CHAPTER VIII

PRESBYTERIANS AND INDEPENDENTS 1642–1647

The settlement of the kingdom after the war ended was a task of far greater difficulty than the defeat of the King’s armies. It could not be solved by putting Charles upon his throne again as if nothing had happened. Measures had to be devised for securing permanent guarantees against misgovernment in the future, and for rendering a new war impossible. Moreover, these ends must be attained by means of an agreement between the King and the Parliament, because the working of the constitution depended on the co-operation of the two powers, and on the reconciliation of the two parties which had followed their flags. Nor was it possible to effect a lasting settlement without taking into account the new ideas and the new forces which had come into existence during the four years’ struggle.

Since the beginning of the Civil War an ecclesiastical revolution had taken place in England. As soon as hostilities commenced the Root and Branch party gained the ascendancy in Parliament, and in the first negotiations with the King, the total abolition of Episcopacy was one of the demands made. In July, 1643, Parliament summoned an assembly of divines to meet at Westminster, and undertake the reformation of the Church. Then followed the acceptance by Parliament of the Solemn League and Covenant, the implied promise to model the Church of England upon that of Scotland, and the inclusion of representatives of the Scottish clergy in the Assembly of Divines.

Step by step the English Church was transformed. In January, 1645, the two Houses passed a series of resolutions for the reorganisation of the Church upon a Presbyterian basis, followed by ordinances which established one after another the component parts of the system. By the close of 1646, the use of the Prayer-book had been prohibited, and a “Directory,” drawn up by the Assembly, had been enjoined in its stead, while new Articles of Belief, a new Confession of Faith, and a new Catechism were in preparation. Bishops and all the ecclesiastical hierarchy dependent on them had been abolished, and their lands vested in trustees for the payment of the debts of the State (October, 1646). The work was still incomplete, but under all outward conformity there would be an essential difference between the Presbyterian Churches of England and Scotland. In Scotland the Church was dependent upon no one; in England it would be dependent upon Parliament. Whatever the Westminster Assembly might decide was established only by the authority of Parliament, which revised its conclusions, criticised its formularies, and limited its functions as it thought fit. Compared to an ideal Presbyterian Church ruling by its inherent right as the one divinely ordained form of Church government, the English Church would be, as a Scottish divine complained, “only a lame Erastian presbytery.” Such as it was, however, its clergy were as high in their claim to authority as English bishops, and as intolerant as Scottish ministers. They proved in a hundred different ways the truth of Milton’s maxim that “new presbyter is but old priest writ large.”

During the years which saw the growth of English Presbyterianism, a rival system of ecclesiastical organisation had also taken root in England. The Independents drew their inspiration not from Scotland, but from the Puritan exiles in Holland and the Puritan colonists in New England. To the idea of a national Church with its local basis and its hierarchy of authorities, they opposed the idea that a true Church was a voluntary association of believers, and that each congregation was of right complete, autonomous, and sovereign. Most of them accepted the theology of Calvin even when they rejected his ecclesiastical organisation; all claimed the right to interpret the Bible for themselves without regard to tradition or authority. Their principle was that set forth in the advice which John Robinson gave to the Pilgrim Fathers—to be ready to receive whatever truth should be made known to them from the written word of God. Hence came their ardent faith in new revelations, with the diversity of doctrines and the multiplicity of sects which were its natural consequence. Hence the horror with which Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike regarded a system which began by a denial of their theory of Church and State, and ended by an attack upon the fundamentals of their creed.

Just as the two divisions of the parliamentary party differed as to the constitution of the Church, so they differed as to the constitution of the State. Each was a political as well as a religious party. The aim of the Presbyterians was to make King and Church responsible to Parliament, and so far the Independents went with them. But while one party proclaimed the sovereignty of Parliament, and justified its claim by historical precedent, the other proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, and based its claim on an appeal to natural rights. Church democracy, as Baxter called Independency, brought in its train State democracy. Applied to politics, the ecclesiastical theories of the Independents developed into the fundamental principles of democratic government. Those who held that a Church was a voluntary association of believers bound together by a mutual covenant, naturally adopted the corollary that a State was an association of freemen based on a mutual contract. If it was the right of the members of a religious body to elect their own ministers, it was evidently equally just that the members of a civil society should elect their own magistrates. More than once in its paper wars with the King, Parliament had put forward the view that Kings were but officers, whose power was a trust from the people, but it shrank from the distinct enunciation or the practical application of the principle its declarations contained. It was therefore in opposition to the Long Parliament that the sovereignty of the people was first asserted in English political life. In 1646, when John Lilburn was imprisoned by the Lords for libelling Manchester he appealed to the House of Commons as “the supreme authority of the nation,” and denied the authority of the Peers because they were not elected by the people. When the House of Commons refused to hear him he appealed “to the universality of the people,” as “the sovereign lord” from whom they derived their power, and by whom they were to be called to account for its use.

