The Siege of Reading was an eleven-day siege of the Royalist city of Reading, Berkshire which occurred in April 1643 during the First English Civil War. The Earl of Essex bombarded the town with artillery until the city surrendered, a relief attempt by King Charles I of England and Prince Rupert of the Rhine having failed.
Background[]
At the opening of the campaign season of 1643, King Charles I of England appeared to have the initiative, but his army was crippled by a serious shortage of arms and ammunition; in some regiments, there were more pikemen than musketeers. At the end of February, Queen Henrietta Maria of France, who had gone to Holland to pawn the crown jewels and buy arms with the proceeds, landed at Bridlington in Yorkshire and prepared a great convoy to convey the arms to Oxford. To cover this vital arms shipment, Prince Rupert moved into the Midlands, stormed the defenses of Birmingham on 3 April, and took Litchfield after a short siege on 21 April.
Emboldened by his absence, however, Essex struck west and laid siege to Reading. Rupert returned in great haste, but both he and the king were powerless to prevent the garrison's surrender on 25 April. The 19,000-strong Parliamentarian army bombarded the city during its eleven-day encirclement, and the garrison's commander Arthur Aston was wounded in the head by a tile blown off of a rooftop by an explosion. His subordinate Richard Feilding entered into negotiations with the Parliamentarians, and he held to a truce as the Parliamentarians beat off King Charles and Prince Rupert's relief army. A short time later, the garrison was surrendered, but the Parliamentarians broke their conditions with the Royalists and plundered Reading. The two field armies then withdrew to their old positions, with the Parliamentarian army being swept by a typhus epidemic.