Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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testimony of their faith and entered into a mutual covenant to live in accord-

ance with it. Every such ‘gathered church’, they held, should have the right to

choose its own pastor and the power to discipline its members, even in the last

resort to cast them out; so the Presbyterians’ entrustment of ordination and

excommunication to presbyteries was unacceptable to them. But they did not

claim the total autonomy for each congregation that most separatists

demanded, for besides accepting (within limits) the civil magistrate’s author-

ity over their churches their ideal lay in a kind of federal association. They

acknowledged the right of sister-churches to meet and censure a congregation

that fell into error, and to renounce communion with it if it proved incorri-

gible, but they rejected the power claimed by presbyteries and synods to

deliver whole churches over to Satan. They did not like being called Independ-

ents, because they believed ‘the truth to lie and consist in a middle way

betwixt that which is falsely charged on us, Brownism, and that which is the

contention of these times, the authoritative Presbyterial government in all the

subordinations and proceedings of it’. They asked only for ‘a latitude to some

lesser differences with peaceableness’.

Few though they were in the Assembly, the Independents had powerful

supporters in parliament, including Cromwell, Vane, and St John in the Com-

mons and Saye and Wharton in the Lords. These and most other lay Inde-

pendents were strongly committed to a vigorous prosecution of the war, so it

is understandable that ‘Independent’ became a loose label for all who pursued

total victory and ‘Presbyterian’ for those who would have preferred a negoti-

ated peace. It was also generally true that most Independents advocated some

degree of liberty of conscience in religion, whereas most Presbyterians

favoured the continuance of a single national church, conformity to which

would be enforced by the state. Yet the labels could be misleading, partly

because many peace-party politicians were at best lukewarm Presbyterians in

religion, and would have preferred a limited episcopacy and a modiﬁed Angli-

can liturgy if that option had been open, and partly because there were com-

mitted religious Presbyterians like Zouch Tate and Samuel Brown who were

keen to ﬁght the war to a ﬁnish. There were also a few radical Independents

like Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner who were virtual freethinkers, and

anything but puritan in their morals. It would be perverse to eschew alto-

gether the use of terms that were so widely employed at the time, but it is often

necessary to distinguish between the political and religious senses of Presby-

terian and Independent, since the correlation between them was so imperfect.

It may help here if ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘Independent’ are henceforth spelt with

capital initials when they denote religious denominations, and without capi-

298 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Tho. Goodwin and others, An Apologetical Narration (1644), pp. 24, 31; facsimile in

W. Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (3 vols., New York, 1934), II.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 298

tals when they refer to the opposed political groupings—‘parties’ suggests a

greater degree of identity, coherence, and organization than actually existed

in the 1640s, though the term is hard to avoid.

There was a social dimension to the mutual opposition between Presbyter-

ians and Independents. Politicians like Cromwell, Vane, and St John would

have extended freedom of worship not only to their fellow-Independents but

to the more peaceable sects—Baptists, Seekers, and others—which were pro-

liferating in the unsettled climate of the 1640s. Conservative souls, however,

distrusted the whole principle of electing ministers of religion, and were hor-

riﬁed by the prospect of giving free rein to sectarian tub-preachers with no

academic credentials, elected by their fellow-plebeians. They might feel

uncomfortable over the authority about to be given to lay elders, many of

whom were bound to be of the middling sort, but the Westminster Assembly

promised the continuance of a single, exclusive national church in which the

majority of the parish clergy would go on being chosen by wealthy gentry

patrons. Such a church was likely to cement the existing structures of society,

whereas sectarian preachers were seen as potential social dynamite.

There was particular concern among the orthodox and conservative over

the high proportion of religious radicals in Cromwell’s cavalry. Cromwell, in

his efforts to enlist men who knew what they were ﬁghting for and loved what

they knew, had found them mainly among those who saw their cause as that

of the people of God, and many of them were puritan enthusiasts. He was

accused unjustly of favouring sectaries at the expense of moderate, orthodox

men, for he did not probe into their beliefs if he sensed that they had what he

called ‘the root of the matter’ in them. He had a famous row in March 1644

with the commander of the infantry in Manchester’s army, Major-General

Crawford, a narrow Presbyterian Scot who arrested the lieutenant-colonel of

his own regiment and sent him up to headquarters, apparently because he was

unwilling, as a Baptist, to sign the Covenant. It was hardly the place of the

lieutenant-general of horse to rebuke the major-general of foot for disciplin-

ing his own subordinate for not complying with the law as laid down by

parliament, but rebuke him Cromwell did:

Sir [he wrote], the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opin-

ions; if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisﬁes . . . Take heed of being

sharp . . . against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you

in every opinion concerning matters of religion.

