As part of the research for my book (saying that still feels a bit weird, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it) I’m going through indemnity cases in class SP 24 in the UK National Archives (aka the PRO). The Indemnity Committee was set up by parliament in 1647 to protect soldiers and officials from prosecution for actions that they had carried out under the authority of parliament, such as requisitioning things for the army or arresting royalists. It also dealt with disputes over sequestered rents and debts, and helped to enforce parliament’s order that apprentices who joined the army should be allowed to count military service towards their term of apprenticeship. If someone was prosecuted in court for acts which were covered by the Indemnity Ordinance (and many were despite the Ordinance banning people from bringing cases of this kind) the defendant could send a petition to the Indemnity Committee asking for protection. In SP 24 there are 58 boxes of petitions and other papers relating to cases, such as depositions and lists of expenses. Unlike some classes these are quite well sorted: papers relating to each case are grouped together and sorted in roughly alphabetical order of the plaintiff’s name (although confusingly the plaintiff in an indemnity case is the defendant in the corresponding criminal prosecution). I’m particularly interested in cases relating to horse requisitioning. According to Ian Gentles, about 30% of the military cases involve horses, although from what I’ve seen so far military cases seem to be a minority as many cases are disputes between civilians over payment of rents and debts due to sequestered estates. It usually takes me less than an hour to skim through a box, look at the first petition in each case to see if it’s about horses, and photograph the relevant cases. Sometimes I get cases that look interesting for other reasons, but I try not to wander too far off topic too often. Since I’m photographing these papers for my research, and since the National Archives allow document images to be uploaded to Flickr, that’s just what I’m doing. I’m also putting transcripts or summaries of the documents, along with links to the images, on the Your Archives wiki. You can see what I’ve done so far, and follow my progress in future, via a Flickr collection and Your Archives category.

So far I’ve uploaded cases from the first 2 boxes. I have another 16 boxes ready to be uploaded, but I’m working on some Python scripts to automate the process. The trial run on the first two boxes proved that doing it all manually is quite labour intensive. First I copied the image files from my camera and sorted them into directories for each box. The directory structure is based on the archival reference, so there’s a directory called “SP 24” with sub-directories called “30”, “31” etc. Then I went into each of these directories and made sub-directories for each case, so it looks like this:

• SP 24
  • 30
    • 1 Abeary vs Windebanke
    • 1 Adams vs Haughton
    • 2 Alford vs King
    • etc
  • 31

And the path to a particular case would be:

SP 24/30/2 Alford vs King

Which looks quite similar to the archival reference.

The numbers at the start of the case name are the part number (each box usually contains three folders called part 1, part 2 and part 3 but I decided not to make directories for these). Up to here it has to be done manually as arranging cases into directories involves looking at the documents to see where a new case begins and to check the names. But from here a lot of it can be automated.

Each directory containing one case needs to have its own photoset on Flickr. I used Postr to upload one case at a time and then used Desktop Flickr Organizer to create a set and add photos to it (I got both of these applications from the Ubuntu repository – if you’re on Windows then… stop using Windows!). Then I used the Organizr on the Flickr website to drag each set into the “SP 24 Indemnity Cases” collection. Once the Flickr photos and sets were in place I went to the web page for each set, manually created a Zotero item for the case, and attached a link to the page. Finally I created a Your Archives page for each case and attached a link to it in Zotero. This includes a template that I made for indemnity cases which gives some basic information in a standardized form and includes a link to the relevant Flickr set. Doing all this manually for each case is quite tedious and takes a long time, so I’m working on some Python scripts to automate the process. What I want the scripts to do is:

1. Upload photos from multiple directories
2. Create a separate photoset for each directory, with a name based on the directory name and path
3. Get the ID of each set and write the IDs and names to a CSV file
4. (At this point I’ll manually edit the CSV file to add data that will be needed for Your Archives and Zotero and which can only be got by looking at the document images, eg full names of plaintiffs and defendants, date of the petition, summary of the case, categories/tags)
5. Use the data from the CSV file to construct a wiki page with the correct template and upload to Your Archives through the MediaWiki API
6. Export an XML file which can be imported into Zotero

So far I’ve written a Flickr upload script which does the first three steps and more or less works. Rather than working directly with the Flickr API I’m using the Python Flickr API library, which makes things very easy. It provides a flickr class with methods to handle API calls and authentication. Before using it you have to go to the App Garden and request an API key, but that doesn’t take long to do. App pages can be kept private, which is what I’m doing in this case as I don’t really have the time or skills to make my scripts fit for public consumption. The next step is to add error handling as the script only works as long as nothing goes wrong. In the real world, there are lots of things that could go wrong. The library throws an exception if it gets an error response from the API. Until I add some exception handling this means that the script just stops on an error. The script will need to keep track of what has and hasn’t been done (photos uploaded, sets created, photos added to sets) so that I can run it again if anything was left undone, and so that it doesn’t try to do the same thing again if it’s already been done. One annoying thing about Flickr’s public API is that it provides no way to create a collection or add sets to a collection. I assumed I’d be able to automate that part of the process but it looks like I’ll still have to do it manually.

For step 5 I’ll be using the Pywikipediabot library. I’ve already done some simple tests on a local MediaWiki installation and it seems quite easy to create a page. Once I’ve finished the script and thoroughly tested it I can ask for a bot account on Your Archives. Step 6 will involve learning a bit more about Zotero RDF. The easiest way to find out how to generate the right code is to export some similar existing items and look at the results.

