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Battle of Dunbar (1650)
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The Battle of Dunbar (3 September, 1650) was a battle of the Third English Civil War. The English Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell defeated a Scottish army commanded by David Leslie which was loyal to King Charles II of England, who had been proclaimed King in Scotland on 5 February 1649.
iament had long suspected the Scots' intentions, and decided to invade Scotland. Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Army's commander, disagreed with this strategy and resigned.
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Encyclopedia
The Battle of Dunbar (3 September, 1650) was a battle of the Third English Civil War. The English Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell defeated a Scottish army commanded by David Leslie which was loyal to King Charles II of England, who had been proclaimed King in Scotland on 5 February 1649.
Background
Parliament had long suspected the Scots' intentions, and decided to invade Scotland. Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Army's commander, disagreed with this strategy and resigned. Oliver Cromwell was made General in his place. John Lambert was appointed Sergeant Major General and the Army's second in command.
As Cromwell led his army over the border at Berwick in July 1650, the Scottish general - David Leslie - decided that his best strategy was to avoid a direct conflict with the enemy. Although his army comprised some 14,000 soldiers and outnumbered the English army of only 11,000 men, most of the Scots soldiers were poorly trained and inexperienced. Leslie chose, therefore, to shelter his troops behind impregnable fortifications around Edinburgh and refused to be drawn out to meet the English in battle. Furthermore, between Edinburgh and the border, Leslie adopted a scorched earth policy thus forcing Cromwell to obtain all of his supplies from England, most arriving by sea through the port at Dunbar.
Whether in a genuine attempt to avoid prolonging the conflict or whether because of the difficult circumstances he found himself in, Cromwell sought to persuade the Scots to accept the English point of view. Claiming that it was the king that was his enemy rather than the Scottish people, he wrote to his opponents on 3 August famously stating:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
This plea, however, was unsuccessful.
The Battle
By early September, the English army, weakened by illness and demoralized by lack of success, began to withdraw towards its supply base at Dunbar. Leslie, believing that the English army was retreating, ordered his army to advance in pursuit of the English. The Scots army reached Dunbar first and Leslie positioned his troops on a hill just south of the town where they overlooked Cromwell's land route back to England. Then, under the mistaken impression that Cromwell was planning to evacuate his army by sea, Leslie brought his army down from the hill on which it had been well positioned and approached the town. Witnessing this manoeuvre, Cromwell quickly realised that here was an opportunity for him to turn the tables on the Scots.
That night, under cover of darkness, Cromwell secretly redeployed a large number of his troops to a position opposite the Scottish right flank. Just before dawn on the 3 September, the English launched a surprise attack. Soldiers in the centre and on the left flank caught Leslie's men unawares, but were held by the greater number of Scottish opponents. On the right flank, however, the Scots soldiers were pushed back under the weight of superior English numbers until their lines started to disintegrate. Observing this disaster, the rest of the Scottish army lost heart, broke ranks and fled. In the rout that followed, 3,000 Scots were killed and over 10,000 were taken prisoner.
The Aftermath
As a result of the destruction of the Scottish army, Cromwell was able to march unopposed to Edinburgh. He quickly captured the Scottish capital, although Edinburgh Castle held out until the end of December. Of the 10,000 Scottish prisoners, Cromwell ordered about half to be released because they were unable to fight owing to their wounds. The remainder were then force-marched south towards England in order to prevent any attempt to rescue them. The conditions on the march were so appalling that many of the prisoners died of starvation, illness or exhaustion. By 11 September, when the remnants arrived at Durham Cathedral where they were to be imprisoned, only 3,000 Scottish soldiers were still alive.
Although Durham Cathedral offered a degree of shelter, the English failed to provide their prisoners with adequate food or fuel. For a time, the prisoners kept warm by burning all of the woodwork in the Cathedral with the notable exception of Prior Castell's Clock in the South Transept. It is thought that they left the clock alone because it carries a thistle, the emblem of Scotland, on it. The prisoners did take the opportunity to revenge themselves on the tombs of the Neville family, however, beheading their effigies and most of the statuary in the Cathedral. Lord Ralph Neville had commanded part of the English army which had defeated the Scots at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346 on the outskirts of Durham City.
By the end of October, cold, malnutrition and disease had resulted in the deaths of another 1,600 of the Scots soldiers. The bodies of many of those who had died were simply thrown into a mass grave in the form of a trench running northwards from the Cathedral. The location of their remains was then forgotten for almost three centuries until rediscovered by workmen in 1946. There is no permanent memorial to these soldiers and it is suggested that they had received neither Christian burial nor blessing, although their story is briefly told in the Cathedral guidebook. In 1993 the Cathedral approved in principle a request by the Scottish Covenanter's Memorials Association to erect a suitable memorial or plaque, but progress seems to have stalled at this stage. A campaign properly to respect and remember the "Dunbar Martyrs" was launched at the end of 2007, aiming as a minimum to gain a Christian blessing for the dead and an adequate memorial at the Cathedral burial site or even possible exhumation of the remains and reburial in Scotland. (see, www.dunbarmartyrs.com)
Of the estimated 5,000 Scottish soldiers that began the march southwards from Dunbar, over 3,500 died either on the march or during imprisonment in Durham Cathedral - more than the total number killed on the battlefield. Of the 1,400 survivors, the majority were eventually transported as slave labour to English colonies in the New World and the Caribbean.
After formally accepting the Solemn Oath and Covenant, Charles was finally crowned King in Scotland on 1 January 1651.
Sources
Battles and Generals of the Civil Wars, H.C.B. Rogers, Seeley Service & Co.,London, 1968
Dunbar 1650, Cromwell's Most Famous Victory, Turner, Graham, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 2004
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