James was almost captured during the battle. He later described the incident himself:
Sir Will Howard went off with the prince [Charles, later Charles II, then a boy of twelve] and myself and we had not gone above musket-shot off from the place when we saw a body of horse advancing directly towards us from the left hand of the King’s foot; upon which sending to see what they were, and finding them to be the enemy, we drew behind a little barn not far distant from them, which was encompassed by a hedge. In this barn several of the king’s wounded men were there dressing, but the enemy observing the King’s men to be within the enclosure, drew back immediately without engaging them, by which means the Prince and Duke escaped the evident danger of being taken; for had they charged our small party they could not have failed of beating them.
A great historical possibility flashes into view: what if Charles, Prince of Wales had been held by Parliament? The prince might have been willing to make a deal behind his father’s back and over his head. Assuming Charles did not escape as his brother was to do, there would have been no reinvasion in 1649/50, and perhaps no Restoration. This may have been one of the war’s key turning-points.
If so, it was scarcely visible in the confusion and mess of the battle. Meanwhile two Parliamentarian cavalry regiments were still not engaged, and now they moved forward against the Royalist foot. They crashed headlong into Feilding’s brigade, and broke it, capturing its commander and colonels, and surging into the Royalist gun positions. It felt marvellous, but they had no nails with which to spike the guns. ‘Nails! Nails!’ shouted the commander, like a despairing Richard III turned smith. There were none, however, so they had to be content with cutting the cannons’ drag-ropes. After that, they had little idea of what to do, so they suddenly decided to retire to their own lines. Meanwhile, a Parliamentarian force had brilliantly taken to guarding the Parliament guns, which had been abandoned by their original defenders. Though no artillery-men, they had managed to turn and fire at least one piece at an oncoming troop of horse. Unfortunately, the troop in question was their own men, come back from their failed attempt to spike the Royalist guns.
Now Lindsey, the insulted commander who had hoped to grapple Essex hand-to-hand, met the fate he had been seeking. He caught a musket shot in the thigh, and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. And he was not alone. After the battle, Sir Edward Sydenham wrote to Ralph Verney, to tell him some terrible news:
For all our great victory I have had the greatest loss by the death of your noble father that ever any friend did … he himself killed two with his own hands, whereof one of them had killed poor Jason [Sir Edmund Verney’s bodyservant] and broke the point of his standard at push of pike before he fell, which was the last account I could receive of any of our own side of him. The next day the king sent a herald to offer mercy to all that would lay down arms … he would not put on arms or buff coat on the day of battle, the reason I know not … the king is a man of the least fear and the greatest mercy and resolution that I ever saw, and had he not been in the field, we might have suffered … My humble service to your sad wife. God of his infinite mercy comfort you both which shall be the prayers of your friend and servant.
Ralph was miserable:
Madam, I never loved to be the messenger of ill news; therefore I forbore to send you this; which is the saddest and deepest affliction that ever befell any poor distressed man; I will not add to your grief by relating my own deplorable condition, neither can my pen express the miseries I am in; God’s will be done, and give me patience, to support me in this extremity.
His misery only increased as the details were revealed, and it became obvious that Sir Edmund’s body would never be recovered. It had been buried among the multitude, which the family felt as a dishonour.
Meanwhile Sir Charles Lucas’s men charged into Essex’s rear; Captain John Smith took a colour from the foe, and brandished it to show his fellows, only to discover that he had almost no fellows left; there was only one man still with him. He prudently decided to trot back to the king’s army, but as he went he noticed a man on foot carrying another set of colours. A boy called to him sharply, ‘Captain Smith! Captain Smith, they are carrying away the royal standard!’ ‘They shall have me with it, if they carry it away!’ Smith declared, and cried out to the Parliament-men, ‘Traitor, deliver that standard!’ He charged in with his rapier drawn, killed one man and wounded another, captured the banner, and freed Richard Feilding, who was being led into captivity by some Parliamentarian troops.
It sounded like splendid dash. But Edmund Ludlow, a Parliamentarian, told a different, sourer tale: ‘It [the standard] was taken by one Captain John Smith, who with two more, disguising themselves with orange-coloured scarves, had [the Earl of Essex’s colour] and pretending it unfit that a penman should have the honour to carry the standard, took it from him, and rode with it to the King, for which action he was knighted.’
For Ludlow, Smith was a trickster; an early example of the tendency for the Scarlet Pimpernel self-images of Royalist officers to melt into a puddle of pomposity and deceit. Or the victim of a vile post-war calumny? No way to resolve it, but there is one clue; even in his friend’s account, Smith sounds just the man to think of the idea that a secretary should not have the honour of carrying the king’s colours.
The Royalist cavalry were still galloping about after booty until finally they were so tired, and their horses so blown, that fresh Parliamentarian troops under MP John Hampden were able to drive them off.
