Oliver Cromwell Wins Naseby: Parliament Tips Civil War

Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army crushed King Charles I's Royalist forces at Naseby on June 14, 1645, in the engagement that effectively decided the English Civil War. The Parliamentarian army of roughly 15,000 men outnumbered the Royalist force of 12,000, but numbers alone did not determine the outcome. Naseby was the first major test of the New Model Army, a professional fighting force created just three months earlier to replace the patchwork of regional armies that had fought the war's first three years with mixed results. Charles had been winning. His nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine, commanding the Royalist cavalry, had a fearsome reputation. The king's forces had captured Leicester on May 30 and threatened to march on London. Parliament's decision to consolidate its armies under a unified command with Sir Thomas Fairfax as general and Cromwell as lieutenant general of cavalry was a desperate gamble that the new organization could fight effectively before it had time to train together. The battle opened with a Royalist cavalry charge on the right wing that scattered the opposing Parliamentarian horse and pursued them off the field, a characteristic error of Rupert's impetuous style. On the other flank, Cromwell's Ironsides drove the Royalist cavalry back in a disciplined charge, then wheeled to attack the exposed Royalist infantry center. Fairfax's infantry held firm in the middle. The Royalist foot, caught between Cromwell's cavalry and advancing infantry, broke and surrendered in large numbers. Charles lost nearly his entire army: 1,000 killed, 4,500 captured, all his artillery, his baggage train, and critically, his private correspondence, which Parliament published to show he had been negotiating for foreign Catholic armies to invade England. The revelations destroyed whatever remained of his political credibility.