hindered the carrying of the university plate to the king. Ably seconded by Valentine Walton, husband of his sister Margaret, and John Desborough, who had married his sister Jane, Cromwell effectually secured Cambridgeshire for the parliament.
As soon as Essex’s army took the field, Cromwell joined it as captain of a troop of horse, and his eldest surviving son, Oliver, served in it also as cornet in the troop of Lord St. John. At the battle of Edgehill Cromwell’s troop formed part of Essex’s own regiment and, under the command of Sir Philip Stapleton, helped to turn the fortune of the day. Fiennes in his account mentions Captain Cromwell in the list of officers who ‘never stirred from their troops, but they and their troops fought to the last minute’ (Fiennes, True and Exact Relation, &c., 1642). In December the formation of the eastern association and the similar association of the midland counties recalled Cromwell from the army of Essex to his own country. In the first of these associations he was a member of the committee for Cambridge, in the latter one of the committee for Huntingdon. Seizing the royal sheriff of Hertfordshire and disarming the royalists of Huntingdonshire on his way, he established himself at Cambridge at the end of January 1643, and made that place his headquarters for the rest of the spring. We hear of him busily engaged in fortifying Cambridge and collecting men to resist a threatened inroad by Lord Capel. But his most important business was the conversion of his own troop of horse into a regiment. A letter written in January 1643 seems to show that he was still only a captain at that date (Carlyle, Letter iv.), and he is first styled ‘colonel’ in a newspaper of 2 March 1643 (Cromwelliana, 2). By September 1643 his single troop of sixty men had increased to ten troops, and it rose to fourteen double troops before the formation of the ‘New Model’ (Husband, Ordinances, f. 1646, p. 331; Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, 98). His soldiers were men of the same spirit as himself. From the very beginning of the war Cromwell had noted the inferiority of the parliamentary cavalry, and in a memorable conversation set forth to Hampden the necessity of raising men of religion to oppose men of honour. ‘You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still’ (Speech xi.) Other commanders besides Cromwell attempted to fill their regiments with pious men, but he alone succeeded (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 180). In September he was able to write to St. John and describe his regiment as ‘a lovely company,’ ‘no anabaptists, but honest, sober christians.’ The officers were selected with the same care as the men. ‘If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them,’ wrote Cromwell to the committee of Suffolk. ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than what you call a gentleman and nothing else. . . . It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments, but seeing it was necessary the work should go on, better plain men than none’ (Carlyle, Letters xvi. xviii.)
So far as it lay in Cromwell’s own power the work did go on, in spite of every difficulty. On 14 March he suppressed a rising at Lowestoft, at the beginning of April disarmed the Huntingdonshire royalists, and on the 28th of the same month retook Crowland. At Grantham on 13 May he defeated with twelve troops double that number of royalists (Letter x.), and before the end of May was at Nottingham engaged on ‘the great design’ of marching into Yorkshire to join the Fairfaxes. The plan failed through the disagreements of the local commanders and the treachery of Captain John Hotham, whose intrigues Cromwell detected and whose arrest he helped to secure (Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, i. 187; Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1885, i. 220, 363). The repeated failure of the local authorities to provide for the payment of his forces added to Cromwell’s difficulties. ‘Lay not too much,’ he wrote to one of the defaulters, ‘on the back of a poor gentleman who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and bleed the last drop to serve the cause and you’ (Carlyle, Letter xi.) Obliged to return to the defence of the associated counties themselves, Cromwell recaptured Stamford, stormed Burleigh House (24 July), and took a leading part in the victory of Gainsborough (28 July). He it was who, with his disciplined troopers, routed Charles Cavendish and his reserve when they seemed about to turn the fortune of the fight, and covered the retreat of the parliamentarians when the main body of Newcastle’s army came up (ib. Letter xii. app. 5). On the same day that Cromwell thus distinguished himself he was appointed by the House of Commons governor of the Isle of Ely, and a fortnight later became one of the four colonels of horse in the new army to be raised by the Earl of Manchester (Husband, Ordinances, 10 Aug. 1643). Though not yet bearing the title of lieutenant general, he was practically Manchester’s second in command; and, while
