THE CIVIL WAR
1642-1646
[Sidenote: Edgehill.]
The breaking off of negotiations was followed on both sides by
preparations for immediate war. Hampden, Pym, and Holles became the
guiding spirits of a Committee of Public Safety which was created by
Parliament as its administrative organ. On the twelfth of July 1642 the
Houses ordered that an army should be raised "for the defence of the
king and the Parliament," and appointed the Earl of Essex as its
captain-general and the Earl of Bedford as its general of horse. The
force soon rose to twenty thousand foot and four thousand horse; and
English and Scotch officers were drawn from the Low Countries. The
confidence on the Parliamentary side was great. "We all thought one
battle would decide," Baxter confessed after the first encounter; for
the king was almost destitute of money and arms, and in spite of his
strenuous efforts to raise recruits he was embarrassed by the reluctance
of his own adherents to begin the struggle. Resolved however to force on
a contest, he raised the Royal Standard at Nottingham "on the evening of
a very stormy and tempestuous day," the twenty-second of August, but the
country made no answer to his appeal. Meanwhile Lord Essex, who had
quitted London amidst the shouts of a great multitude with orders from
the Parliament to follow the king, "and by battle or other way rescue
him from his perfidious councillors and restore him to Parliament," was
mustering his army at Northampton. Charles had but a handful of men, and
the dash of a few regiments of horse would have ended the war; but Essex
shrank from a decisive stroke, and trusted to reduce the king peacefully
to submission by a show of force. But while Essex lingered Charles fell
back at the close of September on Shrewsbury, and the whole face of
affairs suddenly changed. Catholics and Royalists rallied fast to his
standard, and the royal force became strong enough to take the field.
With his usual boldness Charles resolved to march at once on the capital
and force the Parliament to submit by dint of arms. But the news of his
march roused Essex from his inactivity. He had advanced to Worcester to
watch the king's proceedings; and he now hastened to protect London. On
the twenty-third of October 1642 the two armies fell in with one
another on the field of Edgehill, near Banbury. The encounter was a
surprise, and the battle which followed was little more than a confused
combat of horse. At its outset the desertion of Sir Faithful Fortescue
with a whole regiment threw the Parliamentary forces into disorder,
while the Royalist horse on either wing drove their opponents from the
field; but the reserve of Lord Essex broke the foot, which formed the
centre of the king's line, and though his nephew, Prince Rupert, brought
back his squadrons in time to save Charles from capture or flight, the
night fell on a drawn battle.
[Sidenote: Charles at Oxford.]
The moral advantage however rested with the king. Essex had learned that
his troopers were no match for the Cavaliers, and his withdrawal to
Warwick left open the road to the capital. Rupert pressed for an instant
march on London, where the approach of the king's forces had roused
utter panic. But the proposal found stubborn opponents among the
moderate Royalists, who dreaded the complete triumph of Charles as much
as his defeat; and their pressure forced the king to pause for a time at
Oxford, where he was received with uproarious welcome. When the
cowardice of its garrison delivered Reading to Rupert's horse, and his
daring capture of Brentford in November drew the royal army in his
support almost to the walls of the capital, the panic of the Londoners
was already over, and the junction of their train-bands with the army
of Essex forced Charles to fall back again on his old quarters. But
though the Parliament rallied quickly from the blow of Edgehill, the
war, as its area widened through the winter, went steadily for the king.
The fortification of Oxford gave him a firm hold on the midland
counties; while the balance of the two parties in the North was
overthrown by the march of the Earl of Newcastle, with a force he had
raised in Northumberland, upon York. Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary
leader in that county, was thrown back by Newcastle's attack on the
manufacturing towns of the West Riding, where Puritanism found its
stronghold; and the arrival of the queen in February 1643 with arms from
Holland encouraged the royal army to push its scouts across the Trent,
and threaten the eastern counties, which held firmly for the Parliament.
The stress of the war was shown by the vigorous efforts of the Houses.
Some negotiations which had gone on into the spring were broken off by
the old demand that the king should return to his Parliament; London was
fortified; and a tax of two millions a year was laid on the districts
which adhered to the Parliamentary cause.
[Sidenote: The Cornish rising.]
