CHAPTER 2
Falstaff: Will you tell me, Master Shallow, how to choose a man? Care I for the limb, the thewes, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man! Give me spirit, Master Shallow.
Henry IV, Part II, III, ii, 124–25
BETWEEN THE BATTLES OF BOSWORTH FIELD AND CULLODEN, WAR affected millions of inhabitants of the British Isles. For many it was the most important experience of their lives—for too many it was the last. For instance, of the period's seventy leading literary figures, twenty- one (or 30 per cent), saw combat, which profoundly affected many of them.1 For instance, fighting as a young man in the French Wars of Religion made Sir Walter Raleigh more sceptical, perhaps an atheist. Edmund Spenser's experiences during the Irish Wars permeate his poetry. John Donne's combat during the 1596 Cadiz and 1597 Azores expeditions was so traumatic that Thomas Hester, a leading authority on the poet, has called it ‘Donne's Vietnam’. The theme of war, argued Hester, imbues his poems and sermons as he tried to make sense of his ordeal.2 Other combatants tried to come to terms with their military experiences by keeping diaries or writing memoirs, of which, according to a cursory survey, 236 have survived in print. The vast majority come from the long seventeenth century (1603–1714), which is not surprising since these years covered the British Civil Wars, the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Twenty-three deal with the Tudor period (1485–1603), and nine with the relatively peaceful years from 1714 to 1746. The overwhelming majority of these diaries or memoirs, 186, describe land warfare. Only six of them were by other ranks, and only two by women, one of whom was a ‘she-soldier’, who fought disguised as a man.
Joining
Many wondered what sort of men could possibly want to go for a soldier. The answers were far from complimentary. Most Englishmen, wrote Geoffrey Gates, the veteran of Elizabeth I's wars, despised the profession of arms as ‘a vile and damnable occupation’.3 James Boswell even denied that sleeping with a grenadier's wife had been adultery, since ‘a soldier's wife is no wife’. (Dr Johnson must have been unaware of his biographer's opinion when he observed that ‘every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier’.)4 ‘Tosspots and Ruffians … Rogues and vagabonds’ were your typical recruits, thought Barnaby Rich. Half a century later Thomas Barnes agreed they were ‘corrupt men, to whom it is a sport to destroy houses, to rob Churches, to ravish virgins, to ruinate cities’. They had ‘a whore in one hand and a pair of dice in the other’.5 Over half a century later in Sir Aston Cokayne's play Trappolin, the protagonist asks Captain Mattemores, ‘What is a soldier?’ He replies, ‘A soldier, Trappolin, is he that does venture his life a hundred times a day. Would—in his country's and prince's cause—stand cannon shot and wood of steel pikes. Would, when his body's full of wounds, all night lie in the field.’
‘Venture my life, so many times a day,’ Trappolin interjects. ‘There is more safety and gain in turning a thief.’ No wonder when Matthew Bishop told his mother that he was enlisting in the army to fight in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), she railed, ‘Have you a mind to break your friends’ hearts? Pray, do not think of such a thing for it will be your utter ruin.’6
Men joined the armed forces for a number of reasons. Some were pulled by the attractions of service, others were pushed by problems in civilian life. Many had several reasons. All of them had little idea of the reality of what they faced. ‘War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it,’ noted Desiderius Erasmus, while George Gascoigne, that seasoned soldier (and poet), agreed, writing ‘how sweet war is to such as know it not’ (see ill.7). Gascoigne went on to argue that men joined the armed forces for three main considerations: first, to win honour, fame and glory; second, in the hope of money and plunder; and third, to escape poverty, crime, or family problems.7 The trouble was that these motivations could be contradictory. The desire for honour and glory could appeal to the best; the craving for money and plunder to the worst. General George Monck recognized this contradiction:8
There are two things that cause men to be desirous of this profession: the first is Emulation of Honour, the next is that they have by license to do evil, as the aims of the first are Virtuous, so will they do good service: the others by strict Discipline may be brought to do good Service. But if that Discipline be neglected then they prove the scum of an Army.
