Plenty and Peace breeds cowards
Cymbeline, III, vi, 24
IN RETROSPECT, AT LEAST, THE PERIOD BETWEEN JAMES I'S ACCESSION to the English throne in 1603 and the outbreak of the British Civil Wars in 1639 seems a pacific interregnum between two periods when war was dominant. From the perspective of the Civil War, it could have been seen as a lull before the storm. ‘O those were golden days!’ recalled Peter Hausted, an Oxford don.1 For the first half of this interval such an interpretation is valid. James pursued a largely peaceful policy because he disliked war; because England needed to rest after the huge military effort of the last third of Elizabeth's reign; and because time was required to allow the conquest of Ireland to take hold. Between 1624 and 1628, when the king's heir, Charles I (r.1625–49), and his favourite, the duke of Buckingham, dominated policy, England become involved in four military expeditions. All of them failed catastrophically with considerable political ramifications.2 In the last decade of this period, from 1629–39, Charles recognized that he could not wage an expensive continental war without calling parliament—something he was not prepared to do. So he used his energies to reform the navy and militia. During this period of relative peace, very large numbers of men from the British Isles served overseas as mercenaries.
‘The most cowardly man’
Sir John Oglander, a gentleman from the Isle of Wight, thought that King James I of England and VI of Scotland was ‘the most cowardly man that I ever knew. He could not endure to see a soldier, to see men drilled, to hear of war was death to him.’3 During a tour of the Bodleian Library, James declared that had he not been king he would have been a don. His personal motto (which one can still see emblazoned above his statue outside the Bodleian) was ‘beati pacifice—blessed are the peacemakers’. As king of Scotland he had shown some courage: at the Bridge of Dee in 1589, when his army expected an imminent attack from the rebel Catholic earls, James walked amongst his troops, perhaps with ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’, encouraging them, not taking off his clothes for two days. In his Works, which were first published in 1616, the king may have been thinking of the Bridge of Dee when he advised commanders to ‘once or twice in your own person hazard yourself fairly,’ but also ‘conserve yourself thereafter for the weal of your people.’4 But by the time he inherited the English crown in 1603, James had lost whatever martial urges he might have had, finding excitement instead in the hunting field.
James also recognized that after the stresses of Elizabethan warfare, England needed to conserve her resources. Thus he made peace treaties with France and Spain that allowed the settlement in Ireland to take root. When Sir Cahir O'Doherty rebelled in April 1608, having been insulted by George Paulet, the governor of Derry, the City of London sent two hundred troops to Ireland, but the rebellion petered out of its own accord before they could arrive.5 The Union of England and Scotland under a common monarch also needed a period to take hold. James tried to integrate the two kingdoms, but the English parliament thwarted him, leaving Anglo-Scottish relations a contentious issue for generations.
James I sorely neglected the navy. Spending on it fell from £70,000 in 1590 to £30,000 in 1608. The system of having cadres of skilled warrant officers, such as a carpenter and boatswain attached to each ship when it was laid up, broke down, being replaced by night watchmen whose quality left much to be desired. Of the ninety-three watchmen at Chatham, only ten knew the Lord's Prayer, and even fewer the points of the compass. ‘The Navy is for the greatest part manned with aged, incompetent, vagrant, lewd and disorderly companions,’ reported a royal commission in 1608. ‘It is become a ragged remnant of tapsters, tinkers, cobblers, and many common rogues which will never prove good seamen.’6 Although the Royal Navy was able to perform routine duties, such as patrolling the North Sea and transporting dignitaries, it could not stop the Dutch in 1605 from attacking some Spanish ships that had sought refuge in Dover Harbour.7
Corruption was rife in James's reign, especially during the administration of Charles Howard, first earl of Nottingham. As Lord Admiral he showed the same enthusiasm for plundering the English navy as he had as a commander for defeating the Spanish Armada. Bills were padded, dead men paid, repairs double-billed, positions sold. It has been estimated that between 1605 and 1608 naval fraud cost the king £40,000.8
Many attacked James's policies as fraudulent, ineffectual and utopian.9 Foreigners concurred that the English had become ‘effeminate, unable to endure the fatigations and travails of a war: delicate, well-fed, given to tobacco, wine, strong drink, feather beds; undisciplined, unarmed, unfurnished of money and munitions’.10 Sir Walter Raleigh snidely observed that the only sounds of war came from the playhouses on London's South Bank. The playwright Thomas Dekker confirmed this denunciation in The Artillery Garden (1616):11
Boys blush that men should loiter out an age
Never to hear drums beat but on a stage.
