3

‘Valiant Colonel Cromwell’

Oliver Cromwell’s military deeds raised him to national attention. His fame sprang mostly from his own achievements, but from early on he was alive to the chances of self-promotion – which, no doubt, he would have viewed as the promotion of his cause – and to the importance of imposing his view of events on others. The great explosion in pamphlet and newsbook printing of the seventeenth century was set off when Parliament removed restrictions on publishing that had been imposed by Charles I’s government. Later, when in power, Cromwell, like Charles, would be moved to suppress unpalatable reporting; during his rise to power, however, he benefited from press freedom. Along with his fellow Parliamentarians, such as Sir Thomas Fairfax, John Pym and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, Cromwell would also become a familiar face across the country, his image appearing in engravings circulated during the war.

While Cromwell’s trajectory from gentleman to ruler was unprecedented in English history, it was preceded by a scarcely less unusual ascent to popular fame – or notoriety, as far as his enemies were concerned. Charles I, it has often been pointed out, was attempting to promote the sacredness of kingship at a time when popular prints were engaged in ‘desacralizing’ royalty. But pamphlets, newsbooks and engravings could all be used to bolster images too: posthumously, with the publication of the wildly successful Eikon Basilike, a humble defence of the king’s actions purportedly written in his own words, the phenomenon benefited Charles more than it ever had in his lifetime. On Parliament’s side, there were several stars in the early part of the war, notably William Waller, whose successes in the south-east made him ‘William the Conqueror’ in the parliamentary press. No one, however, rode the wave of press and public opinion in the 1640s and 1650s to more personal benefit than Oliver Cromwell.

At the beginning of his parliamentary career, Cromwell had found himself among more experienced politicians and better speakers who naturally took the lead. In the parliamentary army, too, Cromwell began as a minor figure. From early on, though, the confusions of war provided him with the chance to think on his feet, and to put his personal decisions more often into action than he could in the Commons. His first command was only a partial success. By the time he arrived in Cambridge, leading a small force tasked with preventing the despatch of college plate to the king, some silver had already been spirited away. But Cromwell reacted quickly, securing the plate in the remaining colleges, and taking possession of the magazine at Cambridge Castle. No shots were fired or blows exchanged, though armed representatives of both town and university turned out for the king. Among them was Cromwell’s cousin, his uncle Sir Oliver’s son Henry. Cromwell’s own son and namesake was a Cambridge undergraduate who did support his father’s cause, and later served as a captain of horse under him. Although not everything had gone to plan, Cromwell had shown he could be relied upon. Shortly after, he returned briefly to Parliament to receive its thanks, before making his way to Huntingdon, where he set about raising a troop of horse.

There were no professional armies in England at the outbreak of the Civil War, but there were men with military experience. More of these were on the Royalist side, including the king’s nephews the Rhine Princes Rupert and Maurice, sons of the Elector of the Rhine Palatinate Frederick V: they had seen action on the continent in the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War. Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas were among the parliamentary commanders who had served abroad, also fighting for the Dutch Protestants. Cromwell was in the majority who had never fought – but not many of his contemporaries learned faster. That included two future commanders on either side: the Earl of Manchester, who became major-general in the Eastern Association of counties in 1643, and Cromwell’s commanding officer, and the Earl (later Marquess) of Newcastle, who commanded the Royalist forces in the north. To begin with, however, Cromwell’s education was less a matter of strategy and tactics than of recruitment and fundraising for the parliamentary cause.

At the outbreak of war, the country was not neatly divided between Parliament and king. The king’s main areas of loyalty were in the north and parts of the west, including Cornwall and most of Wales, while Parliament could rely on London and the east, with three fingers of parliamentary land stretching north and westwards, up to Hull, into Lancashire and across towards Bristol and Gloucester. Strategically, it was clear that the Royalists would attempt to squeeze Parliament from the north and west, while Parliament would try to expand its territory into the same areas. The two external factors – of potential Irish reinforcements for Charles if the rebellion there could be quieted, and, on the Parliamentarian side, potential Scottish aid if some agreement between Covenanters and Parliament could be reached – would also be crucial. But within these areas, and especially on their edges, loyalties were unpredictable, and the support of different communities was often hard won.