Some men joined the army for the basest of reasons. Even though he was writing a Defence of the Militarie Profession (1579), Geoffrey Gates confessed that such men went to war ‘more to spoil than serve’, and to wallow in ‘swearing, drunkenness, shameless fornication’.9 Others enlisted from a sense of adventure. ‘My shoes were made of running leather,’ the Elizabeth veteran and dramatist Thomas Churchyard explained his thirty-year military career, ‘and born I was about this world to roam to see the wars.’ One of The Four Prentices of London in Thomas Heywood's play (1615) confessed that he had as much capacity to resist the recruiting drum as he had not to eat when he was hungry.10 Sir James Turner (see ill.13), the Scottish mercenary, felt much the same way while a student at the University of Glasgow. ‘But before I attended to the eighteenth year of my age, a restless desire entered my mind, to be, if not an author, a least a spectator of these wars.’ Peter Carew, the third son of a Devonshire gentleman, became a mercenary soldier in 1526 because he was bored at school, refusing ‘to smell a book’. Weary of studies, the eighteen-year-old undergraduate Anthony Cooper recalled:11
When first to Oxford, fully intent
To study learned science there I went,
Instead of logic, physic, school converse,
I did attend the armed troop of Mars.
Instead of books, I sword, horse, pistols bought.
Cooper served for eighteen years, being thrice wounded, thrice taken prisoner, and thrice besieged. Two years at Balliol College were enough for Richard Atkyns. No longer able to ‘read a Greek or Latin book with pleasure’, the Oxford undergraduate joined the king's forces at the start of the Civil War, eventually becoming a captain.12
Others sat down and made a careful intellectual decision about joining, particularly during the Civil Wars. In April 1642 John Hutchinson read all of the pamphlets that came pouring off the presses before concluding he should enlist with the parliamentary forces. Another parliamentary captain turned to prayer. ‘When I put my hand to the Lord's Work in 1642,’ recalled John Hodgson, ‘I did it not rashly, but had many an hour and night to seek God to know my way.’ Sir William Campion, a cavalier from Sussex, found the decision to fight equally difficult. Echoing the words of the marriage service, he wrote: ‘I did not rashly or unadvisedly put myself upon this service, for it was daily in my prayers for two or three months together to God to direct me in the right way, and besides I had conference with diverse able and honest men for advice, who confirmed me in my judgment.’13 On 4 December 1691 Colonel William Maxwell explained why he was going to war: ‘the power of France is that which chiefly stands in opposition to the advancing of Christ's kingdom…. I'll therefore go with cheerfulness to jeopardize my life for His interest.’14 On the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, John Blackadder (see ill.21) wrote in his diary, ‘The important crisis of my life is approaching near, and I am again to mingle in the troubles, dangers and toils of a new war. This morning I took a solitary walk and went up to the crag at Craigforth, and there renewed my covenant with Christ.’15
Most recruits experienced some degree of compulsion, be it economic, social, or outright coercion.
Poverty was a powerful recruiting tool. In his play, The Funeral, Or Grief-A-La-Mode (1701), Richard Steele, who had served as an officer in the Life Guards, described a conversation between Ensign Campley and Private Matchlock.16 On being asked why on earth he had enlisted, Matchlock replies, ‘I was whipped from constable to constable.’
‘But what pretense had they for using you so ill,’ asked his officer, ‘You did not pilfer?’
‘I was found guilty of being poor.’
Whenever labourers’ wages fell below soldiers’ pay, noted Daniel Defoe, ‘thousands of men will run into the army’.17 For the starving, soldiering was the job of last resort. ‘Hungry dogs must follow such as give them bread,’ noted the Elizabethan Captain Roger Williams. According to the duke of Marlborough, a ‘hard winter’ raised ‘more men in a day than in a week’ during the spring.18 Thus colonels sent officers back to Britain to raise men in the winter, for spring training and summer fighting. A few enjoyed their furloughs at the expense of their duty. In 1746 Lieutenant Colonel Windus of the 93rd Regiment (Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders) complained that some of his junior officers ‘are apt to become a little Giddy & mind their Country Diversions more than Recruiting’.19
For officers the hope of finding or regaining their fortunes, rather than escaping penury, was a common reason to enlist. After Star Chamber fined Sir John Smythe two hundred pounds and imprisoned him in the Fleet in 1590 for brawling at court, ‘finding I was brought into further displeasure with Her Majesty,’ he recalled, ‘I determined with her license to go beyond the seas…. That I might recover Her Majesty's good opinion and favour.’ After failing as a lawyer and courtier, and having spent time in Bedford jail as a debtor, in 1572 George Gascoigne volunteered for Dutch service, hoping that it might ‘make him rich again’.20 Having spent his wife's ten-thousand-pound dowry in gambling and debauchery, George Goring joined the British troops fighting for the Dutch, and even managed to persuade his father-in-law to buy him a colonelcy. Patrick Gordon explained why he left Scotland in 1651 to become a mercenary, ‘my patrimony being small, as being the younger son of a younger brother of a younger house’. In 1707 John, first baron Cutts's obituary told a similar story. ‘He was a Cambridgeshire gentleman of a pretty good fortune, which was unhappily squandered … which put him in a kind of necessity of undertaking a military life.’21 During his service as a chaplain to the Royal Scots, Samuel Noyes, who was present at Blenheim, wrote frequently to John Sharp, Archbishop of York, in the hope that his descriptions of Marlborough's campaigns would win him preferment. It worked. Noyes was appointed a prebend of Winchester Cathedral.22
Women, family trouble, a boring job, or a cruel master could make men enlist. The very popular tune ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ (1706) gave vent to all these motivations:23
Our prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel Master's Shoes,
For now he's free to sing and play
Over the hills and far away.
