported
too ill to fight at one stage during the Edinburgh campaign. As the
Roundheads closed in on the Scottish capital, they discovered that Leslie
had shepherded his army into a masterfully designed position between
heavily fortified Edinburgh and Leith on the coast, its narrow approaches
bristling with hidden artillery and musketry. Cromwell's own guns
agonizingly wheeled all the way north from Newcastle briefly bombarded the
city with a few potshots from Arthur's Seat and his ships fired some
desultory broadsides from the Firth of Forth, unmolested thanks to
Scotland's traditional failure to assemble any kind of navy. But the New
Model Army was unable to breech Leslie's Edinburgh defences.
In late August, the badly weakened English retreated east to
Musselburgh on the coast, shipping out sick and wounded soldiers from its
port by the hundreds. Leslie's brigades took up the chase, paralleling the
English march and harrying the Roundheads with incessant guerrilla attacks
as both armies headed southeast. Cromwell graphically described the
situation in one of his dispatches: "We lay still all the said day, which
proved to be so sore a day and night of rain as I have seldom seen . . .In
the morning, the ground being very wet, we resolved to draw back to our
quarters at Musselburgh, there to refresh and revictual. The enemy, when
we drew off, fell upon our rear . . . We came to Musselburgh that night,
so tired and wearied for want of sleep, and so dirty by reason of the
wetness of the weather, that we expected the enemy would make an infall
upon us -- which accordingly they did, between three and four o'clock in
the morning." One disheartened English officer writing home described
Cromwell's forces at Musselburgh as "a poor, shattered, hungry,
discouraged army."
The Scots pushed the 11,000 remaining English troops into a narrow
strip of coastal land near the town of Dunbar and boxed them in. Leslie
marched his main regiments to the top of Doon Hill escarpment, blocking
the route south with a high ground position that Cromwell instantly
recognized as impregnable. The stage was set for what Oliver Cromwell
himself later regarded as his greatest military victory -- greater even
than Naseby or Marston Moor. The committee of Covenanter ministers
accompanying the Scottish army was poised to instruct David Leslie in the
art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The morning of Sunday, September 1, 1650, was wet, cold and miserable
-- a typical late summer's day on Scotland's southeast coast. The English
commander's scouts had reported the road to the south and safety at
Berwick effectively blocked. It was time to stand and fight, against
impossible odds. But how? Cromwell could see the threatening glint of
Scottish pikes and a sea of regimental pennants fluttering on the summit
of Doon Hill a mile and a half away. He listened to the mutters of men and
the rumble of moving artillery pieces drifting down the escarpment from a
massive Scottish army itching for a fight. At this point, Cromwell's
choices amounted to charging uphill against a much superior Scottish army
or staying put, to wither and die.
The Lord-General was holed up in Broxmouth House, a structure owned by
the Earl of Roxborough, where a stream called the Broxburn slashes into
the sea through a steeply sloped and heavily wooded glen. From Broxmouth
the following day, he penned a urgent dispatch to Sir Arthur Haselrigge,
his commander in Newcastle, pleading for reinforcements as soon as
possible and urging him to keep the army's predicament at Dunbar a secret
from the parliamentarians back in London. "The enemy hath blocked up our
way to Berwick at the pass through which we cannot get without almost a
miracle," Cromwell wrote. "Our lying here daily consumeth the men, who
fall sick beyond imagination."
On Monday afternoon, Cromwell summoned his regimental commanders and
staff officers to a desperate strategy session at Broxmouth House. The
English had only one thing going for them. If Leslie wished to attack, he
could only do so by coming down the Doon escarpment -- Cromwell's men were
out of range for Leslie's artillery. As the Roundheads desperately groped
for solutions to a frightening military predicament, the Scots themselves
provided the answer. Instead of waiting atop Doon Hill for the English to
collapse from disease and starvation, Leslie's army began moving slowly
down the dominating slope at four o'clock in the afternoon to the
cornfields below on the opposite side of the Broxburn from the Cromwell
encampment. As Cromwell watched in disbelief and delight, the Scots
cheerily settled into a night camp amid the rows of corn to get ready for
the final victorious battle they believed would follow the next day. The
Scots doused their matches, stacked their weapons, and unsaddled their
horses. Many of their officers left to spend the night in the comfort of
Dunbar-area farmhouses miles behind the lines -- all the better to fight
the English after a decent night's sleep and a hearty farm breakfast.
