6

THE GLORIOUS YEAR

Cromwell reached Cambridgeshire at the end of May, when the summer pastures of the Fens around Ely were starting to roll with grass pollen heads and the meres were coated with opening water lilies. He travelled in his own coach, as a sign of his importance, attended by the horse troops. As it rattled into Cambridge its arrival provoked an incident which illustrated the deep divisions in the town, as in all England: one onlooker commented that a dung cart would be a better vehicle for Oliver, and was promptly reported to a magistrate by two ‘godly men’.1 Cromwell set to work at his new assignment, roaming between Ely, Cambridge and Huntingdon and finding that, because of the long security of the area, the fortifications were indeed neglected and undermanned. He and the central committee of the Eastern Association wrote to the deputy lieutenants of its counties to mobilize their local soldiers to be ready to guard them, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms empowered him to dispose of them as he saw fit. They began to gather around him at Huntingdon, reputedly three thousand strong.²

Then the miracle occurred, in a rapid sequence of events. First, infuriated by the loss of Leicester, the elected government of London, the common council, petitioned Parliament on 4 June for a change of strategy. It requested the Houses to increase the size of the New Model Army, give Sir Thomas Fairfax freedom to lead it wherever he decided in order best to defeat the king and regain Leicester, and to continue Cromwell in service as commander of the Eastern Association.3 As soon as this arrived, the Committee of Both Kingdoms was given complete freedom by Parliament to respond, and it obliged by giving Fairfax in turn the requested freedom of action, and recalling Vermuyden and his men to rejoin him. It then ordered the Eastern Association to allow Cromwell to dispose of its forces as he wished, and on 9 June told him to take all the horse and dragoons he had with him and all the musketeers for whom he could find horses, and ride to join the New Model Army.⁴ Fairfax had been smarting to be allowed to go after the king, and his army was behind him in this.⁵ As soon as the new orders from the committee arrived, they moved north-east into the Great Ouse Valley, carrying on down it for two days to get between the king and the Eastern Association, and await the return of Vermuyden’s force.⁶ Vermuyden was now approaching them, but was himself an unhappy man. As before, Londoners wanted a scapegoat for a military disaster, and many of them had blamed him for the fall of Leicester, holding that he should have intervened to prevent that, as the nearest parliamentarian commander to it.⁷ Perhaps also he had personal reasons for wanting to leave England. At any rate, at this critical juncture Vermuyden resigned his commission and prepared to go abroad, and the man who had for a time seemed the best qualified one to command the New Model Army’s horse division vanished from the scene.⁸

On 8 June, the day before Vermuyden delivered up his commission, Fairfax called a council of war, of all his senior officers, at his headquarters in the village of Sherington, among the summer meadows beside the Ouse. His cavalry outposts were starting to clash with those of the king, and it seemed likely now that a battle was imminent. The army still had nobody in overall charge of its large and complex horse division, somebody was urgently needed, and there was no sufficiently trusted and experienced commander eligible and available under the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance. In these circumstances the council decided unanimously to write to Parliament asking it to appoint Cromwell to the position for such limited period of time as it chose. The letter was entrusted to the fiery Thomas Harrison, a religious independent and the major to Fleetwood’s horse regiment, who had served under Oliver all the previous year and caused such offence to Scots and presbyterians by coming to London after Marston Moor and giving all credit for the victory to Cromwell’s cavalry. All present at the council signed it.9 It reached Westminster on the 10th, and the Commons decided rapidly to dispense with Oliver’s attendance as a temporary measure, but without a set time limit, to act as lieutenant-general of horse in the New Model Army. The Lords did no more than agree to debate the matter; but the Commons’ resolution was taken by Harrison as sufficient warrant for Oliver to act.¹⁰ On the following day he galloped back with it, and Fairfax wrote at once to Cromwell to inform him, and to summon him immediately with all the horse and dragoons he could bring.¹¹ Back in London, the Lords silently acquiesced and no journalists questioned the move, while some enthusiastically hailed it.¹² Oliver had suddenly made the jump to commanding the horse division in Parliament’s main, consolidated, field army, and done so under a commander who enthusiastically valued and supported him. If he were to retain the position for more than a month or two, however, he had rapidly to prove his worth in it.

NASEBY

At the time of his appointment, many people might have thought that Cromwell’s tenure of his new position could indeed be brief, as he was joining what looked increasingly like a discredited army. The reputation of the royal one had soared after its storming of Leicester, while after all the care which had gone into its creation, the New Model had achieved nothing in its first two months except the relief of Taunton; and the detachment sent to effect that had ended up trapped inside the town, which was immediately put under siege again by Goring and the western royalist forces. Fairfax’s men had ceased to be paid properly from London or supplied with sufficient provisions by the local parliamentarian administrators, and they were struggling to find food and having to take free quarter. They were also increasingly deserting, many being conscripts who had been impressed in the spring to supply the large shortfall of soldiers needed to bring the New Model up to its desired strength. Fairfax’s secretary wrote defiantly and grumpily on 12 June that ‘I am confident the Lord will go along with this despised army’.13 Parliament did its best to remedy the situation, empowering Sir Thomas to seize men for soldiers from the counties along his route of march, and to commandeer horses without payment as soon as he entered territory currently held by the royalists. A month’s pay was ordered for his men.

Parliament also urged the Scottish army to march south again, although with all available money going to the New Model it could only invite the Scots to take free quarter as they moved. This would hardly make them any more popular with English locals, and Parliament made desperate attempts to get extra taxation collected, and loans raised, to pay them. This time the earl of Leven obliged the appeals of his allies. It is likely he was persuaded that with the king apparently stuck in the Midlands there was no longer a likelihood of his army coming north, and that there was now a real chance of joining the New Model to bring Charles to battle, and so having the necessary strength. By the second week of June he was marching rapidly through Yorkshire. Meanwhile, Fairfax was striving to bring in re-inforcements from the parliamentarian garrisons and local forces in the East Midlands, which with those of Vermuyden and Cromwell might swell the New Model to the greatest possible extent for a showdown with the king.¹⁴ On 12 June he felt ready to start moving straight towards Charles, though heavy rain was making progress slow.¹⁵

For the previous two weeks, Charles himself, and his advisers, had been trying to agree a plan of action, because after their resounding success at Leicester they had become paralyzed by disagreements over strategy. Rupert still wanted to go north, fast, whereas other councillors urged that Oxford be relieved and the New Model Army defeated outside it, instead. The king failed to decide between them, and his army wandered around Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire while the arguments continued. When it was learned that the New Model had abandoned the siege of Oxford and was heading in the king’s direction, Prince Rupert advised a retreat westwards to link up with reinforcements, above all Goring’s three thousand horsemen, recalled from the west, and another detachment of 2,700 horse and foot returning from a Welsh campaign. His opponents called for an immediate attack on the New Model while the morale of the king’s victorious men was still high and the opposing army was still freshly formed and unused to working together. As Fairfax advanced, the disputes continued, and the king still dithered.16

As soon as Cromwell received Sir Thomas’s letter, he hurried west to join the New Model, through a brimming green countryside studded with the creamy saucers of elderflowers and the paler, shyer blooms of wild roses. He had taken all the mounted soldiers he had with him, which numbered between six and eight hundred. On the morning of 12 June he and his troopers found Fairfax to the north-west of Northampton, at the village of Guilsborough, holding a council of war. Oliver’s appearance provoked great rejoicing, and the council decided to call the whole army together and advance on the king at once. Until the previous night, the royalist infantry had been encamped in makeshift huts on a high hill five miles away, and their cavalry flung out in a screen between that and the approaching enemy. Just before dawn that morning, Fairfax, riding out on a reconnaissance through a wet night, saw a glow on the hill and realized that the king’s foot soldiers were burning their huts and preparing to march; which they proved to be doing north-east.¹⁷

This was indeed where the king was going, as on the previous night, having realized that the enemy was so close, he and his advisers had resolved to make for Newark with all speed. There they intended to draw more foot soldiers out of the town and its complex of outlying garrisons, to plug the holes left in the royal infantry by casualties sustained in the taking of Leicester and desertions by men anxious to get their loot from it home. Charles’s foot were indeed now dangerously reduced. By evening they were quartered in and around the small town of Market Harborough, which Rupert made his headquarters, while Charles was accommodated in a fine house just to the west. The horse units were spread out behind to the south, the rear guard being in the village of Naseby, which stood on a ridge providing good views in each direction.18 Meanwhile drums and trumpets had called the New Model together and most of it marched six miles to the east of the royal army, preparing to swing round upon it. Cromwell now being in charge of the horse, it must have been he who sent out units to shadow and harass the royalists, including one under his protégé Ireton, which attacked those stationed at Naseby in the evening and took them completely by surprise, capturing a number of them.¹⁹

The king and his advisers had thought that the New Model was moving wide of them to protect the Eastern Association, and now realized that it was both dangerously close and intending to attack. An emergency council of war was called at once, to meet at Rupert’s quarters in the middle of the night.²⁰ As the Julian calendar, on which England depended at the time, was by then ten days out of true alignment with the sun, the date, 13–14 June, was actually Midsummer Eve and Midsummer Day, the climax of the summer solstice and one of the shortest nights of the year. Had the sky been clear as the royalist advisers gathered, it would have been briefly covered with the season’s constellations: Antares red-gold in the south, Capella sparking in a succession of rainbow colours in the north, and the summer triangle of Lyra, Vega and Altair burning ice-blue overhead. Even had it been overcast, the leaves of trees would still have stood out against the midnight blue of the northern horizon. When the council met, Rupert urged an avoidance of battle, and rapid retreat to safety and reinforcement, while some of the king’s civilian councillors argued for immediate engagement of the New Model. Charles decided in favour of the latter.²¹ All his life he was inclined – usually disastrously – to bold and dramatic courses of action, to resolve difficult situations once and for all. They all retired for a few hours of sleep, and at seven o’clock in the morning of 14 June the king’s soldiers formed up and marched south to attack their pursuing enemies.²²

It is possible to reconstruct the actions of the king and his advisers so vividly because the records allow. By contrast we do not know how Cromwell, Fairfax and their fellow senior officers spent that night, save that they probably got a longer sleep, in requisitioned beds in cottages and farmhouses. In the morning their army marched towards Naseby, to follow the king, sending more bodies of horse to harass his men and try to slow them down and bring them to battle. Instead, climbing one of the many ridges of the Northamptonshire uplands – which one of them aptly described as ‘a place of little hills and vales’ – they sighted their quarry coming towards them.23 Both forces halted on separate ridges, a valley between them, in battle formation. That valley, however, was choked with undergrowth, and stretches of bog and standing water left by the recent rain, so that for either to launch an attack across it would have been suicidal. The New Model therefore moved west along the ridge, looking for a better way across, and Rupert led the royal army in the same direction parallel to it. Both found what they wanted after half a mile, just north of Naseby.²⁴

The two armies were still on parallel ridges with a broad and shallow valley between them, but that was now drier, and so allowed of a rapid crossing. The ridge on which the New Model stood was mainly taken up with the large open fields which served the villagers of Naseby. The one on which most of the army stood was down to grass, which provided ideal cavalry terrain. Another was under corn, which could be trampled like that on the ridge above Marston Moor, and again then made for good fighting terrain. The only difficulty in the position was at its eastern end, where the ridge was steeper and narrower, and the slope in front rendered more hazardous by gorse bushes and a rabbit warren. This would cramp regiments formed up there and make it difficult for them to advance, but also powerfully favoured them if they stood on the defensive. The whole position was a mile across, and the midsummer morning sun was shining upon it.²⁵

Neither army had a good sense of the other’s numbers, or left a wholly reliable estimate of its own, but it is clear in retrospect that the king was outnumbered, perhaps seriously. Calculations at the time and in recent years have put the royal soldiers at anything between seven and twelve thousand men, and the New Model between twelve and seventeen thousand, with the discrepancy significant in both the foot and the horse divisions.26 Around ten o’clock both of them deployed fully in battle order, Fairfax ordering the infantry and Cromwell the cavalry.²⁷ On the left flank of the army Cromwell placed five horse regiments and some of the troops he had just brought from the Eastern Association, under the overall control of Ireton whom he had now promoted to the office of Commissary-General, the second-in-command of the horse division of the army. To strengthen Ireton’s position, Oliver made a further deployment. His command included the New Model’s dragoon regiment, which had been given to a former London chandler and stoker, a fervently godly man called John Okey, who had previously served under Sir Arthur Hesilrig. Oliver found Okey in a meadow half a mile behind the rest of the army, distributing ammunition to his men, and ordered him to get them mounted and lead them immediately to cover Ireton’s flank. There, stretching across the valley in front, and to the left hand, was a thick hedge at right angles to the two armies, which marked a parish boundary. Behind it was a small enclosure, in which Okey’s men could put their horses while they loaded their guns and spread out along the hedge, which would give them cover as they poured fire into royalist cavalry moving past in front to attack Ireton’s men.²⁸ It was an excellent use of ground.

Cromwell himself took charge of the opposite, right wing, the traditional post of honour for a cavalry general, with the nine foot regiments, under the immediate command of Philip Skippon, strung out according to custom between him and Ireton. Oliver arranged the right-wing horse units in three lines. The front one consisted of five bodies, many of the men in which had come from his own former regiment, and the line was commanded by its former lieutenant-colonel, his kinsman Edward Whalley. There were three bodies in the second line, and two in the rear, one of those consisting of the new troopers he had just brought from the Eastern Association. As the army was getting into position, another cavalry detachment arrived in the nick of time from Lincolnshire, being its local home guard, some of which would have been veterans who had once served under Willoughby. Cromwell divided this into two, to cover his right flank, one at the extreme end of the front line and the second at the extreme end of the rear one. Each unit was spaced to cover a gap between those in the line in front, according to custom, so that the whole division made a chequer-board pattern, and presented a solid mass to an enemy while leaving each individual body of horse room to manoeuvre before closing with the enemy.29 Some of the New Model’s soldiers distinguished themselves from their opponents by putting pieces of white paper or linen in their hats, while the royalists stuck bean stalks in theirs, obtained from a field along their route of march. Mostly, however, the two armies relied for recognition on their battle cries: ‘God our strength’ for the New Model and ‘Queen Mary’ for the king’s men.³⁰

The manner in which Fairfax and Cromwell ordered their army suggests strongly that they expected to be attacked first and were preparing the best possible defensive position. This supposition was entirely correct, because after his experience at Marston Moor, and trading on the hope that the New Model would indeed be a newly constructed and fragile entity, Prince Rupert had decided to launch the royal soldiers into the swiftest and hardest possible all-out assault on their opponents. The division entrusted with the task of breaking Cromwell’s position consisted mainly of the Northern Horse, the former cavalry division of Newcastle’s army. These were very experienced and capable men, who had achieved great things in the north, including the smashing of Fairfax’s wing at Marston Moor. To reinforce them they had a body of the equally famed and formidable Newark horse. They were, however, faced with a nightmarish task. They needed to attack their objective up a steep slope, across the ground disordered by gorse and rabbit holes. Their chances of encountering their enemy in good order and with men and horses in the first flush of energy were thus badly reduced. Moreover, they were seriously outnumbered by Cromwell’s horsemen, possibly by odds of two to one, and whereas their opponents were formed into a few large regiments, they were made up of the remnants of twenty to twenty-five, all now very weak, which would have reduced cohesion further.31

Cromwell watched the northerners struggling up the slope towards him, and unleashed Whalley’s front line upon theirs at the moment when it would seem to strike with maximum impact. The two sides came together in close order, pistols crackling and swords swinging, and the royalists resisted bravely for a time until numbers told – perhaps with the arrival of Cromwell’s second line – and they fell back to the rear of their infantry, and joined their horse reserve. The first and second of Cromwell’s lines now formed one powerful body, while the rest of his wing made their way down through the gorse and warren to outflank the royalist horsemen for a concerted attack by the whole division, in which the king’s troopers were finally routed and chased off.³² One observer compared Cromwell’s horsemen to ‘a torrent driving all before them’.³³ Four bodies of them pursued the fleeing royalist horsemen to keep them on the run, moving in close order, while the rest remained on the field for further service.³⁴

Once more, as at Marston Moor, Cromwell’s cavalry wing had carried all before it; but just as at that earlier battle, bad things were happening elsewhere on the field. On the opposite side, the royalist right wing of horse, led by Rupert himself, had attacked as the left wing had done, and had easier work.³⁵ The slope up which it had to ride was gentler, it was traversing the pasture of the fallow field, and it seems both to have been slightly larger than the other wing and faced slightly fewer opponents. Okey’s dragoons, firing from the flanking hedge, wounded many of the horsemen as they surged forward but failed to halt them; and they slammed into Ireton’s wing and wrecked it. Accounts differ as to whether they drove all of its units off the field or only some, but they broke through it and dispersed it, and Ireton was wounded and captured. In the centre of the field the king’s infantry, despite its inferiority in numbers, attacked with such ferocity that it drove the first line of the New Model foot back onto the second. Skippon, trying to rally his men, was badly injured by a shot through his side. Within a short space of time, Cromwell was the only one of Fairfax’s three subordinate generals left both unhurt and in action.

