Finally, let us close with the greatest and noblest work of the New Model Army; the establishment of England's supremacy in the British Isles as a first step to their constitutional union. No achievement could have stood in more direct antagonism to the policy of Charles Stuart, who strove with might and main to set nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and paid for his folly with his life. It may be that the greatness of this service will in these days be denied. There were not wanting in the Long Parliament men who intrigued with Scotland against England rather than suffer power to slip from their hands, and it is not perhaps strange that the type of such men should be imperishable. Those, however, who call England the predominant partner in the British Isles should not forget who were the men that made her predominant.[201] The Civil War was no mere rebellion against despotic authority. It accomplished more than the destruction of the old monarchy; it was the battle for the union of the British Isles, and it was fought and won by the New Model Army. AUTHORITIES.--In so slight a sketch of the Civil War and the Protectorate as is given in these pages any lengthy enumeration of the authorities would be absurd. Readers will find them for themselves in the exhaustive history of Mr. Gardiner, to whose labours, as well as to those of Mr. C. H. Firth, I am very greatly indebted. Such collections of documents as the _Calendars of State Papers_, Rushworth, Thurloe, and Carlyle's _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_ are almost too obvious to call for mention. The Clarke Papers are of exceptional value for purposes of military history, and Sprigge's _Anglia Rediviva_ is of course an indispensable authority as to the New Model. But even in such fields as the newspapers and the King's Pamphlets Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Firth have left little harvest ungleaned. Of the military writers of the time Barriffe is the most instructive, particularly in respect of certain comments added in the later editions. A French folio volume, _Le Mareschal le Bataille_ (1647), gives excellent plates of the drill of pikemen and musketeers, and beautiful diagrams of the evolutions. BOOK IV CHAPTER I [Sidenote: 1660.]