The Battle Of Edgehill: The Great Stalemate Of The English Civil War | History Of Warfare | Timeline

This channel is part of the History Hit Network. In 1662, the new King Charles II sent his most trusted advisors to the quiet Warwickshire village of Radway. Reports had been received of strange apparitions. It was claimed the ghosts of the soldiers who had fought the Battle of Edge Hill 20 years before had appeared in the sky to fight the Battle of Fresh. What made the event so strange was the sheer number and quality of the witnesses. Everyone from laborers to doctors and the local justice of the peace were all prepared to testify that they had seen the ghostly figures. Some would even claim that they recognized the faces of those slain 20 years before. If it was simply mass hysteria, then it was forgivable that some manifestation of the shock from the events which had been played out around these very houses should return to haunt the village. The original events had, 20 summers ago in 1642, been brutal, savage and unexpected. This is Edge Hill, the imposing ridge which rises abruptly from the flat Warwickshire plain. The trees are a recent addition. It was from these slopes that the enemy of King Charles I descended to fight the army of the Earl of Essex in a battle which brought to a shattering conclusion the quiet years of peace which England had enjoyed since the days of Henry VIII more than 130 years earlier. This is the village of Radway. As you can see it hasn't changed a lot since 1642. It's still very quiet and very rural. It's located in the very centre of England, in the shadow of Edge Hill. And it was around these houses and on this precise spot that a lot of the fighting took place at the Battle of Edge Hill. So it's no surprise that if you believe that kind of thing that there might be some kind of echoes or resonances from the horrendous events that took place around these houses. In the 1630s the Frenchman Jacques Callot depicted those gruesome images from the appalling conflicts which then wracked the continent of Europe. To Englishmen the horror of scenes like these were unknown, but that happy situation was not to last. Although it is generally known as the English Civil War, the flames of the conflicts which shook the British Isles in the 1640s kindled into life in Scotland, flared up in Ireland, and by the time they ended 20 years later, men had died on battlefields as far apart as Caithness and Cornwall and from Flanders to Virginia. But the real war began in earnest on the bloody field of Edge Hill. Behind me is the plain of Edge Hill. It was off the hill here that the King's army moved down to face the army of Parliament. Both armies laid out in quite a similar fashion. Parliament's army was drawn up exactly the same way as the Royalists down on the on the plain there, and most of the fighting took place on the level ground with the fields that you can see behind me. Although it's known as the Battle of Edge Hill, the hill itself wasn't actually significant in any shape or form because the King's army moved away from this area because otherwise the parliamentarians would probably not have decided to attack them. It was far too strong a defensive position to lure anyone onto. There's been a great deal of debate about who struck the first blow or why. Obviously no one was very keen to take up arms against their sovereign and it must have been a fairly weighty decision when Parliament finally decided to commence the opening cannonade. The causes of the war which led Englishmen to take up arms against other Englishmen in a bitter conflict in 1642 are complex. History Hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans. Our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place. Travel with us to the fascinating world of prehistoric Scotland or uncover the lives of the people who called Pompeii home. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. They stem from the disruptive process of evolution. In this case the evolution of the church and constitution from a medieval society to a modern nation-state. For some Englishmen of the period constitutional change was uppermost. For the mass of the population religious reform mattered most. To others greater freedom of trade was the great issue of the day. The issues which concerned each of these groups were not entirely separate matters and there was some overlap between them. But any move towards reform in any sphere would inevitably come into collision with the person of the king Charles I. It's absolutely impossible to discuss politics of the 17th century without reference to religion. Religion and religious aspects were at the very centre of every debate that was going on in England. The protestant reformation in the previous century was still continuing and there were a large number of groups who wanted to alter the form of worship or to find their own means of worship or to explore other freer forms of reformed religion. Unfortunately in the presence of the person of Charles I they came against an absolutely immovable object. Charles believed absolutely that the church should be organised and