CHAPTER VII

Once more we return to England and take up the thread of the army's history within the kingdom. Of the reign of James the First there is little to be recorded except that at its very outset the Statute of Philip and Mary for the regulation of the Militia was repealed, and the military organisation of the country based once more on the Statute of Winchester. James was not fond of soldiers, and military progress was not to be expected of such a man. Enough has already been seen of his methods through his dealings with the Low Countries, and there is no occasion to dwell longer on the first British king of the House of Stuart.
1625.

Charles the First was more ambitious, and sufficiently proud of the English soldier to preserve the ancient English drum-march.[154] Soon after the final breach with Spain he imbibed from Buckingham the idea of a raid on the Spanish coast after the Elizabethan model, which eventually took shape in the expedition to Cadiz. Of all the countless mismanaged enterprises in our history this seems on the whole to have been the very worst. There was abundance of trained soldiers in England who had learned their duty in the Low Countries; and Edward Cecil, he whom we saw some few years back in command of the cavalry at Nieuport, begged that liberal offers might be made to induce them to serve. Officers again could be procured from the Low Countries, and therefore there should have been no difficulty in organising an excellent body of men. In[192] the matter of arms, however, though English cannon was highly esteemed, Charles was forced to purchase what he needed from Holland, which was a sad reflection on our national enterprise. Accordingly over a hundred officers were recalled from Holland; and two thousand recruits were collected, to be sent in exchange for the same number of veterans from the Dutch service. Eight thousand men were then pressed for service in various parts of England, and the whole of them poured, without the least preparation to receive them, into Plymouth, where they gained for themselves the name of the plagues of England. Sir John Ogle, a veteran who had served for years with Francis Vere, eyed these recruits narrowly for a time, old, lame, sick and destitute men for the most part, and reflected how without stores, clothes, or money he could possibly convert them into soldiers. Then taking his resolution he threw up his command and took refuge in the Church. Very soon another difficulty arose. The States-General firmly refused to accept two thousand raw men in exchange for veterans, and shipped the unhappy recruits back to England. They too were turned into Plymouth and made confusion worse confounded. Then the arms arrived from Holland, and there was no money to pay men to unload them. The port became a chaos. Buckingham had already shuffled out of the chief command and saddled it on Cecil, and the unfortunate man, good soldier though he was, was driven to his wit's end to cope with his task. His tried officers from Holland were displaced to make room for Buckingham's favourites, who were absolutely useless; and yet he was expected to clothe, arm, train, discipline, and organise ten thousand raw, naked men, work out every detail of a difficult and complicated expedition, and make every provision for it, all without help, without encouragement, and without money. Cash indeed was so scarce that the king could not afford to pay the expenses of his own journey to Plymouth.

Under such conditions it is hardly surprising that[193] the enterprise was a disastrous failure. A few butts of liquor left by the Spaniards outside Cadiz sufficed to set the whole force fighting with its own officers, and after weary weeks at sea, aggravated by heavy weather and by pestilence, the result of bad stores, Cecil and the remains of his ten regiments returned home in misery and shame.[155]
1626.

A similar enterprise under Lord Willoughby in the following year failed in the same way for precisely the same reasons; but Buckingham, still unshaken in his confidence, led a third and a fourth expedition to Rochelle with equal disaster and equal disgrace. The captains had no more control over their men than over a herd of deer.[156] At last, at the outset of a fifth expedition, which promised similar failure, the dagger of Lieutenant Felton, a melancholy man embittered by deprivation of his pay, put an end to Buckingham and to all his follies. On the whole he had not treated the soldiers worse than Elizabeth, but a man of Elizabeth's stamp was more than could be borne with.

