By early 1645 the southwest of England was the last great stronghold of the Royalist cause. Sir Thomas Fairfax and his newly formed New Model Army had broken King Charles I at Naseby in Northamptonshire that June and at Langport in Somerset in July, sending the Royalist field army stumbling west into Devon and Cornwall. The cavalry retreated to Exeter, but were so badly behaved that the city refused to let them in. They lodged in surrounding villages and on the moors. By the end of 1645 Fairfax had the city under siege. Lord Goring, the previous commander of the Royalist horse in the west, had given up and fled to France, leaving his commission to Thomas Wentworth, 5th Baron Wentworth. Wentworth had a reputation. Richard Bulstrode, who fought alongside him, called him a very lazy and unactive man. He had fallen out with Lord Hopton, the only Royalist general in the region with any remaining authority. He kept lax discipline. His officers played cards.

Cromwell came down on Bovey Tracey on the night of 9 January. The Royalist sentries were not where they should have been. The officers were inside an inn when the Parliamentary cavalry came clattering into the town. According to contemporary accounts the officers fled out a back window, throwing their stakes of money into the street as they went. The trick worked - Cromwell's troopers broke off pursuit to gather the coins. Wentworth, his principal officers, and most of their men escaped into the moonlit countryside toward Tavistock. They left behind 400 horses and seven battle colours, one of them the King's own standard. It was not the largest engagement of the Civil War. Few died. But seven captured colours including the King's was a major moral and propaganda victory for Parliament, and the loss of 400 horses crippled the western Royalist cavalry.

Wentworth made his report to Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, who was trying to organise a relief army for besieged Exeter. The news from Bovey was disastrous for that plan. The Prince abandoned the relief effort and retreated deeper into the southwest, toward Launceston in Cornwall. Sir Richard Grenville and the other surviving Royalist commanders petitioned the Prince to remove Wentworth from overall command. Lord Hopton was appointed in his place, with Wentworth demoted to general of the horse under Hopton. Fairfax meanwhile marched his army south into the South Hams. He found that the Royalists had abandoned their garrisons in Ashburton, Totnes, and other villages. By 12 January he was outside Dartmouth; by 19 January he had taken the town. Hopton was defeated at Torrington in February. The last Royalist field army in southwest England surrendered at Truro in March. Exeter fell in April. The Royalist headquarters at Oxford surrendered in June. The First English Civil War was effectively over.

Bovey Heath sits today as a small nature reserve on the outskirts of Bovey Tracey, all bracken and heather and birdsong, with views west toward the granite tors of Dartmoor. The town below is a market town of bookshops and craft centres and Sunday papers, and most of the people walking dogs across the heath would struggle to point to where Cromwell's horse came down off the high ground. There is no major battlefield monument. There rarely is, for battles whose importance lay in their consequences rather than their casualties. But the Battle of Bovey Heath was the small turning point that let Fairfax sweep south Devon clear of Royalist garrisons in less than two weeks, and that in turn was what finally ended the war in the west. The card game was the most expensive in English military history.