CHAPTER 8

Talk You of Killing: Civil Wars and Commonwealth: Impact, 1638–1660

 Desdemona: Talk you of killing?

 Othello: Ay, I do.

 Desdemona: Then heaven have mercy on me

Othello, V, ii, 37–40

IN ‘THE CIVIL WARS’, A POEM WRITTEN IN 1609 ABOUT THE WARS OF THE Roses in 1609, over a generation before the actual British Civil Wars, Samuel Daniel observed:¹

O war! begot in pride and luxury,

The child of malice and revengeful hate,

Thou impious good and goodly impiety

That art the foul refiner of a state.

Daniel was using the word ‘refiner’ as a metallurgist might: to enhance, strengthen, even purify the state. Between 1638 and 1660 war was the crucible that forged several key issues of the British experience: the relationships between the component parts of the British Isles, between authority and freedom, between rulers and the ruled, between liberals and conservatives, between religious faith and scientific rationality. Since killing is the central act of war, and it is killing—more than anything else—that makes wars decisive, it seems logical that there was a relationship between the number of war deaths and the impact of war. So this chapter will first assess how many British people were killed directly and indirectly as a result of the Civil Wars. It will then look at how individuals died, the effects of their deaths on family and friends, and the experience of being wounded. Then it will investigate the wider effect of the killing, and how it radicalized people, especially soldiers. Finally, the chapter will show how at the macro level war strengthened the English nation, which used its new-found military power over Scotland and Ireland to form a British state.

How Many Died

As we saw in Chapter 3, trying to establish war casualties is notoriously difficult, particularly when records are not as copious as they are today. Tricks of memory, as well as the needs of propaganda, produced wildly different estimates. For instance, the nineteen contemporary accounts of the assault of 15 June 1644 on St Mary's Tower during the Siege of York estimate from twenty to over three hundred casualties.² Occasionally, physical evidence supports contemporary accounts. A nineteenth-century road widening near Aylesbury dug up a mass grave with two hundred skeletons, confirming the estimates given by Civil War newsletters. The best way of getting a total picture of how many died is to enter into a computer every incident found, ranging from Marston Moor, the wars’ bloodiest battle, to a fracas in Doncaster in which one man perished. Mindful of the cliché ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, in doing so I have tried to be conservative: long ago as an intelligence officer I was trained that underestimating the numbers of the enemy could be literally fatal, especially if they attacked! The trouble is that by producing precise figures computers give a misleading sense of accuracy. On the other hand they enable one to analyse data by asking, for instance, how many people died per month or year, or in battles or skirmishes. Since it is impossible to assess the nationality of those who died, casualties are be listed in the place there they did so. Thus the 6,120 Scots who died fighting in England, mainly at Marston Moor, Preston and Worcester, are listed under England, just as Cromwell's roundheads who died at Drogheda are put in the Irish column.

During the 1640s perhaps a thousand died from combat deaths at sea. In the 1650s large numbers died in foreign expeditions such as the conquest of Jamaica, privateering, the Dunkirk campaign, and naval warfare off the Spanish coast. Rather arbitrarily, these have been estimated at 40 incidents, with 3,000 combat casualties. Since pestilence and accidental deaths at sea tended to be far more frequent than on land, and the West Indies were notorious for yellow fever, a three to one ratio for non-combat to combat deaths would not be unreasonable, giving us a total of twelve thousand.³ Adding the thousand who died in the 1640s gives us thirteen thousand, so if we allocated this in proportion to the relative populations of England (62.5 per cent), Scotland (12.5 per cent), and Ireland (25 per cent), we get 8,125, 1,625 and 3,250 for each nation respectively.

Between 1639 and 1640 some fifty thousand English and Scots troops took part in the two Bishops’ Wars. If we assume a 10 per cent death rate (a conservative one), and split the deaths equally between the two kingdoms, we get 2,500 English deaths for the Bishops’ Wars. Between 1642 and 1651 the computer analysis shows that 34,105 parliamentarians and 51,645 royalists died in England in combat in 647 incidents. Violence declined in England during the years from 1651 to 1660 when 25 roundheads and 300 royalists died in ten incidents such as the Sealed Knot conspiracies, and Penruddock's (1655) and Booth's risings (1659). This gives us a total figure of 86,075 dead in combat.⁴

Estimates as to the ratio between the number of people who died in combat and those who succumbed indirectly to disease vary. Jacques Dupâquier, the French demographer, calculated that during the seventeenth century only 10 per cent of military deaths were due to battle. Geoffrey Parker put the figure at 25 per cent. During the years 1642–45 the annual death rate for the Banbury garrisons averaged 10 per cent, while burials in the parish church rose three and a half fold. Death rates in more crowded cities such as Oxford, Bristol and Exeter could well have been twice or even thrice as high.⁵ Joseph Bampfield, the royalist governor of Arundel, attributed the majority of the five hundred deaths of its nine-hundred garrison during the siege to ‘the bloody flux and spotted fever’.⁶ An archaeological finding supports this diagnosis. Fewer than half, three, or perhaps four of the nine members of the royalist garrison of Sandal Castle, Yorkshire, who were buried in the same grave during the siege, were killed in combat.⁷ Applying a conservative ratio of 1.5 disease to combat deaths to our total of 86,075 combat deaths produces 129,113 disease deaths.

