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]

Perceptions of Cromwell’s early military career have been very heavily influenced by two famous but non-contemporary quotes.

First, this generalization from Clarendon:

And that difference was observed shortly from the beginning of the war, in the discipline of the king’s troops, and of those which marched under the command of Cromwell, (for it was only under him, and had never been notorious under Essex or Waller,) that, though the king’s troops prevailed in the charge, and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day: which was the reason, that they had not an entire victory at Edge-hill: whereas Cromwell’s troops, if they prevailed, or though they were beaten, and routed, presently rallied again, and stood in good order, till they received new orders.

Too many people have taken this as objective truth even though Clarendon is notoriously unreliable. He only ever witnessed one battle (Edgehill) and never saw Cromwell in action. He was also very hostile to Prince Rupert. In fact the situation Clarendon describes only happened at Edgehill and Naseby. Royalist cavalry did re-form for a second charge at Hopton Heath, Roundway Down, and Marston Moor. Furthermore Malcolm Wanklyn points out that the cavalry charge which Cromwell directed against the royalist foot at Naseby was carried out mainly by reserves which had not been engaged with the enemy horse. Sir Charles Lucas did the same thing at Marston Moor, and Sir William Balfour did it Edgehill.

Second, this from Cromwell himself (from Carlyle’s letters and speeches):

At my first going out into this engagement, I saw their men were beaten at every hand; I did indeed, and desired him that he would make some additions to my Lord Essex’s army of some new regiments; and I told him I would be serviceable to him in bringing such men in, as I thought had a spirit that would do something in the work. This is very true that I tell you, God knows I lie not. Your troops, said I, are most of them old decayed serving men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows ; and said I, their troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality : do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be enabled to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage, and resolution in them?

We should be suspicious of this because it actually comes from a speech made in 1657. The main purpose of the speech was to explain why he didn’t want to be king, but there’s a strong element of self-justification. Malcolm Wanklyn recently showed that Cromwell told self-justifying lies about the Second Newbury campaign after the event (see this post). I think this speech falls into the same category. It certainly isn’t true that Essex’s cavalry were “beaten at every hand” even early in the war. There isn’t much surviving evidence of the social status of cavalry troopers on either side. Essex’s troops certainly did contain some servants, but they also contained some gentlemen. Cromwell’s apparent admiration for the qualities of gentlemen and their sons here is directly at odds with another famous quote from a letter he wrote in 1643:

I had rather have a plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call “a Gentleman” and is nothing else.

This isn’t intended to be lazy iconoclastic revisionism. I think Cromwell was good at his job, but other men had similar jobs and were also good at them. Sir William Balfour, an experienced professional soldier, was appointed Lieutenant-General of Horse in the Earl of Essex’s army in 1642. He was also colonel of a horse regiment and captain of a troop of heavily armoured cuirassiers (if the folk etymology that I discussed here carried any weight then Balfour’s men would have had more right to be called Ironsides than Cromwell’s). Balfour was officially subordinate to the General of Horse, the Earl of Bedford, but it’s generally reckoned that Bedford was more of a figurehead and that Balfour did the real work. In any case, Bedford deserted to the King in 1643, and although he changed his mind and returned to parliament he wasn’t trusted with a military command again. Eventually Balfour succeeded him as General of Horse. (see this document for dates of Balfour’s commissions). Cromwell had no military experience at the outbreak of the First Civil War, but like many other MPs, peers and their sons, he was made captain of a horse troop in Essex’s army.

Balfour commanded the cavalry reserve at Edgehill and used it to good effect. Both of Essex’s cavalry wings ran away when they were attacked by the royalists, but all of the royalist horse, including the reserves, chased them off the field and failed to return. Meanwhile, Balfour and Sir Philip Stapleton (commander of Essex’s lifeguard – a troop composed entirely of gentlemen) turned the battle around by charging the royalist foot. What was nearly a disaster for parliament turned into a draw, thanks to Sir William Balfour and his “decayed serving men and tapsters” who were “beaten at every hand”. Cromwell played little part in this battle because he arrived late, through no fault of his own. Cavalry often had to be quartered over a wide area so that they could feed their horses, and by the time Cromwell had received his orders and arrived on the field there was not much that he could do. He acted competently by keeping his men in order and observing the situation, but there was no opportunity to do anything spectacular.