As yet, however, Lilburn’s principles found little acceptance in Parliament, and the Lower House had no intention of quarrelling with the Upper on a question of abstract rights. In the Commons, even after the new elections of 1645 and 1646 had recruited the numbers of the House, the Independents were a minority both on political and ecclesiastical questions. On a purely religious issue they could muster fifty or sixty votes, of whom probably less than half were convinced democrats. But the ties of party allegiance were weak, and the ability of the Independent leaders gave them an influence beyond the circle of their followers. On questions such as the conduct of the war, the control of the pretensions of the Westminster Assembly, and the claim of the Scots to dispose of the King, a majority of the House adopted the policy of the Independents. But when the war was over, and the dispute with the Scots settled, the ascendancy passed to the Presbyterian leaders, and remained with them.

On the other hand, the army had been from the beginning a stronghold of Independency, and there its adherents grew more numerous every day. In the summer of 1645, when Richard Baxter became chaplain to a regiment of cavalry, he found it full of hotheaded sectaries. Every sect and every heresy was represented in its ranks. “Independency and Anabaptism were most prevalent; Antinomianism and Arminianism equally distributed.” One day he had to confute the opponents of Infant Baptism, and another to vindicate Church order and Church government. But the most universal belief amongst officers and soldiers, and the error he most often had to controvert, was that the civil magistrate had no authority in matters of religion either to restrain or to compel, and that every man had a right to believe and to preach whatever he pleased.

In the army, too, the political principles of Independency had reached their fullest and freest development. Baxter found officers and soldiers “vehement against the King and against all government but popular.”

“I perceived” he writes, “that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him or to ruin him, and that they thought, that if they might fight against him they might kill or conquer him; and if they might conquer they were never more to trust him further than he was in their power; and they thought it folly to irritate him by wars or contradictions in Parliament, if so be they needs must take him for their King, and trust him with their lives when they had thus displeased him.”

These were the principles upon which they thought any settlement should be based, and they meant to make their views heard. “They plainly showed me,” continues Baxter, “that they thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.”

In peace, even more than in war, the army looked to Cromwell to lead it. Apart from his splendid military gifts, he had all the qualities required to win popularity with soldiers. Cromwell had none of the reserve or reticence of Fairfax. A large-hearted, expansive, vigorous nature found expression in his acts and utterances. “He was of a sanguine complexion,” says Baxter, “naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man is when he hath drunken a cup of wine too much.” Elsewhere he speaks of Cromwell’s “familiar rustic carriage with his soldiers in sporting,” and one of Cromwell’s officers tells us that “Oliver loved an innocent jest.” Nor did it make him less popular that underneath this geniality lay a fiery temper, which sometimes flamed up into vehement utterances or sudden bursts of passion. Partly for this very reason he was generally credited with much more democratic opinions than he really had. People remembered his hard sayings about the Lords during his quarrel with Manchester, and took a practical man’s irritation against half-hearted and incapable leaders for rooted hostility to an institution. His patronage of Lilburn seemed another proof of his extreme views. Cromwell had procured Lilburn’s release from imprisonment in 1640, obtained him a commission in Manchester’s army in 1643, and intervened on his behalf with the House of Commons in 1645. People attributed to sympathy with advanced democracy what was really due to hatred of oppression and injustice. Lilburn’s praises fostered the illusion. Great as Cromwell was in the field, argued Lilburn, he was still more useful in Parliament.

“O for self-denying Cromwell home again ... for he is sound at the heart and not rotten-cored, hates particular and self-interests, and dares freely to speak his mind.” “Myself and all others of my creed,” wrote Lilburn to Cromwell in 1647, “have looked upon you as the most absolute single-hearted great man in England, untainted or unbiassed with ends of your own.”