Who was to blame? In 1604 Barnaby Rich, that old soldier, dedicated his memoirs to Prince Henry, the king's son and heir, explaining that ‘in a prince there is nothing so glorious as to be called a great Captain or a worthy soldier…. The affair of war [is] a knowledge behoveful for the greatest monarch.’12 The implications were obvious: that James I (r.1603–25) was a mediocre monarch especially when compared to his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I of blessed memory. Sir Francis Bacon was blunter. Alluding to the homosexual monarch's lack of masculinity (as well as his appalling personal hygiene), he wrote that ‘a slothful peace both courage will effeminate and manners corrupt’.13
There is no doubt that James loved men, making his paramours, such as George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, his chief ministers. Before women and gays were allowed into fighting units, soldiers connected toughness and courage with being real men. Those who lacked these attributes they deemed sissies, effeminate, or to use the words of John Corbet, the seventeenth-century military historian, ‘fellows unfit for women and war’. So it was a short step for contemporaries to use the king's homosexuality as an explanation for his cowardice.14
Four Failed Expeditions
As James aged his timidity grew, and he may have suffered from dementia. He in effect handed over the control of politics to Buckingham, on whom he became cloyingly dependent. Within half a dozen years after Prince Henry's death in 1612, Buckingham managed to control the new heir, Prince Charles, retaining his dominance from 1625 to 1628 during the first three years of King Charles's reign. Together, Charles and Buckingham launched four military expeditions against Spain and France.
Why they did so is a bit of a mystery. Until his marriage to Henrietta Maria, a French princess, on 20 June 1625, Charles was almost certainly a virgin, so he may have hankered after war to prove his masculinity.15 Charles did not suffer from that desperate yearning for military glory that had afflicted Henry VIII. To be sure, he was determined to restore his sister, Elizabeth, and his brother-in-law, Frederick, to the Palatinate, the territory from which they had been expelled in 1618 at the start of the Thirty Years War. If there was a constant in Charles's foreign policy, this was it. Yet it is hard to see how any of these four expeditions could have done much to further that goal. Charles was angry with the Spanish for having humiliatingly spurned his efforts as prince to woo their king's sister during his madcap visit to Madrid in 1623. When he arrived home in October, Charles received such an ecstatic welcome that it was not exceeded by any British emissary back from a botched mission abroad until Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938. The jubilation at the prince's return—bonfires, bell ringing, fountains flowing with wine for all to drink—may well have encouraged him later to go to war with Spain. During their stay in Madrid, Buckingham lost his influence over the prince, so he may have egged on Charles's military ambitions as a means of controlling him.16 Both believed that success in war overseas would able them to overcome parliamentary opposition at home.17 Had, for instance, they been able to capture the Spanish silver fleet on its way home from the Americas, any constitutional reservations that parliament might have had about waging war without its approval would have been drowned by the noise of counting coins. Yet the fact remains that apart from personal considerations, Charles and Buckingham had little real reason for going to war with Spain and France. There was no doubt Charles enthusiastically supported the war. Anyone hampering the war effort, he declared, ‘deserves to make their end at Tyburn’.18 With the king's enthusiastic support, Buckingham, who was as able an administrator as he was an inept military commander, raised large expeditionary forces. For example, the expedition sent to the Rhine Delta under Count Mansfeld consisted of 16,399 men on 85 ships.19 In contrast, in the 1588 Armada, Spain, with a population three times larger than England's, dispatched 30,000 men on a 130 vessels. When the considerable expeditions of the 1620s failed, their size magnified the extent of Britain's military defeats and the ensuing political fallout.