Everywhere, however, the numerical weakness of the royalists told against them. Their victorious horsemen on their right wing lacked the extra units to attack the flank of the New Model’s infantry, their full power being needed to drive Ireton’s troopers off the field. In the centre the progress of the royal foot soldiers was halted as soon as the first line of their opponents was steadied against the second, and they were fighting a larger force. In this situation, they suddenly found themselves bereft of cavalry support. On their left their horsemen had been driven off, and on their right, they had vanished over the ridge, keeping Ireton’s men on the run. Cromwell’s wing, by contrast, possessed both the additional strength and the leadership to turn most of its bodies of horse upon the left flank and rear of the king’s infantry. In front that was counter-attacked by the consolidated mass of the New Model foot regiments and Okey’s dragoons mounted and charged into its now exposed right flank, while some of Ireton’s horse regiments were now rallying and returning. It was effectively surrounded, and began to surrender unit by unit. By the time that the victorious royalist troopers of the right wing returned to the field, the battle was lost. They joined the king back on the ridge from which they had launched their attack, and retreated towards Leicester, abandoning the remnants of the infantry, and the artillery and baggage train. Most of the cavalry, from both wings, got away, but all the rest of the royal army, the core of the king’s war effort, had been destroyed, in just two hours.36

Although the broad outline of these events has always been clear, there remain some puzzles. One is what exactly Cromwell did during the battle, and how he co-operated with Fairfax. It must be presumed that he directed most if not all of the movements of his cavalry wing, but none of the accounts show him in action doing this, and he does not seem to have led a charge himself: for the first time he appears to have held back from the hand-to-hand fighting and overseen and orchestrated operations instead. By contrast, there are pen-portraits of Fairfax in action, both directing the battle and engaging in personal combat against royalist units. One account states that he charged with Cromwell’s wing and lost his helmet in the fighting, and that both men then took some cavalry over to the left wing to restore the situation there after Ireton’s defeat.37 Another agreed that Fairfax lost his helmet, and rode around his army bareheaded.³⁸ Another had him leading an attack on a foot regiment, and fighting his way into the core of it, causing its collapse.³⁹

Another unresolved question is whether Prince Rupert, who was responsible for the royalist battle plan, had intended anything more sophisticated than an attack all along the line in the hope that the enemy would break.⁴⁰ More than a quarter of a century later, a defence of his record blamed the defeat on the commander of the Northern Horse, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, claiming that he should have stood on the defensive until Rupert returned from chasing off Ireton’s cavalry and joined him in facing Cromwell. Instead, it was asserted, Langdale had attacked at once and across appalling ground against impossible odds.⁴¹ Nobody, however, alleged this earlier, even in the bitter recriminations among royalist commanders which followed the disaster. It looks as if Rupert was, long afterward, setting up Langdale to play the part of scapegoat in which Byron was being cast in explaining the defeat at Marston Moor; and by that time Langdale, like Byron, was conveniently dead. Another puzzle is why the royalist reserves were so ineffectual. The battle plan for the king’s army provided for a force to be held back at the rear and deployed wherever there was decisive need for reinforcement in the course of the action. It consisted of Rupert’s own foot regiment of eight hundred men and the king’s horse guards, numbering five hundred, in addition to Charles’s foot guards, probably a few hundred more.⁴² These could have played a vital role, and had they been launched upon Cromwell’s men, in particular, when they were forcing back Langdale’s, the outcome of the battle might have been different. Nothing, however, is heard of this, and Rupert’s foot soldiers and the king’s foot guards were surrounded and overwhelmed with the rest of the royal infantry, while the horse guards ran with the king.

Instead, there was a story put about that King Charles himself had been leading his own guards to charge Cromwell’s troopers and restore the royalist position on the left, but was diverted because a Scottish earl, afraid that his monarch was endangering his life, seized the king’s bridle and dragged his horse aside, throwing the whole company into fatal confusion. The source who quoted this tale, the king’s secretary Sir Edward Walker, himself however could not vouch for the truth of it, and had the designated reserves played their part, there should have been no need for Charles to try impulsively to lead in his guards himself in a panic measure. Somehow there was a lack of co-ordinated leadership in the royal army which left nobody delegated to lead the force held back to await a crisis, when the moment of that crisis came.43

The king’s army, plainly enough, should never have fought at Naseby: Rupert had been correct about that, and the need for reinforcements. Had Goring’s three thousand horsemen, and the seven hundred from Wales, and the two thousand foot coming from Wales with them, been with Charles, he could have fought the New Model Army with a fair chance of success. Had Goring’s troopers alone been with Langdale on the left wing at Naseby instead of far away in the west, then Cromwell’s wing would have been outnumbered, by a first-class body of cavalry. On top of this fundamental weakness in numbers, however, the king’s soldiers operated a battle plan which was faulty both in conception and execution. It made the left wing incapable of performing the role allotted to it, and provided a reserve which never seems to have been deployed. Rupert’s wing, and the royal foot soldiers in the centre, performed superbly, punching far above their weight, but this could not offset the basic flaws in their position. Nonetheless, it must also be said that the untried New Model Army also functioned very well, and in some cases magnificently. Ireton’s wing, which contained some of the best of the Eastern Association horse such as Fleetwood’s regiment, may have crumbled, but the foot units rallied well after the initial shock of the enemy attack. Above all, Cromwell’s cavalry wing played its part to perfection, using its undoubted superiority in numbers to best effect. Its operation of a flawless set of manoeuvres must, as historical tradition has long held, owe a lot to Cromwell himself. Finally, everybody agreed that Fairfax had been a model commander-in-chief, ordering and encouraging his army with exemplary skill and charisma.

Having destroyed the foot division of the king’s field force, Cromwell now led his cavalry in an attempt to inflict further damage on the fleeing royalist horsemen, and at best to capture the king himself, Rupert and other senior officers. He forbade his men to dismount and plunder, on pain of death, which disgruntled many of the troopers because it denied them the jackpot of loot after a successful battle: the enemy baggage train.44 That was left to the New Model foot soldiers, who not only made very rich profits (as the royalist baggage included much of the plunder from Leicester) but committed the worst atrocities of the war upon the female camp-followers of the king’s men, killing over a hundred and disfiguring many more by cutting off their noses and slicing open their cheeks.⁴⁵ The pursuing cavalry did not take any notable prisoners, but it killed or captured many stragglers, until two miles from Leicester the royalist horsemen drew together and formed a compact mass to face and halt their tormenters, and cover the retreat of their commanders into the town.⁴⁶ The ledger of victory was becoming clear. The slaughter had been much less than at Marston Moor because of a greater willingness of the defeated infantry to surrender and of the victors to accept this. There were six to seven hundred royalist dead on the field (and one to two hundred parliamentarians), and around three hundred more killed on the flight to Leicester, but four to five thousand prisoners: probably between a third and a half of the king’s army. The New Model also got a haul of five to eight thousand weapons, including the entire royal train of siege and field artillery.⁴⁷ One final factor completed the bliss of the New Model soldiery: they found a huge haul of bread and cheese in the royalist train, their own supplies having failed.⁴⁸

The next objective of the army was clear, as it had been included in the instructions from Parliament and the Committee of Both Kingdoms when it was sent after the king: to retake Leicester, and so wipe out the shame of the loss of it two weeks before. On 17 June the army summoned the town to surrender, preparing to turn on it the same royal siege guns which had blasted holes in its walls before. The royalist governor, abandoned by the king and Rupert, who had fled on westward with their cavalry, immediately asked for terms. On the next day he marched out with his men, leaving the New Model their two thousand weapons and five hundred horses. As this happened, the joy of the occasion was completed by the arrival of a convoy of cash from London, through what was now safe parliamentarian territory, which allowed the army to be mustered and paid for the first time in months.49

The unity of the New Model Army meant that the victory at Naseby was not followed by a contest for the credit, between different factions of the victors, of the sort which had succeeded Marston Moor. Virtually all of the accounts sent to Parliament or published as tracts in the subsequent week applauded Cromwell and Fairfax together, sometimes adding the wounded Skippon or speaking generally in praise of all the commanders.⁵⁰ One pamphlet account took the opportunity to trumpet the manner in which Cromwell’s role had vindicated him from all previous aspersions: ‘see, sir, how God honours those who honour him, [de]spite the malice of enemies’.⁵¹ This time, moreover, Cromwell chose to characterize the battle himself, in a formal letter sent to the House of Commons on the following day. It had all the hallmarks of his previous accounts of his military actions. There was a strong implication that the royalists had outnumbered the New Model, which enabled him to enlarge on the manner in which the result manifested the glory and favour of God Almighty, whom Oliver treated, as usual, as the true author of victory. He tended, again as usual, to use the plural form, ‘we’, throughout, which both modestly subsumed his own role in a collective one but also spared him the need to praise fellow commanders; though this time he did briefly acknowledge Fairfax’s good performance.⁵²

Fairfax’s own despatch to the Commons, sent with an officer instructed to provide a full verbal account of the battle, affords an interesting contrast. There is much less of God in it, even while he did request the prescription of a day of thanksgiving throughout Parliament’s territory which would formally express gratitude to the Almighty (and also bring home the magnitude of the achievement to every parish). Instead Sir Thomas devoted space to praising various of his officers, including the wounded Skippon and Ireton, for the courage and resolution they had shown.53 He also avoided attempting to make any political or religious capital out of the victory; and this again contrasts markedly with Cromwell who now took Naseby as an encouragement to advance the cause of independency, even as he had taken Marston Moor to be. Sir Thomas informed the Commons that ‘he who ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for’. It was delicately ambiguous, hinting that Parliament should allow freedom to a wide latitude to differing religious opinions upon the Puritan spectrum, while seeming to leave the matter up to God. What was hardly ambiguous in the statement was its reminder that men with that wide range of opinions were fighting loyally for Parliament’s cause.⁵⁴

The Commons certainly did not take collective offence at it, concentrating instead on the very obvious fact that almost immediately after Cromwell had been appointed to take charge of the New Model’s cavalry, that cavalry had been the major force in winning the decisive victory over the king’s own army which had eluded Parliament for three years. On 16 June, on hearing the news of Naseby, the House decided after a long debate that Oliver should be continued in that command as long as Parliament saw fit; but once more the Lords, still resentful of his attack on one of their number, and more religiously conservative, jibbed. The most that they would offer, after two days of argument, was that Cromwell be continued for a further three months, and the Commons did not make a fight of the matter. After all, their decision to appoint him as lieutenant-general a week before had not been given the Lords’ concurrence, whereas now it would be confirmed; and it would always be possible to grant him further extensions. The Commons also ordered that ten thousand pounds be allocated to provide for all the needs of his troopers, with six hundred saddles and twelve hundred pistols sent to them immediately. A week later, they added a thousand horses and a further large consignment of saddles, pistols and body armour to the list.55

Oliver’s feelings on receiving this news are not recorded. He must have felt as if God had indeed been good to him, in plucking him in one week from the verge of retirement to a new and glorious command in which he had already achieved sensational results. A possible indefinite future as a general had now been opened up for him. On the other hand, the Almighty remained capricious, giving his new position an insecurity which no other officer of the New Model had to endure, and which ensured that he would be removed as soon as he ceased to shine in it.

RETURN TO THE WEST⁵⁶

It is clear enough that Cromwell’s religion was one of the key aspects of his personal make-up and also of his national reputation. In view of this, we know strangely little about it for most of the Civil War, the records saying virtually nothing about the services he attended, the clergymen whom he favoured, or his conversations about the subject. This is also true for the men serving alongside and under him; and it is dangerous, however tempting, to imagine either the personal or communal religious life of him and them at this time.⁵⁷ There is an account provided of the religious complexion of the army and of Cromwell’s place in it, by a prominent presbyterian minister called Richard Baxter. He apparently had a history with Cromwell already, in that he had known some of the men in Oliver’s own horse regiment, and allegedly been invited to serve it as chaplain; and refused the position, because he had disapproved of the independency to which he already saw it as inclining.⁵⁸ Baxter’s memories were recorded decades later, and the accuracy of their details cannot be confirmed from any corroborating evidence.⁵⁹ Nonetheless, the abiding impression left on him by his time in the New Model Army is still significant.

According to his account, Baxter visited the army at Leicester in order to see old friends now in it, as he was living nearby at Coventry. He rapidly realized that many of its soldiers, of all ranks, shared his own wish for a conservative church settlement, but that it was dominated and led by independents (whom Baxter called sectaries) favoured by Cromwell. Those were concentrated in Fairfax’s and Whalley’s horse regiments (formed out of Cromwell’s own) and Nathaniel Rich’s, and among the new officers in the rest of the New Model. They regarded the king as a tyrant and enemy and the nobility as oppressors, were determined to abolish the bishops and seek a wide freedom of religious belief, and were very hostile to the Scots. When Baxter arrived, Cromwell greeted him coldly and rebuked him for his original refusal to serve his regiment, but Whalley was friendly to him, and he and one of his more orthodox officers invited the minister to join their regiment as chaplain instead: Baxter thought that Whalley himself was inclined to presbyterianism but put his beliefs behind his loyalty to Cromwell. Baxter accepted the post, in which he argued hard against any who wanted to separate from the national Church, and the doctrines and discipline it prescribed; but he achieved little and was excluded from officer’s meetings. He claimed to have been especially horrified – and hated – by the troop led by Whalley’s major, Christopher Bethell, in which many men cried up the belief that humans could find salvation through their own free will (against the mainstream Puritan doctrine that God had predestined individuals to salvation or damnation, ultimately derived from the Continental reformer John Calvin). They also disputed the authorized translation of the Bible and condemned all formal ministry and the power of magistrates over religion. That made them the classic kind of sectary demonized by the orthodox, Anabaptists.60

At any rate, the newly recruited and unhappy Baxter was soon marching south and west with the remainder of the army. Midsummer was passing, and the campaigning season reaching its zenith, with three warm or mild months still to run; and in 1645, in contrast to 1644, not a day of them was to be wasted, and a great victory was to be properly followed up. After a few days’ rest at Leicester, the New Model, including Cromwell, headed through the South Midlands towards the upper Thames Valley, with a subsequent choice of route before it. It could carry on southward, and then swing west, to relieve Taunton which was being slowly starved towards surrender by Goring and the western royalist army – the king’s last one – with part of the New Model still trapped inside the town after relieving it. Alternatively, it could move on west through Gloucester to attack the king again, as he had retreated to South Wales with his cavalry in an attempt to raise a new body of foot soldiers and rebuild his own army. By 26 June the New Model was crossing the Thames at Lechlade, far west of Oxford, and the next day got to the top of White Horse Vale. A royalist garrison occupied the parish church of the little hilltop town of Highworth, which made easy prey, as the New Model’s siege artillery rapidly pounded it into surrender: the huge crater left by one cannonball is still visible to the left of the main door. On the 29th the army rested at Marlborough, up amid the chalk hills, and there its course was determined.61

On the 26th the Commons had decided to recommend that Fairfax relieve Taunton, because the Scottish army had now expressed its willingness to close in on the king. The MPs had also ordered that four thousand men be drafted to fill up the New Model, and that Sir Thomas be empowered to seize more along his way. These he needed, because his foot soldiers were already reduced to around seven to eight thousand. The rigours of service accounted for much of this, but also the tendency of the soldiers to desert in order to get their loot home, a factor which affected Cromwell’s horsemen even more badly.⁶² After the arrival of the money from London, the army was generally able to pay for its quarters on the march, but some of the horse units did not, and they ate up the growing grass in fields again, leaving the owners bereft of their hay crop.⁶³ Fairfax and his officers chose to accept the advice to relieve Taunton, and moved on deeper into Wiltshire at the opening of July. The army held a rendezvous at the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge, and then marched on in a column towards Dorset, over the vast chalk saucer of Salisbury Plain, an expanse of open pasture and heathland, at the opening of a heatwave.⁶⁴ It was the season in this land of blue and yellow flowers and small blue butterflies. The toiling soldiers would also probably have seen droves of the most notable inhabitants of the plain at the time: the largest flightless birds to have survived in Britain into modern times, the yellowish-brown and be-whiskered bustards, big and tasty as turkeys (which is why they did not survive much longer). The minds of the commanders were, however, by this time fixed on a different species of local life: the Clubmen.

