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Gardiner Samuel Rawson
Oliver Cromwell

It might be that religious liberty would in the long run suffer more than it would gain from military support, just as the principles of Andrewes and Laud suffered more than they gained by the support of Charles. Already the regiments under Cromwell's command swarmed with enthusiasts who spent their leisure in preaching and arguing on the most abstruse points of divinity, agreeing in nothing except that argument was to be met by argument alone. Their iron discipline and their devotion to the cause permitted a freedom which would have been a mere dissolvent of armies enlisted after a more worldly system. As Cromwell stepped more pronouncedly to the front, his advocacy of religious liberty would become well-nigh irresistible.

On January 19, 1644, the Scottish army, under the Earl of Leven, crossed the Tweed. Newcastle was pushed back into York, where he was besieged by the combined forces of Leven and the Fairfaxes. On May 6 Lincoln, which had been regained by the Royalists, was retaken by Manchester, who together with Cromwell pushed on to join in the siege of York. Rupert, however, having been sent northward by Charles, succeeded in raising the siege; and on July 2 a battle was fought on Marston Moor, in which the Royalist army, successful at first, was utterly crushed by Cromwell's skill. Having routed Rupert's horse, he drew bridle and hurried back to the assistance of the Scottish infantry, which was holding its own against overwhelming numbers of the enemy. The King's regiments of foot were routed or destroyed by his impetuous charge. Cromwell had redeemed the day after the three generals, Leven, Manchester and the elder Fairfax, had fled from that which they deemed to be a complete disaster. Before long the whole of the North of England, save a few outlying fortresses, was lost to the King.

In the South, matters were going badly for Parliament. Waller's army, checked at Cropredy Bridge, melted away by desertion; whilst Essex, attempting an inroad into Cornwall, was followed by the King. Essex himself and his cavalry succeeded in making their escape, but on September 2 the whole of his infantry surrendered to Charles at Lostwithiel. Unless Manchester came to the rescue, it would be impossible to avert disaster. Manchester, however, was hard to move. Between him and his Lieutenant-General there was no longer that good understanding which was essential to successful action. Manchester, longing for peace on the basis of a Presbyterian settlement of the Church, could not be brought to understand that, whether such an ending to the war were desirable or not, it could never be obtained from Charles. Cromwell, on the other hand, aimed at religious toleration for the sects, and that security which, as his practical nature taught him, was only attainable by the destruction of the military defences in which Charles trusted. That those defences were the ramparts of the city of destruction, he never doubted for an instant. Writing in his most serious mood immediately after the victory of Marston Moor, to the father of a youth who had there met his death-wound, his own losses rose before his mind. Of his four sons, two had already passed away: – Robert, leaving behind him a memory of unusual piety, had died in his schoolboy days; whilst Oliver, who had charged and fled at Edgehill had lately succumbed to small-pox in the garrison at Newport Pagnell. Yet it was not only to the example of his own sorrow that Cromwell mainly looked as a balm for a father's bereavement. "Sir," he wrote, "you know my own trials this way, but the Lord supported me with this that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for and live for. There is your precious child full of glory, never to know sin or sorrow any more. Before his death he was so full of comfort that to Frank Russell and myself he could not express it, 'it was so great above his pain'. This he said to us – indeed it was admirable. A little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that was? He told me it was that 'God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies'." Between a Cromwell eager to destroy the enemies of God and a Manchester eager to make peace with those enemies no good understanding was possible, especially as in the eyes of Manchester the prolongation of the war meant the strengthening of that sectarian fanaticism to which Cromwell looked as the evidence of a vigorous spiritual life.

In Manchester the desire for peace showed itself in sheer reluctance to make war. Cromwell fumed in vain against the Scots and their resolution to force their Presbyterianism upon England. "In the way they now carry themselves," he told Manchester, "pressing for their discipline, I could as soon draw my sword against them as against any in the King's army." "He would have," he added at another time, "none in his army who were not of the Independent judgment, in order that if terms were offered for a peace such as might not stand with the ends that honest men should aim at, this army might prevent such a mischief." This attack on the Scots led to an attack on the English nobility, amongst whom the sects found scant favour. He hoped, he said in words long afterwards remembered against him, to 'live to see never a nobleman in England'. He is even reported to have assured Manchester that it would never be well till he was known as plain Mr. Montague. Manchester persisted in doing nothing till a distinct order was given him to march to the defence of London, now laid open by Essex's mishap.