It appears that General Leslie's tried and true guerrilla strategy had
been summarily overruled earlier in the day by the impatient Covenanter
ministers' committee from Edinburgh. The men of the cloth accompanied the
Scottish commander to the top of Doon Hill, only to bury their heads in
the religious sand. In mid-August, the Covenanters pressed Charles II to
issue a public statement attacking his mother's popery and his late
father's bad counsel. Charles refused and watered down his declaration
considerably before making it public. The Covenanters went berserk and
took their revenge by shooting themselves in the foot. They launched a
purge of the Scottish army, starkly reminiscent of Josef Stalin's
ideological purges of the Soviet Union's Red Army during the 1930s. More
than 3,000 of General Leslie's best professional soldiers including many
of his officers were peremptorily dismissed from the army and sent home
for such unforgiveable sins as loose morals and swearing in public. One
angry Scottish colonel said the Covenanters left Leslie with an army of
"nothing but useless clerks and ministers' sons, who have never seen a
sword, much the less used one."
Leslie's army had already taken the high ground when the English
straggled onto the golf course below late on the last day of August. He
went to the Covenanters for permission to attack the English on September
1, a Sunday, before Cromwell could get his forces organized into a
workable defence. They recoiled in horror from the idea of spilling blood
on the Sabbath -- even English blood. As he resignedly watched the English
regiments set up their defences on Sunday morning, Leslie went over to
Plan "B." He would stay atop Doon Hill and let the English army wither and
die to the point of surrender or try to charge uphill against him. But at
a morning meeting on Monday, Sept. 2, the Covenanters would have none of
it. The preachers now saw themselves as military strategists far more
brilliant than the man who had had used his favorite allies "Hunger and
Disease" to bring the English army to its knees with a minimum of Scottish
losses. God, they piously decided, was on the side of the Covenanters.
They were in charge, and they ordered Leslie to lead his army down Doon
Hill that afternoon to prepare for an all-out attack on Cromwell the
following morning. After an hour of acrimonious debate, the exasperated
general reluctantly obeyed, his tactical genius tied in knots of religious
red tape.
With his back to the ocean, Cromwell now realized that his only chance
of victory had miraculously come to pass. And he thanked the same God for
his one shining chance at deliverance. He watched in amazement as the
Scots formed their line at the bottom of Doon Hill into a giant fan-shaped
arc, stretching from the coast to the Broxburn, presenting him with an
irresistable target. The Scots settled in with a massive contingent of
cavalry on their right wing, crowded down onto the beach to the point
where there was little room for maneuvreability in the event of an attack.
Of course the Scots thought they were about to do the attacking, not the
English. But Cromwell decided to take the offensive. He ordered an
audacious pre-dawn attack across the steep defile of Broxburn brook, aimed
at a lightly defended position between the infantry and the cavalry on the
Scottish right. A nervous Cromwell spent the night riding from regiment to
regiment by torchlight on a small Scottish pony, telling his troops to
"remember our battlecry -- the Lord of Hosts! Put your trust in God, my
boys -- and keep your powder dry!" He had little trouble encouraging his
men to fight. The Scots had captured a Roundhead cavalry patrol near
Glasgow a couple of weeks prior to Dunbar and had sent the tortured and
mutilated bodies back to Cromwell as a warning. That savage gesture served
only to infuriate the English rank and file and stiffened the ailing
army's resolve considerably.
