What Hopton saw from the brow of the southern spur was
almost certainly the final stage of the engagement when some Royalist troops
hurrying to help their fellows were being cut to pieces by enemy cavalry. The
incident is described in considerable detail by eyewitnesses on both sides, and
there is no doubt that the formation being destroyed was under the command of
Henry Bard, colonel of a regiment of foot that had arrived from the north as
escort for the first great munitions convoy of May 1643. According to Slingsby,
Bard ‘leading on his regiment further than he had orders for, and indeed with
more youthful courage than soldier-like discretion, was observed by the enemy
to be a great space before the rest and out of his ground, who incontinently
thrusts Sir Arthur Haselrig’s regiment of cuirassiers well armed between him
and home and there in the view of our whole army kills and takes every man’.
Slingsby’s identification of the attacking force is incorrect. Harley is very
clear about the identity of the attackers. They were a commanded party of 300
men drawn from several of Sir William Waller’s cavalry regiments, including two
troops of his own regiment and probably all four of Colonel Norton’s. Moreover,
Sir Arthur’s account of the battle delivered to the House of Commons as
reported by Yonge makes no mention of his own regiment’s involvement in the
destruction of Bard’s infantry. Instead Haselrig claims to have taken ten men
out of every troop of Waller’s horse to create the shock force. This is an
unlikely story. The chance of destroying Bard’s regiment can only have been
seen at the last moment, leaving insufficient time to complete such a complex
reordering of the cavalry. Possibly Yonge misunderstood what he was hearing. It
is also interesting that Royalist cavalry did not intervene, either because
there was none on or close to the right wing at that juncture, which seems most
unlikely as the cavalry engagement had not yet begun, or because it was all
over in the flash of an eye, as may have been the case if Bard’s men were
entirely musketeers or if the speed with which they advanced broke up their
close order, something that could easily happen to infantry formations crossing
rough ground.
The background to the incident on the left wing in which
Bard’s regiment was destroyed is given only in Robert Harley’s account, but it
is supported in general terms by Slingsby, Haselrig, and the writer of the
report in Mercurius Aulicus. Harley wrote that a party of 1,600 Royalist foot,
which, even allowing for exaggeration, must have comprised almost the whole of
Forth’s infantry, had attacked the ‘little village’. This was probably at about
10 or 10.30 a.m., that is after Hopton had received Forth’s rejection of his
proposal to attack the rear of the Parliamentary army from Cheriton Wood. At
first the Royalists made good progress, according to Harley, driving the enemy
from their hedges and setting fire to a barn, but Waller sent in
reinforcements, the wind changed direction, sending smoke into the eyes of the
attackers, and they began to fall back. Such an outcome is not at all
surprising. Allowing for the fact that Bard’s regiment was not involved at this
point, Forth could only have committed a maximum of 1,000 foot soldiers to the
assault on the little village, as Hopton’s infantry regiments were all on the
left wing of the Royalist army. The formation he was attacking, on the other
hand, was probably much larger. Harley described the original force as ‘very
strong’, and Waller drew a further 600 (Haselrig) or 1,200 (Harley) foot
soldiers from the reserve to support the left wing when the attack began. The
length of the engagement is uncertain, but it may have been quite lengthy as
Balfour implies that he did not deploy his cavalry in the heath until after the
attack had begun, and it was from the heath that the assault against Bard’s
regiment was launched.
The fact that Bard’s regiment was not involved from the
start suggests that it was Forth’s infantry reserve, possibly guarding the
artillery. Bard therefore behaved in an appropriate manner in one respect.