Cromwell started to gain the attention of the press in 1643. By this time he had been promoted to colonel of a regiment in the army of the Eastern Association. However, the victories which his legend was founded on were not very big or important. He successfully beat up enemy quarters at Grantham, but this was a fairly routine operation for cavalry and not something which signified a military genius at work. Although Cromwell won a tactical success at Gainsborough it had no operational value: he was forced to withdraw immediately afterwards because of the arrival of Newcastle’s whole army. In the face of overwhelming numbers he was right to retreat, and his gradual withdrawal using part of his force to cover the retreating parts shows that he knew what he was doing, but again this is something that any competent cavalry officer would have been able to do. Winceby was a bigger tactical victory, and at the operational level helped with the Eastern Association’s reconquest of Lincolnshire, but was not really in the same league as Roundway Down, Marston Moor, or Naseby.

Balfour played little part in the campaigns of 1643 as he was away, but the performance of Essex’s cavalry was by no means completely inadequate. The army was seriously short of money and horses, which limited Essex’s options. The skirmish at Chalgrove in June 1643 is often seen as a disaster for the parliamentarians, but that’s just because John Hampden was mortally wounded there. If he hadn’t been present the engagement would be much less well known. Essex’s cavalry were beaten but it was nowhere near as disastrous as Roundway Down or even Lostwithiel. The pressure from Rupert’s cavalry and the weakness of his own army, particularly the cavalry, persuaded Essex to retreat to Great Brickhill. However, Rupert didn’t have things all his own way. Earlier, on 26th March, Arthur Goodwin, a colonel of horse in Essex’s army, took out a force of cavalry to raid the countryside around Oxford. He drove away many horses and other livestock and returned to Aylesbury unopposed. This was how cavalry raids were supposed to work. Beating up quarters was a hit and run operation designed to do the maximum damage with the minimum risk. Rupert probably didn’t intend to fight a pitched battle when he set out to raid Chinnor on the night of 17th June. Although they ultimately lost, Essex’s cavalry managed to catch him and make him fight before he could get away. In August, Essex’s army was reinforced and sent to relieve Gloucester. On the way back they had to fight their way through the royalist army at First Newbury. The cavalry had mixed success in this battle. They successfully repulsed the first two royalist cavalry charges but were driven off by the third, leaving the infantry to face the enemy horse unsupported.

1644 was the year when Cromwell became really important as a soldier. Promoted to Lieutenant-General in the Eastern Association army, he was second in command to the Earl of Manchester and in charge of the army’s cavalry. Meanwhile Balfour was back and had been promoted to General of Horse under Essex, but his and Cromwell’s responsibilities would have been similar because Manchester didn’t have a General of Horse. In March 1644 Essex sent Balfour with a large force of cavalry to reinforce Waller’s army (Essex and Waller did manage to co-operate sometimes), helping to defeat Hopton’s army at Cheriton. This battle doesn’t tend to get as much attention as Cromwell’s victories, but it was another occasion when parliamentarian cavalry beat royalist cavalry.

Next we come to Marston Moor. This was one of Cromwell’s finest hours. The Eastern Association horse went head to head with Prince Rupert’s cavaliers and won. Unfortunately the ensuing rivalry between English and Scots, and Presbyterians and Independents, led to Cromwell’s contribution being overrated by his friends and underrated by his enemies. But even if he had left the field to get a wound dressed, and even if it was Leslie bringing in the reserves of Scots horse who tipped the balance, Cromwell had still done a good job. Wanklyn points out that being able to reform the cavalry for a second charge might have been a consequence of the fact that they were already at a standstill after a long hand to hand fight. It should also be remembered that Goring also re-formed his men for a second charge – otherwise Cromwell would have had no more cavalry to fight against! And Lucas kept the reserves out of the chase and directed them against the allied foot, just like Balfour had done at Edgehill and Cromwell would do at Naseby. Nevertheless, Cromwell did what a Lieutenant-General should have done and played a major role in the victory (whereas the generals of the three armies had left the field and played little part in turning things around).

The triumph of Marston Moor makes an obvious contrast with the disaster of Lostwithiel. While getting his army cut off on the Fowey peninsular didn’t do Essex’s reputation any good, it did give Balfour an opportunity to enhance his. Essex slipped away on a boat, the infantry and artillery surrendered, but the cavalry escaped. Balfour led them through the royalist lines and all the way back to Hampshire. Of course wars aren’t won by retreats, but this was an impressive achievement which deserves more recognition.