So just because I’m writing a monograph it doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital history. I’ll still be using lots of digital tricks in the background, but they won’t necessarily be obvious in the text of the book. New technology is certainly making my research quicker and cheaper than it used to be. The stuff that I’ve written about above isn’t exactly revolutionary: it saves labour but it doesn’t offer new insights that couldn’t have been found before. But later in the project I’m planning to do some text mining which I hope will show me things that I couldn’t otherwise have found. I’ll also be revisiting phonetic algorithms for place name identification. And if I can’t think of anything else to blog about, there are likely to be some interesting stories in the indemnity cases.

Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

Back in July I posted a “review” of the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History. One of the strange, interesting, and almost certainly untrue stories in it was that Cromwell and Charles I had a fight when they were small boys:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

As I mentioned, one of the suspicious things about this story is the complete absence of Henry Prince of Wales, Charles’s older, more militaristic, and more Calvinist brother. That led me to believe that the story must have originated after Henry (who died as a teenager leaving Charles as heir to the throne) had faded from popular memory.

Now I’ve found a new lead. I’ve been reading Vernon Snow’s Essex the Rebel, a biography of the third Earl of Essex. During my PhD I read the bits about the civil war but skipped the rest. Now I’m going through the whole thing because I’m interested in all of Essex’s life. Page 43 mentions that at some time from 1609 to 1611 (dates are surprisingly vague in this book) Essex had an argument with Prince Henry while they were playing tennis. Henry called him “the son of a traitor”, and he responded by hitting the prince on the head with a tennis racket! James I seems to have Stoically accepted the assault on his son, telling him that “He who did strike him then, would be sure, with more violent blows, to strike his enemy in times to come”. This prophecy didn’t quite come true, as Essex became the military leader of the armed rebellion against Charles I in 1642. Like Prince Henry, Essex the Lord General has largely faded from popular memory. Just as Henry was overshadowed by Charles, Essex was overshadowed by Cromwell. If the tennis court incident is one of the influences on the story of Charles and Oliver fighting each other, this could be yet another case of Cromwell stealing Essex’s thunder.

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics.

Lawrence draws on a lot of recent work about print culture to show the links between military theory and practice. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “communication circuit”, he does pay a lot of attention to the people (well, men mostly, although Christine de Pizan does get a mention) who wrote, printed, sold, bought, owned, read, used and commented on military manuals. That there were so many military books suggests that there was enough demand to make printing them commercially viable.

The first two chapters set the scene by giving an overview of English military culture in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Lawrence builds on the work of people like Mark Fissel and David Trim which shows that England was not isolated, peaceful or militarily backward in this period. Many English professional soldiers served on the continent, especially in the Netherlands. Lawrence adds to this picture by showing that books were an important part of the military profession. The insult “paper soldiers” was applied selectively to those who either lacked practical experience or were disliked for some other reason. It took combat experience and book learning to make a complete soldier. One was not considered an adequate substitute for the other. Lawrence shows that books were an important part of the military circles which revolved around the Earl of Leicester, the Vere brothers, and Henry Prince of Wales. The multi-talented John Dee was heavily involved in this culture. He was interested in fortifications and sieges, had many military books in his library, and was a tutor to the Earl of Leicester.

In 1607 Jacob de Gheyn published the first ever drill book to include step by step engravings of the postures for pikemen and musketeers. Gervase Markham, not known for originality, became the first author to use copies de Gheyn’s engravings in an English drill book. Although professional soldiers considered books to be important, the English militia was slow to catch on. The first printed drill instructions were not issued until 1623. Infantry were the main users of drill books in the first half of the 17^th century. Lawrence has identified 94 military books published in England after 1603 and before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, of which 41 covered infantry combat. Many of these were written by experienced soldiers. They were based on practical experience, and in turn influenced the practice of those who used them. The Honourable Artillery Company in London was at the centre of English military culture. Company members were highly proficient in infantry drill and several of them wrote books on the subject. Nearly all of the infantry drill books published in England before the Civil Wars followed de Gheyn in describing Dutch drill. The newer Swedish drill developed by Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s appears to have had very little influence in England before 1642. This backs up everyone who says that Prince Rupert was wrong to insist on Swedish infantry formations at Edgehill, and that the Earl of Lindsey was right to defend the Dutch drill which would have been more familiar to English soldiers.

Things could hardly have been more different for cavalry. Of the 94 early Stuart military books only one, Cruso’s Militarie instructions for the cavallrie, was solely about cavalry. A few more covered cavalry as well as infantry, but these were a tiny minority. None of them bore much relation to reality. Gervase Markham is well known as a prolific hack who would publish ill-informed opinions about anything if there was any money in it. Although he had some military experience, it apparently did not inform his drill books, which were mostly copied from other books. They included obsolete and useless formations taken from ancient history which were almost certainly not used by early-modern cavalry. Lawrence seems to have cleared up some of the confusion over Cruso’s biography. Although he served in the Norfolk militia, he almost certainly hadn’t served overseas and probably had no combat experience. His book was an academic work which mostly copied from and commented on other books. It devoted too much space to ancient history and other obsolete things, such as heavy lancers. Despite this, his book was quite popular and often recommended, perhaps because there was nothing else available. Robert Ward also lacked combat experience, copied from other authors, and included obsolete ancient formations. Lawrence does consider Ward to be better than Markham, and believes that his book was reasonably consistent. I think that a careful reading of Ward reveals some serious inconsistencies, probably as a result of carelessly copying bits from multiple sources, but this isn’t a major point as I think we both agree that Ward’s work was unrealistic.