continue to be organised as one central church of England and that was at the very core of the debate. It wasn't like a modern society where people have by and large abandoned a lot of the religious beliefs. It was absolutely central to every single aspect of people's lives. King Charles was a man of great principle and conviction but he was a man totally opposed to the kind of change which large sections of his people now demanded. Charles was only the second king to sit on the combined throne of Scotland and England which although they shared a king were still separate countries in every legal and economic sense. Although he was born in Scotland and spoke with a trace of the Scots accent which he had inherited from his father, Charles largely turned his back on that country. His slight speech impediment meant that he lacked a certain presence but this was more than made up for by his earnest sincere religious faith and the serious manner in which he accepted the burden of kingship. Charles was studious, dedicated and absolutely resolute in any cause in which he firmly believed. He was particularly staunch in his desire to uphold the ancient laws and structures of England as he interpreted them. He once famously outlined his own inflexible and autocratic views for the subjects. I alone must answer to God for our exercise of the authority he has vested in me. It is for me to decide how our nation is to be governed, how my subjects are to be ruled and above all how the church shall be established under the rule of law. These are the divine rights of kings and are ordained by the almighty. It is not the place of the subject to question the royalty prerogative. I shall endeavor to uphold the liberties of the country but my authority is absolute and may not be questioned. You may rest assured that I have no other intention but to honor God and to procure the good of my people. These are clearly not the words of a man who would be likely to embrace the radical change his subjects demanded. Perhaps it was inevitable that war would occur sooner or later, but if there was to be a war between the autocratic king and his subjects, the debilitating military effects of the long years of peace would first have to be overcome. Although the British Isles had long been at peace, large numbers of Scots and English officers and men had served as mercenaries on the continent in the Thirty Years' War. At home, military drills were still practiced by the volunteer trained bands who were charged with the defense of the realm. Drill books like this one by Bariff were hugely popular sellers, so there was still some residue of martial ardor even if there was little actual experience. As always in these matters, there was no shortage of hotheads willing to organize a fight. In 1642 there was no such thing as a standing army such as we would recognize today, but men still did get together and practice military maneuvers and techniques in what were known as the trained bands, where people from a given locality would come together every so often to practice maneuvering with the pike and the musket. It wasn't necessarily going to be a tremendously effective force, they were really there as a defense in times of national emergency and the last time they'd seriously been called upon with any prospect of real action had been in 1588 at the time in the Spanish Armada. Infantry regiments of the period were made up of two quite different types of soldier, musketeers and pikemen. In action, the pikemen were grouped together in the center of each battalion forming a forest of pike shafts with a wing of musketeers on each side. Firearms were still evolving and the musketeers were mainly armed with matchlock muskets. These were simple muzzle loading weapons with a slow burning fuse or match which was used to fire them. An experienced soldier could load and fire within 30 seconds but there were few enough of those when the war began. At this period muskets were still very much in development, they were inaccurate, they took a long time to load and there was not very much chance of hitting anything at much distance over 50 yards. In order to compensate for that they would pack the musketeers very close together so you had a kind of wall of fire which would maximize the chances of actually hitting a target. One of the disadvantages was that it took an incredibly long time to load, it was a cumbersome process and it wasn't easy to manage so they had the musketeers arranged six deep so there would constantly be at least one person at the front ready to fire and in that way they would try and achieve some damage with what were still very much rudimentary weapons. Musketeers probably accounted for as much as two-thirds of each of the regiment, the rest of the regiment were composed of pikemen. It was still considered a far more noble and honourable thing to do to carry or trail the pike as they called it into battle because it was very much a physical thing, anyone could take the cowardly option of firing a musket over a distance but it was still considered very much a gentlemanly and a noble thing to do to get involved in