‘Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends. Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.’
Sir John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook
Both sides in the Civil War looked for past experience when raising their armies, but there were few in either army who could claim to be real soldiers: ‘None was thought worthy of that name, but he that could show his Wounds, and talk aloud of his Exploits in the Low Countries,’ recalled a contemporary, ‘Whereas the whole Business of fighting, was afterwards chiefly performed by untravelled Gentlemen, raw Citizens, and Generals that had never seen a Battle.’[fn1]
Parliament found it easy to recruit in London and the southeast, but the intake in rural areas was often raw and easily shocked by the realities of war. The Earl of Bedford reported from Dorset, in the first month of fighting: ‘The men we brought with us were all Trained-bands, so unskilful, from the colonel to the lowest officer, and withal so astonished, when they heard the bullets whistle about their ears … and when the cannon began to play upon them, they run as if the Devil had been in them.’[fn2] Bedford estimated that the combination of being shot at and having to sleep rough in the field for two nights, resulted in the immediate desertion of more than half his men.
The Parliamentarians were short of junior officers and many sergeants suddenly found themselves commissioned. During the first year or more of the Civil War, partly as a result of this lack of leadership, Essex’s troops were cited as pillagers as frequently as the infamous Cavaliers. A Parliamentarian pamphleteer writing from Ludlow in October 1642 was full of indignation about ‘the barbarous and insolent actions of the blood thirsty party’[fn3] — the Cavaliers. Yet, en route to the first major battle, Edgehill, two Royalists who looted minor objects from an absent Parliamentarian’s home were hanged for their crime. Meanwhile, Lord Clarendon noted with resentment, the rebels’ propaganda was so effective that the many excesses of Essex’s force were buried under the torrent of libels cascading from the printing presses.
Discipline was difficult to establish in either force, which largely comprised shilling-a-day agricultural labourers on foot and their supposed social superiors on horse. There were incidents of Essex’s cavalry stealing from his infantry and of his officers being relieved of their possessions by their own men. Sir Thomas More’s observation in Utopia, of 1516, seemed still to hold true in this, the fourth decade of Stuart rule: ‘Robbers do not make spiritless soldiers, nor are soldiers the most cowardly of robbers, so well are the occupations in harmony with each other.’[fn4] Whichever side could bring its unruly forces under control first, and harness its aggression to its political cause, would enjoy a huge advantage.
To fill his ranks at the outbreak of war, the king drew heavily on the limited populations of Wales, Cornwall, and the northwest of England. The summer and early autumn of 1642 saw a scrambling to control areas with less clear-cut allegiances. Parliament quickly dominated East Anglia and Kent, and controlled the key Midland towns of Banbury, Coventry, Northampton, and Warwick. They also gained footholds in districts that had suffered from Royalist excesses. In September 1642, a large body of Nottinghamshire gentry approached the Earl of Essex and itemised ‘the innumerable oppressions that they had suffered by the Cavaliers, who daily pillage men’s houses, drive away their cattle, take away their arms and monies, cut and spoil their goods, taking away all means of living and subsisting, all their endeavours tending to the destruction of Religion, King and Kingdom’.[fn5] They resolved to live and die in Essex’s service.
Most people, however, were unenthusiastic participants in a conflict that they felt sure was bound to bring them no good. The Recorder of Hereford, while declaring his loyalty to the Crown, begged the king to save his people from the impending apocalypse: ‘O my dread Sovereign, let but your Servant put into your mind the dire effects of War, when flourishing Cities shall be turned to dust, nay this yet flourishing Kingdom shall become its own destroyer, buried in the tomb of blood and slaughter, when our young infants shall be rudely torn from the sad mother’s breast whose shrieks and cries serve as sad music to the sacrifice, when our young virgins and our wives shall be subject to bloody cruelty, when death shall triumph’.[fn6]
A neutral pamphleteer, horrified at the ‘great game’ being played by king and Parliament, advised: ‘That his Majesty would understand his Interest to be, to unite, not to divide his Subjects, and to remember with what manner of Trophies the magnanimous Princes of former times have adorned their Funerals and Fame. That he would choose rather to fight in the head of the British Armies, for restitution of his Nephews to their lost inheritance, than employ them here to pillage and destroy his own subjects.’[fn7] Parliament, meanwhile, should accept the king’s concessions with humility and gratitude. But Charles and his opponents were too far down the warpath to heed the concerns of the common people; they carried on recruiting. When volunteers could not be found, men were pressed into service against their will.