These were associations of country people, led by their parish officials, ministers and lesser gentry, who had taken up arms to protect their property against plundering soldiers on both sides. Their immediate concern was to control the behaviour of rival local garrisons, keeping them from fighting and ensuring that the money levied to support them was done so in a regular and orderly fashion. They also, however, intended to deal with invading soldiers from elsewhere, and had a wider concern to induce king and Parliament to make peace. They had appeared in various parts of southern England and the Welsh Marches since the beginning of the year, but were especially strong and well organized in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset.65 There were three reasons why they concerned Fairfax and Cromwell. One was the sheer size of their potential numbers, running into many thousands. Even if their training and equipment were inferior enough to make them a less formidable prospect than their manpower suggested, the second reason now weighed in: that they could be especially damaging if they cut the lengthening supply lines between the New Model and London as the army marched further west. The third reason was that in their newly weakened position, the royalists, from the king downwards to his local commanders, were making special efforts to woo the Clubmen, expressing sympathy for both their situation and their ideals.⁶⁶

The first contact of the New Model’s soldiers with the movement came on 1 July when some of them visited Salisbury and found the townspeople identifying with it, wearing white ribbons in their hats as a sign of neutrality and treating their visitors coldly. On the next day, Parliament’s local commander in the west, Edward Massey, met Fairfax and Cromwell with his soldiers and reported that he had just fought his way through a Clubman force. Two days later, the army sweated its way into Dorchester, to be met by the governor of Weymouth who warned that the local Clubmen were preventing the county’s parliamentarian garrisons from collecting money or food. News then arrived that the garrison of Lyme had got into a fight with some Clubmen. On entering Dorset the New Model took two of their captains prisoner and released them on a promise to disarm and go home. Now, however, one of the Clubmen leaders arrived with a petition for peace to Parliament and asked for a pass to take it to Westminster: Fairfax, Cromwell and their fellows disliked this but thought it wise to comply. Then four more Clubmen leaders came in with the same request, and on behalf of his army Sir Thomas replied that he would prevent plunder but could not work for a ceasefire with the royalists. He wrote to the Committee of Both Kingdoms appealing for more money to keep his soldiers from looting, and reinforcements to assist the suppression of Clubmen bands.67

With that, the matter had to be shelved for the time being. The news now came in that Goring had raised the blockade of Taunton and was moving his army eastward through Somerset. The objective of the New Model now became to intercept and destroy it. On 5 July, hot and tired, it marched down from the chalk hills into the mid-Somerset lowlands, a country of many rivers, marshes, small lanes and enclosed fields. It was a notoriously difficult terrain over which to move armed forces, especially to catch and engage a nimble opponent. This was where Cromwell had been halted in the spring, and by the same dangerous adversary who faced him now, George Goring. The circumstances now, however, were completely different. Then, Cromwell and Waller had commanded a body of men only around equal to the royalist’s, and composed almost wholly of horse and dragoons, while Goring also had foot. Now Cromwell and Fairfax had a much bigger army, especially superior in foot and of generally higher quality. They also had a massive advantage in morale. Naseby had changed everything. It had ensured that ever after, the king was going to be on the defensive and his forces inferior in numbers to their assailants. For the great majority of the population who wanted an end to the war above anything else, it seemed that the balance had now tipped decisively in Parliament’s favour, and the swiftest and surest way to stop the fighting would increasingly be to back it. For the royalists, the New Model not only had numbers on its side but the huge prestige of Naseby, and nowhere dared they now face it in a formal pitched battle. All that they could do was to try to buy time, avoiding a straight fight and slowing it down and trying to hold territory, in the hope that new recruits would eventually be found to rebuild their numbers. This was the strategy that was now forced upon Goring. In late June his army had been reckoned by the leaders of the West Country royalist administration at around 5,000 horse and 5,000 foot.68 This was not far short of the probable numbers of the New Model by this time, and if handled well it might well reduce the latter to a frustrating game of attrition in that cluttered landscape. Goring’s men, however, would always be on the defensive, and always aware of facing a superior and hitherto victorious foe bent on their destruction; and that was not a predicament likely to bring out the best in soldiers who were not fighting to save homes and families.

Goring’s main line of defence was the River Yeo, which was conveniently long and deep, and ran straight across the path of the New Model. On 7 July Cromwell and Fairfax took a party to find a crossing, but found all the bridges and fords guarded by the royalist army. Horse units from the two armies skirmished in the water meadows along the river. The weakness in Goring’s position, however, was that the Yeo was too long for him to block every way over it, against an enemy with the numbers to pin down his men at the crossings which they held, while probing ever further upriver for an unguarded one. This is what Fairfax’s council of war decided to do, and by the end of the day some of their soldiers had found a bridge at Yeovil which had been broken and then left unwatched. They repaired it and crossed, and the next morning, realizing that his flank was turned, Goring pulled back his whole army from the river and the New Model poured across it. Fairfax heard that his enemy was immediately sending a strong party of horse towards Taunton, apparently hoping to catch the town by surprise. He immediately despatched Edward Massey, with a larger brigade of horse and dragoons, to intercept it. On the next day, Massey caught the royalist force completely by surprise as it rested in a pasture, routing it and killing or capturing three hundred troopers. By now the New Model was marching westward down the valley of the Yeo, towards the small town of Langport, where Goring had established his new headquarters.69 It stood on a hill above where the river joined another, the Isle, to make a bigger one, the Parrett, which flowed down through the large town of Bridgwater.

On the morning of 10 July the royalist general was pulling out of Langport as part of a change of strategy. With the New Model across the Yeo, and his attempt to seize Taunton foiled and his horse division reduced, Goring decided to retire to the apparent safety of Bridgwater, which had been fortified and garrisoned, and review his options. He accordingly sent off his baggage and artillery trains first with his infantry following, and despatched a rear guard to the far side of Langport to cover his retreat. The New Model was divided at this point, as Fairfax and Cromwell had sent Ireton’s horse regiment and most of Okey’s dragoons with Massey, and a foot brigade and more horse to reinforce him; and these were still on the wrong side of the Parrett. They still, however, had most of their cavalry and eight whole foot regiments and parts of three more: quite enough to take on Goring. A council of war was debating whether to attack him at once when his rear guard appeared, going into position on the New Model’s side of Langport. Ironically, this precipitated a decision to launch an assault, on the grounds that the royalists themselves could be intending an attack.

Between the two forces lay a small valley, formed by a muddy stream called the Wagg Rhyne, which ran down to the Yeo. That stream was hardly an obstacle in itself, but it could only be approached by a narrow lane between hedged fields which led to a ford that only four horses abreast could cross at a time, after which the lane went uphill through a large fallow field, under pasture, in front of Langport. The weather was still hot and dry, the lane dusty. Goring tried to make best use of the ground, filling the hedges with musketeers and putting a body of cavalry and set of field guns onto the top of the fallow field. The plan was that the muskets and artillery would riddle an attacking force with shot as it came up the lane and the horsemen would charge it as it emerged, disordered, into the field. This scheme underestimated the speed, determination and firepower of the New Model. Fairfax drew his soldiers up on a ridge on the far side of the valley from Langport, which gave them a good view of the prospective battlefield between, and around noon trained his heavy guns on the royalist troopers and artillery in the field at the top of the far slope. A relentless bombardment forced the gunners to retire altogether and the horsemen to recoil in disorder. Then one and a half thousand musketeers drove their royalist counterparts back beyond the stream and into flight, opening the way for a charge across the ford by the horse.

Cromwell gave that task to the regiments of his relatives Whalley and Desborough, which had been formed out of his old one. He put the spearhead of it, the post of greatest honour, under the command of Christopher Bethell, whose troopers were giving Richard Baxter so much heartache. Baxter himself was watching them from the ridge where the army’s senior officers were gathered, and so was somebody of whose religious policies he must have disapproved just as much, Cromwell’s former protégé John Lilburne, who had turned up to ask Oliver for another favour. His disillusion with military life after his experience of service under the earl of Manchester had led him to return to a civilian existence, and now he was short of money, and needed a letter from his powerful friend asking that Parliament grant him the compensation it had discussed giving to him for his former sufferings at the hands of the royal government.

Bethell’s men careered across the ford and uphill at full pelt into the enemy horsemen, breaking two bodies of them. A counter-charge drove back Bethell to the stream in turn, but by then Desborough’s men were across and reinforcing him, the musketeers pouring fire into Goring’s troopers and the rest of the New Model advancing from the ridge, and the royalists turned and fled. Next to Baxter, another cavalry officer with whose religious views the minister would have been uncomfortable, Thomas Harrison, broke into rapturous praise of the Almighty at the sight. Cromwell and Fairfax agreed that it was one of the best cavalry actions they had ever witnessed. The retreating royalists set fire to Langport to stall pursuit, and Cromwell led a body of troopers along the burning main street to encourage the others to get through. The parliamentarians broke out of the town and found the retreating royalist foot in a large summer pasture on the far side of the Langport ridge, down among the marshes known as the Somerset Levels. Cromwell would have immediately recognized them as a miniature of his familiar Fens, a flat land mostly covered in floods in winter and lush grass in summer, veined everywhere with ditches that held water even in the dry season, and studded with pools. Across this landscape the royalist army broke and ran when it saw the strength of the enemy coming at it, and was chased almost as far as Bridgwater. Many of its horses fell into the ditches and were captured. Cromwell himself led the pursuit of a body of infantry towing two field guns, and captured the guns and most of the men; and he still found time that day to write Lilburne his letter. Parliamentarian sources claimed between nine hundred and two thousand prisoners, and the total defeat of the king’s only remaining army, and Parliament itself decreed another day of national thanksgiving.70

They were not far wrong. Goring himself reported to the king that he had actually lost only just over three hundred men killed or captured, but the remainder were demoralized and fearful and the local Clubmen, seeing them defeated, were turning on them. Most of the western cavalry in his army had deserted, leaving him with only 2,500 horse and between three and four thousand foot, with which he could not face the New Model. Rather than be trapped in Bridgwater, he left a thousand of his foot soldiers to reinforce the town and fled west precipitately with his remaining men to Devon in the hope of picking up reinforcements from the south-west.⁷¹ The partnership of Fairfax and Cromwell had succeeded in crippling the two remaining royalist armies within four weeks. The published accounts of the battle gave full credit to them both for this second victory, and also to Bethell and Desborough. Harrison was favoured by Fairfax by being ordered to carry news of the battle to the House of Commons, which rewarded him with the gift of two splendid horses, and Bethell with two hundred pounds.72 Lilburne was less lucky. He claimed to have returned to Westminster not only with Cromwell’s recommendation for his bid for arrears of pay, but more letters to MPs with accounts of the action; but his presbyterian enemies got him imprisoned on a charge of insulting the Speaker of the Commons.⁷³ Cromwell sent his own report on the battle, which was published as a tract. As usual, he gave a strong impression that the royalists had been more numerous, and he made sure that readers knew that he had given the directions for the successful cavalry charges across the brook while emphasizing repeatedly that God had decreed and decided the result.⁷⁴

The New Model now quartered in the settlements of the Somerset Levels, and Fairfax immediately used the victory to get tougher with the Clubmen. When the leader who had earlier been allowed to take a petition to Parliament reappeared to demand punishment of the garrison at Lyme for fighting some of his men, and compensation, Sir Thomas arrested him. Those from the area around Langport and Bridgwater rose in great numbers on the day after the battle, in arms, and flying sheets and aprons from poles to provide the white banners which signified a yearning for peace. Fairfax and Cromwell marched up to them to receive their petitions for it and promise that the New Model’s soldiers would pay for all provisions taken, and were cheered and given a salute of musket fire. In reality, the money provided at Leicester had run out, and the horse been given none for three weeks; so the promise would be hard to keep unless another convoy of cash arrived.

On the next day the two commanders went to look at Bridgwater and decide whether to besiege it. Cromwell had already made a speech at the head of the army about the need to cut communications with it along the river, and a horse party had been sent to do that. It was a tempting prize, containing Goring’s siege train and baggage and strategically sited, but it also had many soldiers inside, was mostly surrounded by cannon-proof earthworks, and lay in a level valley. The Parrett flowed through the middle of the town, and water from the river had been diverted into the ditches outside the earthworks, to create moats thirty feet across, which were swelled twice daily by the incoming tide; and the tidal race in this part of the Bristol Channel is one of the fastest and highest in the world. Indeed, the two generals were struck by it on 13 July when they went onto the river in a boat to look at the town’s waterside defences and were almost overturned and drowned. They decided to put the question of an attack on Bridgwater to a council of war, which sat on two consecutive days and decided that it was equally dangerous either to leave it in the army’s rear and follow Goring, or to settle down to a regular siege and give him time to rebuild his army. The only solution was the most difficult and dangerous course: to try to take the place by storm.75

During the following four days the army slowly surrounded Bridgwater, glad of the break in forced marches after having covered so much mileage so fast since June. An innovative technology was devised to overcome the problem of the water defences, of constructing wooden bridges between 30 and 40 feet long, which could be brought up to the moats on carts and laid across them. Morale was greatly raised by the arrival of the hoped-for money from London, enabling everybody to be paid. The day before the attack was a Sunday, and the soldiers were treated to sermons in morning and afternoon: the former by an independent minister and the latter by a presbyterian.⁷⁶ The former was a rising star among the more radical English clergy, a preacher returned from New England – the congregations of which provided the clearest model for a federated Church of independent units – called Hugh Peters. The listening men would have seen a fervently animated man in early middle age, with an unruly bob of hair, a round face and a pencil-line moustache.⁷⁷ Towards evening the army was drawn up for a final fierce exhortation by Peters, after which the soldiers went to their posts as night fell. At two o’clock in the morning, when the tide was low, three guns were fired as the signal for them to fall on both sides of the town. The attack on the western part, led by Massey, was intended as a diversion, and it was on the east that Fairfax and Cromwell were stationed and the serious action was intended.