John Vernon, who published a new cavalry drill book in 1644, was different in that his work was more practical and might have been based on personal experience. Lawrence repeats the story that Vernon was a parliamentarian cavalry officer but gives no reference. I’m a bit sceptical because I’ve never seen any definite evidence of an officer by this name. He certainly didn’t hold the rank of captain or above in Essex’s or Manchester’s army. The best John Tincey could show was that there might have been another Captain Vernon in addition to the better documented Captain Francis Vernon, treasurer of Essex’s army. Lawrence points out that some parts of Vernon’s book are derived from Cruso and others, but suggests that the original parts are probably fairly realistic. The biggest weakness of the cavalry chapter is that it doesn’t really compare theory with practice. There are no detailed quotes from eyewitness accounts of battles. Instead Lawrence relies on some lazy clichés, using the phrase “decayed serving men and tapsters” not once but twice. At least he doesn’t buy into the myth of shock. Although he sometimes uses the word “shock” he seems to mean sword fighting rather than “equine battering rams”.

The shortage of cavalry drill books leaves space for a look at a wider selection of horsemanship manuals. The increasing popularity of haute ecole/dressage/manege in the late 16^th century was regarded with suspicion by English soldiers and military theorists because they thought it would distract from more warlike pursuits such as jousting. Citing many modern and early-modern authorities, Lawrence concludes that manege would have had little military value. I’d say that it might have been marginally useful in the close combat between individuals and small groups which usually ensued if neither side ran away during a cavalry charge, but very few horses and men would have had the necessary training. Even the gentleman Sir Richard Bulstrode had to admit that he couldn’t control his horse at Powicke Bridge.

(There’s also a chapter on sieges which I haven’t read, but it’s probably good.)

One thing that slightly annoys me is that, like too many historians, Lawrence uses the word “evolution” to mean gradual change rather than random variation and natural selection. Maybe it’s just my scientific pedantry, or maybe it’s Darwin’s fault for borrowing an existing word instead of making up a new one, but I wish they wouldn’t do it. To me evolution versus revolution is a false dichotomy.

Overall this is a really good book. It’s much more sophisticated than Barbara Donagan’s work on drill books. Lawrence has not assumed that drill books either were or were not related to practice, but has worked hard to find evidence and considered different possibilities. His conclusion that infantry drill books were closely related to practice and that cavalry drill books were not blows away the false dichotomy of sceptics versus enthusiasts and shows that things were more complicated than anyone previously suggested. Because of the outrageous price I can’t really recommend that you rush out and buy it, but if you’re interested in early-modern military history or print culture it’s worth getting out of the library if they’ve got it.

Whatever you do don’t ever get yourself a reputation for writing snarky blog posts about dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell. If you do, people will start giving you other dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell in the hope that you’ll write something funny about them. Which is how I acquired the novelization of the film Cromwell (while searching for that link I found that there’s also a 2008 film called Cromwell that’s about a serial killer and a stripper!). If you’re at all interested in the English Civil War you’ve probably seen the film. I haven’t seen it for a long time but I assume that the structure of the book is quite close to the film (ie bears very little relation to anything historians have ever written, but doesn’t make much sense as a film plot either). Dipping into it at random throws up all kinds of weird things, like John Hampden and Thomas Hammond seem to have been conflated into the same character for no reason other than having some of the same letters in their surnames. But there are some things that are unique to the book. First of all, you’ve got to love the cover:

Is this a historical novel or a heavy metal album? Why hasn’t the image of a fist defiantly holding up a lobster helmet been more widely used on the covers of history books? It’s much more exciting than some of the usual clichés.

Then there’s the style of writing. In the opening scene, Arthur Bates has tried very hard to avoid the usual novelization trap of just tacking “he said” onto every line of the script:

A pair of horsemen made their way slowly across the bleak, lifeless fens of Cambridgeshire, their heads bent against the biting wind that was piling masses of dark clouds in the sky above them. Nothing else in that wintry landscape moved; it was as though the world had paused to gird itself against the onslaught of the bitter season, and even the old Norman church that loomed in the distance seemed to be hunching its shoulders against the wind.

Bates also has the kind of obsession with people’s ages that you normally only find in local newspapers: “Henry Ireton, a lean, keen-eyed young man of 29”; “His [John Pym] 56-year old eyes were blurred and made watery by the relentless wind”; “A pretty, dark-haired girl of 16 [Bridgett Cromwell] looked up from across the room”. He’d probably be very bad at telling the 28-years-old joke: “A 28 year old man strode across the desolate fens, vigorously doing something you would never expect a 28 year old man to do on the desolate fens…”.

Overall this is probably a bit more sensible than the Ladybird book – Arthur Bates at least knows that women have names and that Cromwell didn’t live in Lincolnshire – but somehow I miss the monkey, and the sheer insanity of L. du Garde Peach. It was said that his “only virtue was speed”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if speed was also his main inspiration. I can imagine him knocking out a Ladybird book in one long, frantic night, fuelled by purple hearts and a bottle of gin.

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like.

Ideology is assumptions people take for granted without question. These assumptions might be a certain way of thinking about things which excludes different but equally valid possibilities; they might be factually wrong; they might be harmful. At its narrowest ideology means almost the same thing as prejudice, but at its widest it means almost the same thing as culture. Therefore some might say it’s not a very useful concept, but I still feel that I need it. Prejudice implies an individual failing which individuals can be blamed for. Culture implies something unthreatening, and even benign. Ideology is a widespread system of beliefs which can be potentially dangerous, and which often is dangerous in practice. If an ideology is widespread enough (and I define this very vaguely) it can be described as a dominant ideology, or ideological hegemony. For me the best example of ideological hegemony is gender. Why do people assume so many things about men and women? Why are people classed as men and women at all? Gender often claims to be supported by biology, but it isn’t. Biologists can classify organisms according to their reproductive organs, but this taxonomy is only relevant to the biological process of reproduction and not to anything else. If we’re talking about reproduction then we necessarily have to bring fertility into consideration, and that completely undermines a simple binary opposition between male and female. Is a woman only a woman when she’s fertile? If so, what is she when she isn’t fertile? Does her gender change with her menstrual cycle? Most of what we “know” about differences between men and women is ideology.