In the autumn of 1644 the armies of Essex, Manchester, and Waller concentrated at Newbury, probably hoping to destroy the king’s army once and for all. This was the first time that Cromwell and Balfour had operated together since Edgehill, but now they were roughly equals. Both were assigned to Waller’s force which was to march around the royalist position and attack from the rear. Second Newbury turned out to be a disappointment, and the ensuing recriminations have given an even more distorted view than the rivalry over Marston Moor. Therefore it’s very hard to say what went wrong or whose fault (if anyone) it was. What seems reasonably certain is that Cromwell’s cavalry didn’t achieve much on the day, while Balfour had better success on the other wing. But ultimately the attack failed to achieve enough before darkness fell, and the royalists escaped. Wanklyn hints that Cromwell and his cavalry were in a position to detect the escape but failed to do anything. I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt as it might not have been obvious that the whole royalist army was escaping, or that letting them go would have been a bad thing. After a hard and indecisive fight, it might have seemed attractive to give the enemy a golden bridge. Whatever really happened, it now seems fairly clear that Cromwell lied about many things afterwards and that these lies have distorted historians’ interpretations of the events.

The outcome of the dispute was the Self Denying Ordinance and the creation of the New Model Army. When it came to selecting a cavalry leader for the new army, parliament had a problem. Everyone who had held the rank of Lieutenant-General or General of Horse was either barred from serving or declined to serve. Fairfax was to be General of the army. Cromwell, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and Sir Philip Stapleton were MPs. Balfour and John Middleton were Scots. Sir Richard Grenville had deserted to the king. The Earl of Bedford was a peer, and had deserted to the king, and was possibly never any good in the first place. Of the experienced foreign mercenaries who had been Commissary General or Quartermaster General, only Vermuyden made it into the New Model, and he resigned before long.

The post of Lieutenant-General was left open until June 1645 – at Naseby Cromwell wasn’t even officially a member of the New Model at all. He was granted a temporary exemption from the Self Denying Ordinance and was sent by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to reinforce Fairfax with some cavalry raised in the Eastern Association. He arrived just before Naseby and was given command of the right wing. His attack routed the royalist Northern horse, and he still had enough reserves in hand to attack the royalist foot. Weight of numbers and the experience of the troopers must have given him an advantage, but his experience and leadership qualities probably counted for something. Ireton on the left also outnumbered Rupert, and his men were no less experienced than the veterans in Cromwell’s first line, but he had only been appointed Commissary General that day. He had never commanded a whole wing before, and until the formation of the New Model had probably never commanded a regiment in a battle.

Overall Cromwell and Balfour were both unusual. They achieved a rank and level of responsibility which few men held. They were both good at their jobs, but neither had a perfect record. Cromwell did well at Winceby, Marston Moor and Naseby, but less well at Second Newbury. Balfour did well at Edgehill, Cheriton, and Second Newbury, but was out of action in 1643. Cromwell deserves a reputation as a good soldier, but he was not unique, and his military record did not make it inevitable or obvious that he would become Lord Protector. Sir William Balfour had an equally good military record and deserves more attention.

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’.

Webb’s article on the siege of Portsmouth is a straightforward narrative of events, with some analysis of the reasons for Goring’s failure to hold out. The siege of Portsmouth is interesting to me in this context because it was one of the first (arguably the first) examples of formal warfare taking place in England in the summer of 1642 (well before the raising of the standard at Nottingham). Therefore it’s crucial for any account of when, how, and why fighting broke out. I now think I might be able to exclude it from my calculations, but then again I might not. According to Webb, the numbers of soldiers involved in the siege were quite small – two horse troops and one foot regiment from Essex’s army plus the Hampshire trained bands and some sailors, against a garrison of only a few hundred. The involvement of the trained bands is noteworthy here as I’ve tended to assume that they weren’t very important on the grounds that they didn’t form part of Essex’s army in 1642. While Portsmouth and trained bands have no bearing on the battle of Edgehill – a point at which everyone can agree war was happening even if they can’t agree on how long it had been going on – they could be quite important in their own right.

Alan Everitt’s 1969 article comes with a postscript in which he wishes to abandon a couple of over-optimistic paragraphs but says he stands by most of what he said. Although he makes some claims about local communities in general, the core of the article focuses on the very different experiences of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire in the civil war, emphasising that generalisations are difficult because no two counties are the same. He makes an excellent point that the civil war added to the complexity of local government, something confirmed by my own work.

On allegiance, Everitt describes “royalist” and “parliamentarian” as “conventional categories” which only apply to a small minority of gentry (this article only considers the gentry – not unusual for the period when it was written). Everitt finds that the government of Leicester was not strongly committed to either side (suggesting that this contributed to the sacking of the town by the king’s army in 1645) while Northampton “from the outset, was decisively on the side of parliament” (p. 23). This is not a claim about public opinion in Northampton, but about the fact that a puritan minority was in control of the town government, the parish church, and the county committee.

