God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [148]
Essex would have preferred to wait for reinforcements, which were known to be on their way, but could not avoid battle with the royal forces in such close proximity. The parliamentary force was, accordingly, drawn up with infantry in the centre, cavalry and dragoons on either side and, crucially as it turned out, two regiments of cavalry in the rear. They were perhaps caught on the hop, trying to move to reinforce the cavalry facing Rupert but failing to make the manoeuvre before battle was joined. In any case, the battle opened with exchanges of artillery fire which lasted an hour, but did little damage. It was Rupert, commanding the cavalry on the royalists” right wing, who initiated the real fighting, when he led a devastating charge against the parliamentarian cavalry. At almost the same time Wilmot, on the other royalist flank, led a similarly successful charge, and a second wave of royalist cavalry charges joined the pursuit of the fleeing parliamentarians.
This pursuit was unfortunate, and a sign of inexperience. A royalist victory would have been much more likely had the cavalry regrouped and supported an assault on the parliamentarian infantry. As it was, with the royalist cavalry in exultant pursuit of the parliamentarians through Kineton, Astley was left to lead the royalist infantry forward without cavalry support. The second line of cavalry had disobeyed an order from Rupert not to quit the field, perhaps confused by the shape of the battle, and something similar seems to have happened on the other wing, where it was not immediately clear that the parliamentary cavalry had indeed been scattered.
The battle of Edgehill
With the cavalry gone, the infantry battle came to a grim ‘push of pike’. As the infantry closed they faced each other at close range, firing volleys, until hand-to-hand combat was joined. Safety depended on mastering fear and maintaining the ranks, which could also withstand a cavalry charge, since horses would turn away from a solid rank of men. Among these raw recruits, however, that discipline was not easy to maintain and Nathaniel Fiennes remembered many years later the sight of four regiments fleeing their colours without a fight in the face of an intimidating cavalry charge.9 As the two bodies of infantry closed with one another the parliamentarian cavalry regiments that had been held in reserve were able to advance through the gaps in the parliamentary infantry formations and inflict heavy losses on the royalist infantry. These were terrifying moments for foot soldiers, what all the drill was designed to avoid, when they enjoyed little protection:
when the horsemen fall in amongst the infantry and cruelly hack them; the poor soldiers the while sheltering their heads with their arms, sometime with the one, then the other, until they be both most cruelly mangled: and yet the head fares little better the while for their defence, many of them not escaping with less than two or three wounds through the skull into the membranes, and often into the brain.
But flight was hardly an attractive option either if the enemy pursued, ‘his hinder parts meet with great wounds as over the thighs, back, shoulders and neck’.10 If Rupert had not belatedly succeeded in rallying some of his cavalry and returning to the field, the parliamentarian cavalry might themselves have secured an outright victory for their army.
When night fell, however, the two sides had fought themselves to a standstill. They slept in the field and overnight there was a sharp frost. Sir Adrian Scrope was among those seriously wounded. Left for dead and stripped, he spent the night among the fallen. It was common throughout the war for the fallen to be stripped, so that in the morning the field was covered with naked corpses. Waking in the morning he pulled a corpse on top