CHAPTER 4

Why Men Fought

 That he which hath no stomach for this fight,

 Let him depart; his passport shall be made

 And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

 We would not die in that man's company.

Henry V, IV, iii, 40–43

AS THEY ANTICIPATE THEIR FIRST EXPERIENCE OF COMBAT MOST soldiers ask themselves two fundamental questions. First, what really makes a person fight when he—and today she—is in combat, and, second, will I fight and not run away? To paraphrase Shakespeare, they ask what gives humans the stomach to fight, and do I have it? These question are very different from asking why nations or groups go to war, or why individuals join the armed forces in the first place. They relate to why people actually fight, kill and run the risk of being killed. The answers are complicated and consist of two components. The first is external: it depends on good leadership, and is mainly coercive. Far from letting men depart home with ‘crowns for convoy’, armies do all they can, including inflicting the death penalty, to stop men from running away. The second is internal, being based on a person's sense of self-worth as a human being—on what has been called ‘honour'—and on the fact that as social creatures we crave the respect of the small group in which we live. If we lose either or both, we are so shamed that we come to fear that no man would wish to die in our company. Just before a skirmish in Flanders, Thomas Churchyard, the Tudor captain, played on this sentiment. ‘I asked of my company if they would fight, and desired such as would be in their houses to depart.’ All stayed and fought.¹

The challenge of getting men—for until recently fighting has been an overwhelmingly male activity—to face the test of battle is as old as war itself. William Patten, a veteran of the Battle of Pinkie (1547), noted that fighting was ‘quite against the quiet nature of man’. ‘A rational army,’ thought Charles-Louis, baron de Montesquieu, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, ‘would run away.’² Captain Roger Williams thought three things made men overcome their natural fear and stay: ‘a good chief, a good purse, and good justice’.³

A few men knew no fear: happy warriors, they loved fighting and killing. At the Siege of Rouen (1591) Sir Thomas Coningsby enjoyed watching cannon balls smash houses, pass through walls, and ricochet all over the place: ‘It was a pleasure to behold,’ he noted in his diary. George Lauder, the author of The Scottish Soldier (1629), revelled in carnage:⁴

Let me still hear the Cannons thundering Voice,

In terror threatening ruin; that sweet noise

Rings in my ears more pleasing than the sound

Of any music consort that can be found …

Then to see legs and arms torn ragged fly

And bodies gasping all dismembered lie.

A contemporary called Sir Simon Harcourt, who was killed fighting in Dublin in 1642 after twenty years of very active service as a soldier of fortune, a man ‘who loved always to be in action’. After his fourth campaign Colonel Blackadder wrote to his wife: ‘I still have reason to say that the time of fighting and action, and the prospects of danger, are the pleasantest times I have.’ Corporal Matthew Bishop wrote to his spouse, ‘My Dear, you cannot conceive the Pleasure I have enjoyed in the last campaign.’ He continued, ‘I longed to be in action, for my nature was such that without it my Spirits fell.’ After surveying the carnage at Malplaquet, where the allies lost 26 per cent dead and wounded, Matthew Bishop was more stoical, taking consolation in Williams III's adage that ‘every ball that kills or wounds has his commission before it is fired’.⁵ Some soldiers welcomed war. In 1630 Ensign Edmund Verney, a mercenary on the continent, wrote home, ‘We hear that you are likely to have war with France. Tis brave news. ‘Twere sport for us to hear that all the world were in combustion, then we would not lack for work. O ‘tis a blessed trade!’ Sir Thomas Birch recalled that during the Civil Wars some of his comrades actually opposed negotiations that might end the war ‘too soon’.⁶

‘Pay well, hang well’

Sir Ralph Hopton, the royalist Civil War commander, was convinced that two of the best ways to make men fight were to ‘pay well’ and to ‘hang well’.⁷ Carrots and sticks have always been good ways of motivating people. Pay was particularly efficacious. From the Scots campaign of 1560 Sir Ralph Sadler wrote to Queen Elizabeth that when soldiers ‘lack their wages, they will serve with the worst will’.⁸ During the Siege of Denbigh in May 1646, a group of parliamentary officers described their troopers as ‘most unreasonable men if they are disappointed in pay’. Francis Gamull, a royalist colonel, sardonically observed, ‘money best stoppeth all discontented men's mouths.’⁹ Most mutinies were, in truth, strikes against poor or no pay.

