The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 319 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 319 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861.
looking back till they got as far as Lincoln, some others toward Hull, and others to Halifax and Wakefield, pursued by the enemy’s horse for nearly two miles from the field.  Wherever they came, the fugitives carried the news of the utter rout of the Parliament’s army."[B] This strong picture of the panic that prevailed in the very army that won the Battle of Long-Marston Moor is confirmed by Sir Walter Scott, who says that the Earl of Leven was driven from the field, and was thirty miles distant, in full flight toward Scotland, when he was overtaken by the news that his party had gained a complete victory.  Yet Leven was an experienced soldier, having served in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, in which he rose to very high rank; and the Scottish forces had many soldiers who had been trained in the same admirable school.  That there were many spectators of the battle, whose fright “daunted the soldiers still more,” shows that people were as fond of witnessing battles in 1644 as they are in 1861, and that their presence on the Moor was productive of almost as much evil to the Roundheads as the presence of Congressmen and other civilians at Manassas was to the Federal troops on the 21st of July.  There would seem to be indeed nothing new under the sun, and folly is eternally reproducing itself.  One of the names connected with our defeat is that of one of the most gallant of the Parliament’s commanders at Long-Marston:  Fairfax being named after the sixth Lord Fairfax, whose singular history furnished to Mr. Thackeray the plan for his “Virginians.”

[Footnote B:  Mr. Sanford quotes from a letter written by a spectator of the panic at Long-Marston Moor, which is so descriptive of what we should expect such a scene to be, that we copy it.  “I could not,” says the writer, “meet the Prince [Rupert] until after the battle was joined; and in fire, smoke, and confusion of the day I knew not for my soul whither to incline.  The runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, so full of fears, that I should not have taken them for men but by their motion, which still served them very well, not a man of them being able to give me the least hope where the Prince was to be found, both armies being mingled, both horse and foot, no side keeping their own posts.  In this terrible distraction did I scour the country; here meeting with a shoal of Scots crying out, ’Wae’s me!  We’re a’ undone!’ and so full of lamentations and mourning, as if their day of doom had overtaken them, and from which they knew not whither to fly.  And anon I met with a ragged troop, reduced to four and a cornet; by-and-by, a little foot-officer, without a hat, band, or indeed anything but feet, and so much tongue as would serve to inquire the way to the next garrisons, which, to say truth, were well filled with stragglers on both sides within a few hours, though they lay distant from the place of fight twenty or thirty miles.”—­See Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, (p. 606,) the best work ever written on the grand constitutional struggle made by the English against the usurpations of the Stuarts.  The letter here quoted was written by an English gentleman, Mr. Trevor, to the best of the Royalist leaders, the Marquis (afterward first Duke) of Ormond.]

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.