ponders nirvana.
Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex – Captain General of the Army of Parliament
(1591-1646)
Commander of Parliament's Army 1642 and of one of the main field armies 1643-44
Our model of Essex shows him taking the cheers of his beloved foot. "Hey for Robin!".
Poor old Essex has for many years been the ECW general everyone liked to ridicule. As Peter Young says "What other General fought three of his major battles with the enemy between his army and his base?". It seems he was constantly living in the shadow of the notoriety of his executed father (immortalized later in film by Errol Flynn no less!) and the fact that he was cuckolded by two wives (cue numerous humorous Royalist cavalry cornets) and the modern day theory that he may have suffered from male hormone deficiency. His relationships with other generals were notoriously poor and he even went to great lengths to carry his coffin on campaign with him. At Loswithiel, in 1644, his failure led to Parliament's worst defeat of the Civil Wars. Not exactly inspiring stuff is it?
However, once you read into the detail a little bit more you find there is another side to this much lampooned General. A veteran of the Dutch Wars he was highly regarded in the years building up to the First Civil War and was regarded as the "go to" General by Parliament when the war started. He turned a raw, untrained Army within months into a force where the core of his infantry stood their ground when both wings of cavalry had been beaten and a brigade of infantry had fled. Not on,y did they stand but they defeated the Royalist foot with Essex himself fighting at the front of his own regiment of foot, pike in hand! Indeed, throughout the first three years of the war he attracted a strong loyalty from his troops and seems to have been the London Trayned Bandes preferred General on campaign.
For the first two years of the war his importance can be compared to that of Admiral Jellicoe in the Great War – defeat and loss of his army would have meant the end of the Parliamentary cause and victory for the King. Despite this, in 1643, with Waller's army decimated at Roundway Down and the Fairfax's routed at Adwalton Moor he took Parliament's last effective field army on campaign marching through hostile territory and under regular attack all the way from London to Gloucester, relieved the siege before returning to home, again through hostile territory and the First Battle of Newbury followed by a triumphant entry back into the City. That he felt capable to take this huge gamble with such a relatively inexperienced army and return the hero suggests there is much more to this General than we normally read about. Through all this we can read his communications either the Parliament in London going to great lengths to ensure they were properly clothed, equipped and provisioned. This paternal attitude may explain the high regard in which he was held by his troops,
We now know that Essex was slowly dying from cancer and this may explain his increasingly volatile behavior which, in part, led to his lamentable performance the following year in the Loswithiel campaign and his ultimate desertion of his army when surrounded. His reputation was never to recover from this.
Our model of Essex shows him taking the cheers of his beloved foot. "Hey for Robin!".
We have also released a flagsheet for his Lifeguard and Majors troop.