THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
299 
doubt was to march upon London,, and Essex’s object was to prevent him, 
but it seems to me to have been little more than a happy chance that led the 
King between the Parliamentarians and the capital. On leaving Worcester 
to pursue the King and cut him off from London, Essex’s train of Artillery 
“ was so very great that he could not move but in slow marches, so that 
the two armies, though but 20 miles asunder when they first set out and 
both marched the same way, they gave not the least disquiet in ten days’ 
march to each other: and in truth, as it appeared afterwards, neither army 
knew where the other was.”* * * § Essex, urged on by messages from London, 
was at length persuaded to leave his ordnance behind him, and caught up 
the Royalists at Edgehill, early on the morning of the 23rd Oct. 1642. The 
Royalists occnpied a good position which they were unwilling to leave, and 
the Roundheads were loth to begin an action without their guns. The 
battle consequently did not begin before 2 p.m., opened by the Roundheads, 
whose Artillery had arrived, firing three guns, as some narrate ;f or accord¬ 
ing to others by the King in person discharging a piece.f The Royalists 
were drawn up with their infantry in the centre in three lines; the 
cavalry on either flank of the infantry; and the artillery, protected by a 
small detachment of infantry, on the outer flanks of the cavalry. The 
Royalist cavalry charged at once, and with success as regarded their right 
wing; but in so doing they repeated the error of Tilly at Leipsic, eleven 
years before,—they isolated and silenced their own guns; and the successful 
wing delaying to pillage, the Roundhead reserve cavalry charged the right 
wing guns, inflicting but little injury it is true on the guns and gunners, 
but doing almost irreparable damage to the harness. Little more than a 
month afterwards Prince Rupert says,—“ we took thirteen handsome field 
pieces of brass ... a great strengthening to our train of artillery 
. . . yet for want of harness we were forced to sink some of our iron 
guns in the Thames.”§ The Royal cavalry seem to have succeeded in 
silencing the Roundhead artillery, for towards the close of the battle, 
according to Sir E. Gust, the King opened a (( brisk cannonade which the 
Parliamentarians could not return, for all their cannon had been nailed and 
their cannoneers were killed or had fled.” No further reliable account 
can be given of the part taken by the artillery at the battle of Edgehill, for 
the accounts of this encounter are so contradictory and conflicting that it 
would be a hopeless task to reconcile them. 
At the siege of Bristol, 1643, a number of field guns were employed, 
but, as the Royalists themselves were obliged to allow, with little 
result. “ Our ordnance was of little effect; only, as we heard, || one 
of their cannoneers vapouring in his shirt on the top of the fort, 
was killed there for his foolhardiness.”!! In this year at Braddock 
* Clarendon’s “ History of the Great Rebellion,” p. 327. Guizot’s “ Charles I. and the English 
Revolution,” Yol. II. p. 9. 
f Warburton’s “Rupert, &c.” Vol. II. p. 20. 
X Lingard’s “ History of England,” Yol. X. p. 79. 
§ MS. letter of Captain Pym, one of Rupert’s captains in his corsairage; 
|| Like the Romans at Yeii, no doubt,—“jam per longinijuitatem belli commercio sermonum 
facto.”—Livy. 5, 15. 
Rupert’s Diary. 