While disease-related fatalities are rare in modern war, accidental deaths, particularly those from aircraft crashes and friendly fire, are far more common than they were in early modern conflicts. For instance, of the 162 alumni of North Carolina State University who died during the Second World War, 98 (60 per cent) were killed in action, 59 (36 per cent) died from accidents, and 5 (4 per cent) from disease.⁸ The earliest firm figures we have for the ratio of combat to accidental deaths is for the American Civil War, where for every hundred soldiers who died directly in combat, five did so by accident.⁹ So if we apply this ratio to the 86,075 English combat deaths, we get 4,303 accidental ones.

In addition, after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 the army sent about thirteen hundred prisoners of war—about half of whom were English—as slaves to Barbados, where they were cruelly treated. Since the mortality rate for Europeans crossing the Atlantic and in Barbados was so terrible, we could safely estimate that half perished prematurely, giving 325 English dead from transportation. ‘No one, but myself, as far as I know, came out again,’ recalled Heinrich von Uchteritz, a German mercenary, who was ransomed for eight hundred pounds of sugar.¹⁰ Only two others were known to have returned home: John Heywood, from Devon, and Thomas Jackson, from Kendal. Fourteen years in Barbados seems to have addled Jackson's brains. After he was arrested in April 1665 for speaking ‘treasonable words’ against Charles II, the local magistrates dismissed the case explaining that ‘The fellow seemeth but simple.’¹¹

Table 2 below summarizes the totals for war deaths in England, suggesting that 230,441 died directly or indirectly as a result of war between 1638 and 1660.

While it must be remembered that these figures are only estimates (their illusory precision notwithstanding), they do accord roughly with the views of contemporaries. ‘Scarce a month, scarce a week without the sight or noise of blood,’ recalled Chaplain Richard Baxter. Cromwell told parliament in 1645 the conflict was ‘a vast burden upon the people’. Four years later Nicholas Lockyer called the wars ‘a time of slaughter, fields, cities, towns, dipped and dyed in blood’.¹² Thomas Hobbes reckoned that a hundred thousand people had perished during the fighting and from war-related disease, while both an anonymous English officer and Sir William Petty, the father of English demographics, put the English casualties at three hundred thousand.¹³

Scottish casualties are even harder to estimate because records north of the border were sparser than in England. During June 1640 the earl of Argyle led five thousand Campbells in a six-weeks’ expedition to pillage royalist clans in the Highlands, in which perhaps a thousand perished. In addition, another 2,500 died as a result of the two Bishops’ Wars (see above). The computer-based analysis shows that 16,245 parliamentarians and 11,765 royalists died in forty-six incidents between 1642 and 1651.¹⁴ This does not include Glencairn's Rebellion of 1653–54, in which nearly twenty thousand roundheads were involved. So perhaps four thousand died in thirty incidents. This gives a total of 32,010.

Table 2 War deaths in England, 1638–60
Bishops' Wars	2,500
Combat	86,075
Disease	129,113
Accident	4,303
Overseas/at sea	8,125
Transported	325
Total	230,441

Disease ravaged both sides in Scotland. Perhaps four to five thousand died from plague in 1644, while as many may have perished in the war-related famine of 1648–49. During the 1650 invasion of Scotland, 4,500 of Cromwell's army died from sickness. Thus, if we apply the English ratio of battle to non-battle deaths, 48,015 died from disease in Scotland. To this we must add 5 per cent of the combat deaths to account for accidents, making 1,601. In addition, as many as ten thousand Scots prisoners were transported as slaves, of whom perhaps half died on the Atlantic crossing or were worked to death in the West Indies.

Table 3 War deaths in Scotland, 1638–60
Bishops’ Wars	3,500
Combat	33,010
Disease	48,015
Accident	1,601
Overseas/at sea	1,625
Transported	5,000
Total	92,751

If the figures for England are estimates, and those for Scotland inspired guesses, those for Ireland are—it must be admitted—miracles of conjecture, and cannot be broken down into categories as can those for England and Scotland. Sir William Petty estimated the loss of life in Ireland between 23 October 1641 and 23 October 1652 as follows:

Table 4 Petty's war deaths, Ireland, 1641–52
Protestants dead through plague, war and famine (including 37,000 massacred at the outbreak)	112,000
Roman Catholic dead	504,000
Total	616,000

Without doubt Petty grossly exaggerated the number of Protestants massacred in 1641: most likely six thousand, about 4.8 per cent of Ireland's Protestants, died. But his totals do not include the forty thousand ‘wild geese’ who were driven into exile, some to die in Spanish or French military service, others to settle abroad. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, estimated that after the Elizabethan wars only one in four Irish mercenaries made it back home. In addition, during the commonwealth six to twelve thousand of the wives and children that the wild geese left behind in Ireland were deported as indentured servants to the Americas.¹⁵ Very few of the Irish sold as indentured servants in New England (where many prospered) or in the West Indies (where most perished) returned home. In the parish of Kilcormick a surveyor reported, ‘There is no house or church.’ The population of North Wexford fell by 80 per cent, many parishes having become ‘free-fire zones’.¹⁶ As early as 1642 Owen Roe Neil related that County Donegal ‘not only looks like a desert, but like Hell’. Having travelled extensively throughout Ireland in 1652 and 1653, Colonel Richard Lawrence, governor of Waterford, stated that ‘the plague and famine had swept away whole counties that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast or bird’.¹⁷ Lawrence was reporting before the Cromwellian settlement during which Petty estimated that the English confiscated eleven million acres, out of twenty million, to give them to Protestants. Between 1641 and 1688 the Catholic share of the profitable land in Ireland fell from 59 per cent to 22 per cent.¹⁸ On pain of death tens of thousands of Catholics were ordered to the rocky province of Connaught, or into foreign exile. The English threat to kill those who refused to leave was not a hollow one. Colonel Daniel Axtell, the officer who commanded the guard during Charles I's trial, smashed the brains of six women he found near Athy outside their reservation in Connaught.¹⁹ Fighting in Ireland was, as usual, extremely bloody: while 10 per cent of the participants died in an average battle in England, three times as many did so in Ireland, where prisoners of war—and civilians—were routinely massacred.²⁰

As recently as 1974 a leading Irish historian described Petty's estimate that 618,000 people—or 38 per cent of Ireland's population—died due to the Civil Wars as ‘the best we have’.²¹ Since then Petty's figures have been questioned. Scott Wheeler put the dead at between 125,000 and 200,000 (6.25 per cent to 10 per cent) of the total population. David Scott put the number at 500,000 (25 per cent). Robin Clifton suggests that 400,000, or 19 per cent of Ireland's population, perished.²² The most recent—and most convincing—estimate comes from Padraig Lenihan, who argued that the population of Ireland fell by between 15 per cent and 20 per cent to 1.3 million. In other words 230,000 to 325,000 people died out of a total population estimated from between 1,530,000 and 1,625,000. Since Lenihan's research focused on the years from 1649 to 1653, his higher number of 20 per cent, or 325,000 deaths, seems more probable for the longer period, and will be used.

Even though Petty's figures have been proven too high, one thing no one—not even English historians—can doubt: that during the middle of the seventeenth century Ireland suffered a bloodbath of major proportions, which Lenihan has rightly called ‘a demographic catastrophe’.²³ In comparison to the fifth of Ireland's population who died because of war between 1641 and 1660, 18.6 per cent perished during the Great Famine of the 1840s—a far better known cataclysm.

In Table 5 the numbers for England, Scotland and Ireland have been combined to give a total tally of 648,192 dead in the British Isles from 1638 to 1660.

Even though it must be stressed that these figures are very rough estimates, and should be taken with a pinch of caution and a pound of scepticism, they do suggest that the loss of life the Civil Wars inflicted on the British Isles was immense, even when set into context of calamities such as plague or other horrors.

Table 5 British war deaths, 1638–60
	Dead	Population	Percent of nation	Percent of British
England	230,441	5,000,000	4.6	66
Scotland	92,751	1,000,000	9.2	13.2
Ireland	325,000	1,575,000	20.6	20.8
Total	648,192	7,575,000	8.6

Let us put these figures in context with other wars. In gross numbers the bloodiest conflict in history, with as many as seventy-eight million dead, was the Second World War, followed by the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64, when twenty million Chinese perished. In proportionate terms the worst conflict in history was the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) in which three hundred thousand (60 per cent) out of half a million Paraguaians died. About 20 per cent of the population died in the Thirty Years War, as compared to 5.5 per cent and 6.05 per cent in Europe in the First and Second World Wars. Compared to these figures, those for the Civil Wars in England (4.6 per cent) and Scotland (9.7 per cent) seem high, and for Ireland (20.6 per cent) catastrophic. Perhaps a more accurate context would be to compare these proportions to other British wars and other Civil Wars. The effects of the Wars of the Roses, England's other great Civil War, have, for instance, been exaggerated, being nowhere as devastating as Shakespeare would have us believe.²⁴ In the American Civil War 3 per cent of the total population died.²⁵ In the First World War, out of a British population of thirty-five million, officially 765,399 people lost their lives. If we include as war-connected deaths the 183,577 people who died in 1918–19 from Spanish flu, then 2.61 per cent of the population died directly or indirectly as a result of the war. By comparison ‘only’ 0.94 per cent of the British population died in the Second World War.