Ideology is in minds and in culture, but this poses a problem. No-one really knows enough about how minds and culture work to make any strong and convincing claims for or against the existence of ideology or its influence on historical causation. These days I usually work from the premise that other minds are unknowable. I got this idea from postmodern historian Keith Jenkins, but I’m, also convinced that it’s supported by empirical science. The cognitive and neuro-sciences have given us bits and pieces of evidence but they’re still a long way off from being able to tell us exactly what people think and why. In any case, we’ll never have direct access to minds/brains that existed in the past but which don’t exist now, no matter how far brain scanning advances in the future. So how can I make any claims about ideology or think that it’s any use to me? The key is that it’s in culture as well as in minds, and that culture manifests itself outside minds as well as within them, and these manifestations have real consequences (eg who gets power and wealth, and who doesn’t). Without knowing the insides of minds we can still see traces of ideology in words, actions, and physical objects. If the same assumption crops up in lots of different texts, then we have to suspect ideology, especially if that assumption is empirically wrong (eg women are too small and weak to fight in wars; for more details see this post). This Nietzschean suspicion is necessary regardless of what we do or don’t know about how culture works. Suspicion is not the same as proof or conclusions, but it’s always useful. If you’re not suspicious then you’re not trying. But I don’t buy the idea of false consciousness. Even if you don’t see other minds as unknowable, how can you tell an authentic idea from a false one? If a belief is in someone’s mind and they sincerely believe it (or think they do), what makes it any less sincere than anything else they might believe? If the belief has the same effects on reality, does it matter if it’s authentic or false? (I have some similar reservations about the hidden transcript, but that’s another story.)

Ideology often denies that it is ideology. The most ideological things are often the things which appear most normal. We should be suspicious when anyone says that there is no ideology to see. For example, the revisionist historians who dominated the study of the English Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s were generally hostile to Marxism and feminism. There seemed to be an assumption that these approaches were politically biased and therefore illegitimate, but this ignored the fact that the revisionists had their own conservative or liberal ideological assumptions which inevitably influenced their work. Ideology is not just overt political manifestos, and it isn’t just something that “extremists” have. The revisionist influence on the study of the English Civil War has left us with a dangerously narrow definition of ideology.

Ideology is not easily controlled. This is at least partly because no-one really understands how it works. It can’t be quickly turned on and off by propaganda in response to an emergency. Ideology often serves the interests of governments, and they can influence it in some ways, but what they try to do might not work, or might have unintended consequences. Anti-Catholicism was encouraged by Elizabeth I in England in order to secure her position as monarch. It’s debatable whether it actually became a dominant ideology during her reign, but it certainly was by the reign of Charles I (despite him being more sympathetic towards Catholics than Elizabeth had been). In the early 1640s parliament tried to manipulate anti-Catholicism for its own ends. This was partly successful, because it encouraged the Colchester mob to disarm Sir John Lucas in August 1642, something which was definitely in the interests of parliament. But this sparked off a wave of anti-Catholic and anti-royalist rioting across Essex and Suffolk which alarmed parliament’s supporters among the gentry, threatened property rights, and allowed the royalists to claim that they were the party of order. Because ideology is about what is ostensibly normal, it can be hard to trace the ideology and its effects in abnormal situations (although people’s perceptions of whether a situation is normal or abnormal are likely to be influenced by their own ideological assumptions). Ideology is likely to be one of the things that influence complex events (such as wars and revolutions) but it can’t be a single simple cause. Ideology as I define it is often a better explanation of what doesn’t happen than what does. Why wasn’t there a women’s revolution, or a civil war between men and women? That’ll be the dominant ideology.

Ideology is not easy to spot, because it masquerades as the normal and the unremarkable. We have to work hard to overcome our own ideological assumptions and question what is there by default. Cultural changes can sometimes make it easier to identify ideology in the past. For example, white British people are now more likely to recognize that golliwogs and minstrel shows are horribly racist, and be shocked that they were mainstream family entertainment until quite recently. This does not make us superior to people in the past. Many of our ideological assumptions which we have failed to question will look awful in the future, as George pointed out when he caught the Guardian being homophobic in 1918. But this is not progress (and progress itself is a dubious ideology – see this discussion at Historiann). Ideology does not necessarily improve over time. I’m not being a complete moral relativist here. I think some ideologies are better than others, but things can get worse or stay the same as well as getting better. Liberalism has its problems, but it’s better than fascism despite being older.

Ideology is built into language. The grammar and vocabulary we have access to make it difficult to avoid perpetuating ideology. In English there are many insulting words for a promiscuous woman (eg slut, slag, slapper, tart, whore) but not for a promiscuous man. The double standard is right there in that ostensibly most neutral of books, the dictionary. Use of the word “raped” as a passive verb is common and grammatically correct, but puts us on a slippery slope towards victim blaming. Compare “someone raped her” with “she was raped”. Both technically correct, both technically saying the same thing, but with a significantly different emphasis. The common colloquial habit of using “got” instead of “was” to indicate the perfect passive makes it even worse. “She got raped” makes it sound like something that the victim brought on herself through her own failings, or even wanted!