In religion, however, Cromwell represented the army more completely than in politics. Cromwell was, as Baillie truly termed him, “the great Independent”—a type of Independency itself, representing not any particular species of Independent, but the whole genus which the term included. He called himself by the name of no sect, “joined himself to no party,” and “did not profess of what opinion he was.” “In good discourse” he would sometimes “very fluently pour himself out in the extolling of Free Grace,” but he refused to dispute about doctrinal questions. There are indications in some of Cromwell’s utterances that he was attracted to those who called themselves “Seekers,” because they found satisfaction not in any visible form or definite creed, but in the perpetual quest for truth and perfection. “To be a Seeker,” says Cromwell in a letter written about this time, “is to be of the best sect next after a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end.” But while standing a little apart from every sect, Cromwell seemed to share the aspirations and enthusiasms of each. “Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, Separatists,” he sympathised with all, welcomed all to the ranks of the army, and “tied all together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they all did unite.”

Of this demand for freedom of conscience, Cromwell had ever made himself the spokesman. At the outset of the war, he and his officers had proposed to make their regiment “a gathered Church.” While he was governor of Ely, he and his deputy-governor, Ireton, had filled the island with Independents until people complained that for variety of religions the place was “a mere Amsterdam.” When he became Lieutenant-General of Manchester’s army, Independency had spread from his regiment to the rest of the troopers he commanded.

“If you look on his regiment of horse,” said an opponent, “what a swarm there is of those that call themselves godly men; some profess to have seen visions and had revelations. Look on Colonel Fleetwood’s regiment with his Major Harrison, what a cluster of preaching officers and troopers there is. To say the truth almost our horse be made of that faction.”

Cromwell protected them against Manchester’s Presbyterian chaplains and against the hostility of Presbyterian officers. In March, 1644, when Major-General Crawford cashiered the lieutenant-colonel of his regiment on the ground that he was an Anabaptist, Cromwell at once remonstrated. If any military offence were chargeable upon the lieutenant-colonel, he must be tried by court-martial; if none, Crawford must restore him to his command. “Admit he be an Anabaptist, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Sir, the State in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing to serve it faithfully, that suffices.” Six months later, after a second quarrel with Crawford on the same subject, Cromwell procured from Parliament what was known as “the Accommodation Order.” A committee was to be appointed

“to take into consideration the differences in opinion of the members of the Assembly of Divines in point of Church government, and to endeavour a union if it be possible; and in case that cannot be done, to endeavour the finding out some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word, and as may stand with the public peace” (September 13, 1644).

After every victory of the “New Model,” Cromwell reminded Parliament of the necessity of legally establishing the toleration which this vote promised. “Honest men served you faithfully in this action,” he wrote from the field of Naseby; “they are trusty; I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for.” So little did the Commons share his feeling, that they mutilated his letter by omitting in the published copies his plea for toleration, but he repeated it in still plainer language after the storming of Bristol.

“Presbyterians and Independents, all here have the same spirit of faith and prayer ... they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity which is most glorious because inward and spiritual.... For being united in forms, commonly called Uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. And from brethren in things of the mind we look for no compulsion, but that of light and reason.”

Parliament had answered by mutilating this letter as it had mutilated the other. What prospect was there, now that the swords of the Independents were no longer needed, that their political and religious demands would be listened to, or that no compulsion save that of light and reason would be exercised against their consciences? As to religion, if Parliament allowed the Presbyterian clergy to work their will, Independents could expect nothing but persecution. “To let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences,” wrote one Presbyterian divine, “was to cast out one devil that seven worse might enter.” Toleration, wrote another, was “the Devil’s Masterpiece.” “If the devil had his choice whether the hierarchy, ceremonies, and liturgy should be established in the kingdom, or a toleration granted, he would choose a toleration.” “We detest and abhor the much endeavoured toleration,” declared a meeting of the London ministers. The corporation of London backed their declaration by a petition for the suppression of all heresies. In Parliament itself it was evident that the anti-tolerationists had gained the upper hand. As late as April, 1646, the Commons had promised a due regard for tender consciences, providing only that they differed not in any fundamentals of religion. In September, however, the House passed the second reading of a bill which punished with death those who denied doctrines relating to the Trinity and the Incarnation, and with imprisonment for life those who opposed Infant Baptism and other less important doctrines. In December, when a bill was introduced prohibiting laymen from preaching in churches or elsewhere, Cromwell could only muster fifty-seven members in favour of allowing them at least to expound the Scriptures. Nor was there in the proposals of Parliament for the settlement of the kingdom any sign that the constitutional settlement would include in it toleration for Independency.