For a moment it all seemed to go wrong. On the west side Massey’s men did not assault the town as planned, while on the east only one of the mobile bridges worked, and some of the storming parties – made up of volunteers – were obliged to wade the moat. What saved them was that the defences were not yet complete on that side, and for a space the moat was the only protection. Bereft of anything behind which to shelter, some of the defenders there, inexperienced Welsh conscripts just sent over by the king, shot wildly over the heads of the enemy and then threw down their arms. The attackers seized their artillery pieces and turned them on the remaining royalists. The gate to the defences was captured and its drawbridge let down so that a party of horse could charge into the town. The rest of the defenders there now surrendered and the eastern half of Bridgwater was taken. The governor, however, pulled up the central section of the bridge across the Parrett, which connected the east and west parts of the town. He then ruthlessly fired grenades and red-hot slugs of lead into the eastern section and set it on fire. The following night, the commanders decided to try a diversion on the east and launch a proper attack on the west, but there Massey’s men, lacking the resolution of the New Model, again failed to move. On the following afternoon, Fairfax allowed the governor to send out the women and children from his remnant of the town, and then copied the man’s own tactic by firing explosive shells and heated slugs into that remnant so it began to burn. This was too much for the defenders, and they forced the governor to capitulate. What was left of Bridgwater was granted immunity from plunder, but the near two thousand soldiers who had been in it were all kept prisoner, and lost their weapons, horses, ammunition and personal possessions. Goring’s artillery and his army’s baggage were added to the spoil, and the sale of the goods taken was enough to award a five-shilling bonus to each man in the storming parties. Once again, Fairfax favoured a leading independent when sending his victory despatch to the Commons, for he chose Hugh Peters, whom the MPs rewarded with a hundred pounds.78

The fall of Bridgwater on 23 July was as great a victory as that at Langport. The New Model had driven a wedge through the West Country, as far as the sea, and split the royalists at Bristol, and the king on the far side of the channel, from Goring and those in the south-west. Moreover, its taking of such an apparently strong town, as its third striking achievement in a row, convinced many even formerly loyal royalists that their cause was lost. The South Welsh gentry turned on King Charles, refused to obey him any longer, and drove him and his cavalry out of their region, leaving them to wander around the Midlands and Yorkshire for a month.79 In Devon, Goring’s remaining foot soldiers mostly deserted, and he had neither money nor realistic prospects of victory and loot to entice replacements.⁸⁰ The gaining of the town had prevented either of the king’s two last armies, both of which the New Model had just wrecked, from being rebuilt. As long as Cromwell, Fairfax and their fellows did not now make any mistakes, and unless the king could find any new sources of support, the war was won, and what remained would be an extended process of mopping up.

AUTUMN OF SIEGES

Immediately after taking Bridgwater, Fairfax himself had wanted to march west at once and destroy the remainder of Goring’s army.⁸¹ The majority of his officers were less keen on this. After so much rapid action, the army needed to be recruited and resupplied to bring it up to full strength, and there was a great risk in going into the south-western peninsula with a weakened force and powerful royalist fortresses left in its rear. Bristol in particular had a concentration of troops which could seriously menace the New Model from behind, and the king’s garrisons in Wiltshire and Hampshire might cut the vital supply lines from London; as might the Clubmen. On 25 July, therefore, a council of war resolved to clear those communications before going any further west. The first target was to be Bath, which seemed an easy one and would handsomely enlarge the territory that the army controlled. On the 28th the New Model reached Wells, in another heatwave, and Nathaniel Rich was sent ahead the next day with a party to summon Bath to surrender and probe its defences. He did better than that, as there were fewer than two hundred soldiers defending the city and they had no more stomach for a fight than the Welshmen at Bridgwater. When Okey’s dragoons stormed the bridge over the River Avon and set fire to the gate at its end, the governor immediately gave up on condition that he and his officers could depart to Bristol.82

When this good news came, the New Model was advancing on Bath across the bare limestone ridge of the Mendip Hills, pockmarked with lead workings. On receiving it, the army immediately turned south-east towards its next prey, the powerful castle of the medieval bishops of Salisbury at Sherborne on the northern edge of the Dorset chalk hills. It had long held an especially active and troublesome royalist garrison, and while nobody expected that to give in easily, to take it would clear a useful corridor between the West Country and London. Pushing across the south Somerset pasturelands again, the roadside grass now the golden hue of late summer, Fairfax reached the castle with his advance guard on 1 August. There he was back in the territory of the most numerous, highly organized and hostile of the Clubman associations, and word reached him that their leaders from across the region were to meet on the following day at Shaftesbury, the next town to the east along the edge of the hills. He decided to seize them, and so behead their whole organization, and he and Cromwell sent Fleetwood with a thousand horsemen to do the job. He came back with fifty prisoners, but that action only provoked a mass rising of the Clubmen on the next day, with the design of staging a rescue. The leaders of the New Model resolved that this was the time to attack and crush them, and Cromwell was chosen as the one with the necessary experience, energy and ruthlessness for the job.

On 4 August he set out with a strong force, making his way through the hills towards Shaftesbury. This was now the land of the High Chalk, of steep-sided hills divided by deep wooded valleys, and he was making his way along one of the latter when he saw flags waving from the top of a crest on one side, above the trees. He sent an officer to ask the business of the countrymen gathered under them, and was answered with a deputation demanding to know why the men at Shaftesbury had been taken. He replied that they had held illegal meetings, and now took the initiative, boldly going up the hill with the Clubman deputation and an escort of his soldiers. There he told the armed mass in front of him that if they returned to their homes, he would personally protect them against plunder and molestation, and this did the trick. Marching on, he reached the massif of Hambledon Hill, which was ringed with ancient earthworks. These still represented a serious barrier and were held by the main body of the Wiltshire and Dorset Clubmen, between two and a half and four thousand strong, who fired on the party that Oliver sent to parley with them. He formally issued them with three warnings, to no effect, and that now meant a real fight.

First he sent a frontal attack uphill, which the defenders resolutely beat back. Then he ordered in his own former troopers, the regiment directly led by Desborough, which rode round the back of the hill and charged into the countrymen from behind. This broke them, and most fled down a slope so steep that the horsemen could not pursue, leaving some dead on the hill and four hundred captives, including most of the leaders. Cromwell and his men noted, perhaps with sympathy and perhaps with contempt, the slogan written across one of their banners: ‘If you offer to plunder or take our cattle, be assured we will give you battle.’ Others had passages of Scripture, but these did not give their captors any sense of a common heritage, one later commenting that these were ‘profanely applied’ by the ‘malignant priests’ who had led out their parishioners to the hill. The prisoners were herded into a village church, where Cromwell cross-examined them on the following day and released those who promised to submit to Parliament. In the evening he was back at the siege of Sherborne Castle, having solved the Clubman problem in forty-eight hours.83 He had done so, moreover, carefully and judiciously, making a distinction between outright enemies and proponents of peace and neutrality, acknowledging the right of rural folk to protection from looting soldiers, and officially treating the bulk of those he had found in arms as simple souls misled by unscrupulous or deluded leaders. It had worked, and he had completely crushed the Clubman organizations while avoiding a massacre. When the news reached Parliament, the Commons secured a further four months’ extension of his commission as lieutenant-general when that came up for renewal in September.84

The defenders of Sherborne Castle proved as resolute as had been feared and continued to resist for almost two more weeks. They were only broken when heavier siege guns were brought up to the New Model and these blasted in some of the walls, and miners arrived from the Mendips to plant more explosives beneath other sections. Cromwell visited both the gunners and the miners with Fairfax, to encourage them. The place was stormed and yielded a huge trove of booty, which the soldiers mostly sold to the local people, in the marketplace of the nearby town of Sherborne. This was needed as a boost to morale, because the convoy of money which had arrived at Bridgwater had only represented two weeks’ worth of pay for the army, and now another two weeks’ worth arrived at Sherborne. Overall, this meant that the amount owed was sliding more than a month behind schedule. Likewise, the promised recruits were reaching the New Model, but numbered no more than 1,200, instead of the 4,000 which it had been told to expect.⁸⁵ This helped to inform the decision which a council of war reached after gaining the castle: to postpone a march against Goring once again, and continue the mopping-up operation in the West Country. Specifically, it seemed unwise to push into the south-west while Bristol remained untaken in the rear. Prince Rupert himself was in command there, and if he could strengthen himself might take the New Model in the rear; at the very least, he might cut its communications. It was therefore resolved to turn on Bristol itself.

It was a great prize, being England’s third largest city (after London and Norwich) and the second largest seaport after the capital. Its capture would be a further huge blow to the king’s cause, and it had been stormed once already, by Rupert himself in 1643, so it seemed vulnerable. Just two days after Sherborne Castle was taken, the army began moving north-west towards this new objective, and the day after that it was deep in eastern Somerset and Ireton had been sent ahead with two thousand horse and dragoons to drive in the garrison. On the evening of 20 August Cromwell and Fairfax led the vanguard of the New Model up to the top of the huge hogback of limestone known as Dundry Ridge, and their prospective prize lay before them.86 Opposite, across the broad valley of one of England’s three large rivers called the Avon, snaked another line of hills, running across the horizon all along the watching horsemen’s front, and closing off the land to their left. At one point on that left hand the Avon cut through the hills in a huge gorge of bare limestone cliffs through which the port’s shipping passed to and from the sea. In the centre of the valley sat the city, a huddle of grey church towers and spires, with a wood of ships’ masts in the midst of them. That valley situation was its military weakness: in the words of Rupert’s engineer, it lay ‘in a hole’, with high ground surrounding it on all sides.⁸⁷ On three of those, the hills were at a safe distance, but all along the north they came closer, and siege artillery positioned there could fire down easily into the city.

The only remedy was to push an encircling ring of new fortifications far out to the north so that it ran along the crest of the nearest ridges. That rendered Bristol safe from bombardment, but it resulted in a defensive perimeter five miles in circuit. To man this effectively needed over four thousand soldiers, which the city and its region could not easily support. Moreover, the high ground was made of hard limestone, so that the digging of ditches through it, and extraction of blocks to build ramparts, was extremely difficult. That was why the royalists had managed to get over the line in 1643. Since then, they had strengthened it in places and constructed or strengthened forts along it, but there were sections which remained weak. The worst was to the east, which had been especially neglected, and was only five feet high. Moreover, too many hedges and ditches had been left beyond it where an enemy might hide.⁸⁸ During daylight, the guns in the forts could rake along the approaches to the walls, but in darkness this advantage would be gone. To defend the whole precinct, Rupert had gathered 2,300 foot and 1,000 horse, but too many of the foot soldiers were raw Welsh conscripts of the kind who had proved useless at Bridgwater, and he could not rely on more than 1,500 of his soldiers. These were too few to defend a precinct of that size. To make things even worse, a serious outbreak of bubonic plague had occurred in the city, carrying off an increasing number of the inhabitants and the garrison, and reducing morale further.89

Initially, however, it was the strength and size of the defences which impressed the New Model as it took up its stations around the city. In the next ten days Rupert’s best men sallied out six times to attack its regiments in their quarters. They came in both daylight and darkness, and on some nights Cromwell and Fairfax could get no sleep, but were riding round the billets of their men with horse contingents trying to assess the danger and damage and co-ordinate responses. To make matters worse, the weather turned wet and misty, literally dampening the spirits of the parliamentarians and giving further cover to the garrison’s attacks. After such a run of victory, moreover, bad news was arriving from elsewhere. On 28 August it was heard that the king’s cavalry, on their wanderings with him, had sacked Cromwell’s original home town of Huntingdon, and then returned to Oxford, to gather more horsemen for a descent on the Scots or the New Model. In July the Scottish army had invaded the Welsh Marches in what was supposed to be the start of its campaign to catch and crush the remnant of the royal army in South Wales. Instead it had got stuck in a siege of Hereford, possessing neither the artillery to break a way into the city nor the determination to attempt a storm of it. It was still there all through August, when appalling tidings arrived from Scotland itself: the king’s champion there, the marquis of Montrose, had managed to destroy the army retained by the Covenanter government to guard the kingdom, and was now dominant there and might invade England.

Immediately many of the best units of the Scottish army in England left for home to restore the situation there, which they swiftly did, and in their absence that army began to disintegrate before Hereford. When the king advanced upon it, its remaining members raised the siege on 4 September and fled the region. Charles entered the city in triumph and moved on to restore his authority in South Wales.90 All this was relayed to the New Model as it sat in its wet quarters around Bristol, and even more worrying information arrived from the south-west, in a letter intercepted from Goring to one of the king’s secretaries. Fairfax had detached Massey and his local army to keep the royalists in Devon pinned down, but once more they had failed in a mission, and Goring had now advanced into Somerset. The letter announced that within three weeks he would bring ten thousand men to Prince Rupert’s relief. In reality, this was a pure bluff, like the advance itself, and almost certainly intended to fall into parliamentarian hands and shake the New Model’s nerve. At any rate, the leaders of that army were now conscious of what seemed a real danger of being attacked simultaneously by the king, Goring and Rupert, in superior combined strength, when it was spread out around Bristol. The fear of this, however, had the opposite effect to that for which Goring had hoped: after a day of prayer and fasting to seek divine guidance, and a long debate, a council of war decided to take the risk of storming the city, as each new day outside it seemed to increase the danger of the army’s position.

Preparations took almost two weeks, some of that time being spun out by a ploy of Rupert’s, in offering to negotiate in order to buy time. Two thousand local sympathizers had appeared with weapons to reinforce the army, which made the assault all the more practicable. It eventually began in the dead of a fine autumn night, the weather having cleared: at one o’clock on 10 September. The great gold star of the season, Arcturus, would have hung in the western sky, and near it the pendant semicircle of the Corona Borealis. A huge bonfire of straw bales, left from the local corn harvest, was lit on a ridge to the north, and four cannon fired one after the other. At that the New Model attacked, and its size enabled it to do so from different sides of the defences at once, with scaling ladders, and logs to fill up the ditch. Almost everywhere they held, but at two places foot battalions got over the low eastern wall with little difficulty, and at a third with a harder fight: a total of nine regiments had converged on those points and so would have had overwhelming numbers. Once inside the line, they opened a gate and gap for some of Cromwell’s horse regiments to enter, his old troopers in Desborough’s and Whalley’s units being once more part of the vanguard. They then provided cover as pioneers pulled down a whole section of wall for all the rest of the cavalry to enter.

The remaining defenders of the eastern perimeter were now surrounded and gave up or fled; the royalist horse, outnumbered, fell back, and the forts in that sector were isolated. That on Prior’s Hill was attacked, and fought hard until some of the New Model’s infantry got over its palisades and killed almost everybody inside. By now day was starting to break, and Cromwell and Fairfax climbed on top of the captured fort to survey the scene. A cannonball from the medieval castle at the end of the city centre grazed the roof next to them: like the shot or blow on Cromwell’s neck at Marston Moor, it came very close to changing the course of history. Instead it was Prince Rupert’s career which was coming to an end. He still held the city and the strongest forts on the northern sector, but this counted for little with his enemies occupying all the ground between that sector and the medieval walls. They could mount siege guns whenever they wished, and blast down those walls, which had never been designed to withstand cannon fire, at close range. With so many soldiers cut off, dead or demoralized, the prince would not be able to muster the strength to defend the breaches, and to shut himself in the castle would leave him trapped while his foes took over the city. He decided to surrender while he still had some bargaining power, and was allowed to march his surviving soldiers away without their weapons, while the citizens were granted immunity from plunder.