Nevertheless, amid all these failures there were still plenty of men in England who had the welfare of the military profession at heart. Foremost among them was the veteran Edward Cecil, now Lord Wimbledon, who strove hard to do something for the defence of the principal ports, for the training of the nation at large, and in particular for the encouragement of cavalry. The mounted service had become strangely unpopular with the English at this time, whether because the eternal sieges of the Dutch war afforded it less opportunity of distinction, or because missile tactics had lowered it from its former proud station, it is difficult to say. Certain it is that officers of infantry, and notably Monro, never lost an opportunity of girding at horsemen as fitted only to run away, and as preferring to be mounted only that they might run away the faster. But Cecil, though in this respect unique, was by no means the only man who [194]made his voice heard. Veteran after veteran took pen in hand and wrote of the discipline of Maurice of Nassau and, as time went on, of the system of Gustavus Adolphus; while on the other hand one ingenious gentleman, still jealous of the old national weapon, invented what he called a "double-arm," which combined the pike and the bow, the bow-staff being attached to the shaft of the pike by a vice which could be traversed on a hinge. Strange to say this belated weapon was not ill-received in military circles and found commendation even among Scotsmen.[157] On one important point, however, there was a general consensus of opinion, namely that the condition of the English militia was disgraceful, its system hopelessly inefficient and the corruption of its administration a scandal. The trained bands were hardly called out once in five years for exercise; few men knew how even to load their muskets, and the majority were afraid to fire a shot except in salute of the colours, not daring to fire a bullet from want of practice.[158]. The Londoners, as usual, alone made a favourable exception to the general rule.
1639.

The real root of the evil was presently to be laid bare. The disputes between Charles the First and his subjects were assuming daily an acuter form, until at last they came to a head in the Scotch rebellion of 1639. It was imperative to raise an English force forthwith and move it up to the Border. Charles, as usual in the last stage of impecuniosity, thought to save money by an exercise of old feudal rights, and summoned every peer with his retinue to attend him in person as his principal force of cavalry. It was a piece of tactless folly whereof none but a Stuart would have been guilty: the peers came in some numbers as they were bid, but they did not conceal their resentment against such proceedings. [195]The foot were levied as usual by writ to the lord-lieutenant with the help of the press-gang, they behaved abominably on their march to the rendezvous, and on arrival were found to be utterly inefficient. Their arms were of all sorts, sizes, and calibres, and the men were so careless in the handling of them that hardly a tent in the camp, not even the king's, escaped perforation by stray bullets. In other respects the organisation was equally deficient; no provision had been made for the supply of victuals and forage; and altogether it was fortunate that the force escaped, through the pacification of Berwick, an engagement with the veterans from the Swedish service under old Alexander Leslie that composed a large portion of the Scottish army.
1640.

The following year saw the war renewed. This time the farce of calling out a feudal body of horse was not repeated, but unexpected difficulties were encountered in raising the levies of foot. In 1639 the infantry had been drawn chiefly from the northern counties, where the tradition of eternal feuds with the Scots made men not altogether averse to a march to the Border. But in 1640 the trained bands of the southern counties were called upon, and they had no such feeling. It is possible that unusual rigour was employed in the process of impressment, for the authorities had been warned, after experience of the previous year, to allow no captains to play the Falstaff with their recruits. Be that as it may, the recalcitrance of the new levies was startling. From county after county came complaints of riot and disorder. The Wiltshire men seized the opportunity to live by robbery and plunder; the Dorsetshire men murdered an officer who had corrected a drummer for flagrant insubordination; in Suffolk the recruits threatened to murder the deputy-lieutenant; in London, Kent, Surrey, and half a dozen more counties the resistance to service was equally determined; and when finally in July four thousand men reached the rendezvous at Selby, old Sir Jacob Astley could only designate them as the arch-knaves of the country. Money being of course[196] very scarce, the men were ill-clothed and ill-found, and their numbers were soon thinned by systematic desertion. A new difficulty cropped up in the matter of discipline. Lord Conway, who commanded the horse, had executed a man for mutiny; he now found that his action was illegal and that he required the royal pardon. If, he wrote, the lawyers are right and martial law is impossible in England, it would be best to break up the army forthwith: to hand men over to the civil power is to deliver them to the lawyers, and experience of the ship-money has shown what support could be expected from them.