The rebels had the edge in weaponry. They had taken quick possession of the armaments amassed for the campaigns in Scotland and Ireland. They also seized the royal arsenals and the ironworks of the Weald of Kent. As a result, Parliament never wanted for artillery throughout the war. The early defection of the navy to the rebels was another huge advantage, making it easy to supply their garrisons by sea and also to blockade the king’s ports.
The Royalists had to work harder. Although they secured the weaponry of some of the county militias, it was the energy of a few key men that transformed the king’s negligible support into a serviceable army. While Rupert’s drive transformed the cavalry, in the regions grandees tried to raise men for the king and to create Royalist enclaves. This effort met with varying degrees of success. In south-central England the Marquess of Hertford, a descendant of Henry VII’s, was frustrated in his efforts on Charles’s behalf. In Yorkshire, though, the Earl of Newcastle successfully formed the Northern Army. He also held Newcastle, a crucial lifeline for aid and arms crossing from the Continent.
It was thanks to the arrival of the first of the earl’s convoys of arms and ammunition that Charles was able to face Essex’s army, when it moved into the Midlands in September, seeking to bring the king to heel. Parliament had instructed its lord general: ‘You shall use your utmost endeavours by battle or otherwise to rescue his Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince, and Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who are now about them.’[fn8] Pym and his acolytes wanted the people to believe that the king was a reluctant captive of the Cavaliers and that Parliament was sending an army to rescue him.
In hoping that the king would be unable to raise a battle-strength army, Essex underestimated the strength and resolve of the Royalists. He had left London on 9 September, amid the crowds’ calls of ‘Hosanna!’, cautiously stowing his coffin in his baggage train. News of Powick Bridge had stunned the earl, his own Lifeguard among the broken units. He was further surprised by intelligence that Rupert had sidestepped his force and hurried to unite with the king’s main army at Meriden, between Coventry and Birmingham. With Essex a day’s march behind them, it appeared that the Royalist target was London, a conclusion that Rupert’s own recollections bear out: ‘The King’s purpose was all the while … to bring them to a battle, and clear the way to London.’[fn9] Essex moved quickly southeastwards, hoping to overhaul the Royalists, while sending warnings to the capital to prepare itself for attack.
Reconnaissance during these fast-moving weeks was poor, and soon neither army was sure of the other’s whereabouts. It was a shock to all when, on 22 October, the advance rebel units rode into the Warwickshire hamlet of Wormleighton and stumbled upon some of Rupert’s troopers. The prince learnt from these prisoners that the main body of the enemy was near by and his scouts set out that evening to pinpoint its location. They discovered dozens of campfires twinkling round the village of Kineton and raced back with the news. Rupert ordered an immediate attack, but his senior officers restrained him, insisting that such a decision must be referred to the king.
Charles, after consultation with his other generals, agreed to turn back towards the enemy and offer battle on advantageous ground the next day. Before dawn Rupert received the following message: ‘Nephew, I have given order as you have desired, so that I doubt not but all the foot and cannon will be at Edgehill betimes this morning, where you will also find, your loving uncle and faithful friend, Charles R.’[fn10]
Edgehill, near Kineton, was a 650-foot-high ridge whose defensive qualities promised to negate the king’s disadvantage in numbers and weaponry: he had 12,500 men to Parliament’s 14,500. Essex was so eager to accept the invitation to fight that he decided not to wait for straggling troops and artillery to catch up with his main field army. This left the earl with a slight deficit in cavalry.
*
There was pre-battle dissent among the Royalist high command, much of it sparked by Rupert. The prince insisted that he answer to no man except the king: he wanted to lead his cavalry in independent command. This has long been held up as an example of Rupert’s arrogance and ambition, but this is to ignore context. It was normal for European royalty to have supreme power in the army — the wholesale reforms in Louis XIV’s French armies, a generation later, left intact the premise that Princes of the Blood outranked marshals in the field.
The prince’s preferred tactics were more controversial. There were two principal methods of fighting at this time: one the creation of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the other the legacy of Gustavus Adolphus. Rupert favoured the bolder tactics of the Swede. He believed that a bold strike at the rebels was more likely to succeed than the conservative and attritional methods of the Dutch. Lord Ruthven, a 70-year-old veteran who had fought for Adolphus and was now a Royalist general, was foremost among those who agreed with Rupert.