For a while after this episode he did promote Independents and sectaries in

preference to rigid Presbyterians, not because of the latter’s religious convic-

tions but because of their intolerance towards comrades-in-arms who did not

Towards a Resolution 299

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 278.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 299

share them. But the phase did not last long, and his true spirit spoke in his dis-

patch to the Speaker after the New Model Army’s heroic storming of Bristol

in 1645: ‘Presbyterians, Independents, all had here the same spirit of faith and

prayer, the same presence and answer; they agree here, know no names of dif-

ference: pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere.’

Such sentiments were anathema to the Scots, and they helped to bring

about an interesting reversal of alliances in the course of 1644. When the

Scots ﬁrst came into the war, they saw Pym’s middle group and the war party

as their natural allies, and the abortive treaty of Oxford deepened their suspi-

cions of the peace party. Several things changed this alignment, and turned

them particularly against Cromwell: his quarrel with Crawford, followed by

his demand for the man’s dismissal; the excessive credit that they thought he

received for the victory of Marston Moor; and above all the so-called Accom-

modation Order which Cromwell and St John piloted through the Commons

in September. This was a directive to the parliamentary committee that was

then in liaison with the Scottish commissioners and a committee of the

Assembly divines, and it requested them ‘to endeavour the ﬁnding out some

way how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the com-

mon rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the

Word’.

This was moderate enough, and its immediate effects were slight, but

the Scots saw it as a betrayal of the Covenant’s commitment to a common

religious uniformity based on the faith and practice of their Kirk. They drew

steadily closer to the presbyterians, partly because the latter were friendlier

towards their religious aspirations and partly out of a shared hostility

towards Cromwell and the independents.

Furthermore the Scots lost their appetite for outright victory when they

began to fear that it would carry the independents to ascendancy, a prospect

so disturbing that they came to share the presbyterians’ predilection for a

negotiated peace. The Scottish commissioners, indeed, were the main initi-

ators of a new set of peace proposals which parliament approved and sent to

the king in November 1644, and on which the so-called treaty of Uxbridge

was conducted early in the new year. There is no need to consider them in

detail, for they made demands that would have been excessive even if the par-

liamentarians and the Scots had found the means to beat the king in the ﬁeld,

which so far they had not. No wonder Charles told the commissioners who

brought him these preposterous proposals that there were three things he

would not part with, his church, his crown, and his friends—‘and you will

have much ado to get them from me’, he added.

Nevertheless it suited him to

300 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 377.

Ibid., p. 294.

Quoted in Gardiner, Great Civil War, II, 25; text of the propositions of Uxbridge in

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 275–86.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 300

appear amenable to overtures for peace, and the peace party did not give up

on the Uxbridge treaty until late in February 1645.

Long before then the parliament was riven by an altogether more serious

debate. This opened on 25 November when, at the Commons’ request,

Waller and Cromwell gave their accounts of what had gone wrong in the

recent campaign. Widely though they differed in their politics and religion,

both men were heavily critical of Manchester, and both pressed the point that

the war could not be won while three armies in varying degrees of delapid-

ation were competing for parliament’s resources. Cromwell’s accusations

against Manchester were detailed and devastating, indicting his ‘continued

backwardness to all action’ with a frankness remarkable enough in a com-

moner criticizing an earl but sensational, and to many shocking, in a second-

in-command publicly censuring his own general. He did acknowledge,

however, that Manchester was motivated by a sincere conviction that the

issues between king and parliament should not be resolved by war. Manches-

ter, replying in the Lords, made counter-accusations of a more personal kind.

One was that Cromwell had said ‘he hoped to live to see never a nobleman in

England’, which sounds improbable, since Cromwell remained a believer in

social hierarchy all his life. Others were that he had called the Assembly

divines persecutors, and said that he would as soon draw his sword against

the Scots as against any in the king’s army, and that he wanted none but Inde-

pendents in his own.

