Elsewhere, the Royalists seemed to have won the battle. Newcastle’s Whitecoats had made a colossal attack on the Parliamentary infantry, and the Scots in the second line could hardly hold them. The first line was in complete disorder and it seemed that the Whitecoats’ driving pikes might lift the Roundheads clean off the field. On the Royalist left, Lord Goring had launched his cavalry in the sort of tear-away charge Rupert might have produced had he not been so hesitant. The Parliamentary right had been torn away as a man’s shoulder might be torn away by a cannonball, and the Earl of Leven and one or two other worthies went with it. Back down the roads leading to the south went news of the trampling of Parliament’s main armies, and in Newark a peal of bells was rung in honor of a Royalist triumph.

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The time was getting toward 8:30 p.m. and there was at most an hour of daylight left. Cromwell had pulled his cavalry round behind the Royalists and halted either in or near Wilstrop Wood. Most of Rupert’s cavalry had fled beyond it, and Cromwell let them go while he and his men coolly evaluated what else needed to be done on that hectic field.

Lord Fairfax had joined the rout of the infantry, but to his right with some of the cavalry was still his redoubtable son, Sir Thomas. In the midst of the confusion he threw away the white scarf by which many of the Parliamentarians distinguished themselves (those were the days before regular uniforms), and he rode amid the turmoil right through the rampaging Royalist cavalry. It is not certain who first found Cromwell at Wilstrop Wood with news of the chaos on the Parliamentary right, but it might have been Fairfax. At any rate, Fairfax would have been sufficiently coolheaded to put Cromwell in the picture. And Cromwell knew what to do.

At 8:30 Goring’s cavalry was slicing away the right flank of the wavering Roundhead infantry, and some of his men had even reached Marston Hill. Suddenly from behind them, from where they might have thought Rupert’s Bluecoats were waiting, came a sweeping, violent charge of 2,500 horsemen led by Cromwell in person. And these men were fresh-remember, they had paused after the rout of Rupert’s cavalry, and had not just returned from a chase.

John, second Earl Maitland’s regiment of Scots was still holding its ground with pike and musket, and the grand sweep of Cromwell’s cavalry did the rest. From being the victors, Goring’s horse became the fugitives, the mere backwash of a river trying to contend with an oncoming tide. By 9 o’clock the battle was over as a contest, and Cromwell was the master of the field, with which his nominal superiors, Manchester, Leven and Lord Fairfax had lost touch.

There was a bloody postscript. The gallant Whitecoats refused to surrender to an army that included many Scots. They were penned in White Sike Close, and they fought on far into the night under a full moon while Cromwell’s cavalry had the hideous work of cutting away their outer ranks layer by layer. The Whitecoats who were wounded spent the last of their strength thrusting upward from the ground with pikes and scythes, trying to maim the horses of their attackers. Late that night some 30 or so surrendered; the rest were dead or so badly wounded they could no longer bear arms.

The Royalist dead totaled between 3,000 and 7,000, probably nearer the latter figure when it is recollected that 3,000 Whitecoats alone must have died. The Roundhead losses are reckoned to have been less than 1,000 dead and wounded, but it was a narrow squeak. For without Cromwell, those figured could easily have been reversed. Rupert still managed to find 6,000 horsemen with whom he escaped back over the hills into Lancashire.

A few days later, Yorkshire troops under Sir Thomas Fairfax entered York under an agreement that no ‘foreign’ soldiers would garrison the city. Sir Thomas, one of the most civilized men in that war, saw to it that the stained-glass windows of York Minster (containing more than 2 million separate pieces) were not damaged by the iconoclasts among the Roundheads.The results of the battle were cataclysmic. Apart from Newark, the whole of the north and the English midlands had fallen to Parliament in two hours. The biggest battle fought on British soil was a Parliamentary landslide. Cromwell was free to turn his attention to the south.

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