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hearkened unto," but his power was to assert itself in deeds rather than in words. He appeared at the head of a troop of his own raising at Edgehill; but with the eye of a born soldier he at once saw the blot in the army of Essex. "A set of poor tapsters and town apprentices," he warned Hampden, "would never fight against men of honor"; and he pointed to religious enthusiasm as the one weapon which could meet and turn the chivalry of the cavalier. Even to Hampden the plan seemed impracticable; but the regiment of a thousand men which Cromwell raised for the Association of the Eastern Counties, and which soon became known as his Ironsides, was formed strictly of "men of religion." He spent his fortune freely on the task he set himself. "The business hath had of me in money between eleven and twelve hundred pounds, therefore my private estate can do little to help the public.

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money of my own (left) to help my soldiers." But they were a lovely company," he tells his friends with soldierly pride. No blasphemy, drinking, disorder, or impiety were suffered in their ranks. "Not a man swears but he pays his twelvepence." Nor was his choice of "men of religion" the only innovation Cromwell introduced into his new regiment. The social conditions which restricted command to men of birth were disregarded. “It may be," he wrote, in answer to complaints from the committee of the Association, "it provokes your spirit to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honor and birth had entered into their employments; but why do they not appear? But seeing it is necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in their employment, and such, I hope, these will approve themselves." The words paint Cromwell's temper accurately enough: he is far more of the practical soldier than of the theological reformer; though his genius already breaks in upon his aristocratic and conservative sympathies, and catches glimpses of the social revolution to which the war was drifting. "I had rather," he once burst out impatiently, "have a plain russet-coated captain, that knows what he fights for and loves. what he knows, than what you call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I honor a gentleman that is so, indeed," he ends, with a characteristic return to his more common mood of feeling. The same practical temper broke out in an innovation which had more immediate results. Bitter as had been his hatred of the bishops,

and strenuously as he had worked to bring about a change in Church government, Cromwell, like most of the parliamentary leaders, seems to have been content with the new Presbyterianism, and the Presbyterians were more than content with him. Lord Manchester "suffered him to guide the army at his pleasure." «The man, Cromwell," writes the Scotchman Baillie, "is a very wise and active head, universally well beloved as religious and stout." But against dissidents from their own system, the Presbyterians were as bitter as Laud himself; and, as we shall see, Nonconformity was now rising every day into larger proportions, while the new claim of liberty of worship was becoming one of the problems of the time. Cromwell met the problem in his unspeculative fashion. He wanted good soldiers and good men; and, if they were these, the Independent, the Baptist, the Leveler found entry among his Ironsides. "You would respect them, did you see them," he answered the panic-stricken Presbyterians, who charged them with "Anabaptistry" and revolutionary aims; "they are no Anabaptists; they are honest, sober Christians; they expect to be used as men." He was soon to be driven-as in the social change we noticed before-to a far larger and grander point of view. "The State," he boldly laid down at last, "in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." But as yet he was busier with his new regiment than with theories; and the Ironsides were no sooner in action than they proved themselves such soldiers as the war had never seen yet. "Truly they were never beaten at all," their leader said proudly at its close. At Winceby fight they charged "singing Psalms," cleared Lincolnshire of the Cavendishes, and freed the Eastern Counties from all danger from Newcastle's part. At Marston Moor they faced and routed Rupert's chivalry. At Newbury it was only Manchester's reluctance that hindered them from completing the ruin of Charles.

Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the creation of the Ironsides; his military genius had displayed itself at Marston Moor. Newbury first raised him into a political leader. "Without a more speedy, vigorous, and effective prosecution of the war," he said to the Commons after his quarrel with Manchester, "casting off all lingering proceedings, like those of soldiers of fortune beyond sea to spin out a war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament." But under the leaders who at present conducted it, a vigorous conduct of the war

was hopeless. They were, in Cromwell's plain words, "afraid to conquer." They desired not to crush Charles, but to force him back, with as much of his old strength remaining as might be, to the position of a constitutional King. The old loyalty, too, clogged their enterprise; they shrank from the taint of treason. "If the King be beaten," Manchester urged at Newbury, "he will still be King; if he beat us, he will hang us all for traitors." To a mood like this Cromwell's reply seemed horrible: "If I met the King in battle, I would fire my pistol at the King as at another." The army, too, as he long ago urged at Edgehill, was not an army to conquer with. Now, as then, he urged that till the whole force. was new modeled, and placed under a stricter discipline, "they must not expect any notable success in anything they went about." But the first step in such a reorganization must be a change of officers. The army was led and officered by members of the two Houses, and the Self-Renouncing Ordinance, which was introduced by Cromwell and Vane, declared the tenure of civil or military offices incompatible with a seat in either. In spite of a long and bitter resistance, which was justified at a later time by the political results which followed this rupture of the tie which had hitherto bound the army to the Parliament, the drift of public opinion was too strong to be withstood. The passage of the Ordinance brought about the retirement of Essex, Manchester, and Waller; and the new organization of the army went rapidly on under a new commander in chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, the hero of the long contest in Yorkshire, and who had been raised into fame by his victory at Nantwich and his bravery at Marston Moor. The principles on which Cromwell had formed his Ironsides were carried out on a larger scale in the New Model. The one aim was to get together twenty thousand "honest" men. "Be careful," Cromwell wrote, "what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted. A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them.” The result was a curious medley of men of different ranks among the officers of the New Model. The bulk of those in high command remained men of noble or gentle blood - Montagues, Pickerings, Fortescues, Sheffields, Sidneys, and the like. But side by side with these, though in far smaller proportion, were seen officers like Ewer, who had been a serving man; like Okey, who had been a drayman; or Rainsborough, who had been a skipper at sea." Equally strange was the mixture of religions in its ranks.

