The New Model Army defeated Lord Hopton's Royalist forces at Great Torrington in Devon on 16 February 1646. During the fighting, an explosion destroyed the church where Royalist prisoners and gunpowder had been placed. The victory broke organised Royalist resistance in the West Country.

The church explosion gave chroniclers a terrible image of sacred architecture, prisoners and weapons destroyed together. It exemplified the Civil War's unsettling mixture of providential interpretation and accidental catastrophe.