Cromwell’s certainty of the rightness of his cause, and the furious energy with which he approached the business of recruitment and fundraising, were among the qualities that made him an outstanding officer in these circumstances. They were certainly as important as the tactical and strategic lessons he assimilated with extraordinary speed from the experience of actual combat. His rise and eventual eminence were part of a process that ensured that the more ‘radical’ positions he represented – on not compromising with the king; on the importance of reforming religion and morals, though not necessarily, as his opponents alleged, on a broader ‘levelling’ of society – all came to the fore as the Civil War turned into a revolution.

Later, as Lord Protector, Cromwell gave an account of his own theories of recruitment, as well as an insight into his rapid promotion: ‘I was a person that from my first employment was suddenly preferred and lifted up from lesser trusts to greater, from my first being a captain of troop of horse. And I did labour as well as I could to discharge my trust, and God blessed me as it pleased him.’ One of the first problems he identified was with the quality and commitment of the troops Parliament was raising to fight its wars. He recalled addressing his cousin John Hampden, probably just after the first major encounter of the war, the Battle of Edgehill, about reinforcing the Parliamentarian army: ‘Your troopers, said I, are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and, said I, their [the Royalists’] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, persons of quality: do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, courage and resolution in them? … You must get men of a spirit … that is like to go as far as a gentleman will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still.’

There is no reason to suppose that Cromwell was embellishing his recollection much. From our first view of him, he had always been ready to voice his opinion even to, or perhaps especially to, someone he respected as ‘a wise and worthy person’. Hampden thought the notion of restricting recruitment to ‘spirited’ men impractical when numbers seemed all-important, but Cromwell ‘raised such men as had the fear of God before them, and made some conscience of what they did. And from that day forward they were never beaten.’1 His sometimes desperate pleas for troops throughout the year 1643 still usually prized quality over quantity: ‘I beseech you be careful what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted; a few honest men are better than numbers … If you choose godly honest men … honest men will follow them.’2

The recruiting principle that associated military capability with conspicuous godliness anticipated the later formation of Parliament’s New Model Army. It was a principle that brought Cromwell success, celebrity, controversy and opprobrium in almost equal measure, as the way the war was fought, to what end and for whose benefit all came into contention over the following four years and beyond. Cromwell’s epiphany about recruitment came after his first experience of combat, which was hardly auspicious. At the first pitched battle of the Civil War, the confused, bloody and inconclusive engagement on 23 October 1642 between the king and Essex’s Parliamentarian army at Edgehill in Warwickshire, Cromwell’s troop seems to have arrived late, as did Hampden’s brigade. They did little to affect the outcome. But if neither side could claim victory, the Royalists were, crucially, not prevented from continuing towards London. Cromwell may have been part of the hastily assembled force, including the London trained bands and those of Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey, that turned out to repel Charles’s rapid advance on the capital at Turnham Green. If so, he was present at an occasion where, for the first time, large numbers of volunteers showed the wider popularity of Parliament’s cause, along with the sort of ‘spirit’ that Cromwell was searching for, in a stand-off that was as important as any deadlier engagement of the Civil War. There was a lot of fighting after Turnham Green, but it would turn out to have been the king’s best chance of winning the war quickly.

If Charles were to lose it, however, Parliament would have to make him do so slowly. That was one implication of Manchester’s remark to Cromwell in 1644: ‘If we beat the King 99 times, yet he is King still.’3 The other was, of course, that whatever the military outcome of the war, Parliament would still have to decide how to deal with the king, whose status couldn’t be altered by something as ephemeral as a lost battle.

