Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at him and kept out of his way until the fatal 3rd of September came. By this time Cromwell had only eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, and they were in no great state for fighting. Leslie had twenty-two or three thousand Scots and all the advantage of the position, but the Fates had already taken the matter into their own hands. On the afternoon of the 2nd, Cromwell saw that the wary Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic exhortation of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands!” he cried, and straightway began to set his battle in order. The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, they came to blows. In an hour or so it was all over. The Scots fled in utter panic and confusion, “being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords,” to use Oliver’s own words. When the rout was at its height the sun rose, scattering the morning mists. “Let God arise and His enemies be scattered!” he shouted exultantly through the roar of the battle, and then--how characteristic it was of the man!--he halted his army in the very moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and seventeenth psalm, beginning: “O praise the Lord all ye people, for His merciful kindness is great towards us!” Then he unleashed his bloodhounds again, and the rest was massacre. [Illustration: HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH PSALM.] Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting and arguing, slaughter and psalm-singing, and once more the sun of the 3rd of September, Cromwell’s Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it: “His day of double victory and death,” dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of “the Crowning Mercy.” The same miracles of generalship were accomplished, the same tremendous victory was won at a ridiculously small expense--under two hundred men to conquer an entrenched army of fifteen thousand--and this was the end of the fighting at home. But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, more than that, the fame of the great Oliver and his marvellous doings had been ringing from end to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian of the Royalists, candidly admits: “His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad.” The mastery of the seas was wrenched out of the hands of the Dutch by Blake, the sea-power of England was organised as its land-power was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degradation to which she had sunk under the first Stuart to the proud position of the first naval and military Power of the world, and the greatest ministers and monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were forced to respect the prowess and cringe for the friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon.