strike in effectually. Sir Thomas Fairfax, tearing off his white badge, had succeeded in making his way round the rear of the royalists, and encountering Cromwell was able to tell him what was happening under the smoke. He saw at once his opportunity. Bidding Leslie charge into the rear of the Whitecoats, he led his own men round, as Fairfax had come, encountered and totally routed Goring's horsemen, returning in confusion from their reckless raid. The Whitecoats perished almost to a man: and then Cromwell and Leslie had no difficulty in completing the victory, by breaking up the rest of the royalist infantry, with which Crawford and Baillie had been engaged. A battle so stubbornly contested and involving such vicissitudes was necessarily a bloody one. According to one eye-witness over 4000 bodies were buried on the field. The royalist cause was utterly ruined in the north, though prince Rupert rallied a few thousand men. York surrendered in a few days: before the winter nothing was left to the king in the whole of the north and northern midlands except a few isolated posts. Marston Moor is rightly regarded as the turning-point of the civil war. The victory was conspicuously due to Oliver Cromwell personally, and to the troops raised by him and trained on his principles. This naturally gave great additional weight to the Independents, the party partly religious and partly political which he represented—all the more so because of the comparative failure of the Scots, the champions of Presbyterianism, whose valour was in truth somewhat unfairly decried. The most important, for the time being at least, of the ideas of the Independents was the conviction that the war could only be adequately waged by strong measures, by leaders who meant to win thoroughly, and by troops that could and would fight effectively. The victory of Marston Moor was a clinching argument in favour of the New Model army. Marston Moor was however much more than the decisive event in a conflict between two contending parties. It produced consequences more far-reaching than any battle ever fought on British soil, except perhaps Hastings. If ideas rule the world, it is one of the most important in human history. When the royalist gentry went down before Cromwell's Ironsides, absolutism received its death-wound. The great issue, whether the king or the nation should be supreme, was decided in favour of the nation, though generations had yet to elapse before the full results were attained. And since England alone set the example, and stored up the ideas, from which political liberty in other countries has been derived, it is hard to see what hope would have been left for sober freedom anywhere.[53] Had Charles I. definitely triumphed in the civil war, and stamped out by force Puritanism in the widest sense of the word, the circle of absolute monarchies would have been complete. The United States of America, the French Republic, the constitutional Parliaments of Germany, Austria,