In the spring of 1643 Lord Essex, whose army had been freshly equipped,
was ordered to advance upon Oxford. But though the king held himself
ready to fall back on the West, the Earl shrank from again risking his
raw army in an encounter. He confined himself to the recapture of
Reading, and to a month of idle encampment round Brill. But while
disease thinned his ranks and the Royalists beat up his quarters the war
went more and more for the king. The inaction of Essex enabled Charles
to send a part of his small force at Oxford to strengthen a Royalist
rising in the West. Nowhere was the royal cause to take so brave or
noble a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart from the
general life of England: cut off from it not only by differences of
blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its people, who clung
with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, and suffered their
fidelity to the Crown to determine their own. They had as yet done
little more than keep the war out of their own county; but the march of
a small Parliamentary force under Lord Stamford upon Launceston forced
them into action. In May 1643 a little band of Cornishmen gathered round
the chivalrous Sir Bevil Greenvil, "so destitute of provisions that the
best officers had but a biscuit a day," and with only a handful of
powder for the whole force; but, starving and outnumbered as they were,
they scaled the steep rise of Stratton Hill, sword in hand, and drove
Stamford back on Exeter with a loss of two thousand men, his ordnance
and baggage-train. Sir Ralph Hopton, the best of the Royalist generals,
took the command of their army as it advanced into Somerset, and drew
the stress of the war into the West. Essex despatched a picked force
under Sir William Waller to check their advance; but Somerset was
already lost ere he reached Bath, and the Cornishmen stormed his strong
position on Lansdowne Hill in the teeth of his guns. The stubborn fight
robbed the victors of their leaders; Hopton was wounded, Greenvil slain,
and with them fell the two heroes of the little army, Sir Nicholas
Slanning and Sir John Trevanion, "both young, neither of them above
eight-and-twenty, of entire friendship to one another, and to Sir Bevil
Greenvil." Waller too, beaten as he was, hung on their weakened force as
it moved for aid upon Oxford, and succeeded in cooping up the foot in
Devizes. But in July the horse broke through his lines; and joining a
force which Charles had sent to their relief, turned back, and dashed
Waller's army to pieces in a fresh victory on Roundway Down.
[Sidenote: Hampden and the War.]
The Cornish rising seemed to decide the fortune of the war; and the
succours which his queen was bringing him from the army of the North
determined Charles to make a fresh advance upon London. He was preparing
for this advance, when Rupert sallied from Oxford to beat up the
quarters of the army under Essex, which still remained encamped about
Thame. Foremost among this Parliamentary force were the "Greencoats" of
John Hampden. From the first outbreak of warfare Hampden had shown the
same energy in the field that he had shown in the Parliament. He had
contributed two thousand pounds to the loan raised by the Houses for the
equipment of an army. He had raised a regiment from among his own
tenantry, with the parson of Great Hampden for their chaplain. The men
wore his livery of green, as those of Holles or Brooke or Mandeville
wore their leaders' liveries of red, and purple, and blue; the only sign
of their common soldiership being the orange scarf, the colour of Lord
Essex, which all wore over their uniform. From the first the
"Greencoats" had been foremost in the fray. While Essex lay idly
watching the gathering of an army round the king, Hampden was already
engaged with the royal outposts. It was the coming up of his men that
turned the day at Edgehill; and that again saved Lord Brooke from
destruction in the repulse of the royal forces at Brentford. It was
Hampden's activity that saved Reading from a second capture. During the
gloomy winter, when the fortunes of the Houses seemed at their worst,
his energy redoubled. His presence was as necessary in the Parliament as
in the field; and he was continually on the road between London and
Westminster. It was during these busy months that he brought into
practical shape a league which was destined to be the mainstay of the
Parliamentary force. Nowhere was the Puritan feeling so strong as in the
counties about London, in his own Buckinghamshire, in Hertfordshire,
Bedfordshire, and the more easterly counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge,
and Northampton. Hampden's influence as well as that of his cousin,
Oliver Cromwell, who was already active in the war, was bent to bind
these shires together in an association for the aid of the Parliament,
with a common force, a common fund for its support, and Lord Manchester
for its head. The association was at last brought about; and Hampden
turned his energies to reinforcing the army of Essex.
[Sidenote: Rupert's raid.]
The army was strengthened; but no efforts could spur its leader into
activity. Essex had learned his trade in the Thirty Years War; and like
most professional soldiers he undervalued the worth of untrained levies.
As a great noble, too, he shrank from active hostilities against the
king. He believed that in the long run the want of money and of men
would force Charles to lay down his arms, and to come to a peaceful
understanding with the Parliament. To such a fair adjustment of the
claims of both a victory of the Parliament would, he thought, be as
fatal as a victory of the king. Against this policy of inaction Hampden
struggled in vain. It was to no purpose that he urged Essex to follow
Charles after Edgehill, or to attack him after his repulse before
Brentford. It was equally to no purpose that he urged at the opening of
1643 an attack upon Oxford. Essex drew nearer to the town indeed; but
at the news of the queen's junction with her husband, and of the
successes of the Cornishmen, he fell back to his old cantonment about
Thame. Hampden's knowledge of the country warned him of danger from the
loose disposition of the army, and he urged Essex to call in the distant
outposts and strengthen his line; but his warnings were unheeded. So
carelessly were the troops scattered about that Rupert resolved to beat
up their quarters; and leaving Oxford in the afternoon of Saturday, the
17th of June, he seized the bridge over the Thame at Chiselhampton, and
leaving a force of foot to secure his retreat, threw himself boldly with
his horsemen into the midst of the Parliamentary army. Essex with the
bulk of his men lay quietly sleeping a few miles to the northward at
Thame as Rupert struck in the darkness through the leafy lanes that led
to the Chilterns, and swooped on the villages that lay beneath their
slopes. At three in the morning he fell on the troops quartered at
Postcombe, then on those at Chinnor. Here some fifty were slain, and
more taken prisoners, as they sprang half-naked from their beds. The
village was fired, and Rupert again called his men together to pursue
their foray. But the early summer sun had now risen; it was too late to
attack Wycombe as he had purposed; and the horsemen fell back again
through Tetsworth to secure their retreat across the Thame.