Charles was militarily ignorant and was easily persuaded by Rupert’s passion. However, the Earl of Lindsey, the king’s lord general and the leading advocate for Dutch tactics, felt humiliated: this was not the first time that uncle had turned to nephew and overruled his senior officer, who (Clarendon recalled) was ‘a person of great honour and courage, and generally beloved; who many years before had good commands in Holland, and Germany, and had been Admiral at Sea in several expeditions’.[fn11] Apart from hurt feelings, though, Lindsey was also properly concerned that the Royalists’ chances would be compromised by this last-minute change in battle-plan. An accomplished old soldier, who had served in the Lowlands alongside his enemy counterpart, Essex (whom he respected as a fighting man), Lindsey resigned a command that had been so publicly undermined. Demoting himself to the rank of colonel, he elected to lead his own regiment of Lincolnshire men into battle, telling friends that he hoped to meet an honourable death.
This falling-out over tactics was not so much the result of a young prince’s petulance, as a clear and early example of the disunity in the upper reaches of the king’s high command — a situation that was to hamstring the Royalist cause throughout the Civil War.
Further ripples came from the highly regarded Viscount Falkland, a supporter of Parliament against the king in the 1630s and an admirer of John Hampden — one of the ‘Five Members’ that Charles had failed to arrest in the Commons, and the most famous opponent of the imposition of Ship Money. Falkland’s mansion at Tew, in Oxfordshire, formed a salon for men of learning in the years before the war. However, Falkland was essentially a cautious man and his radical colleagues’ rush for wholesale constitutional change appalled him. Reluctantly appointed as one of Charles’s secretaries of state, Falkland remained among the moderates on both sides who were sickened by the prospect of compatriots spilling each other’s blood: his constant hope was for a negotiated peace. This aim conflicted with Rupert’s view, that differences with Parliament could now only be settled by clear-cut military victory.
One of the secretary of state’s key duties was the transmission of the king’s will to others. However, when Falkland passed on Charles’s instructions to Rupert, the prince declared that he would not receive orders from anyone but his uncle. Falkland, unruffled by the insult, replied with dignity: ‘That it was his office to signify what the King bid him; which he should always do; and that his Highness, in neglecting it, neglected the King; who did neither the Prince, nor his own Service any good, by complying in the beginning with his rough Nature.’[fn12] Falkland quietly refused to serve in Rupert’s division, choosing instead to ride with the Commissary General of the Horse, Wilmot, on the left wing.
There was further dissatisfaction in the King’s Life Guard. Its 300 men were recruited from those aristocrats and gentry who had no independent command, together with their most senior servants. The rest of the cavalry had taken to mocking the Lifeguard for being a ‘show troop’, a pampered adornment rather than a serious fighting unit. To counter this slur its commander, Lord Bernard Stuart, persuaded Charles to place the Life Guard in the place of greatest honour, the extreme right of the front line of his army. Rupert reluctantly incorporated them in the first of his two lines of cavalry, alongside his regiment and those of his brother Maurice and of their cousin, the Prince of Wales. This forward deployment of the lifeguards — well armed with their long swords, pairs of pistols, and battleaxes — deprived the Royalists of a reserve force, if the battle started to go awry.