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A clause in the Act for new modeling the army had enabled Fairfax to dispense with the signature of the Covenant in the case of «< godly men"; and among the farmers from the eastern counties, who formed the bulk of its privates, dissidence of every type had gained a firm foothold. A result hardly less notable, though less foreseen, was the youth of the officers. Among those in high command there were few who, like Cromwell, had passed middle age. Fairfax was but thirty-three, and most of his colonels were even younger. Of the political aspect of the New Model we shall have to speak at a later time; but as yet its energy was directed solely to "the speedy and vigorous prosecution of the war.' The efforts of the peace party were frustrated, at the very moment when Fairfax was ready for action, by the policy of the King. From the moment when Newbury marked the breach between the peace and war parties in the Parliament, the Scotch commissioners. had been backed by the former in pressing for fresh negotiations with Charles. These were opened at Uxbridge, and prolonged for six months; but the hopes of concession which Charles had held out through the winter were suddenly withdrawn in the spring. He saw, as he thought, the Parliamentary army dissolved and ruined by the new modeling, at the instant when news came from Scotland of fresh successes on the part of Montrose, and of his overthrow of the Marquis of Argyle's troops in the victory of Inverlochy. "Before the end of the summer," wrote the conqueror, "I shall be in a position to come to your Majesty's aid with a brave army." The negotiations at Uxbridge were at once broken off, and a few months later the King opened his campaign by a march to the north, where he hoped to form a junction with Montrose. Leicester was stormed, the blockade of Chester raised, and the Eastern Counties threatened, until Fairfax, who had hoped to draw Charles back again by a blockade of Oxford, hurried at last on his track. Cromwell, who had been suffered by the House to retain his command for a few days, joined Fairfax as he drew near the King, and his arrival was greeted by loud shouts of welcome from the troops. The two armies met near Naseby, to the northwest of Northampton. The King was eager to fight. "Never have my affairs been in as good a state," he cried; and Prince Rupert was as impatient as his uncle. On the other side, even Cromwell doubted the success of the new experiment. "I can say this of Naseby," he wrote soon after, "that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we, a company of

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poor ignorant men, to seek to order our battle, the general having commanded me to order all the horse, I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it." The battle began with a furious charge of Rupert uphill, which routed the wing opposed to him under Ireton; while the Royalist foot, after a single discharge, clubbed their muskets and fell on the centre under Fairfax so hotly that it slowly and stubbornly gave way. But the Ironsides were conquerors on the left. A single charge broke the northern horse under Langdale, who had already fled before them at Marston Moor; and, holding his troops firmly in hand, Cromwell fell with them on the flank of the Royalist foot in the very crisis of its success. A panic of the Royal reserve, and its flight from the field, aided his efforts: it was in vain that Rupert returned with forces exhausted by pursuit, that Charles, in a passion of despair, called on his troopers for one charge more." The battle was over: artillery, baggage, even the Royal papers, fell into the conqueror's hands; five thousand men surrendered; only two thousand followed the King in his headlong flight upon the west. The war was ended at a blow. While Charles wandered helplessly in search of fresh forces, Fairfax marched rapidly into Somersetshire, routed the Royal forces at Langport, and in three weeks was master of the west. A victory at Kilsyth, which gave Scotland for the moment to Montrose, threw a transient gleam over the darkening fortunes of his master's cause; but the surrender of Bristol, and the dispersion of the last force Charles could collect in an attempt to relieve Chester, was followed by news of the crushing and irretrievable defeat of the "Great Marquis" at Philiphaugh. In the wreck of the Royal cause we may pause for a moment over an incident which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. Cromwell spent much time with God in prayer before the storm of Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester had held stoutly out through the war for the King. The storm ended its resistance, and the brave old Royalist was brought in a prisoner with his house flaming around him. He broke out," reports a Puritan bystander, "and said 'that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing House, he would adventure it as he did, and so maintain it to the uttermost,' comforting himself in this matter that Basing House was called Loyalty.'» Of loy

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