The military historian Sir John Keegan once remarked that alcohol and the prospect of plunder played a much larger part in getting the British soldier (and sailor) to fight than most commanders would care to admit.¹⁰ In addition to being high in the calories that active service requires, in war and peace alcohol makes men violent. (In the seventeenth century at least a third of civilian murders were committed under the influence of drink.)¹¹ Before combat getting drunk together helped men bond; during battle liquor invoked Dutch courage; and afterwards it numbed memories, soothing post-combat stress.

Once fighting started, the prospect of plunder became a much stronger incentive to fight than provisions or pay. As Rudyard Kipling, that most astute observer of the British soldier, put it:¹²

 Ow the loot!

 Bloomin’ loot!

That's the thing to make the boys git up an’ shoot!

Looting was one way in which the soldier could lord it over civilians, who normally looked down upon him. It was a legitimate, or semi-legal, form of stealing—sometimes of goods that were valued more as trophies of domination than for their market worth. Ben Jonson, the playwright, boasted not just of having killed an enemy soldier in single combat during his service in the Netherlands in 1591, but of having ‘taken optima spolia from him’. Jonson, like most soldiers, would admit that looting was fun. After storming Sherborne Castle, Dorset, in 1645, the roundheads started to massacre the defenders, but stopped when they discovered ‘a great store of treasure’. Afterwards an observer noted that ‘five shillings gotten in the way of spoil from the enemy gives them more content than twenty shillings by way of reward in an orderly manner.’¹³ Looting could raise morale. During the 1589 assault on Lisbon, Sir Francis Drake reported that lack of food had demoralized the troops, ‘but if God will bless us with … reasonable booty for our soldiers and mariners, all will take good heart again.’ Bounteous booty cheered Donald McBane during the Blenheim Campaign of 1704. ‘We plundered and lived a jolly life,’ he wrote, ‘being in an enemies country we had liberty to do as we pleased.’ But looters could themselves be looted. In 1702 during the Siege of Rota, Matthew Bishop ‘found’ sixty pieces of eight, only to be robbed of them by comrades when he was asleep. Perhaps this explains why Bishop was so censorious of the Guards who at Malplaquet in 1709 ‘behaved themselves like blackguards by plundering their own dead … before they were cold or quite dead’.¹⁴ Sometimes looters were hanged. But proclamations threatening death failed to deter many. Too common was the attitude Captain Henry Herbert reported in 1672: ‘Our men were forbidden to plunder but if they found any that was not too hot nor too heavy, they would have valued the proclamations no more than the Ten Commandments.’¹⁵

Those who broke the Commandments—or, more pertinent, the army's articles of war—had to be judged promptly and punished severely. When a man entered the armed forces he surrendered many of his civil rights. He had to. War is a harsh environment. Lawyers are bad enough in the barrack room: they are fatal on the battlefield. That is why John Cruso maintained that it was better ‘for a soldier to meet a glorious death in battle than a shameful one at the end of a rope’.¹⁶ Punishments worked. Sir James Turner observed with irony that in 1651, after two or three Scots soldiers had been hanged for plundering and robbery, the regulations against such activities ‘were well enough observed’.¹⁷ Therefore, most military crimes were punished physically, either through whipping or running the gauntlet, or with death. It was best to begin harshly. When the earl of Pembroke invaded France in 1557, he brought a ‘hangman with all his necessaries’. ‘Violent and bloody men’ such as soldiers, wrote William Jenkyn in 1656, ‘fear not hell so much as the halter.’¹⁸ At the start of the 1596 attack on Cadiz a soldier was executed for murder and a lieutenant cashiered for corruption. The admiral's physician, Roger Marbeck, recorded that ‘the severe execution of justice at the very first did breed such a deep terror’ that there was no further trouble.¹⁹ The expedition was a great success. Ruthless punishments not only deterred men from running away during combat, but kept them fighting, sometimes to well beyond the bitter end.