We all shall lead more happy lives
By getting rid of Brats and Wives
That scold and brawl both night and day—
Over the hills and far away.
The seventeen-year-old Sydenham Poyntz volunteered for the Thirty Years War (1618–48) to escape ‘a costly wife’ and an apprenticeship, which ‘I deemed little better than a dog's life’. Captain George Carleton was persuaded to seek his fortune in Scotland as a soldier by ‘A most indiscreet marriage … though to a very good woman’.24 The proverbial wicked stepmother forced the twelve-year-old Samuel Gledhill to join the Royal Navy in 1698. John Bernardi joined the army to escape a tyrannical father, vowing never to return home until the old man was dead. Born into a Denbighshire county family, Samuel Bagshawe disliked his guardian, an uncle, so much that in 1731, aged eighteen, he ran away to enlist as a private. It has been suggested that Ben Jonson, the playwright, enrolled in an English regiment in Dutch employ in 1591 because he was angry with his father for dying before he was born, and hated his stepfather, a bricklayer to whom he had been forceably apprenticed. Later he boasted of killing an enemy in single combat, perhaps to assuage his resentment or else assert his manhood. Jonson could well have been a naturally violent man, for he murdered a fellow actor in a brawl, but got off by pleading benefit of clergy.25
Crime forced men into the ranks. George Monck did so in 1627 to escape punishment after beating up the undersheriff of Devon who was trying to arrest his father. Convicted criminals might enlist to avoid jail or the gallows. This practice was especially prevalent during the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1708, for instance, justices of the peace drafted 1,493 criminals to 57 infantry battalions, an average of 26 per unit of roughly six hundred men: one hapless battalion got 125 convicts.26
Many men were conscripted into the armed forces. Before the Civil Wars the normal practice was for the Privy Council to set each county a quota of draftees, which the lord lieutenants would subdivide for each village constable. In towns the city authorities were responsible for levying men: many wanted to avoid serving. At St Paul's Cross, the most important venue for sermons in London, Roger Hacket preached against draft dodging: ‘When Saul called upon the people,’ declared his Sermon needful for these times (1591), ‘they hired not others but came in person.’27 The same year the city authorities sealed off the churches during Sunday Communion so recruiting officers could have their pick. Within four years the quality of London's recruits was so bad that the Privy Council reprimanded the Lord Mayor for using the draft ‘to rid the city of rogues and loose people’.28
When the levy was new, with small quotas of one or two conscripts per village, the constable would select undesirables, the rowdy, the work-shy, or—if he had nubile daughters—lotharios. According to Captain Barnaby Rich, the Elizabethan soldier and author, he would choose ‘Any idle fellow, some drunkard or seditious quarrelers, some privy picker, or such as has some skill at stealing a goose’. The authorities sometimes endorsed this practice. One Lord Lieutenant ordered that ‘idle persons who will not labour’ be drafted for the 1544 Boulogne expedition.29
If such draftees never returned it was a case of good riddance to bad rubbish. So after the failure of the Mansfeld expedition in 1625 there were few recriminations. Sent to the Rhine delta in winter without adequate food, clothing and shelter, only six hundred of the original twelve thousand made it home.30 Greatly expanded draft calls for the expeditions to Cadiz in 1626, to the Isle of Rhé in 1627 and La Rochelle in 1628 meant that sober, well-connected young men began to be called up and killed, so alienating public opinion.
