Rupert after the action gave Cromwell the name of Ironside; he had never encountered so tough an adversary before. Marston Moor may indeed be termed the first great day of the English cavalry. We find, curiously enough, examples of three different schools in the field, the old school of the lance under Thomas Fairfax, the Swedish of mixed horse and musketeers under Goring, and the new English of Rupert and Cromwell; but the greatest of these is Cromwell's. He alone had his men under perfect control, and had trained them not only to charge, but what is far more difficult, to rally.
Little more than a week later came the first sign of an entirely new departure in the Parliament's conduct of the war. In spite of Marston Moor the general position of its affairs was anything but favourable. The inefficiency of local committees and the narrow self-seeking of local forces, combined with the jealousy of rival commanders and the absence of a commander-in-chief, threatened to bring swift and sudden dissolution to the cause. Time had aggravated rather than diminished the evil, and unless it were remedied forthwith, it would be useless to continue the war. Sir William Waller, an able commander, who had frequently suffered defeat less from his own incapacity than from the impossibility of keeping a force together, gave the authorities plainly to understand that unless they formed a distinct permanent army of their own, properly organised, properly disciplined, and regularly paid they could not hope for success.
Mutiny, desertion, and indiscipline had dogged every step of the local levies, as the Parliament very well knew; but experience still more bitter was needed before it could be induced to take Waller's advice. For the present it voted the formation of an army of ten thousand foot and three thousand horse and ordered it to be ready to march in eight days. Ignorance and infatuation could hardly go further than this. Shortly after came a great disaster in the west, nothing less than the capitulation of Essex's whole army. Then came the second battle of Newbury, which left the King in a decidedly improved position. Finally at the close of the campaign the Parliamentary forces sank into a condition which was nothing short of deplorable, the dissensions among the commanders rose to a dangerous height, and as a crowning symptom of the general collapse the Eastern Association, the strongest of all the local bodies, declared that its burden was heavier than it could bear and threw itself upon the Parliament. In the face of such a crisis the Houses could hesitate no longer, and on the 23rd of November they made over the whole state of the forces to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with directions to consider a frame or model of the whole militia.
Thus the work that should have been done years before by Elizabeth was at length taken in hand; and the broken-down machinery of the Plantagenets was at last to be superseded. There was of course jealousy as to the hands in which so powerful an engine should be placed, and the difficulty was overcome only by the Self-denying Ordinance, which debarred members of both Houses of Parliament from command, and laid the ablest soldier in England aside as impartially as inefficient peers like Manchester and Essex. But such an evil as this could be easily remedied, for something more than an ordinance is required at such times to exclude the ablest man from the highest post. To bring the New Model into being was the first and greatest task; and this was done by the Ordinance of the 15th of February 1645. The time was come, and England had at last a regular, and as was soon to be seen, a standing army.