hand-to-hand combat which was the real point of the pikemen, they were there to be at the very crux of the battle and to physically drive their enemy from the field. In an emergency they were also intended to act as a defence against cavalry because with the long pikes they were able to keep the horse at bay but as the war developed the number of a pikemen gradually decreased because there was very little call for hand-to-hand combat in most situations in raids and things like that, you needed to be fast, you needed to be mobile and quite often you were striking from a distance, so this really was the very end of the era in which the pikemen would be seen on the battle. For every two musketeers in the regiment there would ideally be one pikeman. The pikeman had once been the more important element of an infantry regiment and had formed two-thirds of the regiments in Elizabeth's time, but by the time of the civil war they were in decline, eclipsed by the more versatile and deadly musketeers. Fewer and fewer of them now wore the armour shown in the elegantly illustrated drill books, but they still had an important role to play, especially in using their long pikes to fend off enemy cavalrymen. They could also be called upon to deliver the decisive blow by moving forward with their pikes levelled at the charge. Usually the threat of coming to grips with the pike was enough to cause one side or the other to break and run, but if both parties were resolute it came to push of pike, with both parties contending, locked in mortal combat as one observer put it, like bulls trying to bear the other down. Cavalry were of two kinds, the heavy cuirassiers, clad in armour from head to toe like medieval knights, and the light cavalrymen, called harquebusiers, who wore only helmets and either a breastplate or a heavy buff leather coat. The cuirassiers were intended to charge home, while the harquebusiers were skirmishers trained to fight with firearms rather than the sword. In the England of 1642 both the armour for cuirassiers and horses fit to bear them were hard to find, but Prince Rupert, the king's flamboyant young nephew, appointed to command the royalist company, ignored convention and trained his lightly armed troopers to charge home as if they were cuirassiers. At this period the cavalry were still considered as the prime arm on the battlefield. It was a kind of hangover from the medieval days when the mounted knight had precedence on the battlefield. Although they were still a very effective arm, there was an underlying tendency to be a somewhat ill-disciplined that was present throughout the whole of the civil wars until the rise of Cromwell and his Ironsides which finally stamped some real discipline into the cavalry. It's no surprise that the word cavalier has come into the language because to an extent that was the epitome of the warrior who fought and moved around according to his own whim rather than the discipline which we hope to find among the infantry. Artillery was invaluable in but seldom played a decisive part in the battles since cannon were generally too heavy to move easily and too slow to reload. The cannon of the period fired cannonballs, smooth projectiles which were not designed to explode but rather to cause horrific injury by the violence of their passage, tearing off arms and legs as they passed through the massed ranks of men. Although they were cumbersome and inefficient, no field army of the period was considered complete without at least a few guns. Cannons were still very much in their infancy, they weren't yet the force that they would become in another hundred years time. The tactics were very rudimentary and the guns themselves were still fairly rudimentary. They were difficult to load, they were difficult to aim and they were difficult to move around the countryside and they hadn't yet developed the kind of tactics of employing the guns en masse that was to happen in the Napoleonic era for example when they really became effective. At this point they were still deployed scattered throughout the infantry, they would fire infrequently and as we were to see at Edge Hill without doing a tremendous amount of damage. These were the men and the weapons with which the coming war would be fought but the tensions in English society had not yet come completely to a head. Because the king and his advisors represented a common obstacle to change, inevitably the king and the conservative elements of the court would come to be viewed as the common enemy for those who sought to change society in some way or other. Eventually the various groups seeking change would coalesce from a range of separate interests into a single party directly opposed to the royalists. Supporters of these and a number of other groups became generally known as Puritans and despite their many differences they did share one thing in common. King Charles would not yield to any of their requests for change unless they fitted precisely with his own view of how the church should be governed. Charles was not content with imposing a rigid form of worship solely on the Church of England. He wished to extend