So, in other words, the British Civil Wars were not just the bloodiest conflict in British history, but rank high in the sad story of man's inhumanity to man.

How People Died

Unlike modern wars, we do not have figures for the Civil Wars of how men died, or of what sort of weapons did the most damage. In the Second World War, for instance, artillery caused 75 per cent of British wounds, compared to the Civil Wars, when cannon were so primitive and slow that they had comparatively little effect.²⁶ Then, many men died in pitched battles as the infantry stood in line facing each other, exchanging volleys, before advancing towards each other. As pikemen came within range of the enemy's weapons, about a dozen feet, their pikes went up, and they drew their swords. Like musketeers they stabbed, hacked, clubbed and trampled the enemy to death. Even more perished when one side broke and ran. In this butchery the cavalry were terribly lethal. A horseman could readily outrun a footsoldier, and from his saddle bring his sword down on the victim's vulnerable head, back and neck.

Surprisingly, only 15 per cent of casualties occurred in the nine largest and best known battles in which over a thousand perished. In conflicts, 37 per cent did so with between 200 and 999 dead, while almost half (47 per cent) lost their lives in small battles or skirmishes in which two hundred or fewer were killed. There seems to have been a fair amount of almost random killing, unreported by military authorities, or newsheets, but noted in parish registers when corpses were found and given a Christian burial. For instance, between 1644 and 1645 Guy Carleton, vicar of Bucklebury, Berkshire, recorded four such deaths, which cannot be attributed to any known skirmish or battle.²⁷

The reasons why many more people died from disease than enemy action are obvious. From the crowded royalist base of Oxford, Lady Anne Fanshawe wrote that ‘the sad spectacles of war’, plague and sickness came ‘by reason of so many people being packed together’. John Taylor, the poet, who was appointed water bailiff for the besieged city, vividly recalled the bestial condition of the River Thames:²⁸

Dead hogs, dogs, cats and well flayed carrion horses

Their noisome corpses soiled the water sources;

Both swines’ and stable dung, beasts’ guts and garbage,

Street dirt, with gardeners’ weeds and rotten herbage.

And from this water's filthy putrefaction,

Our meat and drink were made, which bred infection.

Such poor water caused dysentery, which could kill a third of those infected. Typhus, which contemporaries called camp fever because it was associated with the crowded military accommodations, had a 25 per cent fatality rate.²⁹ Even more devastating was that perennial seventeenth-century scourge, the bubonic plague, with a 50–70 per cent death rate. Between 22 June 1647 and 20 April 1648, 2,099 people died of the plague in war-torn Chester. Plague so devastated Stafford that it took a generation for the town's population to recover.³⁰

Accidents by definition were episodic. Weapons are inherently dangerous machines, especially in the hands of ill-trained troops or careless conscripts, such as those involved in accidents in late 1642, right at the start of the First Civil War. On 17 September during an argument with a couple of Oxford undergraduates, Captain Staggar's musket went off—accidentally, said he—hitting a woman who happened to be shopping at the butcher's stall next door.³¹ In November 1642 Thomas Hollamore, a member of Sir Ralph Hopton's troop, was ‘killed by the going off of a musket’. Hopton's men must have been a careless bunch, for the following month ‘the going off of a musket unawares’ killed Christopher Awberry, one of Hopton's gentleman volunteers.³² Mistakes made during the stress of combat could kill. Colonel John Hampden died at Chalgrove when his overloaded pistol blew up.³³ Gunpowder is extremely dangerous, as Thomas, earl of Haddington, and several of his staff officers discovered when they called for candles, and the servant set them down on a conveniently placed powder barrel!³⁴ At the Siege of Gloucester, Captain James Hurcus stepped out of his trench to see whether the grenade he had just thrown at the roundheads had gone off. It did. He died.³⁵ After Captain Starker captured Hoghton Tower, Lancashire, he and his troops inspected the loot. One soldier was so impressed with the huge stash of gunpowder that he lit his pipe, blowing up the arsenal, as well as himself, his captain and sixty of his comrades.³⁶ Major Bridges, and twenty-three other royalists, drowned in the Avon when a partially demolished bridge collapsed.³⁷

