September the Third
September 3, 2007 - 10:59 pm
On September 3rd, 1650, Oliver Cromwell defeated a Scottish army at the Battle of Dunbar. On September 3rd 1651, he defeated another Royalist army at Worcester and there’s evidence that Cromwell deliberately waited so that the battle would take place on a day he considered auspicious for him.
Royalist propaganda at the time stated that one of Cromwell’s own troopers had spotted him in a wood early on the morning of the Battle of Worcester, bargaining with an old man clutching a scroll and asking for “seven more years”. Seven years later to the day, on September 3rd 1658, Cromwell died as a terrifying thunderstorm rent the sky.
His victory at Worcester seven years earlier led to the flight of Charles II, who took refuge in an oak tree while trying to elude Cromwell’s troopers. A month or so later, the future sovereign hid at Stonehenge during the day, apparently “reckoning and re-reckoning the stones” in an attempt to pass the time, although another account says that “…the King’s Arithmaticke gave the lye to that fabulous tale that those stones cannot be told alike twice together”.
In any event, Cromwell’s victory at Worcester on this day and his supposed Pact with the Devil inadvertently provided Stonehenge with another story of the ruins’ association with British kings, an association that goes back, as far as we can ascertain, to Pytheas of Massilia’s description of the kings of the City of Apollo.
Care to comment?