At four o'clock in the morning of Tuesday, September 3, six cavalry
regiments and three more regiments of foot slipped quietly across the
Broxburn in the moonlight, skirting the Scottish right wing. Screaming
"The Lord of Hosts!" at the pitch of their lungs, the Roundheads stormed
into the Scottish camp, catching Leslie's men sound asleep and completely
unprepared. But the Scots recovered quickly, rising to defend the position
against the English cavalry with their long Spanish pikes, muskets,
claymores and baskethilt swords. In the centre of the line, ferocious
hand-to-hand combat erupted between Scottish and English infantrymen and
the tide began to turn in favor of the defenders as dawn broke. Cromwell
took a look at the battlefield, and threw all of his reserves into the
fight at precisely the right time in exactly the right place. The
Ironsides -- never defeated in battle -- hit the exhausted Scots in an
opening to the left of the infantry fighting and their line collapsed. The
English cavalry regrouped and spilled through the gap. The battle had been
lost by Leslie's men in a instant. Cromwell himself marvelled at the work
of his cavalry, saying "they flew about like furies doing wondrous
execution." An English officer put it a little more succinctly: "The Scots
were driven out like turkeys."
The English victory was so complete that Cromwell broke into
uncontrollable laughter amid the agonized screams of the wounded from both
sides and the shattering silence of the bodies scattered two and three
deep in places across the Dunbar battlefield. It was what the clerics
subsequently called a "religious manifestation," a fairly common
occurrence among deeply religious men of all faiths caught in battle
during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. One Puritan preacher
described Cromwell as "drunken of the spirit and filled with holy
laughter" at Dunbar. An observer named Aubrey wrote in his book
Miscellanies a few years after the Restoration that Cromwell "was carried
on with a divine impulse. He did laugh so excessively as if he had been
drunk. The same fit of laughter seized him just before the Battle of
Naseby. 'Tis a question undecided whether Oliver was more of the
enthusiast, or the hypocrite."
The battle was no laughing matter for Scotland. With 3,000 soldiers
killed, it turned into the worst rout ever endured by Scottish soldiers,
who threw down their arms and fled by the thousands into the countryside.
They were chased down, killed or captured by Cromwell's cavalry as far as
eight miles behind the original Scottish line. In Scottish history, the
defeat became known sarcastically as "the Race of Dunbar." The English
booty included Leslie's entire baggage train, all of the Scottish
artillery, 15,000 stands of arms and 200 regimental pennants. When news of
the victory reached London, ecstatic members of the Rump Parliament
resolved that a Dunbar medal should be struck for both officers and men.
It was the first such military medal ever issued in Britain. There was no
other until the Battle of Waterloo, a century and a half later.
In addition to the 3,000 Scots killed at Dunbar, another 10,000 were
taken prisoner. Some English historians say Oliver Cromwell lost only 40
men killed and wounded. But that has to be taken with a grain of salt,
given the intensity of the first hour of fighting. After the battle ended,
Cromwell simply could not handle 10,000 prisoners. About 5,000 Scots
described in an English document as "those wounded and those fatigued by
flight"were released almost immediately on parole. But Cromwell ordered
5,100 Scottish soldiers marched south from Dunbar into captivity in
England as quickly as possible, fearing the Scots might organize a
counter-attack aimed at freeing and re-arming the prisoners. The English
also had big plans for the prisoners they kept. A document from the
English Calendar of State Papers issued during the period spells out the
disposition of "Scotch rebel prisoners." Initially, the plan was to
"execute all ministers and officers." That was subsequently changed to
execution of one in 10 "of the common sort . . .one forced to confession .
. .the rest sent to the plantations." There is no evidence of arbitrary
executions. Instead, the Scots were all to be enslaved, sold and deported
to Ireland or across the Atlantic for indentured servitude in the New
World colonies. Fighting men from the losing side had suddenly become
beasts of burden, a marketable commodity on a grand scale. But first came
what could well be called the Durham Death March, a disgusting stain on
English military and social history generally glossed over by British
historians then and now.
