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The Strategic Situation Summer 1643

By the early summer of 1643 the tide of military success in the English Civil War seemed to be flowing increasingly in favour of the Royalists. Nearly a year of conflict had brought varying fortunes for both sides. The autumn campaign of 1642, which many had expected to bring a quick decision to the war, had given King Charles I a narrow victory at Edgehill (23 October) in the first major engagement of the war. But, probably correctly, the King and his Council of War had vetoed a plan by Charles’ nephew and General of Horse, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Rupert, to make a dash for London with a flying column of cavalry and mounted musketeers. Instead the Royalists had opted for the safer course of a more methodical advance on the capital.

The outcome in early November was a stand-off between the opposing armies of King Charles and the Parliamentarian Captain-General, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, at Turnham Green on the approaches to London. Unwilling to risk an engagement with the strongly positioned Parliamentarians, the Royalists had fallen back, establishing their headquarters and temporary capital at Oxford, while both sides prepared for a prolonged war.

During the winter, most parts of England and Wales were caught up, to a greater or lesser extent, in the spreading conflict. The opening months of 1643 saw the honours of war distributed fairly evenly. The Parliamentarians held their own in the vital Thames Valley area, and gained ground in northwest England and the West Midlands. For their part the Cavaliers could gain satisfaction from holding their own in Cornwall and the north-east, and the King’s forces had expanded the area under their control around Oxford, where Rupert and his cavalry were burnishing their reputation with a number of minor successes.

The arrival of spring saw a stepping-up in the pace of operations. Although in the long term the Parliamentarians’ greater resources of men, money and materials would increasingly make themselves felt, in the spring and early summer of 1643, the Royalist armies, invigorated by new recruits and supplies of munitions imported from the Continent, enjoyed a steady stream of successes.

Prince Rupert, in a lightning operation in the West Midlands, sacked Birmingham and captured Lichfield, improving Royalist communications with the north. However in the Thames Valley, following an initial success in taking Reading, the Earl of Essex made slow progress. Intended operations against Oxford were crippled by Essex’s caution, the ravages of disease and desertion among his troops and the effective counter-strikes by the Royalist cavalry, climaxing in Rupert’s victory at Chalgrove (18 June).

Although the King’s opponents continued to gain ground in Lancashire and Cheshire, elsewhere in the north Royalist forces under the Earl of Newcastle, supplied with arms and ammunition from the Low Countries, increasingly gained the upper hand over the smaller northern Parliamentarian army led by Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas. On 30 June, Newcastle gained a crushing victory over the Fairfaxes at Adwalton Moor near Bradford. The remnants of the northern Parliamentarian forces were forced to seek refuge behind the strong defences of the port of Hull, apparently leaving the way open for Newcastle and his ‘Popish Army’ to drive on into the heartlands of the Parliamentarian Eastern Association.

In the south-west also, after initially fluctuating fortunes, the Cavaliers were meeting with increasing success. The largely Cornish Royalist army led by Sir Ralph Hopton advanced eastwards through Devon, and in June linked up in Somerset with troops from Oxford under the King’s Lieutenant-General in the west, the Marquis of Hertford, and Rupert’s younger brother, Prince Maurice. A closely contested duel with the Parliamentarian army of Sir William Waller followed. The opponents were well matched in skill and strength, and for some time the issue remained in doubt. Following cavalry skirmishes in the Mendip hills, the main armies clashed on 5 July on Lansdown Hill, outside Bath. In assaulting Waller’s strong defensive position the Cavaliers suffered heavy casualties, especially among their Cornish infantry. The contest ended at nightfall with no clear victor, but with the battered Royalists pulling back and heading eastwards towards the town of Devizes, hoping to gain assistance from Oxford.

Waller, dogging their footsteps, besieged the Royalist foot in Devizes, but their horse broke out and, linking up with reinforcements from Oxford under the King’s Lieutenant-General of Horse, Lord Wilmot, and Sir John Byron, returned to inflict a crushing defeat on Waller outside Devizes on Roundway Down (12 July).

The battle left the Parliamentarians without any effective field army in the west of England, and the Royalists were free to turn their attention to the great prize of the city of Bristol, England’s second port and an important trading and manufacturing centre. Rupert had been frustrated in an attempt to take control of Bristol by means of treachery earlier in the year, and this time was determined to make sure of success. He reinforced the Western Royalist forces with a major part of the Oxford Army and on 26 July, in a fiercely contested action, stormed Bristol.

England’s second city was now in the King’s hands, though Royalist casualties had been heavy, especially among the Cornish infantry, whose losses of 500 rank and file and many officers greatly reduced their effectiveness for a considerable time to come. Nonetheless, few doubted that the price had been worth paying. By the beginning of August 1643 the Royalists appeared clearly dominant in every strategically important theatre of the war, and, with the only remaining major opposing army, that of the Earl of Essex, still seriously under-strength and with sagging morale, it seemed that one more major defeat might be sufficient to bring down the Parliamentarian cause.

For the Royalists the overriding question was how to strike such a decisive blow. The Cavaliers were far from certain as to their best next course of action. It was clear that the war had entered a critical phase, and the resolutions which the King and his advisers now reached might well settle its outcome. Unfortunately, a number of weaknesses in the Royalist position presented problems at a time when speed and decisiveness were vital.

