Who won the Battle of Naseby?
Parliament won. On 14 June 1645 the New Model Army of Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Oliver Cromwell commanding the horse, destroyed the main army of King Charles I north of Naseby in Northamptonshire. About 5,000 Royalists were captured with all their guns and baggage, and the King could never replace the veteran infantry he lost.1
A few hours on a June morning in Northamptonshire decided the English Civil War. At Naseby the King's veteran infantry, who had followed him since 1642, were killed or taken almost to a man, and his secret letters were read aloud in London within weeks. This is the story of why Charles I chose to fight against the odds, how Prince Rupert's charge nearly won the day and then took itself out of the battle, how Cromwell's discipline won it, and what followed, including the killing of the Royalist women after the fight.2
Why was the Battle of Naseby fought?
By the end of 1644 neither side could finish the war. Parliament's armies had won at Marston Moor in July, but the campaign ended in disappointment at the Second Battle of Newbury, and English Heritage notes that this prompted Parliament to merge most of its forces into one new army under fresh commanders. The New Model Army, founded in early 1645 under Sir Thomas Fairfax, was a national force paid from taxation rather than a set of county levies, and members of Parliament were barred from its commands by the Self-Denying Ordinance.3
The Royalists opened the 1645 campaign without an agreed plan. Some of the King's council wanted to march north and undo Marston Moor; others wanted to fight the New Model. English Heritage calls the result a feeble compromise: Lord Goring was sent west with some 3,000 cavalry, and a weakened main army went north. When Parliament ordered Fairfax to besiege Oxford, the King's headquarters, Charles and Rupert stormed the Parliamentarian town of Leicester on 31 May to draw him off. It worked. Parliament gave Fairfax a free hand, and he marched north to find the King.4
Parliament also allowed Fairfax to make Cromwell his lieutenant-general of horse, an exception to the Self-Denying Ordinance. Gardiner tells how Cromwell rode into the camp at Kislingbury on the morning of 13 June with 600 horse and was greeted with “a mighty shout.” That evening Henry Ireton's horse dashed into Naseby village and captured a party of Rupert's troopers who were playing quoits. The news reached the King's quarters near Market Harborough that night, and a council of war met to decide what to do.5
Why did the Royalists fight at Naseby?
From the Royalist side, the choice was hard rather than foolish. English Heritage explains the dilemma: retreating toward Leicester with the enemy so close risked turning a withdrawal into a rout, but standing meant fighting against heavy odds. Sir Edward Walker, the King's secretary at war, wrote that the council resolved to turn and seek the enemy out rather than be pursued, “contrary (as 'tis said) to Prince Rupert's Opinion,” and blamed the rivalry between the court party around Lord Digby and the soldiers. The Naseby Battlefield Project adds that Rupert and Astley both argued for continuing north and were outvoted.6
The Royalists also had reasons for confidence. They had just taken Leicester by storm, and their officers were seasoned men; Joshua Sprigge, Fairfax's chaplain, claimed that the King's army had some 1,500 officers who were old soldiers of the Continental wars, while the New Model had hardly ten who could say the same. The National Army Museum notes that Rupert's European experience had brought him several victories before Naseby, and Gardiner writes that Rupert's contempt for the New Model, raised only that spring, left him knowing almost nothing of Fairfax's movements. EBSCO's summary puts it simply: the Royalists underestimated their opponents.7
On the morning of 14 June the Royalists formed up on high ground near Market Harborough. Walker says the scoutmaster, Francis Ruce, came back reporting that he could find no sign of the rebels, so Rupert rode out to look for himself. He saw the New Model on the move near Naseby and, taking it for a retreat, called the army forward in haste. Walker thought it a grave error: they gave up their strong position and engaged “before we had either turned our Cannon or chosen fit ground to fight on.”8
How were the armies deployed at Naseby?