In the first year of the war, although Cromwell had more success in a hard campaign for Parliament than many of his comrades, beating the king even once proved difficult. Cromwell’s early contribution to an increasingly attritional conflict was made on home territory, in the fenlands around the Isle of Ely, before he was sent north into Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. In early 1643, he had impressed the parliamentary authorities enough to receive a promotion, from captain to colonel, in command of a regiment of horse under the new eastern counties’ major-general, William, Lord Grey of Warke. In the course of the year, while Grey himself was absent assisting the Earl of Essex besieging Reading, Cromwell took effective command of the eastern counties, concentrating his efforts on the defence of Ely, as well as action in Lowestoft, King’s Lynn, Peterborough and, in April that year, the bombardment of Crowland Abbey. In July he led his cavalry to the capture of Burghley House and the relief of the Lincolnshire manor of Gainsborough.

He began to appear in the parliamentary press as ‘valiant Colonell Cromwell’: a singling-out that he no doubt attributed to Providence, but which would, a year later, form a portion of the charge against him made by an anonymous ‘opponent’, who alleged that the valiant colonel was in fact one of those men who ‘gloryes in themselves whilst we have warre’. The same anonymous accuser charged Cromwell with taking the credit for other men’s deeds (such as those of the ‘opponent’ himself): ‘that servisse, and all other done by me and others, must goe in his name or ells alls was not well’.4 Whatever the motivation for such criticism, or the truth behind it, it demonstrated two things. First, that Cromwell, now clearly on the up, would cause resentment. Secondly, that resentment was unlikely to blow him off course.

Cromwell’s first success in a pitched battle, for which again he seems to have received more than his fair share of credit, was at Winceby, Lincolnshire, in October 1643. During the initial cavalry charge his horse was shot from under him. Remounting, he and his cavalry ‘performed with so much admirable courage and resolution … that the Enemy stood not another’.⁵ This breathless account, which also relates how the Parliamentarians marched to war singing psalms, may be doing his fellow cavalry commander Sir Thomas Fairfax’s contribution to winning the fight a disservice. Another parliamentary paper depicted ‘that Noble Sir Thomas Fairfax’ (who had far more military experience than Cromwell) as relishing being outnumbered: ‘I never prospered better,’ he reportedly said, ‘than when I fought against the Enemy three or four to one.’⁶

It was understandable that Parliament’s supporters should make so much of a relatively small engagement, and the commanders who delivered victory. Elsewhere that year, the war was not going well for them. Royalist gains in the north and west even encouraged a tentative round of peace negotiations, though both sides’ starting positions were much too far apart for those to have any real prospect of success. For Cromwell, however, the year ended with more good news. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general, below the Earl of Manchester, who had replaced Grey as General of the Eastern Association. That December, the map of England showed big gains for the Royalists: both in the west, where Parliament was reduced to isolated strongholds at Plymouth, Gloucester and Pembroke; and in the Midlands, where Cromwell’s contribution had merely been as part of an effort to resist further encroachment. What is more, in a move that shocked Protestant opinion but added to Royalist manpower, Charles I agreed a cessation of hostilities with the Irish rebels, thereby freeing up troops, many of them Catholic, to come over to England to aid his cause.

In September 1643, after long negotiation (John Pym’s last great achievement before his death at the end of the year), Parliament managed to secure its own external help, which was to prove vital to winning the war, but also played a pivotal role in the course of the subsequent peace: they agreed to join forces with the Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters. The price for Scottish cooperation (the price apart from money, that is) was parliamentary agreement to the Solemn League and Covenant hammered out between the allies, which committed Parliament to imposing Presbyterianism in all three kingdoms. The letter of the agreement may not have spelled this out, but as it talked of ‘preserving’ Scottish religion (i.e. Presbyterianism) and ‘reforming’ English and Irish, the implication was clear. The Covenanters went on to provide 20,000 troops to the cause, troops who in their effectiveness and numerical superiority far outweighed the king’s Irish auxiliaries. Perhaps the most serious consequence of Charles’s decision was to give ammunition to those who saw the Royalists as crypto-Catholics, and their ultimate goal as the one that some had feared all along: ‘the malignant design, now in hand by force of arms to hinder reformation of religion and church government and to introduce popery and suspicion’. Or, in other words, to return England to Catholicism.7

