force, ‘3,000’ (or say 2,000) ‘to the Eastward, 500 to the North’; with ‘drums beating, colours flying,’ for the last time; all with passes, with agitated thoughts and outlooks: and in sacred Oxford, as poor Wood intimates,[1] the abomination of desolation supervened!—Oxford surrendering with the King’s sanction quickened other surrenders; Ragland Castle itself, and the obstinate old Marquis, gave-in before the end of August: and the First Civil War, to the last ember of it, was extinct.
The Parliament, in these circumstances, was now getting itself ‘recruited,’—its vacancies filled-up again. The Royalist Members, who had deserted three years ago, had been, without much difficulty, successively ‘disabled,’ as their crime came to light: but to issue new writs for new elections, while the quarrel with the King still lasted, was a matter of more delicacy; this too, however, had at length been resolved upon, the Parliament Cause now looking so decidedly prosperous, in the Autumn of 1645. Gradually, in the following months, the new Members were elected, above Two-hundred-and-thirty of them in all. These new Members, ‘Recruiters,’ as Anthony Wood and the Royalist world reproachfully call them, were, by the very fact of their standing candidates in such circumstances, decided Puritans all,—Independents many of them. Colonel, afterwards Admiral Blake (for Taunton), Ludlow, Ireton (for Appleby), Algernon Sidney, Hutchinson known by his Wife’s Memoirs, were among these new Members. Fairfax, on his Father’s death some two years hence, likewise came in.[2]