Seeing the main infantry body under attack, he had launched his regiment
towards the fray, probably with the intention of attacking the advancing enemy
foot in their right flank. The trouble was that in his determination to hit
them hard, he almost certainly cut corners. First, instead of making his way to
the village using the hedges that covered the slopes of the western end of the
southern spur and the valley beyond, he led his men across a corner of the
heath. Second, he advanced across open ground without a cavalry escort, taking
a route that would have taken him to within a few hundred yards of where
Balfour had drawn up Waller’s regiments of horse. If this was Bard’s most
direct route towards the fighting, his regiment was almost certainly positioned
in the centre of the Royalist front line rather than on the right. Otherwise a
march through the enclosures followed by a short hook to the left over open
ground just before he reached the enemy would have been more appropriate. That
he had erupted from the centre of the Royalist line is apparent from Slingsby’s
remark that the whole of the army could see the destruction of Bard’s regiment.
If it had met its fate any further to the west, it would have been hidden from
Slingsby’s line of sight by the gentle northward curve of the southern ridge of
the arena as it neared Cheriton village. The corollary of this is that Bard’s
regiment must have been close to Forth’s own position, which makes one wonder
why the Lord General did not order it to halt as soon as the attack began.
Possibly Bard was also under orders, but had exceeded them in his enthusiasm to
get at the enemy. This may possibly explain Hopton’s statement that Forth was
‘much troubled with it, as the engagement was by the forwardness of some
officers without orders’, which can be read as if it was Bard’s forwardness and
its probable effects that caused Forth such concern, not the original attack.
The destruction of Bard’s regiment seems to have had a
highly significant effect on morale, raising the spirits of the
Parliamentarians whilst dampening those of the Royalists. However, Forth and
Hopton had only suffered a reverse, they had not yet lost the battle. Indeed, Forth
was able to stabilize the situation in the Itchen valley, possibly by
withdrawing infantry from Cheriton Wood, possibly by drawing his own retreating
infantry behind hedges on the southwest corner of the southern spur, as nothing
much seems to have happened on the Royalist right wing for some hours. However,
elsewhere the battle flared into life. According to Hopton, Lord Forth’s
response to the setback on the right was to order Hopton to launch a cavalry
attack, probably against the centre of the enemy position on the heath. The
decision seems an irrational one, as the southern slope of the ridge and the
heath beyond were not good cavalry country – first enclosures, then a hedge
line and finally a small, narrow piece of rough heath, which would have made it
difficult for the Royalist horse to maintain close order in a charge, and where
the Parliamentary horse were already drawn up under the cover of their
artillery and musketeers. Moreover, for the king’s horse at Cheriton as for Sir
Phillip Stapleton at Newbury and Sir Thomas Fairfax at Marston Moor, there was
only a single entrance into the heath, which meant that his regiments could not
deploy in close order until they had passed the hedge line. Slingsby goes so
far as to say that they did not have time to deploy, as the Parliamentary horse
were upon them as soon as they emerged from the entrance. However, this is not
confirmed by any of the Parliamentary sources, which is rather surprising if it
had had a major effect on the outcome of the battle. Possibly Hopton managed to
stop it as soon as he realized it was happening by moving down some musketeers
to provide sufficient firepower at the entrance into the heath to deter the
enemy. There were certainly Royalist foot in the valley when the cavalry fight
was under way, but this still leaves unanswered the question of why Forth
ordered a head-on attack on the enemy horse, backed as they were by the
firepower of their musketeers and artillery pieces. A possibility, but no more
than that, is that the resources committed to the attack on the little village
and the fierce enemy reaction to it combined with Hopton’s defences in and
around Cheriton Wood left very few infantry in the centre of the Royalist line.
To make matters worse enemy horse and foot were drawn up on the little heath
and on the slope behind it in such a way that they could easily move forward
and divide the Royalist army in two. Thus, as at the northern edge of Wash
Common during the First Battle of Newbury, cavalry were required to plug a gap
caused by shortage of infantry at the critical point in the battle line, with
attack being seen as the best form of defence.
