Investigations of a Dog

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

Wanklyn says this is not a postmodern book, but he is clearly open to new ideas and able to put them to good use. Citing Keith Jenkins, he reiterates that history is not the reconstruction of the past but a narrative created by a historian using traces of the past and heavily influenced by the historian’s circumstances and the expectations of the audience. He also reminds us that meaning is likely to be in the mind of the reader, not in the text. This is an encouraging sign that theory is not as controversial as it used to be, and that it can be incorporated into military history without an influx of impenetrable jargon. Wanklyn still believes that fact and fiction are absolute, but places a sliding scale of opinion in between. He makes it clear that in practice most of what we “know” about battles is somewhere on this scale. This is close enough to what I think. Although I don’t accept that there can be absolute facts, the sliding scale of probabilities can sometimes get close enough for it not to matter in practice.

In the past it has been all too easy to dip into an accepted canon of easily accessible primary sources to extract battle accounts without thinking too carefully about the origins of the text. We’ve all done it. I know I have. Wanklyn points out that many of these canonical sources are untrustworthy for various reasons. The frequently used printed sources are not always accurately transcribed from the original manuscripts and have sometimes been abridged or altered. The most dramatic example is Edmund Ludlow’s memoirs which were dealt with at length in Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are doubts about the often cited memoirs of Sir Richard Bulstrode since only part of the original manuscript survives. Like many pamphlets in the Thomason Tracts, Lionel Watson’s account of Marston Moor was edited before being published. Drill books have also been used too trustingly to fill in the gaps in the primary accounts. Wanklyn points out that they were an ideal which was not necessarily achieved in practice. I might go even further than this as I have my doubts about whether cavalry drill books in this period influenced, or were influenced by, reality at all.

Battlefield archaeology has offered new evidence to add to our narratives, but there are dangers here too. Wanklyn is sceptical about patterns of recovered musket balls since they could have been dropped without being fired, and many might have disintegrated, been removed without being recorded, or moved from their original positions.

Having blown some big holes in what previous historians have written, Wanklyn goes on to offer his own versions of events at a selection of major battles. Since most of what happened in these battles doesn’t meet the criteria which he sets for fact, he offers only hypothetical narratives. Instead of creating a truth effect, he is honest about the limitations of the evidence and his interpretations of it. He refuses to speculate on some points, such as the number of soldiers at First Newbury, because a reliable answer is impossible to find. On other points, such as the length of the cavalry fight on the western flank at Naseby, he makes tentative conclusions but points out that the sources are too contradictory to allow any certainty. I would much rather see this kind of caution than overambitious and unsupported claims.

For a book with this title, there is surprisingly little discussion of decisiveness, but this is not particularly relevant and was dealt with in Wanklyn and Jones’s A Military History of the English Civil War (2005). For the purposes of critiquing previous reconstructions and offering new hypotheses, it doesn’t necessarily matter how decisive the battles were. This is more of a look at the canon of famous civil war battles. Therefore Marston Moor is included despite Wanklyn’s doubts about how much long-term impact it had, and Adwalton Moor is left out, despite David Johnson’s claims for its importance (see David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 The Battle That Changed A War (2003; ISBN: 0954053583). I was slightly disappointed that Roundway Down didn’t make it in, as I would have thought it was both famous and important.

Too many previous historians have been too hostile to the earls of Essex and Manchester and over-estimated the genius of Cromwell. Wanklyn does not make this mistake, offering a balanced assessment of all the generals which recognizes the extent to which rival commanders tried to assassinate each others’ characters. There is still some blame for things that went wrong, but less than in most books. He also refuses to pour scorn on Prince Rupert for the defeat at Naseby, arguing that re-forming cavalry for a second charge was extremely difficult, and that even Cromwell only definitely achieved it once and possibly by accident. Furthermore we can’t be certain that it was Rupert who summoned the baggage train to surrender, and the royalist cavalry might have been trying to get to the other wing to attack Cromwell when they found their way blocked.

Wanklyn still maintains that the historiography is too dominated by determinism. While I’m not convinced that everyone is a determinist or that the people identified as determinists in A Military History all think the same things, we certainly agree that anyone who thinks that resources made the outcome of the civil war inevitable is wrong. In this book Wanklyn acknowledges that by 1645 the royalists were short of infantry, but he also points out that the decisions of their commanders made the situation worse, and that sometimes both sides threw away numerical advantages through bad decisions or bad luck. There is a lot more work to be done to explain the result of the war, and Wanklyn is dead right that it has been scandalously neglected compared to the amount of work on its causes.

Finally there is little sign of the “equine battering rams” interpretation of cavalry charges which I thought was the weakest point of A Military History. Wanklyn now argues that changes in cavalry tactics were less dramatic and less significant than Frank Jones suggested. This book makes infantry at least as important as cavalry.

Wanklyn’s conclusion that a definitive account of any civil war battle is unattainable is exactly the sort of thing I like to see. This is far from being a pessimistic view. There will always be room for more battle narratives, and that is an opportunity not a problem. It’s really exciting to see a historian relatively late in his career still coming up with new ideas and pushing the boundaries. This book, especially the first three chapters, should be read by anyone interested in military history. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, on generalship, which will complete the trilogy.

1. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (Routledge, February 2003).
2. David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 the battle that changed a war (Blackthorn Press,: Pickering :, 2003).
3. Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War (Pen & Sword Military, October 2006).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).
5. Blair Worden, Roundhead reputations (Allen Lane: London, 2001).