During the Civil Wars of the 1640s the crown tended to use a commission of array to raise men, whereas Parliament relied on the militia. As fighting widened, both sides resorted to outright conscription. A commission of array was basically a commission from the king to a powerful local figure to form a regiment, who would bill the crown for the costs. Coercion was often used in this process. Landlords forced their tenants to enlist, usually in their own regiments. Sir Bevil Grenville threatened to ‘thrust them out of house and home’ if his tenants did not join his battalion. In 1642 Colonel Sir Thomas Tildsley summoned his tenants to a rendezvous at Warrington, and force-marched them to Edgehill, from which battle ‘most of them never returned again’.31 To avoid such a fate some mutilated themselves. A Boston man cut off his big toe.32
Using the militia to raise men was more effective, if only because by volunteering for part-time service during the peace, in war they became full-time soldiers less reluctantly. Henry Foster joined the London trained bands with his fellow apprentices, most likely motivated by that peer-group pressure that is so strong among adolescent males. By the time war broke out in 1642, he had just finished his apprenticeship and was promoted sergeant in Denzil Holles's Regiment. On 19 August the regiment marched off to fight in high spirits. Three days later, after having got rid of their colonel, whom Foster called ‘a Goddamn blade and doubtless hatched in hell’, they had a grand time drinking, plundering, and chopping up altar rails for firewood.33
Once inducted, and if they were lucky, conscripts were issued basic outfits, and were then marched under the command of sergeants to rendezvous points, where they joined their units. A ballad described those marched to Portsmouth in 1625:34
With an old Motley Coat and a Malmsey nose
With an old Jerkin that's out at the elbows
And with an old pair of boots drawn on without hose
Stuffed with rags instead of toes.
It's not surprising that when two hundred draftees from Hampshire reached Portsmouth, Sergeant Major Sir George Blundell rejected three-quarters of them as unfit for service.35
Old sweats who had volunteered for the army had little time for draftees. Corporal Matthew Bishop called them ‘stubborn and sulky, and ready to comply with anything that is villainous’. Other veterans found instructing draftees, reluctant to the point of stupidity, extremely frustrating. ‘I am teaching cart horses,’ fulminated Edward, Viscount Conway, about the recruits he was trying to train in Newcastle in 1640.36 Many deserted. In about 1689 a Jacobite officer lamented that on the way to their units most of his Irish draftees had ran back to ‘their former security, slavery and beggary in the mountains’.37 Captain Robert Barret, who was involved in drafting men for Elizabeth's wars, described them as ‘scum of their county’. Yet, like Wellington's ‘scum of the earth’, they could fight. Indeed, it was reasonably easy to desert on one's way to join a unit, and those who did so were rarely executed, the death penalty being mostly reserved for those who ran in the face of the enemy. So by not going absent without leave, conscripts had implicitly consented to being soldiers, and more readily adapted to the hardships of military life. Captains John Smythe and Roger Williams both agreed that they ‘had rather have three hundred soldiers rogues than five hundred volunteering soldiers’, because ‘the rogues can abide more hunger, cold, travail, and better shift for themselves.’38
After the Civil War, recruiting became the responsibility of individual regiments of roughly a thousand men, being organized by the colonel and conducted by recruiting sergeants. Admittedly, a few men were shanghaied into service. In 1692 Richard Welsh, a tavern handyman, got drunk, was loaded on to a troop ship, and woke up to find himself en route to serve in Holland. ‘I raved, tore my hair, and cursed my drunken folly,’ he wrote to his wife, Christian. ‘I am now a private sentinel of foot, where I fear I must pass the remainder of my wretched life.’39 Most men volunteered after being subjected to high-pressure salesmanship from recruiting sergeants who promised them a life of ease, adventure, happiness and glory if they would only take the ‘king's shilling'—the first use of the phrase was in 1707. John Scot described how six years earlier Captain John Campbell inveigled him into joining the Royal Scots Fusiliers:40
And with a very good will he proferred the lads
A pint of Scots ale and a gill
And some bits of silver he slipped to them
And then drew them in with his purse.
In addition to wine, songs were used to recruit soldiers. One, sung to the tune now used for ‘Waltzing Matilda’, described how41
A Gay Grenadier come marching down through Rochester
Bound for the Wars in the Low Countries
And he sang as he rode through the crowded streets of
Rochester.
Who'll be a soldier with Marlboro and me?