The first expedition was commanded by Count Peter Ernst von Mansfeld, a freebooter whom the Spanish ambassador called ‘an infamous man that had long wasted the empire by his spoils and robberies’.20 The illegitimate son of the governor of Luxembourg, he felt the stigma so bitterly that he became one of those bully boys who bloomed during the Thirty Years War. As liable to plunder his own employer as he was the enemy or neutrals, Mansfeld raised a ragtag expeditionary force, which rendezvoused in late December 1624 at Dover. At the end of January 1625 the Mansfeld expedition set sail, much to the relief of Dover's mayor and citizens, without much idea of where they were headed. When the French refused to let them land at Calais, they cruised aimlessly around for several days, before finally going ashore near Breda in the southern Netherlands. Lacking rations, warm clothing and ready cash, they perished in a Rhine Delta winter. ‘We die like dogs,’ wrote one commander from his regimental headquarters (a pigsty the tenancy of which he had most likely obtained by eating the previous occupant), ‘and in the face of an enemy we could not suffer as we now do.’21 As spring melted the snows of the Rhine Delta, so disappeared a British army. Within six months only one in twenty of Mansfeld's men were left alive.
The record of the next expedition was even more catastrophic. The attack on Cadiz was commanded by Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon—'the general,’ sniffed a contemporary, ‘from whom as little could be expected as he performed.’22 Chosen for his court connections, rather than for any military experience or competence, on 2 October 1625 Wimbledon sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour at the van of eighty-five ships. Then they anchored for a council of war, which decided to attack Cadiz. The British bombarded the port on the 20th. To avoid getting hit, they opened fire beyond the range of the enemy's cannon. Since the range of the Spanish cannon was equally limited, the Royal Navy accorded the enemy a similar convenience. Two days later two thousand British infantry landed on the beach a few miles south of the castle guarding the entrance to Cadiz Harbour. Having forgotten to fill their water bottles, they were delighted to stumble across a warehouse just outside the castle containing six hundred tuns of wine. ‘No words of exhortation, nor blows of correction would restrain them,’ one of their officers wrote, ‘but breaking with violence into the rooms where the wines were, crying out that they were King Charles's men and fought for him, caring for no man else, they claimed the wine their own … till in effect the whole army, except the commanders, were drunken and in common one confusion.’23 Seeing the opportunity, the Spanish sallied out to slaughter the intoxicated British troops. ‘I must confess,’ reported Wimbledon, displaying that sangfroid so characteristic of British commanders after a debacle, ‘that it put me to some trouble.’ But he excused the incident by saying that even when sober the troops were ‘incapable of order’ and had never obeyed him.24 The expedition sailed home in defeat and disgrace, with one-third of its ships lost to battle, gales, incompetence and disease. One ship lacked enough men to row the longboat, another sufficient to ply the pumps. The horror was not over when they reached port, where many died of the plague. The expedition ended, John Rous told his diary, in ‘a shameful return’. Lord Delaware, one of its leaders, agreed, confessing to a friend, ‘Never an army went out, continued, and returned with so much disorder as this.’25
Delaware's forecast that the record of the Cadiz expedition for ineptitude could never be beaten lasted less than two years. Charles and Buckingham learned nothing from their mistakes, except, perhaps, not to let minions make mistakes for them. Thus in June 1627 Buckingham personally led a fleet of 100 ships from Portsmouth, carrying six thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry, to capture the Isle of Rhé, just off the French port of La Rochelle, where Louis XIII was besieging the Huguenots, his rebellious Protestant subjects. The landings on 12 July went well, two thousand men wading ashore, with Buckingham at their head.26 One commander described his troops as ‘the mere scum of our provinces’.27 In fact, they fought robustly: it was their leaders who did badly. Five days after landing, the British started to besiege the main French position at St Martins. By September it seemed as if the French would capitulate, the St Martins’ garrison being down to a couple of days’ rations. On the night of 28 September, however, the French managed to relieve St Martins by using the small fort of La Prée on the mainland side of the island that Buckingham had neglected to take in the initial landing. The mistake cost the British dear. The besiegers became the besieged. ‘Our army grows everyday weaker,’ an officer wrote home, ‘our victuals waste, our purses are empty, ammunition consumed, winter grows.’28 On 27 October the British made one last desperate effort to take St Martins. They failed, largely because the scaling ladders were five feet too short—an inexcusable piece of negligence considering that the besiegers had been staring at the walls for over three months, during which they had plenty of time to measure them. Two days later two thousand French troops sallied out of La Prée, forcing the British to pull back. Thanks to Buckingham's decision to place the rearguard on the wrong side of the bridge to Loix, the small island from which the main evacuation took place, the retreat turned into a rout. A few weeks later the jubilant French king and his victorious officers heard a Te Deum sung in Notre Dame, Paris, beneath forty captured British colours hung from the cathedral walls.
