Investigations of a Dog

And now a post about the English Civil War (you know, the thing that I’m actually qualified to write about). I’ve just read a really good article by Malcolm Wanklyn in the new issue of War In History, reassessing the Earl of Manchester’s generalship. In previous posts I’ve been quite critical of some aspects of A Military History of the English Civil War by Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, but I haven’t said enough about that book’s good aspects, so I hope this post will redress the balance to some extent. I had my doubts about whether there was a coherent “determinist” school dominating civil war historiography, but in this article Wanklyn successfully attacks something much more definite. Until now there has been almost total consensus among historians that the Earl of Manchester, commander of the Eastern Association army, was slow to react and unwilling to fight in the autumn of 1644, and did not want a decisive victory.

Wanklyn shows convincingly that this is pretty much all lies. The sources that most historians have relied on can’t really be trusted as much as they have been, because of the circumstances in which they were created. The failure of the combined parliamentarian armies to destroy the King’s army at Second Newbury in October 1644 was a major disappointment which fed into existing animosity between Presbyterian and Independent factions, and personal rivalry between commanders, to spark off an acrimonious dispute in which everyone blamed their opponents for the failure. That parliament investigated the issues in detail has proved to be a double edged sword: while the examinations of witnesses created plenty of documentary evidence, these documents are compromised by hindsight, special pleading and scapegoating. Too many historians have uncritically accepted Oliver Cromwell’s version of events, but Wanklyn compares his story with other sources (particularly letters sent between the army commanders and the Committee of Both Kingdoms throughout the campaign) and finds that it doesn’t add up. By placing Manchester’s actions in the context of the strategic situation, Wanklyn shows that there is very little evidence of operational ineptitude or reluctance to fight.

This is all good, but my only criticism is that it doesn’t go far enough. Wanklyn writes: “Manchester was only one member of a committee set up to manage the army group, and his personal contribution towards the catalogue of mistakes and missed opportunities that followed is much less clear than Cromwell and his supporters would have us believe”. This makes it clear that he is still assuming that something went wrong and that someone must be to blame. Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, he strongly hints that the fault might have been more with Cromwell than with Manchester. I’m sympathetic to that point of view, as I tend to be very suspicious of Cromwell worshippers. One of the major problems with A Military History was that Frank Jones seemed to be convinced that Cromwell was a military genius who revolutionised cavalry tactics in a way which had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war, a view based more on wishful thinking than on a critical analysis of the evidence. However, I’m also suspicious of a simple revisionist view which automatically takes the opposite position to everyone else just to be different. I don’t think this is what Wanklyn is actually doing, but I’ll come back to him later.

There are some huge problems with trying to study Cromwell objectively (even if you think that objectivity is at all possible, Cromwell gives you difficulties way beyond the usual ones). We all know that he went on to play a leading role in the regicide and later became Lord Protector. That isn’t particularly relevant to his career during the First Civil War, but in practice it’s difficult to ignore. It can be very tempting to construct a teleological narrative in which Cromwell’s rise is inevitable because of his inherent “greatness”, and to look for early signs of his greatness in the First Civil War. At the other extreme, it can also be tempting to believe that Cromwell somehow conspired to get himself into a position of power that he didn’t deserve. Furthermore, Cromwell was very good at constructing his own mythology and getting other people to believe it, as shown by the malign influence of his dubious testimony on the reputation of the Earl of Manchester from 1644 to 2007.

If I had to try to offer an unbiased assessment of Cromwell’s military career in the First Civil War (and trying to be unbiased about anything is might well be futile) I’d say that he was a competent Lieutenant-General of Horse. He seems to have been good at his job, but there were other officers who had similar jobs and were good at them. Sir William Balfour was Lieutenant-General of Horse in the Earl of Essex’s army. He kept the reserves under control at Edgehill, commanded the detachment of Essex’s cavalry which helped Waller to defeat Hopton at Cheriton, and led the successful breakout from Lostwithiel. You don’t get to hear about him much unless you’re a hardcore civil war enthusiast, but that’s probably down to the fact that he didn’t go on to become Lord Protector.

If Wanklyn is blaming Cromwell for the failure of the second Newbury campaign, or at least suggesting that Cromwell’s share of the blame should be greater than has been previously assumed, he isn’t necessarily replacing bias in favour of Cromwell with bias against Cromwell. He convincingly shows that Cromwell’s testimony is unreliable by comparing it with evidence from all parties created before the dispute broke out. However, he is operating within a paradigm in which blame has to be apportioned. In the terms of that paradigm his argument is very strong, but I find the paradigm itself to be severely limited. I don’t like the idea of judging generals and their decisions. That’s fine – I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to. But it’s more than personal taste. I think trying to find fault with generals leads to a very narrow view of the past, which fails to account for the chaos and complexity of war. How to win a war is something which is still not very clearly understood. There are so many variables involved it seems overambitious to claim that if only a commander had done x instead of y things would have turned out better. And better for whom? The blame paradigm seems to implicitly assume that the side in question winning would have been A Good Thing.

The recent historiography of the First World War (yes, I had to mention it; I wouldn’t let it lie…) suggests that we can get a much deeper understanding of war by abandoning assumptions that something went wrong and someone must be to blame. Do civil war historians want to be like Alan Clark and John Laffin, or can we do better than that?

1. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.
2. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).