ALAMY X2
“Edgehill confounded all expectations: it produced
heavy casualties on both sides but no clear winner”
- The reform of the
parliamentarian
armies October–November 1644
When a parliamentarian clique bent on
securing a decisive victory ousted
their commander-in-chiefBy the second anniversary of the
battle of Edgehill, in October 1644,
neither side was significantly closer
to achieving decisive victory.
Escalation of the conflict during
1643 into a three-kingdoms war
(with the king seeking to enlist Irish
Catholic troops and parliament
responding by calling in the
Covenanter Scots) had raised the
stakes, but had still failed to deliver
an unambiguous victor.
Blame for parliament’s failure fell,
at Westminster, on its commander-
in-chief, the Earl of Essex, whose
reluctance to fight the war to an
‘absolute victory’ was explained by
his critics not as a failure of the
army’s resources, but of its
commander’s resolve.
In the autumn of 1644, those
critics turned on him. Led by an
influential group of peers and
Commons-men – known as the
Committee of Both Kingdoms –
they devised a bold series of plans:
to demote Essex and most of the
senior commanders he had
appointed, and create the sort of
well-funded and supplied fighting
force on which, they believed, adecisive
victory
over the
king
depended.
What followed
was a legislative and
organisational coup. By the spring
of 1645, six months of debate at
Westminster had transformed the
political control of the war. Essex
was replaced as commander-in-
chief by Sir Thomas Fairfax and,
through the ‘Self-Denying
Ordinance’, almost all the senior
commanders appointed since 1642
were ousted from their posts. A
clique had captured control of
parliament’s war-effort and
intended to use that control to
determine the government and
godliness of postwar England.
John Adamson- The battle
of Edgehill
23 October 1642
When a ‘test of arms’
descended into a bloody,
chaotic meleeAfter relations between the king and the leaders of
parliament broke down irretrievably at the beginning
of 1642, both sides saw a test of arms as the likeliest
way of determining the conflict. Few, however,
thought that large-scale mobilisation by the ‘king’s
party’ and the ‘parliament’s party’ would necessarily
end in widespread killing.
There was every reason to believe that the War of
1642 would be much like the recent wars of 1639 and
1640 against the Scots. One side or the other would
concede once they saw the military superiority of the
other (as Charles had done when confronted by the
Scots in 1639). Or, as one privy councillor put it, if
matters did actually come to a fight, “one day of
battle will decide under what power or person we
must all hereafter breathe”.
Edgehill confounded all these expectations.
Fought near the village of Kineton, in Warwickshire,
on Sunday 23 October 1642, it was a chaotic melee,
long and viciously fought, and with heavy casualties
on both sides.
Instead of the clearly defined outcome that both
sides had expected, neither party emerged with
a decisive war-winning advantage. Both sets of
combatants were confronted with the choice
they had all hoped to avoid: between ending the
bloodshed and coming to some form of compromise
at the negotiating table; or fighting on – with all the
perils and bloodshed that course entailed – until
one side or the other achieved an ‘absolute’,
definitive victory. John AdamsonAs commander-
in-chief of
parliamentarian
forces, Thomas
Fairfax’s remit
was to crush the
royalist armies