Had not John Felton, an army lieutenant deranged at being denied promotion, assassinated Buckingham in August 1628, the duke would surely have led the second expedition to relieve the Huguenots at La Rochelle. Instead, the following month under the command of Robert Bertie, earl of Lindsey, the fleet sailed from Portsmouth. ‘Such a rotten, miserable fleet, set out to sea no man ever saw,’ thought John Ashburnham.29 They arrived off La Rochelle on the 10th. First they tried to bombard the French forts into surrender, ‘with the expense of much powder on our side and little blood’, Captain Dawtry Cooper noted in his log.30 Finding the entrance into the horseshoe-shaped harbour blocked by a boom of large tree trunks chained one to another, a captain tried to blow it up: instead, he blasted himself to smithereens. Five days later the British attacked, losing six men. Even more faint-hearted was the next day's assault, in which neither side suffered a single fatality. Several days afterwards, as the anchored fleet watched through their telescopes, the four thousand surviving members of La Rochelle's original garrison of fifteen thousand surrendered to the French king, having eaten all of the city's horses, dogs, cats, and most of its rats. On 1 November Lindsey's ships departed for home.
For sheer ineptitude it would be hard to find such a quartet as the expeditions that left England during the 1620s. Admittedly, amphibious operations are extremely difficult to mount and prone to disaster. Yet if such was the case, why then were the six most senior officers on the Cadiz raid all soldiers? Without doubt bad weather played a crucial role in all of the expeditions, but tardy planning meant that they set out far too late in the year, many troops having hung around billets in England since the spring, untrained and undisciplined. Instead of eating fresh food, they consumed preserved rations, such as salted beef and pork, which were less healthy, more expensive, and should have been left for the expeditions.
For their limited objectives, Charles and Buckingham's expeditions were too large, and thus took too long to assemble: Mansfeld took twelve thousand men to the Rhine delta; 16,399 sailed for Cadiz. True, the British lacked the one quality that Napoleon demanded all his generals possess—luck. The Spanish treasure fleet, replete with gold and silver from the Americas, sailed into Cadiz a few days after the British had left. Soon after Lindsey's fleet headed home, a Biscay storm broke the boom at La Rochelle. Yet bad luck does not excuse the fact that in all of these expeditions leadership was inept, command was fractured and goals were poorly defined. Senior commanders issued orders that made those given to the Light Brigade seem like models of clarity. Intelligence—both in the psychological and military sense of that word—was in short supply, none of the four targets, for instance, having been adequately reconnoitred. Even though equipment was old and lacking, surely someone could have issued water before the landing at Cadiz, measured the height of the walls at St Martins, or fabricated a waterproof charge to blow up the boom at La Rochelle?
The results of incompetence were profound. Perhaps a fifth of the fifty thousand men drafted for the four expeditions made it home alive: of the rest some succumbed to enemy action, and more perished from disease, poor food and miserable accommodation. Initially, the public did not feel the loss too badly. Many welcomed the departure of the first drafts, which ‘rid the county of these straggling vagrants,’ as Thomas Barnes preached at Great Waltham, Essex, ‘which do swarm amongst us’. It was far better, he continued, ‘for loitering fellows and lewd livers’ to be ‘fighting in the field than playing in the tap-houses’. But after good riddance had been bidden to bad rubbish, to what Francis Markham called these ‘filthy base and debased creatures’, and honest young fellows were being conscripted and killed, public opinion hardened: the not insignificant support for war in 1624 quickly evaporated.31 The monstrous behaviour of troops stationed in England before they left to fight overseas further estranged the public. Sir John Oglander recalled that the Scottish regiment commanded by William Douglas, earl of Morton, billeted in the Isle of Wight before the La Rochelle expedition in 1627, committed ‘murders, rapes, robberies, burglaries, the getting of bastards and almost the undoing of the whole island’.32 In addition, the growing tax burden that per capita was 47 per cent higher in 1628 than it had been in 1618, and 14 per cent higher than in 1598–1603 (when England was fighting in Ireland, the Netherlands, and at sea against Spain), further alienated people, especially when one expensive disaster followed another—the Rhé expedition alone cost over half a million pounds.33
The Halcyon Days
After the failure of the La Rochelle expedition, England remained at peace from 1628 to 1638, a decade that from the purview of the Civil Wars many Englishmen, such as the poet Thomas Carew, thought of as the ‘halcyon days’.34 Like most of Charles's policies, having ten years of relative peace was not one consciously decided upon, but one into which he drifted. Buckingham's murder, and the king's growing dependence on his French wife, Henrietta Maria, made foreign wars less attractive. During the next decade there were four main motifs in British military history. First, an anti-war one in which the government, artists and poets extolled the blessings of peace. The second was an effort initiated by the king to improve the militia and trained bands. The third was a huge exodus of mercenaries from not just England and Wales, but also from Scotland and Ireland, to fight in the Thirty Years War. And finally there was ship money, which the crown used to expand the navy, ostensibly to deal with piracy, but more as a royal status symbol.
Many Englishmen were grateful for having been spared the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Best-selling pamphlets reported a continental conflict of unmatched brutality, in which promiscuous plunder, rape, sackings and atrocities led to famine, disease, cannibalism and untold miseries. For instance, A True Representation of the Miserable Estate of Germany (1638) illustrated the horrors with crude woodcuts that can still sicken modern stomachs hardened by photographs of Dachau or Cambodia. One woodcut showed soldiers using a minister's library of rare books to roast him alive. In another the troops had just torn a baby from its mother's breast, and tossed it into the air to be caught on a pike. A third illustration depicts troopers stripping a victim's muscles from his hands. The caption to a fourth reads ‘Men's guts pulled out of their mouths.’35 Horror stories of the Thirty Years War reached the British Isles through private correspondence. ‘The whole army,’ Sydenham Poyntz, the mercenary, wrote home about the Swedish capture of Wurzburg, ‘in a fury breaking in the Town pillaged it, Cloisters and Abbies, committing great disorders, using much tyranny towards the clergymen, cutting off their members, and deflowering the nuns.’36 No wonder after looking at such material and reading reports from abroad, Nehemiah Wallington, the London artisan, wrote how fortunate he was to live in England, and not famine-torn Germany where ‘they did boil whole pots and kettles of frogs and did eat them with their entrails.’37
Charles used official royal propaganda to extol the blessings of peace. ‘Look up,’ Ben Jonson advised people as they entered the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, ‘to read the king in all his actions.’ Above them they could see Peter Paul Rubens's masterpiece, one of whose three great central panels Charles had commissioned, acclaiming his father as a peacemaker.38 More obvious was the message in Ruben's Saint George and the Dragon, a painting (see ill.11) that pleased Charles so much that he gave the artist a diamond ring. It portrays Charles as St George, England's patron saint, who has just rescued a maiden (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Queen Henrietta Maria) from the Dragon of War. On the left two women support a third who has apparently just survived a fate worse than death. In the foreground amid corpses, civilians beg for mercy—all victims of the Thirty Years War, from which Charles has spared a happy nation, depicted by the idyllic rural background and the heavenly choir of cherubs fluttering above.39
Painting was not the only form of court-sponsored art that celebrated the advantages of avoiding the Thirty Years War. Poets identified the king with peace:
Welcome Great Sir, and with all the joy that's due,
To the return of Peace and You.
Thus wrote Abraham Cowley on Charles's return from a state visit to Scotland in 1633.40 The same year the court put on a masque entitled The Triumph of Peace. Thomas Carew joined in the chorus:41
But let us that in myrtle bowers sit
Under secure shields, use the benefit
Of peace and plenty, which the blessed hand
Of our good king gives this obdurate land.
And if England did have problems, then they were due to a surfeit of peace. Salmacida Spolia, the Twelfth Night court masque for 1640, opens with a Fury fomenting a storm over England:42
And I do stir the humours that increase,
In thy full body, overgrown with peace.
Notwithstanding the work of officially sponsored artists, poets and playwrights, Charles I's commitment to peace was marginally thicker than the paint upon the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall. The king would have loved to bow to public pressure to join the Thirty Years War, and thus restore Elizabeth and husband Frederick to the Palatinate. In 1632 the ballad ‘Gallants to Bohemia’ urged:43
The true religion to maintain
Come let us to the wars again.
But going to the wars meant going to parliament for taxes, and parliament inevitably meant a renewal of the constitutional crisis (caused mostly by military failures) that had bedevilled the 1620s—and this was a price Charles was not prepared to pay.
The Militia and Trained Bands
In much the same spirit of making the best of a bad job, Charles turned his efforts—which were far from considerable during the 1630s—to reforming the militia and its more skilled component, the trained bands. On paper they appeared to be formidable bodies. A muster roll of February 1638 for England and Wales listed 93,718 infantry and 5,239 cavalry, ranging from 130 soldiers from Rutland to 12,641 from Yorkshire.44 In reality, the militia was far less impressive. These ‘weekend warriors’ frightened few foreigners, and impressed even fewer Englishmen. John Corbet described Gloucester's militia as being ‘incapable of discipline’. Thomas Palmer, vicar of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, told the city militia that their training was more like ‘a May-game than a battlefield’.45 Professional soldiers were particularly caustic. Lieutenant Colonel William Barriffe began his widely read training manual Military Discipline for the Young Artilleryman (1643) by lamenting that the trained bands were ‘called forth to exercise their postures and motions every four to five years. Whose fault it is I know not, but I pray God it will be amended.’46
Soon after becoming king, Charles attempted to amend the situation by using the brief Instructions for Musters and Armes and their Use that the Privy Council had issued in 1622. He ordered that only ‘householders of good condition or yeomen's sons be allowed to join the militia’.47 Far more significant was the cadre of eighty-nine sergeants, all veterans of the Thirty Years War, whom the crown dispatched to the counties to train the local volunteers. The presence of these seasoned soldiers, known as muster masters, did much to expose civilians to military realities, particularly those who served in the infantry. Cavalry soldiers, who provided their own horses, and thus came from gentry or richer yeomen families, tended to be less amenable to the advice of hoary veterans. In 1630 the king had to cancel the summer regional musters that he had scheduled for cavalry regiments because their basic training was not up to this fairly simple operation.
Charles's attempts to create what he called ‘a perfect’ or ‘exact’ militia failed. They were symptomatic of his propensity for grandiose objectives that exceeded both his resources and his attention span. The king's goals were mostly conservative, and sometimes degenerated into the trivial. He had an obsession for detail that would have been creditable in a regimental sergeant major but not a commander-in-chief. He deplored the introduction of the newfangled continental style of marching, issuing a warrant in 1632 to retain the traditional English march, as ‘the best of all marches’. He urged the militia to revive the use of the longbow, a weapon that had seen its glory days two centuries earlier in the Hundred Years War.48
During the 1630s there was no obvious threat from abroad to stimulate enthusiastic training, or to prompt local governments into spending vast sums of money on defence. With the repeal in 1603 of the Tudor militia legislation, the crown's right to compel subjects to attend musters fully equipped at their own expense rested on custom and the prerogative, rather than the firmer foundation of statute law. In 1635 the mayor and aldermen of Norwich contested the king's right to raise a militia. More important than legal challenges was the refusal to turn up. ‘There is no law to enforce him,’ explained John Bishe of Brighton for having skipped musters for three decades.49 Magistrates were less inclined to prosecute the recalcitrant, especially if they were also friends. During the 1630s, as the government demanded more and more in unpaid services from local elites, it became harder to find volunteers to serve as company officers. One muster master, Gervase Markham, complained that he got no respect, only contempt and impudence, from those he tried to train. In addition, muster masters often had to wait for years for their wages: the only way that Somerset could pay Captain Thomas Carne was from the county's maimed soldiers’ fund. By the end of the 1630s both the Somerset militia and the Sussex trained bands were in such bad shape that even if they had wanted to fight they could not have done so.50
There were exceptions. In 1633 Captain Anthony Thelwell, a veteran of the Thirty Years War, reported that Lancashire's forces were ‘reasonably well exercised … and able bodied’, the county having spent £10,000 over fifteen years to produce a fairly proficient militia.51 Two years later Lieutenant Hammond watched the ‘ready exercised and well disciplined’ Isle of Wight militia skirmishing along the River Medina: ‘A brave show there is, and good service performed,’ he concluded.52 Captain de Eugaine, a continental veteran hired to train the Yarmouth Artillery Company, reported after their 1638 field day that ‘although I have seen good service in the Netherlands and other places, yet never I saw a better thing’. Another observer agreed that Yarmouth's gunners were ‘well schooled’, and exercised in ‘a soldier-like manner’.53
