Royalist and Parliamentarian armies fought at Lansdowne Hill near Bath on 5 July 1643. The Royalists held the field but suffered severe casualties, including the death of Sir Bevil Grenville. Their commander Ralph Hopton was injured shortly afterwards by an ammunition explosion.

Grenville's death became a potent subject of Royalist elegy and ancestral commemoration. Later poems presented him as an ideal of chivalric loyalty, converting a costly encounter into a moral victory.