In the prelude to battle Charles rode among his units, his armour visible beneath a coat of black velvet, lined with royal ermine. He reminded his men of their noble purpose, while countering the enemies’ verbal barbs:
‘Friends and soldiers! You are called Cavaliers and Royalists in a disgraceful sense … Now show yourselves no Malignants, but declare what courage and fidelity is within you. Fight for the peace of the kingdom and the Protestant religion. The value of Cavaliers hath honoured that name both in France and other countries, and now let it be known in England, as well as horseman or trooper. The name of Cavalier, which our enemies have striven to make odious, signifies no more than a gentleman serving his King on horseback. Show yourselves, therefore, now courageous Cavaliers, and beat back all opprobrious aspersions cast upon you.’[fn13]
In the Parliamentary ranks Puritan ministers rode through the units, leading prayers whose content was little different from those being mouthed at the top of Edgehill. Churchmen on both sides convinced their men that they would be doing the Lord’s work later that day, when the killing began. ‘Such may the persons be,’ one Royalist priest was later to say, ‘and such the cause they maintain, that in doing them harm we shall do good, and sure then in wishing them harm we shall do no ill. Such may the persons be, and such the cause they maintain, that we may lawfully fight against them in the field …’[fn14]
An early afternoon exchange of artillery opened the battle of Edgehill, with Parliament getting the better of the duel. Dragoons from both sides then fought a series of preliminary skirmishes, a contest won by the Royalists. Meanwhile, one of the King’s Life Guard recalled, ‘Prince Rupert passed from one wing to the other, giving positive orders to the Horse to march as close as possible keeping their ranks with sword in hand, to receive the enemy’s shot without firing either carbine or pistol, till we broke in amongst the enemy and then make use of our firearms as need should require.’[fn15] The prince then took his position at the head of the right wing, whose 1,400 troopers he had deployed in two lines. The second was to remain in reserve. Rupert led the front line in an orderly advance that progressed from walk, to rising trot, to full-blooded charge, swords drawn, firearms tucked away, spurs digging into their horses’ flanks. The battle cry was ‘The King and the Cause!’
For the Parliamentarians, the enemy thundering towards them was the same demonic force that had swept to bloody victory at Powick Bridge. Colleagues eager to explain the shame of unexpected defeat had boosted the Cavaliers’ reputation, persuading Essex to place the bulk of his horse in the wing facing Prince Rupert. There had been reports, readily believed, that many of the rebel survivors were seen in Worcester, ‘most woefully cut and mangled, some having their ears cut off, some the flesh of their heads sliced off, some with their very skulls hanging down, and they ready to fall down dead, their pistols and carbines being hewed and hacked away in slices, which it seems they held up for guard of their heads’.[fn16] It was the legend of Powick Bridge, as much as the momentum of the charge, which condemned the Parliamentarian left wing at Edgehill.
As the Royalists hit home, they levelled and fired their pistols and carbines. The rebel cavalry had tried to meet the impetus with their own, half-hearted, counter-charge, but it was no use. They poured back into the infantry behind and then continued their flight, some with such panic that by nightfall they reached St Albans, 40 miles away. Rupert’s men pushed on, annihilating the rebel musketeers on the ground before pursuing the broken enemy horse. Some Cavaliers headed for the baggage train, where the silver plate and personal possessions of senior Parliamentarians were seized. Others took the opportunity to pillage innocent civilians.
Wilmot’s front line of Royalist cavalry on the left wing also rolled over their opponents. The terrain between them and the enemy was not suitable for a sweeping charge, being crisscrossed with ditches and containing pockets of Parliamentary musketeers, but Wilmot and his deputy, Sir Arthur Aston, led their men on. Met by a stuttering volley, they cut their way into Parliament’s ranks before firing into the body of the enemy, with devastating effect. The Parliamentarians joined their colleagues in flight.
These twin successes tempted the second lines of the Royalist cavalry into fatal disobedience. Against Rupert’s clear instructions, they charged forward, their commanders, Sir John Byron and Lord Digby, eager to be in at the kill. This waywardness left the infantry and artillery shorn of mounted protection in the face of superior numbers. One of the prince’s colonels, Sir Charles Lucas — a colleague from the successful storming of Breda, several years earlier — rallied some of his men, intending to bring them immediately back to the battle’s centre. But a wave of fleeing enemy blocked his men’s return, and they plunged back into the headlong pursuit that Lucas had temporarily denied them.
Parliamentary propagandists later asserted that Rupert was at the forefront of his frenzied men, urging them on, the plunderer-in-chief (it was later claimed that Prince Rupert’s conduct introduced the word ‘plunder’ to England: ‘Many towns and villages he plundered’, wrote May, ‘which is to say robbed (for at that time was the word first used in England, being born in Germany when that stately country was so miserably wasted and pillaged by foreign armies), and committed other outrages upon those who stood affected to the Parliament, executing some and hanging servants at their masters’ doors for not discovering of their masters.’ May, History of the Long Parliament, ed. 1854, p. 244). In truth, he took no part in the undisciplined rout. Instead, he rode among his men, imploring them to join him in a return to the battlefield. However, the adrenalin surge among his troopers, many of them fighting their first battle, was irresistible: the enemy’s thrilling disintegration, so complete and so immediate, lured them on.