On 5 February 1644 Cromwell belatedly signed the Solemn League and Covenant in person on a rare return to Parliament. He was also appointed to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which from now on would direct the parliamentary effort in the war. Although Cromwell thus made the same commitment as Parliament now required from every loyal Englishman over the age of eighteen, his own religious position was set against Presbyterianism, preferring the less formal organization based on gathered congregations of like minds known as Independency. Consequently, he may, in private, have been reluctant to take the Covenant. But it is likely that he was in sympathy with the spirit, if not the letter, of the oath, which talked of ‘our unfeigned desire to be humbled for our sins and for the sins of these kingdoms; especially that we have not as we ought valued the inestimable value of the Gospel’.8 There were always divisions in the alliances that fought against Charles, but there were powerful forces bringing them together: to Cromwell, as to so many of his contemporaries, nothing was more urgent in that regard than the word of God – ‘quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword’, as the New Testament put it, in words that would have been very familiar to the godly majority, for whom Bible-reading was a cornerstone of worship.⁹

On Cromwell’s return to action in February 1644, he had some success in Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire before marching north with Manchester’s army to join Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas, and Parliament’s new Scottish allies under the Earl of Leven, following which this combined force laid siege to the Marquess of Newcastle at York, a siege raised when Prince Rupert approached with his army. Precipitately, Rupert then pursued the retreating Parliamentarians, who turned to face him at Tadcaster. Rupert’s impetuosity became a feature of the fighting, his cavalry’s indiscipline contrasting with the obedience of Cromwell’s.

On 2 July 1644 the two armies, Rupert now joined by Newcastle, clashed at Marston Moor. It was the biggest and deadliest battle of the war. On Parliament’s side, Cromwell’s horse on the left and Sir Thomas Fairfax’s on the right flanked the infantry of Manchester, Lord Fairfax and Parliament’s overall commander, Leven. These allied Parliamentarian forces outnumbered their opponents by perhaps 28,000 to 18,000, but the battle was still close-run. Both Thomas Fairfax and Cromwell were wounded, Cromwell leaving the battle for a while to have his wound dressed. But, after the Royalists had initially broken through on the other side while Cromwell was being treated, he returned to ensure that it was on his flank that the battle turned in Parliament’s favour. Cromwell’s cavalry were able to counter-attack and, as he famously wrote afterwards, ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’ Not all the casualties were on one side, however, as the same letter, written to his brother-in-law Valentine Walton, makes painfully clear.

The ominous tenor of the opening – ‘It’s our duty to sympathise in all mercies that we praise the Lord together in chastisement or trials, so that we may sorrow together’ – is put to one side for an account of Parliament’s ‘absolute victory’. But then comes the news that ‘God hath taken away your eldest son by cannon-shot’. The offered consolation is, of course, eternal: ‘Sir, you know my trial this way’ – Cromwell had lost his own eldest son Oliver to smallpox just over three months before – ‘but the Lord supported me with this: that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant after and live for. There is your precious child full of glory, to know sin nor sorrow any more. He was a gallant young man, exceeding gracious. God give you His comfort.’10 On the Royalist side, the death toll was more than ten times the 300 Parliamentarian dead: 4,150 died, among them all but thirty of Newcastle’s 3,000 Whitecoats Regiment, who refused quarter.

