Meanwhile the notion which Hampden had thought impracticable was rapidly becoming a fact. Cromwell’s one troop of eighty horse had become the nucleus of a regiment. By March, 1643, he had five troops, and by September, ten. When the New Model army was constituted, his regiment had become a double regiment of fourteen full troops, numbering about eleven hundred troopers. Above all they were men of the same spirit as their colonel. His original troop had been carefully chosen. “He had a special care,” writes Baxter, “to get religious men into his troop; these men were of greater understanding than common soldiers ... and making not money but that which they took for public felicity to be their end, they were the more engaged to be valiant.” The new additions were of the same quality. “Pray raise honest, godly men and I will have them of my regiment,” Cromwell promised the town of Norwich. “My troops increase,” he told a friend a few weeks later; “I have a lovely company; you would respect them did you know them; they are no Anabaptists, they are honest, sober Christians.”
The officers were selected on the same principle. “If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them; and they will be careful to mount such,” wrote Cromwell to the Committee of Suffolk. When he could get gentlemen he preferred them, but godliness and zeal for the cause were the essentials.
“I had rather have,” said he, “a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call ‘a gentleman,’ and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.... It may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments—but why do they not appear? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none.”
What struck observers first was the rigid discipline which Cromwell enforced not only in his own regiment but in all men under his command. No plundering was permitted, reported a newspaper; “no man swears but he pays his twelvepence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks or worse. How happy were it if all the forces were thus disciplined!” The next notable fact was that they were better armed than other regiments, as well as better disciplined. Besides the sword, each trooper had a pair of pistols, but not carbines or other firearms. For defensive arms, they had simply a light helmet or “pot,” and a “back and breast” of iron. Thus while adequately protected they were lighter and more active than fully equipped cuirassiers, and while adequately armed they had no temptation to adopt the tactics of mounted infantry or dragoons. Moreover, from the beginning, Cromwell’s men were taught to charge home, and to rely on the impact of their charge and the sharpness of their swords. They were well mounted and many of them owned the horses they rode, being, as Whitelocke says, “freeholders or freeholders’ sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel.” Others were provided from the stables of Royalists, and one of Cromwell’s letters is a defence of an officer who had seized the horses of “Malignants” to mount his troop. A great lover of horses and arms himself, Colonel Cromwell made his men keep both in good condition. “Cromwell,” says a royalist writer, “used them daily to look after, feed, and dress their horses, and, when it was needful, to lie together on the ground; and besides taught them to clean and keep their arms bright and to have them ready for service.” Men of such a spirit, armed, mounted, drilled, and disciplined with care, soon proved their superiority both to the King’s troops and to those of Essex and Waller.