[Sidenote: Death of Hampden.]
It was time to think of retreat, for Hampden was already in pursuit. He
had slept at Watlington; but the tidings of the foray in the village
hard by roused him from slumber, and he at once despatched a trooper to
Essex to bid the Earl send foot and horse and cut off the Prince from
Chiselhampton bridge. Essex objected and delayed till Hampden's patience
broke down. The thought of his own village blazing in that Sunday dawn,
his own friends and tenants stretched dead in the village streets,
carried him beyond all thought of prudence. A troop of horse volunteered
to follow him; and few as they were, he pushed at once with them for the
bridge. The morning was now far gone; and Rupert had reached Chalgrove
Field, a broad space without enclosures, where he had left his foot
drawn up amidst the standing corn to secure his retreat. To Hampden the
spot was a memorable one; it was there, if we trust a Royalist legend,
that "he first mustered and drew up men in arms to rebel against the
king." But he had little time for memories such as these. His resolve
was to hold Rupert by charge after charge till Essex could come up; and
the arrival of these troops of horse with some dragoons enabled him to
attack. The attack was roughly beaten off, and the assailants thrown
into confusion, but Hampden rallied the broken troops and again led them
on. Again they were routed, and Rupert drew off across the river without
further contest. It was indeed only the courage of Hampden that had
fired his little troop to face the Cavaliers; and he could fire them no
more. In the last charge a shot struck him in the shoulder and disabled
his sword-arm. His head bending down, his hands resting on his horse's
neck, he rode off the field before the action was done, "a thing he
never used to do." The story of the country-side told how the wounded
man rode first towards Pyrton. It was the village where he had wedded
the wife he loved so well, and beyond it among the beech-trees of the
Chilterns lay his own house of Hampden. But it was not there that he was
to die. A party of Royalists drove him back from Pyrton, and turning
northwards he paused for a moment at a little brook that crossed his
path, then gathering strength leaped it, and rode almost fainting to
Thame. At first the surgeons gave hopes of his recovery, but hope was
soon over. For six days he lay in growing agony, sending counsel after
counsel to the Parliament, till on the twenty-fourth of June the end
drew near. "O Lord, save my country," so ended Hampden's prayers; "O
Lord, be merciful to----!" here his speech failed him, and he fell back
lifeless on his bed. With arms reversed and muffled flags, his own men
bore him through the lanes and woods he knew so well to the little
church that still stands unchanged beside his home. On the floor of its
chancel the brasses of his father and his grandfather mark their graves.
A step nearer to the altar, unmarked by brass or epitaph, lies the
grave in which, with bitter tears and cries, his greencoats laid the
body of the leader whom they loved. "Never were heard such piteous cries
at the death of one man as at Master Hampden's." With him indeed all
seemed lost. But bitter as were their tears, a noble faith lifted these
Puritans out of despair. As they bore him to his grave they sang, in the
words of the ninetieth psalm, how fleeting in the sight of the Divine
Eternity is the life of man. But as they turned away the yet nobler
words of the forty-third psalm broke from their lips, as they prayed
that the God who had smitten them would send out anew His light and His
truth, that they might lead them and bring them to His holy hill. "Why
art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, which is the help of my
countenance, and my God!"
[Sidenote: Relief of Gloucester.]
To Royalists as to Parliamentarians the death of Hampden seemed an omen
of ruin to the cause he loved. Disaster followed disaster: Essex, more
and more anxious for a peace, fell back on Uxbridge; while a cowardly
surrender of Bristol to Prince Rupert gave Charles the second city of
the kingdom, and the mastery of the West. The news of the loss of
Bristol fell on the Parliament "like a sentence of death." The Lords
debated nothing but proposals of peace. London itself was divided. "A
great multitude of the wives of substantial citizens" clamoured at the
door of the Commons for peace; and a flight of six of the few peers who
remained at Westminster to the camp at Oxford proved the general despair
of the Parliament's success. From this moment however the firmness of
the Parliamentary leaders began slowly to reverse the fortunes of the
war. If Hampden was gone, Pym remained; and while weaker men despaired
Pym was toiling night and day to organize a future victory. The spirit
of the Commons was worthy of their great leader: and Waller was received
on his return from Roundway Hill "as if he had brought the king prisoner
with him." The Committee of Public Safety were lavish of men and money.
