First Battle of Newbury - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Parliamentarian force, now free of Charles's army, retreated towards Aldermaston as quickly as possible and eventually made it to Reading and then London, where Essex received a hero's welcome. The Royalists, on the other hand were forced to spend the next day recovering their casualties, finding more than a thousand injured soldiers who were sent back to Oxford. After they finished recovering their dead and wounded men, the Royalists left 200 infantry, 25 cavalry and 4 guns in Donnington Castle to defend their rear and then marched to Oxford, having buried their dead senior officers in Newbury Guildhall. Casualties at Newbury eventually came to approximately 1,300 losses for the Royalists, and 1,200 for the Parliamentarians. The loss at Newbury was due to a multitude of factors; Day gives credit to the greater ability of Essex to conserve his force through the campaign, which put the Royalists at a numerical disadvantage by Newbury, and notes the Royalist overreliance on Cavalry, with Essex " for his much lamented paucity of cavalry by tactical ingenuity and firepower", countering Rupert's cavalry by driving them off with mass infantry formations. The Royalists infantry were also outperformed, Essex's force retaining a high level of cohesiveness while the Royalists were described as relatively unprofessional; both Day and Blair Worden also give the paucity of ammunition and gunpowder as an important (and endemic) deciding factor in the success or failure of Charles' campaign.

Although the attention of historians is normally on the larger battles such as Edgehill and Marston Moor, several historians who have studied the period consider the First Battle of Newbury to be the defining moment of the First English Civil War, both as the high point of the Royalist advance and as the "one bright period of generalship". John Day writes that "Militarily and politically, Parliament's position at the beginning of October 1643 was demonstrably far stronger than in late July. With hindsight, the capture of Bristol was the high tide of King Charles' war, his best and only chance of ending the conflict on his own terms". John Barratt noted that the Royalists had failed in "what might prove to have been their best chance to destroy the principle field army of their opponents, and hopes of a crushing victory which would bring down the Parliamentarian 'war party' lay in ruins". The high Parliamentarian feelings after Newbury led to the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant, bringing a powerful Scottish army down to assault the Royalists. "Thanks to the failure...to win a decisive victory there, the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish subjects of all of King Charles' Three Kingdoms would henceforth play a bloody price in a steadily widening and deepening war".