Cromwell and Fairfax moved into Bristol for a single night, appalled by the extent of the pestilence in it, the obvious poverty to which war had reduced it, and the stench of the streets, where plague and the demands of the fighting had caused the system of refuse collection to be abandoned. The following day they watched Rupert, clad flamboyantly in scarlet embroidered with silver lace, lead his men towards Oxford, as a crowd of local people from the area around shouted ‘Give him no quarter’: he had burned the neighbouring villages to deny the New Model shelter in them and driven their livestock into the city to feed it. The ashes of the villages were added to those of Langport and Bridgwater to mark the trail of the summer’s fighting. The New Model had lost around a hundred killed and a hundred wounded. There were few casualties among the infantry officers who had led their men over the wall, but more among those leading in the first wave of horse. Their concentration among independents showed again how much Cromwell used these as shock troops and so gave them the best opportunities for glory. Ireton had an arm broken by two pistol shots, which left him in pain for months, while Christopher Bethell, the hero of Langport, who might now have looked forward to a splendid career, was dying. For all that, the damage to the army was minimal and the gain colossal. Parliament had won the capital of the West Country, and with it control of the Bristol Channel. The king promptly dismissed Rupert from his employment in disgrace, and he never held another command in the war. South Wales promptly slipped out of royal control once more, this time for good, Goring retreated helplessly back into Devon and the king moved away northward again. The military initiative had been returned decisively to the New Model.91

The fall of Bristol also had some impact on the continuing debate over the future form of English religion. In August, Parliament ordered the establishment of a presbyterian system in London and Westminster, with a provincial synod, divided into ten district ‘classes’ meeting monthly. This was to be a model to be extended later across the nation, with a national assembly to unite the synods. Ministers and congregations were to choose elders to serve on the classes, who had to take the Solemn League and Covenant, excluding both royalists and religious and political radicals. In the same month the traditional service book was outlawed and a new ‘Directory of Worship’ suited to broad Puritan tastes made mandatory in its place.⁹² These measures, however, left open once again the burning question of the status of Puritans who chose no longer to worship inside the national Church, or who exhibited a divergence of opinion from the mainstream. Cromwell used the conquest of the city to make a very public intervention in the matter, with Fairfax’s support. Formally at the latter’s command, Oliver wrote to the Commons to announce the victory, and followed this with the message ‘presbyterians, independents, all had here the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and manner, they agree here, know no names of difference, pity it is, it should be otherwise anywhere . . . As for being united in forms (commonly called uniformity) every Christian will for peace sake, study and do as far as conscience will permit; And from some bretheren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.’93

It was, as usual, a clever statement. On one reading it could be taken as an expression of abhorrence for religious division, and an exhortation to unity without regard for faction. On the other, its conclusion did seem like a plea for the toleration of diverse opinions and an absence of legal sanctions enforcing orthodoxy upon true Christians. The House supported him once again, directing that another day of thanksgiving be held in all Parliament’s territory on 5 October, and the letter read out at the services held upon it. It returned formal thanks to all Fairfax’s officers, but singled Cromwell out for special regard.⁹⁴ Fairfax tactfully wrote to the Lords himself to describe the victory, in more detail than Cromwell and not seeking to draw any religious lesson from it.⁹⁵ Nonetheless, Oliver’s letter immediately became partisan. When an official version of it was published, for use at the thanksgiving, the section concerning religion was omitted.⁹⁶ In response, the missing section was scattered round London on the night of 21 September, and the following month an ally of Lilburne’s called William Walwyn, who was emerging as a notable radical thinker in the city, published an anonymous tract calling for liberty of conscience which used Cromwell’s words as an exemplar of the case it was trying to make.⁹⁷ By that time the Scottish representatives in London were badly disillusioned, recognizing that their influence had declined because of the near-uselessness of their army in England all year. They considered the presbyterian system being established at London to be merely a nominal one, and commented that ‘our wrestlings with devils and men are great’.98 In October, also, Parliament passed an ordinance excluding from communion all who committed a long list of religious and moral offences and who did not hold a set of defined basic beliefs; but again it did not legislate against those who might not want to be in communion with the new Church anyway.⁹⁹

Because of the epidemic in the city, after its fall the army was quartered in villages at a safe distance from it, to east and south.¹⁰⁰ When it had arrived outside Bristol the hedgerows would have been blushing with rose hips and hawthorn berries, and purple with elderberries and dark with blackberries. Now those were passing, the leaves on the turn and the weather cooling. It was the time when armies generally went into winter quarters, but neither the New Model nor its political masters were anxious to do so this year. Instead, there was a general wish to continue inflicting damage on the royalists, to deprive them of any opportunity to recover. For the time being, the New Model rested in its villages, waiting for more money and recruits to arrive from London. A council of war on 13 September decided to use the interlude to clear more enemy garrisons from the region around. The task of reducing those in northern Wiltshire was given by Fairfax to Cromwell, to honour him again and give him a fresh chance for glory and an extension of his command. He was allotted four foot regiments, this being the first time that he had ever led a substantial body of infantry, and a powerful siege train.¹⁰¹

Civil War artillery consisted of a series of different sizes of big, wheeled gun, firing balls weighing anything from six to forty-eight pounds. The lighter were useful as anti-personnel weapons, and could blow in gates and chop down battlements. To make a serious impact on fortifications, however, required a demi-cannon, firing balls twenty to forty pounds in weight, or a whole cannon, which used shot of forty-eight to eighty pounds. These weapons could smash a hole in a medieval castle or town wall. Even they, however, could be foiled if the defenders resorted to either of two remedies, both of which amounted to getting literally down and dirty. One was to construct low modern fortifications of earth around the whole position, with deep ditches and sloping banks, both studded with sharply pointed projecting wooden poles to deter storming soldiers. These works would include projecting bastions, the larger shaped like arrow heads and the smaller in semi-circles and triangles, to provide the defenders with flanking fire. Defences like these had foiled the parliamentarians at Donnington and Faringdon. The other remedy was to pack solid earth behind medieval stone walls, to their tops and at least to a width of fifteen feet. This would enable the stonework on the front to absorb the shock of even heavy shot, and if it crumbled then the mud bank behind would present an equally formidable barrier. Both measures were, however, extremely onerous and expensive, and in many places garrison commanders had gambled that an attack was unlikely and would not put in the extra effort to provide them; this was why Leicester had fallen to the king in May. Even a well-fortified position, however, might be reduced by mortars, which could lob their explosive shells up over the defences and down among the people inside. One mortar would make life unpleasant for the besieged, while a number would create conditions that were simply unendurable.102

Cromwell seems to have been given the best of the train which had been assembled to reduce Sherborne Castle, including a whole cannon, two demi-cannons and four mortars. They were accompanied by smaller guns, still formidable in weight, like five culverins which fired a fifteen to twenty-pound ball. These would work in a team with the giant wall-smashers, to crack masonry and topple parapets before the bigger shot broke a structure open. No Civil War army disposed of better firepower than Cromwell did now. In the third week of September great teams of men and animals – for each demi-cannon alone needed thirty to forty horses or oxen, or a hundred men to move it – dragged these monsters across the west Wiltshire clay lands towards the steep grassy scarp which was the edge of Salisbury Plain. There sat Devizes Castle, another fortress built by long-dead bishops of Salisbury, like Sherborne, on the brink of a range of chalk uplands; though it had now been a Crown property for centuries. It was the main royalist stronghold in the north and west of the county, and governed by a skilled engineer who had surrounded it with cannon-proof earthworks. Cromwell accordingly unleashed his mortars on it, as well as pounding the defences, day and night. After two days of this ordeal, unable to get his men any sleep and having his position blown to pieces around him and his powder magazine at risk, and with absolutely no hope of relief, the commander asked for terms.

Here a new policy of clemency became fully apparent on Cromwell’s part, having already manifested itself in the measured and cautious way in which he had treated the Clubmen. It was not a personal initiative but part of a unified response which was now enacted by the whole New Model and which he was following. At Bridgwater, Fairfax had allowed the women in the town to leave before the final bombardment; at Devizes, Cromwell offered the same. When the governor asked to negotiate, he got the same terms which Fairfax had given Rupert at Bristol, being allowed to march out his men, to other garrisons if they wished, leaving their arms behind. It seems very much that the leaders of Parliament’s army had decided that generosity would be more likely to persuade enemy commanders to capitulate than severity. It is also likely that after the treatment of the royalist women at Naseby a decision had been taken at some very high level to avoid further atrocities, because of reputational damage. On the day of the surrender of Devizes, 23 September, Cromwell sent three regiments to obtain the surrender of the small royalist force in the pretty manor house of Lacock Abbey, fashioned from a former medieval monastery. It gave in at once, and he honoured the force for its prudence by coming to watch it march away himself. With that his job in Wiltshire was done.103

Immediately, however, Fairfax gave him another, and tougher (and more glorious) task. On 23 September the Committee of Both Kingdoms asked Sir Thomas to advance south-west at last and occupy most of Devon, so finally ruining Goring’s army by leaving it with too small a span of territory on which to subsist. The House of Commons endorsed this, and resolved to borrow a further forty thousand pounds in London and its area in order to pay the New Model during the campaign. It also desired the remnant of the Scottish army in England to make itself useful by besieging Newark.104 The task of invading Devon meant a winter campaign, which was the hardest sort of soldiering and made a reliable supply line along which money, food, equipment and recruits could regularly arrive all the more imperative. The problem here was that communications between London, which would be the collecting point for all these supplies, and the south-west, were still cut by major royalist garrisons at Donnington Castle, Winchester and Basing House. A chaplain of Fairfax’s described these in a memorable metaphor as ‘vipers in the bowels’. Sir Thomas and his officers decided that while they marched towards Devon, Cromwell should take his present expeditionary force and first-class siege train eastwards, and reduce as many of these fortresses as possible. Oliver accordingly led his foot soldiers and his train around the edge of Salisbury Plain, and on over the rolling chalk uplands to Winchester, arriving there on 28 September.¹⁰⁵

Immediately, he deployed his men to attack all the gates of the city, reasoning both that the garrison would be too few to defend such a widely spread perimeter and that the inhabitants would want a rapid surrender to avoid being looted. He was exactly right, for the defenders withdrew into the castle and the mayor admitted Cromwell’s men on an assurance of protection for the citizens. The serious siege now started, of the castle which was one of the great royal fortresses of England and the legendary seat of King Arthur, whose reputed round table (actually a medieval fake) hung in its hall. The governor burned down the houses surrounding it to give his men a clearer field of fire. Those houses, however, had prevented the construction of protective earthworks, and nobody had bothered to stack earth inside the castle walls. As a result, when Cromwell planted his batteries the wretched men inside were given a masterclass in siege warfare. He bombarded twelve points at once. The mortar shells began to smash the interior, right down to the vaults, wrecking the defenders’ dining chamber, and blowing up the mill which ground their flour and killing the horses which worked it. The cannon fired twelve hours a day and sent the stones of the castle walls flying in all directions, after eight days opening a gap through which thirty men could pass abreast. By now almost half of the garrison had deserted, slipping over the walls in the night, and the morale of the rest had plummeted. When the great breach was made, the governor finally asked for terms.

On the tariff of those that the New Model now seemed to operate, the governor got some less generous than those at Bristol and Devizes but more than at Bridgwater or Sherborne, as befitted the middle level of resistance he had shown. He and his officers were allowed to march away to join the king, but his men were dispersed and all the weapons, munitions and food stocks were seized. Once more the independent Hugh Peters was chosen to take the news of victory to the House of Commons, as a way of underlining the contributions of such men to the cause. Peters was careful in turn to pass on Oliver’s thanks to the House for his leave of absence from it, implying with it the reminder that his service might be further extended. He also delivered a moving plea for money and supplies to be sent to the men of the New Model, including Cromwell’s party. It included the news that the horse regiments were now twelve weeks behind in pay, and the foot were falling sick because they were reduced to eating raw roots and green apples.106

The day after the royalists left Winchester, Cromwell headed for Basing House. Of all the fortresses on his list, this was the most notorious, and expected to be the most formidable. Unlike all those which the New Model had attacked since June, it had regularly been besieged, for long periods, and held out against each attempt to reduce it. Furthermore, the garrison consisted of Roman Catholics, followers of a Church which the English in general, and Puritans in particular, regarded as the mortal enemy of their own religion and committed to its destruction. It was the seat of the marquises of Winchester, the fifth of whom was now the leader of the garrison, and consisted of two neighbouring great houses, an older castle with towers and battlements, and a sprawling new Tudor mansion with pepper-pot turrets, both built out of red brick. These had been surrounded by fourteen and a half acres of new defences, constructed of brick thickly lined with earth to stop cannonballs. These, and the resolution of the defenders, had kept out attackers hitherto, but Cromwell had three advantages over his predecessors in trying to take the place. The first was that it had been softened up before his arrival, by a local parliamentarian force which had surrounded it with over a mile of siege works with close approaches constructed to the defences. The second was that having joined his own men to that local force he deployed overwhelming numbers, several thousand men against three hundred defenders. The third was that previous besiegers had possessed, at best, a single demi-cannon, whereas Oliver brought a siege kit of unsurpassed power.107

He immediately released that power upon the defences, and cannily ignored the shot-proof new brick and earth works to concentrate on the precinct of the Tudor mansion, which had tall walls of brick that were more vulnerable. After three days his guns ripped two large breaches in them. The next morning, that of 14 October, was chosen for the assault. Cromwell spent the previous night in prayer, and chose as his text to inspire his men part of Psalm 115, a fierce ancient Hebrew diatribe against idolatry, which could now be deployed against the Papists in the fortress. At six o’clock, which at this season was still a time of darkness, they went into the gaps in the walls and attacked a third point as well. As they did so the defenders offered to surrender but the attacking soldiers, eager for blood and loot, refused to parley – which had also happened at Sherborne – and fought their way into both houses. Under these circumstances, and remembering that the garrison was mostly Catholic, it is remarkable that the slaughter was not greater than it was. The marquis was taken prisoner unharmed, and so was his chief military officer, and so were over two hundred other soldiers and civilians. Nobody seemed sure afterwards how many died, the rough figure being a hundred. The problem was that the new house caught fire during the fighting, and after twenty hours had burned down to the bare walls and chimneys. Some bodies were buried under the wreckage, and – much worse – more of the inhabitants took refuge in the cellars and were trapped there by the flames, crying out in vain for aid and mercy. One woman was killed outright, allegedly for berating the incoming soldiers, and eight or nine ‘gentlewomen of rank . . . were entertained by the common soldiers somewhat coarsely, yet not uncivilly’, whatever that means.

