The same lack of general comprehension appears in Mr. Wells’s quite honestly held idea of the Parliamentary army—particularly of the “new model.” He thinks of it as a sort of democratic force. It was, as a fact, a very highly paid professional body, especially its cavalry, which was its decisive arm. Of course, there were many people of no origin in it, and a few, not many, people of low birth even held commands in it as officers. But it had a very large proportion of the wealthy classes in such positions. Nor is it true to say that this highly paid cavalry, well disciplined though it was, and containing excellent personnel, “swept the cavaliers before them from Marston Moor to Naseby.” That is typical of the quite wrong old-fashioned textbook history from which such judgments are still drawn. Cavalry was the great strength of Charles; and if there had only been cavalry on either side, Charles would have won. It was the cavaliers who generally swept the _mounted_ part of the “new model” before them, and particularly at Naseby, but the counter-charge was fatal to the increasingly weak infantry of the King. Naseby was won by Oliver Cromwell, leading his cavalry in person against shaken infantry. The Parliamentary horse was badly mauled by Rupert’s horse on the left, but Cromwell on the right, checking the usual sweep of the counter-charge, gave up the following-up of the horse, wheeled to the left, and destroyed the badly trained, ill-disciplined and numerically weak Welsh footmen of the centre. The cavalry part of the few years’ fighting, when against cavalry, was in Charles’s favour, but Charles’s infantry got weaker and weaker; and the reason that Charles grew weaker and weaker in quality and numbers of infantry was lack of money. His cavalry was composed largely of noble-hearted and devoted volunteers, a good part of whom, popularly said to be half, were Catholic; but his infantry he had to hire as best he could. I only pick out these points (small in themselves) because they are typical. They show the way in which the old conventional schoolboy history of a lifetime ago is the only one our author possesses; and that explains also his quite erroneous view of what the Reformation was in England. He perpetuates what was once the official legend; naturally, no doubt, for he has never heard the modern destructive criticism levelled against it.