Who won the Battle of Edgehill?
Neither side. On 23 October 1642 the armies of King Charles I and Parliament met at Edgehill in Warwickshire, the first pitched battle of the English Civil War. Prince Rupert's Royalist cavalry swept most of the Parliamentary horse from the field, but chased them so far that they left the foot soldiers to fight it out alone. The infantry battle ground to a bloody standstill, and nightfall left the result undecided. The clash proved the war would not be settled in a single day.1
For years the quarrel between the king and his Parliament had built toward violence, and both sides had begun preparing for armed conflict. Then, on an October afternoon in the English Midlands, two armies of raw recruits drew up on the slopes below Edge Hill.2
King against Parliament
By 1642 the long struggle between King Charles I and his Parliament over money, religion and power had broken into open war, and in August Charles raised his standard at Nottingham. Both sides scrambled to gather armies; Britannica notes that most of the soldiers who met at Edgehill were raw recruits. Parliament's main army was led by Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex.3
The dates in this story are Old Style. England still used the Julian calendar, then ten days behind the Gregorian calendar used across most of Catholic Europe, and did not change until 1752. The battle of 23 October 1642 was fought on 2 November by the modern reckoning.4
The race for London
In early October the royal army was mustering at Shrewsbury, while Essex lay at Worcester, watching the Severn valley. The king's council preferred open country, where its stronger cavalry could work, to the hedged fields of the valley, and advised a direct march on London. On 12 October the king set out southeast from Shrewsbury by way of Bridgnorth, Wolverhampton and Birmingham to Kenilworth, and for days neither army knew where the other was.5
Essex learned where the king had gone and set off in pursuit on 19 October, his army strung out along the roads. On 22 October the two sides' quartermasters, looking for billets, ran into each other at Wormleighton. The king was at Edgecote near Banbury; Essex was at Kineton, seven miles away. Two of his regiments under John Hampden and most of his artillery were still a day's march behind.6
Down from the ridge
Early on 23 October the Royalists drew up along the top of Edge Hill, a steep, long escarpment overlooking the Vale of the Red Horse. Essex would not attack up the slope, so in the early afternoon the king's army came down into the vale to meet him. Getting thousands of raw soldiers into line took hours. Each army numbered roughly 12,000 to 14,000 men; the Royalists were stronger in cavalry, the Parliamentarians probably in infantry.7
The Royalist command was already in disarray. The king's Lord General, the veteran Earl of Lindsey, wanted the foot drawn up in the conventional Dutch manner. Prince Rupert, the king's young nephew and general of horse, backed by the Scottish professional the Earl of Forth, insisted on the newer Swedish formation of brigades split into diamond-shaped battalions. Rupert won, and Lindsey resigned in fury, handing command to Forth, and went to fight at the head of his own regiment. The Royalist foot under Sir Jacob Astley formed five brigades in a checkerboard, with Rupert's horse on the right wing and Lord Wilmot's on the left.8
Across the field Essex placed twelve regiments of foot in three brigades. His horse was nominally under the Earl of Bedford but in practice led by two Scottish professionals, Sir James Ramsay on the left and Sir William Balfour, who with Sir Philip Stapleton held two regiments of heavily armored cuirassiers in reserve behind the infantry on the right. Before the charge, according to the memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, Astley prayed: "Lord! Thou knowest how busy I must be this day: if I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me," and then rose, crying "March on, boys!"9
Rupert's charge
At about three in the afternoon the guns opened fire, and for an hour the two sides exchanged shot to little effect. Royalist dragoons cleared the hedges on the flank and drove back the musketeers covering Ramsay's horse. Then Rupert ordered the charge. As his squadrons came on, a troop of Parliamentarian horse under Sir Faithful Fortescue switched sides on the spot. Ramsay's troopers fired a single volley and fled, and on the other wing Wilmot's horse broke Parliament's right in the same way.10
It was a stunning success, and it went to waste. Both Royalist wings galloped after the fugitives, and against orders their second lines joined in. Many rode as far as Kineton, where they fell to plundering Essex's baggage train. The king was left with almost no cavalry on the field, while Balfour's and Stapleton's cuirassiers were still fresh. Britannica sees in it a pattern repeated in later battles: the pursuit went on too long and let Essex's infantry drive the Royalists back.11
The push of pike
With the Royalist horse gone, the battle fell to the infantry. In the center the two lines of pike and musket ground into each other, and Essex himself fought on foot with a pike. Then Balfour struck. Finding the flank of Richard Fielding's brigade open, his cuirassiers broke it and rode on to the Royalist guns, where they cut the traces so the pieces could not be moved. For a moment they were close to capturing the king's young sons, Charles and James, watching from behind the lines.12
Balfour and Stapleton then joined forces and fell on the flank and rear of the Royalist foot while Essex's infantry attacked from the front. The Royalist line gave way, and the king's own lifeguard of foot was left exposed.13
The king's standard
In the fighting around the lifeguard, the royal standard-bearer, Sir Edmund Verney, was killed and the Banner Royal was taken. Lindsey fell mortally wounded and was captured; his son, Lord Willoughby, fought his way to his side and was taken with him. As the first Royalist horsemen drifted back to the field, Captain John Smith rode at the party carrying off the standard, recaptured it and was knighted for it.14
As evening came on, the Royalist foot was still holding. Rupert and Wilmot came back to steady the line, but their horses and men were spent. As the light failed and ammunition ran low, the firing died away, and the armies drew apart with nothing decided.15
A cold night
Both armies spent the night in the open in a hard frost. Britannica estimates that of some 26,000 men engaged, about 1,000 were killed and 2,000 more wounded; the Battlefields Trust gives about 1,000 dead and 2,000 to 3,000 wounded. On the 24th the armies drew up again but neither had the strength to renew the fight. That evening the Royalists fell back to Edgecote, and Essex fell back to Kineton, withdrawing to Warwick the next day. Both sides claimed the victory.16
A war, not a battle
Edgehill settled nothing, but Essex's withdrawal left the road to London open. Rupert urged a fast cavalry strike on the capital. The king chose a slower advance with the whole army, taking Banbury, then passing through Oxford and Reading, and Essex reached London first, on 7 November. On 12 November Rupert stormed Brentford in a thick mist and the Royalists sacked the town, but the next day they found more than 24,000 men, the London Trained Bands among them, drawn up across Turnham Green.17 › The English Civil War, 1642 to 1646
The two armies faced each other all day, exchanging only cannon shot. At dusk the king, outnumbered almost two to one, withdrew to Reading and then to Oxford, which became his capital for the rest of the war. Britannica judges that he had just lost his best chance of ending the rebellion at a stroke. The gamble on one decisive battle had failed, and England settled in for years of civil war.18 › Battle of Hopton Heath, 1643
