When War Came To West London: The Battle Of Turnham Green
CIVILIANS LIVING IN WAR ZONES quickly learn that certain places can be safe one week; deadly dangerous the next. Such lessons soon fade as generations pass, and those who come after–living in peacetime–are blessed not to have to remember how it was to live in fearing daily for their lives.
After many years of travelling and living overseas as a journalist, sometimes witnessing others’ wars, I settled more than a decade ago in a comfortable part of west London. Yet the streets where this morning I strolled while doing my Saturday shopping were once one of the violent places of the earth.
On this equivalent weekend in 1642, two military confrontations–the Battles of Brentford and Turnham Green–terrorized the local population, and made the country realize that Civil War would not be a matter decided easily or quickly.
The Battle of Brentford set the Royalist army against the parliamentary forces defending the western approaches to the capital. The previous month, at the Battle of Edgehill in Warwickshire–‘an intense but indecisive encounter’ in which in the words of the historian Blair Worden. ‘both sides met the shock of war’–England’s intense political division had turned to armed conflict.
Now, despite the fact that negotiations were underway, the royalists advanced on London. They were victorious at the Battle of Brentford on 12 November, but squandered their military–and potential propaganda–advantage. The troops of King Charles I sacked the town, spending the night drinking and looting.
Such was the trauma suffered by the civilian population that some survivors are even said to have emigrated afterwards to the New World. Their memories of their home near London are given as one of the possible origins of the name of the town of Branford, Connecticut.
Had they not wasted the gains they had made the day before, the royalists might have been in better shape to advance further the next day, Sunday 13th November. Their ill discipline cost them dear, and gave the defenders of the capital time to prepare to meet them.
Then, as now, telling the story of a campaign–as well as actually fighting it– was an indispensable part of war. As in our own age, a media revolution–in this case, news books and pamphlets–had provided ammunition for the propaganda war that had broken out alongside the military conflict.
So as the royalists advanced further towards London, the capital’s defenders ‘had support and encouragement from Londoners, fearful that a victorious cavalier army would sack the city,’ as Stephen Porter has put it. Parliamentary media had already vilified ‘royalists as cruel plunderers and papists’–and after the fate of the population of Brentford, Londoners needed little convincing that this might be their fate too. As Porter also wrote, inhabitants of the capital provided ‘so many provisions for the troops that almost a hundred cart-loads were taken to the army’.
The provisions included a plentiful supply of beer and wine–perhaps useful to keep out the cold fall weather; perhaps useful too to fuel a will to fight where perhaps there was little. As Worden wrote of Edgehill, ‘The opposing armies, raw and ill-trained, suffered heavy casualties.’
The soldiers’ lust for war had by now been diminished by encounter with its reality. Perhaps some of the royalists’ savagery following the Battle of Brentford was a release of the trauma they themselves had experienced. If so, it only served to pass on greater terror to the civilians who were the objects of their barbarity.
Perhaps still drunk the next day, perhaps hungover, the royalists at least made a more sober assessment of their situation. The two armies faced each other at Turnham Green, but the royalists decided against attacking. The King eventually set up his wartime capital at Oxford, and only returned to London as a captive of his enemies, prior to his eventual execution in 1649.
Today the greatest controversy troubling Turnham Green Terrace is the implementation of new parking regulations that has angered some motorists and shopkeepers already coping with the hardship caused by the pandemic.
Yet we are yet again a bitterly divided country. Our political conflict may have calmed as we cope with the pandemic, but it has not gone away–and will likely flare again as the realities of Brexit arrive in the New Year. The narrator of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year talks of religious differences being overcome during the plague summer of 1665 (the Civil War then very much in living memory) but then notes that ‘after the Sickness was over […] Things returned to their old Channel again.’
Having seen, as a journalist in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, how quickly things can fall apart, and political chaos turn into armed conflict, I treasure the peaceful streets where I now live. I do not take them for granted, and trust that our divisions over Brexit will eventually heal rather than worsen.
Peace now in a place where once there was war is no guarantee of peace in the future. Life in others’ war zones has made me ready to do all I can to preserve what stability we have in this country, imperfect though it may be. For once you reach the stage of having to fight for it, it is already lost.
For this post, I drew on Stephen Porter’s article ‘The Battle of Turnham Green 1642’ in the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Journal; Blair Worden’s The English Civil Wars 1640-1660 (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009); and a guided walk I took with Hounslow Heritage Guide Howard Simmons in November 2018.
All text and images © James Rodgers 2020.