All the King's Armies

by Stuart Reid

Overview

On 23 September 1642 Prince Rupert's cavalry triumphed outside Worcester in the first major clash on the English Civil War. Almost precisely nine years later, on 3 September 1651, that war was won by Oliver Cromwell's famous Ironsides outside the same city and in part upon the same ground. Stuart Reid provides a detailed yet readable new military history – the first to be published for over twenty years – of the three conflicts between 1642 and 1651 known as the English Civil War. Prince Rupert, Oliver Cromwell Patrick Ruthven, Alexander Leslie and Sir Thomas Fairfax all play their parts in this fast-moving narrative. At the heart of the book are fresh interpretations, not only of the key battles such as Marston Moor in 1644, but also of the technical and economic factors which helped shape strategy and tactics, making this a truly comprehensive study of one of the most famous conflicts in British history. This book is a must for all historians and enthusiasts of seventeenth-century English history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752486758
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	08/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

All the King's Armies

A Military History of the English Civil War 1642â"1651

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By Stuart Reid

The History Press

Copyright © 2012 Stuart Reid
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8675-8

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CHAPTER 1

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men: The Soldiers

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to pause for a moment and look at the nature of the forces being raised by King and Parliament. In the years leading up to the Civil War the military forces of the Crown comprised little more than the Sovereign's personal bodyguards and a handful of chronically underpaid gunners and garrison soldiers whose principal job seems to have been to prevent anyone from walking off with the cannon and stores left in their charge. Consequently, England still relied, as it had in Elizabethan times, upon the county militias both for its own defence and also for operations farther afield, such as the wars with Scotland in 1639 and 1640.

Whilst it was in theory possible to call up every able-bodied man, the terms Militia and Trained Bands were to all intents and purposes synonymous. The latter sometimes also known as the Freeholders' Bands, were, as their alternative title indicates, supposedly composed of men who actually owned or leased land: 'none of the meaner sort, nor servants; but only such as be of the Gentrie, Freeholders, and good Farmers, or their sonnes, that are like to be resident.' Far from being a rustic peasant rabble, they were to be men of some substance who had a stake in the country and a consequent interest in preserving it from foreign invasion or domestic insurrection. Nevertheless, while the Lieutenant or his deputy might be greatly encouraged (and perhaps astonished as well) by the appearance of a local magnate at a muster, attended by his sons and tenants in all the awful panoply of war, it was generally considered no great matter if only his servants and hired substitutes turned up instead. Notwithstanding which William Barriffe complained of how 'Porters, Colliars, Waterbearers, & Broom men, are thrust into the rooms of men of better quality, as though they themselves were too good to do the King and their Country service.'

Not surprisingly, this militia has often been dismissed as ineffectual where it was not actually moribund, and indeed it is suggested that the best use which the King could make of it in 1642 was simply to disarm it in order to equip his own volunteer regiments. Nevertheless, the initial reliance by both sides upon voluntary recruiting rather than calling out the Bands did not reflect their supposed inefficiency – after all the volunteers who replaced them could scarcely be expected to be any better trained or equipped – but was rather an acknowledgement that neither side possessed sufficient authority to cause the Bands to be mustered and to march wheresoever they were required. It was simply much easier to ask for volunteers. In any case, once the territorial limits of the opposing factions did become well established, considerable use was in fact made of the Bands by both sides although, with some notable exceptions, they tended to stay in their home areas.

As to the marching regiments, they were initially recruited by beat of drum and by the exertions of the local gentry, which is a polite way of saying that some men volunteered without compulsion and others came forward because their landlord or employer told them to. Naturally enough there was a limit to the number of men who could be raised in this manner, especially once the initial enthusiasm evaporated, and both sides soon resorted to more formal methods of conscription, including, in its most direct form, demands that the parish constables produce a certain number of able-bodied and decently clothed men on a certain date. It is little wonder therefore that desertion should have been so rife later in the war or that the common soldiers so readily changed sides when taken prisoner.

THE OFFICERS

The absence of a standing army before the Civil War has fostered the notion that it was an affair conducted by amateurs. By comparison with the previous civil war in the 15th century this may very well have been so, but in fact even at the outset there was no shortage of technical expertise on either side. The Dutch and Spaniards had been at each other's throats in the Low Countries for over seventy years, and since 1618 an even greater conflict had been raging in Germany. Both wars, or rather series of wars, provided ample employment opportunities for younger sons and other adventurous souls. For the most part the English ones seem to have learned their trade in Protestant Holland, a choice readily explained by the close cultural, trading and sometimes family links which existed between south-east England and the Low Countries. While some Scots also fought for the Dutch, most of them went farther afield, serving in both the French and most notably in the Swedish armies. Nor was foreign service confined to the Protestant powers. Scots and Englishmen were also to be found in the Imperial and Spanish armies and a few, such as Sir Arthur Aston, even went as far as Poland and Muscovy.

All in all, there was a considerable body of experience available to the opposing commanders. Indeed the King's General for much of the war was Patrick Ruthven (Lord Forth in the Scottish peerage and later Earl of Brentford in the English), who spent thirty years in the Swedish service before coming home in 1638. On the other side the Earl of Essex, though perhaps not able to boast as much experience, had commanded a regiment in the Dutch service and fought under Sir Horace Vere in the Palatinate.