These were not Cromwell’s considered sentiments, but

his temper had a short fuse, and words he had spoken in heat may have been

heightened in the telling.

While the Commons’ Committee for the Army was considering the evi-

dence against Manchester, Essex summoned the Scottish commissioners and

ﬁve MPs including the Presbyterian leaders Denzil Holles and Sir Philip

Stapleton, to a secret conference at Essex House, late at night on 3 December.

They met to consider a proposal by the Scots that Cromwell should be

impeached before parliament as an incendiary between the English and Scot-

tish nations, in breach of the Solemn League and Covenant. Holles and

Stapleton were all for proceeding, but the lawyer-MPs Bulstrode Whitelocke

and John Maynard persuaded the Scots that Cromwell had too much support

in parliament for the charges to stick.

Cromwell was not pursuing a personal vendetta against Manchester, nor

did he relish the antagonisms within and between the two Houses that their

quarrel was generating. He was waiting only for the Committee of the Army

to endorse the evidence of Manchester’s persistent unwillingness to ﬁght since

Towards a Resolution 301

Quoted in Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland,

1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 4–5. The sources for the whole episode are printed in D. Mas-

son (ed.), The Quarrel Between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell (Camden Society,

1875).

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 301

the fall of York. It did so when it reported to the House on 9 December, and

towards the end of a long debate he rose to make the most important speech

of his career so far. The long continuance of the war, he said, had brought the

nation into such a state of misery that unless they conducted it more urgently

and effectively they would make the people hate the name of a parliament.

For what do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning

of the parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses have got great places

and commands, and . . . will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not

permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it . . . If I

may speak my conscience without reﬂection upon any, I do conceive if the army be not

put into another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can

bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.

So let them cease pursuing particular complaints against any one com-

mander, since none was infallible, but apply themselves rather to the

necessary remedy; and he hoped no member of either House would take

offence at it, or hesitate to sacriﬁce private interests for the public good.

He did not directly specify the remedy, but he was plainly colluding with

the chairman of the Committee for the Army, Zouch Tate, a Presbyterian but

a ﬁrm believer in ﬁghting to a ﬁnish. Tate immediately moved, as from his

committee, that for the duration of the war no member of either House

should hold any military command or civil ofﬁce conferred by parliament.

Vane seconded him, offering to give up his own post as Treasurer of the Navy.

Such a Self-Denying Ordinance was one half of the remedy; the other would

be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be

fruitless unless they were put under commanders with a whole-hearted will to

win. Removing Essex and Manchester was the ﬁrst problem to be faced,

though there were other peace party peers and MPs holding less exalted com-

mands. To have sought their individual dismissal would have caused huge

offence to honourable men and deepened already serious divisions, but to call

for a sacriﬁce by all legislators who held places of proﬁt was practical politics,

though it was much resisted. It was an imperfect solution, for it proposed to

end the military careers not only of seven peers, who were mostly of the peace

party, but of seventeen MPs, including Cromwell himself, Waller, Lord Fair-

fax (MP for Yorkshire—his Scottish peerage gave him no seat in the Lords),

Haselrig, Brereton, and half-a-dozen others who were equally committed to

total victory. Waller was not sorry to go, and Fairfax was over sixty, but for

Cromwell to have hung up his sword would have been a serious military loss.

Yet the indications are that he accepted the necessity and thought it worth-

while. He told the Commons that the recall of their fellow-members to West-

minster ‘will not break, or scatter our armies. I can speak this for my own

302 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, I, 314.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 302

soldiers, that they look not upon me, but upon you; and for you they will

ﬁght, and live and die in your cause.’

From an early date it was suspected

that he was counting on being personally exempted from the ordinance, as

eventually he was; but there was just such an attempt to exempt Essex, which

his allies narrowly defeated, and Cromwell could hardly have expected them

to treat him differently. The loophole that would permit his continuance in

the army lay in the future.