One reason for the survival of most of the royalists was that their assailants were more intent on plunder than killing, and the more anxious to lay their hands on it before the fire got to it first. Also, the garrison had some parliamentarian prisoners, who might be killed if their captors despaired of their own lives. The loot was certainly prodigious. One bed alone was worth £1,300, and a single soldier got 120 gold pieces and others plate dinner services and jewels. An unlucky infantryman secured three bags of silver, only to be stripped of all but one coin by his companions. When the valuables were taken, the wooden furniture and store of wheat were dragged out and sold off to the local people, and finally the lead was stripped from the buildings, including the gutters, and sold in turn. For Cromwell’s ill-paid and hungry men, it was a prodigiously lucrative action.108

Tellingly, he once more gave Hugh Peters the honour of carrying the news to the House of Commons, which he did two days later. The House decreed a national thanksgiving for Oliver’s string of victories, and ordered him to proceed at once to reduce Donnington Castle, the last royalist fortress west and south-west of London. Cromwell was very reluctant to do this, having already started his march back into the chalk hills to rejoin Fairfax. In a reply to the Commons he emphasized that the New Model badly needed him and his men to have the strength to confront Goring, and this makes sense: he urged the House to neutralize Donnington with a blockade by local forces. The House decided to allow him and Fairfax to dispose of their soldiers as they thought best; and they accorded Cromwell the practical reward for which he had apparently been hoping, of persuading the Lords to concur with a further extension of his office as lieutenant-general, into the following spring. Oliver marched on westward, and completed his tally of victories by accepting the surrender of the last royalist stronghold in Wiltshire, a country house near Salisbury called Langford: the garrison got the same terms as at Devizes and Winchester. He entrusted the account of this sent to the Commons to another independent, a former London artisan, now a lieutenant-colonel, called Paul Hewson, who was rewarded like Harrison with two excellent horses. As ever, Oliver was looking after his own.109

WINTER CAMPAIGN

Meanwhile Fairfax was leading the bulk of the New Model Army into Devon. On 19 October he opened the way into the centre of the county by taking Tiverton Castle, with a lucky shot as a cannonball severed the chain holding up the drawbridge. Oliver and his returning expeditionary force were then passing over the rolling chalk ridges, with their faded cornfields and withering sheep pastures, into Dorset. At Blandford he held a council of war which tried six of his troopers who were proved to have looted goods from royalist officers marching out of Winchester and Langford. As a gesture to advertise the probity of their army and their cause, he and his fellows returned the items concerned to their former owners according to the articles of surrender, and condemned the guilty men to death. One, who drew a fatal lot, was hanged before the soldiers the next morning, and the others were handed over to the royalists to do with as they pleased. Cromwell led his force on, and, having got into the south Somerset lowlands again, received an urgent summons to Fairfax’s headquarters, leaving his foot soldiers and siege train to catch him up later. Late on the evening of the 24th he rejoined them in the market town of Crediton, situated south-west of Tiverton at a point from which the army could strike in any direction across Devon. He must have got a very warm welcome, as his victories had won glory for the whole army and he brought a much-needed reinforcement: allegedly, when Fairfax had informed the men at Tiverton that Oliver was on his way, they had burst into cheers.¹¹⁰

He had been summoned with such haste to attend another council of war, to decide on the next steps of the campaign. There were now several reasons against continuing a rapid attack on Goring. The weather had broken, in the manner of the season, becoming so wet that the lanes were suddenly deep in mud and the wagons of the army could not get along them. The men were worn out with their recent marches, and the increasing cold and rain were nurturing a serious outbreak of epidemic disease among them: probably influenza or typhus. There seemed no need for haste as the chances of the king mounting an attack against the New Model’s rear were diminishing: at Crediton the news arrived that the last of his Northern Horse had been destroyed at Sherburn in Yorkshire.111 Goring remained unable to recruit a force large enough to make a counter-stroke against the New Model from the two impoverished and exhausted counties of Devon and Cornwall.¹¹² To the south of the army’s current position lay the city of Exeter, which blocked the main route in and out of Devon and was a royalist fortress containing over two thousand soldiers under determined leadership. Not even Cromwell’s siege train was of any use against it, because it had two rings of brand-new defences around the medieval walls. The inner consisted of a ditch about seven feet deep and thirty feet wide, with an earthen breastwork for foot soldiers behind it and a counterscarp on the outer side angled to deflect cannonballs from hitting the breastwork. The outer ring consisted of at least three forts, also made of earthen banks and ditches proof against bombardment, the guns of which could rake soldiers trying to attack the breastwork and ditch. The suburbs had all been burned down to allow clear fields of fire to the defenders.¹¹³ Exeter could therefore neither be taken by storm nor easily left in the rear of the New Model.

On 28 October Fairfax’s council, including Cromwell, decided to retreat behind the city and put the army into winter quarters in the villages and small towns to the east of it, blockading it on that side and fortifying the mansions and crossings along the Rivers Exe and Clyst, to establish a defensible line about twenty-five miles long. This was achieved in eight days, the headquarters of Fairfax and Cromwell being established at the small market town of Ottery St Mary. After that the soldiers stayed put, as the East Devon landscape, one of small hills, woods and pastures, settled slowly into its midwinter colours of black, brown and olive green. They were protected in their billets from the storms and frosts, but these static and crowded quarters were perfect for the transmission of disease. During November half of some regiments were ill, and seven to nine people died daily. It must have been some consolation to the commanders that the House of Commons remained supportive throughout this period. It replenished Cromwell’s cavalry division by directing that five hundred pounds be spent on new horses for the New Model immediately and two hundred a month henceforth: in this way it hoped to keep the troopers effective through the winter. When the Lords wanted to force Fairfax to march further into Devon immediately, the lower House refused to agree, and won his army the rest it needed. A stream of money was maintained from London, and to win over the local people, and provide good publicity in general, the soldiers were ordered to pay for everything they needed in the county, on pain of death.114 The army consumed around seventeen thousand pounds of bread (often baked into biscuit to preserve it), seventeen thousand quarts of beer, and a proportionate amount of cheese and meat, per day. By now, with the roads from London cleared of enemy garrisons, and nearby seaports such as Lyme Regis sending on goods delivered by sea, these foodstuffs too were arriving from the capital with some regularity.¹¹⁵

On 2 December Fairfax moved the headquarters back to Tiverton, and pulled most of the New Model forward to it again, to find healthier quarters, start to establish fortified posts on the west of Exeter, and leave those on the east side to be manned by local parliamentarians. Some of the best of Cromwell’s horse, including the regiments of Fleetwood, Whalley and Fairfax (under Desborough), had to be sent away to the Oxford area at Parliament’s request, to keep the royalist horsemen from raiding at will out of that city. Those remaining under Cromwell skirmished regularly with Goring’s troopers in Devon. Then with midwinter came a prolonged and intense period of cold, with blizzards and severe frosts, in which horses could not operate, and both sides were confined to their bases.¹¹⁶

In this period Cromwell was probably warmed spiritually by personal developments. Preparations were being made for the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth, reputedly his favourite one and now aged seventeen, to John Claypole, the son of an old family friend based in Northamptonshire: Oliver was not yet making any dynastic alliances outside his traditional circle of kin. The ceremony took place in January, at Ely where his wife and children were still safely living; and he could not have attended as he was still on campaign in Devon.117 He did allot a very generous dowry of £1,250 to the union, which was a distinct sign of how much he had risen in the world; but then another development that month made him capable of affording it. Until this point, he had been drawing his salary as a captain, colonel and general, though at a reduced rate and inadequately paid. He could expect, if all went well, to receive the arrears as a golden handshake after the war, and also in the same best-case circumstances to be repaid with interest the huge sums he had lent to support the reconquest of Ireland and Parliament’s war effort in 1642. He had, however, no personal source of income on which to fall back when returning to civilian life, having liquidated all his assets so dramatically in 1640. On 1 December, however, the House of Commons debated the peace terms it would offer the king on what was now expected to be his final defeat; and the two soldiers whom the House thought had done most to bring about that defeat would both be well rewarded from the spoils. Fairfax was to be made an English baron (his father held a Scottish title), and granted lands worth five thousand pounds a year, while Cromwell was also to become a lord, and be given an estate worth two and a half thousand pounds a year. Skippon was to get a thousand a year. The former generals were not neglected: Essex would be made a duke and Manchester a marquis, and Waller would have the same package as Cromwell. Honours were also to be spread among a range of politicians from both the current parties, with more promotions in the Lords, and in the Commons the Presbyterians Denzil Holles becoming a viscount and Sir Philip Stapleton a baron, while the Independent Vane also got ennobled.¹¹⁸ For Cromwell, the man who had worked as a tenant farmer and then risen back into the lesser gentry, this promised glory, comfort and security indeed; if the deal went through and he survived the rest of the war.

At the opening of 1646 the icy weather was continuing but both armies in Devon were preparing for action. Goring, shrewd soldier that he was, had decided that the royalist cause was doomed, and found excuses to depart to France. In his absence the council appointed by the king in the previous spring, to run the West Country with his son, the teenage prince of Wales, as figurehead, became a collective leadership by default. In late December this had set about organizing a relief expedition for Exeter, by uniting the militia of Cornwall, the regular Cornish and Devonian field soldiers, units from garrisons, and the horse regiments Goring had brought from the royal army. This promised an army just about big enough to challenge the New Model, if of rather doubtful quality. The royalist problem was the Dartmoor massif, that great high barren crown of granite rock which occupied the centre of the county and presented a major barrier to the assemblage of the new army. By the first week of January the horse units were quartered on the south-east side of the moor, and in the South Hams, the southern part of the county which jutted out into the English Channel. The regular Cornish foot was on the north side of Dartmoor and the rest of the infantry was assembling on the west side.119 The New Model had a natural vested interest in attacking this scatter of units before it could unite.

By January it was both collected for action and ready for that: one more missing element in its provisions, vital for winter warfare – fresh stockings and shoes for the soldiers – had arrived from London. On 5 January the officers prayed for divine guidance and held private discussions, in preparation for a council of war the next day. That decided to attack the cavalry on the side of the moor and then advance into the South Hams to shatter the royalist position. On the 8th the main army advanced to Crediton again and sent an advance guard onward due west towards the Cornish. This was a feint, because that afternoon Cromwell led the cavalry southward towards Bovey Tracey, a little market town on the side of the moor where the nearest party of royalist horsemen was stationed. He delayed his attack until darkness had fallen and his victims settled into their billets for food, recreation and sleep.

It was another freezing winter night, and the constellations of the season – Orion with his jewelled belt and sword, and red upraised hand and blue-white foot, the great sparkling green eye of his dog Sirius, red-eyed Taurus the bull, the clustered shimmer of the Pleiades, and the ice-white heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux – would have shone above the parliamentarian troopers as they carried out the action. They were in the streets before their presence was suspected, and they captured 130 men and four to six hundred horses. Most of the royalist soldiers ran off into the dark countryside and the highest-ranking officers got away because they were playing cards in an upstairs room of a house when the attackers came into the street outside. With admirably quick wit the men in the room threw the money laid out as stakes down from a window, and escaped out of the back as the New Model’s soldiers scrambled for it. Nonetheless, the main enemy outpost had been routed, and the next day Cromwell and Fairfax reunited their forces outside the town and pushed on through the still thick ice and snow into the South Hams. The royalist cavalry fled before them and the relief plan for Exeter was destroyed.120 On 12 January the last royalist units retired into Cornwall, lifting the blockade of Plymouth, a major parliamentarian seaport which had been cut off by land for well over a year. On that day also, the New Model arrived outside the principal port of the South Hams, Dartmouth.

On the following day, muffled against the still bitter cold, Fairfax, Cromwell and their fellows viewed the town and decided that it could be stormed, despite the fact that their siege guns, which could not be pulled through the snow, had been left behind. Dartmouth had been taken by assault by the king’s men in 1643, showing its vulnerability. There were strong forts on the landward side of town, but their guns did not cover the defences there comprehensively, and there were various weak points in the fortifications where a determined party might enter, especially in the dark. A parliamentarian squadron arrived off the harbour which could bombard that and draw off defenders. Five days were spent in preparations, which were delayed slightly by a sudden unexpected warming of the weather, producing a massive thaw and flooding. On 18 January the blood of the men was raised by sermons from Peters, and from a new man called William Dell, another independent who had replaced the presbyterian chaplain who partnered Peters before, and so strengthened that religious interest in the army. At eleven o’clock at night the attack began, and at one place the defenders fled at once, allowing the New Model’s soldiers to get over the wall on their scaling ladders. After that, resistance in the town crumbled fast. The outlying forts were left isolated at daybreak, and surrendered, and so the New Model had notched up another important victory. Again Peters was sent to Parliament with the news. On hearing it, the Commons ordered that a clerical living be found for him, and gave thought to the practical business of how the income to be granted to Fairfax and Cromwell to support their forthcoming titles of nobility could be found. They referred the matter to a committee, but specified that some of the income for Cromwell be provided by granting him the Hampshire estates of the marquis of Worcester, a leading Catholic royalist. For good measure, they also obtained a further, whopping, six-month extension of his commission as lieutenant-general, pushing it well into the autumn.121

He now went with Fairfax and the bulk of the New Model back north and east to tighten the stranglehold on Exeter. This involved using infantry units to reduce the royalist outposts on the west of the city and drawing a circle of strongpoints all round it which would starve it out. Cromwell’s horsemen gave this work cover. New regiments were raised from local volunteers, and news came in of the surrender of Chester, the king’s last major sea port. Various councils of war were held to discuss either storming Exeter or marching west to finish off the royalist field army, but reached no settled plan.¹²² As at times before, it was a royalist initiative which precipitated a decision. After the failure of the project to relieve Exeter, the prince of Wales had formally replaced Goring as commander-in-chief of the western royalist army, and at the start of February the prince appointed the veteran commander Ralph, Lord Hopton, to act as his lieutenant-general and gather that army for a fresh attempt to break the siege of the city. He could only collect 1,890 foot and 3,200 horse, the former reluctant and demoralized and the latter mutinous. Nonetheless, he dutifully advanced into North Devon on 6 February, and after four days reached the small hilltop town of Great Torrington, which he thought an easily defensible position and where he halted to await more ammunition and other supplies.123

The news of his advance reached the leaders of the New Model on 8 February, when they were holding another council to discuss strategy, and that resolved at once to march to meet him. On the 10th, Fairfax and Cromwell entered Crediton once more with the bulk of the army, and more contingents came up from the south of the county, with the latest welcome instalment of pay, which had been shipped to Dartmouth. That gave them seven foot regiments, five horse regiments and five companies of dragoons, which even at reduced strength would have provided a superiority of around three to one in foot but only a slight one in horse.¹²⁴ The weather was still mild, but this being the start of an English spring, mildness meant wind and rain, and so mud. Progress was therefore slow, and five more days were needed to get within sight of Torrington. The downpour had continued and the bridges over the little rivers of this land of hillocks had been broken by the royalists. On arrival, Fairfax sent an advance party under Cromwell’s former major James Berry to alarm the royalists in the town while the rest of the army retired to quarters for the night, glad that the weather was at last clearing. Hopton’s foot soldiers at the defences, however, opened fire on Berry’s men. Despite Cromwell’s efforts to restrain them, some of the New Model’s infantry went in to help their comrades, and then Sir Thomas himself led in yet more to aid those. He ordered Cromwell to call up all the rest of the army to join the action, and so a regular battle developed in the moonlight which neither side had intended.

The royalists had hastily fortified the town with barricades made of earth and chopped-down trees, and opposed the attackers bravely across these with pikes and muskets for one to two hours. The defences were, however, both inadequate and incomplete, and could be outflanked. Slowly, superior numbers told, and eventually the New Model infantry got across and around the barriers and pulled them open to let in Cromwell’s horsemen. Hopton’s fundamental problem now showed itself: his main strength, relative to his enemy, was in horsemen, but his were mostly gathered outside the town on the far side from the attackers and could not easily get into its streets, which were infantry country. Two hundred royalist horsemen were inside the town, and twice charged the parliamentarian foot soldiers in the main street and beat them back, only to be hit by a counter-charge of the New Model’s troopers, which broke them in turn; and so the whole force of defenders began to run and Torrington was taken and plundered. As its occupation was completed, around eleven o’clock, Hopton’s magazine of eighty barrels of gunpowder, which had been stored in the parish church, blew up. It shattered the building and strewed stones, timber, lead and ironwork across the whole town, inflicting terrible damage. The victors had penned two hundred of their prisoners into the building, and it seems one of those had ignited the store by accident, though parliamentarian propaganda held that a hired hand had been paid by Hopton to perform the deed. Debris crashed into the street where Cromwell and Fairfax were riding, but once again both escaped injury. Most of the defeated infantry, and almost all of the cavalry, escaped out of the town and into the night, but the foot soldiers threw away their weapons to speed their flight, leaving streets, and the lanes and fields beyond, full of pikes and muskets. When the news reached Parliament it ordered another thanksgiving.125 At the same time the grant of the lands of the marquis of Worcester in Hampshire to Cromwell – three manors, including fine woods – was formally sealed, and the process began of making up the rest of his estate worth £2,500 a year, by signing over to him more land, with a large country house, that belonged to the captive marquis of Winchester.¹²⁶

Hopton’s frightened infantry had not done badly at Torrington: Fairfax thought it the hardest fight the New Model had known when storming a town. Moreover, Hopton managed to gather most of those who had got away and lead them and the horsemen to temporary safety, across the River Tamar into Cornwall. Fairfax himself was determined to give them no time to regroup, by sending Ireton with a force to blockade Barnstaple, the royalist stronghold in northern Devon, and taking the rest of the New Model into Cornwall to hunt down and destroy the last of Hopton’s army. On 20 February another council of war, including Cromwell, unanimously agreed to this after a long argument. Speed seemed further compelled by the now regular arrival of rumours – actually false but believed by the New Model – that in another month a French royal army would land to rescue the king’s cause. The conquest of Cornwall, however, seemed on first sight to be a daunting prospect. The county had provided some of the king’s most ardent supporters at the opening of the war, who had raised a complete regional army, led by Hopton, which had taken most of the West Country in 1643. It had remained a great royalist recruiting ground ever since and had rallied to the king when Essex had invaded it in 1644, a factor which had played a significant part in his defeat there. It was a unique region, part English and part Celtic in culture and tradition, and at this period still preserving in its western parts its own Celtic language. During the previous hundred and fifty years it had repeatedly displayed an aggressive local patriotism and refusal to conform to metropolitan English policies.127

The leadership of the New Model had therefore agreed upon a charm offensive to win the Cornish over. All soldiers from that county who were captured at Dartmouth were released and given two shillings each to pay for their journey home, and now the same treatment was accorded to those taken at Torrington. Hugh Peters was sent to Plymouth, to contact the gentry of East Cornwall over the river and offer them friendship. Another four thousand pounds had arrived to pay the men, which made it easier to enforce a directive to them not to loot or abuse the common Cornish people.¹²⁸ On 23 February the advance guard of the New Model seized a crossing into Cornwall over the River Tamar, and two days later the bulk of the army drove the royalists out of the first town to be reached there, Launceston. Fairfax gave the prisoners the same deal as those at Dartmouth and Torrington. As March opened the next advance began, led by Cromwell and Fairfax, in battle order across Bodmin Moor, another large granite upland, of rock outcrops, bogs and rough grass, open to the elements. The season was turning, and the sap rising in the trees: in the valleys it was the time of catkins, elder buds and birdsong. The weather, however, had grown cold once more, and many of the infantry had to sleep on the open moor in a night of hard frost.

Cromwell had a worse time, because on the far side of the moor lay the largest town of East Cornwall, Bodmin, which was Hopton’s current headquarters. Another battle might be imminent, in which the open moor would give the numerous royalist horsemen some advantage, and that afternoon Oliver led forward his horsemen to reconnoitre, hearing that an outpost of New Model dragoons had already come under attack by them. He and his companions sighted two large bodies of enemy cavalry near the town. Those retreated, but for much of the night he and his men remained in the saddle, ranging the final slopes of the freezing moorland to block, and give warning of, an attack; they snatched brief periods of sleep on the icy grass. When the sun rose, it turned out that Hopton’s army had fled westwards under cover of darkness, and the New Model was able to occupy Bodmin in its place. The policy of clemency, and the obvious weakness of the royalists, now began to bear fruit, as the locals of the eastern half of the county started to come into the town with weapons and offer their services. The real danger now was not that Hopton would fight, but that his cavalry, which still numbered in the thousands, would take advantage of the New Model’s position on the south-east side of the moor to ride round the northern side, and away across the Tamar. They could then make for Oxford, to reinforce the king. To prevent this, Cromwell set off again that same morning, despite his lack of sleep, with a thousand horse and four hundred dragoons to occupy Wadebridge, which controlled the main river crossing on the north coast, and block the way eastwards. Two foot regiments and two more horse regiments joined him there the next day.129 The king’s army of the west was finally trapped.

After spending a week tightening the parliamentarian grip on east Cornwall, from his base at Bodmin, Fairfax moved in for the kill. Hopton’s army was now quartered in and around Truro, the main town of west Cornwall, and the last point on the narrowing south-western peninsula of Britain which had space to accommodate it. This was the point from which he had launched his conquest of much of the West Country, over three years before, and now he was back there, defeated. The prince of Wales and his councillors had fled overseas, and when Hopton called a council of war on 2 March almost all of his senior officers said that their men were no longer willing to fight. On the 8th the New Model advanced to within seven miles of them, Cromwell coming down from Wadebridge to rejoin the main body, and the royalist general wrote to Fairfax offering to parley. The negotiations took four days, and ended in an agreement that Hopton’s whole force would disband, the common soldiers handing over all their weapons and their steeds. This process lasted until the 20th, and by then the troopers who had been Goring’s, and who had routed Cromwell’s men at Newbury, peacefully capitulated, and thousands of cavalry horses came into the possession of their victorious foes; though hundreds of them were now in poor enough condition to be useless. In their reports to Parliament, Fairfax and his subordinates played up the drama of the achievement by crediting fresh rumours, that the king had made an alliance with the Irish rebels, and that the latter were about to land a large force of infantry in Cornwall to join Hopton’s cavalry. This, the reports went, had been thwarted in the nick of time. Fairfax rewarded Peters for his service in winning over many of the Cornish by giving him his own main despatch again to take to Westminster.130

Cromwell and Fairfax had made a perfect team. Sir Thomas had employed a consultative style of leadership, with frequent councils of war to represent the views of his senior officers, in which Oliver played a full part. Cromwell had been given a series of missions and duties, from start to finish of the New Model’s first campaign, which had enabled him to display his talents to the full and increase his reputation and his standing with Parliament. Just as important, Sir Thomas had shown consistent favour to the religious independents in the army, soldiers and ministers, who looked to Oliver as their natural patron. Fairfax had also countenanced presbyterians, but not to the same extent, and never in such a way as blocked or threatened the independents. For his part, Cromwell had been a consistently loyal, capable and reliable lieutenant, carrying out every duty assigned to him to perfection. The result had been that Parliament had won the Civil War, greatly assisted by the king’s blunder in fighting at Naseby, and the two men now had the prospect of spending the rest of their lives as wealthy aristocrats. That prospect, however, would be heavily contingent on subsequent events, and that qualification weighed especially heavily in Cromwell’s case because he was the more prominent and exposed politically.

ENDGAME

The day after the last of the western royalist army was disbanded, on 21 March, a body of newly recruited infantry, marching from Worcester to join the king at Oxford, was trapped and destroyed at Stow on the Wold in Gloucestershire. This was the last battle of the war, because it removed Charles’s final chance to rebuild a field army in time for a summer campaign and left him completely helpless militarily. The mission of the New Model Army was now clear: to head for Oxford itself and besiege it into surrender, preferably with the king trapped inside it and forced to give himself up with his wartime capital. It set out on the very next day after the last of Hopton’s regiments handed over its arms, and on 25 March Fairfax, Cromwell and the other senior officers crossed the Tamar again, to Plymouth, where three hundred guns were fired to welcome them. Two days later they rejoined the army halfway across Devon, and on the last day of the month surrounded Exeter again and summoned it to surrender. This time the governor, recognizing a hopeless situation, agreed to talk at once, and got generous terms in return, his men being allowed to join the Oxford garrison with their weapons or hand them over and go home. Barnstaple followed suit, and by 18 April Fairfax and Cromwell could continue the march on Oxford, leaving the whole of the west of England clear of royalist soldiers, save for a few coastal forts and castles which could be starved out by local forces. After two gruelling days they reached Salisbury, and from there Fairfax sent Cromwell to report to Parliament in person on the condition in which the West Country had been left.131

The political atmosphere in London and Westminster, when Oliver returned there after his long absence, was as febrile as ever, and the tension still focused primarily on the impending Church settlement. In essence nothing had changed to resolve the instinctual opposition between those who were comfortable with a looser structure of discipline and belief and those who were not. Everybody recognized both that the New Model Army had been stunningly successful in achieving a decisive victory in the war, and that religious independents had been prominent in that achievement. Where people differed was over the logical consequences of those facts. Opinion occupied a spectrum running between those who felt that the independents, and the sectaries who were often allied to them, should be rewarded with a place in the reformed Church of England, and those who felt that to award such a place would negate the whole role of a “national religion, and that the temporary freedom granted to those with unorthodox opinions had been reward enough (and perhaps too much). The latter view was still strongly propounded by the Scots, increasingly allied with a dominant faction in the city of London and the Westminster Assembly, and the Presbyterian grouping in Parliament and its allies in the counties. The most potent force that the independents had on their side, other than the political Independents in and out of Parliament, was the New Model Army itself, and the awful logic of the latter’s situation was that the closer it came to winning the war, the sooner it would have to disband.

Thus far, the Independents had continued to hold a precarious supremacy at Westminster and contain the problem. On 17 April the Commons issued a prospectus for reconstruction of the nation after the war. It tried to reassure presbyterians by promising to settle the Church according to the Solemn League and Covenant, and in a presbyterian form, and to keep the alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. It then offered hope to religious independents by reaffirming a will to ‘give some ease to tender consciences’, but left the nature of this unclear. Three days later the MPs trounced the Westminster Assembly by declaring that it exercised no authority of its own and had purely an advisory role. The assembly had just pushed its luck by petitioning Parliament to entrust religious discipline ultimately to churchmen, and not to itself, and the Commons had voted this a breach of privilege. The motion had passed after a long debate by a dozen votes, in a classic division between Independents (the tellers for whom were Hesilrig and Sir John Evelyn) and Presbyterians (the tellers for whom were Holles and Stapleton, as usual); the latter opposing and being defeated.132 Nonetheless, participants felt that the debate had sharpened the distinctions and animosities between the two parties, one MP noticing ‘much joy that the independents should be bolted out of their burrows’.¹³³ Furthermore, having lost the vote, some of the Presbyterians went to the common council of London, the elected body of the city’s government, and persuaded their allies there to agree to frame a protest to the Commons about the decision. There was talk of a refusal by the citizens to pay taxes until it was reversed.¹³⁴

Through the winter, Cromwell had kept up his role and reputation as a leading political Independent and religious independent. During his army’s immobilization in East Devon he wrote twice to John Lilburne, trying to tempt him back to join it, but Lilburne remained too disenchanted with military life to oblige.¹³⁵ There was a rumour in January that both Houses had canvassed Oliver to see if he were willing to leave the war in England to undertake the reconquest of Ireland, with the title of Lord Deputy. He was said to have refused because he wanted to see the Independents securely in charge of England before going abroad.¹³⁶ In February it was reported in London that one MP had called Cromwell the only true friend to religious independents in the House of Commons.¹³⁷ At that time his cousin and ally Oliver St John wrote to him despondently that their cause in Parliament had slid back to where it had been before the battle of Naseby had boosted it.¹³⁸ When Cromwell reappeared at Westminster, on 23 April, newspaper editors who favoured that cause hailed him as a returning hero. One called him ‘active, pious and gallant’ and claimed that he had come ‘to advance . . . reformation’, while another termed him ‘ever renowned, and never to be forgotten’.¹³⁹

Certainly he was graciously received by the Commons, with the public and formal thanks of the Speaker for all his services. Immediately his presence seemed to bolster the resolution of the House to deny the Scots a role in the forthcoming settlement of England, as it agreed after a hard dispute that the New Model Army should replace the Scottish army in reducing Newark, which had been blockaded all winter by the Scots but still not surrendered. The obvious argument that this could provoke a breach with the Covenanters was made but did not prevail. It is not known what part Cromwell himself played in this, but on the following day he was recorded as speaking, on purely military affairs, by asking the House to ensure that the soldiers left to conduct the remaining sieges in Devon and Cornwall were properly paid. On 25 April he was asked to take back to Fairfax the MPs’ direction that any peace overture from the king to his army should immediately be forwarded to them without any attempt to answer. On the 28th he was added to the membership of a Commons committee again – on his old subject of Fen drainage – but seems already to have left Westminster, and his appointment to have been made in the expectation that he would return before long and resume his political career.140

On May Day, Fairfax opened the siege of Oxford,¹⁴¹ but by then he and Parliament knew that the greatest prize he might have taken in it had already escaped, for the king had left the city in disguise before a blockade closed around it. The question of his destination was solved on 5 May, when it was reported to both Houses that he had surrendered himself to the Scottish army besieging Newark, in a blatant attempt to divide the allies. The Commons sat until ten o’clock at night and resolved to demand that the Scots hand him over immediately. Fairfax detached five thousand horse and dragoons from his army to march towards Newark to enforce this directive, and it looked as if war might be about to break out between the Scottish and English forces. If it did, the former would find many English sympathizers, as when the news of the king’s union with the Covenanters broke, bonfires were lit all over London to celebrate it. Such a conflict was prevented by two factors. One was that King Charles, still devoted to the traditional Church of England, refused to agree to its replacement by a Scottish presbyterian system. The Scots therefore made him a prisoner, and sent hastily to Parliament to reassure it that his appearance had been completely unexpected and that they did not want a breach. When the king ordered his governor inside Newark to surrender, the Scots immediately handed it over to parliamentarian soldiers and retreated rapidly to Newcastle with their royal captive.

The other calming factor was that the House of Lords was more conciliatory, and a majority in it, mostly Presbyterian, voted not to agree with the Commons’ demand for an immediate handover of the king. It also resolved to support a plea from the Scots to recall the force sent against them from the New Model. On 11 May the Commons moderated their stance to the point of demanding only that Charles order all his remaining adherents to lay down arms and abandon any alliance with the Irish. Holles and Stapleton acted as tellers for the majority to indicate that this was a Presbyterian initiative. However, the House then voted to snub the Lords by not seeking their concurrence with these terms, with two Independents telling the votes for the majority. On the 14th Holles and Stapleton were in a majority again, against an Independent minority with Hesilrig and Evelyn as tellers, in resolving against informing the Scots that they should have no part in the coming settlement of England. Four days later, by one vote, the Presbyterian peers confirmed this victory by resolving that Parliament should act with the Scots to present terms for a lasting settlement to the king. The Commons did, however, agree to offer their Scottish partners £150,000 to remove all their soldiers from England; only for the Lords to fail to support this.142 The balance of power between the parties was dizzyingly even, but it seemed that Parliament had rejected the opportunity to exclude the Covenanters from a role in settling England, and so to reduce the possibility of ending up with a Church close to their model. Instead the Houses agreed to set up a huge national commission to establish the presbyterian Church system agreed upon in the spring, subsequently taking up to three years over the job.¹⁴³

Meanwhile Cromwell, Fairfax and the New Model were proceeding with the reduction of the royalist capital. It was soon obvious that Oxford, like Exeter, had been turned into an impregnable fortress. It sat at the junction of two rivers, the Thames and Cherwell, which flowed around it on three sides and could not be bridged or waded. The fourth side, across the neck of the peninsula between the rivers, had been given defences of a strength and modernity which made them impervious alike to gunfire and storm parties. Inside the city were thousands of veteran infantry and a huge magazine of food and munitions. It could only therefore be starved out slowly or enticed out with good terms. These terms Fairfax set out to provide, with the full support of a council of war which included Cromwell, and on 20 June they were concluded. The garrison marched out four days later, to go home or overseas, while those whose property had been seized by Parliament would be allowed to regain it swiftly on payment of a fine.144 Units of the New Model, under individual officers including Fairfax, would now disperse to reduce the remaining royalist fortresses across the nation, and on 29 June Sir Thomas appointed Cromwell to a council of officers empowered to decide who should tackle each siege.¹⁴⁵ Oliver himself, however, undertook none of them. For him the war really was over at last.

