On 13 November 1642, three weeks after the drawn battle of Edgehill, King Charles I's army stood within a few miles of London at Turnham Green, near Chiswick. Facing it was the Earl of Essex's Parliamentarian army, swollen by the London trained bands and volunteers to about 24,000 men, roughly twice the king's strength. The two armies watched each other all day with little more than skirmishing and cannon fire, and at dusk the Royalists withdrew. It was as close as the king's armies ever came to retaking his capital.
The sack of Brentford
After Edgehill on 23 October the Royalists pushed on through Banbury, Oxford and Reading toward London, which Charles had left in January and which had been secured for Parliament. Parliament sent commissioners to meet the king at Colnbrook, but on the morning of 12 November, in a thick mist, the Royalists attacked the Parliamentarian outpost at Brentford.1
The regiments of Denzil Holles and Lord Brooke held the town's barricades for hours before they broke. Some of their men drowned trying to swim the Thames, and the British Civil Wars Project counts around fifty Parliamentarians killed and more than three hundred taken prisoner before the Royalists looted the town. Coming while talks were under way, the attack was a gift to Parliament's propagandists, who had already painted the king's nephew Prince Rupert as a plunderer schooled in the brutal German wars.2
London turns out
London answered at once. The historian Stephen Porter, formerly of English Heritage's Survey of London, describes carts carrying munitions through the night, the trained bands and auxiliaries mobilizing under Philip Skippon, and Londoners, urged on by their preachers that Sunday morning, sending almost a hundred cart-loads of food, beer and wine to the army. By eight o'clock on the morning of 13 November Essex had about 24,000 men drawn up across Turnham Green, Acton Green and Chiswick common field. The king had about 12,000 to 13,000, roughly equal in horse but far weaker in foot. Porter reckons that some 36,000 men on one field made it one of the largest gatherings of troops in British history.3
Essex sent a detachment of horse and foot, among them John Hampden's regiment, around the Royalist left toward the high ground near Acton, which might have trapped the king's army against the Thames. Then, for reasons that are still unclear, he called it back. The sources suggest the professional soldiers around him urged caution, while some of the members of Parliament who had ridden out from Westminster wanted to attack.4
A battle that was not fought
The armies faced each other through the day, about half a mile apart, with skirmishing and an ineffective exchange of artillery fire in the afternoon. Parliamentarian accounts say their men sang psalms all day. Casualties were few. One Parliamentarian report claimed more than 800 Royalist dead, which Porter calls implausibly high, while another said no more than 20 people were killed. As darkness fell the Royalists drew off through Brentford, covered by Rupert's cavalry, and Essex chose not to follow among the hedges and enclosures.5
The king fell back to Reading and then to Oxford, which became his capital for the rest of the war. Porter concludes that the Royalists never again came so close to London, and that Turnham Green marked the high water mark of their campaign against it. Dates here are in the Julian calendar, which England used until 1752. The battle that opened the campaign is told in our article on Edgehill.6
Also on this day
- 1474: Battle of Héricourt. Swiss Confederates and their Alsatian and Swabian allies, besieging Héricourt, turned to meet an approaching Burgundian relief army in the Burgundian Wars.
