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 them till they became the ‘Ironsides ’, the finest cavalry in the world. Look well at them, and think of them; for they are the direct forerunners of the cavalry regiments of our present gallant little army. Cromwell was no narrow-minded Puritan, and for forms of Church government he cared not a straw. But he held that God spoke to each individual man's soul and pointed out his path for him. He thought that all forms were just so many fetters on men’s souls, and that all churches, especially the Roman and English, had laid on such fetters. And he had been a strong opponent of the King in civil matters also. Moreover, he saw, as no one else saw, that ‘half-measures’ would never finish the war. ‘If I met the King in the field, I would pistol him’, he said.

In 1645 a new Parliamentary army, better paid and better armed and more in earnest, was raised under Fairfax and Cromwell, and it won, within three months, the great victory of Naseby, which practically brought the Royalist cause to an end. A few gallant Highlanders under Montrose made a diversion for the King in Scotland, but Montrose too was beaten before the year was over. Charles had already called into England all the soldiers whom he had sent to put down the Irish rebels, and he tried to get the help of these same rebels themselves. This, as you can imagine, did not make his cause more popular with his English Protestant subjects. He was in fact a very bad leader of a very good cause. Early in 1646 the King fled to the Scottish army and Oxford surrendered. The Scots, after trying to induce him to take the oath to the Covenant, sold him for £400,000 to the English Parliament as a prisoner and went back home. The Parliament spent the years