So that’s what I mean when I write about ideology. I like to think that I use the concept carefully, but I’m not about to defend people who don’t use it carefully (and I think Julian Putkowski is someone who does use it carefully and gets good results from it). I’ll probably write some more about seeing ideology soon. In the meantime, be suspicious and trust no-one.

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from.

As I said in my previous post, Goldstein’s book didn’t pay enough attention to cultural differences within the west over the last several hundred years. This is understandable in such an ambitious and wide-ranging book. To cover so much ground he necessarily had to abstract things and omit lots of details. Previously I pointed out that the ideal of the warrior as the epitome of masculinity doesn’t seem to hold for 17th century England. Since then I’ve become more aware that although women have nearly always been excluded from combat roles, this exclusion hasn’t always been the same. In contrast to the Whig idea of progress, there might actually have been more opportunities for women to participate in combat in the past. Brilliana Harley and the Countess of Derby were both elite women who effectively commanded garrisons when their houses were besieged by the enemy during the English Civil War. In these cases their social status, and particularly their position of authority over the household in the absence of their husbands, overrode normal gender roles. In practice there isn’t necessarily that much difference between commanding servants and commanding soldiers. As I said in my last Horses, War and Gender post, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms, which suggests that it was considered to be a real possibility. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby in 1645 was that they were carrying knives, and were therefore seen as a threat (although the women who were killed and mutilated there probably weren’t Irish or whores or likely to kill anyone). In Warrior Women and Popular Balladry (pp. 128-8), Diane Dugaw pointed out that boundaries between combat and non-combat roles got very blurred by the presence of women on board Royal Navy ships in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Although women were eligible for campaign medals for service at the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, they were denied them on the grounds that it would leave the army and navy “exposed to innumerable applications” from women! Dugaw also showed that the cross-dressing warrior woman wasn’t just a fictional character in ballads. In the early-modern period many women actually did disguise themselves as men and join the army or navy. That they got away with it suggests that perceptions of gender were very different in that period, and that clothes were probably more important than the body. Although the ballads make breasts (often lily white) an important signifier of gender, they also suggest that it was easy to keep them hidden. Later ballads from the 19th century show an increasing preoccupation with the slenderness of waists and fingers, which suggests that perceptions of the body were changing.

Things had changed even more by the First World War. There was a new obsession with biology: new recruits to the British Army had to undergo a thorough medical examination and were graded on a scale of fitness for combat. This would have made it pretty much impossible for someone with female genitals to pass as a man. But despite this new fashion for empirical scientific measurements of the soldier’s body, the idea that women were weak and unsuitable for combat was much more dominant than it had been 100 years earlier. Remembering the evidence presented by Goldstein, this is the opposite of what you might expect. It’s easy to imagine a Whiggish narrative of the progress of science and reason, where a “medieval” superstition that women are “the weaker vessel” gives way in the face of hard empirical evidence, allowing women to achieve equality and men to congratulate themselves on how progressive they are. No such thing in reality, of course. During the First World War the idea that women might serve in combat roles in the British Army was not even on the cards. It was just assumed that they couldn’t and shouldn’t. This is despite the fact that the British Army was in a desperate situation. The pre-war regular army was very small, while the Territorial Force was under strength and hardly trained to fight at anything above company level. During the war the army suffered unprecedented casualties and expanded at an unprecedented rate to an unprecedented size. In 1916 Britain introduced universal conscription for the first time ever. Things got so bad that the minimum height requirement was reduced from 5’3” to 5’1”. Short men were initially recruited into special “bantam battalions”, and later mixed in with normal battalions. Men who were unfit for front line combat were still retained by the army when possible, often for manual labour or home service. For example, the service record of my ancestor Thomas Wenham shows that he was only 5’2” tall, and so wasn’t called up for service immediately. When he did get into combat he was wounded in the head, which rendered him unfit for further combat, so he went on to serve with the Royal Defence Corps in Britain, then went back to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. It’s quite likely that some of the women who went to work in factories as part of the war effort (something which is often seen as a Whiggish step forward) would have been at least as able to fight as many of the men who served in the army.

So the exclusion of women from combat roles in Britain is constant at a certain level of abstraction, but if we look closer we can see that it changed quite a lot. The way that it fluctuates reminds me of Judith Bennett’s concept of patriarchal equilibrium. Bennett used the wage gap to illustrate this: in medieval England the average woman’s wage was about 75% of the average man’s wage, and it’s about the same now. The wage gap hasn’t always stayed the same, but it has fluctuated within a certain range: women’s wages have always been between 50% and 75% of men’s wages. Equal opportunities legislation hasn’t fundamentally changed this situation. The exact size of the gap often changes, but it’s always true that women’s wages are less than men’s wages. Bennett came up with patriarchal equilibrium to describe, and start to explain, this situation. Although some things might improve for women in some ways, the system always manages to readjust so that women never quite achieve equality. This idea is exactly what we need to allow us to move beyond Goldstein’s model of universal exclusion of women from combat. Things can change, but in a more fundamental way they stay the same. The gendering of combat roles isn’t just analogous to patriarchal equilibrium: it’s part of the same thing, and possibly a very important part. Historiann is right on the money when she says:

Mark my words:  the U.S. won’t give up on sex segregation in the military so easily and quietly as the officers quoted in the New York Times say they have, because military service, and in particular combat service, is the one thing that differentiates men from women citizens.  Of course, this difference is for the most part theoretical, since the vast majority of Americans don’t in fact serve in the military, but a whole aircraft carrier’s worth of assumptions and privileges rests on this slender thread.

