complete a success over Rupert's troopers. "God made them
as stubble to our swords," wrote the general at the close of the day;
but in the heat of victory he called back his men from the chase to
back Manchester in his attack on the Royalist foot, and to rout their
other wing of horse as it returned breathless from pursuing the Scots.
Nowhere had the fighting been so fierce. A young Puritan who lay dying
on the field told Cromwell as he bent over him that one thing lay on his
spirit. "I asked him what it was," Cromwell wrote afterwards. "He told
me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner
of His enemies."

[Sidenote: Newbury.]

At nightfall all was over; and the Royalist cause in the North had
perished at a blow. Newcastle fled over sea: York surrendered, and
Rupert, with hardly a man at his back, rode southward to Oxford. The
blow was the more terrible that it fell on Charles at a moment when his
danger in the South was being changed into triumph by a series of
brilliant and unexpected successes. After a month's siege the king had
escaped from Oxford; had waited till Essex, vexed at having missed his
prey, had marched to attack what he looked on as the main Royalist
force, that under Maurice in the West; and then, turning fiercely on
Waller at Cropredy Bridge, had driven him back broken to London, two
days before the battle of Marston Moor. Charles followed up his success
by hurrying in the track of Essex, whom he hoped to crush between his
own force and that under Maurice; and when, by a fatal error, Essex
plunged into Cornwall, where the country was hostile, the king hemmed
him in among the hills, and drew his lines tightly round his army. On
the second of September the whole body of the foot were forced to
surrender at his mercy, while the horse cut their way through the
besiegers, and Essex himself fled by sea to London. Nor was this the
only reverse of fortune which brought hope to the royal cause. The day
on which the army of Essex surrendered to the king was marked by a
Royalist triumph in Scotland which promised to undo what Marston Moor
had done. The Irish Catholics fulfilled their covenant with Charles by
the landing of Irish soldiers in Argyle; and as had long since been
arranged, Montrose, throwing himself into the Highlands, called the
clans to arms. Flinging his new force on that of the Covenanters at
Tippermuir, he gained a victory which enabled him to occupy Perth, to
sack A