this standardized service to the Church of Scotland. The whole Scots nation was outraged. In 1639 it seemed as if the whole nation had come to sign a national covenant in defense of their own fiercely Presbyterian religion. To show their mettle they threw out the bishops imposed on them by James I 30 years earlier. The wars of 1639 and 1640 therefore became known as the Bishop's Wars. The outcome of these two short and relatively bloodless conflicts proved to be an unmitigated military disaster for King Charles. The victorious Scots army of the covenant easily defeated the English forces hastily thrown against them at the half-hearted battle of Newburn and then marched on to occupy Newcastle. Any war between Scotland and England was a war that Charles would always have expected to win. Historically for the three or four hundred years before that England had always triumphed in any major conflict of arms. So it must have came as a great shock to Charles to find that his army was so easily defeated by the army of the covenant in the Bishop's Wars. But far more significant for him was the economic cost of putting an army into the field. Effectively it bankrupted his exchequer and forced him to recall a parliament in order to raise the taxes to pay for that military venture and it was that that would provide the spark which would ignite the whole of the country into the English civil war. Forced to recall parliament so that it could vote him the funds to finance his Scottish wars, Charles found that he had unleashed a pent-up force which would not easily be contained. For 11 years he had been governing the country without recourse to Parliament. Charles mistrusted Parliament and whenever possible sought to rule the country without one. In order to raise the money to govern the country he had twisted and manipulated the laws governing taxation and the sovereign's right to grant monopolies. But in so doing he had created huge unrest among the merchant classes. Parliament presented King Charles with a list of grievances which became known as the Grand Remonstrance and further challenged the authority of royal control by claiming that Parliament, not the King, should have the right to raise and control the army. In 1641 Ireland had exploded into rebellion. The native Catholic population launched a series of ferocious attacks on the Protestant incomers who had colonized Ireland from Scotland and England. The question of who controlled the armed forces was now more pressing than ever. The significance of the events in Ireland are often overlooked but they had a great deal of influence on the events leading up to the war and also on the war itself. Firstly it made available a large pool of men under arms which otherwise wouldn't have existed. More importantly it caused the debate between the King and Parliament to come to a head with regard to who was going to control the army. Two factions finally came to an all-out declaration of war after a failed attempt by Charles to seize the leaders of the party acting in opposition to him. With his failure to arrest the five members Pym, Hollis, Hampton, Hazelrig and Strode, the King had played his last card. He had attempted to overrule the rights and privileges of Parliament by coup d'etat. The London mob took to the streets backing the Parliament and there was no turning back. Unrest in society now took the form of increasingly open conflict. Soon riots and brawls became more serious and the first shots were fired in anger. Faced with the outright hostility of the Commons and the populace of London, the King fled north to York. From there he attempted to seize arms and ammunition stored at Hull but was refused entry by Sir John Hotham on St George's Day 1642. Desperately short of arms and ammunition, Charles spent the next four months gathering the beginnings of an army. In August, when he felt strong enough and raised his standard at Nottingham, the genteel pretenses were cast aside. Civil war had begun in earnest. Parliament had certainly managed to raise the more sizeable army. A large part of these men were drawn from the regiments which had been recruited to suppress the rebellion in Ireland. London was then a hotbed of Puritanism and large numbers of Londoners joined the army. The popular Earl of Essex was appointed to command it. Unfortunately, he was to prove a more able politician than a soldier. In command of the parliamentarian forces was Old Robin, the Earl of Essex. He was never to establish a reputation as a great military commander. At best, he was workmanlike. He never achieved any strategic or decisive victories in the way that most of the other commanders did. He had an unfortunate habit of allowing his opponents to interpose themselves between him and his home base at London. It happened at Edge Hill and it happened again at Newbury and also at Cropperdy Bridge in the following year. In his personal life, he was equally unlucky. It was a well-known fact among both armies that he had been cuckolded by his younger wife and, as you can imagine, this provided a great source of merriment, I suspect, for both sides. The King's army