After this disaster, Newcastle himself was less obdurate. He went into exile in the Netherlands, playing no further part in the war. His reason for doing so sheds more light on the mixture of motivations and concerns that moved men to fight or not to fight in the times: loss of face. Newcastle could not ‘endure the laughter of the court’.11 Such courtly, aristocratic amour propre was a world away from the atmosphere of determined, almost fanatical commitment in which Cromwell operated. It was also, of course, a Royalist world, but one wonders if the increasing signs of discontent with Parliament’s own lordly commanders that took hold from around this time contained a suspicion that, for all their differences, Parliament’s peers shared something of the attitudes and culture of the men they were meant to defeat. If so, they might be more inclined to treat with their opposite numbers, rather than pressing their advantage. It is difficult to sustain the argument that Cromwell and those who shared his religious and political outlook necessarily had any social ‘levelling’ agenda, something they were accused of at the time. But, as the detailed business of war strategy and war aims began to dominate parliamentary discussions, now conducted under the aegis of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, there is a sense that the Commons, however disunited they were among themselves, began to believe they had a monopoly on the genuine parliamentary cause.

These divisions became more overt because Marston Moor turned out not to be the decisive victory that Parliament’s supporters hoped. To begin with, opinion differed over who should take credit for it. Cromwell had written to Walton that ‘The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, save a few Scots in the rear, beat all the Prince’s horse.’ This was in stark contrast to Scottish views of the battle, for example that of the minister Robert Baillie, who wrote that David Leslie, the Scottish cavalry commander who had supported Cromwell’s horse, ‘in all places that day was his [Cromwell’s] leader’, and that reports of the battle ‘give much more to Cromwell than we are informed is his due’.12 It must have been true at the very least that Leslie and the Scottish contingent held their own while Cromwell was away from the battlefield for medical treatment.

Though in his private letter Cromwell included the characteristic imperative – ‘Give glory, all the glory, to God’ – the belittling of the Scots’ contribution was a manifestation of existing tensions between the English and Scottish causes. He had twice clashed with the Scottish major-general Lawrence Crawford, who had wanted to dismiss an officer of Cromwell’s for his religious opinions. Cromwell defended the officer in strikingly modern terms: ‘the State, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions’.¹³ However laudable the sentiment to our ears, though, this was simply untrue. The Solemn League and Covenant, to which the offending officer, like all adult males, was compelled to swear, did indeed take notice of opinions. If a man felt conscientiously unable to sign it, he could hardly serve in Parliament’s army. As always with Cromwell, it is impossible to know whether to take his argument at face value. Even after he rose to power, he agonized greatly over liberty for ‘tender’ religious consciences, so it must be admitted that this argument was part of a consistent outlook. Then again, Cromwell was known to be a popular and charismatic leader, who recruited among Independents. This was his own preference. So his defence of his man against Crawford is also a straightforward objection to another commander, and a Scottish Presbyterian, interfering in what Cromwell clearly thought of as his own business. The passion and consistency with which, here as so often, Cromwell embraced a principled argument should not be permitted to conceal the fact that there were personal issues at stake too.

Disagreeing over who should take credit for a great victory was one thing. Failing to capitalize on that victory was far worse. Yet, through a series of strategic and tactical blunders, some of which may have betrayed an attitude to war aims that differed greatly from Cromwell’s, that is what Parliament and their allies did after Marston Moor. Cromwell was not implicated in most of these setbacks, something which was to prove significant later on. The first came when the commander-in-chief of Parliament’s forces, the Earl of Essex, who had been conducting a campaign in the west of England, was lured into chasing a Royalist army deep into Cornwall, while another Royalist force under the king sealed off his route back. At Lostwithiel on 2 September 1644 Essex’s infantry surrendered, while the Lord General himself got away by ship.

This was a setback for Parliament, but not a fatal one. They regrouped, and a combined army led by Manchester (with Cromwell), Essex and Waller (the south-eastern major-general who was at loggerheads with Essex) faced a Royalist army, which had turned eastwards, at Newbury on 27 October 1644, the second time battle had been joined there in the Civil War. Before this battle, Cromwell had been engaged in a series of attacks on Royalist bases around Oxford. He had also taken the time to appear before Parliament and formally demand Crawford’s removal as major-general, though he was persuaded to withdraw that ultimatum. During this time, he was becoming involved in another increasingly heated dispute with the Presbyterian Earl of Manchester, whose desultory contribution to the campaign between Marston Moor and Newbury exasperated his lieutenant-general.

