First-Blood in Warwickshire
Southam, August 1642
Two months before the Battle of Edgehill, and one month before the skirmish of Powick Bridge, the Warwickshire town of Southam saw the first clash of Royalist and Parliamentarian forces in the field - and Lord Grey's first taste of military action.
In the summer of 1642 leading parliamentarians vied with the supporters of the King for control of the Midland counties, each side attempting to gain control of strongholds and local militia forces as political tensions intensified and increasingly bitter confrontations began to look like civil war.
Lord Grey had been in the Midlands since late July. He had come down from Westminster to secure the Leicestershire county magazine that his father, the Earl of Stamford, had removed to the family seat at Bradgate Park. Grey was forced to hurriedly withdraw from the Leicester area at the approach of the King's forces on July 27 and the town of Leicester “sent to Lord Brook at Warwick for aid” (HMC, 5th Report, pp.182-183). However, Warwick Castle was subsequently besieged at the beginning of August by the county's leading Royalist, the Earl of Northampton, and Lord Brooke had to summon a force from London to hurry to the castle's relief. At what point Lord Grey's cavalry troop joined with the London force is unclear.
Lord Grey had been in the Midlands since late July. He had come down from Westminster to secure the Leicestershire county magazine that his father, the Earl of Stamford, had removed to the family seat at Bradgate Park. Grey was forced to hurriedly withdraw from the Leicester area at the approach of the King's forces on July 27 and the town of Leicester “sent to Lord Brook at Warwick for aid” (HMC, 5th Report, pp.182-183). However, Warwick Castle was subsequently besieged at the beginning of August by the county's leading Royalist, the Earl of Northampton, and Lord Brooke had to summon a force from London to hurry to the castle's relief. At what point Lord Grey's cavalry troop joined with the London force is unclear.
Failing to take Warwick Castle, the Earl of Northampton then turned his attention to the parliamentary town of Coventry, which barred its gates against him. Northampton's force was still before Coventry on 22 August when it was learned that Brooke's force has reached Southam, some twelve miles to the south. Northampton pulled his troops away from Coventry that evening to secure the road south, hoping to engage the parliamentarian force while it was still recovering from its long march.
In Southam, the resting parliamentary soldiers were warned that Northampton was on the move. Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton, a London painter serving in Hollis's foot regiment, wrote: "in half an hour all our soldiers, though dispersed, were complete in arms ready to encounter the enemy, crying out for a dish of cavaliers to supper". When the expected attack failed to materialise that evening, Hollis's soldiers stayed ready at their posts through the night, crying out instead “to have a breakfast of Cavaliers”.
Northampton's force did not push south until the following morning, and his force appeared in full-view of the parliamentarians shortly before eight o'clock on 23 August. Wharton understood this early advance as an attempt by the Royalists to catch the Parliamentarians unprepared. The Royalist force formed a line of battle some distance from the parliamentarians (Wharton describes a cornfield and a hill between them) and some time elapsed while Brooke waited to see if they would continue advance on his own position. As they appeared reluctant to do so, Brooke ordered his cannonier to open fire. Two salvoes were then fired from the Parliamentarian guns, under cover of which Brooke sent his regiments of foot forward to engage the enemy.
It is generally agreed from topographical references that the engagement took place in an area north-west of Southam, between the town and the River Itchen: the Royalists were approaching from the north and Wharton described Brooke's troops moving forward of their original positions and gaining the brow of a hill. Ten skeletons, uncovered while quarrying for stone in 1815, were found in the vicinity of Southam Fields Farm and were believed to be casualties from the day's fighting (Smith, 92). An account by chronicler John Vicars, published two years after the action, states that the parliamentary force at Southam numbered 6,000 foot and 300 horse, with nine field guns: the combined commands of Lord Brooke, Lord Saye, Lord Grey, and of colonels Hampden, Hollis and Cholmley (quoted in Fetherston, 97). Wharton believed Northampton's strength to be 800 horse and 300 foot.
Area north of Southam, showing possible positions of the Royalist (red) and Parliamentarian (blue) forces, and Brooke's forward movement from his original position just north of the town. Southam Fields Farm, where the remains of ten bodies were uncovered in 1815, can be seen top left.
