Waller on 13 July at Roundway Down. Waller's foot were cut in pieces or taken, and, with the few horse left him, he returned to Bristol:
Great William the Con.,
jeered a royalist poet,
So fast he did run,
That he left half his name behind him
(ib. p. 199; Clarendon, Rebellion, vii. 99–121; Portland MSS. iii. 112; Denham, Poems, ed. 1671, p. 107).
Waller left Bristol just before the siege by Rupert began, and returned to London to raise fresh forces. In spite of his disaster his popularity had suffered no diminution, and the citizens at a meeting in the Guildhall resolved to raise him a fresh army by subscription. On 4 Nov. 1643 parliament passed an ordinance associating the four counties of Hants, Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, and giving them power to raise troops to be commanded by Waller. The city was also authorised to send regiments of the trained bands and auxiliaries to serve under him (Husband, Ordinances, 1646, pp. 281, 310, 320, 379, 406, 475). The commission given Waller caused a dispute between him and Essex, which ended in October with a threat of resignation on the part of Essex and a vote placing Waller under the lord-general's command (Lords' Journals, vi. 172, 247). In December 1643 Waller defeated Lord Crawford at Alton, taking a thousand prisoners, and Arundel Castle fell into his hands on 6 Jan. 1644. By these two successes the royalist attempt to penetrate into Sussex and Kent was definitely stopped. On 29 March 1644, in conjunction with Sir William Balfour, Waller defeated the Earl of Forth and Lord Hopton at Cheriton, near Alresford, thus regaining for the parliament the greater part of Hampshire and Wiltshire (Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 254, 322; Hillier, The Sieges of Arundel Castle, 1854; Old Parliamentary History, xiii. 15). In May Essex and Waller simultaneously advanced upon Oxford, Essex blocking up the city on the north and Waller on the south. Charles slipped between their armies with about five thousand men, and, leaving Waller to pursue him, Essex marched to regain the west of England. Waller proved unable to bring the king to an action until Charles had rejoined the forces left in Oxford, and when he did attack him at Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury, on 29 June, he was defeated and lost his guns (Walker, Historical Discourses, pp. 14–33; Fairfax Correspondence, iii. 105). The disorganisation of Waller's heterogeneous, unpaid, undisciplined army which followed this defeat enabled Charles to march into Cornwall. In September 1644 Waller was sent west with a body of horse to hinder the king's return march towards Oxford, but he was too weak to do it effectively. At the second battle of Newbury on 27 Oct. 1644 he was one of the joint commanders of the parliamentary forces, attacked in company with Cromwell and Skippon the left wing of the royalists, and joined Cromwell in urging a vigorous pursuit of the retreating king (Gardiner, ii. 36, 46; Money, The Battles of Newbury, ed. 1884, pp. 221–3). In February 1645 Waller was ordered to march to the relief of Taunton, but his own men were mutinous for want of pay, Essex's horse refused to serve under him, and Cromwell's horse declined to go unless Cromwell went with them. Cromwell went under Waller's command. They captured a regiment of royalist cavalry near Devizes, and attained in part the purpose of the expedition. The self-denying ordinance passed during his absence put an end to Waller's career as a general, and he laid down his commission with great relief, saying that he would rather give his vote in the house than ‘remain amongst his troops so slighted and disesteemed’ as he was (Gardiner, ii. 128, 183, 192). In December 1645, when it was proposed to appoint him to command in Ireland, he rejected the offer, telling a friend ‘that he had had so much discouragement heretofore when he was near at hand that he could not think of being again engaged in the like kind’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. p. 237).
Waller now became one of the political leaders of the presbyterian party. Hostile on religious grounds to liberty of conscience, he was a firm supporter of the covenant and the league with the Scots. ‘None so panting for us as brave Waller,’ wrote Baillie when the Scottish army was about to enter England; and Waller's zeal for the imposition of presbyterianism on England was not abated by the growing strength of the independents. He thought that the toleration the army demanded meant that the church would come to be governed, like Friar John's college in ‘Rabelais,’ by one general statute, ‘Do what you list’ (Baillie, Letters, ii. 107, 115; Vindication of Sir W. Waller, pp. 25, 148).
Waller had been a member of the committee of both kingdoms from the time of its origin, and in 1647 he was one of the committee for Irish affairs to which parliament delegated the disbanding of the new model and the formation from it of an army for the recovery of Ireland. In March and