As little hope was there from the King. Ever since May, 1646, Charles had been a prisoner in the camp of the Scots, first at Newark, and then at Newcastle. The chief demands contained in the propositions sent to him at Newcastle were, that the King should enforce the taking of the Covenant through all the three kingdoms, and accept the Presbyterian Church which Parliament had set up. At the same time he was to give Parliament the control of the naval and military forces of the nation for the next twenty years, and when that period ended the two Houses were to decide as to their future disposal. Backed by the Church, and with the sword as well as the purse in their hands, the power of Parliament would be securely established.

As long as he could, Charles evaded a direct answer. He believed that bishops and apostolical succession were necessary to a true Church. If he gave way to the abolition of Episcopacy “there would be no Church,” and to yield against the dictates of his conscience would be “a sin of the highest nature.” Political motives reinforced conscientious objections. To accept or impose the Covenant would be a “perpetual authorising rebellion.” As to establishing Presbyterianism by law,

“under pretence of a thorough reformation in England they intend to take away all the ecclesiastical power of government from the Crown, and place it in the two Houses of Parliament. Moreover they will introduce the doctrine which teaches rebellion to be lawful and that the supreme power is in the people, to whom kings, as they say, ought to give account, and to be corrected when they do amiss.... There was not a wiser man since Solomon than he who said ‘no bishop, no king.’”

The utmost that Charles, after months of negotiation, would concede was to grant the establishment of Presbyterianism for three years, and the control of the army and navy for ten. At the end of the ten years he stipulated that the control of army and navy should return to the Crown, and at the end of the three he was firmly resolved to re-establish Episcopacy.

After eight months of futile negotiating, the Scots, disgusted by the King’s obstinate refusal to accept Presbyterianism, resolved to abandon the King’s cause and hand him over to his English subjects. They settled their own differences with the English Parliament about their arrears of pay, received two hundred thousand pounds on account, and evacuated Newcastle on January 30, 1647, leaving Charles in charge of the parliamentary commissioners. In February he was brought to Holmby House in Northamptonshire in custody of the commissioners and of a guard of cavalry.

But the moment when the King seemed to have fallen lowest marked the success of his policy. His refusal to accept the terms offered him at Newcastle rested mainly on the conviction that he was indispensable. “Men,” he said in one of his letters, “will begin to perceive that without my establishing there can be no peace.” Even his adversaries must see it: “without pretending to prophesy I will foretell their ruin unless they agree with me.” Sooner or later, he felt certain some party amongst his opponents must, for their own sake, accept his terms and come to an understanding with him. What he had anticipated was now coming to pass. Before he arrived at Holmby, a number of the Presbyterian Peers had agreed to accept the King’s concessions as the basis of an agreement, upon the completion of which Charles was to be restored to the exercise of his power. It was the beginning of that alliance between the Royalists and the Presbyterians which produced the Second Civil War, and finally the restoration of Charles II. On May 12th, a new message from the King embodying these concessions reached Westminster, and it was not doubtful that a majority in the two Houses would accept them as satisfactory.

An agreement on such a basis was a truce, not a peace. It left unsettled the questions which had caused the war, and threw away all the fruits of the victory. Parliament and the King had fought for sovereignty, but now, at the price of temporary concessions, sovereignty would be left in the King’s hands. As long as the King’s right to veto bills was left intact he could prevent any of his temporary concessions from becoming permanent, and he meant to do so. The Independents felt all the danger of such a one-sided compromise, but they were now in a hopeless minority in both Houses. When the army was disbanded, they would be entirely without influence. Its disbandment would have taken place in October, 1646, but for the strained relations of Parliament with the Scots, and a scheme for disbandment was voted on, February, 1647. Out of the forty thousand men in arms in England, Parliament proposed to form a new army consisting of six thousand four hundred horse, and about ten thousand foot for garrison service. It seized the opportunity to get rid of all the Independent officers of the “New Model.” Fairfax was to be retained as General, but all the other general officers were to be dismissed. No member of Parliament was to hold a commission in the new army, and no officer was to be employed who did not conform to the Presbyterian Church. Of the soldiers of the “New Model,” four thousand horse were to be retained in service in England; the rest of the horse and the infantry were to be employed for the reconquest of Ireland.

