ABSTRACT
Victories won by the king’s supporters in the north of England and in the southwest in late June and early July and the arrival of the second convoy of arms and ammunition from the north at Oxford in mid-July gave a significant but not decisive advantage to the Royalist cause in the crucial theatre of war. It enabled them to storm Bristol, the second largest city in England, but an advance on London with serious intent required the king to have sufficient infantry to fight the Earl of Essex’s army in an entrenched position, or, if it withdrew into the city, to maintain a blockade or mount a successful assault. The defeat of Waller enabled the king to add some Welsh borderland regiments to his army for the siege of Gloucester, but the regiments that had arrived from the north as escorts for the munitions convoys did little more than offset the losses incurred at Bristol. Admittedly, Lord Hopton managed to raise large numbers of new recruits for the field army regiments in the Bristol area in August and September, but they would have received little training, which may explain the poor performance of some Royalist infantry brigades at the first battle of Newbury. Moreover, the Cornish regiments were so depleted by the fighting at Lansdowne and Bristol that they had been sent home to recruit. Essex, on the other hand, had huge infantry reserves in the shape of the city of London trained bands, and his shortage of cavalry was being resolved.