London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington, who compiled his own version of events from news sheets published in the capital, wrote: “The enemy discharged three times their two pieces of ordnance upon the very body of our army . . . one went over the Lord Brooke's head, as also another bullet went close to the Lord Grey” (Wallington, pp152-153). Vicars wrote that the Royalist guns fired three times during the course of the short action. The failure of the Royalist guns to do much damage to the Parliamentarian formation was taken by Wallington to be divine providence. Similarly, the hand of God was observed in the effect of a parliamentarian gun “which was charged with musket bullets, which with the scattering, many of the adverse party were dangerously wounded”. More prosaically, it is possible that the ineffectiveness of the royalist heavy guns was due to the speed of the parliamentarian advance: “being on fire to be at them”, wrote Wharton, “we marched thorough the corn and got the hill of them, whereupon they played upon us with their ordinance, but they came short”.
The second volley from the Parliamentarian guns (Wharton writes of six guns, Vicars nine) seems to have caused Northampton's foot to break, the Royalists having already suffered casualties amongst their ranks. The reaction is understandable. This was the very beginning of the Civil War: few men, if any, would have been subject to artillery fire in open battle before. Vicars describes the Parliamentarian shot as carving “a lane” through the ranks of Northampton's foot and “cut off a whole file of the enemy's horse at the first shot”, and Wharton described seeing dead horses “some of them having their guts beaten out on both sides”. Wharton wrote that fifty of Northampton's men were killed in the action, by the Royalists own estimation. Vicars noted “forty found slaine in the field”, and nine Royalists taken prisoner – a modest figure, which gives some credibility to his account.
We are lucky that the fighting at Southam was described in three contemporary accounts, no doubt indicative of how newsworthy the first pitched battle of the war was. Nehemiah Wharton went on to describe the aftermath of the battle, as he and his men picked their way down the hill towards the River Itchen:
"One drummer, being dead at the bottom of the hill, our knapsack boys rifled to the shirt. Another drummer we found two miles off with his arms shot off, and lay a-dying. Several dead corpses we found in cornfields, and amongst them a trumpeter . . ."
The latter still had the trumpet in his possession. The Parliamentarian soldiers retrieved it from the corpse and sounded it in triumph as they marched their way into Coventry later that day. Wharton's description of the aftermath of the fighting is vivid in its detail. Wharton drew great strength from his religious faith (there are continual references to hearing sermons and the pillaging of Papists in his letters), yet in his grisly report of the field at Southam, God is strikingly absent – a stark contrast to the allusions of divine intervention repeatedly made by the civilian writers, Vicars and Wallington.
Brooke was unable to pursue and harry the fleeing royalist foot due to his lack of horse. He was content to hold his high ground, then push on to Parliamentarian Coventry that afternoon. His local rival, the Earl of Northampton, subsequently withdrew his forces from the area and joined the King's main army, which based itself at Shrewsbury in late September. Brooke was reinforced when the Earl of Essex brought more troops up from London in early September, and Lord Grey's troop became part of the large Parliamentarian army that began to coalesce in the Midlands. The two sides would face each other again in open battle at Edgehill on 23 October - just nine miles from their first encounter at Southam, two months earlier.
Robert Hodkinson
August, 2020
Robert Hodkinson
August, 2020
Members of the Sealed Knot at the re-enactment of the Battle of Southam in 2013
(southamcouncil-warks.gov.uk)
(southamcouncil-warks.gov.uk)
Sources:
“Narrative of the Battle-Fields in Warwickshire During the Civil War 1642-3, &c.”, in: Fetherston, J. (ed.) The Warwickshire Antiquarian Magazine, Part II (Warwick: 1860), pp. 83-105.
Smith, F. Warwickshire Delineated (2nd edn.) (Southam: 1820)
Wallingon, N. Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I (vol. 2) (London: 1869)
"Nehemiah Wharton to George Willingham", in: Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1642-43, vol. 491: August 1642.
“Narrative of the Battle-Fields in Warwickshire During the Civil War 1642-3, &c.”, in: Fetherston, J. (ed.) The Warwickshire Antiquarian Magazine, Part II (Warwick: 1860), pp. 83-105.
Smith, F. Warwickshire Delineated (2nd edn.) (Southam: 1820)
Wallingon, N. Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I (vol. 2) (London: 1869)
"Nehemiah Wharton to George Willingham", in: Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1642-43, vol. 491: August 1642.