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It had been two years since Parliament and king had resorted to war. Neither side had yet landed a decisive blow or found a brilliant paladin. Charles had the advantage at first; the trained bands of Parliament were undisciplined enthusiasts. But one of the first to raise a troop of cavalry was the former Huntingdonshire farmer Cromwell.

Prince Rupert, still only twenty-five, was six foot tall, given to wearing the high boots, silk and velvet suits and broad hats of a cavalier, keen to enjoy mistresses and gambling and never seen without his lucky dog Boye; he possessed elan but lacked discipline. Cromwell was proud in his plainness: ruddy, balding with reddish hair, high cheekbones, ‘his voice sharpe and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour’, his clothes rough and dark. As Rupert’s dashing cavalry had dominated the early battles, Cromwell noticed that ‘their troopers are gentlemen’s sons’ while parliamentary horsemen were ‘old decayed serving men and tapsters’. He decided to recruit believers instead: ‘You must get men of spirit.’ Some complained that these Cromwellians were ‘proud, self-conceited hot-headed sectaries’ who ‘call themselves godly’ and see ‘visions and revelations’. Cromwell called them his Lovely Company. Promoted quickly to colonel, he built around himself a ‘family’ of likeminded officers, led by Henry Ireton, who married his daughter Bridget. The parliamentary press called him Old Ironside; his godly horsemen became the Ironsides.

Until that day in Yorkshire, the two sides had been stalemated in a war where the early courtliness had now deteriorated into a ferocious sectarian scrimmage. But when the Scots, signing a Solemn League and Covenant that agreed to follow ‘the word of God’ and seek ‘the extirpation of popery’, joined the war, sending 22,000 men to form the Army of the Two Kingdoms, they tipped the balance towards Parliament.

The anxious king said goodbye to Henrietta Maria. When the war started, the queen, whose Catholicism attracted violent parliamentary hostility, was in Holland. She only just made it back, being nearly shipwrecked. Reunited with the king, she became pregnant again, but was forced to move from town to town, hunted by parliamentarians. She duly gave birth to a daughter, but their two younger children were already parliamentary prisoners. Just before Marston Moor, Charles sent her to France to raise funds. ‘Adieu, my dear heart,’ she wrote. ‘If I die, believe you lose a person who has never been other than entirely yours.’ They never met again. ‘I ought never to have left the king,’ she later told her son. Warwick, Parliament’s lord high admiral, pursued her, hoping to kill the papist queen, but she made it to France, accompanied by her court and Lord Minimus.^*

As the Anglo-Scottish army threatened to take York, Rupert prepared to fight at Marston Moor, already afraid of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

On an early summer’s evening, Rupert could hear the puritans singing hymns as Cromwell led his 4,000 Eastern Association cavalry plus 1,000 Scots in the charge, breaking one division of royal cavalry. Cromwell was a zealot but far from dour: instead he was impassioned, often giddy, charging into battle transfigured by a manic righteous glee, laughing aloud. ‘I could not, riding about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory,’ he wrote. The Ironsides charged with the shouts ‘God and our Strength’ and ‘The Lord of Hosts!’

Then Rupert charged. ‘Cromwell’s own division had a hard pull of it,’ observed a parliamentarian, ‘charged by Rupert’s bravest … they stood at the sword’s point a pretty while, hacking one another.’ Cromwell was wounded in the neck. ‘But at last (it so pleased God) he brake through them, scattering them before him like a little dust.’ Cromwell (and English historians) conveniently forgot that Marston Moor was really a Scottish victory: the Scottish paladin Leven occupied northern England for the next two years.

After the battle, the moderate Parliamentarians, the Presbyterian faction, wanted to negotiate but Cromwell, leader of the Independents, insisted on total victory. ‘Why did we take up arms at first?’ he asked. The power had moved from Warwick and his God-fearing magnates to the new hard men. Arguing for ‘vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war’, Cromwell urged, ‘Let us apply ourselves!’ While he advertised his God-fearing humility, he was the ultimate humble bragger, advertising his prowess in pamphlets, claiming as his own the exploits of others and undermining his superiors, whom he subverted and displaced one by one. The ruling Committee of Both Kingdoms commissioned a New Model Army under the dashing commander Sir Thomas ‘Black Tom’ Fairfax, a Yorkshire grandee, who became lord general with his deputy, Cromwell, promoted to lieutenant-general of horse. The duo worked well together: at Naseby, on 14 June 1645, the two finally won decisively with Cromwell leading the charge.