was smaller than that of Parliament. At first, there was the real possibility that he might not be able to raise an army at all. But to his enemy's dismay, he at length succeeded in finding sufficient men to take the field, though many were very poorly armed and were described by one contemporary as poor Welsh vermin. During the summer and early autumn of 1642, the two sides jockeyed for position in the Midlands of England. The Midlands were to become the cockpit of the civil war for the next four years. In support of the King, the Earl of Northampton seized the initiative and besieged Warwick Castle. But the affair had all the hallmarks of amateurs learning a professional trade. The brief siege of the castle was raised by the parliamentary garrison with very little bloodshed. But the precedent had been set and throughout the towns and villages of the North and Midlands, ugly little skirmishes were being fought and they were steadily rising in scale. It was only a matter of time before these small scale affairs gave way to the first big battle of the war. King Charles placed a great deal of faith in his nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, whom he appointed to lead the cavalry. The young prince brought a much-needed sense of energy and purpose to his command. He was to become the epitome of the dashing cavalier and was followed everywhere by his faithful dog named Boy, yapping and barking around the hooves of his horse. Prince Rupert was the epitome of the cavalier, so much so he's almost a cliche. He was young, dashing, handsome. He led his men very stylishly in battle. He even had a barked and skipped around the heels of his horse as he led them into to battle. But above all he was successful and it's often overlooked that on the field he was able to drive away his opponents. He's quite fairly criticized for his failure to rally his troops, but I'm not sure that that's necessarily a personal feeling. With two or three thousand horsemen careering in every which way, I'm not sure there's anybody who could have brought undisciplined, untrained men together in circumstances like that. So Prince Rupert had a lot of the qualities as a cavalry leader. He was certainly personally brave, he was courageous, he led his men from the front, he was prepared to put himself on the line in a way that commanders of a later generation wouldn't do. His big failing was his inability throughout the whole course of the war to establish the kind of discipline that Cromwell, for example, would later bring to his troop of cavalry who knew that once they defeated the enemy the job was only half done. It wasn't about pursuing people all over the countryside, it was about rallying, coming together and attacking the remaining infantry. This was something that Rupert just didn't quite seem to be able to instil in his men. Throughout the civil wars Rupert led a great deal of dashing and very daring raids and strategic movements throughout the parliamentarian rear, but every time when it came to the crunch he just could not exercise that vital control over his own cavalry that made all the difference between success and failure. The first time we see the flaws in Rupert's skill as a cavalry commander are apparent here at Edge Hill. It's really his wing that starts the battle, they drive the parliamentarians from the field and instead of gaining control of his men Rupert and all the rest of the cavaliers go dashing off away into the distance towards Kyneton where his men begin to plunder the baggage train. What's often overlooked about Prince Rupert is his extreme youth. He was only 22 years of age and he was a comparatively young man. At that age a great deal of people are still learning the ways of the world so it's no great surprise that he couldn't exercise the iron control that possibly an older head such as Cromwell was able to demonstrate with his men. On the 23rd of September cavalry detachments of both armies met each other at Poick Bridge outside Worcester. Neither side had realized that the other was close at hand but the royalists were the first to recover from the shock of discovery and in the short fight which followed Prince Rupert's cavaliers were victorious. Of itself the skirmish was unimportant but significantly it began the myth that the cavalier horse were invincible a belief which the parliamentarians would need some time to destroy. A month later at Edge Hill in the Vale of the Red Horse in Warwickshire the first major battle of the civil war was fought. As a commander Essex was to develop an unfortunate reputation for allowing his opponent to interpose between him and his home base. The Edge Hill campaign was the first example of this dangerous tendency. Essex's army therefore formed up with the royalist army between him and his base at London. The king's nephew Prince Rupert commanded the cavalry on the right wing and Lord Wilmot a professional soldier turned courtier commanded the left. In the centre the infantry formed five brigades with three in the front line and the two others in support. The dragoons were deployed on the flanks of the cavalry. We're now standing