Over sixty officers in the Parliamentarian army at Edgehill were professional soldiers, as were at least thirty on the King's side including Sir Arthur Aston, Sir Jacob Astley, Charles Gerard, Richard Fielding, and Sir Nicholas Byron and his nephews. Indeed only one of the King's infantry brigades was not commanded by a professional soldier. In Scotland the recruitment of professional soldiers was handled quite systematically. Even before the armies began to be raised Scots officers serving abroad were invited to return home and paid retainers until employment could be found for them. In the main, Scottish regiments and companies were entrusted to local magnates but they were backed up by professional soldiers at every level. Wherever possible lieutenant colonels, majors, lieutenants and even sergeants were chosen from amongst the large pool of veterans.

The vast majority of the officers on both sides, however, had no military experience beyond what some of them might have picked up at Trained Band musters. Some inevitably learned the hard way or died trying, others turned to drill-books. It is a little-appreciated fact that the invention of printing revolutionised warfare by making theoretical and practical texts readily available to potential officers.

At a company and even regimental level there were a bewildering selection of drill-books, theoretical texts and even military memoirs upon which the newly commissioned officer could draw. Some, such as John Bingham's Taktics of Aelian, a comparative study of classical texts and the more modern doctrines of Mauritz von Nassau, probably went over the heads of most, but there were also more accessible titles. In addition to the very basic Directions for Musters produced in 1638 to give Trained Band officers a grounding in infantry drill, there was William Barriffe's very much more comprehensive (and influential) Militarie Discipline: or the Young Artillery-man. This went through six editions between 1635 and 1661 and despite its slightly misleading title, it may fairly be considered to have been the standard work on infantry. As to the cavalry there seems to have been broad agreement that the most important treatise was John Cruso's Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie, first published in 1632 and sufficiently well thought of to be reprinted at Cambridge in 1644.

By and large, however, most of these works, whose initial target audience was Trained Band officers and the members of volunteer military societies, are pitched at a fairly low tactical level. Both Directions for Musters and Cruso's Militarie Instructions are aimed primarily at the officers of companies and troops. Barriffe goes a stage further and also deals with battalion-sized formations, but the handling of brigades and higher formations was very largely a matter of practical experience, and it was there that the professionals made their mark.

THE INFANTRY

The basic tactical unit was what might best be referred to as a battalion, although the term was not much used at the time. In theory infantrymen were organised in regiments commanded by colonels, each subdivided into a number of companies commanded by captains. Ideally there should have been ten companies each with its own colour or flag and numbering at least 100 men,3 but in practice a regiment could comprise anything from three to thirteen or fourteen companies, and would be counted lucky if they all mustered as many as thirty soldiers apiece. This was particularly true of Royalist formations. The King's Lifeguard, exceptionally, may have had as many as thirteen companies at the outset, but seven companies and sometimes fewer appears to have been the rule since commanders preferred to maintain the numbers of soldiers in each company at a reasonable level even if this meant disbanding weak ones and drafting their personnel into the stronger ones. Consequently, intelligence reports on both sides tended to estimate the strength of enemy formations from the number of colours on display.

As a further complication, the fact that most units comprised two quite distinct types of soldier – pikemen and musketeers – meant that a regiment's constituent companies did not line up one beside the other, but were broken up before going into action, and their personnel formed into combined divisions of the respective arms. It is a commonly held belief, in part fostered by that famous row at Edgehill, that there were two quite distinct tactical doctrines – the Dutch and the Swedish – employed by the Civil War armies. In reality both the authors, Mauritz von Nassau and Gustaf Adolf respectively, were in their graves long before the war began, and the distinctions between them had long since been blurred by practical experience. This is most strikingly revealed in the case of the Scottish army. Given the considerable body of officers trained in the Swedish service, it would be reasonable to suppose that Swedish doctrines were employed, yet there is not one single example of Scots regiments adopting the infantry formation known as the 'Swedish Brigade'. Instead they were invariably drawn up in the battalion formations common to all of the armies fighting in Germany and the Low Countries by that time. Ordinarily the pike division was deployed in the centre of the battalion with the musketeers forming on either flank. The optimum size for such a formation – usually drawn up six deep – seems to have been about 300–500 men. Very large regiments, recruited well up to their theoretical strength, could and did form two battalions, but conversely, it was much commoner to find two or more very weak regiments combining to form a single battalion rather than each standing alone.

At the outset of the Civil War the ideal was regarded as one pikeman for every two musketeers, and the regiments raised to go to Ireland at the beginning of 1642 were not only organised in that ratio, but also mustered a company of firelocks, presumably to act as skirmishers in the bogs and woods. Frequently enough in the early days a shortage of muskets dictated a more equal division. For example, on 18 February 1643 a muster discovered that out of 513 soldiers serving in the King's Lifeguard of Foot – which certainly ought to have been properly equipped – no fewer than 322 men were completely unarmed. By 23 April some firearms and a total of 212 pikes had been issued, which would certainly suggest an equality of pike and shot. Nevertheless, this situation did not last, particularly after the Royalists captured the Bristol firearms manufactories in 1643, and the proportion of pikemen declined dramatically. By March 1644 both the King's and Queen's Lifeguards were being issued with 'Two parts Musquetts with Bandaliers, and the rest Pikes', while an increasing number of units were being armed with muskets alone.