The New Model had first drawn up on the steep ridge north of Naseby, facing Clipston. According to a pamphlet of 1647 quoted by English Heritage, Cromwell urged Fairfax to draw back to ground that would encourage the enemy to attack, and the army shifted west above a shallow valley called Broad Moor. The two lines faced each other across it: the Royalists on Dust Hill to the north, the New Model on the ridge in front of Mill Hill to the south, with the parish hedges of Sulby closing the west end of the field.9
Fairfax pulled his men back about a hundred paces from the brow so that the Royalists could not see how they were drawn up, a move that Sprigge says the enemy took for a retreat. Infantry stood in the center under Philip Skippon and cavalry on each wing: Cromwell on the right with six regiments of horse, Henry Ireton, made commissary-general that morning, on the left with five. Cromwell sent Colonel John Okey's dragoons to line the Sulby hedge on the far left. The Parliamentarian word for the day was “God our strength”; the Royalists' was “Queen Mary.” The field, wrote Sprigge, was about a mile broad, and the armies filled it.10
Opposite them, Lord Astley led the Royalist foot in the center, Rupert and his brother Prince Maurice the horse on the right, and Sir Marmaduke Langdale the Northern and Newark Horse on the left, with the King and his Lifeguard in reserve. Gardiner puts some 4,000 Royalist foot against about 7,000 of Fairfax's.11
What happened when Prince Rupert charged?
The battle opened on the western wing, probably around ten in the morning by Walker's account, as both sides sought the advantage of the wind. Rupert's horse advanced, took fire from Okey's dragoons behind the hedge, and met Ireton's regiments head on. Part of Ireton's line held, but the rest was broken and fled. Ireton himself, turning to help his infantry, had his horse shot under him, was run through the thigh by a pike and wounded in the face by a halberd, and was briefly a prisoner.12
Rupert's men then did what they had done at Edgehill in 1642: they chased the beaten enemy off the field. They rode almost to Naseby, where Rupert called on the Parliamentarian baggage train to surrender. Its guard of firelocks refused and fired on his horsemen. By the time Rupert turned back, the battle behind him had been lost. A Parliamentarian writer in The Weekly Account admitted that his own left wing had made a shameful retreat, excusing it on the grounds that its troopers were new men, “better armed than hearted.”13
Who was winning the infantry fight?
In the center, the Royalist foot were doing better than anyone had a right to expect. Walker writes that the two lines hardly saw each other until they were within carbine shot, fired one volley and closed “with Sword and butt end of the Musquet,” and that he saw the enemy's colors fall. Sprigge admits that almost all the Parliamentarian front line gave ground in some disorder; only Fairfax's own regiment, on the right, held. The officers carried their colors back into the reserve regiments, which came forward and stopped the Royalists.14
Skippon was shot in the side early in the fight. Asked by Fairfax to leave the field, Sprigge records, he answered that he would not stir as long as a man would stand. Walker's verdict is the Royalist view of the whole day: had their left wing done half as well as the foot or the right wing, “we had got in Few Minutes a glorious Victory.”15
How did Cromwell win the Battle of Naseby?
On the eastern wing, Cromwell did not wait to be charged. Colonel Edward Whalley's divisions went in first against Langdale's horse, which, Sprigge concedes, made “a very gallant resistance” before breaking. The rest of Cromwell's wing was slowed by furze, uneven ground and a rabbit warren, but it had the numbers: Walker counted five Royalist bodies of horse against seven, and Gardiner puts Cromwell's men at about 3,600 against 2,000. Langdale's troopers, charging uphill, were outflanked and driven from the field.16
What followed separated Cromwell from Rupert. He sent part of his wing to keep the beaten Royalist horse from rallying and wheeled the rest against the flank and rear of the Royalist infantry. A newsletter ascribed to Fairfax's secretary, John Rushworth, put the secret of the Parliamentarian cavalry in the depth of its reserves and their “orderly and timely comming on.” Okey's dragoons mounted and charged the Royalist foot from the other side, joined by the rallied remnants of Ireton's wing. Regiment after regiment surrendered.17
Only one Royalist brigade, which the Naseby Battlefield Project identifies as Rupert's own Bluecoats, held out against charges to its front, flanks and rear, until Fairfax brought up his own regiment of foot, which fell on it with musket butts while he charged with the horse. At about the same moment the King was ready to lead his Lifeguard in a counter-charge when the Earl of Carnwath seized his bridle and turned him away, asking whether he would go upon his death. A cry of “March to the right” sent the reserve wheeling to the rear.18
Rupert's horsemen, back on Dust Hill, could not be brought to charge again. When Fairfax formed a fresh line of horse, foot and guns and his dragoons opened fire, the last Royalist cavalry broke and fled. Parliament's horse chased them about fourteen miles, to within two miles of Leicester, killing and taking prisoners all the way.19
How many men died at the Battle of Naseby?