In Ireland, ever since the cessation of 1643, Ormond, the King’s Lord-Lieutenant, had maintained himself in Dublin, struggling ever to turn the cessation into a peace, and to send help to the King in England. But the refusal of the Catholic clergy to accept less than the establishment of Catholicism in Ireland frustrated his negotiations, and, in 1646, Dublin was again besieged. With few troops and with no money to pay them, Ormond found himself obliged to submit to either Irish or English rebels. He chose the latter as the only way to preserve Ireland to the English nation, and in February, 1647, offered to deliver up his charge to the Parliament. Nothing could have fallen in more opportunely for the plans of the Presbyterians, and on March 6, 1647, Parliament voted that 12,600 men, drawn from the ranks of the “New Model,” should be promptly despatched to Ireland, and sent commissioners to the headquarters of the army to persuade the soldiers to enlist for Irish service.

If the soldiers had been justly treated there would have been no difficulty in persuading them either to volunteer for Ireland or to disband quietly. But the folly of the Presbyterian leaders created a military revolt which changed the face of English politics. As was natural, the soldiers wanted to be paid for their past service before disbanding or re-enlisting. The pay of the foot was eighteen weeks in arrears; that of the horse, forty-three weeks. They petitioned Fairfax to represent their desires to Parliament, asking particularly to be indemnified against legal proceedings for acts done in the late war, and to be guaranteed their back pay. The House of Commons ordered the petition to be suppressed, and declared those who persisted in petitioning to be enemies of the State and disturbers of the public peace. As to their arrears, it offered only six weeks’ pay, and even that offer was delayed till the end of April. The result was that out of the whole twenty-two thousand men of the “New Model,” only twenty-three hundred volunteered for Ireland, and the discontent of the army swelled to a formidable agitation. In April, the horse regiments elected representatives, called Agitators or Agents, to concert united action, and in May the foot followed their example. At the end of April, the Agitators of eight regiments sent a joint letter to Skippon and Cromwell, urging them to represent the wrongs of the army to Parliament, and to procure redress. Cromwell and Skippon laid the letter before the House, and the House ordered the two, accompanied by Ireton and Fleetwood, to go down to the army, and endeavour to quiet the distempers of the soldiers. It promised the soldiers a considerable part of their arrears on disbanding, and good security for the payment of the remainder. The six weeks’ pay offered was increased to eight.

Up to this point Cromwell had taken no part in the negotiations with the soldiers, much less in the movement amongst them against disbanding. In February, 1647, when the first votes for disbanding were passed, he was dangerously ill, and for some time absented himself both from the House and from the Committee of Both Kingdoms. All men knew his dissatisfaction with the policy which the Presbyterian leaders were following, and some attributed his abstention to that cause. “We are full of faction and worse,” was Cromwell’s comment on the state of affairs in Parliament, in August, 1646. He marked with anxiety the growth of royalist feeling in London and the increasing hostility of the citizens to the army and the Independents.

“We have had a very long petition from the City,” he wrote to Fairfax on December 21, 1646; “how it strikes at the army and what other aims it has you will see by the contents of it; as also what is the prevailing temper at this present, and what is to be expected from men. But this is our comfort, God is in heaven, and He doth what pleaseth Him; His and only His counsel shall stand, whatsoever the designs of men and the fury of the people be.”

In March, 1647, the feeling in the city was still worse.

“There want not in all places,” he told Fairfax, “men who have so much malice against the army as besots them.... Never were the spirits of men more embittered than now.... Upon the Fast-day divers soldiers were raised, both horse and foot, near two hundred in Covent Garden, to prevent us soldiers from cutting the Presbyterians’ throats! These are fine tricks to mock God with.”

He was irritated also by the suspicions with which he himself was regarded and the reception they met with from people who ought to have known better.

