Investigations of a Dog

When I set out on my PhD I was hoping to use the supply of horses to English Civil War armies as a case study to demonstrate how logistics influenced the outcome of the war. In the end it didn’t work out like that. The biggest problem was loss of royalist records. Because they lost the war there wasn’t much reason to keep their archives, and many officers burnt their papers before surrendering. It seems like a miracle that so many parliamentarian records survived the Restoration and ended up in the Public Records Office. This means that there’s a huge disparity in surviving administrative records that makes it difficult to compare both sides. The comparisons I could make weren’t very helpful to my original hypothesis. Where there was definite evidence of how the royalists got their horses it was quite similar to the methods used by parliament at the same time. Clutching at straws, I deduced that the royalists were unlikely to have been able to buy horses on the scale that parliament did in 1644-46 because they didn’t have similar tax revenues. That wasn’t a very safe assumption, and Martyn Bennett quite rightly demolished it during the viva (although the viva was actually a pleasant experience, and I passed with minimal corrections mostly consisting of commas and apostrophes!).

Ultimately there wasn’t much evidence that the royalists were suffering from a major shortage of horses at any crucial stages of the war. It wasn’t until the very end of the war in 1646 that royalist cavalry were making do with worn out or low quality horses. That makes it look like horse shortages were a consequence, not a cause, of defeat. So the study of horse supply doesn’t provide much evidence that finance, supply, or logistics contributed to royalist defeat. Malcolm Wanklyn would say, of course not, that’s far too determinist.

In his 2004 book A Military History of the English Civil War, Wanklyn attacked what he called a determinist view of the civil war, which he claimed dominated the study of the war and assumed parliament’s victory was inevitable. I’m not sure that many people ever did believe that, and since Wanklyn doesn’t name all of them or spend very much time arguing against them, it’s hard to tell who or what he’s reacting against. Having hinted at scope for further interesting debate on the matter, he closed it down as quickly as possible and launched into a very traditional narrative of campaigns and battles which could almost have been written by A. H. Burne (though thankfully without that euphemism for conjecture “inherent military probability”). This narrative contained some very strong analysis of operational strategy, giving a particularly balanced view of the Earl of Essex and the Committee of Both Kingdoms which rescues them from the unfair criticism of many other historians. However, it’s a long time since it was considered safe to discuss operational strategy without giving equal consideration to logistics, since the two are very closely linked. Aryeh Nusbacher’s 2001 thesis contained some very interesting new ideas about how the New Model Army’s food supply system allowed Fairfax greater freedom of movement than his predecessors. Whether or not you agree with this argument, it can’t be ignored.

To the extent that Wanklyn does engage with the “determinist” school, he makes some good points. Control of the navy and London were not necessarily the great advantages that have often been assumed (although London was a major centre of manufacturing, and that must have been some kind of advantage). Ben Coates has shown that the navy couldn’t stop royalist privateers from disrupting trade, and that this, along with royalist blockades of inland trade, depressed London’s economy, with a knock-on effect on tax revenues. However, for a book which claims to restore contingency to the centre of attention, Wanklyn’s work is surprisingly teleological. All roads lead to Naseby and anything which isn’t directly linked to Naseby is unimportant. Above all, he fails to answer the question of why Naseby was so decisive. I don’t think it’s enough to point out that the King’s field army was destroyed there. The destruction of an army doesn’t always decide the outcome of a war in spectacular fashion. Rossbach didn’t knock the French out of the Seven Years War. They were back the next year with another army. We don’t even have to go that far. At Roundway Down in 1643, the parliamentarians lost an entire army, which led to them losing most of the West country, including Bristol. But the destruction of Waller’s army didn’t knock them out of the war.

Losing an army is only fatal if you can’t replace it. Having lost the west, Waller was placed in charge of the Southern Association and built a new army. Meanwhile, the Earl of Manchester was building another army in the Eastern Association. By the end of July 1645, the royalists had no field army capable of opposing the New Model Army and were apparently unable to get a new army together. This might seem paradoxical when my study of horse supply suggests that the royalists weren’t completely exhausted this early. The real problem was infantry. In The Royalist War Effort Ronald Hutton argued that by 1645 the King was chronically short of infantry, and that in order to get an army into the field he had to empty garrisons. While cavalry could usually escape from even the worst defeat, infantry had no chance of getting away from Naseby, since they were completely surrounded by infantry, cavalry, and dragoons. With those infantry effectively wiped out, garrisons fell easily since there were not enough men to defend them and no field armies to relieve them. Wanklyn didn’t mention Hutton’s argument, which implies that he has no answer to it. Hutton is also inconvenient for Wanklyn’s stereotyping because he can’t easily be described as a “determinist”. His view that the royalist cause “committed suicide” at Naseby obviously stresses tactical and operational contingency as well as attrition.

Although it seems fairly clear that the royalists ran out of infantry first, I don’t think this makes the outcome of the war inevitable. Parliament also had major problems getting enough infantry into the field. The numbers of soldiers available certainly weren’t directly correlated to the population of the areas controlled by each side. The establishment of the New Model Army was intended to include 14,400 infantry, but in practice it never reached this strength during the First Civil War. The amalgamation of the three field armies (Essex, Manchester, and Waller) brought the cavalry more or less up to its full strength of 6,000, but provided only around 7,000 infantry. Impressment had to be used to recruit the infantry, but it proved to be expensive and inefficient. Many pressed men deserted at the first opportunity. Those who stayed were unlikely to be very effective compared to the veterans of the old armies. It’s difficult to tell how long these men had been in the army. It would probably be pushing it too far to suggest that many of them had fought at Edgehill, but just going back to 1644 we can conjecture that they would have gained significant combat experience and developed some esprit de corps. In that year, Manchester’s men had marched into Yorkshire, assaulted York, stood firm at Marston Moor, and then marched down to Newbury. Essex’s infantry had marched all the way to Cornwall and back, then assaulted the royalist gun positions at Newbury.

Essex’s march into Cornwall is particularly interesting here. Lostwithiel has often been seen as a disaster for Parliament. It certainly didn’t do Essex’s reputation any good, and the loss of the entire artillery train along with around 1,000 draught horses was hardly trivial. However, the infantry got off very lightly, being allowed to march away on the condition that they didn’t fight again until they got to Southampton (once they got to Southampton they were rearmed and reclothed quite easily). It seems remarkable that the royalists threw away the chance to deprive the parliamentarians of so many veteran infantry, but holding large numbers of prisoners was impractical and not usually done in this period, while killing such a large number of prisoners in cold blood would probably have been unacceptable. If they had been able to take these men out permanently, the outcome of the war might have been very different. Essex’s army provided around half of the 7,000 veteran infantry for the New Model. Without them Fairfax would have had much less of an advantage as Naseby. Maybe Cromwell and his cavalry would still have saved the day, but maybe they wouldn’t. Would Fairfax even have been willing to give battle if the numbers weren’t stacked in his favour?

This is all part of my pet theory that Essex’s army is important both in its own right and for the development of the New Model Army, and has been unfairly and inexplicably ignored. It’s tangentially related to an article I’m writing, but that article concentrates on the horse side of things and only briefly mentions infantry and the “determinism” “debate”. So I should get back to that article and finish it, but I just thought I should post something about my actual area of expertise rather than pretending to know about the First World War.

1. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642-46 (Routledge: London, 1999).
3. Aryeh J. S. Nusbacher, ‘The Triple Thread’ (Oxford University, PhD, 2001).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).