Manchester's reluctance to engage in military operations was probably strengthened by the knowledge that Vane, who, since Pym's death in the winter of 1643, was the most prominent personage amongst the war party at Westminster, had come down to York, at the time of the siege, to urge the generals, though in vain, to consent to the deposition of the King, and he could not but suspect that the arrival of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, the eldest surviving son of Charles's sister Elizabeth, on August 30, had something to do with a design for placing him on his uncle's throne. The design, if it really existed, came to nothing, probably because it was hopeless to carry it out in the teeth of the generals. It was only with the utmost difficulty that Manchester's hesitation was overcome, and that he was induced to face Charles's army at Newbury. The battle fought there on October 27 was a drawn one. That it did not end in a Parliamentary victory was mainly owing to Manchester's indecision. When, a few days later, the King reappeared on the scene, he was allowed to relieve Donnington Castle, in the immediate neighbourhood of Newbury, no attempt whatever being made to hinder his operations. In the controversy which followed, Manchester went to the root of the matter when he said, "If we beat the King ninety and nine times, yet he is King still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves". "My Lord," answered Cromwell, "if this be so why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never so base." Each of the two men had fixed upon one side of the problem which England was called upon to solve. Manchester was appalled by the political difficulty. There stood the Kingship accepted by generation after generation, fenced about with safeguards of law and custom, and likely to be accepted in one form or another by generations to come. A single decisive victory gained by Charles would not only expose those who had dared to make war on him to the hideous penalties of the law of treason – but would enable him to measure the terms of submission by his own resolves. If Manchester had had the power of looking into futurity, he would have argued that no military success – not even the abolition of monarchy, and the execution of the monarch – would avail to postpone the restoration of Charles's heir for more than a little while.

Cromwell's reply did not even pretend to meet the difficulty. It was not in him to forecast the prospects of kingship in England, or to vex his mind with the consequences of a problematical Royalist victory. It was enough for him to grasp the actual situation. It is true that, at this time, he had not got beyond the position from which the whole of the Parliamentary party had started at the beginning of the war – the position that the war must be ended by a compact between King and Parliament. To Cromwell, therefore, whose heart was set upon the liberation of those who in his eyes were the people of God, and the overthrow of ceremonial observances, the immediate duty of the moment was to secure that, when the time of negotiation arrived, the right side should be in possession of sufficient military force to enable it to dictate the terms of peace. It was his part not to consider what the King might do if he proved victorious, but to take good care that he was signally defeated. Strange to say, the folly of the Presbyterian party – strong in the two Houses, and in the support of the Scottish army – was playing into Cromwell's hands. On November 20, ten days after Cromwell's altercations with Manchester, Parliament sent to Oxford terms of peace so harsh as to place their acceptance outside the bounds of possibility. The royal power was to be reduced to a cipher, whilst such a form of religion as might be agreed upon by the Houses in accordance with the Covenant was to be imposed on all Englishmen, without toleration either for the sects favoured by Cromwell, or for the Church of Andrewes and Laud which found one of its warmest and most conscientious supporters in Charles. Every man in the three kingdoms, including the King himself, was to be bound to swear to the observance of the Covenant. Such a demand naturally met with stern resistance. "There are three things," replied Charles, "I will not part with – the Church, my crown, and my friends; and you will have much ado to get them from me." It needed no action on the part of Cromwell to secure the failure of such a negotiation, and, so far as we are aware, no word passed his lips in public on the subject.

On November 25 Cromwell appeared in Parliament to urge on the one thing immediately necessary, the forging of an instrument by which the King might be ruined in the field. The existing military system by which separate armies, to a great extent composed of local forces, and therefore unable to subordinate local to national objects, had been placed under commanders selected for their political or social eminence, had completely broken down. So well was this recognised that, two days before Cromwell's arrival at Westminster, a committee had been appointed without opposition to 'consider of a frame or model of the whole militia'. It was perhaps to assist the committee to come to a right conclusion that, upon his arrival at Westminster, Cromwell indignantly assailed Manchester as guilty of all the errors which had led to the deplorable result at Newbury. Manchester was not slow in throwing all the blame on Cromwell, and it seemed as if the gravest political questions were to be thrust aside by a personal altercation. So angry were the Scottish members of the Committee of both kingdoms, a body which had recently been appointed to direct the movements of the armies, that they won over the Presbyterian leaders, Essex and Holles, to look favourably on a scheme for bringing an accusation against Cromwell as an incendiary who was doing his best to divide the King from his people, and one of the kingdoms from the other. At a meeting held at Essex House the Scottish Earl of Loudoun asked the English lawyers present whether an incendiary who was punishable by the law of Scotland was also punishable by the law of England. The English lawyers threw cold water on the scheme, Whitelocke asking to see the evidence on which the charge was founded, whilst Maynard declared that 'Lieutenant-General Cromwell is a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons, and with some of the Peers likewise, and therefore there must be proofs, and the most clear and evident against him, to prevail with the Parliament to adjudge him to be an incendiary'. Neither Whitelocke nor Maynard was eager to bell the cat.