Essex was again reinforced. The new army of the associated counties,
which had been placed under the command of Lord Manchester, was ordered
to check the progress of Newcastle in the North. But it was in the West
that the danger was greatest. Prince Maurice continued his brother
Rupert's career of success, and his conquest of Barnstaple and Exeter
secured Devon for the king. Gloucester alone interrupted the
communications between the royal forces in Bristol and those in the
North; and at the opening of August Charles moved against the city with
hope of a speedy surrender. But the gallant resistance of the town
called Essex to its relief. It was reduced to a single barrel of powder
when the Earl's approach forced Charles to raise the siege on the sixth
of September; and the Puritan army fell steadily back again on London
after an indecisive engagement near Newbury, in which Lord Falkland
fell, "ingeminating 'Peace, peace!'" and the London train-bands flung
Rupert's horsemen roughly off their front of pikes.
[Sidenote: League with Scotland.]
The relief of Gloucester proved to be the turning-point of the war. It
was not merely that Charles had met with a repulse; it was that he had
missed a victory, and that in the actual posture of affairs nothing but
a great victory could have saved the king. For the day which witnessed
the triumphant return of Essex witnessed the solemn taking of the
Covenant. Pym had resolved at last to fling the Scotch sword into the
wavering balance; and in the darkest hour of the Parliament's cause Sir
Harry Vane had been despatched to Edinburgh to arrange the terms on
which the aid of Scotland would be given. First amongst these terms
stood the demand of a "unity in Religion"; an adoption, in other words,
of the Presbyterian system by the Church of England. To such a change
Pym had been steadily opposed. He had even withstood Hampden when, after
the passing of the bill for the expulsion of bishops from the House of
Peers, Hampden had pressed for the abolition of episcopacy. But events
had moved so rapidly since the earlier debates on Church government
that some arrangement of this kind had become a necessity. The bishops
to a man, and the bulk of the clergy whose bent was purely episcopal,
had joined the royal cause, and were being expelled from their livings
as "delinquents." Some new system of Church government was imperatively
called for by the religious necessities of the country; and though Pym
and the leading statesmen were still in opinion moderate Episcopalians,
the growing force of Presbyterianism, and still more the absolute need
of Scottish aid and the needs of the war, forced them to seek such a
system in the adoption of the Scotch discipline.
[Sidenote: England swears to the Covenant.]
Scotland, for its part, saw that the triumph of the Parliament was
necessary for its own security. Whatever difficulties stood in the way
of Vane's wary and rapid negotiations were removed in fact by the policy
of the king. While the Parliament looked for aid to the North, Charles
had been seeking assistance from the Irish rebels. Wild tales of the
supposed massacre had left them the objects of a vengeful hate unknown
before in England, but with the king they were simply counters in his
game of kingcraft. Their rising had now grown into an organized
rebellion. In October 1642 an Assembly of the Confederate Catholics
gathered at Kilkenny. Eleven Catholic bishops, fourteen peers, and two
hundred and twenty-six commoners, of English and Irish blood alike,
formed this body, which assumed every prerogative of sovereignty,
communicated with foreign powers, and raised an army to vindicate Irish
independence. In spite of this Charles had throughout the year been
intriguing with the confederates through Lord Glamorgan; and though his
efforts to secure their direct aid were for some time fruitless he
succeeded in September in bringing about an armistice between their
forces and the army under the Earl of Ormond which had as yet held them
in check. The truce left this army at the king's disposal for service in
England; while it secured him as the price of this armistice a pledge
from the Catholics that they would support his cause. With their aid
Charles thought himself strong enough to strike a blow at the Government
in Edinburgh; and the Irish Catholics promised to support by their
landing in Argyleshire a rising of the Highlanders under Montrose. None
of the king's schemes proved so fatal to his cause as these. On their
discovery officer after officer in his own army flung down their
commissions, the peers who had fled to Oxford fled back again to London,
and the Royalist reaction in the Parliament itself came utterly to an
end. Scotland, anxious for its own safety, hastened to sign the
Covenant; and on the twenty-fifth of September 1643 the Commons, "with
uplifted hands," swore in St. Margaret's church to observe it. They
pledged themselves to "bring the Churches of God in the three Kingdoms
to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of
faith, form of Church government, direction for worship, and
catechizing; that we, and our posterity after us, may as brethren live
in faith and love, and the Lord may delight to live in the midst of us";
to extirpate Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism, and profaneness; to
"preserve the rights and privileges of the Parliament, and the liberties
of the Kingdom"; to punish malignants and opponents of reformation in
Church and State; to "unite the two Kingdoms in a firm peace and union
to all posterity." The Covenant ended with a solemn acknowledgement of
national sin, and a vow of reformation. "Our true, unfeigned purpose,
desire, and endeavour for ourselves and all others under our power and
charge, both in public and private, in all duties we owe to God and man,
is to amend our lives, and each to go before another in the example of a
real reformation."