Compared to the huge loss of life, property damage was far less extensive. Seventeenth-century weapons were not nearly as destructive as, say, modern artillery or strategic bombers. Nonetheless the war destroyed two to three hundred country houses and damaged uncounted medieval castles. Perhaps as many as a tenth of townspeople were made homeless, especially when defenders pulled down buildings to give them better fields of fire in a siege: it took sixty years to completely rebuild Exeter.³⁸ Irish property damage was far greater. In The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672), Sir William Petty estimated that the value of people, stock, houses and land in Ireland fell from £13,500,000 to £5,200,000—a plunge of 61.4 per cent.

Radicalization

All wars to some extent radicalize those who survive them. As an American song popular after the First World War put it:³⁹

How yea gonna keep ‘em down on the farm

After they've seen Paree?

Parliament's soldiers had seen Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby, plus dozens of sieges and countless skirmishes. They had seen their friends killed and wounded, and themselves survive. They had no wish to get back to the farm, workshop or apprenticeship, with their arrears unpaid. They did not want to be sent to fight in Ireland, where, if they were lucky enough not to be killed or die of disease, they might end up farming that island's barren and hostile soil. War had—as it does to all who take part in it—fundamentally changed ‘the boys’. Keeping them down was to be a difficult, perhaps an impossible, challenge.

At the time many soldiers realized the effect combat was having upon them. ‘An Army is a harsh, cruel world, a brutal self-seeking power,’ wrote the roundhead Chaplain William Sedgwick in his memoirs, adding that ‘Many are wholly taken off from wars by the great experience we had of the beastly deceits, the horrible cruelty and corruption that attended it.’ Preaching in 1646 Hugh Peters, another parliamentary chaplain, reminded the victorious roundheads that in the army they had found a way to exercise their talents as human beings, sinking their differences to unite to achieve common goals: thus ‘men grow religious and more spiritual’.⁴⁰ Later the same year, Peters told the troops that in the military ‘Men are not in their proper work, which eccentric motions produce many things untouched.’ And then, as if the effects of combat were as obvious to those who had endured it as they had been painful, Peters enigmatically concluded, ‘I need not particularize.’⁴¹

Immediately after combat, survivors’ emotions came to the surface. Time and time again roundheads gave God full thanks for their victory and His favour. ‘Thus the Lord of Hosts hath done great things for us, to whose name be ascribed all the glory,’ wrote Sir Thomas Fairfax after capturing Nantwich in 1644.⁴² Immediately after Naseby in June 1645, Colonel John Okey, whose regiment of dragoons had just taken heavy casualties, wrote to a friend, ‘Now what remains but that you and we should magnify the name of our God that did remember a handful of despised men, whom they had thought to have swallowed up before them.’ Okey embellished God's victory by portraying His (and his) soldiers as the underdogs, although in fact they had outnumbered the royalists: ‘And I desire you that you would, on our behalf, bless God that hath made us instruments for our kingdom's good,’ Okey concluded.⁴³

Taking part in and surviving combat changed the way in which many troopers thought of themselves. ‘I speak not now of our Army of soldiers,’ wrote William Erberry, ‘but of the army of saints.’⁴⁴ In Orders from the Lords of Hosts, a sermon first given to Colonel Rossiter's Regiment, Edward Reynolds described this process:⁴⁵

Because there is death in the camp soldiers carry their lives in the hand, and look death in the face daily. … Soldiers stand in most need to be very holy men because they may be taken away very suddenly … a holy army is victorious and successful. … Yea, is this not to be clearly seen … in our new model?

This view that victory had somehow sanctified the survivors was not just something preachers handed out like medals of approval. While in the past the victors believed that God had brought them victory (as after the Spanish Armada for instance), this was the first time the victors became convinced that God wanted them to use that victory to do His work—whatever that might be. This was a firm conviction that many of the New Model Army, especially the cavalry, accepted and, in several ways, originated. It might be seen as a way of dealing with post-combat stress. ‘Sir, you may speak against the preaching of Soldiers in the Army,’ a young cavalryman told Chaplain Thomas Edwards, ‘but I assure you that if they may not have leave to preach, they will not fight.’ Indeed, the trooper went on to argue that ‘God hath blessed’ His soldiers so bountifully that He had enabled them ‘within these four months to rout the enemy twice in the field’.⁴⁶

These new-found saints did not want to become suckers. They were adamant that the army's ‘harvest should not end in chaff, and what it had won in the field should not be thrown away in the Council Chamber’. In their songs soldiers voiced the fear that they would be betrayed: that having won the war they would somehow lose the peace:⁴⁷

That if our Armies lay down Arms

Before the work is at an end,

We may expect worse Harms

More precious lives and Estates to spend.