To carry out the Lord General’s orders, Hopton chose Sir
Edward Stowell’s brigade, 1,000 strong. It fought bravely for almost half an
hour before falling back, ‘broken and routed’ in Hopton’s words, leaving the
brigadier in enemy hands ‘with five wounds upon him’ after he had managed to
penetrate their gun line. Another brigade commanded by Sir John Smith
apparently attacked the left of the Parliamentary cavalry formation. The
evidence for this is slight, but his biographer wrote of ‘both lanes and hedges
lined with musketeers’, which fits the part of the battlefield around the
little village better than any other. However, the brigade’s performance
apparently left much to be desired. When Smith was wounded, all except his own
troop made a disorderly retreat. This may explain why none of the other
Royalist accounts describe the encounter, but it may have been only a tiny
episode inflated into something bigger by his biographer Edward Walsingham.
Parliamentary accounts of the battle only portray the enemy horse in an
unfavourable light when they retreated from the southern spur at the end of the
battle. Jones in particular commended the Royalists for their valour and Harley
praised them for their desperate and bold charges.
From this point onwards the traces of the past, almost
always less common for the middle part of a battle than one would wish, become
highly fragmentary. They are often no more than brief snapshots of the
fighting, which are not only impossible to relate to one another but also
rarely capable of being allotted a specific place in the timeline of the
battle. On the Royalist left wing the rest of Hopton’s command may have been
more successful than Stowell’s brigade. Slingsby wrote of the left wing as well
as the right being ordered to advance after the capture of Cheriton Wood, and
E.A., the writer of one of the Parliamentary reports, describes a defeat
suffered by some or all of Waller and Balfour’s cavalry in that part of the
battlefield:
The enemy presently came on with their main body of horse
very powerfully, and were met courageously, yet being of the greater number
(for our whole body was not then together) forced ours to a disorderly retreat,
at which time the day was doubtful if not desperate, our foot all the while
being engaged on the left wing.
This cannot be either the episode in which Smith was
mortally wounded, or the one in which Stowell was captured, and the clear
implication is that it took place on the Parliamentary right.
Slingsby also recounts an episode that occurred on the
Royalist left wing soon after the battle became general, but it is not the
encounter that E.A. described. Hopton’s regiment of infantry repulsed an enemy
cavalry charge on three separate occasions by performing classical parade
ground drill for pike and musketeers. There is enough detail in the account to
show that the regiment was positioned on open ground some way in advance of the
crest of the spur. Lord John Stuart then sent the Queen’s regiment of cavalry
down to its assistance, but it made ‘an unhandsome charge’, after which the
cavalry action became general. Interestingly, Stuart’s obituary talks of his
receiving his mortal wound in an action that took place in a large open
low-lying expanse of ground, not a hill full of hedges and bushes. This
description neatly fits the lie of the land to the south and east of Cheriton
Wood as I have depicted it.
A series of engagements lasting for between three and four
hours then ensued across the centre and east of the battlefield, which seems
impossibly long for what appears to have been primarily a cavalry engagement.
Possibly the situation in the valley in front of Hinton Ampner became
completely chaotic by midday, with a seething mass of horsemen pushing
backwards and forwards across the small heath under no control, a scene first
suggested by Burne and taken up by many historians since. However, it is more
likely that fighting was intermittent, but such as to force both sides to feed
in all except their last reserves. Initially, the Royalists were on the
offensive pushing back the enemy cavalry to the foot of the Hinton Ampner ridge
but, as we have seen, they were unable to break through. When the brigades
commanded by Stowell and Smith fell back in disorder, the Parliamentary horse
appear to have gained complete control of the heath, but they in their turn
found difficulty in making progress against enemy infantry drawn up behind the
hedge that marked the northern boundary of Balfour’s Little Heath. Haselrig
indeed uses very similar words to those used by Hopton in describing Stowell’s
difficulties in breaking through the Parliamentary position in the centre:
‘their horse were surrounded by musketeers who lined the hedges and beat us
back always when we drove them back.’
