The Battle of Marston Moor was fought 380 years ago during the English Civil War and was one of the largest battles ever fought on British soil.
The Parliamentarians and their Scottish Covenanters allies had besieged the key Royalist garrison at York when they learnt that the Royalist commander Prince Rupert was on his way to lift the siege. And so the allies abandoned York and regrouped a few miles away at Marston Moor to block Rupert’s advance on York.
When the two forces met on July 2, 1644, it took time for both sides to prepare themselves for battle and by evening the skies grew ominously dark and threatening rain. Rupert decided it was in any case too late to attack, so he stood down his forces ready to fight the next day.
At about 7.30pm a thunderstorm broke out. “A sudden and mighty great storm of rain and hail and terrible claps of thunder were heard and seen from the clouds,” wrote the chronicler John Vicars. But the allies used the storm as a distraction to launch an attack that caught the Royalists by surprise, and the downpours of rain from the storm also snuffed out many of the Royalist muskets.
Even though they were ill prepared and heavily outnumbered, Rupert rallied his troops and during intense fighting the battle ebbed and flowed between the two armies. At one point much of the allied forces were in retreat and their commanders left the battlefield, but Oliver Cromwell then led his cavalry around the rear of the Royalist army and launched a devastating attack and together with an infantry charge drove the Royalists from the battlefield.
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The Royalists were routed, over 4,000 of their troops were killed and all their guns and hundreds of weapons were lost. As a result, the Allies returned to the siege at York and captured the city on July 16, effectively ending Royalist power in northern England. On July 4, Rupert led his remaining force in a retreat south to rejoin the king, while over the following several months the Parliamentarian and Scots forces eliminated the remaining Royalist garrisons in the north.
