On the subjugation of the west the English Parliament thought for the present only of securing its position within England itself. It has been seen how at the first outbreak of the war the Parliamentary leaders had taken the Scottish army into pay, and how even after the formation of the New Model they had tried to saddle it with the hardest of the work. In truth, the behaviour of the Parliament towards the Scots had been sufficiently shifty and ungracious; it had taken at any rate some care to pay its own troops, but it persistently neglected its allies, who had done excellent service in the north. Indeed, had Leven yielded to the English Parliament\'s wishes, had he not in fact been forced by the victory at Auldearn to retreat, the Scots instead of the English might have won the Naseby of the Civil War, an event which would have led to untold complications. Now however that the English army had done the work for itself, all parties in England became anxious to be rid of the Scots. Matters were somewhat confused by the fact that in 1646 Charles threw himself into the hands of Scotland; but by the close of the year it was agreed that the Scottish army should be paid off and withdrawn over the border, and that the King should be surrendered to the English, who had conquered him. The Parliament therefore gained its great object, a free hand for the management of its own affairs. It overlooked however in its calculations one important factor, the Army.
1647.

At the opening of 1647 there was a general cry[230] throughout England for peace. The country was exhausted; the finance of the Parliament was in hopeless disorder; and the people groaned under the enormous expense of the war. Obviously the most natural item for retrenchment was the Army; its work was done, and there was no further reason for its existence; it should therefore be disbanded or at any rate very greatly reduced. Moreover economy was not the only motive that prompted such a policy. The Parliament, united for the moment in the general desire to get quit of the Scots, fell back, almost immediately after this was accomplished, into faction. Presbyterians and Independents were the original names of the two rival parties, but for our purpose it is simpler to narrow them forthwith to Parliament and Army; for among many of the Presbyterian members who had held commands in the first years of the war, there existed a professional as well as a political and religious jealousy of the successful officers who had supplanted them. Parliament having created the Army by a vote thought that it could extinguish it by the same simple process; having used it as a ladder whereon to rise to undisputed supremacy it now proposed to kick it down. But such an Army was not disposed to make itself a plaything of Parliament.

Petitions from various quarters for the disbandment of the New Model turned the heads rather than strengthened the hands of the two Houses. The only safe and honest course, if the Army must be disbanded, was to discharge the whole of the country\'s obligations to it in full. Now the pay of the foot was eighteen weeks and of the horse forty-two weeks in arrear, and the total debt due to the forces amounted to three hundred and thirty thousand pounds. The Parliament was in straits for money and by no means inclined to make the necessary effort to raise this sum. It proposed as an alternative to turn twelve thousand of the soldiers into a new army for the pacification of Ireland, and this without a word as to the terms on which the men had[231] taken service, and without the least mention of a settlement of arrears. Further, as if it were not enough to irritate the men, the Parliament did its best to alienate the officers. It passed resolutions insulting to the army, insulting to Fairfax, insulting to Cromwell. So deeply injured indeed was Oliver by this ungrateful treatment, that he thought seriously of carrying his sword and such troops as he could raise to the wars in Germany. Such was the pitch of disgust to which the Parliament had driven the ablest of its servants.

The Army raised its first protest in the form of a respectful petition from the men: the Parliament met it with violent and ungracious censure. Certain officers who had supported this petition then tendered a vindication of their conduct: the Commons refused even to read it. Finally, as if to aggravate the Army to extremity, the Lords proposed to grant the troops six weeks\' pay in temporary satisfaction of arrears. This was too much. Discontent grew apace in the ranks, the men refused to have anything to do with service in Ireland, and finally the Army, by the election of two representatives for each regiment, organised itself for the orderly maintenance of its just claims. These representatives were called agitators, a name which in those days signified simply agents. The degradation of the term in our own time into a synonym for political busy-bodies must not mislead us, nor blind us to the dignified patience, under extreme provocation, of this irresistible body of disciplined men.
May 25.

For the moment the Parliament was awed into concessions and promises, but its leaders did not lightly submit to humiliation, and rather than yield to the Army looked about for a force to countervail it. First they turned to the City of London, which was strongly Presbyterian, and sought an armed force in the City train-bands. Next they resorted to Scotland, which was intensely jealous of the New Model, and formed a coalition with it in favour of the King, thereby[232] sowing the seeds of a quarrel between North and South Britain. Finally, after stultifying itself by a promise of attention to the Army\'s complaints, it passed an Ordinance for its disbandment without further ado. This was past endurance. The soldiers broke into open mutiny; and Fairfax and Cromwell, having striven in vain to gain justice for their men, and at the same time to keep them in subordination to the Parliament, placed themselves at the head of a movement which they could no longer repress. It was indeed high time, for the Presbyterian leaders had already invited the Prince of Wales to place himself at the head of the Scots for an invasion of England.
August 6.