The twin measures which were to transform the conduct of the war, the

Self-Denying Ordinance and its follow-up the New Model Ordinance, were

not the product solely of the war party leaders in the Commons. They were

devised in concert with a small group of like-minded peers, chief among them

Viscount Saye and Sele, who had been St John’s patron in the 1630s, and also

including Lord Wharton and a convert from the peace party, the Earl of

Northumberland. These formed a coherent group with their allies in the

Commons, a group that some historians have called the royal independents,

and which was to assume even more importance between the ﬁrst and second

Civil Wars. Saye proposed the principle of self-denial in the Lords on the same

day that it was ﬁrst moved in the Commons, but the peers took great offence,

seeing it as aimed primarily against their own members, and promptly re-

jected it. When the Self-Denying Ordinance formally came up to them from

the Commons, who passed it on 19 December, they laid it aside and resisted

all pressure to take it into consideration until 13 January, when they threw it

out; only four peers then recorded their dissents.

What ﬁnally prodded them into action was the reading of the New Model

Ordinance, which the Commons had passed without a division. This measure

had three main objects. One was to forge a genuinely national army out of the

remnants of the earlier ones, an army free of the regional ties which had made

Waller’s London trained bands and Manchester’s East Anglian foot look over

their shoulders when they had been away from home ground for any length

of time. A second aim was to create a fully professional army whose ofﬁcers

were wholly dedicated to prosecuting the war, with no political by-ends.

Thirdly, this army was to have an undisputed ﬁrst call on parliament’s ﬁnan-

cial resources. The creation of so powerful a force aroused the deepest mis-

givings in the Lords, especially since peers were to be precluded from holding

command in it. Its promoters sought to forestall opposition, however, by

writing the names of its generals and colonels into the ordinance itself, and by

letting it be known that the peace negotiations at Uxbridge would not

proceed unless parliament ﬁrst committed itself to remodelling its forces.

Towards a Resolution 303

Ibid., p. 316.

For slightly different readings of Cromwell’s motives and expectations compare J. S. A.

Adamson, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament’ in J. Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and

the English Revolution, pp. 61–5, with my own chapter in the same volume at p. 102.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 303

The choice of a commander-in-chief was far from simple, because the Self-

Denying Ordinance ruled out almost everyone who had commanded any-

thing larger than a regiment. Massey and Skippon were exceptions, but

Massey was a strong presbyterian who had sided with the king in 1642 and

would do so again in 1647. Skippon was nominated to the post to which his

experience best suited him, that of major-general of the infantry. For that of

General of the New Model Army the choice fell boldly on Sir Thomas Fair-

fax. He was only thirty-two, he had no pre-war military experience, his high-

est command had been that of the horse in his father’s small army, and he had

not been lucky at Adwalton Moor or Marston Moor. But wherever he had

fought he had shown the dash and ﬂair of a born leader of cavalry; his nor-

mally mild nature was ﬁred in the furnace of battle to a white heat, which he

communicated instinctively to his ofﬁcers and men. A further virtue was that

he had no known political leanings beyond a steady devotion to the parlia-

ment’s cause, and in religion he was a devout but undogmatic puritan.

Cromwell had seen him in action more than once, and it may further have

helped him that his father had corresponded with Wharton and Northum-

berland. The vote to appoint him, taken in the Commons on 21 January, was

a trial of party strength, with Cromwell and Vane as tellers for the 101 ayes

and Holles and Stapleton for the 69 noes.

