ABSTRACT
In May 1645, George Goring and his cavalry checked Cromwell’s forces outside of Oxford to allow the king and his army to take the field. The king’s council of war then chose to divide the royalist forces, a decision in part based on the desire of both Rupert and Goring to campaign apart from one another. Moreover, General Goring returned west armed with even greater authority from the king. But during his absence, a relief force dispatched by Sir Thomas Fairfax had driven off the royalists besieging Taunton. Goring’s subsequent renewal of the siege kept his forces tied down in June, so that he could not come to King Charles’s assistance against Parliament’s New Model Army. The disastrous result was the battle of Naseby, at which the king lost most of his army as well as any lingering chance of an advantageous settlement to the war. Despite this dramatic downturn in fortune, Goring and the western royalists continued their internal struggles over authority and precedence. Not even the looming annihilation of their cause could stop their quarrels.
