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By Root 1053 0

of himself for warmth, and survived. William Harvey, the great anatomist and physiologist, to whom we owe this story, noted that the cold had probably saved Scrope’s life by slowing his bleeding.11 Harvey himself had left London with Charles and at Edgehill was given care of the Prince and the Duke of York (it was the later recollections of the latter that furnish us with important details about the battle). Taking cover behind a bush, he took out a book and read ‘but he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station’.12

Harvey was probably not the only one to receive a rapid education at Edgehill. The King, shocked by the sight of sixty corpses piled up where the royal standard had flown, huddled over a small fire through the night, unable to sleep because of the moans and cries of the wounded. At Edgehill as elsewhere, the proportion of wounded to dead was higher among officers, probably because they received medical help more promptly. When the two sides faced each other the following morning it was clear that many men had been less fortunate than Sir Adrian Scrope: according to one account ‘the field was covered with the dead, yet no-one could tell to what party they belonged’. Cold and hungry, many witnesses seem to have experienced a kind of lethargy, a numbness that made further action difficult. Sir William Le Neve, sent by the King to demand surrender, was rebuffed, but he reported ‘trouble and disorder’ on the faces of Essex and other senior officers.13 Soldiers had not eaten for a day, and the horses were also probably unwatered.14 There was little willingness or capacity on either side to renew the engagement.15 Among the dead was Sir Edmund Verney, committed to the cause against his political judgement, but in gratitude for the patronage he had enjoyed from the King. He died carrying the standard in the royal lifeguard, apparently having killed two men with his own hands, including the man who killed his own loyal servant. He had broken the point of the standard at push of pike. One story had it that the parliamentarian soldiers had to cut his hand off in order to take the standard, and that he was also wearing a small ring with a miniature portrait of the King.16

About 1,500 men had died, evenly divided between the two sides, and the battle is usually reckoned a draw. But the royalists emerged with a clear advantage since the road to London was now open. Essex had withdrawn northwards to Warwick, allowing the King to move south, securing first Banbury and then Oxford. A rapid advance might have taken him straight to London, with enormous political dividends, but he hesitated, resisting the suggestion that a flying column of 3,000 men be despatched to arrive in London in advance of the regrouped parliamentary forces. This fateful decision may have been taken on the morning after, to allow time to bury the dead, treat the wounded and to take stock, but it seems more likely that the discussion took place some days later. Either way, and although there was perhaps a clear chance to capture London, it is probably an exaggeration to say that it was Charles’s chance to win the war, at least if that is taken to mean his chance to impose his own terms for a settlement. Certainly, a decisive victory at Edgehill, if it had been achieved, would not in itself have ended the war: it is very unlikely that resistance elsewhere would have ceased, or that the Scots would have stood by while the royalists imposed terms on Parliament.17

In London, news of the battle, and the face-to-face meeting with the horrors of war, affected the political will to fight, partly because reporting was so confused. Three days prior to the battle Stephen Charlton recorded in a private letter reports of a great battle in which, some said, Charles had been captured, and Rupert and Essex (according to varying reports) had been killed. In fact, of course, there had been no battle at all, but Charlton spent an entire morning at Westminster trying to find out more. It was symptomatic