of a different temper from the
soldiers of any other army that the world has seen. Their ranks were
filled for the most part with young farmers and tradesmen of the lower
sort, maintaining themselves, for their pay was twelve months in arrear,
mainly at their own cost. They had been specially picked as "honest," or
religious men, and, whatever enthusiasm or fanaticism they may have
shown, their very enemies acknowledged the order and piety of their
camp. They looked on themselves not as swordsmen, to be caught up and
flung away at the will of a paymaster, but as men who had left farm and
merchandise at a direct call from God. A great work had been given them
to do, and the call bound them till it was done. Kingcraft, as Charles
was hoping, might yet restore tyranny to the throne. A more immediate
danger threatened that liberty of conscience which was to them "the
ground of the quarrel, and for which so many of their friends' lives had
been lost, and so much of their own blood had been spilt." They would
wait before disbanding till these liberties were secured, and if need
came they would again act to secure them. But their resolve sprang from
no pride in the brute force of the sword they wielded. On the contrary,
as they pleaded passionately at the bar of the Commons, "on becoming
soldiers we have not ceased to be citizens." Their aims and proposals
throughout were purely those of citizens, and of citizens who were ready
the moment their aim was won to return peacefully to their homes.
Thought and discussion had turned the army into a vast Parliament, a
Parliament which regarded itself as a representative of "godly" men in
as high a degree as the Parliament at Westminster, and which must have
become every day more conscious of its superiority in political capacity
to its rival. Ireton, the moving spirit of the New Model, had no equal
as a statesman in St. Stephen's: nor is it possible to compare the
large and far-sighted proposals of the Army with the blind and narrow
policy of the two Houses. Whatever we may think of the means by which
the New Model sought its aims, we must in justice remember that, so far
as those aims went, the New Model was in the right. For the last two
hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out in a
slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform
which the army propounded at the close of the Civil War.

[Sidenote: Its seizure of the king.]

It was not t