Their fears came to a head in late 1647 when the senior army officers debated with representatives of the rank and file, in Putney parish church. ‘Do you not think,’ asked Edward Sexby, ‘that we fought all this time for nothing? All here, both great and small, do think that we fought for something.’⁴⁸ Colonel Thomas Rainsborough went further. He argued that after winning a war, and seeming about to lose the peace, many soldiers had been radicalized into a new concept of self:⁴⁹

I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he: and therefore truly, Sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent put himself under that government.

Rainsborough's magnificent phrases still blaze down across the centuries as an inspiring declaration of the rights of man, the rule of law, the consent of the governed—even of democracy. It had an appeal to another victorious British Army, that of 1945 which helped elect a Labour government. Just as in 1945, when junior officers, such as Lawrence Stone, helped radicalize their men, they did the same thing during the First English Civil War.⁵⁰ All in all, those plain russet-coated captains, who knew what they fought for and loved what they knew, had created what Richard Baxter, the parliamentary chaplain, called ‘a very extraordinary army’.⁵¹

It was also an army that decisively won its wars. On the continent sieges were the dominant form of warfare. But in the British Isles, where the science of fortification was less advanced, and there were few foreign experts to import the latest technology, battles predominated. By their very nature, the results of battles tend to be more definitive, which meant that a radical army had fewer restrictions on putting their programmes into effect.⁵²

This would in part explain why the army executed the king. The trial and execution of Charles I were one of the most dramatic episodes in British history. The day the king was publicly beheaded before a crowd of thousands outside the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, 30 January 1649, was one of those dates which everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard the news. ‘That the king is executed is good news to us: only some few honest men and a few cavaliers bemoan him,’ wrote Cornet John Baynes to his brother Adam. His callousness is understandable for Baynes was writing from Pontefract, where he was besieging the last royalist holdout, and thought the news that the king was dead would induce the garrison to surrender.⁵³ While posterity has seen the king's trial as a clash between absolutist and representative government, many parliamentary soldiers (like Cornet Baynes) regarded it more as the trial of a war criminal: they believed that having reneged on his surrender, Charles was no longer entitled to the protections granted prisoners of war. By breaking his parole, the indictment against Charles at his trial declared he had inflicted ‘the needless loss of much blood’. The indictment went on to list specific battles—Edgehill, Caversham, Gloucester, Newbury, Cropredy, Bodmin, Leicester, Naseby—where he had been present, and at which consequently ‘much innocent blood of the free people of this nation has been spilt, many families undone’.⁵⁴ The execution of Charles I made a political solution to end the war all the more difficult to achieve because it radicalized parliamentarians, the army and royalists.

Afterward the royalists could do little except lie low, hope for the best, and turn Charles into a martyr. Reading Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by the king just before he died, might provide comfort as they had to deal with the real business of the day. Royalists—or their wives if they had fled into exile—had to negotiate fines with parliament to keep their estates. A few, such as the poet Abraham Cowley, hoped that ‘the Royal Blood which the dying Charles did sow’ would one day become ‘the seed of Royalty’. In despair, many, like the poet Robert Herrick, must have asked themselves:⁵⁵

O times most bad

Without the scope

Of Hope

Where shall I go

Or whither run

To shun

This public overthrow?

State Formation

Practically the first thing the army had to do after executing the king was to create a new form of government known as the commonwealth. But in chopping off the king's head and ending the monarchy, the new regime cut off a link with the past that would have given it legitimacy. The commonwealth never resolved this problem, remaining constitutionally and politically unstable, while being militarily strong. Yet during the 1650s through that military strength the commonwealth laid the foundation for Britain's lucrative Caribbean empire, the British Army won a reputation as exalted as it had enjoyed in the Hundred Years War, the Navy beat the Dutch, and England forged a British state.

After most wars the armed forces are demobilized as quickly as possible to save money and let the men go home to their families and freedom. But during the 1650s the commonwealth retained a large standing army averaging forty thousand men that peaked at seventy thousand men in 1652, and a large navy of over two hundred ships.⁵⁶

‘An army is a beast that has a great belly, and must be fed,’ a pamphleteer complained in 1653.⁵⁷ He was right. A huge standing army and a growing permanent navy were extremely expensive, costing an average of £2,700,000 a year, which was about nine-tenths of the government's revenue. Such a financial burden could not have been borne by the pre-1642 tax collection system in which the king was, in peacetime at least, expected to live off his own. Parliament only voted taxes—and then grudgingly—in the extra-ordinary time of war. Afterwards the costs of war moved from being a royal responsibility to a national one backed up by a government increasingly founded on parliament. They also became a more indirect levy, shifting away from property and income taxes (assessments that could be easily abused) to direct revenue taxes on items such as beer and salt, that were cheap to collect, hard to evade, and extremely productive. They laid the foundation for the fiscal sinews of war that enabled Britain to become a world power.⁵⁸