Instead of counter-attacking, General David Leslie prudently fled with
the skeleton of his once-mighty army to easily defended Stirling, the
gateway to the Highlands. He left Edinburgh undefended and open to a
triumphant Oliver Cromwell. The victorious New Model Army took possession
of the city on Sept. 7, 1650, four days after Dunbar, but the Scottish
garrison in Edinburgh Castle above the city held out until December. A
much different fate awaited the 5,100 Scottish prisoners, who began a
brutal eight-day march of 118 miles south to the English cathedral city of
Durham. In the hours that followed the battle, Cromwell put his Newcastle
commander Sir Arthur Haselrigge, member of Parliament for Leicester, in
charge of the prisoners. The march began at the crack of dawn on September
4th, and the prisoners finally arrived in Berwick, 28 miles to the south,
well after dark that night. Scots escaped in droves along the road to
Berwick and their English captors offered those recaptured no quarter,
killing dozens of the unarmed escapees.
The English foot soldiers and cavalrymen escorting the prisoners had
little food, eating mainly Scottish supplies captured from Leslie's
baggage train. There was virtually nothing to feed the Scots. Civilians
along the route occasionally risked English vengeance and tossed them
bread or whatever else could be spared, which wasn't much after a summer
of fighting in the area. The prisoners quenched their thirst from puddles
of rainwater and fetid ditches. They began dying -- first from wounds,
then from sickness , and later starvation. It turned into a death march, a
forerunner of the Bataan death march endured by American prisoners
captured by the Japanese after the fall of Corregidor in the Second World
War.
Three days after the forced march to Berwick, the bedraggled and
drenched Scots shuffled into Morpeth, where they were quartered in a
farmer's large walled cabbage field. Many had gone without food for
several days, thanks to a Scottish soldierly habit of fasting for a day or
two before a major battle to sharpen the reflexes. At Morpeth, "they ate
up raw cabbages, leaves and roots," Haselrigge wrote in a letter to
Parliament. "So many, as the very seed and labour at four-pence a day was
valued at nine pounds. They poisoned their bodies. As they were coming
from thence to Newcastle, some died by the wayside." By the dozens, then
the hundreds as uncontrolled dysentery and typhoid fever swept through the
Scottish ranks.
In Newcastle, Haselrigge had them put into "the greatest church in
town" -- St. Nicholas' Church -- for the night. More prisoners died among
the pews, and 500 others were unable to continue the march the following
morning. The last agonizing stretch took those who could still walk from
Newcastle down to Durham, leaving a trail of dying men and corpses
stiffening in the early fall frost along the side of the road.
Approximately 1,500 prisoners were lost during the march. Some escaped,
but most died of disease and wounds or were killed by their captors while
attempting to flee home to Scotland.
Late in the afternoon of September 11, about 3,000 surviving Scots
staggered into Durham Cathedral, a magnificent Norman structure on the
site of an abbey originally built by monks more than 1,000 years ago, in
997. Built by Catholics and taken over by Anglicans during the era of
Henry VIII, the cathedral fell on hard times a century later because of
religious ferment between Puritans and Presbyterians on both sides of the
border. Even before the civil wars, the region was regularly raided by the
quarrelsome border clans. A Scottish army occupied the city in 1640 and
held it for two years. The Scots confiscated money from the church to feed
their troops. When the gold and silver coins were slow in coming, the
Scots broke into the cathedral, smashing its priceless font and cathedral
organ to pieces as a warning. Ten years later, when the defeated Scots of
Leslie's army were herded into the cathedral, they were given no fuel and
little food.
"I wrote to the mayor (of Durham) and desired him to take care that
they wanted for nothing that was fit for prisoners," Haselrigge later
insisted. "I also sent them a daily supply of bread from Newcastle . . .
but their bodies being infected, the flux (dysentery) increased."
Haselrigge proudly told his fellow members of parliament back in London
that his cathedral prisoners were provided with "pottage made with
oatmeal, beef and cabbage -- a full quart at a meal for every prisoner."
He also told how his officers set up a hospital for the sick and wounded
in the adjoining Bishop's Castle, where patients were stuffed with "very
good mutton broth, and sometimes veal broth, and beef and mutton boiled
together. I confidently say that there was never the like of such care
taken for any such number of prisoners in England."