Fewer than at many battles of the war, but the losses fell where they could not be replaced. Most accounts put the Royalist dead at about 1,000: the National Army Museum and the Battlefields Trust give that figure, and Gardiner splits it into about 700 killed on the field and 300 in the pursuit. EBSCO's summary gives about 600. Parliament's losses were light, under 150 by the Battlefields Trust's count and about 400 in Britannica.20
The prisoners were the real catastrophe. Sprigge lists about 5,000 taken on the field, including six colonels, eight lieutenant-colonels, eighteen majors and seventy captains; Gardiner reckons nearly 500 of them officers. With them went the whole artillery train, some 8,000 arms, forty barrels of powder, the King's colors, the Duke of York's standard and nearly a hundred other colors, as well as the plunder of Leicester. Gardiner was unimpressed by the generalship: a victory in which 14,000 men beat 7,500, “and that too not without difficulty,” was in his view no great example of military efficiency.21
What happened to the Royalist women after Naseby?
The worst killing of the day came after the fighting. As Parliamentarian cavalry overran the Royalist baggage train in the pursuit, they fell on the women who followed the army. Gardiner, drawing on the newsletters of 1645, writes that about a hundred women of Irish birth were killed outright and that others had their faces slashed. Mark Stoyle, in the fullest modern study, puts the dead at more than a hundred, with many more mutilated. English Heritage's report notes the killings plainly.22
Who were they? The London press called them Irish, and Parliamentarian pamphlets had for years portrayed the King's camp followers as knife-wielding “Irish and Welsh-women.” Stoyle argues that xenophobia, anti-Catholic feeling and a wish to avenge killings that English pamphlets blamed on Irish and Welsh women explain the atrocity, and he suggests that fear of witchcraft may have played a part. The Naseby Battlefield Project believes many of the victims were Welsh women whose speech was taken for Irish; many of the King's foot were Welsh, as Gardiner notes.23
What was in the King's cabinet captured at Naseby?
Among the Royalist baggage the victors found the King's cabinet: his private correspondence, mostly drafts and copies of letters to Queen Henrietta Maria. Sprigge counted it “not the least mercy in this victory.” The papers showed Charles negotiating to bring an Irish army into England, ready to repeal the laws against Catholics, and seeking troops from Catholic powers on the Continent, from France in Britannica's account and from the Duke of Lorraine in Gardiner's.24
Parliament had the letters read in both Houses and at a Common Hall in the City of London, then printed them in July 1645 as The Kings Cabinet Opened, “Published by speciall Order of the Parliament,” with annotations, inviting doubters to inspect the originals. Gardiner judged the effect enormous: it seemed hopeless to negotiate with a king whose private words so contradicted his public ones. Britannica notes that the revelations cost Charles many prominent supporters.25
Who won the Battle of Naseby, and why did it matter?
Parliament won outright, and Naseby is generally reckoned the decisive battle of the First Civil War. The King had lost the foot of his main field army, men he could never replace, and English Heritage notes that although the war dragged on for another year, the critical moment had passed. Fairfax retook Leicester, and in July he beat Goring's army, the last significant Royalist field army, at Langport. In September a Royalist force trying to relieve Chester was beaten at Rowton Heath.26
Charles held out at Oxford into 1646, and in May he gave himself up not to Parliament but to its Scottish allies besieging Newark, hoping to divide his enemies; the story continues in our history of Scotland's wars. That hope led on to the Second Civil War and to the King's trial and execution in 1649. Our pages on the Battle of Worcester (1651) and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms follow the conflict to its end.27
Historic England and the National Army Museum draw the longer lesson. The victory of a national army assured the supremacy of Parliament, and the monarchy in Britain never developed in the absolutist way of its Continental neighbors. The New Model's success also led, in 1660, to a permanent standing army, the ancestor of the modern British Army. Cromwell's own letter to the Speaker, written that night, pressed a point of his own: “Honest men served you faithfully in this action,” he wrote, and he that ventures his life for the liberty of his country should be able to trust God for the liberty of his conscience. Naseby has its place among the greatest battles in British history and in Britain's military history.28
Where was the Battle of Naseby fought?
The battlefield lies just over a mile north of Naseby village in Northamptonshire, about 20 miles south of Leicester, on the open ground between Naseby and Sibbertoft. In 1645 it was unhedged common field; most of the hedges seen today came with enclosure in 1828. The best viewpoint is the battlefield monument beside the Sibbertoft road; there is also an obelisk north-east of the village, on the Clipston road.29
Naseby is on Historic England's Register of Historic Battlefields and is one of the best understood battlefields in Britain. Glenn Foard's analysis of the site and the mapping of musket shot found across it trace the fighting on the ground, and the A14 road now separates the site of the Parliamentarian baggage train from the main field.30
