"Scenario for the Battle of Whalley 1643" Topic

I have been working on a scenario for the Battle of Whalley based upon the period sources available. This is drawn mainly from "A discourse of the Warr in Lancashire" and A true Relation….". So far I have posted details of the location and a suggested table layout over on my blog.

link

For those of you who are not UK based and don't have access to British OS maps Google maps might be worth a look. Details of the forces involved will be my next post hopefully in a couple of days.

Hi Elenderil -looks good, will be interested to see your OB ;-)

Possibilities I have are

Royalist foot
Girlington
Tyldesley
Molyneux
Clubmen

Royalist horse
Tyldesley
Girlington
Bradshaw
Dalton?

Royalist dragoons
Tyldesley
Houghton

Parl Foot
Assheton
Shuttleworth
Brereton?

Not sure about Parl horse

What do you reckon?

I have:

Royalist

Earl of Derby
Tyldesley
Sir Gilbert Hoghton
Lord Molyneux

600 Foot brought from York by Tydesley being 50:50 pike to shot (not certain but I'm tying it in with the troops he brought a couple of weeks earlier) plus clubmen (I'm estimating 3,000 of these). 11 troops of Horse so lets call that 500 -550 which may include dragoons as muskets were captured at Sabden Brook. Plus 1 piece f artillery. I don't see unwilling clubmen being allowed to form part of the scouting force under Tyldesley so I don't think it would be from them although the Discourse talks of capturing foot its unclear if that was up above Read or later at Whalley itself.

Parliament is less clear

Colonels Shuttleworth and Starkie (but they may be back in reserve). The true relation mentions Captain Ashheton (not Colonel so not Assheton of Middleton, possibly Assheton of Downham?) The author of the True relation claims to have taken a leading part. his initials were EF but I haven't tied him into anyone specific. plus a Lt Marsden who came in with other troops for the pursuit down to Whalley.

The foot were assembled at Padiham so probably at Gawthorpe Hall and appear to have been around 400 or so plus around 250 horse. The true relation says two troops at Dunkenhalgh Hall with a further 150 arriving at Read Bank prior to the ambush. But it does state that as being "at first" which suggest further troops may have come in as the day progressed. The Horse may not have been of good quality as Seaton's horse a couple of weeks earlier were described as "who durst not face the enemie".

The Discourse talks of a piece of artillery firing two or three shots upon the Tower, which suggests that Parliament were firing at the tower of the derelict Abbey at Whalley. It isn't clear and none of my other sources mention it.

Just to confuse matters Lancashires Vale of Achor talks of the Earl of Derby with 2,000 men crossing the Ribble to get to Whalley so there is no uniformity on numbers apart from parliament being badly outnumbered overall.

The scenario second post has just been posted at elenderilsblog.blogspot.co.uk

This post covers the forces and their deployment. The next post will cover the scenario objectives for both sides.

Of interest. Thanks for posting.

Will follow your posts.

Thank you Captain. I'm glad you are finding it useful. I'm hoping to have the final part posted over the weekend.

Impressive research on your part Elenderil. We fought the Battle of Whalley this past summer using the Warr Without an Enemie rules and scenario. Slightly different set up than your layout. For example, WWaE has the scouting party as a regiment of Foot as well as Dragoons instead of Horse and Dragoons. We found the WWaE restrictions on Derby to be a little too restrictive; depending on how your rules work, I would be a little wary of special rules that over-emphasize Derby's dithering.

This is at the risk of getting ahead of my blog posts! The issue with this battle is finding a way to reflect the brittleness of Derby's forces, while still giving a balanced game. I have stayed as faithful as I can to the actual numbers in the original sources but this gives Derby a significant advantage. I have tried to create balance by restricting the Royalist's options. In the last post I intend to look at some alternatives to the historical deployments. These will not automatically give balanced games of course but are intended to try out some of the what ifs.

Yeah, I don't recall the Royalists having a significant numerical advantage in the WWaE scenario. Perhaps having had more at his disposal in our game, Derby would not have suffered what seemed like a foregone conclusion when we played.