The exclusion of women from combat roles justifies male privilege. The really neat ideological trick here is that being exempt from combat duty can be portrayed as a privilege itself, but it’s a false privilege. The male British soldier can say, “we have to go off and fight in the muddy trenches and get killed and wounded, while you get to sit at home and enjoy unprecedented freedoms and have sex with American sailors and airmen”. The perception that men suffer in wars for the benefit of women, and that women are spared the suffering, is not true and has all sorts of dangerous consequences. The rhetoric of remembrance says that we’re all (men and women alike) supposed to be grateful to the men (and a few women, but fewer than there could have been) who fought for our freedoms, but in Britain during the First World War women were not allowed to vote, abortions were illegal, and marital rape was not illegal. The men who joined up in 1914 were probably not fighting for gender equality (and any argument that British victory led to greater equality logically depends on Whiggish assumptions about inevitable progress). It could be argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 was a setback for the suffragettes, because everyone “knew” that women couldn’t fight, therefore why should they be given the same rights as the men who were fighting?

There must be plenty more scope to look for examples of how the exclusion of women from combat roles is used to justify male privilege. I’m not claiming that war is the key to patriarchal equilibrium, but it has to be one of the things which contributes to long term gender inequality.

1. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2007).
2. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
3. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
4. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003). 
   

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next.

In my first post I naively expected animals to be a state of nature where there was only biological sex and no gender. I don’t think this is viable now. I’m increasingly following Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur in the view that gender versus sex is a false dichotomy. Perceptions of the body are always gendered. Furthermore it now looks hopelessly wrong to assume that non-human species have no culture or gender. Dominance hierarchies can be heavily gendered. Chimpanzees have patriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by violence, but Bonobos have matriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by lesbian sex, despite the genetic similarities between the two species (see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender).

This actually leads to a simpler way of putting the question: if humans always perceive each other in gendered ways, why wouldn’t they also perceive animals in gendered ways? In fact there is scientific evidence that humans even perceive inanimate objects in gendered ways! A post at Babel’s Dawn mentions an experiment which showed that the grammatical gender of a noun affects how people perceive and describe the physical object which the noun refers to. Genus and sexus are not separate in people’s minds. They bleed into each other in a way which can interfere with perception. This could also have major implications for metaphors. Saying that one thing is like another might cause people to perceive them as the same thing, with serious consequences for how they get treated in reality (we all know about early-modern misogynists who said women were more like animals than men).

As I started to read more about early-modern gender I realized that some of my own assumptions about the relationship between gender and biology were specifically modern. While perceptions of the body (and especially the genitals) have always played a part in gender ideology, modern science has made the reproductive organs appear more important than they did before. In early-modern England clothes were probably more important than bodies. This opened up many possibilities for gender swapping. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat, David Cressy looked at the case of a young man who passed as a woman for long enough to gatecrash a lying-in party (one of the few kinds of all female spaces in England at this time). Diane Dugaw wrote a whole book about warrior woman ballads which featured women dressing as men in order to join the army or navy. She showed that this behaviour was possible and not even particularly uncommon in real life (although I now think the differences between ballads and reality might be significant – in ballads the woman was always found out eventually, usually by exposure of the body, although usually not specifically the genitals; in real life they weren’t always found out and sent home; how many more were never discovered at all? Were the ballads a way of dealing with anxiety about this possibility?). If people could change gender by changing their clothes (and since the female soldiers were perceived and treated as male, their gender effectively was male) where does this leave horses?

When I read Dugaw I thought that this was a problem because horses didn’t wear clothes, but then at the Roehampton horse conference Erica Fudge reminded us that horses did wear clothes. I had a quick chat with Erica afterwards, and the point I should have got straight to is that although horses did sometimes wear clothes, sometimes they didn’t. Horses sometimes had their genitals on display in public in a way which would have been very unusual for humans. So where does that leave us? Horses can wear clothes, but don’t have to, which seems to open up even more possibilities and raise even more questions. Why don’t displays of horse genitals cause the same anxieties that displays of human genitals cause? (Or do they? Did William Prynne have issues with this?) Is a stallion with big balls on display the epitome of masculinity? Do the trappings of a medieval war horse signify masculinity? Or does covering up the body (especially the genitals) make a horse less masculine? Can a mare in trappings masquerade as a stallion? Does a more masculine horse make the rider look more masculine? How male are geldings? How does the creation of an artificial third sex through routine castration complicate the ideas of male and female? This is why I was asking strange questions about testicles at the conference.

As Jennifer Flaherty reminded us at the Roehampton conference, there are lots of representations of war and horses in Shakespeare’s history plays, and lots of interesting ways that they intersect with gender. She told us about the substitution of horses for women, and how horsemanship contributed to masculinity. I think there’s a lot more potential for looking at how the horses themselves are gendered, and especially how their roles in war are gendered. I’m hoping that Jennifer or someone else will have done this, or will be doing it, but I just have a few observations on Henry V:

Good war horses usually seem to be referred to as steeds. This is a very masculine word, coming from the Old English for stallion (as does stud) according to the OED.

Bad horses are referred to as jades. The OED is vague on the etymology: it might come from a Norse word for mare, but there doesn’t seem to be much definite proof. Jade meaning bad woman seems to appear later than jade meaning bad horse, but the relationship between them isn’t very clear from the OED. In any case one might still connote the other. In the light of the experiment about grammatical gender that I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be surprising if two unrelated meanings of the same word can bleed into each other in people’s minds. After all, this is how puns work.