[Sidenote: Pym's plan for 1644.]
The conclusion of the Covenant had been the last work of Pym. He died on
December 6, 1643, and a "Committee of the Two Kingdoms" which was
entrusted after his death with the conduct of the war and of foreign
affairs did their best to carry out the plans he had formed for the
coming year. The vast scope of these plans bears witness to his amazing
ability. Three strong armies, comprising a force of fifty thousand men,
appeared in the field in the spring of 1644, ready to co-operate with
the Scots in the coming campaign. The presence of the Scottish army
indeed changed the whole face of the war. With Lord Leven at its head,
it crossed the Border in January "in a great frost and snow"; and
Newcastle, who was hoping to be reinforced by detachments from Ormond's
army, was forced to hurry northward single-handed to arrest its march.
He succeeded in checking Leven at Sunderland, but his departure freed
the hands of Fairfax, who in spite of defeat still clung to the
West-Riding. With the activity of a true soldier, Fairfax threw himself
on the forces from Ormond's army who had landed at Chester, and after
cutting them to pieces at Nantwich on the twenty-fifth of January,
marched as rapidly back upon York. Here he was joined by the army of the
Associated Counties, a force of fourteen thousand men under the command
of Lord Manchester, but in which Cromwell's name was becoming famous as
a leader. The two armies at once drove the force left behind by
Newcastle to take shelter within the walls of York, and formed the siege
of that city. The danger of York called Newcastle back to its relief;
but he was too weak to effect it, and the only issue of his return was
the junction of the Scots with its besiegers. The plans of Pym were now
rapidly developed. While Manchester and Fairfax united with Lord Leven
under the walls of York, Waller, who with the army of the West had held
Prince Maurice in check in Dorsetshire, marched quickly to a junction
with Essex, whose army had been watching Charles; and the two forces
formed a blockade of Oxford.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR.]
[Sidenote: Marston Moor.]
Charles was thrown suddenly on the defensive. The Irish troops, on which
he counted as a balance to the Scots, had been cut to pieces by Fairfax
or by Waller, and both in the North and in the South he seemed utterly
overmatched. But he was far from despairing. Before the advance of Essex
he had answered Newcastle's cry for aid by despatching Prince Rupert
from Oxford to gather forces on the Welsh border; and the brilliant
partizan, after breaking the sieges of Newark and Lathom House, burst
over the Lancashire hills into Yorkshire, slipped by the Parliamentary
army, and made his way untouched into York. But the success of this feat
of arms tempted him to a fresh act of daring. He resolved on a decisive
battle; and on the second of July 1644 a discharge of musketry from the
two armies as they faced each other on Marston Moor brought on, as
evening gathered, a disorderly engagement. On the one flank a charge of
the king's horse broke that of the Scotch; on the other, Cromwell's
brigade won as complete a success over Rupert's troopers. "God made them
as stubble to our swords," wrote the general at the close of the day;
but in the heat of victory he called back his men from the chase to
back Manchester in his attack on the Royalist foot, and to rout their
other wing of horse as it returned breathless from pursuing the Scots.
Nowhere had the fighting been so fierce. A young Puritan who lay dying
on the field told Cromwell as he bent over him that one thing lay on his
spirit. "I asked him what it was," Cromwell wrote afterwards. "He told
me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner
of His enemies."
[Sidenote: Newbury.]
At nightfall all was over; and the Royalist cause in the North had
perished at a blow. Newcastle fled over sea: York surrendered, and
Rupert, with hardly a man at his back, rode southward to Oxford. The
blow was the more terrible that it fell on Charles at a moment when his
danger in the South was being changed into triumph by a series of
brilliant and unexpected successes. After a month's siege the king had
escaped from Oxford; had waited till Essex, vexed at having missed his
prey, had marched to attack what he looked on as the main Royalist
force, that under Maurice in the West; and then, turning fiercely on
Waller at Cropredy Bridge, had driven him back broken to London, two
days before the battle of Marston Moor. Charles followed up his success
by hurrying in the track of Essex, whom he hoped to crush between his
own force and that under Maurice; and when, by a fatal error, Essex
plunged into Cornwall, where the country was hostile, the king hemmed
him in among the hills, and drew his lines tightly round his army. On
the second of September the whole body of the foot were forced to
surrender at his mercy, while the horse cut their way through the
besiegers, and Essex himself fled by sea to London. Nor was this the
only reverse of fortune which brought hope to the royal cause. The day
on which the army of Essex surrendered to the king was marked by a
Royalist triumph in Scotland which promised to undo what Marston Moor
had done. The Irish Catholics fulfilled their covenant with Charles by
the landing of Irish soldiers in Argyle; and as had long since been
arranged, Montrose, throwing himself into the Highlands, called the
clans to arms. Flinging his new force on that of the Covenanters at
Tippermuir, he gained a victory which enabled him to occupy Perth, to
sack Aberdeen, and to spread terror to Edinburgh. The news at once told.
