OH. IV CROMWELL LIEUTENANT-GENERAL 159

expiry of this new term, Fairfax and the officers, following the Common Council who had demanded it before, petitioned the Houses to sanction the appointment of Cromwell to the vacant post of lieutenant - general with command of the horse. The Commons agreed (June 10), and Fairfax formally appointed him. At the moment, Cromwell had been sent from Oxford (May 26) into the eastern counties to protect the Isle of Ely. He was taken by legal fiction or in fact to have complied with the Self-denying Ordinance by resigning, and strictly speaking his appointment required the assent of both Houses. But the needs of the time were too sharp for ceremony. The campaign had now begun that almost in a few hours was to end in the ever-famous day of Naseby.

CHAPTER V

THE DAY OF NASEBY

I

ARMED puritanism was now first to manifest all its strength. Faith that the God of Battles was on their side nerved its chosen and winnowed ranks with stern confidence. The fierce spirit of the Old Testament glowed like fire in their hearts. But neither these moral elements of military force, nor discipline, technical precision, and iron endurance, would have sufficed to win the triumph at Naseby without the intrepid genius of Oliver. This was the day on which the great soldier was first to show himself, in modern phrase, a Man of Destiny.

The earliest movements of the campaign of 1645, which was to end in the destruction of the king's arms, were confused and unimportant. The Committee of Both Kingdoms hardly knew what to do with the new weapon now at their command, and for many weeks both Fairfax and Cromwell were employed in carrying out ill-conceived orders in the west. In May Charles left his headquarters at Oxford, with a design of marching through the midlands northward. On the last day of the month he took Leicester by storm. The committee at Westminster were filled with alarm. Was it possible that he intended an invasion of their stronghold in the eastern counties? Fairfax, who lay before the walls of Oxford, was immediately directed to raise the siege and follow the king.

CHAP. V FIRST MOVEMENTS OF CAMPAIGN 161

The modern soldier is struck all through the war with the ignorance on both sides of the movements, plans, and position of the enemy. By June 13 the two armies were in Northamptonshire, only some seven miles apart, Fairfax at Guilsborough, Charles at Daventry; and yet it was not until the parliamentary scouts were within sight of the royalist camp that the advance of Fairfax became known. The royalists undoubtedly made a fatal mistake in placing themselves in the way of Fairfax after they had let Goring go; and the cause of their mistake was the hearty contempt entertained by the whole of them from king to drummer for the raw army and its clownish recruits. The cavaliers had amused themselves, we are told, by cutting a wooden image in the shape of a man, and “in such a form as they blasphemously called it the god of the roundheads, and this they carried in scorn and contempt of our army in a public manner a little before the battle began." So confident were they of teaching the rabble a lesson. Doubting friends thought as ill of the New Model as did overweening foes. "Their new-modelled army," says Baillie, like all the presbyterians at this moment hardly knowing what he ought to wish, "consists for the most part of raw, unexperienced, pressed soldiers. Few of the officers are thought capable of their places; many of them are sectaries; if they do great service, many will be deceived."

66

Disaster, however, was not to be. Cromwell, as we have seen, had been ordered off eastward, to take measures for the defence of the Isle of Ely. These commands, says a contemporary, he, in greater tenderness of the public service than of his own honour, in such a time of extremity disputed not but fulfilled." After securing Ely, he applied himself to active recruiting in Cambridgeshire with the extraordinary success that always followed his inspiring energy. As soon as the king's movements

M

began to create uneasiness, Fairfax, knowing Cromwell's value as commander of horse, applied in haste to the parliament that he should be specially permitted to serve as lieutenant-general. The Houses after some demur gave him plenary leave accordingly. The general despatched constant expresses to Cromwell himself, to inform him from time to time where the army was, so that he might know in case of danger where to join them. When he found battle to be imminent, Oliver hastened over the county border as hard as he and six hundred horsemen with him could ride. They rode into Fairfax's quarters at six o'clock on the morning of June 13, and were hailed with the liveliest demonstrations of joy by the general and his army. "For

it had been observed," says an onlooker of those days, "that God was with him, and that affairs were blessed under his hand." He was immediately ordered to take command of the marshalling of the horse. There was not an instant to lose, for before the field-officers could even give a rough account of the arrangements of the army, the enemy came on amain in excellent order, while the plan of the parliamentary commanders was still an embryo. This was the moment that Cromwell has himself in glowing phrase described: "I can say this of Naseby, 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 how to order our battle the general having commanded me to order all the horse-I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not bring to naught things that are.

The number of men engaged, like the manœuvres that preceded the battle, is a matter of much uncertainty. One good contemporary authority puts the parliamentary forces at 11,000, and says that the two armies were about equal.

CHAP. V

PRELIMINARY MANŒUVRES

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Gardiner, on the other hand, believes the parliamentarians to have been 13,600, and the royalists only 7500, or not much more than one to two-a figure that is extremely hard to reconcile with two admitted facts. One is, that nobody puts the number of royalist prisoners lower than four thousand (and one contemporary even makes them six thousand), while the slain are supposed to have been not less than one thousand. This would mean the extinction by death or capture of two-thirds of the king's total force, and no contemporary makes the disaster so murderous as this. The admission, again, that the royalist cavalry after the battle was practically intact, increases the difficulty of accepting so low an estimate for the total of the king's troops, for nobody puts the royalist horse under four thousand. The better opinion undoubtedly seems to be that, though Fairfax's troops outnumbered the king's, yet the superiority can hardly have approached the proportion of two to one.

The country was open, and the only fences were mere double hedges with an open grass track between them, separating Naseby from Sulby on the west and Clipston on the east. On the right of Fairfax's line, where Cromwell and his troopers were posted, the action of cavalry was much hindered by rabbit burrows, and at the bottom there was boggy land equally inconvenient to the horsemen of the king. The level of the parliamentary position was some fifty feet, that of the royalist position not more than thirty, above the open hollow between them. The slope was from three to four degrees, thus offering little difficulty of incline to either horse or foot.

If the preliminary manoeuvres cannot be definitely made out in detail, nor carried beyond a choice of alternative hypotheses each as good as the other, the actual battle is as plain as any battle on rather