That may have been what Haselrigge ensconced in Newcastle thought was
happening, but his rank-and-file English guards in Durham were getting
rich quick by getting away with murder. Tons of supplies coming in from
Newcastle and "60 towns and places" in the Durham area were being stolen
by the cathedral guards. Some of the food was sold to the prisoners for
whatever money or personal jewellery they had managed to retain. Most of
the prisoners' rations went at cut-rate prices to merchants and grocers in
the area. There is general agreement among British historians that
Haselrigge did his best for the prisoners, and had no real idea of what
was actually going on. The harsh reality is that very little of the food
ever found its way into Scottish stomachs.
"Notwithstanding all of this, many of them died -- and few of any other
disease than the flux," a perplexed Haselrigge wrote. "Some were killed by
themselves, for they were exceedingly cruel one towards the other. If any
man was perceived to have any money, it was two to one he was killed
before morning and robbed. If any had good clothes that (a prisoner)
wanted, he would strangle the other and put on his clothes. They were so
unruly, sluttish and nasty that it is not to be believed. They acted like
beasts rather than men." No wonder. The prisoners were dying at an average
rate of 30 a day in the cathedral. That rate probably hit 100 or more
daily by the middle of October, as starvation and murder set in and the
dysentery infection rate peaked.
The English commandant also insisted from Newcastle that his prisoners
were getting an ample supply of coal to warm them as winter drew closer --
at least that's what the men in charge of the cathedral were telling him.
"They had coals daily brought to them , as many as made about 100 fires
both night and day. And straw to lie on." But it appears the coal, like
the food, was ending up everywhere except inside Durham Cathedral. Simply
to stay alive, the Scots burned every sliver of wood in the church -- the
pews, the altar, anything that would keep them warm, regardless of
religious significance. Strangely, the only combustible object that
survived was Prior Castel's Clock, installed in the cathedral in the early
1500s under the great Te Deum Window. It was made primarily of wood, and
running perfectly the following spring when most of the surviving Scots
were shipped out to the New World as indentured slaves. The one-handed
clock may have been left intact because of the decorative Scotch Thistle
carved into the top of its wooden casing. It is running to this day in
Durham Cathedral, its face divided into 48 segments to measure the day in
quarters of an hour rather than the much more familiar 60-minute format.
The Scots also savaged the cathedral tombs of one of England's most
prominent families -- the Nevilles, who had defeated King David II and his
Highlanders at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346. The Nevilles became
the Lords of Raby in the early 13th century, and remained one of the most
influential families in England throughout the Middle Ages. The plundered
and wrecked tombs were those of Ralph, fourth Baron Neville, who died in
1367, and Alice, his wife; John, fifth Baron Neville who died in 1388, and
his wife Matilda. Theirs were the first lay burials allowed in the
cathedral. The desperate Scots were probably searching for jewels buried
with the Nevilles that could be traded for supplies with their English
captors. The Nevilles' tombs were ripped apart, their bones scattered or
burned.
By the end of October, 1650, approximately 1,600 Scots had died
horrible deaths in Durham's much revered House of God. Only 1,400 of the
5,100 men who started the march from Dunbar in September were still alive
less than two months later, when England's traders in human flesh came for
them. Nine hundred of those survivors went to the New World, mainly
Virginia, Massachusetts and Barbados colony in the Caribbean. Another 500
were indentured the following spring to Marshall Turenne for service in
the French army, and were still fighting seven years later against the
Spanish, side by side with a contingent of English soldiers sent over by
Cromwell.
The shocking reality is that far more Scots died as English prisoners
than were killed at Dunbar. In Durham, disposal of the bodies had become a
major problem. The mystery of what became of them was not solved until
almost three centuries later, in 1946, when workers installed a central
heating system in the cathedral's music school. They came upon a mass
grave while digging a trench for heating pipes on the north side of the
cathedral. That grave went in a straight line from the cathedral's North
Door under a line of trees and then under the music school. The bodies had
been buried without coffins or Christian services. The corpses had been
tossed into the trench, one on top of the other, like so much garbage.
To this very day, there is no memorial of any kind to these unknown
Scottish soldiers. They rest in anonymity in what they would have regarded
as foreign soil, far from their homes and the graves of their loved
ones.