The social make-up of the Royalist cavalry in part explains their indiscipline: some were aristocrats and many were gentry — men who, in their own sphere, were used to giving, not receiving, orders. Besides, they were convinced that the day was already won. Now they saw their task, and their privilege, as being the mopping-up of a defeated enemy and the claiming of their just reward — plunder. Cavalrymen of all eras knew their role at such a moment in a battle. A manual for horse-borne troops advised 250 years later: ‘To obtain the greatest results from a successful engagement it must be followed by a pursuit, which must be vigorous and unceasing.’[fn17] The unbroken, spirited amateurs of Rupert’s squadrons felt compelled to pursue: it was what they had done on the hunting field since they could ride; it was part of their birthright; it was their entitlement.
A similar fiasco had occurred in 1264, during Henry III’s reign, at the battle of Lewes. The king’s son had led his over-excited cavalry off in a triumphant charge, leaving Henry and his infantry unprotected. When the prince returned, he found his father had been taken prisoner by Simon de Montfort’s rebel barons. Edgehill, like Lewes, was far from won when the cavalry left the field. During the absence of so many attacking units, the Parliamentarians diligently achieved huge advantages of their own. ‘When Prince Rupert return’d from the chase’, Clarendon later recalled, ‘he found a great alteration in the field, and his Majesty himself with few noblemen and a small retinue about him, and the hope of so glorious a day quite vanish’d.’[fn18] Fairfax’s men had gradually regained on foot what Rupert’s Cavaliers had claimed, then forfeited, on horseback.
*
The infantry battle formed its own distinctive part of the engagement, only starting once the main cavalry action had spun from the field under its own hectic energy. Sir Jacob Astley, the king’s Major General of Foot, had preceded the action by uttering his famous, soldier’s prayer: ‘Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day; but if I forget thee, do not thou forget me!’[fn19] He had then risen from his knees and shouted, ‘March on boys!’ He led his men against an enemy that enjoyed superior numbers, strong artillery fire, and, crucially, some cavalry support.
Sir William Balfour was a Scots-born soldier who had served Charles as governor of the Tower of London. In this era of fluctuating loyalties, he was now Parliament’s Lieutenant General of Horse. Balfour had rescued some of his troopers from the Royalist rout and now funnelled them through the gaps between Essex’s three large brigades of foot. They bore down on, and broke, the Royalist centre. Lord Falkland, seeing this crisis unfold, tried to persuade Wilmot to regroup his cavalry and assist the infantry. Wilmot, however, dismissed the suggestion, replying: ‘My Lord, we have got the day, and let us live to enjoy the fruit thereof.’[fn20] Balfour’s squadrons rode on unchecked, reaching Charles’s cannon, slashing their harnesses, and eliminating them from the battle. They then rode back, past Royalist musketeers who failed to fire on them, believing them to be their own: the cavalry of both sides looked similar and the orange scarves worn by Essex’s men were difficult to see in the smoke-charged air of battle.
When the Royalist infantry on the left-hand flank appreciated the predicament of their colleagues in the centre, they attempted to come to their rescue. However, Essex, alive to the situation, now deployed a body of his infantry to block them. He then ordered his heavily armed Lifeguard to join Balfour’s men in a three-pronged assault on Astley’s beleaguered line. The strength of the Parliamentarian attack prompted many to flee the field, scrambling up Edgehill’s slope in panic. In the confusion, a disaster of major proportions threatened Charles’s army.
Sir Edmund Verney, knight marshal and hereditary bearer of the royal standard, was a reluctant Royalist. ‘I do not like the quarrel’, he remarked, when war became inevitable, ‘and do heartily wish that the King would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master.’[fn21] Assuming his duties at Edgehill, he carried the royal standard as both a symbol of the king’s military power, and as a rallying point for the Crown’s cause. He was unarmed, apart from the speared point of the banner, and was dressed in civilian clothes. His avowed intent was to lay down his life in the king’s service. Some Parliamentarians spied the standard fluttering invitingly among the king’s wavering infantry and spurred their horses towards it. Frenzied fighting followed, which saw Verney’s party whittled away by enemy swords. Sir Edmund battled on, using the point of the standard to good effect: he killed four rebels before being felled himself. So tight was his grip, even in death, that the rebel officer who captured the blood-splattered flag was forced to hack off Verney’s fist in order to carry away the prize.
