The Scots now returned to the siege of Newcastle, Fairfax the Younger mopped up Royalist garrisons just as Rupert, only a few weeks before, had mopped up Parliamentary garrisons. ‘Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord in this great victory given unto us,’ wrote Cromwell to his brother-in-law. ‘God made them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse and routed all we charged.’

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The Marquis of Newcastle declined to help Rupert pick up the pieces; instead, he left the country. He returned at the time of the Restoration in 1660 and lived to the ripe old age of 84. The Earl of Manchester, nominal commander of the Parliamentarians at Marston Moor, returned to East Anglia for a time, where he contemplated the future with increasing doubt.

In the south, King Charles had followed Essex into Cornwall, and at Lostwithiel on September 2 some 8,000 Parliamentarians surrendered-the greatest single capitulation of the war. Charles marched back to Wiltshire, entered Salisbury in high spirits, and at the end of October fought another drawn battle at Newbury against twice his numbers. He thought the war had been dragged back onto an even keel, but it had not. Nothing could undo the effect of those shattering charges of Cromwell’s men, half-humorously and half-fearfully dubbed ‘Ironsides’ by Rupert himself. From now on, Parliament would be able to concentrate its forces in the south and the midlands, where the war would be decided.

Cromwell and Manchester came to a parting of the ways at Newbury. Manchester pointed out that no matter how often Charles was beaten, he was king still and that one defeat would ruin Parliament. Cromwell would have no truck with that defeatism, and he and his friends in the House of Commons dictated the course the war was to take from then on. A new army, the New Model (which included some New England colonials in its ranks) was to take the field in 1645, and under Sir Thomas Fairfax it was to win the Battle of Naseby. It was not an army to be found to any one district, like the Eastern Counties Association or the Cornish Infantry, but would march and fight anywhere. It was England’s first real standing army, and it introduced among its men, New Englanders and all, the red coats that were to be the British infantryman’s until the facts of 19th and 20th century war (and the climate in India and South Africa) led to the introduction of khaki.The powerful Oliver Cromwell, lieutenant general of horse in the New Model Army, grew even more powerful after Marston Moor. After the execution of King Charles I on January 30, 1649, Cromwell’s sweep to military dictatorship could not be stopped.

Yet, that was not to be the end-the reaction, when it came, was against the military republic and not against the monarchy. In 1660, when Charles II was restored, both the Earl of Manchester and the Marquis of Newcastle were on his staff-and example of the constant changing of partners in the waltz of history. And it can be argued that the two hours at Marston Moor ensured the triumph of the constitutional monarchy just as much as it spelled the end of the ambitions of Charles I.

For further reading, South African contributor John Woolford suggests: This War Without an Enemy, by Richard Ollard; Cromwell: Our Chief of Men, by Antonia Fraser; and The King’s War, by C.V. Wedgwood.

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