At the outset of the war many of the nobles raised regiments from among their own tenants, and the armies were of picturesque look, each regiment having its own uniform. The Guards of Lord Essex adopted the buff leather coat, which afterward became the uniform of the whole Roundhead army. Hampden’s regiment was in green; the London trained bands in bright scarlet. Other regiments were clad in blue or gray. In the Cavalier army there were foot-guards in white and foot-guards in red; and among their horse, the Life Guards of the King—composed of lords and gentlemen who had no separate commands—wore plumed casques over their long curled locks, embroidered lace collars over their glittering cuirasses, gay scarfs, gilded sword-belts, and great-boots of soft leather doubled down below the knee. The history of the English Civil War, like the history of the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, teaches two lessons. First, it shows that the average citizen of a civilized community requires months of training before he can be turned into a good soldier, and that raw levies—no matter how patriotic—are, under normal conditions, helpless before smaller armies of trained and veteran troops, and cannot strike a finishing blow even when pitted against troops of their own stamp. In the second place it teaches a lesson, which at first sight seems contradictory of the first, but is in reality not in the least so; namely, that there is nothing sacrosanct in the trade of the soldier. It is a trade which can be learned without special difficulty by any man who is brave and intelligent, who realizes the necessity of obedience, and who is already gifted with physical hardihood and is accustomed to the use of the horse and of weapons, to enduring fatigue and exposure, and to acting on his own responsibility, taking care of himself in the open. Cromwell’s troops were not regulars, like the professional soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War; they were volunteers. After two or three years’ service they became the finest troops that Europe could then show; just as by 1864 the volunteers of Grant and Lee had reached a grade of perfection which made them, for their own work, superior to any other of the armies then in existence.