When Manchester and Cromwell fought side by side again at Newbury, however, it was Cromwell whose inexplicably slow reactions failed to clinch the potential Parliamentarian triumph, when one flank of the king’s forces was routed in a complex engagement. Cromwell hesitated, and his cavalry on the other flank was charged by his Royalist opposite number, Lord Goring. Although neither side could claim victory after this Second Battle of Newbury, the fact that the Royalists were able to reach Oxford unmolested made it more of a frustration for Parliament, on whom the onus remained to achieve a decisive, concluding triumph. It is in this context that Manchester made his remark about defeating the king ninety-nine times, ‘yet he is King still’. For Cromwell, this was a counsel of despair: ‘If this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter.’14 But Manchester had a point, if Parliament were unable to press home its advantages. It was the fundamental point at the heart of any attempt to challenge the will of the king. What constituted success? If the answer was to have the king at your mercy, how could the victors impose their terms reliably and still allow Charles to remain on the throne? For the time being, however, Parliament needed to find a way to make its military advantages count. Cromwell and like-minded MPs suspected that Manchester was more unwilling than unable to make sure that happened. Despite the fact that Cromwell’s own shortcomings at the Battle of Newbury were at least as open to criticism as any of Manchester’s there, it was after Newbury that Cromwell brought his suspicions before the House of Commons, in November 1644:

I thought the Earl of Manchester was most in fault for most of these miscarriages and the ill consequences of them. And because I had a great deal of reason to think that his Lordship’s miscarriage in these particulars was neither through accidents (which could not be helped) nor through his improvidence only, but through backwardness to all action, and had some reason to conceive that that backwardness was not (merely) from dullness or indisposedness to engagement, but (withal) from some principle of unwillingness in his Lordship to have this war prosecuted unto a full victory, and a design or desire to have it ended by accommodation (and that) on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.15

With this, and his references to Manchester’s ‘shuffling pretences and evasions’, Cromwell was effectively accusing his commanding officer of treason: alleging not just that he had failed Parliament but that he had done so deliberately, and underhandedly, in order to help the enemy, ‘contrary to commands received’, to such an extent that ‘he had seemed studiously to decline the gaining of such advantages upon the enemy’. The usual name given to this episode, ‘the quarrel between Manchester and Cromwell’, makes it sound a rather low-temperature contest. In fact, both men’s reputations, their futures and, in Manchester’s case, given the severity of Cromwell’s accusations, potentially his life, were at stake. While this ‘quarrel’ was being aired, two prisoners in the Tower, John Hotham father and son, were awaiting their fate having been arrested for going over to the Royalists (Hotham senior had been the Governor of Hull, whose refusal of entry to Charles was one of the first hostile acts of the Civil Wars). In January 1645, both were beheaded.

In the circumstances, it is no wonder that Manchester went on the offensive himself, alleging that Cromwell packed his troops of horse with sectaries, followers of radical and potentially revolutionary Protestant teaching. In the words of the anonymous ‘opponent’, who had served with Cromwell at the beginning of the war, and who also supplied evidence to the committee appointed to resolve the dispute, Cromwell was reported to have said that ‘God would have noe lording over his peopell, and he verily believed that God would sweep away that lord in power out of this nation’.16 To Cromwell’s accusation that Manchester had not been vigorous enough in his pursuit of Charles, Manchester hit back with the opposite: that, contrary to the stated war aims of Parliament, which had never been to remove Charles, Cromwell was scheming for just that.

This episode might be taken as another example of Oliver’s impetuosity, and his inability to cooperate with his superiors if he believed they were in the wrong: neither quality recommends itself as one for a successful soldier or politician. However, the outcome of the quarrel points to something different. Cromwell won: the Commons Committee for the Army, which had heard the dispute, endorsed his criticisms of Manchester on 9 December. To get that favourable verdict, Cromwell had built up a powerful coalition of supporters, not all of whom were natural allies. They included the chairman of the committee, Zouch Tate, a Presbyterian MP.