Court martials, panels of officers, administered justice quickly and without many formalities. In Hampshire between December 1643 and May 1645 court martials executed nineteen soldiers—thirteen for desertion, and two apiece for murder, robbery and mutiny. Between 22 April and 20 December 1644 in Sir William Waller's parliamentary army, court martials tried thirty soldiers—nine for plunder or robbery, six for mutiny, five for desertion, five for neglect of duty, three for murder and two for disobedience. Of those convicted, eleven were sentenced to be hanged, one was shot, six were cashiered, while eight suffered physical punishment. In order to coerce men to fight, executions were more common in war than in peace. For instance, between September 1651 and January 1652 a court martial in the Dundee area tried fifty-five men, of whom only two were executed. Of the rest it reprimanded ten, cashiered two, imprisoned three, referred two to higher authority, flogged twenty-eight (with a rather high average of forty-one lashes), and acquitted eight.²⁰ Over half a century later, in 1708 in the Low Countries nineteen soldiers were court-martialled for desertion. Seven were acquitted, twelve were sentenced to death, seven of them with recommendations of clemency. General John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, accepted the court martial's recommendations. He spared John Muddy's life because it was his first offence and, as his captain Alexander Ruthven wrote, he was ‘a weak and silly man’. But Marlborough signed Samuel Cluse's and John Hill's death warrants since this was their third conviction for desertion.²¹ For home-based troops the monarch determined who would get clemency. Queen Anne preferred to leave the decision to chance. Of a group of forty-five deserters in the Isle of Wight condemned to death, she used the roll of the dice to determine the six who would suffer the ultimate punishment. George I reviewed the records, pardoning twenty-four of the forty soldiers sentenced to death in 1716.²²

Court martials and executions were dreadful for all concerned. In 1708 Captain Blackadder wrote in his diary, ‘Attended a court-martial, a very unpleasant part of my duty, prosecuting a deserter for his life.’ The trooper, a member of Blackadder's own company and a repeat offender, was sentenced to death. ‘Awoke most of the night, my thoughts taken up with that poor wretch,’ his diary ran. ‘I attended the poor creature at his death. He seemed penitent.’²³

More effective than the death penalty in stopping men from running away in battle was putting them in a position where it was almost physically impossible to do so. In the early modern battlefield men were never on their own. Infantry stood in lines several dozen long, and from two to six deep. To use a phrase from the American Civil War, they were in effect locked in a moving iron box from which it was very hard to escape, with battle-proven veterans on the flanks, the enemy to the front and sergeants to the rear with poleaxes to dispatch any who tried to make a break. Because soldiers were part of a group, who fired together, there was no problem about the reluctant failing to discharge their weapons.²⁴

‘Lead well’

In addition to rewards and punishment, Sir Ralph Hopton believed that a third factor made men fight, advising his officers to ‘Lead well’. Leadership has always been crucial in persuading men to remain in combat, which as Clausewitz observed is ‘the province of danger’. Leaders must also make their troops take actions, such as firing weapons or manoeuvring, and prevent them from becoming paralyzed by terror. ‘Sometimes fear doth seize men,’ recalled the veteran James Touchet, earl of Castlehaven, in 1690, ‘that they know not what to do.’ Conquering panic was so crucial to a leader's job that an Elizabethan military manual advised ‘Let every great commander vomit at the scent of fear.’²⁵

The question of effective leadership has always preoccupied military thinkers—by the mid-1980s some four thousand volumes on the topic had been published, and a 2009 Google search came up with twenty-four million hits for ‘leadership’.²⁶ Leadership is hard to teach and even harder to define: yet most soldiers know it when they see it, especially when displayed by their own officers. Sometimes attempts to define leadership can be so broad as to lack utility. John Keegan argued that the ‘big man’, the larger than life person, makes a good leader. Charles Wilson, baron Moran, who served as a front-line medical officer in the First World War (and as Churchill's doctor in the Second), observed that ‘The art of command is the art of dealing with human nature.’ Again, the British Army's adage that ‘There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers’ is as vague as Roger Boyle's comment of 1677 that ‘I very seldom saw the English soldiers flinch if their officers were good.’²⁷

What, then, makes a good officer? In 1944 the US Army asked that question of its soldiers. Thirty-one per cent replied courage and example; 26 per cent pep talks, humour and keeping subordinates informed; 23 per cent concern for their men's welfare; and only 5 per cent friendliness and informality.²⁸ Remarkably, this tallies with the definitions of leadership from prominent Elizabethan military thinkers. Roger Williams listed first, combat experience; second, bravery; third, loyalty to one's own men; and fourth, liberality and generosity, as the qualities most needed for a successful leader. John Cruso listed experience, valour, authority and felicity, with which Barnaby Rich agreed, adding four more of his own: justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance.²⁹ Thus war (as I have argued in this book and elsewhere) in many ways remains remarkably constant. Take, for instance, one aspect of junior leadership. In 1727 Major General Humphrey Bland, a veteran of the Wars of the Spanish Succession, advised young lieutenants ‘that the private soldiers when they are about to go into Action form their Notions of the Dangers from the outward appearance of their officers….In Order to dissipate their Fears and fortify their Courage, the Officer should assume a Serene and Cheerful air.’³⁰ A Second World War platoon commander said almost the same thing. He described his role in battle as ‘essentially histrionic … to feign a casual and cheerful optimism to create an illusion of normality and make it seem as if there was nothing in the least strange about the outrageous things one was asked to do.’³¹

