Investigations of a Dog

Previously I wrote about how Henry Marten criticized the Earl of Essex for keeping his army in winter quarters at Windsor in December 1642. It took a whole post just to establish what Marten (probably) said. But did he know what he was talking about, and was the criticism fair?

Henry Marten had no military experience before the outbreak of the First Civil War. That didn’t automatically mean that he was going to be inept. Oliver Cromwell had no previous experience of war either, and he turned out to be very good at it (as I pointed out here, not a super-special genius, but he could hold his own against professional soldiers of similar rank). Marten seems to have been strongly opposed to the monarchy and the House of Lords from very early in his political career, and in 1642 he was a very active supporter of the parliamentary war effort. He used his inherited wealth to pay spies, which along with his extravagant personal spending eventually bankrupted him (Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 4-5, 36, 39-40). His first military command was as governor of Reading but he abandoned the town without fighting when the King’s army approached in November 1642 (Waters, Henry Marten, 17). This fact alone makes it look a bit hypocritical of him to complain about Essex not fighting, but that wouldn’t undermine the point if it was a good argument.

Marten’s basic facts were correct: there was action in Yorkshire and Devon while Essex’s army was inactive at Windsor. But he wasn’t comparing like with like. Most of the forces which were fighting in the north and west were very new. Cornwall wasn’t secured for the King until the Cornish rising in early October, and Hopton’s first (failed) attempt to invade Devon was only made in November (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 40, 43). Lord Fairfax, Parliament’s commander in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had agreed to a neutrality pact in September and didn’t start raising his army until October. Newcastle’s ‘popish’ army didn’t invade Yorkshire until 1 December (Hopper, Black Tom, 26-8, 36). These forces were only just starting their first campaigns when Essex had finished his. Parliament had started raising its main army in June 1642 and appointed Essex as general in July. He set out with the army in September, advancing to Worcester and fighting a cavalry skirmish at Powicke Bridge. On 23 October Essex’s army fought the King’s main army at Edgehill in the first major battle of the First Civil War. After a few days of rest at Northampton, Essex rushed his army south to block the King’s approach to London. He arrived just in time, and although some of his infantry were wiped out by Prince Rupert at Brentford, the main body of the army linked up with the London Trained Bands at Turnham Green. The King decided not to fight when the weight of numbers was against him and retreated to Oxford. It was only after this that Essex settled at Windsor. His army had been on campaign for three months, fighting battles before the northern and western forces had done anything, or even before they existed. A period of rest and recovery in a safe place was probably necessary.

Even when they were completed, the armies fighting in Yorkshire and Devon were significantly smaller than the main armies in the Thames Valley. The best recent calculations put both armies at Edgehill at similar strengths with about 10,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry each (Graham, ‘Earl of Essex‘, 282, 288-9). They also had large artillery trains. Newcastle’s army was the most comparable, but at 8,000 men in total was still only 2/3 the size. The remaining forces were even weaker. Hopton’s Cornish army was only 3,000 strong, and Lord Fairfax had only 2,000 men (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 43; Hopper, Black Tom, 36). Moving and quartering were much easier with a small army than with a big one, especially when rain made the roads muddy and cold made it more necessary for soldiers to sleep indoors. Transporting heavy artillery was a particular problem if there was too much mud. So why not leave it behind? Essex and the King had both made their winter quarters in strong defensive positions. Essex’s headquarters were at Windsor castle, and the King was at Oxford, safely situated between two rivers. If either army advanced it would need heavy artillery if the other wouldn’t come out and fight in the open. Since advancing, especially with an artillery train, was very difficult it made sense for both armies to stay in their winter quarters and prepare for the next year, which is what they did. It’s also possible that Essex’s army was suffering from desertion and shortages of money and horses (although the jury is still out on Parliament’s financial situation after Edgehill), but even without that there was no good reason to expect the army to advance in the middle of winter.

From now until 30 August Cambridge University Press is offering free access to all articles published in its journals in 2009 and 2010, and you don’t even have to sign up for an account. That includes Historical Journal as well as lots of other titles in history and other disciplines. These are a few picks for English Civil War enthusiasts:

• Aaron Graham, ‘Finance, localism and military representation in the army of the Earl of Essex (June-December 1642)‘
• Tom Crawshaw, ‘Military finance and the Earl of Essex’s infantry in 1642 – a reinterpretation‘
• Elliot Vernon and Phil Baker, ‘What was the first agreement of the people?‘

Coming tomorrow: the promised biography of Valentine Stuckley/Stuckey.

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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Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.

The English Civil War historiography goes on and on. This week I’ve been looking at R. C. Richardson (ed.) The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), a collection of articles on local history previously published between 1969 and 1994. Not all of these are directly relevant to the questions I’m focusing on: how is the problem of the civil war/revolution defined? How is “allegiance” conceptualised? How many people did it take to start the war?

Richardson’s introduction to the collection is mostly a straightforward descriptive survey of the historiography (much like his Debate on the English Revolution). He suggests that the approaches used by local historians have become increasingly important to our understanding of the period. In some ways this depends on how you define “local history”. Is microhistory always a subset of local history, or can it be something entirely different? Richardson seems to be assuming that anything less than national history is necessarily local. Maybe this was more or less true at the time he was writing, although even then he lumped in a couple of books which sought to reconstruct the experiences of one individual (Alan MacFarlane on Ralph Josselin and Paul Seaver on Nehemiah Wallington). You can argue that such a narrow focus is necessarily local, but you could just as easily argue that it’s both more and less than local history. Things have only got more complicated in the last ten years. For example, John Adamson’s recent work The Noble Revolt is hardly local history (even though most of the action takes place in Westminster) but its narrow focus is hardly national either.

I’m not going to go through the rest of the collection in order, as I haven’t looked at all the essays, and some needed more comment than others. B. G. Blackwood is getting a whole post to himself tomorrow. Below are some thoughts on John Webb ‘The Siege of Portsmouth in the Civil War’, and Alan Everitt, ‘The Local Community in the Great Rebellion’.

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When I set out on my PhD I was hoping to use the supply of horses to English Civil War armies as a case study to demonstrate how logistics influenced the outcome of the war. In the end it didn’t work out like that. The biggest problem was loss of royalist records. Because they lost the war there wasn’t much reason to keep their archives, and many officers burnt their papers before surrendering. It seems like a miracle that so many parliamentarian records survived the Restoration and ended up in the Public Records Office. This means that there’s a huge disparity in surviving administrative records that makes it difficult to compare both sides. The comparisons I could make weren’t very helpful to my original hypothesis. Where there was definite evidence of how the royalists got their horses it was quite similar to the methods used by parliament at the same time. Clutching at straws, I deduced that the royalists were unlikely to have been able to buy horses on the scale that parliament did in 1644-46 because they didn’t have similar tax revenues. That wasn’t a very safe assumption, and Martyn Bennett quite rightly demolished it during the viva (although the viva was actually a pleasant experience, and I passed with minimal corrections mostly consisting of commas and apostrophes!).

Ultimately there wasn’t much evidence that the royalists were suffering from a major shortage of horses at any crucial stages of the war. It wasn’t until the very end of the war in 1646 that royalist cavalry were making do with worn out or low quality horses. That makes it look like horse shortages were a consequence, not a cause, of defeat. So the study of horse supply doesn’t provide much evidence that finance, supply, or logistics contributed to royalist defeat. Malcolm Wanklyn would say, of course not, that’s far too determinist.

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