The Scottish army in England refused to march further from its own
country; and used the siege of Newcastle as a pretext to remain near the
Border. With the army of Essex annihilated and the Scots at a safe
distance, no obstacle seemed to lie between the king and London; and as
he came up from the West Charles again marched on the capital. But if
the Scots were detained at Newcastle the rest of the victors at Marston
Moor lay in his path at Newbury; and their force was strengthened by the
soldiers who had surrendered in Cornwall, but whom the energy of the
Parliament had again brought into the field. On the twenty-seventh of
October Charles fell on this army under Lord Manchester's command; but
the charges of the Royalists failed to break the Parliamentary
squadrons, and the soldiers of Essex wiped away the shame of their
defeat by flinging themselves on the cannon they had lost, and bringing
them back in triumph to their lines. Cromwell seized the moment of
victory, and begged hard to be suffered to charge with his single
brigade. But Manchester shrank like Essex from a crowning victory over
the king. Charles was allowed to withdraw his army to Oxford, and even
to reappear unchecked in the field of his defeat.
[Sidenote: Cromwell.]
The quarrel of Cromwell with Lord Manchester at Newbury was destined to
give a new colour to the war. Pym, in fact, had hardly been borne to his
grave in Westminster Abbey before England instinctively recognized a
successor of yet greater genius in the victor of Marston Moor. Born in
the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, the child of a cadet of the
great house of the Cromwells of Hinchinbrook, and of kin, through their
marriages, with Hampden and St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his
father's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family
estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have
seen his mood during the years of personal rule, as he dwelt in
"prolonging" and "blackness" amidst fancies of coming death, the
melancholy which formed the ground of his nature feeding itself on the
inaction of the time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the
tyranny was over. His father had sat, with three of his uncles, in the
later Parliaments of Elizabeth. Oliver had himself been returned to that
of 1628, and the town of Cambridge sent him as its representative to the
Short Parliament as to the Long. It is in the latter that a courtier,
Sir Philip Warwick, gives us our first glimpse of his actual appearance.
"I came into the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman
speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain
cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His
linen was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of
blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar.
His hat was without a hat-band. His stature was of a good size; his
sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swoln and reddish; his
voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour."
[Sidenote: The Ironsides.]
He was already "much 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
honour"; 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
in later times were 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. . . . I have little 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 twelve pence." Nor was
his choice of "men of religion" the only innovation Cromwell introduced
into his new regiment. The social traditions 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 honour 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 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 honour a gentleman that is so indeed!" he ends, with
a return to his more common mood of feeling, but the outburst was none
the less a characteristic one.
[Sidenote: The Independents.]
The same practical temper broke out in a more startling innovation.
Against dissidents from the legal worship of the Church the
Presbyterians were as bitter as Laud himself. But Nonconformity was
rising into proportions which made its claim of toleration, of the
freedom of religious worship, one of the problems of the time. Its rise
had been a sudden one. The sects who rejected in Elizabeth's day the
conception of a National Church, and insisted on the right of each
congregation to freedom of worship, had all but disappeared at the close
of the queen's reign. Some of the dissidents, as in the notable instance
of the congregation that produced the Pilgrim Fathers, had found a
refuge in Holland; but the bulk had been driven by persecution to a
fresh conformity with the Established Church. As soon however as Abbot's
primacy promised a milder rule, the Separatist refugees began to venture
timidly back again to England. During their exile in Holland the main
body had contented themselves with the free developement of their system
of independent congregations, each forming in itself a complete Church,
and to these the name of Independents attached itself at a later time. A
small part however had drifted into a more marked severance in doctrine
from the Established Church, especially in their belief of the necessity
of adult baptism, a belief from which their obscure congregation at
Leyden became known as that of the Baptists. Both of these sects
gathered a Church in London in the middle of James's reign, but the
persecuting zeal of Laud prevented any spread of their opinions under
that of his successor; and it was not till their numbers were suddenly
increased by the return of a host of emigrants from New England, with
Hugh Peters at their head, on the opening of the Long Parliament, that
the Congregational or Independent body began to attract attention.
[Sidenote: The Parliament and Uniformity.]
Lilburne and Burton declared themselves adherents of what was called
"the New England way"; and a year later saw in London alone the rise of
"fourscore congregations of several sectaries," as Bishop Hall
scornfully tells us, "instructed by guides fit for them, cobblers,
tailors, felt-makers, and such-like trash." But little religious weight
however could be attributed as yet to the Congregational movement.
Baxter at this time had not heard of the existence of any Independents.