The commonwealth used its considerable armed forces to fight two sorts of wars: internal ones, which were in effect continuations of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, and external ones, which were traditional conflicts fought between nation states. The distribution of troops in 1655 suggests the relative importance of each: of 55,500 men, 23,000 (41.4 per cent) were in Ireland, 19,000 (34.3 per cent) in Scotland, 11,000 (19.8 per cent) in England and 2,500 (4.5 per cent) in the West Indies.⁵⁹

In England the army had to deal with the Sealed Knot, a secret royalist society intent on overthrowing the government. In this it had about as much chance of success as its namesake (the Civil War re-enactment society) does today. Of the eight attempts the Sealed Knot made, Penruddock's Rising of 1655 in Salisbury was the most serious: it began as a farce and ended in tragedy; the leaders were executed, their followers transported. As a result of the rebellion, Cromwell divided England into ten, later eleven, military districts each run by a major general with orders to ‘promote godliness and virtue, and discourage …all profanities and ungodliness’.⁶⁰ Lucy Hutchinson called the major generals ‘a company of silly mean fellows … these ruled according to their wills, by no law.’ In fact, even though one of the major generals, William Boteler, advocated stoning blasphemers, their rule was neither as tyrannical nor unpopular as posterity would have us believe: it was an indication of the growing power of the armed forces.⁶¹

The most immediate challenge facing the commonwealth was dealing with Ireland. Ever since the 1641 rising, many Englishmen had been convinced that the Irish papists must be harshly punished. The savagery of Cromwell's conquest (described in Chapter 7) was followed by the confiscations of the 1650s when the English appropriated the land of six thousand Irishmen, forcing untold thousands more to move on pain of death to the barren west of the country. ‘To Hell or Connaught’ were the alternatives the English offered papists whom they could not imagine going anywhere but down in the next life. As we have seen, perhaps a fifth of Ireland's population lost their lives as a result of the wars. No wonder the Irish have never forgotten the brutality of Cromwell's conquest. In 1972 a song (which topped the charts in Dublin) protested the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland:⁶²

Through the streets of Belfast

In the dark of early morn.

British soldiers come marauding

Wrecking homes with scorn …

Round the world the truth will echo

Cromwell's men are here again.

Cromwell's men did not make quite such a lasting impression on the Scots. In the three years between the battles of Preston (17–19 August 1648), that of Dunbar (3 September 1650) and Worcester (3 September 1651), the Scots had taken fearful casualties. They could no longer boast of being an unconquered nation. In 1651 Robert Blair, a minister of the kirk, described his country as ‘a poor bird’, whom ‘the hawk … hath eaten it up’.⁶³

Many of the Ironsides who had won the Civil War were sent overseas to fight foreign enemies. The most important expedition captured Jamaica in 1655. Led by William Penn and Robert Venables with 38 ships and 2,500 men, its original target was Hispaniola, a nest of privateers, which they failed to take, snapping Jamaica up as a consolation prize. An ungrateful government reprimanded Penn and Venables, not realizing that they had laid the foundations for the highly profitable British West Indies. In June 1658 four to five thousand Ironsides routed a Spanish army at the Battle of the Dunes, near Dunkirk. England's standing as a land power had not been higher since the days of Henry V and Agincourt, nearly two and a half centuries before.

The Navy and the First Dutch War, 1652–54

Many have argued that the New Model Army that parliament created, that Cromwell perfected, that won the Civil Wars at home and beat the Scots, Irish and French abroad, was the progenitor of the British Army. If this was the case, then in large part it was due to the army's victory in the Civil Wars, which produced a well run, well financed, confident and aggressive English state. In much the same way the Civil Wars and commonwealth helped produce England's first modern navy: ironically the Royal Navy became a blue-water navy at the only time it was not royal. During this period England's power and prestige increased greatly at sea, due in part to Charles I's ship money, that hated tax levied in the 1630s which helped bring about the First Civil War. From 1640 to 1655 the English navy grew from 43 to 133 ships, as the proportion of armed merchant vessels in military service fell from a half to a quarter. Naval expenditures increased from two to three hundred thousand pounds. After a purge of incompetent officers in 1649, Cromwell's sea captains were as dedicated as their plain russet-coated comrades on land.⁶⁴

