Investigations of a Dog

People often used to ask me whether horses were imported into England during the civil wars to supply the armies, and were usually surprised when I said no. Peter Edwards was the first person to research this in any detail, and my work just confirmed his conclusion that imports of horses were negligible. A few other historians have mentioned horse imports in passing, but apparently without any significant evidence. This post is a modified version of the appendix of my thesis which refuted all these suggestions in (too much?) detail. It’s a cautionary tale of how rumours and misunderstandings can turn into “facts”, and the lengths I had to go to in order to verify or falsify them.

Peter Edwards has done very thorough work on the horse trade in early modern England. One of the many interesting points to come out of this is that there were almost certainly enough horses in England in the 1640s to meet the demands of the various armies. Before war broke out, England was exporting large numbers of horses to the rest of Europe. This trade appears to have dropped off in the 1640s, which suggests that horses bred for export were being diverted to military use. This is almost the exact opposite of weapons and armour, which did have to be imported in large quantities. Peter’s book Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000, ISBN: 0750914963; worth reading for a different perspective on the civil wars, and not just because it mentions some of my research) even suggests that the outbreak of war might not have been possible without these arms imports.

When I started my PhD research I naively thought that I might be able to challenge Peter’s view of horse imports (or their absence). I tried very hard to find new evidence of horse imports, and did turn up one document which no-one had mentioned before, but ultimately I had to agree that horse imports were negligible. Arms imports are very well represented in English and Dutch records, which have been searched thoroughly by Peter Edwards and his research assistants. If horses were imported in significant numbers you would expect them to appear in the same records. In three years going through all the parliamentarian administrative records I only found one document which mentioned imported horses (PRO SP28/263 f. 133). This was an exciting discovery, but it didn’t change the overall picture as it only mentioned 17 Dutch horses being landed at Dover and taken to London in December 1642. Compared to the thousands of horses known to have been bought, requisitioned, or donated from England 17 is next to nothing. There is no other evidence for horse imports by the parliamentarians.

There is slightly more evidence for royalist imports, but this tends to be more anecdotal because most royalist administrative records were destroyed. Peter Edwards found a document among the Duke of Newcastle’s papers which suggests that the royalists were negotiating with the King of Denmark for a supply of arms and horses (Nottingham University, Portland Manuscripts, Pw 1 409). However, he concluded that nothing came of this because he found no evidence of the horses being shipped to England, and plenty of evidence that the King of Denmark was ambivalent about helping Charles I (Dealing in Death, pp. 204-7). The only other mention of horses coming from Denmark is in a very dubious pamphlet in the Thomason Tracts which claims that a fleet of 50 Danish ships loaded with ammunition, horses, and hay had been defeated by the Earl of Warwick in the narrow seas in June 1642 (E. 150 [26]; you can find all of the Thomason Tracts on EEBO if you have access to it). This sounds like pure fantasy, and there is no mention of it in the Commons Journals.

There is more concrete evidence that the Earl of Warwick captured a ship bringing 40 horses from Flanders in August 1642 (Bodleian Library, Tanner Manuscript 63, f. 125; Thomason Tracts E. 112 [9] and E. 112 [36]). On 3 August 1642 Prince Rupert made a contract with William Hickson, master of the ship “Mary” from Scarborough, to bring 10 horses from Rotterdam (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 5th report appendix: House of Lords Manuscripts, p. 41). The Journals of the House of Commons give two more insubstantial examples. On 1 July 1642 there were reported rumours of horses and arms being prepared in the Netherlands, and on 4 August 1642 there was an order concerning some French cavalry officers who had been detained in Canterbury (although there was no specific mention of them having brought horses with them, it’s at least possible that they did).

That’s all the evidence there is. Allowing for loss of records, it’s possible that the royalists imported a few hundred horses but these would mainly have been brought over by mercenary officers for their own use and would not have made a significant difference to mounting the thousands of cavalry raised in England during the First Civil War.