Shakespeare seems to assign a lot of agency to horses. They threaten each other, they neigh for present service, they seem to want to keep fighting when their riders are dead. Does this suggest that horses were imagined to be active participants in combat, and not just transport for their riders? How widespread was this idea? Does it require the horses to be male because only men were supposed to fight?

When I started out on this project I was heavily influenced by Joshua Goldstein’s hypothesis that war, gender, and the exclusion of women from combat roles all appear to be more or less universal, and that war and gender shape each other. The more I think about it the more problems I can see with his model. As I pointed out here, his assumption that the point of gender roles is to create warriors doesn’t seem to hold for early-modern England, where (according to Alexandra Shepard) manhood was defined mostly by domestic paternalism (where age, wealth, marital status and other things intersected). War and soldiers were often viewed with ambivalence, and it seems to me that a career in the military was no more than a second best kind of masculinity. As Bruce Boehrer pointed out in Shakespeare Among the Animals, the third Earl of Essex turned to soldiering after the failure of his marriages and his humiliation as an impotent cuckold.

Goldstein acknowledged that although some form of gender is found in every culture, there are wide variations in the forms it takes and the meanings it has. I suspect that if we look closer we might find similar variations in the forms and meanings of war. Although women have mostly been excluded from combat roles in most cultures at most times, I’m not sure that this translates to a universally rigid boundary between active male and passive female roles. The boundary might sometimes be more or less rigid or in a slightly different place, and there might be very different justifications for it. The exclusion of women from combat roles in early-modern England might not have been as exclusive as in later periods. For example, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby was that they were carrying knives.

That’s all for now. There’s still obviously a lot to do, and I’m still not entirely sure what that is, so it’ll be a long time before I have anything publishable. There’s a whole world of possibilities for looking into gendered perceptions of animals. I’m limiting myself to horses in war to keep it manageable, so there’s plenty of scope for other people to do horses in other situations, and every other species.

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford Paperbacks, February 2001).
3. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
4. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
5. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
6. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
7. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish.

The book starts with the story that as a baby Oliver was carried onto the roof by his grandfather’s pet monkey. I have no idea if this is true but I don’t really care because it’s just so cool. He was nearly dropped off a roof! By a monkey! I don’t think there’s any biography which couldn’t be improved by the protagonist nearly being dropped off a roof by a monkey. Apart from anything else, the cause of death “kild by a monkey” would make the best parish register entry ever. As the author says “it is impossible to imagine what England might have been like to-day if the monkey had dropped him”. It is pretty hard to imagine what England might have been like in 1963 if Cromwell had been killed by a monkey as a baby. But try to imagine it anyway. Maybe you could write a story about it…

The story on the next page almost certainly isn’t true:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

If this had actually happened I like to think that Oliver would have got his ass kicked by Prince Henry, who is strangely absent from the story. Maybe he was off somewhere being a good protestant.

The same page states that: “Oliver had six sisters but no brothers, so his friends were the boys of the little town, who were his schoolmates”. God forbid that he would ever be friendly with his sisters. That could have made him effeminate and stopped him from becoming A Great Man. You’ll also notice that his sisters don’t have names. In fact no woman is ever named anywhere in the book. Even Elizabeth Cromwell is just introduced as “the daughter of Sir James Bouchier”. Once they’re married she’s just “his wife”.

At this time in England there were in England a large number of people known as Puritans. We have come to think of these people as disliking any sort of happiness and always going about with gloomy faces, intent on preventing others from enjoying themselves. This is wrong. They were not all like that.

Unfortunately no-one told the artist, as the accompanying picture features the gloomiest puritans ever:

Unless the people dancing round the maypole are supposed to be non-gloomy puritans.

Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, but he liked music and dancing and was fond of going to horse races. There were many like him.

This is true. Cromwell and others like him were perfectly able to combine music, dancing and horse racing with an obsessive hatred of altar rails, transubstantiation and the Book of Common Prayer. No wonder that “when James I followed Elizabeth, he demanded that all Puritans be driven out of the country”!

But on the next page the stereotypes come right back:

If we had lived in England in Cromwell’s time we would have noticed that there was a wide difference between the clothes worn by the Puritans and those who were on the side of the King and the Church. It was a time when wealthy people mostly dressed in coloured velvets and silks, with lace collars and cuffs, and rich embroidery on their coats and dresses. Many of the men wore lace or coloured ribbons at their knees, and all wore their hair very long. The King and his court must have been a very gay and colourful sight.

No laughing at the word “gay” please. It’s just the emptiness of the signifier.

The Puritans did exactly the opposite. They wore simple clothes in dull colours, with plain white collars. The women wore dark dresses and no jewellery. What chiefly distinguished the Puritan men from the Royalists, as the King’s men were called, was the fact that the Puritans cut their hair shorter. Because of this, they were later known as Roundheads. The Puritans were quiet and sober in their speech and habits, and always strictly observed the Sabbath day.

Oh yes, all those quiet and sober speeches about Shibboleths, and curse ye Meroz, and to your tents O Israel. Let’s face it, puritan preachers were what John Sinclair would have been like if he abandoned the radical counter-culture and became a right-wing christian fundamentalist.

