Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: but their religion as Papists, and the bloody massacres they had perpetrated on the Protestants of Ireland; did more to discredit the cause they were serving, than any addition in point of numbers could compensate for. They earned their savage manners with them, and helped, with Prince Rupert and his dragoons, to make the cause of Charles detestable to every county through which they passed. Against such allies, the parliament were fortunate in being able to oppose 21,000 Covenanters; every man of them with a spirit in him, such as Cromwell longed for when he saw the base spirit of the first raw levies of decayed serving-men and tapsters, and felt how poor a match they were for the cavaliers of Charles, with their high notions of honour and chivalrous loyalty. CHAPTER IX. THE VICTORY OF MARSTON MOOR. The campaigns of the year 1643 are memorable in the history of England as a protracted and doubtful strife in which hope and fear alternated in every breast, and the triumph of freedom or of despotism seemed set as it were on the hazard of a die. How much of its final decision can be assigned to the persevering hardihood and daring of Cromwell, it may be diflicult even now to say; but there can be no question that he was the first to break through the prejudices induced by the ancient monarchial forms of government, the perversion of which for every purpose of illegal oppression and injustice had so effectually induced that state of commotion and strife, which he strove by swiftest means to bring to a close. The instructions he gave his men in reference to the King's person are singularly characteristic of his clear-sightedand straightforward mode of pursuing his object. In leading forth his warriors into the field, says Forster, Oliver Cromwell gave them their last ...