Battle of St Fagans, 1648: the Welsh rising crushed in two hours

They wore a ribbon of blue and white on their hats with the words "We long to see our King". Many of them had fought for Parliament only two years earlier. On a May morning in the fields west of Cardiff, the Welsh rising of 1648 met a small, hard New Model force, and within a few hours its army had ceased to exist.²

Background: a mutiny that became a rising

By 1648 Parliament had won the first civil war, but its own soldiers were restless, and that spring revolts broke out across the country. In south Wales Parliamentarian troops mutinied against orders to disband before their arrears of pay were settled. When officers and the Royalist gentry of Pembrokeshire joined them, the mutiny became a rising.³

The spark was Pembroke. In February John Poyer, the governor of Pembroke Castle, refused to hand it over to Colonel Fleming, the officer Fairfax had sent to take it over, pleading his arrears of pay. On 23 March, sure of the support of the disbanded soldiers, he declared for the king. Colonel Rice Powell, one of Laugharne's officers, joined him, and Tenby and Chepstow castles were held for the king.⁴

Wales was fertile ground for it. Gardiner points out that the country was strongly anti-Puritan, so that a mutiny of unpaid soldiers could easily grow into popular resistance; Phillips, that most of the Welsh gentry were for the king and led the common people as they pleased. As April wore on, the disbanded men took what pay they could get and then went over to Poyer, and Horton found himself facing far more than the garrisons of Pembroke and Tenby.⁵

In London the danger looked national. Royalist risings were stirring in England and the Scots were preparing to invade. Fairfax sent Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell to Wales at the beginning of May with two regiments of horse and three of foot, but the man on the spot was Colonel Thomas Horton of the New Model Army, joined by Colonel John Okey's dragoons.⁶

Armies and commanders

The rebels. Rowland Laugharne had been Parliament's champion in west Wales. A son of John Laugharne of St Brides, he had served as a page to the Earl of Essex. In 1644 and 1645 he won west Wales back from the Royalists, routed them at Colby Moor and was made Parliament's commander in Glamorgan and the three western counties. When the rising began he was in London answering accusations, and at first he held aloof. Then he came back to Wales, and on 4 May at St Nicholas he took command, writing to question Horton's right to enter his counties.⁷

His army was large but raw. The rebels numbered about 8,000, but fewer than 500 of them were horse; many were local recruits, and Horton reported that only about 2,500 carried muskets, the rest bills, pikes and clubs.⁸

Parliament. Horton's force was a little over 3,000, about half of it horse and dragoons, veterans of the New Model Army. It had spent weeks marching and skirmishing across Carmarthenshire and Brecknock in bad weather. When news came that the rebels were in Glamorgan and making for Cardiff, Horton marched south, crossed the Taff at Llandaff on 4 May and camped at St Fagans on the River Ely, with his headquarters at Pentrebane, a farm on the ridge to the north.⁹

The battle in phases

Maneuvers, 5 to 7 May. The rebels drew back from St Nicholas into the Vale of Glamorgan, to Llancarfan, Penmark and Fonmon, then on the night of Sunday 7 May advanced again to St Nicholas. Horton read it as a sign that they meant to fight, and quickly, because they knew Cromwell was coming. He kept his horse close all night.¹⁰

The opening clash. At about seven in the morning on Monday 8 May his scouts found the rebel army a mile and a half away. The rebels came on fast behind a strong forlorn hope of foot. Horton's own forlorn, 30 horse and 20 dragoons, charged and routed it, and his men took the better ground.¹¹

Hedge to hedge. Okey's dragoons and two hundred firelocks pushed the rebels out of two enclosures and over a little brook, then from hedge to hedge until they reached a bridge where the main rebel body stood. The fight became general. Horton's first division of foot closed with the rebel front while a second crossed the brook against their left flank, and the left wing of horse splashed through boggy ground to support it.¹²

Turning point: the horse gets round

The rebel foot stood stoutly until the Parliamentarian horse began to surround them; then, in Horton's words, they presently all ran. The Royal Commission describes the rebels as outmaneuvered and outflanked, almost encircled within two hours. Laugharne was wounded leading a last charge with his reserves, and his army was routed.¹³

Horton's horse and dragoons hunted the fugitives across the Vale. About 3,000 prisoners were taken, along with more than 2,000 firearms. The Royal Commission counts upward of 400 officers among the prisoners; Phillips, working from the Parliamentarian lists, names about a dozen field officers, 24 captains, 30 lieutenants and 28 ensigns. Rickard calls the battle a grim struggle, decided by the better quality of the Parliamentarian troops rather than by clever tactics.¹⁴

Aftermath

The Royal Commission counts Laugharne among the prisoners, but the BCW Project, the Dictionary of Welsh Biography and Phillips all have him escaping to Pembroke, where he directed its defense; that version is followed here. Gardiner dates the news to London on 11 May and writes that it came as England seemed to tremble on the brink of a Royalist reaction, and that those who had most distrusted the army now began to see the soldiers as their preservers.¹⁵

Cromwell, who had reviewed his men at Gloucester on the day of the battle, marched on into Wales. Chepstow town fell on 11 May and the castle was stormed on 25 May, when Sir Nicholas Kemoys was killed; Tenby surrendered on 31 May. Pembroke held out until July. Its walls defied Cromwell's field guns, a storm failed when the ladders proved too short, and the heavy siege guns were held up by contrary winds. Laugharne led sallies that cost the besiegers dozens of men.¹⁶

Wales was only one front of the Second Civil War. While Cromwell marched west, Fairfax broke the Kentish Royalists at Maidstone at the start of June, and the war moved on to Essex and the north.¹⁷

With food and ammunition running out, Poyer and Laugharne surrendered on 11 July 1648. Cromwell went north at once and destroyed the invading Scottish army at Preston that August, ending the Second Civil War.¹⁸ › Battle of Worcester, 1651

In April 1649 Laugharne, Poyer and Powell were court-martialed and condemned to death, but only one was to die, chosen by lot. A child drew the lots: two read "Life given by God", the third was blank, and the blank fell to Poyer. He was shot at Covent Garden, on 25 April according to the BCW Project and the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, on the 21st according to Phillips.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

The Royal Commission calls St Fagans the last set-piece defeat of the Royalist forces, one that effectively ended any realistic attempt to restore the full authority of Charles I. Within a year of the battle the king had been tried and executed.²⁰ › Battle of Edgehill, 1642

The battle is hard to pin down on the ground. Several Parliamentarian letters describe it, but almost no Royalist accounts survive, and no primary source names the exact spot. Horton's letter speaks of a little brook and a bridge where the rebels made their stand; the Commission identifies the stream with confidence as the Nant Dowlais, at a bridge that occupies the site of the one fought over.²¹

Visiting today

The village of St Fagans is now home to St Fagans National Museum of History, and the battle was fought close by. Metal-detector surveys around the Nant Dowlais bridge in 2012 and 2013 found lead shot, buckles, buttons, cavalry fittings, spoons and thimbles; some of these finds, among them a double-looped buckle, have entered the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru.²²

Pentrebane, where Horton made his headquarters, lies about a kilometer north of the village. The present farmhouse is a later building: Cadw, which lists it, dates it to the eighteenth century, with a major rebuilding in the nineteenth.²³