In his play The Recruiting Officer (1706), George Farquhar (who had been one) has Sergeant Kite tell the young men gathered in Shrewsbury's main square (see ill.20):
If any gentlemen, soldiers or others have a mind to serve Her Majesty, and pull down the French King, if any prentices have severe masters, any children undutiful parents, if any servants have too little wages, or any husband too much wife, let them repair to the noble Sergeant Kite, at the Sign of the Raven in the good town of Shrewsbury, and they shall receive present relief and entertainment.
This pitch persuaded five men to enlist, although Kite's officer discharged one for being literate. ‘I will have no body in my company that can write,’ declared Captain Plume, explaining that ‘A fellow who can write can draw petitions.’ Such a man might, for instance, petition against the fraudulent way he was recruited. So, Plume concluded, ‘Those that know the least make the best soldiers.’42
Many found such practices repugnant. A ‘very barbarous’ mob attacked Captain Gabriel Crespigny as he was recruiting in Wigan about the same time as The Recruiting Officer was first performed, and broke a rib and bruised him so badly that he had to go to Bath for medical treatment. ‘This vexing trade of recruiting vexes my mind,’ wrote Lieutenant Blackadder the previous year, ‘Sobriety itself is here a bar to success. I can see the greatest rakes are the best recruiters. I cannot ramble and rove, and drink and cannot tell stories or insinuate, if my life were lying at stake.’43
Training
In war a soldier's life is always at stake, and one of the best ways to reduce the odds of being killed is effective training. As General George S. Patton observed, ‘A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.’44 In addition to preserving one's life, killing the enemy and thus winning the war, training had other purposes: it taught men how to overcome scruples about killing; it turned civilians into soldiers; and it taught them how to use their weapons both as individuals and as members of a group.
Unlike today, early modern training paid little attention to overcoming the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill'—which is surprising since the Bible was the greatest intellectual influence on peoples’ lives. Training then lacked what now would be called ‘battle proofing’. Recruits did not, for instance, charge screaming to stick bayonets in the guts of straw-filled dummies.45 Only in the Civil Wars were serious attempts made to justify killing, and then because the victims were fellow countrymen. Charles I personally told his men that the enemy were in fact ‘Brownists, Anabaptists and atheists’, while a best-selling parliamentary pamphlet called them ‘Papists and Atheists … inhuman, barbarous and cruel … the enemies of God’.46 The Reverend Robert Ram's Soldier's Catechism (which went to seven editions between 1644 and 1645) maintained there was no contradiction between being a Christian and a soldier, and that killing was acceptable when sanctioned by the authorities.47
Killing a foreigner was far easier than killing a fellow countryman (who spoke one's own language), particularly if you could denigrate him into something alien, even subhuman. In 1596 William Lambarde called the French ‘garish and light in apparel’, the Dutch ‘daily drunken’, the Scots ‘cowardly, sudden and ready to stab’, and the Spanish ‘insolent, fleshly and blasphemous’.48 The Irish were even worse: papist subhumans they might, like modern ‘gooks’, be ‘wasted’ without compunction, and without using the word ‘killing’. With the development of the standing army of professionals after 1660, soldiers no longer needed to be told that the enemy were evil people. Killing them, whoever they might be, was their trade.
There is a world of difference between a soldier's trade and most others. In war, quality and training will out. Or, as Barnaby Rich put it in 1587, a ‘few men well practiced more availeth than great numbers unperfect’. On the other hand, the consequences of being untrained can in truth be fatal. As Thomas Audley, Henry VIII's provost martial, observed, ‘it is a grievous pain to set a battle with untrained men.’ Donald McBane was a raw recruit in 1687 when the Clan MacDonald ambushed his unit, and he bolted in abject fear. McBane never forgot the experience. As an old man of sixty-seven he justified writing The Expert Swordsman's Companion (1727) by telling the reader, ‘Here's what to serve you to save your life.’49 His rules would have outraged the marquess of Queensberry. ‘Give a back cut to his throat,’ McBane advised, ‘only three or four inches at most will enter, and that will be sufficient.’ He urged his readers actually to stab the enemy in the back, because ‘all is fair play when swords are presented.’50
War is no place for the untutored: in battle the wages of ignorance are death; soldiers who study war no more get killed. Donald Lupton, a veteran of the Thirty Years War, wrote A Warre-like Treatise of the Pike in 1642 to warn civilians of the harsh realities of his profession. ‘Soldiers are not for sport and jest, but for earnest. Neither is war to be accounted a May-game, or a Morris dance, but as a Plague and Scourge.’51 In his dedicatory verse to Richard Elton's Compleat Body of the Art Militarie (1650), Captain Sam Jervis reiterated this point:
Till now we did but butcher victories
And were but sloven Death's men. What our eyes
Were wanting to our hands, we fell upon
A Miscellaneous Execution.