Everitt finds a long running feud between rival families over control of the county government to be a major influence on allegiance in Leicestershire. No explanation is offered as to why the Hastings family chose to support the king and the Grey’s chose parliament, but it seems to be assumed that once they had made their choices it was almost inevitable that their factions would follow them. Sequestration and Compounding records are used quite uncritically here, but Everitt is interested in actions more than inner thoughts and uses the delinquency charges as evidence for localism rather than royalism, contrasting Leicestershire royalists who fought predominantly in local garrisons with Northamptonshire royalists, who were more likely to fight outside their county. He suggests that the Leicestershire royalists included members of the moderate majority who were forced by circumstances to take sides (p. 25), and that abstract ideals had to compete with the complex realities of life when decisions were made (p. 30). However, the reliance on parliamentarian definitions and evidence of delinquency is a potential weakness, particularly as parliamentarians are identified by very different criteria: mainly having served on the county committee. This is not comparing like with like. Therefore the inferences which Everitt makes from the evidence about relative numbers of royalist parliamentarian gentry, concentrations of each in certain parts of the county, and whether they tended to come from older or newer families, are all unsafe.

Finally a couple of interesting points which are not entirely relevant to what I’m working on at the moment. Everitt suggests that there might have been a certain (although not decisive) economic influence on Northampton’s parliamentarianism, because the town supplied large numbers of shoes and horses to parliament’s armies. This is a flawed argument for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Everitt generalises from a couple of examples of horses being bought at Northampton. More recent work by Peter Edwards (confirmed by my own work) has shown that the Eastern Association commissaries visited several places to buy horses and that Northampton was by no means the most important, while Essex’s army and the New Model got thousands of horses from dealers in London. Peter Edwards does support the view that Northampton was the most important centre of shoe making, although this has been questioned by Ben Coates. But above all, it should be obvious that the royalists needed just as many shoes and horses as the parliamentarians (and since they had no access to London they relied even more heavily on provincial towns to supply their needs), so there is absolutely no reason why the town couldn’t have benefited from the war if the corporation had supported the king instead. However, it’s interesting that Everitt is prepared to talk about the potential benefits of war. He also suggests that the war might have had little impact on day to day life in the provinces, and that its effects were nowhere near as bad as harvest failure. This is in strong contrast to John Morrill and others who have seen the war as a major disaster for ordinary people.

There’s also a huge mistake about the New Model Army, but I can’t be bothered to go into that now (and maybe it was just what everyone thought in 1969).

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
4. Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (OUP for the British Academy: London, 1976).
5. Roger Charles Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars (Sutton: Stroud, 1997).
6. R. C. (Roger Charles) Richardson, The debate on the English Revolution (Manchester University Press,: Manchester :, 1998).
7. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World (Methuen: London, 1985).
8. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
9. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism?’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23-40.

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.

In his 2004 book A Military History of the English Civil War, Wanklyn attacked what he called a determinist view of the civil war, which he claimed dominated the study of the war and assumed parliament’s victory was inevitable. I’m not sure that many people ever did believe that, and since Wanklyn doesn’t name all of them or spend very much time arguing against them, it’s hard to tell who or what he’s reacting against. Having hinted at scope for further interesting debate on the matter, he closed it down as quickly as possible and launched into a very traditional narrative of campaigns and battles which could almost have been written by A. H. Burne (though thankfully without that euphemism for conjecture “inherent military probability”). This narrative contained some very strong analysis of operational strategy, giving a particularly balanced view of the Earl of Essex and the Committee of Both Kingdoms which rescues them from the unfair criticism of many other historians. However, it’s a long time since it was considered safe to discuss operational strategy without giving equal consideration to logistics, since the two are very closely linked. Aryeh Nusbacher’s 2001 thesis contained some very interesting new ideas about how the New Model Army’s food supply system allowed Fairfax greater freedom of movement than his predecessors. Whether or not you agree with this argument, it can’t be ignored.

