Meanwhile the notion which Hampden had thought impracticable was rapidly becoming a fact. Cromwell’s one troop of eighty horse had become the nucleus of a regiment. By March, 1643, he had five troops, and by September, ten. When the New Model army was constituted, his regiment had become a double regiment of fourteen full troops, numbering about eleven hundred troopers. Above all they were men of the same spirit as their colonel. His original troop had been carefully chosen. “He had a special care,” writes Baxter, “to get religious men into his troop; these men were of greater understanding than common soldiers ... and making not money but that which they took for public felicity to be their end, they were the more engaged to be valiant.” The new additions were of the same quality. “Pray raise honest, godly men and I will have them of my regiment,” Cromwell promised the town of Norwich. “My troops increase,” he told a friend a few weeks later; “I have a lovely company; you would respect them did you know them; they are no Anabaptists, they are honest, sober Christians.”
The officers were selected on the same principle. “If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them; and they will be careful to mount such,” wrote Cromwell to the Committee of Suffolk. When he could get gentlemen he preferred them, but godliness and zeal for the cause were the essentials.
“I had rather have,” said he, “a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call ‘a gentleman,’ and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.... It may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments—but why do they not appear? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none.”
What struck observers first was the rigid discipline which Cromwell enforced not only in his own regiment but in all men under his command. No plundering was permitted, reported a newspaper; “no man swears but he pays his twelvepence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks or worse. How happy were it if all the forces were thus disciplined!” The next notable fact was that they were better armed than other regiments, as well as better disciplined. Besides the sword, each trooper had a pair of pistols, but not carbines or other firearms. For defensive arms, they had simply a light helmet or “pot,” and a “back and breast” of iron. Thus while adequately protected they were lighter and more active than fully equipped cuirassiers, and while adequately armed they had no temptation to adopt the tactics of mounted infantry or dragoons. Moreover, from the beginning, Cromwell’s men were taught to charge home, and to rely on the impact of their charge and the sharpness of their swords. They were well mounted and many of them owned the horses they rode, being, as Whitelocke says, “freeholders or freeholders’ sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel.” Others were provided from the stables of Royalists, and one of Cromwell’s letters is a defence of an officer who had seized the horses of “Malignants” to mount his troop. A great lover of horses and arms himself, Colonel Cromwell made his men keep both in good condition. “Cromwell,” says a royalist writer, “used them daily to look after, feed, and dress their horses, and, when it was needful, to lie together on the ground; and besides taught them to clean and keep their arms bright and to have them ready for service.” Men of such a spirit, armed, mounted, drilled, and disciplined with care, soon proved their superiority both to the King’s troops and to those of Essex and Waller.
“That difference,” says Clarendon, “was observed shortly from the beginning of the war: that though the King’s troops prevailed in the charge, and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day, whereas Cromwell’s troops if they prevailed, or though they were beaten and routed, presently rallied again, and stood in good order till they received new orders.”
In May, 1643, Essex ordered the forces of the eastern counties and the east midlands to unite in order to relieve Lincolnshire, and if possible to penetrate to Yorkshire and assist the Fairfaxes. Cromwell was eager to carry out his orders, but first one then another local commander declined to leave his particular locality unprotected. “Better it were that Leicester were not,” said Cromwell, “than that there should not be found an immediate taking of the field by our forces to accomplish the common ends.” He himself set out for Lincolnshire, and at Grantham on May 13th defeated a royalist force twice the size of his own. The Royalists were beaten mainly through their inferior tactics. Their commander had twenty-one troops and some dragoons to Cromwell’s twelve, but he never attempted to charge. The two bodies of horse stood about musket-shot from each other, and their dragoons exchanged shots for about half an hour.
“Then,” says Cromwell’s despatch, “they not advancing toward us we agreed to charge them ... we came on with our troops at a pretty round trot, they standing firm to receive us: and our men charging fiercely upon them, by God’s providence they were immediately routed and ran all away, and we had the execution of them two or three miles.”
Ten days later, Cromwell reached Nottingham and joined the forces of Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, but with all his eagerness he could get no farther. The three commanders quarrelled, and one of them, Captain John Hotham, was secretly in correspondence with the Royalists. To add to Cromwell’s difficulties, some of his soldiers were unpaid and mutinous, though he wrote urgently for money. It was a trouble continually recurring in his letters throughout this campaign, because parts of the Association were always behindhand in paying the men they raised.
“Lay not too much,” he appealed to one defaulter, “upon the back of a poor gentleman, who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and bleed the last drop to serve the cause and you. I ask not your money for myself; if that were my end and hope—viz: the pay of my place—I would not open my mouth at this time. I desire to deny myself, but others will not be satisfied.”