On 23 October 1642 the armies of King Charles I1 and Parliament met at Edgehill in Warwickshire, the first pitched battle of the English Civil War1. 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.
For years the quarrel between the king and his Parliament had built toward violence, and few believed it would come to a real war, or that it would last. Then, on a cold October afternoon in the English Midlands, two amateur armies drew up on the slopes below Edge Hill, and the country discovered how wrong it had been.
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. Charles raised his standard at Nottingham2, and both sides scrambled to gather armies of half-trained volunteers. As the king marched toward London, the main Parliamentarian army under the Earl of Essex moved to block him, and the two forces stumbled into contact near Edge Hill in Warwickshire.
Rupert's charge
Overall command of the Royalist army was disputed: its Lord General, the veteran Earl of Lindsey, resigned after a quarrel with Prince Rupert3 over how the foot should be drawn up and gave way to the Earl of Forth, then was mortally wounded and captured at the head of his own regiment. The battle opened with the great strength of the Royalist army, its cavalry under the king's dashing young nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. The Royalist horse, Rupert on the right and Wilmot on the left, charged and swept most of the Parliamentary cavalry from both wings in a headlong rout. But instead of turning back to fall on the enemy foot, the Royalist riders galloped miles from the field in pursuit and plunder3, and by the time they returned the crucial moment had passed.
The push of pike
With the Royalist horse gone, the battle fell to the infantry. Parliament's reserve cavalry under Sir William Balfour and Sir Philip Stapleton, still on the field, crashed into the Royalist foot, while the two masses of pike and musket ground against each other in the centre in a brutal, indecisive struggle. Neither side could break the other.4 As darkness and cold closed in, the exhausted armies drew apart3, each too battered to claim a clear victory.
A war, not a battle
Edgehill settled nothing. The king's road to London lay open for a moment, but he advanced too slowly, and in November the Parliamentarians and the trained bands of London blocked him at Turnham Green, on the city's edge, without a fight5. Charles fell back to Oxford, which became his wartime capital5. The great gamble for a quick, decisive victory had failed, and England settled in for years of civil war.