Courage is the first quality demanded from all leaders, no matter their rank. Proven bravery helps a junior leader convince men to follow him into danger, while it gives a senior commander the moral authority to send men to their deaths. Lacking long-distance communications, such as radio, early modern leaders at all levels were expected to be heroes, getting involved in the actual fighting to inspire their troops. As Sir Philip Sidney, perhaps the most heroic figure of Elizabeth's reign, noted: ‘A brave captain is a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring.’ Sir Francis Vere recognized this at the Battle of Nieuport (1600). Wounded in the leg and, fifteen minutes later the thigh, he refused to complain or see a surgeon, ‘for I knew if I left the place my men would instantly quail.’³²

Courage in itself was not enough. Anticipating the duke of Wellington's adage that ‘There is nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer,’ Barnaby Rich observed in 1578 that ‘It is not requisite that every private captain … should rashly enter into attempts.’ Yet a first-rate commander must know when to take action, for as James Touchet noted in 1680, ‘Great Advantages in War are rarely offered, and for the most part soon past.’³³ A good leader must share like dangers with his men. ‘I will run the same fortunes and hazards with you,’ Major General Philip Skippon promised the London trained bands in November 1642 before the Battle of Turnham Green.³⁴ Half a dozen years later, in 1648, Oliver Cromwell reminded the roundheads how ‘he had oftimes ventured his life with them, and they with him.’³⁵ Marlborough always rode into battle on a white horse wearing a shining scarlet uniform with a sash, not, as he explained to his wife, from vanity, but ‘to deserve and keep the kindness of this army, I must let them see that when I expose them I would not exempt myself.’³⁶

A good leader not only courted danger: he scorned it. For instance, at the Siege of Maastricht in 1673 the Prince of Orange (later William III) was hit in the arm, which nigh panicked his soldiers. So, George Carleton recalled, ‘he took off his hat with the wounded arm, and smiling, waved it to show those there was no danger.’ He displayed similar sangfroid in the face of peril, admitting on being wounded at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) to have lost ‘near half a spoonful of blood’. William also empathized with his men. During the same battle, as he watched the Dutch Guards receive an attack from James II's cavalry, he whispered, ‘My poor Guards, My poor Guards, My poor Guards.’³⁷

Leaders paid a price—in their own blood. One way of showing this is to compare the ratio of killed and wounded among officers and other ranks. The higher the ratio the more intense the fighting, and the degree to which officers hazarded their lives. During the Civil Wars, of a sample of seventy-six senior commanders 30.3 per cent were killed and 36.8 per cent wounded, a 1.21 ratio. The injury rate for cavaliers, 41.4 per cent, was much higher than that for roundheads, 31.4 per cent. This is to be expected. Cavalier officers had a strong sense of honour which made them more likely to press home an attack, while medical services tended to break down on the royalist side, especially after it was losing. Improved medical care may explain why during the Nine Years War (1688–97), and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the rate fell. Yet officers continued to die more often than other ranks. For instance, at Steenkirk (1692) the killed/wounded ratio for the former was 2.28 and 0.71 for the latter, and at Blenheim (1704) it was 2.44 and 1.59 respectively.³⁸

Soldiers had nothing but contempt for cowardly leaders. Elis Gruffudd, the Welsh captain, scorned Thomas Hussey, whom the duke of Norfolk appointed his second in command during the 1544 Boulogne Campaign, calling him ‘a fat-bellied lump of a man, big in body and authority, lacking in sense and a coward’.³⁹ As they campaigned on the continent in 1672, Captain Henry Herbert's regiment were unhappy, the officers’ mess being ‘a cabal of eating and drinking as well as finding fault with our colonel’. Their colonel, Sir Herbert Jones, was a coward, or, as Captain Herbert more tactfully put it, ‘His Laundress observed that the knight's linens have a stronger smell after a fight than at other times.’ This, the captain continued, explained why Colonel Jones kept on sliding off his horse, his saddle being so well lubricated.⁴⁰ Before Blenheim, an unpopular major in the 14th Foot (The West Yorkshire Regiment) apologized to his men, and begged them not to shoot him. After the fighting, much relieved to survive, he called for three cheers, and was promptly shot dead by a nameless marksman.⁴¹