The infantry debacle claimed the life of that other fatalistic Royalist, The Earl of Lindsey. He strode out at the head of his regiment, before being felled by a shot high in the thigh. He was then taken prisoner and lay in some straw in a barn while bleeding heavily. Although the wound was not in itself life-threatening, he received no medical treatment. Lindsey died after several hours of blood loss, lying in the arms of his son, Lord Willoughby, another prisoner. If it had not been for his umbrage at Rupert’s special commission from his uncle, he would most likely have been safely at the rear of the action, directing proceedings from the king’s side.
When matters in the centre of the battlefield tilted further Essex’s way, Charles’s companions urged him to flee, but he would not. The king knew that his presence was essential to his hard-pressed forces and bravely insisted on remaining with his men. Rupert eventually returned to his side, realising that his efforts to organise a meaningful cavalry force late in the day were doomed.
As hopes of a great victory faded with the light, the only positive development was the recapture of the royal standard by John Smith, one of Rupert’s cavalry captains. Smith earned a battlefield knighthood from Charles for his valour. However, the talisman would not have been forfeited in the first place, had the Royalist horse been on the battlefield to protect it instead of careering across the surrounding countryside.
Rupert was in time to see Essex prepare to close in on the right-hand side of the Royalist foot, the centre and left having already folded. But it was evening by this stage, and the lateness in the day and the reappearance of vestiges of Rupert’s horse dissuaded the earl from trying to finish off the enemy infantry.
In the freezing night-time air, both sides reformed as best they could. Neither commander knew whose day it had been: by the standards of the time, which ever side left the field of battle was considered the loser, but Royalists and Parliamentarians both held their positions throughout a night remembered by survivors for its biting cold. Some 3,000 of Essex’s stragglers, who had failed to reach Edgehill in time for the battle, now caught up with their lord general and urged him to resume the fight the following day. Across the valley, on the ridge of Edgehill, Rupert also advocated the battle’s resumption at the earliest opportunity.
However, there was shock for many of the combatants as the reality of warfare hit home. The scale of the casualties has been debated ever since, but between 1,500 and 3,000 men probably died at Edgehill, with many others fatally wounded. Nothing similar had been seen in England for over a century and a half. The struggle between Crown and Parliament had developed from a political contest to a military engagement where large numbers of compatriots had killed one another in the name of opposing causes.
In the aftermath of battle, practical considerations came into play: Essex was reluctant to risk his forces in an attack on the Royalist position, since he would expose them to Rupert’s cavalry which, for all its indiscipline, was recognised as a dangerously destructive force. For their part, the Royalist infantry was in no condition to fight again. Three of its five brigades had been routed.
Essex withdrew towards Warwick. When Rupert learned this, he persuaded his uncle to let him pursue the rebels with four mounted regiments. The prince attacked the enemy rearguard in Kineton, inflicting significant casualties and capturing prisoners, valuables, and correspondence. Among the letters addressed to the Earl of Essex were some from Blake, Rupert’s secretary, giving details of Royalist manoeuvres and requesting greater financial reward for his espionage. Rupert had Blake hanged at Oxford, days later.
Parliamentarian sources accused the prince of murdering their wounded, but these claims were false. Thick fog stopped Rupert from pursuing further: the action in Kineton was the final episode of the battle of Edgehill.
*
The result of the battle was open to interpretation. While the Royalist cavalry had triumphed, the king’s infantry had been utterly defeated. The Parliamentarians, meanwhile, had witnessed Rupert’s destruction of their horse, while celebrating the success of their foot in the centre of the field. More rebels had been killed and captured than had Royalists, and forty of the former’s regimental colours were taken, compared with a handful of Charles’s. However, more prominent figures had fallen in the king’s cause than had died for Parliament. In the wider context of the war, however, both sides had failed. Essex’s priority had been to close Charles’s route to London. In this he had failed. Equally, the Royalists had given battle at a time and place chosen by them, hopeful that they could decide the war in a day. They had seen their aims evaporate in the cloud of Digby and Byron’s indiscipline. Yet both sides quickly claimed to have triumphed: it was important, at this early stage, to be seen as the divinely-favoured party. Parliament rewarded Essex with a victor’s bounty of £5,000.
