The Earl of Essex's returning Parliamentarian army fought Charles I's Royalists near Newbury in Berkshire on 20 September 1643. Parliament held open its road towards London after a hard and indecisive battle. Royalist casualties included the poet and courtier Sir John Suckling's friend, the Earl of Carnarvon, and the statesman Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland.

Falkland's death became emblematic of the intellectual and personal tragedy of divided loyalties. Elegiac responses and later histories portrayed Newbury as the destruction of a cultured generation by political extremity.