Milton in his earlier pamphlets shows no sign of their influence. Of the
hundred and five ministers present in the Westminster Assembly only five
were Congregational in sympathy, and these were all returned refugees
from Holland. Among the one hundred and twenty London ministers in 1643,
but three were suspected of leaning towards the Sectaries. The struggle
with Charles in fact at its outset only threw new difficulties in the
way of religious freedom. The great majority of the Parliament were
averse from any alterations in the constitution or doctrine of the
Church itself; and it was only the refusal of the bishops to accept any
diminution of their power and revenues, the growth of a party hostile to
Episcopalian government, the necessity for purchasing the aid of the
Scots by a union in religion as in politics, and above all the urgent
need of constructing some new ecclesiastical organization in the place
of the older organization which had become impossible from the political
attitude of the bishops, that forced on the two Houses the adoption of
the Covenant. But the change to a Presbyterian system of Church
government seemed at that time of little import to the bulk of
Englishmen. The dogma of the necessity of bishops was held by few; and
the change was generally regarded with approval as one which brought the
Church of England nearer to that of Scotland, and to the reformed
Churches of the Continent. But whatever might be the change in its
administration, no one imagined that it had ceased to be the Church of
England, or that it had parted with its right to exact conformity to its
worship from the nation at large. The Tudor theory of its relation to
the State, of its right to embrace all Englishmen within its pale, and
to dictate what should be their faith and form of worship, remained
utterly unquestioned by any man of note. The sentiments on which such a
theory rested indeed for its main support, the power of historical
tradition, the association of "dissidence" with danger to the State, the
strong English instinct of order, the as strong English dislike of
"innovations," with the abhorrence of "indifferency" as a sign of
lukewarmness in matters of religion, had only been intensified by the
earlier incidents of the struggle with the king.
[Sidenote: Growth of dissidence.]
The Parliament therefore was steadily pressing on the new system of
ecclesiastical government in the midst of the troubles of the war. An
Assembly of Divines, which was called together in 1643 at Westminster,
and which sat in the Jerusalem Chamber during the five years which
followed, was directed to revise the Articles, to draw up a Confession
of Faith, and a Directory of Public Worship; and these with a scheme of
Church government, a scheme only distinguished from that of Scotland by
the significant addition of a lay court of superior appeal set by
Parliament over the whole system of Church courts and assemblies, were
accepted by the Houses and embodied in a series of Ordinances. But while
the Divines were drawing up their platform of uniform belief and
worship, dissidence was growing fast into a religious power. In the
terrible agony of the struggle against Charles individual conviction
became a stronger force than religious tradition. Theological
speculation took an unprecedented boldness from the temper of the times.
The shock of war had broken the bonds of custom, and given a violent
impulse to the freest thought. "Behold now this vast city!" cried Milton
from London, "a city of refuge, the mansionhouse of liberty, encompassed
with God's protection! The shop of war hath not there more anvils and
hammers working to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered truth than there be pens and heads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new
notions and ideas wherewith to present us, as with their homage and
fealty, the approaching reformation; others as fast reading, trying all
things, according to the force of reason and convincement." The poet
himself had drifted from his Presbyterian standpoint and saw that "new
Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." The same change was going on
widely about him. Four years after the war had begun a horror-stricken
pamphleteer numbered sixteen religious sects as existing in defiance of
the law; and, widely as these bodies differed among themselves, all were
at one in repudiating any right of control in faith or in worship on the
part of the Church or its clergy. Above all, the class which became
specially infected with the spirit of religious freedom was the class to
whose zeal and vigour the Parliament was forced to look for success in
the struggle. Cromwell had wisely sought for good fighting men among the
"godly" farmers of the Associated Counties. But where he found such men
he found dissidents, men who were resolved to seek God after their own
fashion, and who were as hostile to the despotism of the National Church
as to the despotism of the king.
[Sidenote: Cromwell and the dissidents.]
The problem was a new and a difficult one; but Cromwell met it in the
same practical temper which showed itself in his dealings with the
social difficulties that stood in the way of military organization. The
sentiments of these farmers were not his own. 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 they were startled
and alarmed by his dealings with these dissident recruits. He met the
problem in his unspeculative fashion. He wanted good soldiers and good
men; and, if they were these, the Independent, the Baptist, the Leveller
found entry among his troops. "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." But
he was busier with his new regiment than with theories of Church and
State; and his horsemen 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
Cavaliers, and freed the eastern counties from all danger from
Newcastle's partizans. 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.
[Sidenote: Self-denying Ordinance.]
Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the creation of the
Ironsides; his military genius had displayed itself at Marston Moor.
Newbury 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 modelled, 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-denying Ordinance, which was introduced by Cromwell
and Vane, declared the tenure of military or civil offices incompatible
with a seat in either.
[Sidenote: The New Model.]
