[246] Both sides claimed the victory. May, who thinks that Essex, by his injudicious conduct after the battle, lost the advantage he had gained in it, admits that the effect was to strengthen the king's side. "Those who thought his success impossible began to look upon him as one who might be a conqueror, and many neuters joined him."--P. 176. Ludlow is of the same opinion as to Essex's behaviour and its consequences: "Our army, after some refreshment at Warwick, returned to London, not like men that had obtained a victory, but as if they had been beaten."--P. 52. This shows that they had not in fact obtained much of a victory; and Lord Wharton's report to parliament almost leads us to think the advantage, upon the whole, to have been with the king. _Parl. Hist._ ii. 1495. [247] May, 212; Baillie, 373, 391. [248] May, Baillie, Mrs. Hutchinson, are as much of this opinion as Sir Philip Warwick and other royalist writers. It is certain that there was a prodigious alarm, and almost despondency, among the parliamentarians. They immediately began to make entrenchments about London, which were finished in a month. May, p. 214. In the _Somers Tracts_, iv. 534, is an interesting letter from a Scotsman then in London, giving an account of these fortifications, which, considering the short time employed about them, seem to have been very respectable, and such as the king's army, with its weak cavalry and bad artillery, could not easily have carried. Lord Sunderland, four days before the battle of Newbury wherein he was killed, wrote to his wife, that the king's affairs had never been in a more prosperous condition; that sitting down before Gloscester had prevented _their finishing the war that year_, "which nothing could keep us from doing, if we had a month's more time." _Sidney Letters_, ii. 671. He alludes in the same letters to the divisions in the royal party. [249] _Parl. Hist._ iii. 45, 48. It seems natural to think that, if the moderate party were able to contend so well against their opponents, after the desertion of a great many royalist members who had joined the king, they would have maintained a decisive majority, had these continued in their places. But it is to be considered, on the other hand, that the king could never have raised an army, if he had not been able to rally the peers and gentry round his banner, and that in his army lay the real secret of the temporary strength of the pacific party.