liers, and freed the eastern counties from all danger from
Newcastle's partizans. At Marston Moor they faced and routed Rupert's
chivalry. At Newbury it was only Manchester's reluctance that hindered
them from completing the ruin of Charles.

[Sidenote: Self-denying Ordinance.]

Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the creation of the
Ironsides; his military genius had displayed itself at Marston Moor.
Newbury raised him into a political leader. "Without a more speedy,
vigorous, and effective prosecution of the war," he said to the Commons
after his quarrel with Manchester, "casting off all lingering
proceedings, like those of soldiers of fortune beyond sea to spin out a
war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a
Parliament." But under the leaders who at present conducted it a
vigorous conduct of the war was hopeless. They were, in Cromwell's plain
words, "afraid to conquer." They desired not to crush Charles, but to
force him back, with as much of his old strength remaining as might be,
to the position of a constitutional king. The old loyalty, too, clogged
their enterprise; they shrank from the taint of treason. "If the king be
beaten," Manchester urged at Newbury, "he will still be king; if he beat
us he will hang us all for traitors." To a mood like this Cromwell's
reply seemed horrible: "If I met the king in battle I would fire my
pistol at the king as at another." The army, too, as he long ago urged
at Edgehill, was not an army to conquer with. Now, as then, he urged
that till the whole force was new modelled, and placed under a stricter
discipline, "they must not expect any notable success in anything they
went about." But the first step in such a reorganization must be a
change of officers. The army was led and officered by members of the two
Houses, and the Self-denying Ordinance, which was introduced by Cromwell
and Vane, declared the tenure of military or civil offices incompatible
with a seat in either.

[Sidenote: The New Model.]

The long and bitter resistance which this measure met in either House
was justified at a later time by the political results that followed the
rupture of the tie which had hitherto bound the Army to the Parliament.
But the drift of public opinion was too strong to be withstood. The
country was weary of the mismanagement of the war, and demanded that
military necessities should be no longer set aside on political grounds.
The Ordinance pas