The debate that followed the committee’s endorsement showed that Tate and Cromwell had found a way of working together. Cromwell outlined the popular notion that Parliament was failing to win the war because it was no longer in the personal interests of Parliamentarian commanders to do so. ‘Members of both Houses hath got great places and commands, and … will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the War speedily to end.’ Tate followed him by proposing that ‘during the time of the war, no member of either House shall have or execute any office or command’.17 This proposal led to the Self-Denying Ordinance, which established the complete separation of Parliament and its armies – meaning that no longer could peers such as Manchester command Parliamentarian forces. It was clearly not a spontaneous move; the trio of Cromwell, Tate and Cromwell’s fellow Independent Sir Henry Vane speaking to the same theme one after the other had the hoped-for effect of carrying first the Commons, and eventually the Lords with them.

The Self-Denying Ordinance solved Parliament’s and Cromwell’s difficulties with the dubious leadership of peers such as Essex and Manchester. But it also created a problem for Cromwell himself – who, as MP for Cambridge, should, like them, have been excluded from military command. It is impossible to know whether Cromwell expected or planned for the eventual solution, which was to exempt him, if only temporarily and over some objections, from the ordinance, allowing him to resume his post. It is, however, eloquent witness to Cromwell’s own rise that, barely two years after he had first taken up arms, the country gentleman from Huntingdon (who could, after all, have stood down from his parliamentary seat) was deemed indispensable to Parliament’s cause, while traditional leaders from the aristocracy (who could not resign their places in the Lords) had apparently become redundant.

The issue of the prosecution of the war was a wider one for Parliament than the dispute between two of its commanders. But it would become typical of Oliver that his personal troubles became inextricable from the nation’s, and that the solution to them was a change in national policy, rather than a mere alteration in individual circumstances. This link between one man’s personality and the direction of the nation is one with which we are familiar when dealing with monarchs, and occasionally with great nobles. Cromwell is the first commoner to have made the same connection. What people call greatness can often be found to lie in the extent to which a person can involve others in the drama of their lives, and persuade the public of the importance for them of the fortunes of one individual. By that measure, Oliver Cromwell was beginning to be a great man.

It was not only issues of command, or indeed will to win (or lack of it), that had made Parliament incapable of pressing home their undoubted advantages in men and resources. It was also problems in the army’s structure and organization. The solution to these problems, proposed in January 1645, was the ‘new modelling’ of the army. Though some regional forces remained, and the Scots continued with a separate army in the field, the New Model became Parliament’s main instrument for winning the war. Answerable directly to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, it would at its envisaged full strength be a powerful force of 6,000 horse, 14,400 foot and 1,000 dragoons (mounted infantry). It began to be formed from February 1645, even before legislation had passed both Houses. It was to be paid for in a far more regulated way than previous armies, which had existed almost hand to mouth, with an assessment of £56,000 to be drawn from all parliamentary regions.

Cromwell was deeply involved in the committees to set up the New Model Army, though until his own position was resolved he could not, of course, expect to serve in it. He supported the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax as Lord General, and of Philip Skippon, an experienced soldier who had endured difficult service under Essex, as sergeant-major-general. The fact that the post of lieutenant-general went conspicuously unfilled surely suggests that Cromwell had hopes, if not expectations, of an exemption from the Self-Denying Ordinance. When, the following May, Leicester fell to Prince Rupert’s Royalist troops, the crisis was acute enough for Cromwell to be appointed as lieutenant-general. The appointment was never permanent, and was repeatedly renewed during the rest of the war, a reminder that Cromwell remained an exception to the rule he had helped to create, that his rise to supremacy rested on a technicality.

The campaign that eventually brought Parliament lasting victory had begun in May 1645 with Fairfax, his force still at half-strength, besieging Oxford, but the sack of Leicester had the intended effect of drawing the New Model Army away from the king’s capital. Fairfax requested Cromwell’s appointment as lieutenant-general, in command of the horse, and though the Lords refused, the Commons assented, their endorsement apparently sufficient in the circumstances. Marching from Ely, where he had been raising troops, to Fairfax’s army in Leicestershire, Cromwell was ‘received with the greatest joy’, and the following day, at Naseby near Market Harborough, he commanded the right wing of the army with Henry Ireton on the left and Skippon in the centre.

