Investigations of a Dog

Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s an added bonus: some paragraphs that I’ve just cut from the article I’m working on. I’ve decided not to take it too far into the debate over “determinism” and the outcome of the war because it’s not entirely relevant to what the article is really about, and I needed to lose some words somewhere. It’s also not very safe territory to be on, and I’ve changed my mind about some of this stuff since I wrote it, so I don’t necessarily believe everything that’s written below.

The success of parliamentarian finance and supply has a direct bearing on debates over the outcome of the First Civil War. Malcolm Wanklyn has recently criticised a “determinist” view of the war and argued that advantages such as control of London and the navy did not make the result of the war inevitable. Ben Coates has found that the parliamentarian navy was unable to protect trade from privateers, and that with its economy depressed by royalist blockades, London was by no means a bottomless pit of tax revenue. Wanklyn is right to stress tactical and operational factors, otherwise it is exceptionally difficult to explain how the combined field armies failed to destroy the King’s army at second Newbury while the New Model Army, not much bigger than the combined strength of its predecessors and composed of many of the same personnel, managed to destroy the King’s army at Naseby. The incremental improvements in supply and finance in the spring of 1645 are not necessarily enough to explain this drastic reversal of fortune in the field. One possible exception is the influence of the supply of food on operations. Aryeh Nusbacher argues that improvements in finance in 1645 allowed the soldiers to be fed by a private market – an important exception to the general trend towards centralization – and that better food supplies allowed Fairfax to keep his army concentrated for longer. This suggests that Fairfax might have had more operational freedom than his predecessors, but still does not explain the difference between tactical failure at Newbury, when the three armies were concentrated, and the tactical success of the similarly sized New Model Army at Naseby. It could be that this difference is explained by obvious tactical factors: at second Newbury the parliamentarians were attacking and the royalists had a strong defensive position, while at Naseby the royalists decided to attack in the open.

There is clearly room for more debate on this important issue, but we need to move beyond a simplistic and adversarial dialectic between “determinism” and “decisive battles” to consider how a broad range of factors could combine in a complex manner. One crucial question which Wanklyn fails to address is: why was the loss of an army at Naseby so devastating for the royalist cause? Parliament had lost an army at Roundway Down in 1643, leading to the loss of a large area of territory. Although this tipped the balance of power in favour of the royalists, it was not immediately fatal to the parliamentarian cause. Thanks to their meticulous record keeping we know a great deal about how strong the parliamentarians were in the later years of the war. Loss of records means that we know far less about the royalists. The fragments of surviving evidence suggest that there was not a severe shortage of horses or saddles in 1645. However, Ronald Hutton argued that the royalists could not replace the infantry lost at Naseby and had already emptied garrisons to get an army into the field. The New Model Army gained a reputation for invincibility, but could its apparently spectacular successes have been a consequence rather than a cause of royalist collapse?

Similarly, the successful supply and finance of parliament’s field armies in the second half of the war could be a symptom rather than a cause of parliamentarian strength, based on the resources of London, the South-East, and East Anglia. This does not mean that parliamentarian victory was inevitable. The royalists could have won the war before attrition became a serious issue.

[and then it goes back into important stuff that I actually know about...]

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).