Anyway, “Many things were happening in England during the eleven years of the King’s government without a Parliament”. (Apparently not in Scotland or Ireland, but we’ll get to that later.) This is one of those things:

It’s William Prynne in the pillory. Surely the most famous thing about Prynne’s ordeals at the hands of Star Chamber is that in addition to being pilloried, whipped, and branded, he had his ears cut off. Twice. But in this picture he’s surprisingly unmutilated. I know it’s a children’s book, but surely children love all that stuff. I feel cheated that we never had Horrible Histories when I was little. The text describes Prynne as “Another brave Englishman… who had written against the illegal taxes”. That and saying actresses were whores. Such a brave man. Misogynistic above and beyond the patriarchal standards of his time, but brave nevertheless.

Cromwell’s involvement in the enclosure dispute around St Ives in the 1630s gets a mention. His role is exaggerated way beyond the evidence, but there’s another problem: it’s described as “another battle for freedom in Lincolnshire”. This is the start of a weird obsession with Lincolnshire. Later we’re told that Cromwell raised his first cavalry troop in Lincolnshire, and that after that “he was put in charge of the whole of Lincolnshire”, where he had to search the house of his uncle Sir Oliver Cromwell. Look L. du Garde Peach, Huntingdon just isn’t in Lincolnshire and never has been.

After eleven years, during which the King had governed the country as he pleased, he found that even the illegal taxes did not bring in enough money. So he was forced again to summon a Parliament.

No mention of the Scots Covenanters or the Bishops Wars. Anglocentrism is pretty standard for the time this was written, but it’s taken to a really absurd degree here. At the battle of Marston Moor “The Parliament army had been joined by some Scottish soldiers”. Either this is a serious understatement, or it’s an unorthodox counting system in which “some” means “about 20,000″. But they weren’t there for long: “The Cavaliers on the right scattered the Scots and thinking that the battle was won, rode after them as they ran away”. That would be the right wing commanded by well-known Scotsman Sir Thomas Fairfax, with his Scottish Yorkshire cavalry. Meanwhile David Leslie and his cavalry, who actually were Scottish, were on the left helping Cromwell and didn’t run away. “Many brave Englishmen were killed on both sides at the battle of Marston Moor”. No, the Scots weren’t brave. They ran away, remember? And you might be surprised to learn that they changed sides as early as 1646. When Charles I escaped from Oxford “He finally reached Newark, which was held for him by a Scottish army”.

But if you think the Scots have it bad, spare a thought for the Irish.

Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel. He was a good father to his children and the friend of all honest men.

See, he was only cruel in Ireland. And that doesn’t count.

In Ireland, Cromwell was the most hated of all. There were still men in Ireland who were ready to fight for King Charles II after Charles I had been executed. In order to crush them Cromwell crossed to Ireland with an army. The Irish were no match for trained and experienced soldiers. The two towns of Drogheda and Wexford, which tried to hold out against them, were besieged and quickly captured. All the defenders were killed without mercy. To this day the people of Ireland hate Cromwell’s memory. They have never forgotten Drogehda and Wexford.

They’re so unreasonable. Can’t they see what a Great Man he was? And it was only Ireland. But surely the Irish armies were also trained and experienced soldiers. Maybe it was just their essential Irishness that made them lose.

But the greatest Anglo-bombast comes in the 1620s with a description of Cromwell’s journey to London to study at the Inns of Court (which have no record of him, according to the DNB): “Although the English roads were bad, English inns were at that time among the best in the world”.

I’m probably oversensitive to cavalry myths, but you have to admit this is pretty stupid:

The foot soldiers of the seventeenth century had not got the weapons to stand up to a charge by soldiers on horseback. Prince Rupert, the King’s nephew, commanded the Royalist cavalry and often charged right through the Parliament army of foot soldiers.

Yeah, those 18 foot long wooden poles with big metal spikes on the end. What were they called again? Pikes? I don’t think those would have been any use for fending off horses. Or maybe they didn’t really exist. But the Great Man knew exactly what to do about this:

So Cromwell and Hampden decided after the battle of Edgehill, that they must have more mounted soldiers to fight Prince Rupert’s cavalry. Cromwell immediately set to work to raise more troops of horse soldiers. These men were known as the New Model Army.

Just forget about the Self-Denying Ordinance,  Sir Thomas Fairfax, Philip Skippon, Robert Scawen, the Army Committee, the monthly assessment and all that crap. The New Model Army was created by Cromwell and Hampden. Just after Edgehill. And it was all cavalry. It is true.

Cromwell was so good that he didn’t really want to execute the king or expel the rump. He just had to. Maybe it was his destiny as a Great Man.

Cromwell now found himself obliged to do what King Charles had done earlier: he went to the House of Commons with a regiment of soldiers at his back. But where Charles had failed Cromwell succeeded.

See, the real problem with Charles wasn’t that he went into the Commons with soldiers, it was just that he did it wrong. As we’re told on the page about the Five Members: “King Charles was a very stupid man”. That might sound harsh but it’s not so very different from what lots of proper historians have said.

The book ends:

It is a blot on the history of our country that when Charles II returned, Cromwell’s body was taken from the tomb and his head set upon a pike [you know, those things that didn't exist] for all to see. It was a mean and unworthy revenge on the part of those whom he had beaten in a fair fight, whose country he had preserved from tyranny, and whose freedom he had ensured.

Bastards. They’re almost as bad as the Irish. But for a final thought, let’s go back to the very first paragraph:

Oliver Cromwell is one of the most important figures in English history. In the time in which he lived, a great man was needed to lead the people of England in their fight for freedom, and to-day we still enjoy freedoms which he won for us.

There’s a cookie for anyone who can name a freedom we enjoy today (sorry I mean to-day) which Cromwell won for us. Come on, there must be at least one. And don’t forget to thank the monkey for not dropping him.