Many argued that courage and competence proven by combat experience were the criteria for good leadership. ‘He therefore that judgeth or directeth against experience, is not in deed a man, but a fool more ignorant than a beast,’ wrote Geoffrey Gates in 1579. ‘It is impossible for any state to know the worth of their Captains without being in action against great enemies,’ observed Roger Williams. Captain John Baynard wrote to Elizabeth I in 1599 that ‘It is most necessary that there be no commander employed to have command of men in the wars, but such as are of experience.’⁴² ‘If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them,’ believed Oliver Cromwell, adding that ‘I would rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that you would call “a gentleman” and is nothing else.’⁴³

Such views could be subversive, as those plain russet-coated captains demonstrated when the army executed Charles I in 1649 and took over the government. Early modern society was based on hierarchy rather than ability. To be sure, military incompetence could be fatal. Thomas Churchyard, who took part in the botched assault on the walls of Leith in 1560, where many English troops died because the scaling ladders were eight feet too short, bitterly observed that this mistake took place ‘with blood the poor men bought’. Captains, as James Achesone noted in 1629, ‘hath the charge of men's lives’.⁴⁴ But so long as not too many men's lives were at hazard, competence took a back seat to deference. Elizabeth's senior commanders were aristocrats. Charles I chose the viscount Wimbledon to lead the disastrous attack in Cadiz in 1626 because of his court connections and loyalty rather than his abilities and experience. Two years later the king selected his favourite, the duke of Buckingham, to lead the expedition against the French island of Rhé, where—once again—in the decisive assault on St Martin's Fort the scaling ladders were too short. At the start of the Civil War even parliament chose as their generals men such as the earl of Essex, more for their pedigree than proficiency. But as the war went on, and as casualties mounted, soldiers increasingly volunteered to serve under officers with a proven record of success. During the war officers such as Oliver Cromwell, John Lambert and Henry Ireton rose on their abilities. After the war they established military rule, perhaps even a military dictatorship.⁴⁵ In reaction, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a system developed in which officers purchased their commissions, ensuring that the establishment was financially linked with the officer corps. Surprisingly, this produced competent leadership for nearly two centuries.

The qualities needed to be a good leader change according to rank. At the lower levels leadership is a face to face business, in which decisions are fairly simple and limited. At the top it becomes impersonal: as they become more senior, leaders have a problem projecting their personalities and objectives to those they command in an increasingly complicated milieu. Surprisingly little attention was paid to the qualities required for a good non-commissioned officer—perhaps because such aptitudes were assumed, or else did not find their way into manuals that appealed to the more literate officer class. Certainly in the highly structured early modern battlefield, the role of NCOs was rather limited. However, towards the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth, as battle tactics and movements became more complicated, and long-term enlisted infantrymen required extensive training, the task of NCOs grew. Increasingly, they acted as intermediaries between the officers and other ranks. The purchase system meant that inexperienced officers required more guidance from veteran sergeants, who had been promoted on merit. One late seventeenth-century cartoon portrayed a boy officer advancing into battle secured by baby's reins held by an old NCO.

Young officers received scant respect. In 1707 Edward Ward wrote that⁴⁶

An Ensign's usually a young gentleman who passed through all the classes of his education handsomely enough, and was ripe for the university, being designed for a clergyman, but unfortunately happened to be caught abed with one of his mother's chambermaids. … The young spark was doomed to the army.

The key leader was the captain. ‘The charge of Captains is of so great importance,’ wrote John Cruso, the Cambridge don, in his best-selling manual Military instructions for the Cavallerie (1632), ‘that it should not be given to any but to men of singular valour and experience.’ A captain must maintain discipline, ensure orders are carried out, and know every man by name. This was very important because, explained Cruso (who possessed military insights rare amongst academics), soldiers had left their friends and family to follow their captain to a foreign country. Thus the captain must be a father to his men. Sir John Smythe, a veteran, made a similar point about general officers: in 1590 he wrote that they must ‘win the love of their soldiers by taking great care of their healths and safeties’, and by treating them like ‘their own children’. They must, Smythe continued, ‘preserve by all means possible the lives of their soldiers, and not to employ and hazard them on every light occasion’.⁴⁷

‘I shall die in honour’