There, in fact, lay the kernel of the whole matter; indiscipline was not only rife in the ranks but widespread throughout the nation. From long carelessness and neglect the organisation of the country for defence by land and sea had become not only obsolete but impossible and absurd. For centuries the old vessel had been patched and tinkered and filed and riveted, occasionally by statute, more often by royal authority only, but chiefly by mere habit and custom. But now that the reaction which had established the new monarchy was over, and men, stirred by a counter-reaction, subjected the military system to the fierce heat of constitutional tests, the whole fabric fell asunder in an instant, and brought the new monarchy down headlong in its fall. The story is so instructive to a nation which has not yet given its standing army a permanent statutory existence, that it is worth while very briefly to trace the progress of the catastrophe.

According to ancient practice, the various shires were called upon to provide their levies for the Scotch war with coat-money and with conduct-money to pay their expenses till they had passed the borders of the county, from which moment they passed into the king's pay. The writs to the lord-lieutenants distinctly stated that these charges would be refunded from the Royal Exchequer, and though the chronic emptiness of the Royal Exchequer might diminish the value of the pledge, the form of the writ was distinctly consonant with[197] custom and precedent. Many of the county gentlemen, however, refused to pay this coat- and conduct-money; they had been encouraged by the attacks made on military charges in the Short Parliament; and the Crown, aware of the general opposition to all its doings, did not venture to prosecute. Another incident raised the general question of military obligations in an acuter form. In August 1640, Charles, sadly hampered by the general objections to military service on any terms, fell back on the old system of issuing Commissions of Array to the lord-lieutenants and sheriffs. In themselves Commissions of Array, especially when addressed to these particular officers, were nothing extraordinary; they had been in use to the reign of Queen Mary, and though more or less superseded by the appointment of lord-lieutenants, were by implication sanctioned by a statute of Henry the Fourth.

Now, however, these Commissions at once raised a storm. The deputy-lieutenants of Devon promptly approached the Council with an awkward dilemma. To which service, they asked, were the gentry to attach themselves, to the trained bands or to the feudal service implied in the Commissions of Array; since both were equally enjoined by proclamation? The Council answered that the service in the trained bands must be personal, and the feudal obligation satisfied by deputy or by pecuniary composition; in other words, if the gentry halted between two services, they could not go wrong in performing both. A second question from the deputy-lieutenants was still more searching: how were the bands levied under the Commissions to be paid? The reply of the Council pointed out that the laws and customs of the realm required every man, in the event of invasion, to serve for the common defence at his own charge. Here Charles was strictly within his rights; and the plea of invasion was sound, since the Scots had actually passed the Tweed. Parliament, however, seized hold of the Commissions of Array, and after innumerable arguments as to their illegality, took[198] final refuge under the Petition of Right. Stripped of all redundant phrases, the position of the two parties was this: Charles asked how he could raise an army for defence of the kingdom, if the powers enjoyed by his predecessors were stripped from him; and Parliament answered that it had no intention of allowing him any power whatever to raise such an army.[159]
August 28.
1641,
May.

The campaign in the north was speedily ended by the advance of the Scots and by the rout of the small English detachment that guarded the fords of the Tyne at Newburn. The Scots then occupied Newcastle, and England to all intent lay at their mercy. Nothing could have better suited the opponents of the king. A treaty was patched up at Ripon which amounted virtually to an agreement to subsidise the Scotch army in the interest of the Parliament. The Scots consented to stay where they were in consideration of eight hundred and fifty pounds a day, failing the payment of which it was open to them to continue their march southward and impose their own terms. Charles could not possibly raise such a sum without recourse to Parliament, and the assembly with which he had now to do was that which is known to history as the Long Parliament. Within seven months it had passed an Act to prevent its dissolution without its own consent, and having thus secured itself, it allowed the English army to be disbanded, while the Scots, having played their part, retired once more across the Tweed.
1641-2.
1642.