just behind where the left wing of the royalist army would have been. On the plain behind me is where Lord Wilmot and his cavalry would have been drawn up facing the parliamentarians who would have been further in the distance and with Warwick in behind us. In total it is estimated that the royalists fielded nearly 3,000 cavalry 1,000 dragoons and just over 10,000 infantry. The earl of Essex's army waiting for them at the foot of hill was drawn up in much the same way. The parliamentarians had 12,000 infantry but less than 3,000 cavalry and dragoons. That the parliamentarians opened fire first is well documented. The parliamentarian Ludlow is the best source on that issue. Our general having commanded to fire upon the enemy it was done twice upon that part of the army wherein, as it was reported, the king was. The great shot was exchanged on both sides for the space of an hour or thereabouts. Lord Wharton also on the parliament side later compared the effects of the artillery of the two sides. Their cannon did not kill even 20 men while we gave them two shots for one and their ordnance did scarcely hurt any at all whereas we scarcely discharged away a bullet in vain. It was now time for the royalist cavalry to make their move as a royalist recalled. Just before we began our march Prince Rupert passed from one wing to the other giving positive orders to the horse to march as close as was possible keeping their ranks with sword in hand to receive the enemy's shot without firing either cabin or pistol till we broke in amongst the enemy and then to make use of our firearms as need should require which order was punctually observed. The royalist horse 3d began to move forward. The future King James II's description of this charge has survived. The royalists marched up with all the gallantry and resolution imaginable especially the right wing led by Prince Rupert. While they advanced the enemy's cannon continually played upon them as did the small divisions of their foot which were placed in the intervals betwixt their squadrons neither of which did in the least discompose them so much as to mend their pace. Thus they continued moving till they came up close to the enemy's cavalry which immediately turned their backs the royalists pursuing them with great eagerness. We're now standing exactly where the parliamentarian cavalry would probably have been drawn up to to face Prince Rupert's charge. Over behind us we can see Edge Hill. Rupert and his cavaliers would have been drawn up slightly ahead of the hill and on the bottom of the flat in front of us. They came charging straight across those fields behind me expecting to meet with the parliamentarian cavalry in a huge hand-to-hand combat here. In practice what happened was as the royalists got nearer the parliamentarians lost their nerve and many of them fled from the field without ever coming to grips with the royalists and were pursued for about seven miles down there towards Kyneton. At first it looked as though the cavaliers might end the war in an afternoon. Led by the fiery Prince Rupert the royalist cavalry swept all before them. As the royalists advanced upon the parliamentary cavalry the roundheads who opened fire with their carbines expected the royalists to respond in kind. Instead the cavaliers came on at a furious charge and the parliamentarians, panicking, fled away pursued clear of the battlefield by the jubilant cavaliers who thought the day won. The parliamentarian cavalry may have given in easily but the foot was made of sterner stuff. A little way behind Ramsay's men stood Holly's regiment whose colonel now saw the fleeing mass of his own cavalry with the royalist horse at their heels come rushing pell-mell down upon his regiment and break through it. An eyewitness recalled, undaunted he went and planted himself just in the way and did what possibly he could do to make them stand and at last prevailed with three troops to wheel a little about and rally. This small force of cavalry was to prove invaluable later in the battle. Despite the exhortance of Prince Rupert his cavalry swept on in great disorder to Kyneton. When they reached the town they found a new prize, the carts and wagons of Essex's army. All sorts of prizes came their way, Essex's coach, Sir Samuel Luke's commission and much baggage belonging to the six parliamentarian commanders. On the other wing Lord Wilmot had a more difficult task than Rupert for he had to charge in worse cavalry ground amongst hedges and through gaps and ditches which were lined with musketeers but Wilmot led his men forward with as much determination as Rupert. It may be that his advance was synchronized with Rupert's by a sudden discharge of all six big royalist guns. Although Wilmot was much weaker than Rupert he still outnumbered the roundhead cavalry under fielding by nearly three to one. The unfortunate fielding was swept from the field with if anything even less resistance than Ramsey's men. The foot regiment of Sir William Fairfax's ran too and none faster than Lieutenant Thomas Whitney who found a horse and galloped post-haste all the way to London. It was now time for the