The year 1644 saw a great change in the English Civil War. For a start, it ceased to be exclusively English, as the Scots and Irish entered the fray. Many familiar faces, amateurs at war, were gone. But German-born Prince Rupert of the Rhine, King Charles I’s nephew, was still there for him, recruiting and training forces on the Welsh border, and Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, still guarded London with a Parliamentary army that denied Rupert’s aspirations of conquest while itself being unable to conquer.

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In December 1643, Ralph Hopton, the most successful Royalist general next to Rupert, had been turned back from Arundel in Sussex and from Alresford in Hampshire. By then, Hopton’s magnificent Cornish Infantry, which had stormed Lansdown Hill on July 5 and held the defenseless town of Devizes in that hopeful summer of 1643, had returned home. The campaigns of both sides had stalled in the south.

Control of the House of Commons was in the hands of younger, harder men, such as Oliver St. John and Sir Henry Vane the Younger. Vane had negotiated Scotland’s entry into the war, and 20,000 men were about to march into England to preserve Scotland from English prelates and to impose Presbyterianism on England-or so they thought.

Oliver Cromwell, that superbly efficient soldier of the Eastern Counties who in a few months had made himself into a total professional, had the spiritual force to make himself master of his regiments of cavalry and then to make his regiments the masters of the armies of Parliament. In a few years he would rule England, and under him Britain would become the master of North America’s eastern seaboard as well as an equal and sometimes feared voice in the councils of Europe. ‘Few indeed loved his government,’ wrote the historian Thomas McCauley nearly two centuries later, ‘but those who hated it most hated it less than they feared it. Had it been a worse government, it might perhaps have been overthrown in spite of all its strength. Had it been a weaker government, it would certainly have been overthrown in spite of all its merits. But it had moderation enough to abstain from those oppressions that drive men mad; and it had a force and energy which none but men driven mad by oppression would venture to encounter.’

Yet Cromwell, who became a military dictator with the power of a king, though he spurned the title of king, came from the class of small gentry that was often on the side of Charles I in the Civil War. An uncle of Cromwell’s had entertained King James VI of Scotland in 1603 when that monarch was on the way to London to accept the English crown as King James I. In the 1620s Oliver Cromwell became a not very prominent member of the House of Commons. In the 1630s he supported his cousin John Hampden in his resistance to the Ship Money Tax, imposed by Charles I without Parliamentary approval. A poor speaker who tended to ramble, the unprepossessing Cromwell was nevertheless picked out by Hampden as likely to become ‘the greatest man in England’ if war should come. Cromwell’s utter conviction that he had sought and found the will of god impressed his listeners far more than his speaking ability or appearance.

Cromwell was at the Battle of Edgehill on October 23, 1642, and became convinced that Parliament should recruit for its cavalry God-fearing men with a spiritual certainty that would enable them to prevail against the ‘men of honour’ to be found fighting for the Royalists. Mere’serving men and tapsters,’ he told Hampden, would never do.

He showed great energy recruiting cavalrymen to fight under Edward Montagu, second Earl of Manchester in the Eastern Counties Association, and he was largely responsible for turning back the southward movement of Royalist forces left in Lincolnshire by the absent William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, at Winceby on October 11, 1643. Colonel Cromwell’s regiment of horse soon swelled to 1,400 strong. He trained his men to charge at a ‘good round trot,’ although they also must have belted in at full gallop when contact was made. His troopers wore leather jackets that were often covered by armor. They were drilled to pull up on command after a charge so that Cromwell could regroup them and charge again if need be. In contrast, Prince Rupert’s men, following the more traditional battle tactic of the day, would tear through the enemy like dogs jumping through a hoop and then return to the battlefield so exhausted they could hardly charge again. At Naseby in 1645, they drove the rebel horse clean off the field, kept going, then returned to find the rest of the battle was lost. At Marston Moor, by contrast, Cromwell’s men were able to make two separate charges on different parts of the field. It was a new battlefield discipline that Rupert never mastered.

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