Without doubt the best part-time soldiers were London's trained bands. Their permanent staff were regularly paid; on weekends and summer evenings young men enthusiastically marched north out of the city to drill and fire their weapons in the Artillery Ground—which Ben Jonson boasted was a ‘seed plot of the war’.54 Londoners supported their trained bands so ardently that when Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher satirized them in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), the audience hissed the play off the stage.55 Puritan ministers, such as William Gouge, praised the trained bands, preaching in 1626, ‘I do love it, I admire it, I honour it, I praise God for it.’56
Mercenaries
It has been calculated that, between 1620 and 1649, 170,537 men from the British Isles fought overseas as mercenaries.57 Roughly half of the troops were English and Welsh, about a fifth were Scots, and the rest Irish. The vast majority of the English and Scots fought for the Protestant anti-Hapsburg forces. Overwhelmingly, the Irish served Spain, then France, and finally the German emperor. English soldiers tended to go out in formations recruited at home with official approval. Typical were the 5,013 men Charles sent in 1627 to help his brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark. As a result of mismanagement, the worst their commander Sir Charles Morgan had seen in twenty years’ service, many died of disease. In April 1628 Morgan had to surrender his forces, now reduced to about 2,800, to Marshal Tilly. They were held in houses ‘so nasty and ill kept,’ wrote Morgan, that ‘they seemeth more fit to keep hogs than brave soldiers.’ Only 2,472, or 49 per cent, of his men survived. The six thousand men the marquess of Hamilton raised with royal sponsorship in 1631 to fight for Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden, were so ravaged by disease (a third died from dysentery within a month) and so poorly trained that the Swedish king sent the useless survivors home before they had a chance to fight.58
The Scots have had a long and glorious tradition of foreign service. One seventeenth-century Dutch pamphlet called them ‘sure men, hardy and resolute’.59 Between 1619 and 1624 fifteen thousand Scots fought as mercenaries for France, while in the following eighteen years twenty-five thousand of them served in foreign armies.60 So many Scots fought for the Dutch that at times they comprised 7 per cent of their army. The majority of the Scots entered Swedish service, making up about a quarter of its army, the relationship between the two nations being so close that one author has described it as an ‘An unofficial alliance’. Many Scots died in foreign service. Between 1626 and 1634 half of the 105 gentlemen volunteers in Lord Reay's Regiment lost their lives fighting for Gustavus Adolphus. Scots mercenaries made love as well as war: a third of the widows of Scottish officers drawing pensions in 1635 were foreign born, mainly Dutch.61
Not surprisingly, Irish mercenaries chose to fight for Catholic monarchs. From 1605 to 1641, 32,660 such mercenaries served overseas. Between 1634 and 1636, 13,800 fought in the Netherlands for their Most Catholic Majesties of Spain. In the next decade this number rose to an average of 26,487.62
Typical of a mercenary's experiences were those of James Turner, a minister's son, who was educated at the University of Glasgow from which he graduated with an M. A. in 1631 at the age of eighteen (see ill.13). Defying his father's wishes that he become a Presbyterian minister, the following year Turner volunteered to serve Gustavus Adolphus. He landed in Denmark in 1632 and after marching to Mecklenburg ‘fell grievously sick’. It was five weeks before he was able to walk. In the early winter of 1632 Turner took part in the Siege of Nuremberg, in which four thousand were killed and six thousand wounded, and in June fought at Hamelin, where nine thousand imperial soldiers perished. In his memoirs he recalled the horrors of war. ‘After this battle I saw a great many killed in cold blood by the Finns, who professed to give no quarter.’ Campaigning was nearly as bad. ‘My best entertainment was bread and water,’ he wrote, adding with the dry humour which has kept many a soldier going that he had ‘abundance of the last, but not so the first’. After a couple of years service he had become a seasoned campaigner so capable of fending for himself under all circumstances that ‘I wanted for nothing—horses, clothes, meat nor monies.’63 Neither did he want for brutality, for those who served overseas endured an especially cruel form of warfare. For instance, in August 1612 within three weeks of landing in Norway (then part of Denmark), a contingent of three hundred Scots from Caithness was ambushed by the local peasants at Skottereien. Half were killed, 134 taken prisoners, of whom 120 were shot in cold blood the following day. A grateful Danish government rewarded the peasants with grants of land.64