At Naseby, on 14 June 1645, Cromwell’s contribution was perhaps his most important to date, as the discipline of his cavalry rescued a perilous position and kept his horse together on the field, where they overwhelmed the cavalry and then the infantry of their opponents. Parliament outnumbered the Royalists by around 15,000 to 8,000, but those numbers could only be brought to bear if they stayed united on the battlefield. Once again, as at York, Rupert’s cavalry could not be prevented from pursuing the enemy off the field, while Cromwell kept his horse intact, and was able to turn it decisively against the Royalist foot, unprotected in the centre. The result was a total victory for the New Model Army in its first battle, with 1,000 Royalist dead and 4,500 prisoners taken, compared to around 200 dead on Parliament’s side.

Cromwell naturally saw ‘the good hand of God’ at Naseby, and praised his general Fairfax as well as the troops. But others were happy to give the new lieutenant-general the credit: ‘Cromwell charging before them, with his Horse brake into the Kings Body, routed them, ceized up on all their Train and Canon, took 4,000 Foot and Horse prisoners, their Standard, Engines, 70 carriages, 12 pieces of Ordnance … took the Kings own Waggons, and in one of them a Cabinet of Letters supposed to be of great consequence.’18 Cromwell’s own report of the battle reached Parliament before Fairfax’s, and he took the opportunity of manipulating the moral of the victory: ‘honest men served you faithfully in this action. Sir, they are trusty; I beseech you in the name of God, not to discourage them … He that ventures his life for the liberty of this country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.’¹⁹Although the Commons took out this final plea from the published version of the letter, as they would do with subsequent pleas on the same lines, the Lords’ publication didn’t, so that Cromwell’s association of victory at Naseby with the cause of liberty of conscience – and against the strict imposition of Presbyterianism implied by the Solemn League and Covenant that many in Parliament still hoped for – would not be forgotten.

Over the next eleven months, a far more effective and vigorous campaign to capitalize on Parliament’s victory at Naseby played out than had followed Marston Moor. As the Royalists were squeezed ever harder, and ultimate victory approached, Cromwell continued to make pleas for the case that a religious settlement should not be imposed, that all good Protestants should be accommodated in the future. In arms, ‘Presbyterians, Independents, all had the same spirit of faith and prayer … they agree here, know no names of difference: pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere.’20 Parliament, where Presbyterians dominated, continued to suppress such outpourings, but they were distributed in pamphlet form anyway. Cromwell’s successes during this campaign – with and without Fairfax – at Langport, Bristol, Winchester and Basing House were part of a summer and autumn of Parliamentarian progress that tightened the noose around the Royalist cause.

Though Charles held out until the new year, hoped-for relief from Scottish supporters under the Marquis of Montrose or a new injection of Irish manpower came to nothing. As Fairfax besieged Oxford in April 1646, Cromwell briefly returned to Parliament. By the time he joined the siege, Charles had already escaped, making his way to Southwell to surrender to the Scots on 5 May. It was the king’s final manoeuvre in a strategy that had long relied on seeking weaknesses in the parliamentary alliance. That he thought he was likely to do better in Scottish hands than English may have had something to do with the growing perception that the more ‘Radical’ Parliamentarians, of whom Cromwell was now the most celebrated, had acquired the loudest voice among Charles’s enemies. Whether or not that judgement reflected reality, the king was surely right to assume that at this point, with the triumphs of the New Model Army still fresh, Parliament could not be relied upon to offer Charles the terms on which he had surrendered to David Leslie: not to make him go against his conscience, and to support him if Parliament refused to reinstate his rights and prerogatives. There were many MPs who had long since rejected that as a basis for accommodation. Cromwell was one of them.