The most curious thing is that the works which perpetuated the myth of horse imports didn’t even cite any of these sources. These are the ones I came across:

Alan Turton, Chief Strength of the Army: Cavalry in the Earl of Essex’s Army (Partizan Press) p. 13: This is a well researched booklet which proved very useful to me during my PhD research because it lists the captains of every cavalry troop known to have served in Essex’s army. It also got my hopes up because page 13 contains the claim that parliament imported large numbers of horses. No reference though. I got in touch with Alan and he said that he didn’t write the reference down but that it was somewhere in SP28 in the PRO. As this class contains around 400 boxes of documents with up to 1,000 folios in each volume, that doesn’t narrow it down much. I’d looked through a lot of SP28 anyway because it was the most important source for my thesis, and all I found was that one document with only 17 horses in it. Although there were some boxes I never looked in, I suspect from the quote in Alan’s book that he had misinterpreted some of the lists of horses that were procured in England.

Robert Stradling, “Spain’s Military Failure and the Supply of Horses”, History, 69 (1984), p. 214: This is a really good article, and one of the first pieces of research to focus on horse supply. However, an incidental comment in a footnote stated that after 1642 the royalists imported horses from the United Provinces to England “in considerable numbers”, giving Peter Young and Kevin Sharpe as the sources of this information. I e-mailed Robert Stradling to ask him for more information. He said that the information from Peter Young was in a popular magazine, probably Radio Times or a Sunday colour supplement but that he couldn’t remember any more than that. I thought about trying to track down this article, and even looking at Peter Young’s correspondence which is preserved at the National Army Museum, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. There was no way I could ask Peter Young himself, since he’s been dead for quite a while. As far as I know he never mentioned the horse imports in any of his academic works. Stradling also said that the information from Kevin Sharpe came during an informal conversation after a research seminar. So I e-mailed Kevin Sharpe, who couldn’t remember the conversation but kindly searched his notes for me. He found no record of any horse imports during the First Civil War and thought he might have been talking about the Bishops’ Wars. I stopped there because I wasn’t doing the Bishops’ Wars and by this time it was apparent that the footnote was just based on vague hearsay which couldn’t be corroborated. This is not a criticism of Robert Stradling. His work on Spain is still excellent and I’m not going to hold one minor and tangential point against him.

Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester University Press, 1966) p. 166: Mentions that in the summer of 1642 men and horses began to arrive at Dover for the King, but gives no reference. I never got hold of Professor Everitt to ask him for clarification, and all I can find to support this is the entry in the Commons Journal about the French officers detained at Canterbury. It might just have been an isolated incident rather than the beginning of anything, and it’s not proven that there were any horses involved.

And so pedantry triumphs and one more myth is destroyed. I admit it’s not a very widespread or serious myth, but it’s an interesting case study of how misconceptions can get out of hand. For a bigger example, see Robert Poole, ‘”Give Us Our Eleven Days!”: Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England’ (Past and Present, 149, 1995, pp. 95-139; also available free at Find Articles). Maybe Hayden White was right about footnotes creating a false sense of truth, but in two of the three horse import cases the assertion wasn’t even backed up by a footnote. The value of footnotes isn’t that they automatically make something true, but that they allow readers to check for themselves whether it’s true or not.

Bibliography

1. Peter Edwards, ‘The Supply of Horses to the Parliamentarian and Royalist Armies in the English Civil War’, Historical Research, 68 (1995), pp. 49-66.
2. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
3. Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, June 2004).
4. Alan Milner Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester UP: Leicester, 1966).
5. Robert Poole, ‘Give us our eleven days!’, Past and Present, 149 (1995), pp. 95-139.
6. Robert A. Stradling, ‘Spain’s Military Failure and the Supply of Horses’, History, 69 (1984), pp. 208-221.
7. Alan Turton, Chief Strength of the Army (Partizan Press: Leigh-On-Sea, 1992).