The Lords delayed passing the New Model Ordinance until 15 February,

despite constant pressure from the Commons, and they disputed the lists of

ofﬁcers submitted by Fairfax for more than a month after that. Although

Fairfax proposed no one for the service who did not already hold a commis-

sion, they tried to make no fewer than 57 changes in his recommendations,

and most of them were politically motivated; 35 of the 52 ofﬁcers whom they

tried to demote or remove were independents or men of radical views. They

tried to make every ofﬁcer take the Covenant and undertake to conform to

the church government to be settled by parliament, and to cashier or disqual-

ify any who refused. Under extreme pressure from the Commons and the

City, and under the threat of both to withhold essential ﬁnancial provisions

until they gave way, an evenly divided House of Lords ﬁnally approved Fair-

fax’s nominees on 18 March with the help of the proxy vote of his own grand-

father, the Earl of Mulgrave. Even then the new army was not in the clear, for

at the end of the month Essex, Manchester, and Denbigh had still not resigned

their commissions, and the presbyterian peers were holding up Fairfax’s

because it did not bind him, as previous commanders had been bound, to pre-

serve the safety of the king’s person. Without his parliamentary commission,

Fairfax had no legal authority to discipline what was left of Essex’s infantry,

who were in a state of mutiny. Earlier, some of Essex’s cavalry had refused to

serve under Waller when the latter had been ordered to take them to the relief

of Weymouth, which was under severe threat by royalist forces. By their

304 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 304

obstructiveness the Lords were jeopardizing the whole parliamentarian war

effort, and they still had not passed the Self-Denying Ordinance. The Com-

mons, to break the deadlock, passed a modiﬁed ordinance which discharged

all members of both Houses from their military commands or civil ofﬁces, but

gave them forty days’ grace and did not debar them from being reappointed.

The Lords then approved Fairfax’s commission by one vote; Essex, Man-

chester, and Denbigh resigned their commands on 2 April, and the second

Self-Denying Ordinance passed the Upper House next day. Ironically, it

paved the way for Cromwell’s later appointment to the command of the

cavalry in the New Model Army, which so far was left vacant.

Mere pique and injured pride seem inadequate explanations of the tenacity

with which the Lords obstructed the measures essential for the continuance of

the war. It has been persuasively argued that Essex and his allies had, since at

least 1642, been nursing a dream of a resurgent aristocracy, in which the

power-vacuum left by the king’s incapacity to rule would be ﬁlled by the

magnates as his ‘natural’ counsellors. There is some evidence that Essex’s aim

was to have the medieval ofﬁce of Lord High Constable, which had carried

supreme military authority, revived for him, as a possible step towards even

more vice-regal powers. His repeated failures to obey the Committee of Both

Kingdoms’ directions may be attributable to an ambition to be the master of

the war and the architect of the peace—an ambition to which the New Model

Army and its political sponsors were fatal obstacles. Not all the peers sup-

ported him, of course. At the same time as parliament ﬁnally passed the New

Model Ordinance it appointed Northumberland, Saye’s ally and the senior

peer still attending the Lords, as Governor of the king’s children, and it was

reported that if Charles refused reasonable terms of settlement, his youngest

son, the eight-year-old Duke of Gloucester, would be made king and Northum-

berland Lord Protector. The new elevation of Northumberland looks very like

an aristocratic move to scupper Essex’s pretensions once and for all.

Sheer military necessity forced the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with the

Commons’ backing, to go ahead with forming the New Model Army before

it received parliament’s legislative blessing. It was to consist of 6,600 cavalry,

1,000 dragoons, and 14,400 infantry, and the general aim was to embody in

it intact such units in the existing armies as had proved their military worth.

Fairfax was entrusted with the nomination of all ofﬁcers below colonel, and

he faithfully observed the principle of keeping together ofﬁcers and men who

had already forged a bond in war. Despite acute Scottish suspicions to the

Towards a Resolution 305

J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The baronial context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the

Royal Historical Society, 5th series 40, pp. 93–120 (esp. 105–19). I do not attribute quite as

much motive force to aristocratic faction as Dr Adamson does, and I believe Fairfax to have been

chosen more on his military merits than as the candidate of the Saye–Northumberland group, but

it is a most interesting argument.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 305

contrary, there was no deliberate design to create an army of a speciﬁc polit-

ical or religious complexion; the overriding criterion was military effective-

ness. The senior ofﬁcers named in the ordinance covered a wide ideological

spectrum, though the greater commitment of Independents both religious

and political to outright victory gave them a certain preponderance. Proven

ﬁghting quality ensured the embodiment of most of Cromwell’s Eastern

Association cavalry, which furnished ﬁve of the New Model’s original regi-

ments of horse.

