1645 had unmade the King's cause. On 14 June the New Model Army destroyed the Oxford Army at Naseby. Goring's Western Army was beaten at Langport in July. Bristol fell on 10 September. Then on 13 September, the Marquess of Montrose - whose run of Highland victories had briefly looked like delivering Scotland to the King - was crushed at Philiphaugh, his army cut down after surrendering. Charles I retreated to Newark with 2,400 horsemen and a shrinking set of options. He resolved to send those horsemen north to find Montrose and rebuild a Scottish front. Command went to his Secretary of State, Lord Digby, despite Digby's reputation for poor judgement and his long feud with Prince Rupert. The cavalry were the Northern Horse under Marmaduke Langdale - men who had been fighting since their estates were lost at Marston Moor, hardened, but ill-disciplined and bitter.

Sydnam Poyntz, the Parliamentary commander in the north, was tracking the King's movements but had little useful intelligence. As he probed northwards he stumbled into Digby's column near Sherburn in Elmet. Almost a thousand Parliamentarian infantry under Colonel Wren were in the village, evidently caught off guard. They surrendered without much of a fight. As the Royalists were disarming the prisoners, word came that another Parliamentary force - Colonel Copley's cavalry - was riding hard to relieve them. Langdale drew up his half of the Royalist force, gave what one source called "a stirring speech," and met Copley's horse in the open. For a quarter of an hour the Northern Horse had the upper hand.

Then everything came apart. Some of Copley's troopers broke and rode straight through the village of Sherburn in Elmet. To the Royalists watching from the high ground, in the gathering dusk, those horsemen looked like their own men in flight. The cry of "They run!" - whether from Digby himself or one of his less reliable officers - spread through the rear of the Royalist column. Men who had been holding their position turned their horses and joined the imagined retreat. Just as this collapse was setting in, a second Parliamentary regiment under John Lilburne arrived to back up Copley. Langdale's men, now fighting alone against superior numbers, were overrun. Wren's prisoners were released and rearmed in time to join the pursuit.

The numbers tell the story bluntly. Parliament admitted to ten men killed. They claimed to have killed forty Royalists and taken three to four hundred prisoners, along with six hundred horses. Of the 1,600 Northern Horse who had set out from Newark, only about 600 reached the Royalist garrison at Skipton. The greater loss was political. Among the captures was Lord Digby's coach, and in it the Secretary of State's correspondence - letters to and from the King, to foreign courts, to potential allies. Parliament sent the lot to London for a committee to sift through, then handed selected items to the Scottish Covenanters. The papers exposed schemes the King had denied. Digby's diplomatic credibility, never strong, was destroyed.

The survivors fled west to Skipton, then over the Pennines into Cumberland, then north into Scotland. They were beaten again at Annan Moor. On 24 October the remnants were finally broken at Carlisle Sands by Sir John Browne. Digby and Langdale, the two architects of the disaster, escaped to the Isle of Man. The Royalist cause in the north was over. Today Sherburn in Elmet is a quiet market village south-east of Leeds, indistinguishable on first glance from a hundred other Yorkshire settlements. The church tower of All Saints stands where it stood in 1645. The fields around the village are still farmed. There is no monument worth the name to the action that ended the King's hopes of a Scottish reunion.