1644 MARSTON MOOR 543 Essex and Waller were approaching to attack Oxford, but Charles slipping out of the city before it was surrounded despatched Rupert to the relief of York. At Rupert's approach the besiegers retreated. On July 2 Rupert and Newcastle fought a desperate battle on Marston Moor, though they were decidedly outnumbered by their opponents. The whole of the right wing of the Parliamentarians, and part of the centre, fled before the Royalist attack; but on their left, Cromwell restored the fight, and drove Rupert in flight before him. Cromwell did not, however, as Rupert had done at Edgehill, waste his energies in the pursuit of the fugitives. Promptly drawing up, he faced round, and hurled his squadrons upon the hitherto victorious Royalists in the other parts of the field. The result was decisive. "It had all the evidence," wrote Cromwell, "of an absolute victory, obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly party principally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. God made them as stubble to our swords." All the north of England, except a few fortresses, fell into the hands of Parliament and the Scots. 25. Presbyterians and Independents. 1644.-Cromwell spoke of Marston Moor as a victory of the 'godly party.' The Westminster Assembly of Divines had declared strongly in favour of Presbyterianism, but there were a few of its members-only five at first, known as the five Dissenting Brethren--who stood up for the principles of the Separatists (see p. 470) wishing to see each congregation independent of any general ecclesiastical organisation. From holding these opinions they were beginning to be known as Independents. These men now attracted to themselves a considerable number of the stronger-minded Puritans, such as Cromwell and Vane, of whom many, though they had no special attachment to the teaching of the Independent divines, upheld the idea of toleration, whilst others gave their adherence to one or other of the numerous sects which had recently sprung into existence. Cromwell, especially, was drawn in the direction of toleration by his practical experience as a soldier. It was intolerable to him to be forbidden to promote a good officer on the ground that he was not a Presbyterian. On one occasion he was asked to discard a certain officer because he was an Anabaptist. "Admit he be," he had replied; “shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion." He had accordingly filled his own regiments with men of every variety of Puritan opinion, choosing for promotion the best soldier, and not the adherent of any special Church system. godly party,' and it was by the soldiers of understood, that Marston Moor had been won. These he styled 'the the godly party,' so 26. Essex's Surrender at Lostwithiel. 1644.-Essex was the hope of the Presbyterians who despised the sects and hated toleration. Being jealous of Waller, he left him to take Oxford alone, if he could, and marched off to the West, to accomplish what he imagined to be the easier task of wresting the western counties from the king. Charles turned upon Waller, and fought an indecisive action with him at Cropredy Bridge, after which Waller's army, being composed of local levies with no heart for permanent soldiering, melted away. Charles then marched in pursuit of Essex, and surrounded him at Lostwithiel, in Cornwall. Essex's provisions fell short; and on September 2, though his horse cut their way out, and he himself escaped in a boat, the whole of his infantry capitulated. 1644.-London was 27. The Second Battle of Newbury. thus laid bare, and Parliament hastily summoned Manchester and the army of the Eastern Association to its aid. Manchester, being good-natured and constitutionally indolent, longed for some compromise with Charles which might bring about peace. Cromwell, on the other hand, perceived that no compromise was possible with Charles as long as he was at the head of an army in the field. A second battle of Newbury was fought, on October 27, with doubtful results: Manchester showed little energy, and the king was allowed to escape in the night. Cromwell, to whom his sluggishness seemed nothing less than treason to the cause, attacked Manchester in Parliament, not from personal ill-will, but from a desire to remove an inefficient general from his command in the army. Two parties were thus arrayed against one another: on the one side the Presbyterians, who wanted to suppress the sects and, if possible, to make peace; and on the other side the Independents, who wanted toleration, and to carry on the war efficiently till a decisive victory had been gained. I. The Self-denying Ordinance and the New Model. 