Cromwell replied by a renewed attack on Manchester's inefficient generalship. Yet it was not in accordance with the character of the man who had stopped the headlong rush of his squadrons at Marston Moor to allow a great public cause to be wrecked by personal recriminations. On December 9 Zouch Tate, himself a strong Presbyterian, reported from a committee which had been appointed to consider the questions at issue between the two generals, 'that the chief causes of our division are pride and covetousness'. It is immaterial whether Tate had or had not come to a previous understanding with Cromwell to damp down the fires of controversy which threatened to rend the Parliamentary party into warring factions. What was of real importance is that Cromwell followed with an admission that, unless the war was brought to a speedy conclusion, the kingdom would become weary of Parliament. "For what," he added, "do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the Parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands and a sword into their hands, and, what by interest of Parliament, and what by power in the army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it. This I speak here to our faces is but what others do utter behind our backs." Then, after calling for the more vigorous prosecution of the war, and advising that all charges against individual commanders should be dropped, he proceeded to express a hope that no member of either House would scruple to abandon his private interests for the public good. Later in the day, Tate gave point to Cromwell's suggestion by moving that so long as the war lasted, no member of either House should hold any command, military or civil, conferred on him by Parliament. The idea struck root. It satisfied those who misdoubted Essex and Manchester, as well as those who misdoubted Cromwell. That Cromwell was in earnest in proposing to exclude himself is evident. The majority in both Houses was Presbyterian, and if the so-called Self-Denying Ordinance brought in to give effect to Tate's proposal by refusing to members of either House the right of holding commands in the army or offices in the State had been passed in the form in which it was drawn up, nothing short of a repeal of that ordinance could have enabled him to command even a single troop.

That a door was left open was entirely the fault of the House of Lords in rejecting this ordinance on January 13, 1645. By this time both parties in the Commons were of one mind in pushing on an ordinance for a new model of the army, from which it would be easy to exclude peers, whether the Self-Denying Ordinance were passed or no. On January 21 the Commons named Fairfax as General and Skippon as Major-General of the new army. The post of Lieutenant-General, which carried with it the command of the Horse, was significantly left open. No legislation now barred the way to Cromwell's appointment, but the House thought it desirable to make their action in the matter dependent on the line finally taken by the Lords. On February 15 the Lords passed the New Model Ordinance. A few days later, the negotiation with the King which is known as the Treaty of Uxbridge, came to an end, and Parliament was now committed to the design of meeting Charles in the field with an army commanded by professional soldiers, and withdrawn from local and political influences. In such an army nothing more would be heard of the dangers of success which had loomed so large before the eye of Manchester. Apparently to save the Parliamentary officers from the indignity of tendering the resignation of their commissions, a new Self-Denying Ordinance was passed on April 3, by which members of either House were discharged from their military or civil posts within forty days afterwards. There was nothing to prevent the reappointment of Cromwell on the one hand, or of Essex or Manchester on the other, if the two Houses should combine in doing so.

CHAPTER II.
THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE PRESBYTERIANS

The New Model Army had been accepted by both Houses and by both parties in either House, because in no other way could the difficulties of the situation be met. The failure of the negotiations at Uxbridge had convinced the Presbyterians – at least for the moment – that Charles would give no help towards the settlement of the nation on any basis that their narrow minds could recognise as acceptable, and if the war was to be continued, what prospect was there of success under the old conditions? Nevertheless, the creation of the New Model was, in the main, Cromwell's work. Men are led by their passions more than by their reason, and if Cromwell had continued his invectives against Manchester, he would have roused an opposition which would have left little chance of the realisation of the hopes which he cherished most deeply in his heart. All through the discussion he had shown not only a readiness to sacrifice his own personal interests, but a determination to avoid even criticism of the actions of his opponents in all matters of less importance, provided that he had his way in the one thing most important of all. Without a word of censure he had left the Presbyterians not only to negotiate with Charles, but to pass votes for the establishment of intolerant Presbyterianism in England. The skill with which he avoided friction by keeping himself in the background, whilst he allowed others to work for him, doubtless contributed much to his success. It revealed the highest qualities of statesmanship on the hypothesis that he was acting with a single eye to the public good. It revealed the lowest arts of the trickster, on the hypothesis that he was scheming for his own ultimate advantage. As human nature is constituted, there would be many who would convince themselves that the lower interpretation of his conduct was the true one.

