In September King Charles had gathered a force of 10,000 men at Nottingham, while Essex was getting together a larger army not far off, at Northampton. The wealth of the kingdom was with the Parliament, which also possessed the arsenal, the fleet, and the principal ports. On the other hand, man for man, the King’s troops were superior to the Parliament’s, especially in the most dreaded arm of the service, the horse. The fervid zealots who, like John Bunyan, entered the Parliamentary army, were never in the majority, and needed peculiar training to bring out their remarkable soldierly qualities. The sober, thrifty, religious middle class—which was the backbone of the Parliamentary strength—had no special aptitude for military service. If its members could once be put in the army and kept there a sufficient length of time, their qualities made them excellent soldiers; but, as a whole, they were not men of very adventurous temper, and had had no such training in arms, or in the sports akin to war, as inclined them to rush into the army. On the other hand, the Royalist nobles and squires, and their game-keepers, grooms, and hard-riding kinsmen, with their taste for field-sports, their love of adventure, and their high sense of warlike honor, made splendid material out of which to organize an army, and especially cavalry. In consequence, for the first half of the war the Royalist cavalry was overwhelmingly superior to the Parliamentary cavalry, composed as it was of men bought with the money of the _bourgeoisie_, who had no particular heart in their work; who were timid horsemen and unskilled swordsmen. The difference in favor of the Royalist horse was as marked as the superiority of the Confederate horse in the American Civil War, under leaders like Stuart, Morgan, and Basil Duke; until time was afforded, in the one case for the growth of Cromwell, in the other for the development of leaders like Sheridan and Wilson. Cromwell had already shown himself very active. He had seized the magazine of the Castle of Cambridge, and secured the University plate, which was being sent to the King. He had raised volunteers and expended money freely out of his own scanty means. His troop of horse was, from the beginning, utterly different from most of the Parliamentary cavalry; it was composed of his own neighbors, yeomen and small farmers, hard, serious men, whose grim natures were thrilled by the intense earnestness of their leader, and whom he steadily drilled into good horsemanship and swordsmanship. His chaplains always played an important part; one of them, Hugh Peters, was a man of mark, who joined ability to high character.