It would be tedious to follow the widening of the breach during the year 1641. Both parties saw that war was inevitable, and both struggled hard to keep the militia each in its own hands. The scramble was supremely ridiculous, since it was all for a prize not worth the snatching. Charles has been censured for throwing the whole military organisation out of gear because he wished to employ it for other objects than the safety of the kingdom, but it would be difficult, I[199] think, for any one to explain what military organisation existed. By the showing of the Parliamentary lawyers themselves, there was no statute to regulate it except the Statute of Winchester; in strictness there was no legal requirement for men to equip themselves otherwise than as in the year 1285. It was to the party that first made an army, not to that which preferred the sounder claim to regulate the militia, that victory was to belong. Strafford had perceived this long before, but three years were yet to pass before Parliament should realise it. The few movements worth noting in the scramble may be very briefly summarised. The king reluctantly consented to transfer the power of impressment to the justices of the peace with approval of Parliament, and abandoned his right to compel men to service outside their counties. But he refused to concede to Parliament the nomination of lord-lieutenants or the custody of strong places, and Parliament therefore simply arrogated to itself these privileges without further question. In July the Commons resolved to levy an army of ten thousand men, in August the King unfurled the Royal Standard at Nottingham; and so the Civil War began.

The lists of the two opposing armies of 1642 are still extant: the King's, of fourteen regiments of foot and eighteen troops of horse, and the Parliament's, of eighteen regiments of foot, seventy-five troops of horse, and five troops of dragoons; but it would be unprofitable to linger over them, for except on paper they were not armies at all. Two names however must be noticed. The first is that of the commander of the royal horse, Prince Rupert, a son of the Winter-King. He had now been domiciled in England for seven years, in the course of which he had found time to serve the Dutch, as we have seen, at the siege of Breda in 1639, and the Swedes in the following year, commanding with the latter a regiment of horse in more than one dashing engagement. He was now three-and-twenty, not an unripe age for a General in those days, as Condé was[200] presently to prove at Rocroi. The second name is that of the Captain of the Sixty-Seventh troop of the Parliamentary horse, Oliver Cromwell, a gentleman of Huntingdon, not inconspicuous as a member of Parliament but unknown to military fame. He was already forty-three years of age, and so far was little familiar with the profession of arms.[160]

On the 23rd of October these two men met at Edgehill, the first important action of the war, on which I shall not dwell further than to notice the part that they played therein. Rupert, knowing the deficiency of fire-arms in the royal cavalry, before the battle gave his horsemen orders to keep their ranks and to attack sword in hand, not attempting to use their pistols till they had actually broken into the enemy's squadrons. Here was an improvement on the Swedish system, a step nearer to shock-action, which was crowned by complete success. Oliver Cromwell having seen the havoc wrought by the Royalist cavalry, sought and found after the battle the cause of the inferiority of the Parliament's. "Your troops," he said to John Hampden, "are most of them old decayed serving-men and tapsters: their troops are gentlemen's sons and persons of quality. Do you think the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen who have courage, honour, and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still." Hampden heard and shook his head; he was a wise and worthy person, but he had probably an idea that no men except such as those which had been swept into the ranks by the King and the King's father could possibly be induced to become soldiers. So he said that it was a good notion but impracticable. Captain Cromwell set to work to show that it was not impracticable, and began to raise men who, in his own words,[201] made some conscience of what they did, and to teach them discipline.
December.

Meanwhile the helplessness of the Parliament in the early stages of the war was almost ludicrous; and though indeed few things are more remarkable than the rapid growth of administrative ability between the years 1642 and 1658, it must be admitted that at first the civil leaders of the people were little better than children. Nearly the whole nation, and with it the majority of legislators, had made up their minds that the first battle would decide the contest, and they were woefully disappointed when it did not do so. Failing at first to realise the elementary principle that money is the sinew of war the Houses trusted at first to irregular contributions for its support, nor was it until pressed to extremity that they determined to employ general taxation. Money was the first and eternal difficulty, which however pressed even harder on the King than on the Parliament. The next obstacle was the utter collapse of the existing military organisation. The county levies were ready enough to fight in defence of their own homes, but they were unwilling to move far from them; and when the enemy had left their own particular quarter they thanked God that they were rid of him and returned to their usual avocations. This again was a difficulty that beset both sides and was never overcome by the King. The Parliament tried to meet it by the establishment of associations of counties, which were virtually military districts, and did something, though not much, to widen the narrow sympathies of the militiamen. But these associations, though a step in the right direction, depended too much on the individual energy of the men at their head to attain uniform success; and one only, the Eastern, wherein Cromwell was the moving spirit, did for a time really efficient work.

A third and most formidable danger was the superiority of the Royalist cavalry. The long neglect of the mounted service left the supremacy to the ablest[202] amateurs, and the majority of these, though there were hundreds of gentlemen on the Parliamentary side, were undoubtedly for the King. Nor was it only the courage, honour, and resolution of which Cromwell had spoken that favoured them; they had from the nature of the case better horses, a higher standard of horsemanship and equipment, a quicker natural intelligence and a higher natural training. The thousand lessons which the county gentlemen learned when riding with hawk and hound were of infinite advantage in the casual and irregular warfare of the first two or three years; and whatever may be said of Rupert's ability on the battlefield, there can be no question that the work of his innumerable patrols was admirably done. The dashing character of Rupert was also an advantage in a sense to the King's cause, for it attracted to him a group of fellow hot-heads similar to those that had followed Thomas Felton under the Black Prince. One fatal defect however marred what should have been a most efficient cavalry, the blot that had been hit by Cromwell, indiscipline.
1643.

The campaign of 1643 found Parliament little wiser than before as to the true method of conducting a war. Though it had named Lord Essex as General it gave him no control over the operations of any army but his own, and there was consequently no unity either of design or of purpose. Charles, on the contrary, had a definite plan, which had been mapped out for him by some unknown hand and was within an ace of successful execution. He himself with one army fixed his headquarters at Oxford; a second army under Newcastle was to advance from the north, a third under Prince Maurice and Sir Ralph Hopton from the extreme west, both converging on Charles as a centre; and the united forces were then to advance on London. Hopton, an experienced soldier and as noble a man as fought in the war, executed his part brilliantly, advancing victoriously into Somerset from Cornwall, and finally defeating the force specially sent to meet him by the Parliament at[203] Roundway Down. This action is memorable for the appearance, and it must be added the defeat, of what was probably the last fully mailed troop of horse ever seen in England, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg's "Lobsters," so called from the hardness of their shells. Hopton's advance was only stayed by the unwillingness of his Western levies to move any further from their homes. In the north again the Parliament had suffered disaster; the Fairfaxes, who were the mainstay of the cause, sustained a crushing defeat, and but one man stood in the way to bar Newcastle's march upon London.

That man however was Oliver Cromwell. Already he had begun to put in practice the scheme which Hampden had pronounced impracticable. He had chosen his recruits from the Puritan yeomen and farmers of the Eastern Counties, men who had thrown themselves heart and soul into the religious struggles of the time, who made some conscience of what they did, "who knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew," and who thought it honourable to submit to rigid discipline for so noble a cause. Cromwell was now a colonel, and he had already shown the mettle of his force, while it was still incomplete, by defeating a body of twice its numbers in a skirmish at Grantham. This too he had done not by any novelty in tactics, for he admits that he attacked only at a pretty round trot, but by superiority of handling and of discipline. With the same troops strengthened and improved he now advanced and met a strong force of Newcastle's advanced horse at Gainsborough; and by skilful man?uvring and full appreciation of the principle, as yet unwritten, that in the combat of cavalry victory rests with him that throws in the last reserves, he routed it completely. Following up his success he came, unexpectedly as he admits, upon the main body of Newcastle's army, both horse and foot. Horses and men were weary after a hard day's work and a long pursuit, but they showed a bold front; and Cromwell, drawing them off by alternate bodies, once again a movement which was not to be[204] found in the text-books,[161] safely effected his retreat. In truth the man was a born soldier, and probably a great deal fonder of the profession of arms, late though he had entered upon it, than he would have cared to admit. "I have a lovely company," he wrote shortly after this action, with the genuine pride of a good regimental officer; and in spite of the rigour of his discipline his troops increased until they were sufficient to fill two complete regiments.

