was with difficulty persuaded from so
perilous an enterprise.

Each side claims that only the night prevented a completely victorious
issue for its cause, but when we consider that the right wing and centre
of the King's army were disorganised, and in part driven up the hill, and
that the Parliamentarians were in possession of the battle ground, the
Royalists retaining possession only of the low ground from Radway to
Bullet Hill, it seems that the advantage rested on the Puritan side.
One[a] remained master of the field of battle, the other kept the London
road.

Amongst the several estimates of the slain, it is hard to say which is
nearest the truth. Clarendon gives the number as 5,000, two parts of whom
were Parliamentarian, and one part the King's, but the probability is
that it was nearer, a half of that number. Fiennes[PB] puts down the
losses acknowledged by the Royalists themselves as 2,000. Certainly the
records show that they were exceptionally heavy in officers, one writer
adducing as a reason that "the rebel officers had fleeter horses, so not
so many of them were slain." During the cold frosty night after the battle
the wounded must of necessity have been left exposed, inasmuch as the
fight stretched over many miles of country, and was continued until night;
nor do the Royalists appear to have been debarred from searching for their
wounded, as we learn by the succour of old Sir Gervase Scroop by his son.
The King's troops says Clarenden "had not the shelter of tree or hedge,
and after a very cold night spent on the field, without any refreshment of
victual or provision for the soldiers (for the country was so disaffected
that it not only sent no provisions, but many soldiers who straggled into
the villages for relief were knocked on the head by the common people),
the King found his troops very thin." The Parliamentarians, whose baggage
had been cut up by Rupert, could not have been in much better plight; some
of them, however, fired the Dassett Beacon, and the news of the conflict
was thus flashed across country to London. Though so much is recorded of
Mr. Wilmot's (afterwards Lord Rochester, of Adderbury,) position and work
during the day, nothing other than the mere statement is made of a far
greater leader, Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, than that he was at
Edge Hill, with some of the best disciplined men.[MW] It would seem that
the extended movement of the Royalist forces along the hill ridge in