Investigations of a Dog

The 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell is coming up soon (even if you’re pedantic enough to commemorate it on 3rd September Old Style it’s not that far off!) so Ted Vallance is organizing a one-off Cromwell themed blog carnival. It’s probably no surprise that I’ve decided to look at Cromwell’s early career as a cavalry officer in the First Civil War. Cromwell is more famous for becoming commander of the New Model Army, and then Lord Protector. Although these things didn’t happen until much later they have seriously skewed perceptions of Cromwell’s military career from 1642-46. For a long time there was a strong Whiggish tendency to look for signs of future greatness in his earlier actions (much as I love C. H. Firth he was one of the major offenders here). This hasn’t been helped by Cromwell’s own self-mythologizing or parliamentarian/Independent propaganda in the Thomason Tracts. I’m going to try to disregard all that and compare Cromwell as a cavalry commander with one of his contemporaries, Sir William Balfour. By 1644 Cromwell and Balfour had similar rank and responsibilities, but Balfour didn’t go on to be Lord Protector and so has been largely forgotten.

[I wrote this off the top of my head and never got round to checking all the facts or putting in references. It doesn’t matter too much because it’s mostly just about my personal opinion, but be aware that some of it might be wrong. The best source for Balfour is Edward Furgol’s article in the DNB]

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The word “Ironsides” is variously associated with Oliver Cromwell, his cavalry regiment, and even English Civil War cavalry in general. The consensus now seems to be that “Old Ironsides” was originally a nickname of Cromwell himself (I’m not sure why he was called that or when it started). It seems likely that “Ironsides” later spread to his regiment, then to all the cavalry under his command as Lieutenant-General of horse, then to parliamentarian cavalry in general, then to civil war cavalry in general. For example, “Ironsides” was used as the title of John Tincey’s book about civil war cavalry.

There was another folk etymology which suggested that Cromwell’s cavalry were known as “Ironsides” because they wore heavy armour. In the classic Cromwell’s Army, C. H. Firth took down T. S. Baldock for repeating the myth that Cromwell’s cavalry were heavily armoured cuirassiers in contrast to Prince Rupert’s supposedly unarmoured light cavalry. As Firth says, the vast majority of cavalry on both sides during the First Civil War were equipped as arquebusiers, and no new research in the last hundred years or so has changed that. I had assumed that the myth belonged to the 19th century but today I discovered that it was much older.

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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.

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