At all events, the New Model Army was being brought into shape in the spring of 1645. It was composed partly of men pressed into the service, partly of soldiers who had served in former armies. That the Puritan, and even the Independent element, was well represented amongst the cavalry of which Cromwell's troops formed the nucleus, there can be little doubt; and even amongst the infantry, the fact that it could only be recruited from those parts of England which at that time acknowledged the authority of the Houses, and that in those counties Puritanism was especially rife, would naturally introduce into the ranks a considerable number of Puritans, whether Independent or not. The army, however, was certainly not formed on the principles which had guided Cromwell in the selection of his first troopers, and indeed it was impossible to select 30,000 men on the exclusive plan which had been found possible in the enlistment of a single troop or a single regiment. What chiefly – so far as the rank and file were concerned – distinguished the New Model from preceding armies was that it was regularly paid. Hitherto the soldiers had been dependent on intermittent Parliamentary grants, or still more intermittent efforts of local committees. All this was now to be changed. A regular taxation was assessed on the counties for the support of the new army, and the constant pay thus secured was likely to put an end to the desertions on a large scale which had afflicted former commanders, thus rendering it possible to bring the new force under rigorous discipline, a discipline which punished even more severely offences against morality than those directed against military efficiency.

The higher the state of discipline the more important is the selection of officers; and here at least Cromwell's views had full scope. On the mere ground that it was desirable to place command in the hands of those who were most strenuous in the prosecution of the war, the preference was certain to be given to men who were least hampered by a desire to make terms with an unbeaten King – in other words, to Independents rather than to Presbyterians. In another way Cromwell's ideas were carried out. "I had rather," he had once said, "have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed." There was no distinction of social rank amongst the officers of the New Model. Amongst them were men of old families such as Fairfax and Montague, side by side with Hewson, the cobbler, and Pride, the drayman. If ever the army should be drawn within the circle of politics, much would follow from the adoption of a system of promotion which grounded itself on military efficiency alone.

For the present the services of the new army were required solely in the field. On April 2 °Cromwell, who was permitted to retain his commission forty days after the ordinance had passed, and whose allotted term had not yet expired, was sent with his cavalry to sweep round the King's head-quarters at Oxford in order to break up his arrangements for sending out the artillery needed by Rupert if he was again to take the field. Cromwell's movement was completely successful. He not only scattered a Royalist force at Islip, and captured Blechington House by sheer bluff, but he swept up all the draught horses on which Charles had counted for the removal of the guns, and thus incapacitated the enemy from immediate action. Rupert had to wait patiently for some time before he could leave his quarters.

It is seldom that men realise at first the necessary consequences of an important change, and, on this occasion, the Committee of Both Kingdoms and the Parliament itself were slow to discover that, if the new army was to achieve victory, its movements must be guided, not by politicians at Westminster, but by the general in the field. The first act of the Committee was to send Fairfax with eleven thousand men to the relief of Taunton, where Blake, who not long before had defended Lyme against all the efforts of the Royalists to take it, was now holding out to the last with scanty protection from the fortifications he had improvised. The Committee's orders, necessary perhaps at first, were persisted in even after it was known that Charles had been joined at Oxford by the field army which had hitherto protected the besiegers of Taunton in the West, and that, whilst a much smaller force than eleven thousand men would be now sufficient to raise the siege, every soldier that could be spared was needed farther east. The next blunder of the Committee was even worse. Charles had marched to the North with all the force he could gather, in the hope of undoing the consequences of Marston Moor. If there was one lesson which the Committee ought to have learnt from the campaign of the preceding year it was that it is useless to besiege towns whilst the enemy's army remains unbeaten in the field. Yet when every military consideration spoke with no uncertain voice for the policy of following up Charles's army without remission till it had been defeated, the sage Committee-men at Westminster ordered Fairfax to besiege Oxford. Charles, at liberty to direct his movements where he would, had been deflected from his course, and on May 31 had stormed Leicester. The news shook the Committee's resolution to keep the direction of the army in its own feeble hands. On June 2 it directed Fairfax to break up the siege of Oxford. On the 4th a petition from the London Common Council asked that, though the forty days during which Cromwell kept his appointment under the Self-Denying Ordinance had now elapsed, he might be placed at the head of a new army to be raised in the Eastern Association. Another petition from Fairfax's officers asked that he might be placed in the vacant lieutenant-generalship. The Commons agreed, but, for the present at least, the Lords withheld their consent. At a later time, when events had rendered refusal impossible, the Lords gave their consent to an appointment for which Cromwell was certainly not disqualified by anything in the Self-Denying Ordinance in the form in which they had allowed it to pass; considering that that Ordinance merely demanded the surrender of his commission, without imposing any bar to his reappointment.