The danger from the north was averted for the moment, but the situation was so critical that the Parliament authorised the impressment of men and raised Essex's army to a respectable total. But meanwhile negotiations had been opened with the Scots for the advance of their army against the King's forces in the north, and by September the conditions, military, financial, and religious, were agreed upon. This treaty brought home to the Parliament the necessity for immediately opening up its communications with the north and making a way whereby the Scots might penetrate further southward. The difficult task was achieved by the united efforts of two men who here fought their first action together, Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The day of Winceby must for this reason remain memorable in the history of the Army, not the less so because it brought Cromwell nearer to his death than any action before or after it.
1644.

By the close of the year Parliament began to realise that if the war were to be carried to a successful issue, some more effective force than mere trained bands must be called into existence. It accordingly voted that Essex's army should be fixed at a permanent establishment of ten thousand foot and four thousand horse with a regular rate of monthly pay. This was progress in the right direction, but in the disorder of the financial administration it was extremely doubtful whether the scheme would not be wrecked by its cost. Meanwhile[205] the Scots had crossed the Tweed and fairly entered as partners with the Parliament in the rebellion. This new factor led to the formation of a Committee of Both Kingdoms for the subsequent conduct of the war, an important step towards unity of design and administration but clogged by one fatal defect, namely, that the military members—Essex, Manchester, Waller, and Cromwell—were all absent in the field, and that the direction of operations therefore fell entirely into the hands of civilians. A Committee was better than a whole House, and that was all that could be said, for the new directorate soon came into collision with its officers in the field. On the invasion of the Scots, Charles of necessity altered his plan of campaign and detached Rupert to the north, who marked the line of his advance in deeper than ordinary lines of desolation and bloodshed. The Parliamentary generals in the north, Fairfax and Manchester, were at the time engaged upon the siege of York. The Committee, scared by the terror of Rupert's march, ordered them to raise the siege and move southward to meet him. They flatly refused; and their persistence in their own design led to the greatest military success hitherto achieved by the Parliament, the victory of Marston Moor.
July 2.

Of no battle are contemporary accounts more difficult of reconciliation than those of Marston Moor, but the main features of the action are distinguishable and may be briefly set down. Both armies consisted of about twenty-three thousand men, and were drawn up in two lines, the infantry in the centre and the cavalry in the flanks. On the Royalist side Rupert, as was usual for the Commander-in-Chief, led the right wing,[162] five thousand horse in one hundred troops; his centre, fourteen thousand foot, was under Eythin, a veteran officer imported from Germany; his left, four thousand cavalry, was led by Goring. On the Parliamentary[206] side Ferdinand, Lord Fairfax, commanded the right wing of horse, the first line consisting of English, the second of Scots; the centre was composed principally of Scottish infantry under old Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven; the left wing of horse was commanded by Cromwell, his first line being composed of English, and the second of Scots under the leadership of David Leslie.