This final episode of it must have been one of the most pleasant parts of the whole conflict for him. He seems to have engaged in no military action, and enjoyed the society and discussions of his fellow officers.¹⁴⁶ Another of his daughters got married on 15 June, Bridget, and this time Oliver was very much present, because the ceremony was at his quarters, a country house near Oxford, and the bridegroom was none other than Henry Ireton. Once again the dowry was generous, the lease of a farm in the Isle of Ely. The clergyman who performed the ceremony was William Dell, the independent who was Fairfax’s chaplain and one of the two main preachers in the army.¹⁴⁷ A week before the wedding Dell had delivered a sermon to the generals of the army, including Sir Thomas and Oliver, which denounced ‘carnal Gospellers’ who libelled the small but glorious number of ‘saints’ in England as independents, sectaries, schismatics and heretics. He predicted that these saints would build the true Church after the war, which was composed only of the godly. When this was reported at London it gave great offence, and Dell was obliged to publish his text with a preface claiming that he believed presbyterians to be among the godly, and abhorred party labels.148 Nonetheless, the impression of the army as a hotbed of independent firebrands was strengthened, The Scottish clergy representing their Kirk in London and at the Westminster Assembly had come, moreover, to regard that army as being under Cromwell’s control.¹⁴⁹

The reception of Dell’s sermon in London, and his hurried response to it, had much to do with the increasingly fraught religious atmosphere there. On 25 May the common council of the city had delivered its rebuke to Parliament, calling for a suppression of all congregations meeting outside the national Church, a purge from public office of any except presbyterians, the preservation of good relations with the Scots, a rapid offer of peace terms to the king, and the reduction of taxes (which meant the end of the New Model Army). Its acceptance would mean the end of all Cromwell’s hopes. The Lords voted to agree with all its main points, against the opposition of their Independent minority. The Independents in the Commons tried to have it rejected, but the Presbyterians got a motion to consider it through by forty-three votes, Stapleton telling against Hesilrig and Evelyn for the majority. A week later many of the London religious independents delivered a petition to the Commons in reply to the council’s one, thanking and praising them for their grace towards them to date. This time the Independents won a decision to thank them, by just four votes, the classic teller teams of Hesilrig and Evelyn, and Holles and Stapleton, being pitted against each other again. The common council voted the petition a scandal. The Commons therefore kept the balance between the religious factions, and without them the Lords could not act effectively and the common council was thwarted. Subsequently Fairfax seemed to snub the upper House by informing only the Commons of the surrender of Oxford, and he had to apologize to the peers after they sent a furious rebuke.¹⁵⁰ A tract published in London in late June called on readers to protect Fairfax and Cromwell, ‘our preservers’, from being first demobbed and then ‘rooted out’ by the same people who were trying to destroy the sects. It called the Scots the true enemies of Parliament and its cause.151

Into this imbroglio came Cromwell in July, returning to civilian life properly at last from the comparative peace and security of the army’s quarters in Oxfordshire. He did so with gusto, immediately settling back into the regular existence of a serving MP. On 11 July he was put on his next committee, and had been appointed to a total of twenty-one by the end of the year, for purposes small (such as a examining a writ for a particular parliamentary by-election, investigating the conduct of the English ambassador at the Turkish court, or deciding whether to approve a petition for a new parish church) and large (some of which will be mentioned later).¹⁵² Likewise, he swiftly returned to service as a teller of votes in divisions, ten times before the year ended. Here too the matters debated ranged from the trivial (such as whether to sack a member of the committee which ran the Welsh country of Montgomeryshire for Parliament) to the nationally important.

Along this whole range, however, the divisions were still often partisan, Cromwell being partnered with a prominent Independent like Hesilrig or Sir Henry Vane against Holles and Stapleton and their Presbyterian allies, who now increasingly included the former general Sir William Waller.¹⁵³ One function which Oliver does not seem to have resumed on his return was to carry messages to the Lords or engage in conferences with them, presumably because he remained in bad odour with them. In case the peers needed a reminder of his quarrel with one of their most respected members, the earl of Manchester, a tract was published in London in July, to greet Cromwell’s return, repeating his accusations against the earl in detail; the author was probably Lilburne, pursuing his own grudge against Manchester. The Lords ordered the tract to be publicly burned in both Westminster and London.¹⁵⁴

Certainly his glorious military career had only enhanced Cromwell’s confidence as a patron and defender of religious radicals. In late July he wrote to Thomas Knyvett, the Norfolk squire whom he had captured at Lowestoft and for whom he had subsequently interceded, to call in that favour. One of Knyvett’s tenants was allegedly persecuting ‘poor men’ among his neighbours because of their ‘consciences’ (which presumably caused them to absent themselves from church or object to what went on there). Oliver asked the squire to lean on his tenant to stop this, adding pointedly that ‘I am not ashamed to solicit for such as are anywhere under a pressure of this kind’.155 He had truly become a national leader of nonconformist Puritans, at all levels of society. On the last day of July he clashed with Holles over this, in a debate over whether to send some of the New Model Army immediately to join the war against the Irish rebels. Cromwell spoke passionately against doing so, on the grounds that the English royalists were still dangerous enough to need to be held down; though another reason was that any weakening of the New Model’s forces at home was likely to strengthen the proponents of an intolerant religious settlement. His side carried the matter by a single vote, and Holles delivered a long and passionate attack on him as a persecutor of presbyterians in the New Model. Cromwell insisted that only one presbyterian officer had been dismissed from it, and he had distributed Scottish propaganda in an attempt to get the army to put pressure on Parliament to establish a Church like that of Scotland.¹⁵⁶ The truth of the matter is lost.

The key development of the month was the presentation of the joint terms of Parliament and the Scots to the captive king at Newcastle on 13 July. They required him effectively to hand over most of his royal powers to the two Houses, some for decades and others for ever, to accept the punishment of a long list of royalists, and to agree to a reform of the Church of England which removed bishops and cathedral chapters (though the form of it in other respects was still left open). On 1 August Charles stunned both nations by rejecting them: he expressed his willingness to keep on talking, but said that he could not consent to that which was absolutely destructive of his hereditary rights.¹⁵⁷ In legal terms, this meant that the war continued and Parliament’s rule lacked any validity in the eyes of a large number of the British people. The Scots representatives in London immediately saw that what one of them termed the king’s ‘madness’ stood to benefit the Independents, whom they credited with a desire both to remove the king from government altogether and to make a breach with Scotland.158 In this situation, the Covenanters decided to give up on Charles and cut their losses, offering to hand him over to Parliament and leave England if all the expenses of their intervention there were covered as had been promised. They initially put these at almost a million pounds, but in September a sum of £400,000 was agreed instead (pushed through by the Presbyterians against an Independent bid for a lesser amount), and the Scottish army prepared to pull out when the first half of that was paid at the end of the year.¹⁵⁹

On learning of the Scottish intention to make a deal, Cromwell himself was far from sanguine. He complained to Fairfax that at Westminster ‘we are full of faction and worse’, begged for the return of his cousin and ally Oliver St John from a mission with the army to help with the situation, and expressed fear that Sir Thomas had now discarded Oliver himself.¹⁶⁰ He clashed again with Holles in the House on 14 August, when the latter won a majority vote that ministers to be ordained in the new Church should be recruited more broadly than from ‘saints’, and that Parliament should not have the whole power to discipline clergy. Later the same day, it was Oliver’s turn to win a motion against another Presbyterian teller, to offer initially no more than £100,000 to the Scots for their expenses: his hostility to them remained intense. When the Commons realized that it had to quadruple the sum, he attempted and failed to slight the Lords by backing a motion to seek a loan to enable the first instalment to be paid on time, without seeking the concurrence of the peers.¹⁶¹

Meanwhile those opposed to his vision of the religious future responded with a proportionate animosity. In August a pamphlet was published denouncing the New Model Army for being increasingly hijacked by preachers such as Peters and Dell, and turned into a vehicle for ‘irreligion’.¹⁶² In the same month one of the publications of the presbyterian minister John Vicars, who produced potted histories of each phase of the war with a religious commentary, brought out the latest instalment with a preface that ranked Cromwell twelfth in order of importance after a list of other military commanders which included some purely local figures.163 Another tract from this period was a list of Parliament’s victories, which gave Essex, Leven, Manchester and Sir Thomas Fairfax most credit, and ranked Cromwell equal among six lesser generals: in such ways a history of the war was already being formed which pushed Oliver into the sidelines.¹⁶⁴ This particular broadsheet is notable for providing what is apparently the earliest securely dated portrait of Oliver. It is a crude woodcut but so distinctive that it must reflect some kind of reality: he has the shortest hair of all the men portrayed, hanging over his ears but cut into a bob above his collar, the largest nose, and the thinnest moustache, above a small beard of severely formal cut. This image matches that provided by Sir Philip Warwick, of a man who disdained elegance and ornamentation in the manner of a stereotypical Puritan.

September brought the deal with the Scots, and the sudden death of the earl of Essex, who had become one of the leaders of the Presbyterian party. He was given a lavish public funeral for his services, but of the New Model Army only three officers attended, two of them rigid presbyterians in religion and one Philip Skippon, who had been the earl’s loyal infantry commander; it was noted that Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton stayed away, and in Cromwell’s case that was the more glaring in that he was in the vicinity.¹⁶⁵ The question of a successor to the earl as lord lieutenant of Yorkshire provoked another heated wrangle between Holles and Cromwell, the former proposing a prominent civilian member of the current House of Lords, and the latter Lord Fairfax.¹⁶⁶

The deepening autumn brought no easing of the atmosphere. In October some of the Commons rounded on the army, with ‘some heat’, to which Cromwell replied with a plea ‘for them and for charity’: the cause of the affair is not known.¹⁶⁷ It may have been incidents like this, and a general weariness with parliamentary life, that produced an alleged exchange long after recalled by Edmund Ludlow, a young Wiltshire gentleman who had fought through the whole war as a fervent parliamentarian and Puritan. He claimed that he had walked with Oliver in a garden at this time, and the latter inveighed bitterly against the Presbyterians, adding that ‘it was a miserable thing to serve a Parliament, to whom let a man be never so faithful, if one pragmatical fellow among them rise up and asperse him, he shall never wipe it off’. He rued the contrast with life in the army, which had a general in charge whom everybody respected and obeyed.168 Ludlow, who by the time of writing had become bitterly hostile to Cromwell, implied that the latter was already losing faith in Parliaments as custodians of the nation’s affairs, but the remarks ring true simply as an outburst of frustration and impatience with the verbal war of attrition in which Oliver now found himself mired.¹⁶⁹ Some tang of the fatigue may perhaps be found in a rare surviving letter of his to one of his children, Bridget, sent in October to her at the Oxfordshire quarters where she was still established with her husband, Ireton. He told her that the latter was sending him long letters, to which he was too busy to reply, and added just that he hoped that marriage had inflamed her love of Christ.¹⁷⁰

Progress was still made with the settlement. In October bishops were at last abolished in the Church of England, though this was impelled by the need to use their lands as security for the loan required to pay off the Scots. Cromwell was put on the committee to launch the sale of these.¹⁷¹ By now even matters which should not, on the surface of things, have been partisan, had become so. A proposal to use a ballot box when determining how rewards would be handed out for service to Parliament, to prevent bribery, was contested between the Presbyterians, with Stapleton as one of the tellers, and the Independents, with Cromwell and Hesilrig acting for them.¹⁷² Sir Thomas Fairfax finally arrived in mid-November, to receive the formal thanks of Parliament, but six Presbyterian peers, one of them Willoughby, tried to persuade their house to snub him by making no formal recognition of his arrival.¹⁷³ Parliament had now made the decision to keep up Fairfax’s army for a further six months – until the early part of the next summer – while starting the calculation of the arrears of pay due to it which was the first major step towards disbanding it.174 Cromwell was put onto a committee to find ways of paying the money due to the men.¹⁷⁵ He himself was owed a hefty sum in unpaid wages for his military service, but his contacts ensured that he was better treated than most: in late November the existing parliamentary committee for the supply of the army’s needs, dominated by Independents, made him a whopping payment of five hundred pounds.¹⁷⁶

As the dead of winter arrived, his position remained at once prominent and glorious, and insecure. He was a war hero to many, mostly Independents, but a figure of suspicion and menace to others, mostly Presbyterians. He had been promised the landed estate and title of a nobleman, but neither had yet been properly obtained. The departure of the Scots removed their influence from English politics, which had been personally hostile to him as well as generally so to his preferred form of religion. On the other hand, it also removed a major reason for the continued existence of the New Model Army, which was the best prop of that form. The refusal of the king to accept terms, even though now a prisoner, put any settlement in doubt. Parliament seemed to be edging towards the establishment of a presbyterian Church which allowed some toleration for independent congregations and was under parliamentary control rather than separate from the state as in Scotland. That toleration was, however, not yet guaranteed, and it was completely unclear whether it would encompass people who wished to worship outside a national Church altogether, the sectaries who also looked to Oliver for help and protection.

On 15 December 1646 the Lords turned the screws on unorthodoxy by completing an ordinance to forbid preaching by the laity, a practice that was a feature of many sects and which traditionally minded people – the vast majority of the nation – found especially offensive.¹⁷⁷ In the Commons, Cromwell and Hesilrig partnered again as tellers in favour of a compromise whereby lay people would be banned from preaching but allowed to ‘expound’ the Bible. If this term were thought to embrace discussion, it was something that Puritans had been doing in private ever since the Elizabethan period. It was doubtless familiar to Cromwell from his own experience as one of them in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire in the 1630s and had apparently first brought him to the attention of those in Cambridge who had decisively relaunched his political career. It was a feature of those sections of the New Model Army which had been deplored by Baxter. Cromwell’s side in the debate was, however, heavily defeated, two Presbyterians serving against him as tellers for the majority.178 Another troubling straw in the wind was a further long petition from the common council of London, which reflected adversely on the army. Oliver reported it to Fairfax, adding resignedly that ‘this is our comfort, God is in heaven and He doth what pleaseth Him’.¹⁷⁹ The annual elections in December to the common council swept out many Independents and brought in some former royalists: opinion in the capital was swinging further against a religious settlement of the kind Cromwell favoured.¹⁸⁰

Oliver himself, of course, showed not the slightest inclination to be deterred by these omens, as midwinter began to pass and preparations for 1647 began. In his time the British still observed a calendar in which the number of the year changed on 25 March, but informally, and to the mass of the population, the passage from December to January was still regarded as representing the end of a major annual cycle and the opening of another. The rebirth of the sun, and the palpable lengthening of the daylight a week beyond the end of the solstice, continued to inspire a host of folk customs of purification, blessing and renewal at this season, and the first of January was still New Year’s Day even if the date did not alter then.¹⁸¹ Cromwell faced this one as a man utterly determined to see through his career as a parliamentary leader, and as a sign of this he had at some point in late 1646 taken the decisive step of moving his family, and his home life, to the capital. When attending Parliament in the previous few years he had lodged in Long Acre, which, as its name suggests, was and is one of the longest streets in the plush area that joined London to Westminster, within an easy walk of both. Now he bought a house in Drury Lane, part of the same new development in that area and with the same convenience of situation, with the great smoking, teeming city – already one of the largest in the world – to the east, and the seat of government, law and legislature an equal distance to the west. Elizabeth and their younger children duly arrived from Ely.182 No longer was Cromwell a country town dweller, an East Midlander or East Anglian. Henceforth he was forever a resident of the metropolis, as befitted his role as a national figure, general and politician. However precarious his position remained, he was now, truly, made.