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Cromwell commissioned himself Captain of Horse. It was a farmers’ uprising, for freedom is ever a sort of farm-product. Adam Smith says, “All wealth comes from the soil.” What he meant to say was “health,” not “wealth.” Men who fight well, fight for farms–their homes, not flats or hotels. Indians do not fight for reservations. The sturdy come-outer is a man near the soil. Successful revolutions are always fought by farmers, and the government which they create is destroyed by city mobs.

Cromwell knew this and said to Cousin John Hampden: “Old, decayed serving-men and tapsters can never encounter gentlemen. To match men of honor you must have God-fearing, sober, serious men who fight for conscience, freedom, and their wives, children, aged parents, and their farms. Give me a few honest men and I will not demand numbers– save for enemies.” And he gathered around him a thousand picked Puritans, men with moles, farmers and herdsmen, who were used to the open. This regiment, which was called “Ironsides,” was never beaten, and in time came to be regarded as invincible. The men who composed it compared closely with the valiant and religious Boers, who were overpowered only by starvation and a force of six to one. The Ironsides were like Caesar’s Tenth Legion, only different. They went into battle singing the Psalms of David, and never stopped so long as an enemy was in sight, except for prayer.

John Forster, who wrote a life of Cromwell in seven volumes, says, “If Oliver Cromwell had never done anything else but muster, teach and discipline this one regiment, his name would have left a sufficient warrant of his greatness.”

The Winter of Sixteen Hundred Forty-two and Sixteen Hundred Forty- three was devoted to preparations for the coming struggle, which Cromwell knew would be renewed in the Spring. All his private fortune went into the venture. He covered the country for a hundred miles square, and broke up every Royalist rendezvous. The Spring did not bring disappointment, for the Royalist army came forward, and were successful until they reached Cromwell’s country. Here the Parliamentarians met them as one to three, and routed them.

“They were as stubble before our swords,” wrote Cromwell to his wife. Old Noll not only led the fighting, but the singing, and insisted on being in every charge where the Ironsides took part. He had not been trained in the art of war, but from the very first he showed consummate genius as a general. He aimed to strike the advancing army in the center, go straight through the lines, and then circle to either the right or the left, milling the mass into a mob, destroying it utterly. It was all the work of men born on horseback, who, if a horse went down, clambered free and jumped up behind the nearest trooper, or, clinging to the tail of a running horse, swung sword right and left and all the time sang, “Unto Thee, O Lord, and not unto us!” This two-men-to-a-horse performance was an exercise in which our Oliver personally trained his Ironsides. He showed them how to sing, pray, fight and ride horseback double. At Marston Moor, Fairfax led the right wing of the Parliamentary army. Prince Rupert at the head of twenty thousand men charged Fairfax and defeated him. Cromwell played a waiting game and allowed the army of Rupert to tire itself, when he met it with his Ironsides and sent it down the pages of history in confusion and derision. At this battle the eldest son of Cromwell was killed, and the way he breaks the news to a fellow-soldier, a young man, as if he were consoling him, reveals the soul of this sturdy man:

To my loving Brother, Colonel Valentine Walton. These:

Before York 5th July, 1644

Dear Sir: It’s our duty to sympathize in all mercies, and to praise the Lord together in chastisement or trials, that so we may sorrow together.