"Argued with us, dividing his discourse into as many heads as Leviathan, and using words from every heathen tongue under the sun. If we had the best of it, called us levellers and fire-brands. If we were silent under his flood of talk, thought we were beaten, as if to have the best in talk were to win the day. As if an honest Englishman was to change his mind, because he could not, all in a moment, see his way out of Mr. Baxter's Presbyterial puzzles. Scarcely grateful, I think, seeing our men had once asked him to be their chaplain. Some of us reminded him of it, and he said he was sorry he had refused, or we should not have come to what we are. And he rebuked us sore, and called us out of our names in a gentlemanly way, in Latin and Greek, as if we had been plunderers and malignants; us of General Cromwell's own regiment. Of his courage there can after this, I think, be no doubt. Nor forsooth of our patience. And he hath gone back to Coventry and spoken slanders of the 'sad state' of the army! "Sad state of the army indeed, where every morsel we put in our mouths is paid for, through which every modest wench, if she were as fair as Sarah, can walk, if she had need, as safe as past her father's door. An army which had just won Naseby, by the strength of the Lord and the Ten Commandments--where not an oath is heard--where psalms and prayers rise night and morning as from the old Temple--and where a young gentleman like Mr. Richard Baxter, could come and go, and call the soldiers what ill names he chose, without hurt. For a godly young gentleman we all hold him to be, and a scholar, and honour him in our souls as such, and for the chastening hand of the Lord on the poor suffering, puny, brave body of him, although in some ways he and the likes of him cost me more wrestlings than even the Irish Papist women with their knives." Wherever General Cromwell was throughout that summer, there continued to be a series of successes. Job's letters and Roger's were records of castles stormed or surrendered, sieges raised and troops dispersed, in Devonshire from Salisbury to Bovey Tracey. On the 4th of August, Roger wrote of the dispersing of the poor mistaken Clubmen; a new force of peasants who had gathered to the number of two thousand on Hambledon Hill, in Surrey. Blind, as my Father says peasant armies mostly are. Aunt Gretel turned pale when she heard of them, and talked of dreadful peasant wars in Dr. Luther's time in Saxony; Dr. Luther dearly loving and fighting, in his way, for the peasants, but not being able to make them understand him, like Oliver Cromwell now. These poor fellows had gathered like brave men in the West to defend their homes from Lord Goring's band--"the child-eaters" as some called them, the most lawless and merciless among the Cavalier troops, surpassing even Prince Rupert's, whom one of their own called afterwards, "terrible in plunder, and resolute in running away."