When the New Model Army won the Civil War for Parliament in 1646, a relatively obscure Cornishman was singled out for particular reward. 'Some considerable recompense' was to be bestowed on Robert Scawen, a grateful House of Commons decreed, to ‘remain to posterity as a mark of the favour and acknowledgement of this House to him, for the great pains and the faithful and extraordinary service he hath performed in the affairs of the army’. From the ‘new modelling' of Parliament's forces in the spring of 1645, Scawen served as chairman of the parliamentary body most intimately involved in the war-effort, the ‘Committee of Lords and Commons for the Army' – a post he held continuously for over four years, to within a few weeks of the king's trial in January 1649. His committee was the principal agency through which the English Parliament saw to its army's recruitment, pay and provisioning. No other civilian MP dealt more directly or frequently with the New Model's senior officers than he. And in purely financial terms, all this ‘extraordinary service' at the head of the Army Committee was well rewarded: 2,000 was assigned to him in cash, all of which was actually paid – making him one of the most generously recompensed of all the Long Parliament's MPs.

Not all contemporary notices, however, were quite so laudatory. To his critics — particularly those who had opposed the military reforms of 1645 and who resented Scawen's hand in their success — the chairman of the Army Committee was a man of faction; a back-room figure whose influence could be decisive, at critical moments, in determining the outcome of events.