There were perhaps a thousand dead on the Royalist side. Their bodies lay thickest at the foot of the hill where their sovereign had watched his great defeat. Fairfax had lost not much more than a couple of hundred men. At the end of the day, despite the dragoons' significant service throughout, Okey had no fatalities at all, with only three wounded.
In the aftermath, it would take days to sort and count the prisoners, of whom there were nearly five thousand. The New Model had killed or captured all the King's experienced infantry. The list of Royalist officers who were taken ran to eight pages, while many more were dead — so many the King could never realistically re-create his army. All the Royalist bags and baggage were captured, with all their artillery, fifty-six standards, two hundred carriages, weapons, gunpowder and horses, carts laden with boats, royal servants, the Duke of York's Lifeguards, money and treasure and plunder the Royalists had with them, including some of the rich pickings from Leicester. Most important was a carriage containing the King's correspondence. It dealt him a devastating blow, because his letters revealed that Charles had been negotiating with Catholics and planning to bring an Irish Catholic army into the war on his side. This damning evidence of treasonous intentions would be published. Eventually, it would seal the King's fate.
Before the sad clear-up, the battlefield was filled with the terrible moans and screams of wounded and dying men, the wheezing death-throes of horses. The aftermath had the normal blood and terror. Royalists who escaped fled at least to Leicester, though Leicester was bound to be retaken by Parliament so some cavaliers kept going as far as their base at Newark, thirty miles distant. Fugitives were hunted and chopped down by cavalry, who rode up behind them and severed their necks with sword blows from above. A group of Royalist horse lost their way, were trapped by New Model pursuers in a dead end, butchered in a churchyard and their bodies tossed contemptuously into clay pits. One desperate fugitive ran for thirty miles, only to surprise a serving girl who was able to kill him with the dolly-stick she had been using to pound laundry.
Cromwell took his cavalry straight on to Leicester, Okey's dragoons with him. Much of the New Model had to stay at Naseby clearing up. The dead were stripped and buried; the wounded were collected. Prisoners were marched away. Various Royalist ladies of quality were found close to the battlefield and quietly returned to private life. Women of the lower orders fared much worse. A group of females were in an encampment, unaware of the battle's outcome. They were denounced as Irish, though they were more likely Welsh. Since they carried knives, whether for their own protection or merely for preparing dinner, they were violently attacked there among the smouldering campfires, denounced as whores, then mutilated by slashing their noses and faces. About a hundred, it was said, were murdered in cold blood.
Elsewhere, a large consignment of cheese and biscuit was discovered among the plunder. Parliament's weary soldiers devoured this, praising God.
Gideon Jukes did not know how long he lay semi-conscious. When he managed to crawl upright, he had been left behind by the dragoons. Now he was bemused. Standing among the littered carcases of men and horses, with his eyes still stinging from the sulphurous smoke of the gunpowder and every muscle aching, he wondered what he was supposed to do. He stumbled about, his booted feet unable to bear him straight. A little while later, he found himself close to where booty was being sorted. Someone handed him a share of the captured cheese and biscuit, which he ate mechanically. He was spent. He needed to be given orders. He felt lost without his regiment.
The field was said to be four miles broad, yet Gideon had a ridiculous chance encounter there. A familiar figure came along — wide-bodied, trailing a battered pike with its shaft bent, his blood-covered breastplate unbuckled so his tattered shirt hung out. It was unmistakably Lambert, who until that moment had had no inkling that Gideon was enlisted or present. His brother's helmet, his heavy iron pot, was missing, along with the soft Monmouth cap he usually wore under it. His tow-coloured hair was black with filth, his face streaked with blood and grime.
Coincidence never fazed Lambert. 'Trust you to sniff out the snap — '
Gideon tore in two the cheese he had been eating. Lambert took hold of the halves and measured them by eye, adjusting for fairness as if they were brothers squabbling at home; then both munched grimly in silence until they could take in no more.
'You join at Windsor?'
'Newport Pagnell.'
Lambert nodded. 'I tried to get and see you there. We were under orders not to mingle, in case the Newport garrison poked us in the eye for having better coats and guns.'
'No, it was because New Model Army soldiers kept trying to run off and join our rather fine garrison!' Gideon corrected his brother with a grin. 'I'm with Okey. Spent half the day on my knees in a ditch with a bramble cane in my ear.'
'We saw you crazy devils whooping and playing at cavaliers,' Lambert said, jealously.
'Going at it like heroes!.. I have lost my father's horse.' Guilt was fixating Gideon.
'You have lost your father,' Lambert informed him in a grey voice, 'so there will be no comeback for the mare… He slipped away in his sleep at the end of March. Colonel Rainborough gave me home leave from Windsor for the funeral.'
'Our father would have wished to see this day…' Tears of grief mingled with tears of stress and fatigue as Gideon thought of John Jukes's delight if he had known of the victory. Then he imagined his mother, without John, to whom she had cleaved for nearly fifty years.
'God is our strength!' Lambert saluted the last crumbs of biscuit with the New Model's watchword of the day. Food had undone him. He looked down and saw- that he was standing in a pool of blood. A wound to the foot which he had not felt in the heat of battle finally made its presence known. He passed out in a dead faint; Lambert could not stand the sight of blood. Gideon just about caught him and supported his substantial weight while others rushed to help lower the hefty pikeman to the ground.
A regimental surgeon's mate glanced at Lambert, cut off his shoe and stocking, and performed rapid cleaning. Gideon stood by, unable to move, suspended in lassitude. 'He'll live. Get him into one of the carriages going out to Northampton.' With two hundred captured vehicles, the Parliamentarian wounded were travelling in style.
'Find yourself another horse!' Lambert woozily commanded as he was lifted into his conveyance, still the elder brother, still trying to organise…
It was only early afternoon. Over Broad Moor, frantic plovers called and searched for fledglings they would never find again. The corn and even the prickly gorse were trampled flat. Smoke lay as thick as the mist that had hidden the armies from each other at daybreak. At least it hid some of the carnage.
Lambert would be tended at Northampton. Parliament sent doctors to attend the wounded there. Gideon helped collect other casualties until a riderless horse was given to him, so he set off to Leicester after his regiment. Along the road he witnessed the bloodied bodies of Royalists who had been chopped down as they tried to escape. Some still had in their hats the beanstalks that the King's men had worn as their field sign. The postures of the corpses and their wounds told its story of sword-blunting massacre. Flight gave a licence for a killing spree. Failure to surrender permitted bloody vengeance. The New Model Army had taken it.
'Honest men served you faithfully in this action,' Oliver Cromwell would write to the Speaker of the House of Commons. 'Sir, they are trusty. I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. I wish this action may beget thankfulness and humility in all that are concerned in it…' It was natural for those honest men of faithful service to exult that the Lord had shown His favour by awarding them easy victory. Riding alone in search of the dragoons, however, Gideon Jukes experienced more melancholy feelings. He was all too aware how close the battle at Naseby came to being lost and how hard it had in fact been won. Then the mercy of God was not on any of the roads to Leicester that evening. The joy of the victor was tempered in Gideon's heart.