The Good Old Cause was the name given, retrospectively, by the soldiers of the New Model Army, to the complex of reasons that motivated their fight on behalf of the Parliament of England. Their struggle was against King Charles I and the Royalists during the English Civil War; they continued to support the English Commonwealth between 1649 and 1660. Oliver Cromwell wrote, in a letter to Sir William Spring in 1643, of the archetypal plain, russet-coated captain who embodies the ideal of republican soldiery. (Many of those who supported the Good Old Cause were also Independents who advocated local congregational control of religious and church matters.)