On the 4th of June the Army assembled about four miles from Newmarket at Kentford Heath. There in the course of the next few days it erected a general council, composed of the general officers who had taken the side of the men and of two officers and two privates from each regiment, and made a written declaration of its policy. Still the Parliament remained obstinate, and now endeavoured to enlist the discharged soldiers of the earlier armies in order to meet force with force. The Army advanced to Triplow Heath, whither Parliament sent a last message to propose terms for an agreement. The overtures were rejected, and the Army continued its advance. In panic fear the Parliament now offered bribes to any officers or men who would desert the Army. This contemptible device was a total failure. It then tried to raise troops, to reopen negotiations with the Army, to call out the London trained bands, to forbid the Army\'s further advance, to gain certain troops, which were not of the New Model, from the north; all was in vain. Irresistible as fate, the Army marched on. At St. Albans it halted and issued a manifesto demanding the expulsion of eleven of its enemies from the Commons, and receiving no encouragement advanced to Uxbridge. There again it halted and spent three weeks in the hopeless effort to arrange a peaceful[233] settlement with the King; and finally it marched straight into London and occupied the capital.

Still the Commons persevered in opposition to the Army; and at last Cromwell, without the orders and in spite of the unwillingness of Fairfax, gave the Presbyterian majority a strong hint to convert itself into a minority. His arguments consisted of one regiment of horse, stationed in Hyde Park, and a small party of foot at the door of the House; and they were sufficient and conclusive. The House thus purged, Cromwell turned to the task which was to occupy the remainder of his life and drive him worn-out to his grave, a final settlement of the original quarrel. Wisely enough he thought that this could be effected only by agreement with the King; and it was to negotiation with Charles Stuart for this object that he now devoted the whole of his energy. But negotiation with a man who was constitutionally incapable of straightforward and honourable dealing could have but one end. The lower ranks of the Army, not more far-seeing but less sanguine than their leader, again interposed. A section of extremists, known at that time by the name of Levellers, began, as is usual at such times, to raise its head, and condemning all further traffic with the King boldly put forward a revolutionary scheme of its own.

Herein, however, the Levellers mistook their man. However Cromwell might be distracted by the difficult questions of a settlement, he was perfectly clear on one point, that the discipline of the Army must be maintained. Symptoms all too significant appeared that that discipline was impaired, and he lost no time in restoring it. One regiment refusing to obey his orders, Cromwell promptly drew his sword and rode single-handed straight into the middle of the malcontents. His resolution speedily convinced the men that he would not be trifled with; the mutineers yielded, and a single execution sufficed to re-establish order.
1648,
January.

Then as usual the portentous folly of the King united all parties not only in the Army but in England[234] against himself. He might have made honourable terms with Cromwell; he preferred to throw himself into the arms of the Scots. Both Houses of Parliament thereupon broke with their North British allies, and the dispute assumed the new phase of a quarrel between English and Scots. English refugees inflamed national feeling at Edinburgh, and on the 11th of April the Scottish Parliament pronounced the treaty between the two nations to be broken. By the first week in May the army which was to invade England began slowly to assemble, and on the 8th of July it crossed the border, ten thousand five hundred strong, and occupied Carlisle.
July.

Meanwhile the energies of the English had been distracted by Royalist risings in Kent and in Wales which kept Fairfax and Cromwell both busily employed; and it was not till the 11th of July that Cromwell was able to leave Pembroke and march to the north. Even then his force, after a trying campaign in very inclement weather, was in no very good state. He was entirely destitute of artillery, and his men were most of them both shoeless and stockingless. In one principal respect, however, the force was strong, for it was perfect in spirit and in discipline. I shall not dwell on the details of Cromwell\'s dash from Wales into Yorkshire. The Scots, embarrassed by a multitude of commanders, suffered him to attack their far more numerous army in detail, when it was divided on opposite banks of the Ribble; and after one sharp engagement at Preston the campaign resolved itself into a mere pursuit of the beaten Scots. How hotly Cromwell pressed the chase, and with what hardships to his own little army, may be read in his own despatches. Unfavourable weather, torrents of rain, and the miserable state of the roads brought men and horses to the last stage of exhaustion. "The Scots," wrote Cromwell, "are so tired and in such confusion that if my horse could but trot after them we could take them all, but we are so weary we can scarce [235]be able to do more than walk after them ... my horse are miserably beaten out, and we have ten thousand prisoners." The memory of this swift raid into Yorkshire, and of the unrelenting chase that followed it should be treasured by the British cavalry that fought through the Pindarri war and the Central Indian campaign of 1857-58.

With the close of the pursuit after Preston, the second Civil War came to an end. The operations of Fairfax in the south had shown him at his very best, swift, active, and resolute, and had been brilliantly successful. Those of Cromwell in the north, though they were directed against Royalist Scotland only, not yet the sterner Scotland of the Covenant, had been crushing. England was now completely under the sway of the Parliament; but it became a question whether Parliament was its own master. A movement arose in the Army for the punishment of the men who had brought all this bloodshed upon the country, and in particular of the chief delinquent, Charles Stuart, who was guiltiest of all. By a final overture for a settlement the Army gave the King a last chance, and on its failure appealed to Parliament to bring him to justice.
1649.

Ireton seems to have been the moving spirit in the actions that followed, though there can be no doubt that Cromwell was in full sympathy with them. Oliver was intensely English in spirit, and had been greatly exasperated by the English Royalists who had called the Scots over the border. He was vehement for justice upon them, and upon the King as the chief of them. Parliament, on the other hand, was engaged in nominal negotiations with Charles; and it was therefore not to be expected that it would comply with the Army\'s request that he should be brought to trial. But the Army was not to be stopped. The King\'s person was seized; the Parliament was purged of recalcitrant members; and from these actions to the High Court of Justice the march was short. One leading soldier, Fairfax, did indeed recoil from the final step, but the majority of the officers pressed on; and on the 30th of[236] January 1649, the King was brought out into the ring of red coats to meet his death. He had done his worst against the British Isles. He had invited foreign armies against England, and when he failed had roused Welsh, Scots, and Irish to a hopeless effort to subdue her. But he succeeded only in establishing her strength; and the fall of his head was but the first instalment of the great work done by Cromwell and the Army towards the unity of the islands under the supremacy of England.

We have a pleasant glimpse of Oliver in his lighter moods before he next unsheathed his sword. On the evening of the 23rd of February, as he and Ireton were returning from dinner with Bulstrode Whitelocke, their coach was stopped by the soldiers who were in charge of the streets. They explained who they were, but the captain of the guard would not believe them and threatened to put them into the guard-room. Ireton began to lose his temper, but Cromwell laughed, and pulling out twenty shillings gave them to the men as a reward for doing their duty. Less than three weeks later he was summoned to take command of the army that was collecting for the reconquest of Ireland; for that unlucky island had been chosen by the Royalists as the base of operations for the invasion of England. Rupert, now turned admiral, had already sailed to Kinsale to enlist Irish sailors, and the faithful Ormonde had invited Charles the Second to place himself at the head of the loyal party in Ireland. Cromwell was not unwilling to undertake the duty. He had no idea of yielding England either to Scots or Irish, least of all to the Irish, whose land was regarded rather as a colony than as an integral part of the realm, and was also a stronghold of papistry. Still he declined to accept the command until he had assured himself that all the wants of his troops should be satisfied; he loved his men and would not suffer them to be enticed by the magic of his name to thankless or unprofitable service.

Four regiments of foot and one of horse were then[237] chosen by lot, and the men were informed that they need not go to Ireland unless they wished, but that if they refused they would be discharged from the Army. Several hundred men thereupon at once threw down their arms and were dismissed; but by some blunder, which was none of Cromwell\'s, not a word was said about the payment of the arrears that were due to them. The idea spread through the ranks that they must either go to Ireland or forfeit those arrears; discontent was naturally aroused and presently burst out into formidable mutiny. Fairfax and Cromwell, however, could depend on their own regiments, and faced the danger with extraordinary swiftness and energy. The mutineers were suppressed with a strong hand. One ringleader was executed in St. Paul\'s Churchyard, a cornet and a corporal were shot before the eyes of their comrades against the walls of Burford Church, and discipline was again restored. Shortly after, Parliament passed an Ordinance to relieve the financial difficulties of the soldiers, and the preparations for the Irish campaign were resumed. It is curious to note the extreme slowness with which the civilians learned that soldiers were after all men of flesh and blood, not puppets to be hugged or broken according to the caprice of the hour.

The details of the preparations for the war in Ireland may still be read in the State Papers of the time. There are still to be seen the orders for fifteen thousand cassocks, "Venice-red colour, shrunk in water," the like number of pairs of breeches "of grey or other good colour," ten thousand shirts, ten thousand hats and bands,[176] one thousand iron griddles, fifteen hundred kettles, giving a curious picture of the equipment of the first English regular army for what was then esteemed to be foreign service. But I shall not follow the red coats through the terrible Irish campaign of 1649. It was not, like the later war with the Scots, an honourable[238] contest for supremacy: it was rather the stern suppression of a rebellion, wherein the spirit of the masters was inflamed by the insolence of long superiority, by the bitterness of religious hatred, and by the recollection of past outrages which, even if truly reported, would have kindled men to vengeance, and when exaggerated by rage and fear fairly blinded them to mercy. If any Englishman doubted whether the Irish could fight with desperate gallantry he was undeceived at the storm of Drogheda and at Clonmel: but they could not stand, untrained and unorganised as they were, against the veterans of the New Model. Much has been said about Cromwell\'s cruelty, and that he was ruthlessly severe there can be no question; but when we speak of cruelty we should take at any rate some account of the standard of humanity in the warfare of the seventeenth century. The Irish War was a war of races, a war of creeds, and a war of vengeance. That there should therefore have been such slaughter as at Drogheda and at Wexford is nothing surprising,[177] however deplorable. What is really remarkable in such a war is that Cromwell, from the moment of landing, should have paid his way, v............