The scene of the making of the New Army which was destined to subdue the King was, by the irony of fate, royal Windsor. It is on the broad expanse of Windsor Park and on the green meadows by the Thames, before the wondering eyes of the Eton boys, that we must picture the daily parade of the new regiments, the exercise of pike and musket and the assiduous doubling of ranks and files, old Skippon, gray and scarred with wounds, riding from company to company and instituting mental comparisons between them and the English soldiers of the Low Countries, and the younger sprightlier Fairfax, still but three-and-thirty, watching with all a Yorkshireman's love of horseflesh the arrival of troopers and baggage-animals. Every day the scene grew brighter as corps after corps received its new clothing, for the whole army, for the first time in English history, was clad in the familiar scarlet. Facings of the colonel's colours distinguished regiment from regiment; and the senior corps of foot, being the General's own, wore his facings of blue.[164] Thus the royal colours, as we now call them, were first seen at the head of a rebel army. The senior regiment of horse was also in due time to be clothed in the same scarlet and blue. For Cromwell's two regiments of horse had been selected, as was their due, to be blent into one and to take precedence, as Sir Thomas Fairfax's, of the whole of the English cavalry. In this same month of April the regiment was in the field, turning out quicker than any other corps on the sounding of the alarm, while the "lovely company" of which the colonel had boasted, now called the General's troop, was distinguishing itself above all others. Modern regiments of cavalry that wear the royal colours need not be ashamed to remember that they perpetuate the dress of Oliver Cromwell's troopers. Excluded though Cromwell was from the making of the New Model Army, he was none the less its creator, for it was he who had shown the way to discipline and regimental pride.