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The sword to which the disputants appealed was a cumbrous weapon, but it was wielded in an unencumbered land, a country mainly of marsh and moor and open pastures, with ample freedom to manœuvre. But for manœuvring power a supple machine is needed and a directing brain, and at first on both sides there was small sign of either.

The main difficulty lay in the high command, and this was naturally greater on the parliament side, where the protagonist was a large deliberative body. The two Houses, as we have seen, appointed a committee of safety in July 1642, and, when the Scots army came into the field, this was extended into a Committee of Both Kingdoms. But such committees were strictly subordinate to parliament, and had to take its orders, and the impossible situation was created of a campaign conducted 1642 by a debating society. Only disaster convinced parliament of the folly of this plan. Essex was confused by instructions constantly changed and often contradictory, and it needed the storming of Leicester by Charles and a panic in London to give a commander freedom of action, “without attending commands and directions from remote councils.”^[155] By June 1645 Fairfax was empowered to do what he liked after consulting his council of war, and later Oliver had the amplest liberty. A general’s council of war was no serious handicap to him; it consisted of his staff and the regimental commanders, but he was not obliged to take its advice. “I have observed him at councils of war,” Whitelocke wrote of Fairfax, “that he hath said little, but hath ordered things expressly contrary to the judgment of all his council.”

The royalists suffered from the opposite fault. From the start their command was concentrated, but in feeble hands. The king’s authority as commander-in-chief was absolute. He had his privy council, eleven peers and five commoners, with Falkland as Secretary of State, but it was not an expert body, and it was generally at variance with the generals. The chief military adviser was whoever had Charles’s confidence at the moment, whether it was a soldier like Rupert, or a civilian like Digby, and behind all there was the steady and most potent influence of the queen. Had Charles had any genius for war, or had there been a great soldier who possessed his undivided trust, the dice at the start would have been heavily weighted against the cumbrous parliamentary machine.

Both armies had the traditional hierarchy;—the commander-in-chief; the second in command, the lieutenant-general, who had also the command of the cavalry; the major-general, who was in charge of the foot, and drew up the order of battle; and the lieutenant-general of the ordinance. There was no chief of staff in the modern sense, but in the parliamentary army the secretary to the commander performed some of his THE GENERALS 1642 functions.^[156] This lack of any true staff system at headquarters would have gravely interfered with the carrying out of any large strategical scheme, had one existed, but, at the start at any rate, there was no such plan on either side. Each underrated the other; most people thought, like Richard Baxter,^[157] that the war would be over in a month or two, and that the first battle would decide it; only those who, like Cromwell, demanded a complete and final victory foresaw a long campaign. On the parliament side the general aim was the capture of the king—Essex’s commission was “to rescue his Majesty’s person, and the persons of the Prince and the Duke of York, out of the hands of those desperate persons who were then about him”; on the royalist side it was the recovery of London. That is to say, the first had the vaguer objective, and inevitably during the early months it lost the initiative and fell back upon the defensive.

There were no formed military reputations of the first class to which either side could confidently turn. Parliament was free to choose its leader in the field, and, as commonly happens in a civil war, it selected him largely on political grounds. The son of Elizabeth’s tragically fated favourite, the third Earl of Essex, had little reason to love courts or kings, and had long lived in a retirement solaced by never-ending pipes of tobacco. His gentleness and homeliness made him widely popular, especially in London, but he had only the scantiest military experience, the slenderest military talent, and no power to restrain the turbulent forces behind him—a poor equipment wherewith to launch out upon seas, where, in Clarendon’s words, “he met with nothing but rocks and shelves, and from whence he could never discover any safe port to harbour in.” Sir Thomas Fairfax was a far abler man, competent if uninspired, a soldier born for such a war, for, says Richard Baxter, “he was acceptable to sober men, because he was religious, faithful, valiant, and of a grave, sober, resolved disposition, 1642 very fit for execution and neither too great nor too cunning to be commanded by the Parliament.” Sir William Waller was another such both in character and attainments, and there were many veterans of the foreign wars who were soon to prove their competence. On the king’s side the first commander, the Earl of Lindsey, had long experience, but he was an old and tired man, and was little more than a figure-head to balance Essex. The royalist strength lay in its subordinate leaders, like Hopton and Astley, who were trained soldiers, and in the natural fighting stuff of the country gentry which in the process of time produced many capable brigadiers. It lay also in the commander of the horse, Prince Rupert, who in spite of his youth had served in more than one campaign, and who had that type of mind, both scientific and imaginative, which turns happily to the military art.

But the war began with neither armies nor generals. Both were still to make. Victory, in a contest so evenly matched and so divorced from the interest of the bulk of the nation, would go to that side which first created an efficient fighting machine, or rather—since men are more important than machines—which first produced a great soldier. The race, though none could then foresee it, lay between the young Palatine prince of twenty-three, and the grizzled Cambridge parliamentarian of forty-three, now captain of the 67th troop of Essex’s horse, and laboriously beginning to instruct himself in the craft of war.