The Phantom Battle of Edgehill and King Charles I's Commission

Sunday, 23 October 1642. Charles I's Royalist army met the Parliamentarian army of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, between Edge Hill, Radway and Kineton in south Warwickshire. It was the first major pitched battle of the English Civil War. Among the dead was Sir Edmund Verney, the King's standard-bearer.

About two months later came the Saturday before Christmas. Between twelve and one in the morning, shepherds, country men and travellers near Kineton heard drums, far off. Then the soldiers appeared in the air. Ensigns displayed. Drums beating. Muskets going off, cannons discharged, horses neighing.

One army carried the King's colours and the other carried Parliament's. The Royalists gave the first charge and the lines went at it "pell mell." At first the King's side seemed to have the best of it before appearing to be put to rout. Still the fight went on "in equal scale" until two or three in the morning. By one account, the terrified shepherds watched for about three hours before going to the minister and the magistrate.

It returned the next night at about the same hour, then again the following Saturday for "four hours, or very near," and on Sunday. The Justice of the Peace, William Wood, and Kineton's minister, Samuel Marshall, gathered others on the field to watch it again. Then they certified the account. In January 1643 it was printed in London as A Great Wonder in Heaven. A second pamphlet, The New Yeares Wonder, retold it in what the historian Peter Gaunt calls "more emotive and racy language."

Charles I was at Oxford. He sent six men: Colonel Lewis Kirke, Captain Dudley, Captain Wainman and "three other Gentlemen of credit." The pamphlet says they heard and saw the prodigies themselves, "distinctly knowing divers of the apparitions or incorporeal substances by their faces, as that of Sir Edmund Varney, and others that were there slain." They swore to it before the King.

Their report has never been found. Searches of The National Archives have turned up nothing, and very little paperwork from the Oxford government survived. Popular accounts say the sightings stopped once the unburied dead were given Christian burial. Gaunt says the replays soon petered out.

At the time, people read the vision as a prodigy, a sign of divine anger at the slaughter of war. Battles in the sky were a recognised pamphlet genre of the period. Oddly, the vision shows the King's side routed, yet it was the King's own officers who confirmed it.

Lord Nugent allowed that "a well supported imposture or a stormy night on the hill-side might have acted on the weakness of a peasantry." But he found it hard to believe "the minds of officers, sent there to correct the illusions, could have been so imposed upon." In 1914 Ralph Shirley wrote: "of all occult happenings in history, none is better authenticated." A modern claim says these are the only ghosts "officially recognised by the Public Record Office." That claim is folklore. The office was founded in 1838, and it only ever stored documents.

The battlefield now lies largely on Ministry of Defence land. In the 1940s and 1950s, WRAF personnel and civilian workers there reported apparitions. Locals say the battle replays at midnight on its anniversary. Verney himself is said to haunt Claydon House, his family's seat in Buckinghamshire. And when Ralph Shirley wrote about the Angels of Mons, he reached back to Edgehill for a parallel.