Decisive Battles of the English Civil War

Malcolm Wanklyn

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781783469758
• eBook ISBN: 9781473813922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this stimulating and original investigation of the decisive battles ofthe English Civil War, Malcolm Wanklyn reassesses what actually happened on the battlefield and as a result sheds new light on the causes of the eventual defeat of Charles I. Taking each major battle in turn - Edgehill, Newbury I, Cheriton, Marston Moor, Newbury II, Naseby, and Preston - he looks critically at contemporary accounts and at historians' narratives, explores the surviving battlegrounds and retells the story of each battle from a new perspective. His lucid, closely argued analysis questions traditional assumptions about each battle and the course of the war itself.

Contents

Illustrations
Preface
Chapter 1	Introduction
Part I: Recapturing the Past
Chapter 2	Civil War Battles: The Primary Sources
Chapter 3	Civil War Battles: Narrative
Part II: The Decisive Battles of 1642 and 1643
Chapter 4	The Battle of Edgehill: Context, Landscape, and Sources
Chapter 5	The Battle of Edgehill: Narrative
Chapter 6	The First Battle of Newbury: Context, Landscape and Sources
Chapter 7	The First Battle of Newbury: Narrative
Part III: The Decisive Battles of 1644
Chapter 8	The Battle of Cheriton: Context, Sources and Landscape
Chapter 9	The Battle of Cheriton: Narrative
Chapter 10	The Battle of Marston Moor: Context, Landscape and Sources
Chapter 11	The Battle of Marston Moor: Narrative
Chapter 12	The Second Battle of Newbury: Context, Landscape and Sources
Chapter 13	The Second Battle of Newbury: Narrative
Part IV: The Decisive Battles of 1645 to 1648
Chapter 14	The Battle of Naseby: Context, Landscape and Sources
Chapter 15	The Battle of Naseby: Narrative
Chapter 16	The Battle of Preston: Context, Landscape and Sources
Chapter 17	The Battle of Preston: Narrative
Chapter 18	Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Illustrations

Maps
1. The Battle of Edgehill
2. The First Battle of Newbury (dawn)
3. The Battle of Cheriton
4. The Battle of Marston Moor
5. The Second Battle of Newbury
6. The Battle of Naseby: First and Second Positions
7. The Battle of Naseby
8. The Battle of Preston

Plates

(between pages 118 and 119)

1. The Edgehill battlefield: the hill on which Essex’s army deployed from the Radway to Tysoe Road

2. The Edgehill battlefield: the hill in profile from the south-west

3. The Edgehill battlefield: the landscape to the north of the Kineton to Banbury road

4. The First Newbury battlefield: Round Hill and the northern spur of the crescent from the south-west

5. The First Newbury battlefield: the steep ascent of Skinners Green Lane

6. The First Newbury battlefield: one of the tumuli on Wash Common

7. The Cheriton battlefield: the southern spur of the arena with the northern spur on the horizon from the Hinton Ampner ridge

8. The Cheriton battlefield: Cheriton Wood and the site of Bramdean Heath from the Hinton Ampner ridge

9. The Cheriton battlefield: looking towards the northern side of East Down, Tichbourne

10. The Cheriton battlefield: the probable site of Sir William Balfour’s ‘Little Heath’ and Sir Edward Stowell’s charge

11. An extract from Lionel Watson’s account of the Battle of Marston Moor

12. The Second Newbury battlefield: the gatehouse of Donnington Castle

13. The Second Newbury battlefield: the eastern half of the enclosure map of Speenhamland 1780

14. The Naseby battlefield: Robert Streeter’s depiction of the deployment of the two armies

15. The Naseby battlefield: de Gomme’s pre-battle sketch of the deployment of the Royalist army

16. The Naseby battlefield: the putative Royalist position at East Farndon from the south-west

17. The Naseby battlefield: the putative Royalist position at Great Oxendon from the south

18. The Naseby battlefield: the shallow valley behind the New Model Army position on Closter and Sheddon Hills

19. Ridge and furrow in profile below the Edgehill escarpment

Preface

This is the second of three books that focus on various aspects of the military history of the wars fought in Britain and Ireland in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The first, A Military History of the English Civil War 1642–1646: Strategy and Tactics, co-authored with Frank Jones and published by Pearson/Longman in 2004, concentrated overwhelmingly on removing a hundred years of historians’ concretions from the strategic narrative of the English Civil Wars. The third, The Warring Generals, to be published by Yale University Press in 2007, will endeavour to assess the experience of generalship in the various British wars of 1642–51, and also the personal and collective responsibility of the army commanders for the wars’ outcomes. This book will examine the way in which historians have written about the battles of the English Civil Wars in the context of recent anti-Modernist doubts concerning the feasibility of reconstructing what happened in past time. However, it is not a postmodernist text. Indeed, an underlying theme is that the claim that the study of History cannot produce factual information about what happened in the past is a fallacious one. Nevertheless, some of the terms and concepts used in the more accessible postmodernist texts, and some of the insights they contain, are of value in shedding a harsh but necessary light on the ways in which military historians practise their craft.

Chapter 1 justifies the choice of the battles, and explains why accurate narratives of battles are essential if the significance of the purely military explanations of how the wars ended as they did are to be adequately evaluated. Chapter 2 discusses in general terms the problems involved in constructing accurate battle narratives from the various types of primary source material military historians use. Chapter 3 examines the potential pitfalls facing historians who write about seventeenth-century warfare, and proposes ways in which narratives of what happened on the Civil War battlefield can be improved.

In the main section of the book seven decisive battles are discussed with two chapters being devoted to each battle. The first chapter places the battle in its exact historical context, deconstructs the sources for the battle, and attempts to reconstruct and repopulate the landscape over which it was fought. The second comprises a narrative of the battle written in accordance with the procedures and protocols set down in Chapter 3. The concluding chapter re-emphasizes the hypothetical nature of narratives of the seven battles. It also suggests some changes in military doctrine which took place during the English Civil Wars and which help to determine their outcome.

I would like to thank my colleagues John Benson and John Buckley for reading various chapters; my university and the British Academy for providing the financial support without which visits to distant archives and distant battlefields would have been impossible; Rupert Harding for his very sound editorial advice and Susan Milligan for copy-editing; the staff of the Libraries and Record Offices I have visited for their assistance; the City Campus Learning Centre, Wolverhampton University, for giving permission to include de Gomme’s sketch of the deployment of the Royalist army at Naseby (Plate 16) from their copy of Volume 3 of E.G.B. Warburton’s Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers’, the Shropshire Record Office and the Berkshire Record Office for allowing brief extracts from their archives to be used in a similar manner (Plate 11 and 13 respectively); English Heritage for permission to include our photograph of the gatehouse at Donnington Castle; Mr Charles Flynn of Hinton Ampner; and friends inside and outside the university who have kept up my spirits during the year 2005, most particularly Mike Dennis, Patrick McGraghan, Toby McLeod, Roger Page, Jim Quinn, Charles Singleton, and the happy band of colleagues with whom I share office space – George, Glyn, Martin and Tony. Finally, I thank my wife Jean for employing her photographic skills on my behalf, and Matt Rogers for drawing the maps.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The central question of the 1640s frequently ignored or marginalized by historians is why Parliament won the Great Civil War of 1642–6 and the Second Civil War of 1648–9. Attempts to answer the question tend to be strongly determinist in nature, stressing the overwhelming preponderance of resources that Parliament enjoyed over the forces that supported the king. The argument that lack of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Full Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents