When the news of the battle reached London (July 5), there was nothing but joy. Within a few days, however, the joy passed into a question between the Independents and the Presbyterians, or at least the Scots among them. Which part of the conjoint army had behaved best in the battle, and to which general did the chief honours of the day belong? Glad would Baillie have been to welcome Marston Moor as at last that great success of the Scots for which he had been longing and praying. No such pleasure could he have. More and more, as detailed accounts of the battle arrived, it became clear that the Scots could claim only a little of the merit of the victory--that the mass of them had behaved rather ill; that the luck or the generalship of Field-marshal Leven had deserted him, and he had been carried far away in a ruck of fugitives; and that, in fact, with the exception of David Leslie, the Scottish Major-general, who really did good service, no Scot in command had shown much head, or been of any considerable use, at Marston Moor. But, worse and worse for Baillie's feelings, not only did it appear that the victory had been gained by the English of the joint army rather than by the Scottish contingent, but gradually the rumour was confirmed, which had been first borne to London on the wings of the wind, that the Englishman by whose conduct, if by that of any one man, the fate of the battle had been decided, was Lieutenant-general Cromwell. "The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince's horse. God gave them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged." These sentences of Cromwell's own, written on the third day after the battle in a letter to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton, are his private statement of the truth which became public. In vain it was represented in London that Cromwell's paramount prowess in the battle was a fiction of himself and the Independents; in vain did the Presbyterians try to distribute the merit among Fairfax, David Leslie, and Major-general Crawford--another Scot, not in the Scottish contingent, but serving in Manchester's army as next in command under Cromwell, and already known as representing Presbyterianism in that army in opposition to Cromwell's Independency; in vain did this Crawford, when he came to London, asseverate that Cromwell, having been slightly wounded in the neck, had retired before the crisis, and that the real work in Cromwell's part of the battle had devolved on David Leslie and himself. It was a comfort to Baillie to believe all this; but London was persuaded otherwise. For London and for all England Cromwell stood forth as the hero of Marston Moor. The victory to which Baillie had looked forward as a triumph for Presbyterianism had been gained mainly by the "great Independent" of the English army, and went to the credit of Independency. [Footnote: Baillie, II.