The nature of the landscape in which the heath was set, that
is, with enclosures both to the north and the south, probably explains why
neither the Royalist nor the Parliamentary cavalry was able to achieve a
breakthrough. It may also explain why those accounts of the battle written by
Parliamentarians had very little to say about the part their horse played in
the major cavalry action. The report of Sir William Balfour, Essex’s lieutenant
general of horse, was completely silent about the cavalry actions, but this may
be because Essex’s regiments had failed to distinguish themselves yet again.
However, in the end, inspired, E.A. says, by some London Trained Band
musketeers, the right wing of the Parliamentary cavalry accompanied by some
infantry appears to have pushed back a weak Royalist cavalry screen and gained
the brow of the southern spur of the arena somewhere near Cheriton Wood.
Long before the cavalry and infantry moved forward on the
right, however, the tactical manoeuvre that would decide the outcome of the
battle was under way on the opposite side of the battlefield. In mid-afternoon
Waller’s infantry and dragoon regiments supported by some of the London brigade
began pushing around the west side of the cavalry mêlée safe in the knowledge
that they would not be attacked. Moving out of the Itchen valley, they began to
ascend the slopes of the southern spur of the arena from the direction of
Cheriton village, where they were successful in pushing back the Royalist
infantry, a body which by then included troops that had earlier taken part in
the attack on Cheriton Wood, as it was here that their commander Colonel
Matthew Appleyard was wounded.
The advance of the enemy foot on both flanks put the
Royalist army in great danger of being surrounded. Hopton took the credit for
securing the retreat of the shattered brigades of horse and their supporting
infantry from the heath using a small body of Oxford army cavalry, with which
he successfully defended the entrance into the enclosures on the southern spur
of the arena. That the withdrawal from the heath was successfully accomplished
is confirmed by other sources, but Hopton’s role in it rests on his testimony
alone.
Initially Forth and Hopton attempted to make a stand on top
of the southern spur, probably where it was crossed by Broad Lane, but the fire
coming from the Parliamentary infantry and dragoons making their way along the
southern spur towards them was too strong, and they decided to retreat to the
place where the Royalist army had camped on the night of 27 March, the high
ground to the south of Alresford.
There followed a pause of anything up to an hour, which gave
the Royalist generals time to collect most of their infantry into a body and
also some of their horse, and to plan their army’s escape to Basing House,
eighteen miles to the north. Eventually Waller’s artillery commander, James
Wemyss, brought some cannon into play, and the Royalist army ran for cover. The
artillery train started off in the direction of Winchester, but then quickly
turned northwards into a landscape of woods and valleys that made cavalry
pursuit difficult, whilst the infantry with a small cavalry escort pursued a
parallel course using a lower route with plenty of passes to delay the enemy. A
small body of foot remained behind in Alresford to win the rest of the infantry
and the artillery train time to reach the safety of the woods. Some were killed
or captured, but most also managed to make their escape. Finally the horse took
off over the downs, pursued for some miles by the enemy. All three sections of
the army arrived safely at Basing House just after midnight. Both Harley and
Birch’s biographers blame senior commanders for showing too much caution once
the battle was clearly won, but Adair is probably right to absolve Waller (and
by implication Balfour) from blame. Even if Harley’s own troop was fresh, and
keen to harry the Royalists as they retreated, the rest of the Parliamentary
cavalry were probably too exhausted and too scattered to do much against an
enemy that had not broken and run.
The immediate reaction of the London newspapers and of the
Parliamentary officers who had fought at Cheriton and written reports of the
fighting was that through God’s mercy the army led by Waller and Balfour had
snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. However, once under way, the battle
had been an uninspired slogging match, which appeared to develop its own
momentum (or lack of momentum) after the initial Royalist error of attacking
Parliament’s left wing with too small a body of infantry. To Birch’s biographer
Roe it was ‘the worst prosecuted battle I ever saw’. It is therefore surprising
that only he was of the opinion that there was a logical order of events,
beginning with the decision not to retreat and ending with the infantry advance
on both wings at about 4 p.m.