With extraordinary rashness and folly Rupert led his army down close to the enemy and posted it within striking distance, trusting that a ditch which covered his front would suffice to protect him from attack. The two forces having gazed at each other during the whole afternoon without moving, he at last dismounted between half-past six and seven and called for his supper, an example which was followed by several of his officers. The Parliamentary army seized the moment to advance with its whole line to the attack. Cromwell on the left led his cavalry across the ditch, and, though Rupert was quickly in the saddle to meet him, routed the leading squadrons of the Royalists. Rupert's supports however were well in hand, and falling on Cromwell threw his troops into disorder[163] till David Leslie, an excellent officer, brought up the Parliamentary supports in their turn and routed the Royalists. Then superior discipline told; Cromwell's men quickly rallied and the whole of Rupert's horse fled away in disorder. In the centre the Parliamentary infantry was for a time equally successful, but the horse on the right wing came to utter disaster. The ground on the right was unfavourable for cavalry, being broken up by patches of gorse; and although Thomas Fairfax with a small body of four hundred men, armed with lances, broke through the enemy and rode in disorder right round the rear of the Royalist army, the main body was hopelessly beaten. Goring, after the Swedish fashion, had dotted bodies of[207] musketeers among his horse, who did their work admirably. Part of Goring's troopers galloped off first to pursue, and then to plunder the baggage, while the remainder turned against the Scotch infantry and pressed them so hard that, in spite of Leven's efforts, almost every battalion was broken and dispersed. Three alone behaved magnificently and stood firm, till in the nick of time Cromwell returned from the left to rescue them. His appearance turned the scale, and the victory of the Parliament was made certain and complete.

Rupert after the action gave Cromwell the name of Ironside; he had never encountered so tough an adversary before. Marston Moor may indeed be termed the first great day of the English cavalry. We find, curiously enough, examples of three different schools in the field, the old school of the lance under Thomas Fairfax, the Swedish of mixed horse and musketeers under Goring, and the new English of Rupert and Cromwell; but the greatest of these is Cromwell's. He alone had his men under perfect control, and had trained them not only to charge, but what is far more difficult, to rally.

Little more than a week later came the first sign of an entirely new departure in the Parliament's conduct of the war. In spite of Marston Moor the general position of its affairs was anything but favourable. The inefficiency of local committees and the narrow self-seeking of local forces, combined with the jealousy of rival commanders and the absence of a commander-in-chief, threatened to bring swift and sudden dissolution to the cause. Time had aggravated rather than diminished the evil, and unless it were remedied forthwith, it would be useless to continue the war. Sir William Waller, an able commander, who had frequently suffered defeat less from his own incapacity than from the impossibility of keeping a force together, gave the authorities plainly to understand that unless they formed a distinct permanent army of their own, properly organised, properly disciplined, and regularly paid they could not hope for success.

Mutiny, desertion, and indiscipline had dogged every[208] step of the local levies, as the Parliament very well knew; but experience still more bitter was needed before it could be induced to take Waller's advice. For the present it voted the formation of an army of ten thousand foot and three thousand horse and ordered it to be ready to march in eight days. Ignorance and infatuation could hardly go further than this. Shortly after came a great disaster in the west, nothing less than the capitulation of Essex's whole army. Then came the second battle of Newbury, which left the King in a decidedly improved position. Finally at the close of the campaign the Parliamentary forces sank into a condition which was nothing short of deplorable, the dissensions among the commanders rose to a dangerous height, and as a crowning symptom of the general collapse the Eastern Association, the strongest of all the local bodies, declared that its burden was heavier than it could bear and threw itself upon the Parliament. In the face of such a crisis the Houses could hesitate no longer, and on the 23rd of November they made over the whole state of the forces to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with directions to consider a frame or model of the whole militia.

Thus the work that should have been done years before by Elizabeth was at length taken in hand; and the broken-down machinery of the Plantagenets was at last to be superseded. There was of course jealousy as to the hands in which so powerful an engine should be placed, and the difficulty was overcome only by the Self-denying Ordinance, which debarred members of both Houses of Parliament from command, and laid the ablest soldier in England aside as impartially as inefficient peers like Manchester and Essex. But such an evil as this could be easily remedied, for something more than an ordinance is required at such times to exclude the ablest man from the highest post. To bring the New Model into being was the first and greatest task; and this was done by the Ordinance of the 15th of February 1645. The time was come, and England had at last a regular, and as was soon to be seen, a standing army.