on Castle. Lord Northampton's lands on the Western border of
Oxfordshire were near enough to find touch with the King. His house played
locally a most prominent part for the Royalist cause, and its military
leadership was of the best.

III.

Early on the morning of Sunday, October 23rd, Prince Rupert forwarded
information to the King that the camp fires of the Parliamentarian army
had been seen on the plain between Edge Hill and Kineton. With keen
foresight Earl Lindsay abandoned the intended advance upon Banbury, and
speedily began the movement of the Royalist army towards the fringe of
hills which dominates the Warwickshire vale. It seems at first strange
that the Parliamentarians, familiar as so many of them were with the
physical features of the neighbourhood, should have neglected when so near
to secure possession of some part of the Edge Hill ridge. This, however,
is explained in a pamphlet of the time,[PH] "An Exact and True Relation of
the Dangerous and Bloudy Fight between his Majestie's Army and the
Parliament near Keynton." Therein we learn that the artillery were
unready, for want of draught horses, and with Colonel Hampden and Colonel
Grantham were forced to be left behind, and hence no advance could safely
be made beyond Keynton.

Hampden had with him three regiments of foot, nine or ten troops of horse,
some companies of dragooners, and seven pieces of cannon, with the
necessary ammunition train,[PB] perhaps about 4,000 men in all. The troops
of the Parliament were quartered in the villages of the plain. Tradition
says that Tysoe was occupied, and that the soldiers took the bread from
the village ovens ere they marched down street to the fight. But of the
doings at Compton in the Hole, barely a mile distant, during the
occupation we know nothing.

It is hard also to understand that there should have been anything in the
nature of a surprise[B] in the Royalist advance, for within a district so
sympathetic to their cause, one would have supposed the Puritan leaders to
have been immediately informed of every movement of their enemies. Indeed,
in another quaint pamphlet, "A Letter sent from a Worthy Divine,"[PG] the
writer says that the alarm came at about eight o'clock in the morning,
that the enemy were advancing, and that "it pleased God to make myself the
first instrument of giving a certain discovery of it, by the help of a
perspective glass, from the top a hill."

Deploying, therefore, before day