Abstract
Three books covering the period of Britain’s revolution, all with very different themes, constitute a serious set of newly developed insights into the cause and effect of the civil wars. One purports to show how parliament won the war by exploring its mechanisms for raising money and assembling materiel during the first civil war, while another shows just how complex the war was through analysing the shifting of personal and professional allegiances during its course. The final book contributes an analysis of what was happening during the Protectorate to the men who had brought the republic into being, a period when attention has generally shifted to the political aspects of the regimes. While at first these may seem widely different in their approaches, beyond covering the period of war and revolution, they do all demonstrate the complexity of the period and open up avenues of study which explain the parliamentarian and republican cause.
Gavin Robinson’s work is long awaited. It is in the realm of study occupied by Peter Edwards, and covers ground familiar to his readers: supply and resource. While some military historians would claim that the study of men and materiel is not ‘true’ military history, the subject is an important one and the supplying of both provides essential context for generalship in the field. Indeed, as Prince Rupert demonstrated in 1643–4, it takes up a lot of a general’s time when he is not on the battlefield. Wars cannot be fought without the accountants and pen-pushers in the army. Robinson amply demonstrates this through an exhaustive study of the parliamentarian logistics machine, but also shows how generals often shifted for themselves, as, for example, when taking possession of horses, often in defiance of parliament’s orders and quotas. Much of the book focuses on parliament’s war effort but to provide context and balance, Robinson does add in some observations of the royalist war, and he does this rather well. He admits that he chose the parliamentarian cause for preferential reasons but also because of the availability of the resources. There is simply more material for parliamentarian logistics than there is for the royalists, although I would suggest that there is work still to be done on the Exchequer papers to tease out the details of royalist collections which are buried within returns made to parliament after the war. What Robinson shows through making the comparisons is that the royalists faced the same dilemmas as parliament and dealt with them – or avoided them (by slicing through the various Gordian knots) – in very much the same way. This is a fine study, which needs to be read alongside the work of Peter Edwards, and which takes us further than the excellent thesis on parliamentary taxation by James Scott Wheeler, sadly not published in full. Generalship and tactics on the battlefield are important in winning battles and wars, but they do not occur in a vacuum: somebody had to ensure that the general has an army, the cavalry its horses, and the soldiers their pay and ammunition. Robinson’s book shows us how this was achieved for parliament and how Essex, Brereton, Cromwell, the Fairfaxes, Manchester, and Waller had the wherewithal to bring about the defeat of the king.
Some of the complexities which Robinson outlines concern the very nature of the parliamentarian cause. To gain enough resources parliament had to cross boundaries which it claimed to be defending, such as the security of private property rights which it had to undermine with, for example, its horse-levy quotas. What constituted ‘the cause’ played directly into the loyalties of either side, and as the cause changed, as happened in the civil wars at a number of points as well as more frequently and subtly, so the need for victory forced various reconsiderations of practice upon the contenders. Soldiers and politicians changed sides as a result of these considerations as well as personal ones throughout the period of the wars. There are many well-known examples of turncoats, such as Sir Faithful Fortescue, George Monck, and Sir John Urry, and of others who, like the Hothams father and son, attempted to switch sides. All of these men changed allegiance without the need for a climatic change in their respective causes, such as the failed peace of 1646–8 and the subsequent renewal of war. Hopper explores personal profiles and the culture of changing sides in an in-depth but very broad-ranging study, including an examination of turncoats in the aristocracy, parliament, the officer corps, and the rank and file. Some, like the Earl of Holland, are familiar, but Hopper takes on the less well known too, such as John Holles, the Earl of Clare, to whom parliament had entrusted the trained bands in Nottinghamshire as England descended into war during the summer of 1642, but who could only look on as the supposedly displaced royalist lord lieutenant, Lord Newark, continued to muster the county troops. Holles left parliament in 1643 with Holland and became a royalist soldier and war council member, but after just a year he returned to parliament’s side, having lost confidence in the king’s desire for peace. Though he was not allowed back into the Lords, Holles was given a position in the local administration of his home county, Nottinghamshire. The welcome received by turncoats depended upon their usefulness, which eased the transition for men such as Hurry and Monck, while past loyalties and friendships could delay the apostasy of MPs such as Sir Gerard Napper. Rank-and-file turncoats could be treated far more roughly. While the Hothams were put to death by parliament in 1645 for attempting to change sides and betraying Hull, such executions of members of the gentry in the first civil war were rare, but Essex hanged a number of soldiers after the capture of Reading because they had left his army for the king’s army a few days earlier. Such retribution continued, and alongside it so did the attempts to encourage turncoats from the opposing side.
