His mili

ties.

As a General, he did not lack daring any more than tary quali- discipline; but he evinced more activity than forecast or vigilance, and he showed no strategy. He made his first march from St. Albans to Worcester for no apparent military object; so that when the King was collecting an army at Shrewsbury, Essex rested from the 14th September to the 19th October, without offering any impediment to this act of the Royalists' army, and only put himself in motion on learning that His Majesty had already done so, when he seemed to have no plan but to march away likewise as fast as he could, although the King's right flank almost touched on the march of the Parliamentary army, and with a little vigour might have been "doubled up," like Marmont's at Salamanca. Edge Hill, though called a battle, was a mere random fight, extremely bloody, and as little decisive as any action that only lasted four hours, and cost 10,000 men without the loss of any ground, could be. The relief of Gloucester was an energetic attack, extremely well planned and promptly executed, and did Essex much credit, for it had considerable influence in the campaign. But the battle of Newbury, if a victory, was won more by the act of the defeated enemy than by that of the conquerors. His march into the West, where he allowed himself and his army to be shut up in the toils of the King in the very centre of Cornwall, with no military object or necessity whatever, was too manifest a blunder and too signal a fault to be otherwise than conclusive against the generalship of Robert Earl of Essex.

The portrait of the Lord-General by Walker, the Parliamentary Vandyk, shows a man of a stern and commanding, but very soldierly bearing. He could not have been fifty years of age at the time he sat for this picture, for he was but fifty-two when he died.

6 Clarendon, Rapin, Rushworth, Whitlocke-Ludlow's Memoirs. Life of Lord Essex.