The long and bitter resistance which this measure met in either House
was justified at a later time by the political results that followed the
rupture of the tie which had hitherto bound the Army to the Parliament.
But the drift of public opinion was too strong to be withstood. The
country was weary of the mismanagement of the war, and demanded that
military necessities should be no longer set aside on political grounds.
The Ordinance passed the Houses on the third of April 1645, and its
passage brought about the retirement of Essex, Manchester, and Waller.
The new organization of the army went rapidly on through the spring
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. But behind Fairfax stood
Cromwell; and the principles on which Cromwell had formed his brigade
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." A
result hardly less notable was the youth of the officers. Amongst those
in high command there were few who, like Cromwell, had passed middle
age. Fairfax was but thirty-three years old, and most of his colonels
were even younger.
[Sidenote: The Army and the dissidents.]
Equally strange was the mixture of religions in its ranks. The
remonstrances of the Presbyterians had only forced Cromwell's mind
forward on the road of toleration. "The State, in choosing men to serve
it," he wrote before Marston Moor, "takes no notice of these opinions.
If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." Marston Moor
spurred him to press on the Parliament the need of at least "tolerating"
dissidents; and he succeeded in procuring the appointment of a
Committee of the Commons to find some means of effecting this. But the
conservative temper of the bulk of the Puritans was at last roused by
his efforts. "We detest and abhor," wrote the London clergy in 1645,
"the much endeavoured Toleration"; and the Corporation of London
petitioned Parliament to suppress all sects "without toleration." The
Parliament itself too remained steady on the conservative side. But the
fortunes of the war told for religious freedom. Essex and his
Presbyterians only marched from defeat to defeat. Though a large
proportion of the infantry was composed of pressed recruits, the cavalry
was for the most part strongly Puritan, and in that part of the army
especially, as in Cromwell's horsemen drawn from among the farmers from
the eastern counties, dissidence of every type had gained a firm
foothold.
[Sidenote: Negotiations at Uxbridge.]
Of the political and religious aspect of the New Model we shall have to
speak at a later time; as yet its energy was directed solely to "the
speedy and vigorous prosecution of the war." At the very moment when
Fairfax was ready for action the policy of Cromwell was aided by the
policy of the king. From the hour when Newbury marked the breach between
the peace and war parties in the Parliament, and when the last became
identified with the partizans of religious liberty, the Scotch
Commissioners and the bulk of the Commons had seen that their one
chance of hindering what they looked on as revolution in Church and
State lay in pressing for fresh negotiations with Charles. These were
opened at Uxbridge, and prolonged through the winter; but the hopes of
concession which the king held out were suddenly withdrawn in the spring
of 1645. He saw, as he thought, the Parliamentary army dissolved and
ruined by its new modelling at an instant when news came from Scotland
of fresh successes on the part of Montrose, and of his overthrow of the
troops under Argyle's command in a victory at 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." He pressed Charles to
advance to the Scottish border, where a junction of their armies might
still suffice to crush any force the Parliament could bring against
them. The party of war at once gained the ascendant in the royal
councils. The negotiations at Uxbridge were broken off, and in May
Charles opened his campaign by a march to the north.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF NASEBY.]
[Sidenote: Naseby.]
At first all went well for the king. 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, was
forced to hurry on his track. Cromwell, who had been suffered by the
House to retain his command for a few days in spite of the Ordinance,
joined Fairfax as he drew near the king, and his arrival was greeted by
loud shouts of welcome from the troops. On the fourteenth of June 1645
the two armies met near Naseby, to the north-west 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 as a soldier the success of his
newly-drilled troops, though his religious enthusiasm swept away doubt
in the assurance of victory. "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 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
nought 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 king's 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; and only two thousand followed the king in his headlong
flight from the field.
[Sidenote: Close of the War.]
The war was ended at a blow. While Charles wandered helplessly along the
Welsh border in search of fresh forces, Fairfax marched rapidly on the
south-west, where an organized royal force alone existed; routed
Goring's force at Langport, in Somersetshire; broke up the Royalist
army; and in three weeks was master to the Land's End. 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 to the Parliamentary army, and the dispersion
of the last force Charles could gather from Wales in an attempt to
relieve Chester, were followed in September 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, who was
sweeping over the southern counties to trample out the last trace of
resistance, "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 loyalty such as this Charles was utterly unworthy. The
seizure of his papers at Naseby had hardly disclosed his earlier
intrigues with the Irish Catholics when the Parliament was able to
reveal to England a fresh treaty with them, which purchased no longer
their neutrality, but their aid, by the simple concession of every
demand they had made. The shame was without profit, for whatever aid
Ireland might have given came too late to be of service. The spring of
1646 saw the few troops who still clung to Charles surrounded and routed
at Stow. "You have done your work now," their leader, Sir Jacob Astley,
said bitterly to his conquerors, "and may go to play, unless you fall
out among yourselves."