It was a similar story in the Parliamentarian ranks. Although most of the 1642 regiments were properly equipped, at least two, Lord Saye and Sele's, and Lord Wharton's, had to make do with three musketeers to two pikemen and one for one respectively. Like their Royalist counterparts, however, Parliamentarian officers soon began fielding much greater numbers of musketeers, and when Essex's army was re-equipped after having been disarmed in the Lostwithiel disaster in 1644, the 6,000 remaining foot were issued with 5,000 muskets and only 1,000 pikes.

However disposed, when infantrymen fought each other in the open field, the two opposing battalions would normally march towards each other, occasionally exchanging fire before coming to a halt at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in order to let the musketeers concentrate on winning the firefight. Sooner or later, however, one of the battalions might feel sufficiently confident to advance into physical contact with the other. In practice this could be a protracted and indecisive business, but the Royalists, perhaps because they were chronically short of ammunition, seem to have been prone to firing only a single volley before falling on with swords, pikes and the butt-ends of muskets.

While it seems to have been by no means uncommon for pikemen to throw down their pikes and fall on with swords, deliberate encounters between two opposing stands of pikemen were generally conducted at 'push of pike'. This was by no means as dangerous as it might at first appear, and hostile commentators such as Daniel Lupton claimed that it was virtually impossible for a pikeman to run someone through, even if he was only wearing a buffcoat. The real object of the exercise seems to have been to push the opposition back sufficiently violently to cause them to lose their footing, or better still to break and run. Nevertheless, both sides needed to enter into the spirit of the occasion and, if one side was less than enthusiastic, the push might only be a token one with the reluctant party throwing down its pikes and giving way almost at once.

If neither side was too keen on the idea they might even be reduced to an ineffective 'foyning' or fencing, standing off at a pike's length and going through the motions of jabbing at each other while they waited for something to turn up. After the initial clash the infantry battle at Edgehill in 1642 seems to have settled down into an affair of this kind:

When the Royalist army was advanced within musket shot of the enemy [wrote the future King James] the foot on both sides began to give fire, the King's coming on and the Rebells continuing only to keep their ground, so that they came so near one another that some of the battalions were at push of pike, particularly the regiment of the Guards ... The foot thus being engaged in such warm and close service, it were reasonable to suppose that one side should run and be disordered; but it happened otherwise, for each as if by mutual consent retired some few paces, and then struck down their colours, continuing to fire at each other even until night, a thing so extraordinary as nothing less than so many witnesses as were present could make it credible.

In the smaller battles it seems to have been the practice for all the pikemen of the army to be gathered together in one reasonably large body or stand rather than scattered along the line in penny-packets. This stand would then be kept in reserve until the decisive moment. A good example of this is provided by Adwalton Moor in 1643. Initially, the battle began as a firefight along the line of a hedge and ditch separating the Marquis of Newcastle's Royalist musketeers and Lord Fairfax's men. Although in overall terms the Parliamentarians were outnumbered, they seem to have had rather more musketeers than the Royalists, and after a time they began to drive them back. Fairfax appeared to be on the point of victory but then Colonel Posthumous Kirton, the commander of Newcastle's own regiment, led the massed Royalist pikemen in a charge against the Parliamentarian left:

At last the pikes of my Lord's army having no employment all the day were drawn against the enemy's left wing, and particularly those of my Lord's own regiment ... who fell so furiously upon the enemy, that they forsook their hedges, and fell to their heels.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from All the King's Armies by Stuart Reid. Copyright © 2012 Stuart Reid. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Dedication,
List of Maps,
List of Plates,
Preface,
Introduction: The Beginning of the Wars,
I All the King's Horses and All the King's Men: The Soldiers,
II Over by Christmas: The Edgehill Campaign 1642,
III The King's Road: Stalemate on the Central Front,
IV Cornishmen and True: The Western Front 1642–1643,
V High Tide: The Central Front 1643,
VI Coals from Newcastle: The Northern War 1642–1643,
VII The Newarkers: The War in Lincolnshire 1643,
VIII Holding the Gates: Nantwich, Newark and Selby,
IX All the Blue Bonnets: The Scots Invasion 1644,
X York March: The Prelude to Marston Moor,
XI No Such Thing in the Fields: The Battle of Marston Moor, Part 1,
XII The Kingdom is Ours: The Battle of Marston Moor, Part 2,
XIII A Miraculous Conquest in the South: Cheriton Wood and Cropredy Bridge,
XIV Westward Ho!: Lostwithiel and II Newbury,
XV Naseby Fight,
XVI All the Kings Horses and All the King's Men: The Last Year of the First Civil War,
XVII Darkness at Preston: The Second Civil War,
XVIII The Scots War: Dunbar and Worcester 1650–1651,
Conclusion,
Select Bibliography,
Plates,
Copyright,