The contexts within which changing sides sat were various. These included personal honour but also perceptions of their cause, such as Holles’s cited fear that the royalist did not wish for peace; other former royalists were concerned about the laxity shown to ‘papists’ within the royalist cause. Hopper also explores the side-changers’ use of the media to justify themselves and at the same time exalt their new cause, something which had become an established practice by mid-1643. Conversely, the press vilified those such as Sir Hugh Cholmley, whose defection also encompassed taking the garrison of Scarborough into the royalist camp. The second civil war in England and Wales upped the stakes for turncoats as well as providing a cataclysm which impelled the changing of sides. Holland, the experienced turncoat, was executed for his role in this second war, as were others like him. Hopper briefly looks at the nature of changing sides in the context of Ireland and Scotland during the civil wars and at the Restoration years, rightly suggesting that there is further work to be done here.
Hopper’s book provides a very useful examination of the choosing of sides in the first place. It is notoriously difficult to explore the reason why men (and women) were royalist or parliamentarian, covenanters or confederates, for they rarely had to explain themselves. By contrast, those who changed sides were often forced to do so as part of the ritual of switching allegiance, and it is through them that we can understand more about the motivation of people during these revolutionary times. We owe Hopper a great deal for bringing their justifications before us in so well analysed a manner.
With the war won and the revolution in place, the victorious parliamentarian army, now a national and republican force, has sometimes tended to fade from sight, despite its presence in garrisons and ports around England and Wales, as well as in the incorporated territories of Ireland and Scotland. It remains in the shadows despite the constant if misplaced claim that the ‘rule’ of the major generals represented the true face of the Protectorate’s military dictatorship, and despite its intervention during the period when Cromwell contemplated the offer of the crown made to him by parliament. Henry Reece tackles this head on, looking at what occupied the army’s time during the period 1649–60, moving from what being in the victorious army led to for its members, on through the daily life of the army to its role in the collapse of the republican experiment. At the outset Reece is dealing with a phenomenon arguably unique in British history up to this time, a standing professional army. He points out that it was not difficult to fill the ranks during the 1650s, as long as it was for service in England or Scotland, but that encouraging volunteers for Ireland was as difficult as it had been back in the late forties. The army remained central to Cromwell even after he had ceased to serve alongside his men in the field. He controlled appointments to command and he was extraordinarily interested in the appointments to the militia as well during the period of the major generals: but then it was an exercise in godliness rather than in purely military matters, and so his interest was not surprising. The influence of the army in politics and the demand for news from London in the regiments and garrisons stationed outside the capital went hand in hand; the outlying regiments did not wish to be excluded or left behind. But there was another aspect to the roles of the officers and men – the physical rewards, land for officers and money for the rank and file. Land usually bought political power and so it did for the soldiers, but it did not seem to corrupt by cementing the purchasers into supporting the regime which had made it all possible: radicals remained radical and moderates found it easy to disagree with the Protectorate, while Cromwell could tolerate a wide spectrum, cashiering only those who made direct and public their opposition to the Protectorate.
If, however, the army remained central to government thinking during the republican years, its forts did not. Building-decline set in rapidly after the war, and neglect was endemic after the battle of Worcester in 1651. The point of maintaining some of the garrisons was dubious, and a duality of roles was quickly established. Infantry based in garrisons primarily defended the coast (there were few major garrisons in the Midlands and the North), while cavalry ensured internal communications and acted as a mobile police force. The impact on those communities where soldiers were based was mixed. Free quarter was all but abolished and loans were available to regiments whose pay was intermittent to allow for day-to-days bills and charges to be settled. A constant military presence, however, required building guardhouses and citadels as well as the commandeering of private buildings, which, in a country unused to a standing army in the days before provincial barrack building, looked very much like a permanent state of war. Reece’s excellent analysis of the downside of a military presence could be rounded out by exploring whether or not there was any financial or business stimulus evident in towns where garrison troops were stationed.
In terms of the government of the shires, Reece makes the important point that as the republican government’s chief concerns were order and taxation, which the localities in the immediate post-war years were unable to manage effectively, the army had filled the vacuum. In this respect the ‘major generals’ represented a change in tone, not practice. This direct involvement in civil government continued in the years after the ‘major generals’ too, establishing continuity throughout the decade, which actually excited little contemporary comment. Indeed, Reece argues that commentaries critical of the ‘major generals’ often post-date the 1650s and were inexorably linked to anti-Cromwell sentiments. While this may or may not be representative of the actual picture, it does suggest that the army and its personalities in the urban and rural arena were becoming accepted as the general day-to-day state of affairs. Reece concludes that the army and its continuous and multipurpose roles in the 1650s did not constitute a barrier to peace but instead ensured the order and stability which could have guaranteed the survival of the republic.
These three books take us further into understanding the period concerned. Though disparate, they are all linked by looking in close detail at the constitution of the parliamentarian and republican cause: how it came to triumph, how it began to cement in place a settlement, and how its nature forced consideration and reconsideration of its purpose and structure. Together the three authors have extended our understanding of the good old cause. Robinson has laid bare its mechanics, Hopper has explored conflicted loyalties to it and to the royalist cause, and Reece has shown us how essential the army was to establishing stability and the rule of law following victory. We have an even greater feel for the war and peace in mid-seventeenth century Britain as a result.