Each stepping where his comrade stood
The instant that he fell.”
Help was now at hand. Sweeping across the moor behind the royalist centre, Cromwell and Leslie came with their whole force to the relief of the Scots. With them too marched Crawford and the three brigades of Manchester’s foot. As they advanced, Lucas’s horse suspended their attack, and Goring’s men streamed back from pursuit and pillage to meet this new antagonist.
Cromwell’s cavalry now occupied the very ground where Goring’s men had been posted when the battle began, and met them at “the same place of disadvantage” where Sir Thomas Fairfax had been routed. The struggle was short but decisive, and when the last squadrons of the royalist horse were broken, Cromwell turned to co-operate with Crawford and the Scots in attacking the royalist infantry. Some of Rupert’s veteran regiments made good their retreat to York; Newcastle’s white-coats got into a piece of enclosed ground, and sold their lives dearly; the rest scattered and fled under cover of the protecting darkness. About three thousand Royalists fell in the battle, while sixteen guns, one hundred colours, six thousand muskets, and sixteen hundred prisoners were the trophies of the victors. Rupert left York to its fate, and made his way back to Lancashire with some six thousand men, and the city itself surrendered a fortnight later.
In the despatch which the three Generals addressed to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, they gave no account of the details of the battle, and made no mention of Cromwell’s services. Private letters were more outspoken. One described him as “the chief agent in obtaining the victory.” Some people spoke of him as “the saviour of the three kingdoms,” though Cromwell repudiated the title with some anger. The friends of the Scottish army depreciated his services, attributed what his cavalry achieved to David Leslie, and circulated reports that Cromwell had taken no part in the battle after his first charge.
The utterances of the royalist leader both before and after the battle showed that he appreciated Cromwell’s importance more justly. “Is Cromwell there?” asked Rupert of a prisoner taken just before the battle, and it was Rupert too who, after the battle, gave Cromwell the nickname of “Ironside” or “Ironsides.” The title was derived, according to a contemporary biographer, “from the impenetrable strength of his troops, which could by no means be broken or divided,” and it was extended later from the leader to the soldiers themselves.
Cromwell’s only account of the battle is contained in a few lines written to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton.
“England,” he said, “and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began. It had all the evidences of an absolute victory, obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. The particulars I cannot relate now; but I believe of 20,000 the Prince hath not 4000 left. Give glory, all the glory, to God.”
Cromwell’s letter has been charged with concealing the services of David Leslie and the Scots. But every word of his brief account was true. He did not give the particulars of the fight, because he was writing a letter of condolence, not a despatch. Walton’s son, a captain in Cromwell’s own regiment, had fallen in the battle, and Cromwell wrote to tell the father details of his son’s death. He began with the news of the great victory in order that Walton might feel that his son’s life had not been idly thrown away. Then he turned suddenly to the real subject of the letter. “Sir, God hath taken your eldest son away by a cannon shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.” Next he praised the dead—the “gallant young man,” “exceeding gracious,” “exceedingly beloved in the army of all that knew him,” who had died “full of comfort,” lamenting nothing save that he could no longer serve God against his enemies, and rejoicing in his last moments to “see the rogues run.” In the spring, Cromwell had lost his own son, Captain Oliver, who died not in battle, but of smallpox in his quarters at Newport. “A civil young gentleman, and the joy of his father,” said a newspaper recording it. He referred to this now while seeking to comfort Walton. “You know my own trials this way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant after and live for.” Let the same faith support Walton, and let “this public mercy to the Church of God” help him to forget his “private sorrow.” So closed the letter, revealing in its tenderness and sympathy, its enthusiasm and its devotion to the cause, the depths of Cromwell’s nature, and the secret of his power over his comrades in arms.
After the fall of York, the three parliamentary armies separated. Leven and the Scots turned northwards again to besiege Newcastle, the Fairfaxes remained to capture the royalist strongholds in Yorkshire, and Manchester, taking on his way Sheffield Castle and a few smaller garrisons, returned to Lincoln. All August he remained there idle, declining even to besiege Newark. He was weary of the war, anxious for an accommodation with the King, and shocked at the spread of sectarian and democratic opinions in his army and in the kingdom. Cromwell, as the protector of the sectaries, was at daggers-drawn with Major-General Crawford, who attempted to suppress them; Crawford cashiered an officer on the ground that he was an Anabaptist, and Cromwell and some of his colonels threatened to lay down their commissions unless Crawford was removed. A compromise of some kind was patched up, but Cromwell’s influence over Manchester was at an end.