‘As the darkness came on, both armies began to draw off, the royalists to the brow of the hill, and the enemy to Kineton’, Prince James noted.
The king spent the night in a barn, reluctant to appear to withdraw. No one could do any more because everyone was exhausted, and baffled. Who exactly had won? No one has been sure since. But historians tend to see Edgehill as a Royalist success; it did clear their way to London. From Charles’s point of view, it resolved nothing, though it proved that his subjects were willing to fire on him, and he on them. The newly formed sides were hardened by the spilling of blood.
Large set-piece battles break down on examination into the piecemeal butchering of many individual men. At Edgehill, many of the soldiers had never seen the face of war before. John Smith’s lieutenant William Holles could stand for all those whose inexperienced bodies were shattered on that cold October afternoon. He received a savage wound, as described by his relative Gervase Holles:
During the fight he received a shot on the face, and came up to me to the head of the brigade bleeding very much. I bid him go and get himself dressed; he replied he was not so ill shot as that he would leave the field whilst I was in it, and notwithstanding the disease his hurt conveyed him. The extremity of his anguish increased by the sharpness of the season and want of present application shut up both his eyes, and swelled his face for some days to a strange deformity.
William could not open his eyes until days later, when he forced them open in order to come to Gervase’s aid in commanding a ‘forlorn hope’, the term for a group deployed in advance of the main army whose job was to harass and disrupt an enemy attack before it could reach the main body of the army. He was to die two years later, near Newark.
For the men who fought the Battle of Edgehill, the aftermath was bewildering. Parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow described the unnaturalness of that night, the loss of normality, the blindness:
The night after the battle our army quartered on the same ground that the enemy fought on the day before. Nor men nor horse got any meat that night, and I had touched none since the Saturday before, neither could I find my servant who had my cloak, so that having nothing to keep me warm but a suit of iron, I was obliged to walk about all night, which proved very cold by reason of a sharp frost … when I got meat I could scarcely eat it my jaws for want of use having almost lost their natural faculty.
The loss of domestic and local comforts was hard on all the new soldiers:
We were almost starve
d with cold that bitter night, our army being in extreme want of victuals; and about 9 or 10 of the clock drew out again into battalia, and so stood 3 or 4 hours, till the enemy was clean gone from the hill, and then we drew again into our quarter, and there have lain this night, and purpose this day, after we have buried our dead, to march to Warwick.
For the wounded, the experience was even more alarming. William Harvey told John Aubrey the story of Sir Adrian Scrope, ‘dangerously wounded and left for dead amongst the dead men, stripped, which happened to be the saving of his life. It was cold, clear weather, and a frost that night, which staunched his bleeding, and about midnight, or some hours after his hurt, he awaked, and was fain to draw a dead body upon him for warmth’s sake.’
The London diary of John Greene reported at Christmastide, 1642 that ‘There are now divers reports of strange sights seen, and strange noises heard at Edgehill where our last battle was fought; in the place where the Kings army stood terrible outcries; where the Parliaments [stood] music and singing’.
A pamphlet recorded:
portentious apparitions of two jarring and contrary armies where the battle was strucken, were seen at Edge Hill, where are still many unburied carcasses, at between twelve and one of the clock in the morning … These infernal soldiers appeared on Christmas night, and again on two Saturdays after, bearing the kings and Parliaments colours. Pell mell to it they went, where the corporeal armies had shed so much blood, the clattering of armes, noise of cannons, cries of soldiers, sounds of petronels, and the alarum was struck up, creating great terror and amazement.
The aftermath of this first major battle confronted both armies not with the spectacle of their prowess, but with their helplessness. The exhausted armies sat silently about the field, listening to the groans of wounded and dying comrades, unable to help or even to find friends in the darkness. There were no stretchers and no ambulances. The very circumstances produced dread. The wounded themselves featured prominently in at least one account of the apparitions: ‘about Edge-hill and Keinton, there are men seen walking with one leg, and but one arm, and the like, passing to and fro in the night’.
The Battle of Edgehill never really ended in the minds of those who had fought and suffered it. It left marks on families, too. Basil Feilding led the horse on the right of the Parliamentarian line, while his father William, Lord Denbigh was on the Royalist right, among the king’s horse; they therefore did not meet, but each was part of a successful cavalry stand. The Feilding family had already suffered loss. A few weeks before Edgehill, Basil’s sister Elizabeth’s husband had been lost, killed on horseback by a musket shot at the Battle of Liscarroll, fighting for the king against ‘the lords and Rebels of Munster’ in Ireland. But a greater loss was to come. Basil’s father William was wounded the spring after Edgehill, while attacking Birmingham with Rupert; he died a few days later at Cannock. Basil was granted a pass to travel and see his dying father, but he arrived too late. By now, Susan was in The Hague with Henrietta Maria, campaigning and raising money and arms.
