In the meanwhile Essex, after several messages from the parliament, had removed from Reading, and fixed his head-quarters at Tame.  One night Prince Rupert, making a long circuit, surprised Chinnor in the rear of the army, and killed or captured the greater part of two regiments that lay in the town.[a] In his retreat to Oxford, he was compelled to turn on his pursuers at Chalgrove; they charged with more courage than prudence, and were repulsed with considerable loss.  It was in this action that the celebrated Hampden received the wound of which he died.  The reputation which he had earned by his resistance to the payment of the ship-money had deservedly placed him at the head of the popular leaders.  His insinuating manner, the modesty of his pretensions, and the belief of his integrity, gave to his opinions an irresistible weight in the lower house; and the courage and activity which he displayed in the army led many to lament that he did not occupy the place held by the more tardy or more cautious earl of Essex.  The royalists exulted at his death as equal to a victory; the patriots lamented it as a loss which could not be repaired.  Both were deceived.  Revolutions are the seed-plots of talents and energy.  One great leader had been withdrawn; there was no dearth of others to supply his place.[2]

[Footnote 1:  After a minute investigation, I cannot persuade myself that Waller and his friends proceeded farther than I have mentioned.  What they might have done, had they not been interrupted, is matter of mere conjecture.  The commission of array, which their enemies sought to couple with their design, had plainly no relation to it.]

[Footnote 2:  Rushworth, v. 265, 274.  Whitelock, 69, 70.  Clarendon, ii. 237, 261.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1643.  June 18]

To the Root-and-branch men the rank, no less than the inactivity of Essex, afforded a legitimate ground of suspicion.  In proportion as he sank in their esteem, they were careful to extol the merits and flatter the ambition of Sir William Waller.  Waller had formerly enjoyed a lucrative office under the crown, but he had been fined in the Star-chamber, and his wife was a “godly woman;” her zeal and his own resentment made him a patriot; he raised a troop of horse for the service, and was quickly advanced to a command.  The rapidity of his movements, his daring spirit, and his contempt of military rules, were advantageously contrasted with the slow and cautious experience of Essex; and his success at Portsmouth, Winchester, Chichester, Malmesbury, and Hereford, all of which he reduced in a short time, entitled him, in the estimation of his admirers, to the quaint appellation of William the Conqueror.  While the forces under Essex were suffered to languish in a state of destitution,[1] an army of eight thousand men, well clothed and appointed, was prepared for Waller.  But the event proved that his abilities had been overrated.  In the course of a week he fought two battles, one near Bath, with Prince Maurice,[a] the other with Lord Wilmot, near Devizes[b]:  the first was obstinate but indecisive, the second bloody and disastrous.  Waller hastened from the field to the capital, attributing the loss of his army, not to his own errors, but to the jealousy of Essex.  His patrons did not abandon their favourite.  Emulating the example of the Romans,