There were divisions and rivalry among the leadership on both sides and, unfortunately for the Royalists, the period immediately following the capture of Bristol was one of the occasions on which they made themselves apparent among the Royalist commanders. Losses at Bristol, totalling perhaps 1,000 men, as well as the large expenditure of powder and ammunition incurred in the storming, were themselves enough to cause a delay in operations, but the situation was exacerbated by disagreements in the Royalist high command. As was not unusual, much of the fault seems to lie with the tactless and highhanded behaviour of Prince Rupert, who without reference to the Marquis of Hertford, nominally the senior commander in the west, had written to the King asking to be appointed as Governor of Bristol. Hertford had already given the job to Hopton, and only after some haggling was the situation resolved when Hopton was made Lieutenant-Governor under Rupert, and in practice placed in day-to-day command at Bristol, with Hertford ‘honourably retired’ to the court at Oxford. The dispute apparently required the King’s personal presence in order to be resolved. However, other than demonstrating the divisions which dogged the Royalist leadership, it is unlikely that it actually did much to delay operations, as the Royalist army was in any case barely fit for immediate action because of the casualties it had incurred in storming Bristol and the large numbers of troops who had deserted with their booty.

On 1 August Charles called together those of his Council of War who were in Bristol to consider the Royalists’ next move. Among those present was Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon), as Chancellor an influential civilian member of the Council. He described later the situation as it appeared after the capture of Bristol:

The King found it now high time to resolve to what action next to dispose his armies, and that their lying still so long there (for these agitations [the dispute between Rupert and Hertford] had kept the main work from going forward ten or twelve days, a time in that season unfortunately lost) had more weakened than refreshed them, having lost more men by storming the city than were afterwards by plundering it, those shoulders which had warmed themselves with the burden of pillage never quickly again submitting to the carriage of their arms.¹

The foot regiments of the Oxford Army which had taken part in the assault on Bristol had been depleted by the same epidemic that had ravaged Essex’s men and, even before the fighting, were noted as being very much under-strength:

As Clarendon explained, the questions facing the Council of War were ‘first, whether the armies should be united, and march in one upon the next design? And then, what that design should be?’²

There were a number of arguments against keeping the Oxford and Western Armies together. Although Bristol had fallen, much of the west of England, notably Exeter, Plymouth and large areas of Devon and Dorset, still remained in enemy hands. The Cornish forces had been badly depleted by their losses at Lansdown and Bristol, and were unwilling to go any further eastwards until Plymouth, which in enemy hands threatened their homes, had been reduced. Any attempt to compel them was likely to result in large-scale desertion, especially as their natural unruliness and indiscipline had been increased by the loss of so many of their officers. If they were allowed to operate nearer to home, there was reason to hope that many deserters would return to the colours and that the ranks could be filled out with new recruits. In any case, as Clarendon admitted: ‘the truth is, their humours were not very gentle and agreeable, and apt to think that their prowess was not enough recompensed or valued.’³ There would in any case be major logistical problems in keeping the Royalist armies together; resources were barely sufficient to maintain the 6,000 horse of the Oxford Army in one place for long. If the Western forces were sent initially to mop up Parliamentarian resistance in Dorset, this would not only ease the supply situation but also neatly solve the touchy protocol question of how best to cater for Prince Maurice, who would lose his command in a united army. So it was quickly agreed that the Earl of Carnarvon be sent at once, with his horse and dragoons, to operate around Dorchester, followed next day by Maurice, as new commander of the Western Army, with its foot and artillery.⁴

More difficult to resolve was the next move for the Oxford Army. Much debate has centred on the existence or otherwise of a grand Royalist strategy for the 1643 campaign. It has been postulated that the intention was for a three-pronged advance on London by the Earl of Newcastle’s forces through the Eastern Association, the Western Army via the southern counties, and the Oxford Army retracing its march of 1642 along the Thames Valley, possibly with the ultimate objective of blockading the capital and starving it into surrender. There is in fact no firm evidence that such a strategy was ever formulated, and in any case its fulfilment would have met with virtually insuperable difficulties. We have seen already that the Western Royalist forces were neither willing nor able to advance much further eastwards until their home territories were secured, and similar considerations limited the options of the Earl of Newcastle. The Yorkshire contingent of his army, over whom he had only partial control, were unwilling to march any further south until Hull was reduced. This was, as Newcastle probably suspected from the outset, virtually impossible, with the Royalists faced by strong defences and an enemy kept constantly supplied, thanks to Parliamentarian supremacy at sea.

This left the Oxford Army. It had proved incapable of taking London in the autumn of 1642 and, though now more experienced, it was hardly stronger numerically, while the defences of the capital had unquestionably been greatly improved. Certainly for as long as Parliament’s principal army under the Earl of Essex remained intact, the capture of London was probably beyond the capability of the King’s main field army operating alone. Clarendon claimed that a number of military commanders favoured the London option, on the grounds that current Parliamentarian dissension there could be exploited, but he pointed out the serious problems facing the Royalists:

…in truth, it was a miserable army, lessened exceedingly by the losses it had sustained before Bristol; and when that part of it that was marched with prince Morice into the west, and which would not have marched any other way, the King had not much above six thousand foot to march