We that grieved the slain, that they must die
Without method and disorderly,
But now we have obtained the handsome skill,
By order, method, and by rule to kill.
Training makes soldiers of civilians, teaching obedience, and the penalties for disobedience. In 1590 Captain Roger Williams pointed out that ‘It is an error to think that a soldier is suddenly made.’ Colonel William Barriffe noted that ‘No man is born a soldier.’ Lord Richard Ranelagh observed in 1685 that ‘a soldier is a trade and must (as all trades are), be learned.’ Training develops routine skills that are quite literally vital in the chaos of combat, as well as a sense of unit cohesion that stops men from running away in fear. Barriffe believed that training can steel a man for combat, because as he wrote in his best-selling Military Discipline (1635), no one ‘can attain to any excellency in the Art Military without practice, but by practice is gained knowledge; knowledge begets courage and confidence’. In doing so he was echoing a commonplace first stipulated by Vegetius Renatus in 378CE, and repeated by commentators such as Edward Cooke (1626), John Raynford (1642), Colonel Richard Elton (1650), and Thomas Venn in 1672. Today the motto of the British Army's parachute-training school, ‘knowledge dispels fear’, makes exactly the same point.52
Training teaches men to fire their weapons as a group in combat. For a medieval archer, weapons training was more a matter of developing the physical strength to pull a longbow. Muskets, which replaced muscle power with chemical power, produced by gunpowder, could only be used by following a number of complicated steps. In theory, there could be as many as forty-four orders for reloading a musket, although in practice these could be broken down into six stages. Muskets were very loud, and recoiled viciously, bruising shoulders. Improperly used, they might explode. So troops had to be taught not to be afraid of their weapon. They must learn to trust it, to see it, wrote George Monck, as ‘the security of our own soldiers, the terror of the enemy, and the assured ordinary means of Victory’.53 They must be taught to clean and care for their weapon, not just because it was the most costly piece of equipment most of them would ever use, but to lessen the already high chances of a misfire: carbon build-up in the barrel could cause a musket to burst, killing the firer and comrades about him.
Soldiers did not fire their weapons as individuals but as part of a group, and had to be drilled into doing so. The origins of drill have been traced back to Eannatum, king of Lagash, Sumeria, in about 214 BCE. Ever since the Egyptians four millennia ago, soldiers have always stepped out left foot first. The founder of modern drill, Maurice of Nassau, Captain General of Holland (1567–1625), studied classical texts and, in an early example of a ‘time and motion’ study, broke down firing weapons and manoeuvring on the battlefield into basic steps, giving each a separate command. In 1607 Jacob de Gheyn published a manual with four pages of text and 119 illustrations of Maurice's drill movements, making them readily understandable to junior officers and drill sergeants. Many others such as Henry Hexham followed suite with his Principles of the Art Militarie (1637) (see ill.12). With so many commands, the number of men a colonel could control declined, and the size of an infantry battalion fell by about half to 440 men.54
Maurice's most important contribution to tactics was insisting that soldiers fired not as individuals, but together as part of a group in volleys. After the Civil Wars, firing patterns became more complicated with rolling volleys, when ranks or platoons fired in succession, laying down a continuous barrage that was far more devastating than a single-unison volley followed by a long pause for reloading. Drill enabled ranks to turn to face flank and rear attacks. Most important, it kept men together affixed in a unit, preventing them from running away. As Captain William Clark cryptically noted in 1650, the purpose of drill was ‘Confusion Methodized and ordered upon the field of battle.’ As James Achesone warned all young soldiers, ‘Confusion is the mother of mischief.’55
Modern soldiers are trained in a structured process. After recruitment they go to basic training or boot camp, where civilians are broken down to be reassembled as soldiers.56 Specialists, such as gunners or engineers, are sent to their own branches for further training, while officers are educated at military academies. Basic training is often traumatic and invariably boring. Henry Reed remembered its tedium during the Second World War:57
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday
We had daily cleaning, and tomorrow morning
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts.
