[44] This fact alone is sufficient to disprove the Yorkist falsehood that while Warwick had 30,000 men, Edward had but 9000. [45] The numbers are not very clearly given, but the accounts seem to indicate no great disparity, with the advantage, if any, to the Lancastrians. [46] Sir John Ramsay must have seen the ground in winter, if he was able to obtain a view of the whole position. In summer the trees, which are none of them ancient, intercept a great deal. I should be inclined to think that the Lancastrian line faced nearly south instead of parallel to the modern road, as he places it: otherwise he seems to me to have worked out the topographical details very well. [47] Curiously enough the earliest cannon seem to have been breechloading. This mode of construction was however abandoned after a time, either because the movable pieces did not fit properly, or because they could not be made strong enough to stand the strain when gunpowder came to be thoroughly explosive, in favour of muzzle-loading. In modern warfare, until after the Crimean War, cannon were mere metal tubes, with a touch-hole by which they were fired. Things have moved fast since then. Of the millions of men now under military service, how many have a clear idea of what "spiking a gun" meant? [48] I use this phrase for convenience' sake, to mean the shot discharged by every kind of hand firearms until the introduction of the rifle. [49] This especially held good of the heavy plate armour which was introduced in the fourteenth century, and grew heavier and heavier. There seems to have been hardly any chain mail which a clothyard arrow could not pierce. [50] There had been many Scots in the service of Gustavus: and this fact made the Scottish intervention in the English civil war more weighty than it would otherwise have been. [51] It is significant of the superior importance of the cavalry in the seventeenth century that the lieutenant-general, second in command, led the cavalry, the infantry being under the major-general, third in command. [52] The letter is rather confused, but it can hardly bear this meaning, though it undoubtedly authorised fighting a battle. [53] Switzerland need not be forgotten, but Switzerland could under no circumstances have wielded the European influence exerted by English ideas, backed by the vast power, military, naval and commercial, of the England of Marlborough, and Chatham, and Nelson. [54] Hodgson, an officer who was in the battle, says that Cromwell sent four regiments to circle round the enclosures of Brocksmouth House and fall on the enemy's right flank. Such a manœuvre was hard to work accurately in the dark, but if successful was bound to be decisive. The evidence is good: but this very decisiveness makes me hesitate to believe that Cromwell himself, to say nothing of other narrators, could have described the battle without mentioning so important a fact. [55] Quoted from Cromwell's despatch to the Speaker.