The Royalists knew that they had thrown away their great chance. ‘Sometimes the good ordering of charging the Enemy causeth victory,’ wrote a Cavalier, later in the war, ‘and the contrary sometimes causeth the destruction of the whole body.’[fn22] Prince Rupert has to take ultimate responsibility for his cavalry’s failures, as well as its successes: at Edgehill, his squadrons’ order quickly unravelled. In mitigation, controlling troopers after a successful charge demanded a level of discipline that neither side possessed so early in the war, and which the Royalists were never to attain. Eliot Warburton, Rupert’s most partisan biographer, also blamed the character flaws of the prince’s men: ‘They never could be taught discipline; jealous and proud of their independence, and fiercely chary of their fancied personal importance, control over these wild and dashing troops was unattainable even by the stern Rupert.’[fn23] After Edgehill, the prince admitted that his men ‘skewed rather too much valour’.[fn24]
One rebel observer, however, was impressed by the Royalist showing at Edgehill. Comparing the confidence of the Cavaliers with the diffidence of their own horsemen, Oliver Cromwell told his cousin John Hampden: ‘Your troopers are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, their troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, persons of quality. Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still.’[fn25] If Parliament failed in this, Cromwell was sure, it would be unable to better Rupert’s proud but wayward squadrons.
When Essex withdrew after the battle, he believed that the king would look to make good his losses, and return towards his most productive recruiting grounds in Wales and the northwest. Instead Charles led his army to the rebel stronghold of Banbury, which fell to him without a fight, four days after Edgehill. At this point, with Royalist morale buoyant, Rupert urged his uncle to agree to a bold plan: he would hurry on to London with a flying army of cavalry, dragoons, and mounted musketeers, capture the members of the Lords and Commons in Westminster, and hold them at Whitehall until the king arrived with the rest of his troops. Edgehill had failed to end the rebellion, but the taking of the capital promised an immediate and successful conclusion to the war.
Charles’s advisers were unconvinced. Some expressed serious reservations about the plausibility of Rupert’s scheme. The Earl of Bristol, father of Lord Digby, revealed a distaste for Rupert’s foreign ways, voicing concern that the prince would set London on fire. The German had shown his readiness to threaten unrestrained force against the citizens of Leicester. How could he be trusted with the safety of the capital, by far the biggest city in Britain — and, with 150,000 inhabitants, the most populous city in the world?
This has been seen as a defining moment in the Civil War. Charles was never to enjoy another opportunity to march on London. Rupert could, possibly, have succeeded in his Blitzkrieg, and such was the terror at his name that his numerical inferiority to the capital’s militia, the London Trained Bands, might have been irrelevant. There was Royalist support in London, which may well have risen for Rupert. But it is hard to see the lightly armed force penetrating London’s defences, decayed though many had become. To speed his progress, Rupert would have had to leave his artillery behind and this would have further reduced his chances of success. The Earl of Warwick had also begun to raise a second Parliamentary army; it was unproven and inexperienced, but it would have been a further impediment. Among all the hypotheses, there is one certainty: Rupert’s aim of taking the Lords and Commons by surprise had absolutely no hope of success.
Charles sided with his more cautious advisers against his nephew’s plan. From Banbury he turned to Oxford, which he made the Royalist headquarters. This was a town he knew well, since repeated bouts of the plague had forced him to move there from London with court and Parliament, earlier in his reign.
‘After the famous Battle at Edgehill’, a Parliamentarian noted, ‘the first large field of blood in these Civil Wars, though the King’s Army was there much broken, yet his strength increased, and multitudes began to look towards him, as one at least wise possible not to be overcome, and in this strange confluence of men His Army seemed like that fabulous generation that sprung out of the teeth of the Cadmean Serpent buried in the earth.’[fn26] After the embarrassing fiasco of the standard-raising at Nottingham, many had thought the king would struggle to form an army. Thanks to Rupert’s energetic work with the cavalry, and Aston’s efforts with the infantry, Charles had met Essex and at least achieved parity on the battlefield. Partial success helped attract waverers to the king’s cause. If Charles were to have a hope of winning the war, Rupert and his colleagues needed to produce further success, quickly and consistently. If not, Parliament’s advantages — in terms of recruitment, armament, and control of the navy — would surely tell.