It is from these years and from these men that Daniel Baugh dates the origins of a blue-water British navy, one able to operate for long periods away from its home bases. In 1652 the system of rating seamen as able and ordinary was introduced; the former were paid twenty-four shillings a month, and had to be over twenty with at least five years’ sea time. The same year the navy adopted the single line-ahead tactical formation that required ships to be able to fire port and starboard broadsides at roughly the same time, increasing the need for standardization and better training. The preamble to the 1652 Articles of War stated that 'It is upon the Navy, under the providence of God, that the safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly attend.’ Some would argue that the institution of a daily rum ration three years later did much to achieve this goal.⁶⁵

The navy demonstrated its new-found capabilities, the result of the army's victory in the Civil Wars, during the First Dutch War of 1652–54. By 1651 years of intense Civil War had severely damaged trade. As a contemporary ballad put it:⁶⁶

Our ships are all taken, our merchants all stripp't

Our tradesmen all taken, our money all clipped.

So parliament passed a Navigation Act. Its objectives were simple. ‘The Dutch have too much trade and the English resolved to take it from them,’ observed General at Sea, George Monck, explaining, ‘what we want is more of the trade the Dutch have.’ By enacting that cargoes to and from British ports must be shipped in British vessels, parliament intended to destroy the Dutch merchant fleet, the largest in the world. The Dutch War (the first of three) was a new sort of war, a global war—fought not like Henry VIII's for glory, nor Elizabeth's for religion, nor Charles I's continental expeditions for dynastic honour, but for trade.⁶⁷

The war began in May 1652 when Admirals Robert Blake and Maarten Tromp met in the Channel in an exchange in which the British got the best. In August an action off Plymouth was inconclusive, while the English won an engagement off Kent the following month. In December, Tromp defeated Blake off Dungeness because many cowardly British commanders refused to fight. After several ‘shy’ captains were dismissed and rates of pay and victuals were improved, the British Navy performed well off Portland Bill in May 1653, and at Texel in July, where Tromp lost 20 of his 100 ships as well as his own life.

In his Panegyric to My Lord Protector (1655), Edmund Waller, the balladeer who could trot out best-sellers with equal facility for either Charles or Cromwell, praised Britain's naval mastery:⁶⁸

The sea's our own! And now all nations greet

With bending sail, each vessel of our fleet.

Your powers extend as far as wind can blow

Our swelling sails upon the earth may go.

Two years later Waller celebrated the capture of a Spanish galley in the Jamaica campaign:⁶⁹

Others may use the ocean as their road,

Only the English make it their abode.

During two decades of the Civil Wars and the commonwealth, the English made an abode not just of the oceans but of the British Isles. Like many European states in the first half of the seventeenth century, Britain was ‘a composite state’, made up of three nations (and a principality), which shared a common monarch and little else.⁷⁰ Indeed, the attempt by one of those monarchs, Charles I, to create a more unified state precipitated the Civil Wars. As Charles Tilly has pithily observed about this European-wide process of state formation, ‘War made the state and the state made war’. R. A. Brown agreed that ‘the origins of Modern Europe were hammered out on the anvil of war’, while John Lynn has argued that ‘warfare and military institutions’ should be placed ‘at the center of our understanding of the creation, character and domination of the state’.⁷¹ Oliver Cromwell—astute as ever—recognized, in part at least, the role war had in forming the state. ‘Sir,’ he wrote to Major General Lawrence Crawford, ‘the state in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve,—that satisfies.’⁷²

The soldiers who forged this British state did not do so consciously. The troops who invaded Scotland in 1650 dubbed themselves ‘The Army of England’.⁷³ Yet within three years, their general, Oliver Cromwell, had himself proclaimed the Lord Protector, of ‘the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging’.⁷⁴ The navy made the same point less subtly. The figurehead of the parliamentarian flagship, The Naseby, nicknamed ‘The Great Oliver’, showed the Lord Protector trampling over England, Scotland and Ireland as well as Spain and the Netherlands.⁷⁵ Half a century before the 1707 Act of Union, England and Scotland shared a common parliament, common rights, the same council of state, and religious toleration.

Yet this war machine, which had achieved so much, ultimately failed. In many ways it was not the republic's fault. Cromwell did not provide for an effective succession; thus when he died in 1658, and his son Richard, the aptly nicknamed ‘Tumbledown Dick’, was made Lord Protector, things immediately fell apart. Law and order broke down; the economy was in chaos. So unpopular was the army that as the Sheriff of Oxford proclaimed the new Lord Protector, the undergraduates pelted the guard of honour with turnips and carrots. The cost of maintaining a large standing army nearly brought England to financial ruin. Bankrupt of both money and ideas, the army restored the monarchy in May 1660, hopeful that Britain would return to the status quo ante bellum civile.