When on June 14 the army under Fairfax found itself in presence of the King at Naseby, Cromwell was once more in command of the horse. As usual in those days the infantry was in the centre. On the two wings were the cavalry, that on the right under Cromwell in person, that on the left under Ireton. Ireton was driven back by Rupert, who, having learned nothing since his headlong charge at Edgehill, dashed in pursuit without a moment's thought for the fortunes of the remainder of the King's army. Cromwell, after driving off the horse opposed to him, drew rein, as he had done at Marston Moor, to watch the sway of the battle he had left behind him. Seeing his duty clear, he left three regiments to continue the pursuit, and with the remainder fell upon the Royalist infantry, and with the help of Fairfax's own foot destroyed or captured the whole body. Rupert returned too late to do anything but join Charles in his flight. Five thousand prisoners had been taken, of whom no less than five hundred were officers, while Charles's whole train of artillery remained in the hands of the victors. That Cromwell had contributed more than any other man to this crushing victory was beyond dispute.

Cromwell, as was his usual habit, ascribed this success to Divine aid. "I can say this of Naseby," he wrote, "that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of 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 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." No doubt, as has been said, Cromwell omitted to mention that the Parliamentary army had numbers on its side – not much less than 14,000, opposed to 7,500. But it was not the numerical superiority of the Parliamentarians which won the day. It did not enable Ireton to withstand Rupert, and the infantry in the centre was already giving way when Cromwell returned to assist it. It was the discipline rather than the numbers of Cromwell's horse aided by the superb generalship of their commander that gained the day. Cromwell, when he wrote of his soldiers as 'poor ignorant men,' was doubtless glancing back in thought at his own early criticism of the fugitives at Edgehill. The yeomen and peasants whom he had gathered round him owed much to discipline and leadership; but they owed much also to the belief embedded in their hearts that they were fighting in the cause of God.

After the victory at Naseby the issue of the struggle was practically decided. There was another fight at Langport, where Fairfax defeated a force with which Goring attempted to guard the western counties; but after this the war resolved itself into a succession of sieges which could end but in one way as Charles had no longer a field army to bring to the relief of Royalist garrisons. For some months Cromwell, sometimes in combination with Fairfax, sometimes in temporary command of a separate force, was untiring in the energy which he threw into his work. Charles was full of combinations which never resulted in practical advantage to his cause. At one time his hopes were set upon Montrose, who, after his brilliant victories, expected to bring an army of Highlanders to aid of the royal cause. At another time he looked with equal hopefulness to Glamorgan, who was to conduct an Irish army to England. Montrose's scheme was wrecked at Philiphaugh, and Glamorgan's concessions to the Irish Catholics were divulged and had to be disavowed. On March 31, 1646 Sir Jacob Astley bringing 3,000 men, the last Royalist force in existence, to the relief of Charles at Oxford, was forced to surrender at Stow-on-the-Wold. "You have done your work," said the veteran to his captors, "and may go play, unless you will fall out among yourselves." Though Oxford and Newark were still untaken, the end of the war was now a mere question of days.

"Honest men," wrote Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall soon after the victory of Naseby "served you faithfully in this action. Sir, they are trusty – I beseech you in the name of God, not to discourage them – I wish this action may beget thankfulness and humility in all that are concerned in it. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for." "All this," he continued three months later, in the same strain, after the storm of Bristol, "is none other than the work of God; he must be a very atheist that doth not acknowledge it. It may be thought that some praises are due to those gallant men of whose valour so much mention is made: – Their humble suit to you and all that have an interest in this blessing is that, in the remembrance of God's praises, they may be forgotten. It's their joy that they are instruments of God's glory and their country's good. It's their honour that God vouchsafes to use them… Sir, they that have been employed in this service know that faith and prayer obtained this city for you: I do not say ours only, but of the people of God with you and all England over, who have wrestled with God for a blessing in this very thing. Our desires are that God may be glorified by the same spirit of faith by which we ask all our sufficiency and have received it. It is meet that He have all the praise. Presbyterians, Independents, all had here the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere! All that believe have the real unity which is most glorious because inward and spiritual in the Body and to the Head. As for being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will, for peace sake, study and do as far as conscience will permit. And from brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other things, God hath put the sword in the Parliament's hands for the terror of evil-doers and the praises of them that do well. If any plead exemption from that, he knows not the Gospel; if any would wring that out of your hands, or steal it from you, under what pretence soever, I hope they shall do it without effect."