There was no difﬁculty in ﬁlling the ranks of the cavalry, indeed quite a

number of redundant ofﬁcers enlisted as troopers. The service carried much

more prestige and better pay and conditions than the infantry enjoyed. A

trooper’s two shillings a day was about twice what he basically needed to feed

man and horse, whereas a foot soldier’s eightpence was the wage of a com-

mon labourer, and his rations in the ﬁeld usually consisted only of cheese with

bread or biscuit. The infantry of the older armies were so depleted that just

over half of the New Model foot had to be raised by conscription, and they

were not raised easily. An impressment ordinance was hurriedly passed at the

end of February, and most of the burden fell on London, which had to ﬁnd

2,500 men, and on Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent, whose quota was 1,000

apiece. None of these targets was easily met, and the pressed men were so

prone to mutiny or desert that they had to be guarded all the way to their regi-

ments. They were drawn from the lowest levels of society, for anyone worth

£3 in land or £5 in goods was exempt, and so were a whole range of occupa-

tions from students to seamen. Death was the penalty prescribed for desert-

ers, but many were homeless men who had little trouble in disappearing

without trace. During the New Model’s ﬁrst year nearly twice as many men

were impressed as actually served in it for any length of time, for desertion

rendered it chronically short of infantry, who were down to only 8,000 late in

September 1645. As Ian Gentles has written, ‘conscripting infantry in 1645–6

was like ladling water into a leaky bucket’.

Fairfax reportedly said at the end

of the war that his best private soldiers were the many former royalists who

had promptly enlisted in his army after being captured.

By that time many

of them knew no other occupation. The problem of recruitment did ease,

however, as the New Model’s reputation rose on its tide of victories, whereas

for the royalists it became ever more acute.

The New Model was certainly better armed and equipped than its prede-

cessors, and it was the ﬁrst English army to wear uniform: red coats faced

306 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Gentles, New Model Army, p. 33. In all that concerns the formation of the army I am great-

ly indebted to Dr Gentles’s work. Mark A. Kishlansky also throws much light on the subject in

The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), though on some points of interpretation

he is questionable.

C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army (3rd ed., 1921), p. 37, citing Sir Philip Warwick’s Memoirs.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 306

with blue (Fairfax’s colour) and grey breeches. It was even paid fairly regular-

ly while the war lasted, but that did not stop its men from taking free quarter

and ‘liberating’ large quantities of livestock, bacon, beer, grain, ﬁrewood,

and household goods wherever they marched. Its discipline and its reputation

for paying its way improved markedly after its run of victories began at

Naseby, but in its early months many of its infantry behaved as one would

expect of unwilling conscripts. ‘An ungodly crew’, Sir Samuel Luke, the

Presbyterian governor of Newport Pagnell, found them as they advanced

towards their ﬁrst battle; ‘I think these New Modellers knead all their dough

with ale, for I never see so many drunk in my life in so short a time.’

Hostile commentators, both royalist and presbyterian, misrepresented the

general character of the new army from the start. They sneered at the base

birth of its ofﬁcers, but of the thirty-seven who fought at Naseby with the

rank of colonel or above nine came from noble families and only seven were

not gentlemen born, while a high proportion of the more junior ofﬁcers were

also of gentry stock. Over the years, casualties and resignations led to more

and more promotions from the ranks, but the resultant social change was

gradual. The New Model was widely feared as the supposed military wing of

the independent party, but in fact it refrained from engaging in any kind of

collective political activity until a presbyterian-dominated parliament threat-

ened it with virtual extinction in 1647; and when that happened the number

of conservative ofﬁcers who left it rather than resist the civil power was, as we

shall see, substantial. This is not to suggest that before then it was apolitical

in the sense of being indifferent to political issues, for most of its ofﬁcers and

very many of its men, especially in the cavalry, cared passionately about what

they were ﬁghting for. But under Fairfax’s leadership and example it scrupu-

lously fulﬁlled, for more than two years, its creators’ intention that it should

be wholly dedicated to beating the enemy in the ﬁeld.

The religious tone of the army also changed over the years. At the outset,

those units which already contained a high proportion of Independents and

sectaries, such as the cavalry drawn from the Eastern Association, retained

their old character, but in choosing ofﬁcers for regiments that had to be reor-

ganized or newly raised the criteria were military ﬁtness and previous service.

In practice a broad toleration prevailed in most of the army during its ﬁghting

years. Something can be gleaned from the names of its chaplains, whose

appointment, outside army headquarters, lay with the regimental command-

ers. But chaplains proved hard to ﬁnd, and though over thirty have been

traced who served with various regiments between 1645 and 1651 few stayed

with the colours for more than a few months. Of the nine in post during 1645

ﬁve were Independents and four either certainly or probably Presbyterian,

Towards a Resolution 307

British Library, Egerton MSS 786, fos. 30, 33.

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 307