1645.Cromwell dropped his attack on Manchester as soon as he found that he could attain his end in another way. A proposal was made for the passing of a Self-denying Ordinance,' which was to exclude all members of either House from commands in the army. The Lords, knowing that members of their House would be chiefly affected by it, threw it out, and the Commons then proceeded to form a New Model Army-that is to say, an army newly organised, its officers and soldiers being chosen solely with a view to military efficiency. Its general was to be Sir Thomas Fairfax, whilst the lieutenant-general was not named; but there can be little doubt that the post was intended for Cromwell. After the Lords had agreed to the New Model, they accepted the Self-denying Ordinance in an altered form, as, though all the existing officers were directed to resign their posts, nothing was said against their re-appointment. Essex, Manchester, and Waller resigned, but when the time came for Cromwell to follow their example, he and two or three others were appointed to commands in the new army. Cromwell became Lieutenant-General, with the command of the cavalry. The New Model was composed partly of pressed men, and was by no means, 1 An ordinance was at this time in all respects similar to an Act of Parliament, except that it did not receive the Royal assent. In the middle ages an ordinance was exactly the reverse, being issued by the King without Parliamentary approval. as has been often said, of a sternly religious character throughout; but a large number of decided Puritans had been drafted into it, especially from the army of the Eastern Association; and the majority of the officers were Independents, some of them of a strongly Sectarian type. The New Model Army had the advantage of receiving regular pay, which had not been the case before; so that the soldiers, whether Puritans or not, were now likely to stick to their colours. 2. Milton's 'Areopagitica.' 1644.-By Cromwell, who in consequence of his tolerance was the idol of the Sectarians in the army, religious liberty had first been valued because it gave him the service of men of all kinds of opinions. On November 24, 1644, Milton, some of whose books had been condemned by the licensers of the press appointed by Parliament, issued Areopagitica, in which he advocated the liberty of the press on the ground that excellence can only be reached by those who have free choice between good and evil. "He that can apprehend,” he wrote, “ and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain—he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, when that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Liberty was good for religion as much as it was for literature. "These are the men," he continued, “cried out against for schismatics and sectaries, as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built." The perfection of the building consisted “in this—that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure." 3. The Execution of Laud. 1645.-In Parliament, at least, there was one direction in which neither Presbyterian nor Independent was inclined to be tolerant. They had all suffered under Laud, and Laud's impeachment was allowed to go on. The House of Lords pronounced sentence against him, and on January 10, 1645, he was beheaded. The Presbyterians had the majority in the House of Commons, and they were busy in enforcing their system, as far as Parliamentary resolutions would go. The Independents had to wait for better times. 4. Montrose and Argyle. 1644.-For the present, however, 1644-1645 MONTROSE'S CAMPAIGN 547 the two parties could not afford to quarrel, as a powerful diversion in the king's favour was now threatening them from Scotland. The Marquis of Montrose, who, in the Bishops' Wars, had taken part with the Covenanters, had grown weary of the interference of the Scottish Presbyterian clergy with politics, and still more weary of the supremacy in Scotland of the Marquis of Argyle, who had all the organisation of the Presbyterian Church at his disposal. Montrose saw that, though Argyle was too strong for him in the Lowlands, it was possible to assail him with effect in the Highlands, where he had made many enemies. In the Lowlands Argyle was regarded as a Scottish nobleman. In the Highlands he was the chief of the clan of the Campbells, which had often unscrupulously extended its borders at the expense of its neighbours, especially at the expense of the various clans of the Macdonalds. Montrose therefore hoped that if he threw himself into the Highlands, he might make use of the enmity of these clans against the Campbells to crush Argyle and to exalt the king. 5. Montrose in the Highlands. 1644-1645.-In 1644, shortly after the battle of Marston Moor, Montrose made his way to the Highlands with only two followers. He was the first to discover the capacity of the Highlanders for war. With their help, and with the help of a trained Irish contingent, mostly composed of the descendants of Highlanders who had emigrated to Ireland, he beat the Scottish forces at Tippermuir and Aberdeen, and then, crossing the mountains, amidst the snows of winter, harried the lands of the Campbells. On February 2, 1645, he defeated Argyle's clansmen at Inverlochy, whilst Argyle himself who was no warrior— watched their destruction from a boat. Wherever Montrose went the heavy Lowland troops toiled after him in vain. On May 9 he overthrew another army under Baillie at Auldearn. Leven's Scottish army in Yorkshire had enough to do to bar the way against Montrose in case of his issuing from the mountains and attempting to join forces with Charles in England. With any other troops Montrose would probably have made the attempt already; but his Highlanders were accustomed to return home to deposit their booty in their own glens as soon as a battle had been won, and, therefore, victorious as he had been, he was unable to leave the Highlands. 6. The New Model Army in the Field. 1645.—The New Model army started on its career in April. Cromwell, with his highly-trained horse, swept round Oxford, cutting off Charles's supplies; whilst Fairfax was sent by the Committee of Both Kingdoms (see p. 542) |