where the King had already been that morning, when in an evil hour he turned back, to revenge some ‘surprise of an outpost at Naseby the night before,’ and give the Roundheads battle.
Ample details of this Battle, and of the movements prior and posterior to it, are to be found in Sprigge, or copied with some abridgment into Rushworth; who has also copied a strange old Plan of the Battle; half plan, half picture, which the Sale-Catalogues are very chary of, in the case of Sprigge. By assiduous attention, aided by this Plan, as the old names yet stick to the localities, the Narrative can still be, and has lately been, pretty accurately verified, and the Figure of the old Battle dimly brought back again.[1] The reader shall imagine it, for the present.—On the crown of Naseby Height stands a modern Battle-monument; but, by an unlucky oversight, it is above a mile to the east of where the Battle really was. There are likewise two modern Books about Naseby and its Battle; both of them without value.
The Parliamentary Army stood ranged on the Height still partly called ‘Mill Hill,’ as in Rushworth’s time, a mile and half from Naseby; the King’s Army, on a parallel ‘Hill,’ its back to Harborough;—with the wide table of upland now named Broad Moor between them; where indeed the main brunt of the action still clearly enough shows itself to have been. There are hollow spots, of a rank vegetation, scattered over that Broad Moor; which are understood to have once been burial mounds;—some of which, one to my knowledge, have been (with more or less of sacrilege) verified as such. A friend of mine has in his cabinet two ancient grinder-teeth, dug lately from that ground,—and waits for an opportunity to rebury them there. Sound effectual grinders, one of them very large; which ate their breakfast on the fourteenth morning of June two hundred years ago, and except to be clenched once in grim battle, had never work to do more in this world!—‘A stack of dead bodies, perhaps about 100,
- ↑ Appendix, No. 8.
