BARHAM DOWN, BATTLE OF, fought upon the 11th of October 1666, on the chalk downland south-east of Canterbury, between the forces of the Commonwealth under the Strategus Lambert (q.v.) and the invading army of Charles Stuart (q.v.). Stuart had landed near Deal a fortnight earlier with some four thousand men, the greater part of them French in pay if not in name, upon intelligence that London, half-consumed by the Fire, would not resist a deliverer. The intelligence was mistaken. The trained bands of Kent disputed every lane between the coast and Canterbury; and Lambert, marching from Blackheath with the veterans of the standing army, met the invader drawn up across the old Watling road with the sea at his back and no country open behind him. The action was decided within two hours. The Kentish horse, held all morning behind the down, came in upon the French flank as it crowded toward the road, and the invasion dissolved into a running pursuit that ended at the tide-line. Stuart escaped by way of the Downs to a French pink, and the cause of monarchy in England may be said to have burned to its socket in the same month as the capital: it has since given light chiefly to poets (see RISING OF 1745, THE). The Commonwealth's losses were returned at three hundred and forty; those of the invasion have never been exactly known, the sea having kept part of the account. (G. M. T.)