In 1651, just before his execution for loyalty to the crown, James Stanley, seventh earl of Derby, explained that ‘I was born in honour, have lived in honour and hope I shall die in honour.’⁴⁸ Honour was critical in explaining why men fought. In life and death, in peace and war, honour played an immense part in motivating early modern men, especially the gentry and aristocracy. Honour is as old as manhood itself, although the concept can change over time. Today it is seen in terms of disrespecting a man as a man. In the middle ages it was connected with the idea of chivalry, even platonic love, in which unattainable women were valued all the more because they were unavailable. The Reformation affected the concept of honour in three ways. First, the Church tried to sanctify honour. In The Mirror of Honor (1597), John Norden declared that ‘no man can become honorable without divine inspiration.’ Second, a group of intellectuals, known as the humanists, attempted to civilize honour by making it less bellicose. Third, the crown tried to control it by becoming honour's official dispenser: in 1555, for instance, Mary Tudor took over the College of Heralds.⁴⁹

Honour had two components—lineage and masculinity. It had two outcomes—winning it gave pride and self-respect, while losing it inflicted a shame that was hard to assuage. Honour was something one's family compounded like interest over generations, endowing its possessors with pride and potency. Maintaining the honour of one's dynasty was a compelling obligation. Keeping one's honour was a matter of keeping faith with one's predecessors, be they members of the same regiment or corps, or blood ancestors. As he stood before a firing squad in 1649, Arthur, baron Capel, declared, ‘I die, I take it, for maintaining the Fifth Commandment.’⁵⁰ He was honouring his father and mother: cowardice would have disgraced them. In his Booke of Honour (1625) Francis Markham argued that ‘The Fittest Man to make a soldier is a perfect gentlemen, for generous spirits are apt for great dangers.’ Perhaps that was the case. Certainly perfect gentlemen, who knew and were proud of their ancestors, had more to lose if they lost their honour. This, it was argued, made them better leaders than ‘men of obscure birth’.⁵¹ The higher they were, the harder they fell. While a gentleman could not earn honour in the same way as a merchant could grub for money through compound interest, he could lose it in a single act far more precipitously than a townsman could go bankrupt. As Iago pointed out:⁵²

Who steals my purse steals trash—'tis something, nothing …

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

Loss of honour made a gentleman a figure of scorn. When Henry, the fifth earl of Northumberland, and his son (also Henry) failed to behave bravely, the poet John Skelton contemptuously wrote in 1522:⁵³

The earl of Northumberland

Dare Take nothing in hand

Our Barons be so bold,

Into a mouse hole, they would

Run away and creep

Like a mainy of sheep.

Death was preferable to dishonour. Before sailing to fight on the continent, an English colonel told his regiment that ‘when honour is gone the soldier dies, although the man may drag on in a miserable despised life.’⁵⁴ Cowards lost their caste, for as Shakespeare put it, ‘True nobility is exempt from fear.’⁵⁵ That was the trouble with honour. You could fall—hard and fast. Arduously won over generations, through many manly feats of valour, honour could be lost in a trice, and regained, if at all, only with much difficulty. But, unlike female honour, which was usually connected with virginity, male honour could be recovered.⁵⁶ Before the Battle of Brentford (1642), Charles I addressed Sir Thomas Salisbury's Denbighshire Regiment, which had broken in battle three weeks earlier: ‘Gentlemen,’ said the king, ‘you have lost your honour at Edgehill. I hope you will regain it again here.’⁵⁷ And they did, routing three crack parliamentary regiments. Salisbury's men would have agreed with the motto of the Royal Regiment of Wales: ‘Gwell Angau na Chiwilydd—Better death than dishonour.’

Honour was also linked with masculinity. In 1562 Gerard Leigh pronounced honour as ‘glory got by courage of manhood’.⁵⁸ In the seventeenth century Sir Francis Bacon defined winning honour as ‘the revealing of a man's virtue and worth’.⁵⁹ In Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's 1607 play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (a pestle being a metaphor for the male organ), Ralph urges his comrades ‘bear yourselves … like men, valiant men.’⁶⁰ In battle, troops were constantly reminded of the biblical injunction to ‘play the men’. In August 1588, as the Armada was approaching, a ballad, ‘The Great Galleazzo’, urged all to ‘play your parts like men’.⁶¹ In 1660, expecting battle, Lieutenant Thomas Browne wrote to his father, ‘I hope you shall hear we behaved ourselves like men.’⁶² After the Battle of Worcester (1651), one of the victors boasted that their triumph was ‘done by us as men’.⁶³

