Then arose Oliver Cromwell, a man of the “Common People,” who, with his Ironsides regiment at Marston Moor (1644), drove the cavaliers pell-mell from the field. Nasby (1645) was the decisive contest of the war. Cromwell swept the field, and the royal cause was irrevocably lost. Charles fled to the Scots, who gave him up to the Parliament; but the army of the “Common People,” led by Cromwell, soon got him into its possession, and he was condemned to death on the charge of treason, and was beheaded. Thus, as has ever been the case when the “Common People” have been goaded by insult into a furious state of temper, some leader has aptly sprung, like Cromwell, from their ranks, and carried them triumphantly to victory. In the same way George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Grover Cleveland have each in turn led the hosts of the “Common People” to victory in their battles against “divine rights,” injustice, “caste,” and “sham aristocracy.” England, by the execution of Charles I., was without a king. The authority was vested in the House of Commons (diminished by Pride’s Purge the expulsion of the Presbyterian minister) contemptuously styled “the Rump.” Cromwell, the man of the “Common People,” and his terrible army, composed of the “Common People,” were the actual rulers. In Ireland and Scotland the Prince of Wales was proclaimed as Charles II., whereupon the grim Ironsides--those representatives of the people, and their terrific earnestness when aroused--conquered Ireland as it never was conquered before. Crossing then to Scotland, the covenanters were routed at Dunbar, and again at Worcester. Cromwell, while he had the power of a king, like Cæsar, dared not take the title. He recognized, what it would be well for the sham aristocrats to attentively regard, that the people MAKE and UNMAKE; hence, he did not dare offend the “Common People” by assuming the title of king, though exercising all the powers of a king. Under Cromwell, England’s glory became greater than under Elizabeth. The Barbarian pirates were punished; Jamaica was captured; Dunkirk was received from France in return for help against Spain; protecting the Protestants everywhere, Cromwell compelled the Duke of Savoy to cease persecuting the Baudois. The very name of England became terrible to the oppressor of the poor in every land. The people, in their might, were ruling England; because, even though Cromwell was styled “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth,” he still understood that his greatest power rested upon the will of the “Common People” as a foundation.