“It is a miserable thing,” he told Ludlow, “to serve a Parliament, to which, let a man be never so faithful, if one pragmatical fellow amongst them rise and asperse him, he shall never wipe it off; whereas when one serves a general he may do as much service, and yet be free from all blame and envy.”

Cromwell even thought of leaving England, with as many of his fellow soldiers as he could take with him, to fight for the cause of the German Calvinists under the flag of the Elector Palatine. He had long conferences with the Elector on the subject in March or April, 1647.

But, in spite of Cromwell’s dissatisfaction, there is no sign either in his words or action that he contemplated resisting the policy of Parliament or thought of stirring up a military revolution. There were bitter complaints from some of his greatest admirers that he persistently discouraged the petitions of the soldiers.

“I am informed this day,” wrote Lilburn to Cromwell on March 25th, “by an officer out of the army, that you and your agents are like to dash in pieces the hopes of our outward preservation, their petition to the House, and will not suffer them to petition till they have laid down their arms; because forsooth you have engaged to the House they shall lay down their arms whenever it shall command them.”

Cromwell’s action during the last few months, continued Lilburn, had filled him with grief and amazement. Could it be that he was held back by temporising politicians, “covetous earthworms,” such as Vane and St. John, or bribed into inaction by the estate Parliament had given him? Let him pluck up resolution “like a man that will persevere to be a man for God,” and risk his life to deliver his fellow soldiers from ruin, and his country from vassalage and slavery.

Cromwell turned a deaf ear to these appeals. He feared to encourage the intervention of soldiers in politics, and dreaded still more the anarchy which might follow a breach between Parliament and the army. In May, he went to the headquarters of the army at Saffron Walden with his three colleagues, examined carefully the grievances of the petitioners, communicated the votes of Parliament, and did his best to persuade officers and soldiers to submission.

“Truly, gentlemen,” he said to the officers, “it will be very fit for you to have a very great care in making the best use you can both of the votes, and of the interest that any of you have in your regiments, to work in them a good opinion of that authority that is over both us and them. If that authority falls to nothing, nothing can follow but confusion.”

The commissioners reported that they found the whole army “under a deep sense of some sufferings” and the common soldiers “much unsettled.” On May 21st, Cromwell received the thanks of the Commons, and told them that the soldiers would certainly not go to Ireland, but that he thought they would disband quietly. Under his influence, the House for a moment seemed disposed to adopt a conciliatory policy, and passed ordinances redressing some of the minor grievances of the soldiers. But no steps were taken to give them the promised security for the payment of their arrears, and on May 27th a scheme for the immediate disbandment was voted. It was to begin on June 1st, with Fairfax’s own regiment, and to prevent any concerted action the regiments were to be separately disbanded at widely distant places.

The Presbyterian leaders had made up their minds to resort to force to carry their policy through. In secret they were discussing with the French Ambassador and the commissioners of the Scottish Parliament a plan for bringing the Scottish army into England. The Prince of Wales was to be sent to Scotland to head the projected invasion. As soon as possible, the King was to be brought from Holmby to London, where the City militia was entirely under the control of the Presbyterians. At the same time, in order to cripple the resistance of the army, the train of artillery was to be removed from Oxford to the Tower. Then, backed by the Scots and the City, they would force the soldiers to submit to their terms, and punish the officers who had taken their part. It meant a new civil war.

Simultaneously a general mutiny began. The votes for disbanding the soldiers before redressing their grievances robbed the tardy and trifling concessions of Parliament of all their value. The ulterior schemes of the Presbyterian leaders were known in the army almost as soon as they were formed. At the bidding of the Agitators the army refused to disband. “Be active,” wrote one, “for all lies at stake.” It was no longer simply a question of arrears of pay. “The good of all the kingdom and its preservation is in your hands.” So thought most of the officers, and pledged themselves to stand by their men. So thought Fairfax’s council of war, and at the petition of the soldiers ordered a general rendezvous of the whole army on June 3rd. “I am forced,” apologised Fairfax, “to yield something out of order to keep the army from disorder or worse inconveniences.” Without his orders, a party of horse secured the artillery train at Oxford, and seized the King at Holmby on June 3rd. The same day Cromwell left London, resolved to throw in his lot with the army.