Those innocent of combat were considered incomplete men, being dubbed virgin or maiden soldiers. In 1647 John Corbet criticized the militia as being ‘effeminate in courage’. Those who would not fight were frequently described as being sissies—'fellows unfit for women and war’.⁶⁴ The link between sex and combat, between honour and manhood, can be found in the poetry of Richard Lovelace. In the well known explanation of why he was going to the wars, he tells his Lucasta that he was choosing a new mistress—combat—because: ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.’ Afterwards, having lost, and having thus left the wars, in ‘To Lucasta from Prison’ he reverts to more traditional ways of realizing his masculinity, dreaming of lying ‘tangled in her hair’.⁶⁵ Cowards lost their manhood. ‘To abandon my honour,’ declared Colonel Joseph Bampfield in 1685, would be ‘womanish’.⁶⁶ Those who did so were reckoned not to be real men worthy of respect: they were scorned as cuckolds, the worst of all insults.⁶⁷

In early modern Britain men craved honour, and war was the circumstance in which it was best won. Lucy Hutchinson remembered that her father was ‘in love with true honour’. Philip Massinger, the playwright, advised that⁶⁸

If ‘ere my son

Follow the war, tell him it is a school

Where all the principles tending to honour

Are taught.

All too often, honour might be a soldier's sole reward. Unpaid, unpensioned, unappreciated, wounded in mind and body, many a veteran would agree with George Monck that ‘He that chooseth the profession of a soldier ought to know withal that honour must be his greatest wages.’⁶⁹

Military honour was largely a male concept with little appeal to women, especially as they were the ones who during wars were raped, widowed, and left to bring up orphaned children. When in Henry IV, Part II Northumberland tells Lady Percy ‘my honour is at pawn,’ his wife berates him ‘for God's sake, go not to these wars.’ In her poem ‘The Soldier's Death’, Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), complained:⁷⁰

Ye Silent, ye dejected men of war

For see! Where on the bier before you lies,

The pale, the fallen, the untimely Sacrifice

To your mistaken shrine, to your false Idol Honour.

Not surprisingly, there was little room for women in military honour. As recent debates suggest, many men find the presence of women in war threatening. Even females of the highest status had to be very careful of male sensitivities when they took part in combat. For instance, Charlotte, countess of Derby, refused to surrender Latham House in 1644 because it would lead to ‘the loss of her honour’. But she went on to add that as an obedient wife, and loyal subject, she would give up the house if her husband, who was away in the Isle of Man, or her king ordered her to do so.⁷¹

Disguising women as men has long had a prurient appeal: it featured in ninety-nine of some three hundred plays performed on the London stage from 1660 to 1700.⁷² Because combat was the apex of being a real man, and cowardice the sanctuary of sissies, men found women disguised as soldiers or sailors especially disturbing. The House of Commons was horrified in 1643 to hear a report that Prince Rupert had women dressed as male soldiers, and got even more upset when they were told he used a couple of them as whores.⁷³ Jane Ingleby, the daughter of a Yorkshire yeoman, is said to have charged with the king's cavalry at Marston Moor in 1644 and, wounded, escaped back to the security of her father's farm. In 1651 it was reported that a drummer boy stationed at the Tower of London was found out to be a drummer girl—after she had a baby.⁷⁴ ‘John Brown’, a black soldier in the Royal Africa Company, was discovered to be a woman, when she fell ill aboard the Hannibal in 1693.⁷⁵

Perhaps the best-known she-soldier was Christian Davies (1667–1739), better known as Mother Ross. On finding out that her husband had got drunk and had been shanghaied into the army to fight in Holland, she immediately cut her hair, put her children into her mother's care and enlisted as a man—apparently she had a boyish figure. She served in the Scots Greys, was wounded, demobilized, re-enlisted and fought at Nijmegen, Venlo and Blenheim—all in order to find her husband. Eventually she found him—in the arms of a Dutch woman. Their ensuing conversation is not recorded. Christian returned to the colours, and on being wounded at Ramillies, her secret was revealed when the surgeon removed her shirt to treat a wound and ‘saw my breasts, and by the largeness of my nipples, concluded that I had given suck’. She became a regimental suttler, selling provisions to the soldiers. On finding her husband's corpse on the field of Malplaquet, she was free to marry a Grenadier, and after the war was presented to Queen Anne, who awarded her a shilling a day. Eventually, she died an out-pensioner of Chelsea, being buried with full military honours. Although partly fictional, Christian's behaviour was more acceptable in a male world, because—like the countess of Derby at Latham House—she was acting as a good wife, trying to rescue her husband.⁷⁶

Stories of she-soldiers and sailors should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Take the Maiden Lillard, who, to avenge her slain lover, reputedly fought and died at the Battle of Ancrum (1545):⁷⁷

Upon the English loons she laid many thumps

And when her legs were cut off she fought upon her stumps.

