Rupert did not need the jeers of his enemies to convince him of his failure. He was beaten and he knew it! His projects were crossed, his labours unavailing, and in his heart he knew that the cause was lost. The disaster had cut him to the heart, yet, in his pride, he would not speak a word of self-justification. He had obeyed orders, the result was unfortunate, and no excuse or vindication would he offer. Perhaps he thought he acted generously in not shifting the responsibility to the King, but Clarendon blames his reticence. "Prince Rupert, only to his friends and after the murder of the King," he says, "produced a letter in the King's own hand ... which he understood to amount to no less than a peremptory order to fight, upon any disadvantage whatsoever; and he added that the disadvantage was so great that it was no wonder he lost the day." Deeply had the iron entered into Rupert's soul! Other misfortunes were yet to come; he was to know a yet more fatal defeat, poverty, hardships such as he had never yet encountered, the misjudgment of friends, the loss of those dearest to him; but nothing could be to him as the shock of Marston Moor had been. Nothing could affect him as that first great failure which dashed him from the height of triumph to the depths of despair. He seems to have been, for a time, strangely unlike himself. The strain under which he had laboured suddenly relaxed, apathy succeeded {153} to over-wrought excitement, carelessness to vigilance, self-indulgence to rigid self-restraint, and the Royalists looked on in terrified dismay! "Prince Rupert is so much given to his ease and pleasures that every man is disheartened that sees it,"[77] lamented Arthur Trevor. Strangely do the words contrast with the "toujours soldat" of Sir Philip Warwick, and with the general praises of the Prince's "exemplary temperance," but Trevor would assuredly not have spoken undeserved evil of his master. Despair had seized on Rupert's soul, and he sought to drown the bitterness of memory in sensual indulgences. The mood passed with the autumn, and, ere the winter had come, Rupert was a man again, ready as ever to do and dare. But the scar remained; all his life long he carried the King's letter on his person, and all his life long Marston Moor was a bitter memory to him! [1] Rupert Correspondence. 18981 Add. MSS. British Museum. Trevor to Rupert, Feb. 16, 1644. [2] Rupert Correspondence. Add. MSS. Brit. Mus. 18981. Trevor to Rupert, Mar. 30, 1644. [3] Ibid. Byron to Rupert, April 1644. [4] Carte's Ormonde. Trevor to Ormonde, Feb. 19, 1644. Vol. VI. pp. 37-38. [5] Carte's Ormonde. Trevor to Ormonde, Feb. 19, 1644. VI. p. 37. [6] Ibid. VI. 87, Apr. 13, 1644. [7] Ibid. VI. 41, Digby to Ormonde, Feb. 20, 1644. [8] Carte's Ormonde. Digby to Ormonde. Vol. VI. p. 21, Jan. 20, 1644. [9] Carte's Ormonde, VI. p. 60, Ormonde to Radcliffe, Mar. 11, 1644.