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 The King very nearly got into London, after a fierce drawn battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire, in the autumn of 1642, but the Londoners turned out in such force for the defence of the city, and looked so grim, that Charles dared not fight his way in. He fell back on Oxford, and fixed his head-quarters there; it was an excellent centre; he meant to move one army up from Yorkshire, another from Cornwall, and a third from Oxford, and so to crush Parliament between three fires. All 1643 he strove for this, and his generals won victories both in the north and west. But then John Pym, the statesman who took the lead in Parliament, called in the aid of the Scots. The Scots agreed to come, but demanded that their ‘Covenant’, to enforce the Presbyterian Church on all three kingdoms, should be the price of their coming. In 1644 they came and helped to rout the King’s best army at Marston Moor, near York.

The real victor in that battle was, however, Oliver Cromwell, a Huntingdonshire squire, forty-three years of age, who had never seen a shot fired until he began to raise the sturdy Puritan farmers of the Eastern Counties for the Parliament. He trained them and led