According to a popular ballad, after Mary Ambree had watched the Spanish murder her lover, Sir John Major, in Ghent, she raised three thousand troops in order to exact revenge. In fact, there is no evidence that the Maiden Lillard or Mary Ambree ever existed. She-soldiers (and sailors) were found far less often in battles than in ballads. Between the reigns of Elizabeth and Victoria over a thousand ditties record the deeds of over a hundred heroic heroines: in contrast, only one of the 236 surviving military diaries was written by a woman.⁷⁸

‘My dearest friends were there’

Religion played an important part in war—as it did in every activity in early modern Britain. Before battle it comforted men, and during it assuaged combatants’ fear of death if only by reassuring them there was an afterlife. But it would be wrong to exaggerate the role of religion in making men fight. After the Battle of Naseby (1645) a parliamentary chaplain described ‘the greatest part of the common soldiers’ in the victorious New Model Army, that supposed ‘army of saints’, as having ‘little religion’.⁷⁹ Religion became even less important in the standing army of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For instance, in 1703 eleven of the twenty chaplains attached to Marlborough's army as it campaigned on the continent were absent. ‘They were either in England, Ireland or in the Colonels’ pockets,’ Chaplain Samuel Noyes complained to the Archbishop of York.⁸⁰ Faith could have little effect on making even the most religious men stay and fight. Richard Baxter, one of the seventeenth century's leading theologians and pastors, and chaplain to Colonel Edward Whalley's parliamentary regiment from 1645 to 1647, might have been expected to rationalize his behaviour in battle in religious terms. Far from it. He explained what made him stay in a fight:⁸¹

Many of my dearest friends were there, whose society had formerly been delightful to me, and whose welfare I was tender of, being men that had a deeper interest in my affections than any in the world had before those times. … It was they that stuck to me, and I to them. … I would not forsake them … my faithful people that purposedly went through with me … so many wars and dangers.

In other words, what contained his fears and stopped him from bolting is what today we call small group loyalty, which was crucial in enabling men to confront the face of battle. In combat men felt intensely towards their comrades, mates, oppoes, buddies, or butties.⁸² They experience a sentiment as ardent as love: directed towards people they may not even like, it can be more intense than what they feel for their families. The key that makes a man fight—not just join up or campaign but stay and fight, slay and be slain—is loyalty to the small group to which he belongs. ‘Man is not a killer, but the group is,’ wrote Konrad Lorenz in his study On Aggression (1963). We may or may not be naturally aggressive animals, but without doubt we are gregarious ones.⁸³ We take comfort—especially in battle where comfort is sorely needed—from the close proximity of our friends and comrades.⁸⁴ Amias Steynings, a veteran of the Thirty Years War, was convinced that it was comradeship that made fighting possible. From Lord Vere's camp in Maastricht he wrote home, ‘If one man or two should endure alone, and not thousands, there would be no wars.’⁸⁵ Robert Monro justified writing his memoirs of mercenary service in the Thirty Years War ‘because I loved my comrades’. He explained why men fought:⁸⁶

Nothing therefore in my opinion, more worthy to be kept next unto Faith, than this kind of friendship, grown up with education, conformed by familiarity, in frequenting the dangers of war. And who is more worthy to be chosen as a friend than one who has shown himself both valiant and constant against his enemies.

After his regiment mustered at Saffron Walden in June 1645, Ralph Josselin, a parliamentary chaplain, wrote in his diary that ‘The Colonel was pleased to honour me to be his comrade. I shall never forget his great love and respect.’ After surrendering at Limerick in 1690, Captain John Stevens refused to leave his unit. He wrote in his journal, ‘I could not live from my regiment, which was all the home I had and all the friends.’ Of course, this feeling could become a two-edged sword: the death of a friend could be so traumatic that it could produce a nervous breakdown or an uncontrollable desire for revenge.⁸⁷ When those bonds of friendship, that glue of unit cohesion, broke down or never developed, the results could be calamitous. Sir Richard Fanshawe, the British ambassador, explained why the expeditionary force sent to Portugal in 1662 disintegrated: he wrote that there ‘appears to me to be no cement at all in our troops, being admirable individuals, but the worst body that ever was’.⁸⁸

Men have always asked themselves: Do I have the stomach to fight? Honour, a sense of manhood, small group loyalty, punishments, rewards, all combine to make them do so, as does the shame of failure. What is remarkable is that most men find that they have the stomach. They do not run, they acquit themselves bravely, perhaps because they lived up to the expectations that they will do so. As a best-selling seventeenth-century ballad put it:⁸⁹

We are no cowardly shirkers, but Englishmen true bred,

We'll play our parts like valiant hearts and never fly for dread.