To the extent that Wanklyn does engage with the “determinist” school, he makes some good points. Control of the navy and London were not necessarily the great advantages that have often been assumed (although London was a major centre of manufacturing, and that must have been some kind of advantage). Ben Coates has shown that the navy couldn’t stop royalist privateers from disrupting trade, and that this, along with royalist blockades of inland trade, depressed London’s economy, with a knock-on effect on tax revenues. However, for a book which claims to restore contingency to the centre of attention, Wanklyn’s work is surprisingly teleological. All roads lead to Naseby and anything which isn’t directly linked to Naseby is unimportant. Above all, he fails to answer the question of why Naseby was so decisive. I don’t think it’s enough to point out that the King’s field army was destroyed there. The destruction of an army doesn’t always decide the outcome of a war in spectacular fashion. Rossbach didn’t knock the French out of the Seven Years War. They were back the next year with another army. We don’t even have to go that far. At Roundway Down in 1643, the parliamentarians lost an entire army, which led to them losing most of the West country, including Bristol. But the destruction of Waller’s army didn’t knock them out of the war.

Losing an army is only fatal if you can’t replace it. Having lost the west, Waller was placed in charge of the Southern Association and built a new army. Meanwhile, the Earl of Manchester was building another army in the Eastern Association. By the end of July 1645, the royalists had no field army capable of opposing the New Model Army and were apparently unable to get a new army together. This might seem paradoxical when my study of horse supply suggests that the royalists weren’t completely exhausted this early. The real problem was infantry. In The Royalist War Effort Ronald Hutton argued that by 1645 the King was chronically short of infantry, and that in order to get an army into the field he had to empty garrisons. While cavalry could usually escape from even the worst defeat, infantry had no chance of getting away from Naseby, since they were completely surrounded by infantry, cavalry, and dragoons. With those infantry effectively wiped out, garrisons fell easily since there were not enough men to defend them and no field armies to relieve them. Wanklyn didn’t mention Hutton’s argument, which implies that he has no answer to it. Hutton is also inconvenient for Wanklyn’s stereotyping because he can’t easily be described as a “determinist”. His view that the royalist cause “committed suicide” at Naseby obviously stresses tactical and operational contingency as well as attrition.

Although it seems fairly clear that the royalists ran out of infantry first, I don’t think this makes the outcome of the war inevitable. Parliament also had major problems getting enough infantry into the field. The numbers of soldiers available certainly weren’t directly correlated to the population of the areas controlled by each side. The establishment of the New Model Army was intended to include 14,400 infantry, but in practice it never reached this strength during the First Civil War. The amalgamation of the three field armies (Essex, Manchester, and Waller) brought the cavalry more or less up to its full strength of 6,000, but provided only around 7,000 infantry. Impressment had to be used to recruit the infantry, but it proved to be expensive and inefficient. Many pressed men deserted at the first opportunity. Those who stayed were unlikely to be very effective compared to the veterans of the old armies. It’s difficult to tell how long these men had been in the army. It would probably be pushing it too far to suggest that many of them had fought at Edgehill, but just going back to 1644 we can conjecture that they would have gained significant combat experience and developed some esprit de corps. In that year, Manchester’s men had marched into Yorkshire, assaulted York, stood firm at Marston Moor, and then marched down to Newbury. Essex’s infantry had marched all the way to Cornwall and back, then assaulted the royalist gun positions at Newbury.

Essex’s march into Cornwall is particularly interesting here. Lostwithiel has often been seen as a disaster for Parliament. It certainly didn’t do Essex’s reputation any good, and the loss of the entire artillery train along with around 1,000 draught horses was hardly trivial. However, the infantry got off very lightly, being allowed to march away on the condition that they didn’t fight again until they got to Southampton (once they got to Southampton they were rearmed and reclothed quite easily). It seems remarkable that the royalists threw away the chance to deprive the parliamentarians of so many veteran infantry, but holding large numbers of prisoners was impractical and not usually done in this period, while killing such a large number of prisoners in cold blood would probably have been unacceptable. If they had been able to take these men out permanently, the outcome of the war might have been very different. Essex’s army provided around half of the 7,000 veteran infantry for the New Model. Without them Fairfax would have had much less of an advantage as Naseby. Maybe Cromwell and his cavalry would still have saved the day, but maybe they wouldn’t. Would Fairfax even have been willing to give battle if the numbers weren’t stacked in his favour?

This is all part of my pet theory that Essex’s army is important both in its own right and for the development of the New Model Army, and has been unfairly and inexplicably ignored. It’s tangentially related to an article I’m writing, but that article concentrates on the horse side of things and only briefly mentions infantry and the “determinism” “debate”. So I should get back to that article and finish it, but I just thought I should post something about my actual area of expertise rather than pretending to know about the First World War.

1. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642-46 (Routledge: London, 1999).
3. Aryeh J. S. Nusbacher, ‘The Triple Thread’ (Oxford University, PhD, 2001).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).