From there she wrote to Basil:
There is none in the world should be more joyed at an accomodation of the King and parliament than myself so that they would humble themselves to the king, and acknowledge their errors, which now we hear the best of his subjects begin to be undeceived and come in to serve him, it is no time to delay for any that loves themselves, for I do assure you the game is changed, and I hope the catastrophe will be the King’s. I dare not speak to the queen of any such business as you wrote me of, because I am sure I should be denied, and thought to want wit. I hope we stand upon other terms now, and if you will believe me as I am a tender and loving mother, it is time for you to run to the king upon your knees and crave his pardon. I dare not write to you what I would, and I really tell you that I do believe your party does not deal fairly with you, for they know they are not so well as they have been, but you think that I shall be the last that shall know of the disorder they are in at this time, believe me this is true.
And when Basil wrote to her to try to comfort her over his father’s death, she flashed back: ‘I beg of you, my first born, to give me that comfort of that son I do so dearly love, that satisfaction which you owe me now, which is to leave those that murdered your dead father.’ Carried away by misery, she wrote angrily: ‘O, my dear Jesus, put it into my son’s heart to leave that merciless company that was the death of his father, for now I think of it with horror, before with sorrow … Before you were carried away by error, but now it is hideous and monstrous … Let your dying father and unfortunate mother make your heart relent; let my great sorrow receive some comfort.’
In a final appeal, she wrote: ‘My tender and motherly care cannot abstain from soliciting you to go to the king before it be too late. All that party will be able to make their peace, while you will be left out … I have so great part in you, that you are cruel to deny me any longer’, while Elizabeth told Basil that ‘[there is] more honour in quitting an ill way than in being constant to it’.
In vain. Basil remained in arms for Parliament throughout the war.
The shooting war, the big battles are all very well. But the principal experiences of war could be very different: less dramatic, and much more personal.
For Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton, the Civil War began in August 1642 with an orgy of plunder and iconoclasm; he does not stress the distinction between them much, and his letters show how one could effortlessly slide into the other. Wharton was an apprentice to George Willingham, who had a merchant’s business at the Golden Anchor in St Swithin’s Street, but he left to join the trained bands under Denzil Holles. On 16 August 1642, he and his men sallied forth, not to the war as such, but to the house of a suspected papist called Penruddock, ‘and being basely affronted by him and his dog, entered his house and pillaged him to the purpose. This day, also, the soldiers got into the church, defaced the ancient and sacred glassed pictures, and burned the holy rails.’ For Wharton in 1642, and perhaps for many others, this was war. There was no ‘front’ to define the fighting; it was us against them in every suburb, village, farmhouse, town and city. His account is corroborated by a pamphlet that presents his acts as atrocities, displaying a pathetic picture of the poor victim sitting with tears rolling down his face amidst the ruin of his home, but to Wharton war was about plundering the wrongdoers and attaining righteousness by doing so. He brought to the trained band exactly the mentality that had fuelled the riots of the winter in London. It was an apprentice’s mentality, seeing things simply, in black and white, and narrowly, with reduced sympathies. Yet the experiences of travel, of war itself, and of fighting enlarged Wharton, almost against his will. He began to see that war was something more than an opportunity for bullying on a really grand scale.
His education took a while, admittedly. He missed the main opportunities for plunder in Oxford, but managed to find a few surplices and tore them up for bandages. His regiment chopped up the altar-rails at Wendover for firewood, and were incited to further violence by a minister who had himself been robbed by Royalists. But some cracks began to appear in Wharton’s godliness. For a godly man, he seemed strikingly fond of swearing, disliking his lieutenant-colonel, and calling him ‘a goddamme blade, and doubtless hatched in hell’ in a letter to his master, Willingham. In a similarly ungodly manner, Wharton was not averse to a barrel or two of good beer, gleefully describing their discovery of a good barrel of Old Hum outside Coventry. But it was feast, then famine: Wharton and his men got no more to drink but ‘stinking water’ on their next twelve-mile march. Casually, he notes that on arrival at the next town, the soldiers pillaged the parson and took away his surplice; at the next town [Long Bugby], however, they had no lodgings ‘and were glad to dispossess the very swine’, while others were quartered in the church. ‘This town’, says Wharton, ‘had been so abused by the rebels, that both men, women and children were glad to leave the town and hide themselves in ditches and corn fields.’ But he and his men went out on an
other fun-filled mission ‘and returned in state clothed with a surplice, hood and cap, representing the bishop of Canterbury’. On another trip, he informed his former master, ‘our soldiers brought in much venison and other pillage from the malignants about the country’.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 23