royalist foot to decide the day. If they could gain a similar success to the cavalry the battle and probably the war would be won for the king. The third Sir Jacob Astley at the head of the royalists is reported to have made his famous prayer. Oh Lord thou knowest how busy I must be this day if I forget thee do not thou forget me. He rose to his feet and crying out march on boys led forward the royalist foot. The foot advanced as James II tells us with a slow steady pace and a very daring resolution. A parliamentarian soldier later recalled the brave advance. Their foot came up all in front and after some playing with the cannon on both sides that part of it which was on their left and towards our right wing came on very gallantly to the charge. To the advancing royalist infantry things must have seemed promising. Many of them on the outside of each wing would have seen the success of their own cavalry and morale must have been high. Their confidence would have been reinforced by the fact that the parliamentarian brigade of Charles Essex wholly disbanded and ran away without ever striking a blow. By this time Astley's brigades were at push of pike with the parliamentarian foot. Now began the terrible struggle later so well described by the royalist Clarendon. The foot of both sides stood their ground with great courage. They kept their ranks and the execution was great on both sides but much greater on the Earl of Essex's party. The seven remaining parliamentarian regiments some 6,000 strong now engaged in mortal combat with 10,000 royalist foot. Surely the day must be won for the king. The hedgehogs of pikemen flanked by their supporting musketeers now struggled to push the enemy back and break his line but it was not to be. After a bitter struggle both sides simply stopped fighting as one eyewitness recalled. Each side as if by mutual consent suddenly unlocked ranks and retired a few paces. There they struck down their colours and continued to fire at one another until nightfall. A thing so very extraordinary that nothing less than so many witnesses as there were present could make it credible. It was now that the initiative passed to the few parliamentarian cavalry who had not routed from the field. Beyond question the credit for this goes to their lieutenant general Sir William Balfour. He gathered up the few available horsemen and launched a furious assault upon the royalist foot. He struck the brigade of Colonel Richard Fielding, broke through a regiment that had green colours, beat them to their cannon where they threw down their arms and ran away. The king on his eminence could now see his centre streaming back towards the hill with the parliamentarians hot on their heels cutting down the fugitives. The king's lifeguard meanwhile was locked in combat with constable's regiment and Sir Edmund Verney, the knight marshal who bore the king's banner royal, was killed in the swirling melee. He was struck down by Ensign Arthur Young and the king's standard was snatched from his lifeless hand. But Young's triumph was short-lived. He was seen by the royalist Captain Smith who galloped up crying Traitor! Deliver the standard! And though wounded himself he killed one round head, hurt another and routed the rest who fled leaving the standard in his possession. It is said that the king's standard only remained in parliamentarian hands for some six minutes. Eventually the armies simply became exhausted and gradually lost the ability to fight and so the two starved and bleeding armies still within cannon shot of one another settled down to endure a night as cold as a very great frost and a sharp northerly wind could make it. When darkness put an end to the fighting on the 23rd of October neither side had won the day. In the final analysis the Battle of Edge Hill could have and some would say should have been won by the royalists. They certainly had the advantage on the field, they had better elan, they were better prepared and at certain points during the battle they had the beatings of the parliament's army. For whatever reason they didn't manage to do that and really the country was then plunged into a long and protracted civil war. It's always going to be a matter of conjecture what would have happened if the king had won at Edge Hill. After a bitterly cold night Essex abandoned the battlefield to the king and retired northwards to the safety of Warwick Castle leaving the way clear for the king to march on London. The impetuous Prince Rupert was all for making a dash with his cavalry to occupy London before Essex could reach the city with the battered remains of his army. However the king prevaricated in the hope of a peaceful settlement and the greatest opportunity of the war to capture the parliamentary stronghold was lost. The parliamentarians mustered at Turnham Green to defend London were too numerous for his exhausted army and the king reluctantly withdrew to Oxford for the winter there to establish his court. For the next four years the university city was to be the royalist capital. The king was never to reach London except as a prisoner of his enemies to await his execution.