Cromwell as the military leader of the Commonwealth Boers is, at least in England where the military art has not been scientifically studied, one of the suppressed characters of history.  His political achievements, as is perhaps natural in a community which courts the voter and despises the soldier, have put out of sight the means by which he mainly won them; namely his genius as a cavalry and partisan commander.  An ungainly, narrow-minded, bigoted, bucolic squireen of Huntingdon, lacking in every quality which we are accustomed to associate with a cavalry officer, inaugurated an era in the history of Mounted Troops.  His methods are studied on the Continent, and the German Staff has recently discovered that he was the first leader to use cavalry as a screen to hide the movements of the main body.  Yet there is no evidence that he ever studied the military art, and he did not become a soldier until he had reached his fourth decade.  In the Royalist Army opposed to him were soldiers by profession and experience; officers and men who had been under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War; for in the XVIIth century the services of aliens were in request on the Continent, and at one time no less than eighty-seven senior officers of British nationality were serving in the Swedish Army, then the most renowned in Europe.  Yet Cromwell with his “Eastern Association,” his Ironsides, his yeomen and raw levies, beat the Royalist Army, officered from the same class which is still believed to possess the monopoly of the aptitude for leading men in war, by exercising the homely qualities of energy, self-control, endurance, and practical common sense applied instantly to the occasion of the moment.

The lessons to be learnt from Cromwell’s campaigns have been thus epitomized by General Baden-Powell:—­“There is one thing that ought not to escape the attention of students, namely the success that attended Cromwell’s method of rallying his troops whenever they got dispersed.  When things looked bad, as they did on one or two occasions, when some of his cavalry were defeated and the rest scattered, he never lost heart and his men never lost heart; they knew they had to rally again and attack somewhere else.  Very often the enemy were deceived by that, thinking that the Roundheads were scattered and broken up, and took no further notice of him until they suddenly found him attacking from quite a new direction.  That was the secret of his success on many occasions, and one that has its lesson to-day, just as it had in those days—­that when all seems pretty bad and you are scattered and broken, keep up a good heart and get together again and have another go.”  With scarcely the change of a word these remarks will account for the prolongation of the war for two years after the occupation of the Boer capitals.