There is no question that early-modern soldiers spent considerable time training, marching and wheeling in drill, constantly exercising their weapons, since without such practice they would have been unable to perform the complicated manoeuvres necessary to fight and stay on the field of battle. Surprisingly little evidence, however, has survived on how they were trained. Military memoirs, for instance, spent little time on training, and far more on actual fighting. Then soldiers learned their trade in two ways—through a practical apprenticeship, and by reading theoretical manuals. Although a huge number of such manuals has survived, they were probably the less important means by which civilians were turned into soldiers.
Recruits were straightaway sent to their regiments where, if they were lucky, they would be trained before fighting started: or else they had to learn on the job, relying on veterans to teach them what war was really like. Before the very successful 1596 Cadiz expedition, the earl of Essex reported to Sir Robert Cecil that ‘I do mingle the old soldiers and the new that one may help discipline the other.’ Early in the Civil Wars Sir William Brereton begged for ‘some old soldiers for sergeants’, since they ‘would do wonderous well’ in training and steadying his regiment.58
The militia were the exception, because in peacetime they had muster masters, experienced sergeants whom the Lord Lieutenant employed to train his county's units. Training could be perfunctory, especially when the prospect of actually fighting seemed remote. In 1700 John Dryden wrote:59
The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands: maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge; in war a weak defence;
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand.
Of seeming arms to make a short essay,
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day.
The tradition of having a drink or two after training was common. In 1688 Thomas Bellingham exercised his Preston troop of cavalry, after which ‘I treated them.’60
In early modern Britain military education was conducted primarily through printed manuals. Often they were read out aloud to soldiers, who (I suspect) welcomed them with the same enthusiasm as did Henry Reed. A few manuals, such as Henry Hexham's The Principles of the Art Militarie, were suitable for non-commissioned officers and other ranks, with their forty-eight pictures showing how to fire and reload a musket (see ill.12). Most, however, were aimed at teaching officers their profession. A few stated the obvious. Thomas Audley's A Treatise on the Art of War advised holding the high ground, ‘because a man going downward is of more force than he that goeth upward’.61 Some manuals became over-complicated with commands such as ‘Bringer up stand, the rest pass through to your left, and place yourself behind your bringer up.’ That useful and ubiquitous command, ‘As you were,’ was first found in Thomas Fisher's The Warlike Directions or the Souldier's Practice (1634), and has survived until today.
Between 1489 and 1643, 165 military handbooks were printed in English (many in multiple editions), and 450 on the continent. After the outbreak of the Civil Wars sales of military manuals took off. To prepare himself for command in March 1642, Colonel Edward Harley spent one pound, eleven shillings on six manuals. Such works were well used, being carried in battle. Sir John Gell's copy of Thomas Styward's The Pathwaie to martial discipline is much worn, being stained with human blood, presumably from the wounds Gell suffered at the Battle of Hopton Heath (1643).62
After the Civil Wars, with the growth of a standing army, military manuals were no longer written by individuals for sale for profit, but were replaced by standardized bureaucratically generated handbooks, which all troops were required to follow. The first of them appeared in 1675, with further editions in 1680, 1685 and 1686.63
In much the same way, uniforms reflected the growing uniformity of the standing army. While the famous British red coat may be traced back to the Battle of Clontibret in 1595, it did not become ubiquitous until the New Model Army fifty years later.64 Just as livery was worn by personal servants, so uniforms indicated that the professional members of a standing army were servants of the state. After the Civil Wars, uniforms became more elaborate, as individual regiments personalized them by adding special features such as coloured facings. Elaborations such as the introduction of high boots, as opposed to shoes, and pipe-clayed belts, meant that soldiers had more to clean—spit and polish being a way in which they were (and are) trained to obey orders without thinking. Moreover, a standing army of long-serving professionals had plenty of time to fill. So it occupied its hours with cleaning, inspections and drill.
Just as the military turned civilians into soldiers, so wherever possible it borrowed peacetime systems to use in war. A common example was sport. General Bernard Montgomery talked about ‘knocking the enemy for six’ at El Alamein in 1942, and General Norman Schwarzkopf described his flanking movement in the First Gulf War (1990–91) as a ‘Hail Mary’ play—to the delight of cricket and American football fans respectively. In early modern Britain, jousting mimicked war, preparing courtiers for the battlefield: it was a highly orchestrated event in Henry VIII's reign, became more stylized in Elizabeth I's, and faded away during Charles I's.65 Hunting was both far more popular and important in training men for combat. ‘Hunting is a military exercise,’ observed Lodowick Lloyd, one of Elizabeth's sergeants-at-arms, ‘the like stratagems are often invented and executed in war against soldiers as the hunter doth against diverse kinds of beasts.’66 Hunting taught men how to ride, gave them courage to jump fences, and the excitement of chasing a broken foe. It did not, however, teach them when and where to stop—which may explain why Charles I's high-born cavalry kept on charging, whereas Cromwell's more plebeian Ironsides regrouped, to return to the field to win the day.
Another way in which an army employed civilian norms was to mesh concepts such as the Great Chain of Being with its own ideas about obedience and hierarchy. The view that everything had its place, and should be in its place, accorded with the military chain of command. Children were brought up by their parents and social superiors so that obedience became an automatic habit. Before the Civil Wwar there could hardly be a recruit who had not heard the official sermon ‘Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion’ at least a dozen times. Thus, even before he joined the armed forces a recruit had been thoroughly indoctrinated to do what his superiors told him.67 Codes, in which superiors acted as gentlemen, and inferiors deferred to them, carried over from peace to war. The high levels of violence frequently used within the family and workplace, as well as state-imposed floggings and public executions, facilitated the often more brutal physical punishments of the military. Forty of the sixty-one offences in the 1627 Articles of War prescribed capital punishment.68 The connection between military and civilian punishments is supported by the fact that in Britain public hanging and army floggings were both abolished in the same year, 1868.
Men preferred to fight within the frameworks they had known in peace, alongside comrades and under leaders they recognized from home. When possible, regiments tended to be recruited locally. ‘I have seen,’ preached Bishop James Pilkington in 1562, that when a ‘gentleman hath gone to the wars, his tenants would strive who would go with him first’. ‘If your Highness will be pleased to command me to the Turk or Jew or Gentile, I will go on my bare feet to serve you,’ protested Thomas Dabridgecourt to Prince Rupert in 1644 on learning he was to be posted from Bristol to Ludlow, ‘but from the Welsh, good Lord, deliver me …’69 Welsh troops in particular preferred to be led by their own gentry, if only because they spoke the same language. When well led, those troops on the fringes of society—the Welsh, the Cornish, Scots Highlanders, the deprived, the rejected, the unemployed, the evicted, those scorned by the establishment—often made the best soldiers, perhaps because they felt a need to prove themselves.70
Retention
Once soldiers had been trained, and their officers educated, they had to be kept with the army as it campaigned, skirmished, and fought battles and sieges. Of course, for the few who actually enjoyed fighting, retaining such happy warriors was no problem. But most troops were kept in the armed forces through such ‘enticements’ as pay, food, clothing, leadership and honour. Because these influences worked at all stages of the military cycle, in examining them in this, as well as other chapters, some duplication is inevitable. For example, food and drink played an important part in keeping soldiers with the colours from recruitment to discharge, if only because they could not perform their strenuous duties without them. ‘And God he knows the English soldier's gut must have his fill of victuals once a day,’ noted George Gascoigne.71
Pay was probably the most important factor in retaining men. Take Captain Samuel Birch's company, which was mustered ‘after much money spent and pains taken’ in Manchester on 15 May 1648. It was a fairly typical territorial unit of 137 men, who over the next ten months took part in one major battle, two sieges and an ambush, in which they panicked. Of the thirty-eight members of this company who deserted, fourteen did so immediately before and after major combat, compared to the twenty-four who left after being paid.72
Punishment kept soldiers from running away, maintained discipline and taught lessons. Soldiers who were forced to watch a flogging or hanging learned what happened to those who broke the rules. Sometimes, as with running the gauntlet, in which the malefactor was forced to run through a line of comrades, who beat him along the way, his crime, usually stealing, was less against superiors but more against his comrades. Even moderate punishments could be effective. Robert Monro, a volunteer in a French Guard's regiment, recalled what happened when he was late on parade in 1626:73
I was made to stand from eleven before noon to eight of the clock in the night Sentry armed with a Corselet, Head-piece, Bracelets, being iron to the teeth, in a hot summers day, till I was weary of my life, which ever after made me the more strict in punishing those under my command.
Monro learned his lesson well. He became a successful and brave commander in both the Thirty Years War and the British Civil Wars, who in old age wrote his memoirs. In them he asked himself what really made men fight when they were actually in combat. The answers will be found in Chapter 4.