The Ship Money Fleet
After Buckingham took over as Lord High Admiral in 1619, the administration of the Royal Navy improved enough to support the four continental expeditions. Their failure, and Buckingham's assassination, left the navy exhausted. So Charles tried to fight on the cheap by commissioning privateers. Legitimated by Letters of Marque, English pirates preyed on French and Spanish merchant ships, taking enemy vessels worth £780,000 between 1625 and 1630. But privateering was a two-edged sword. It has been estimated that from 1616 to 1642 foreign pirates and privateers captured four hundred English ships worth a million pounds, and took eight thousand men, women and children prisoner.65
North African pirates were an especially vexatious problem: thirty Salle vessels took two hundred captives from Cornwall; Yarmouth was bombarded; King's Lynn lost twenty-five ships worth £9,000 and Ipswich five valued at £5,000; even the queen's dwarf and midwife were captured in the Channel. The former's abduction upset Henrietta Maria so much that an unfeeling courtier noted it caused ‘more upset at court than if they had lost a fleet’. The thousand women who petitioned Charles in 1651 to free their husbands held as slaves in North Africa had more cause for complaint. In August of that year Henry Hendy, master of the Dover mail packet, wrote that in the past seven weeks pirates had boarded his ship, robbed and beaten him up seven times. When, on the last occasion, the long-suffering seafarer showed the pirates his laissez passer signed by the Secretary of State, Sir John Coke, they told him ‘to keep it to wipe his breech’.66 Perhaps the most humiliating episode of all took place in 1639 when Charles agreed to protect a large Spanish fleet carrying ten thousand soldiers and much treasure to Dunkirk to fight the Dutch. Off Dungeness a Dutch fleet under Maarten Tromp attacked the Spanish ships, forcing them to take refuge in Dover Harbour. Charles offered to protect them for £150,000, and then started to negotiate with the French for their help to regain the Palatinate for his sister, Elizabeth, and brother-in-law, Frederick, while at the same time offering to have the Royal Navy convey Spanish troops to the Netherlands at thirty shillings a head. On 11 October, Tromp put an end to this triple dealing by sailing his fleet into Dover Harbour, and cutting out the Spanish, only ten, perhaps eighteen, of whose ships escaped to Dunkirk.67
Charles built up the navy less to avenge such insults than to enhance his prestige. As the poet Edmund Waller flattered:68
Wherever the navy spread her wings
Homage to thee and peace to all she brings.
The king described his efforts to expand the navy as ‘his proper vanity’. After art collecting, it was his favourite hobby. When some nobles questioned the high costs of building the Sovereign of the Seas, Charles retorted, ‘Why should he not be admitted to build that ship for his own pleasure?’69 The Sovereign of the Seas was a supership of 1,500 tons, 100 cannon and at least 1,000 crew. Her stern was elaborately carved and gilded, adding to her total cost of £65,000. Balladeers foretold that she would70
Curb the Pope and scourge the Turk
And ferret those that thieving lurk.
In fact, she did no such thing. While the vessel was big enough to range the seven seas, England lacked the support systems for a blue-water navy. Anyway, the ship was far too large to chase North African or Dunkirk pirates. Smaller, shallow draft, fast vessels known as ‘whelps’, such as the ones the Dutch possessed, would have been far more useful than this floating status symbol. Status symbols do not come cheap. To pay for the navy, which in the 1630s was far more important than the army, the crown introduced ship money. Originally this had been a levy on coastal counties to cover maritime defence. In 1633 it was extended to all English counties, producing much more money. Within two years the ship money assessment reached £217,184, and even though parliament had never approved the tax, only 2.3 per cent remained uncollected.
Military activities in the three and a half decades before the outbreak of the British Civil Wars were limited. Until 1623 James's reign had been pacific, and devoid of fighting. Afterwards the military developments between 1623 and 1638 were more significant in the way that they influenced the Civil Wars, the most important conflict in our period. Take the four military expeditions, all of which were spectacular failures. For the thirty thousand Englishmen who died in them, and for their relatives, they were of course catastrophic. As each failed expedition limped home, it engendered more anger at its incompetency, financial cost and loss of life. Parliament, the body that voted taxes, became the forum for dissatisfaction: here many of the ideas and attitudes that came to a crisis during the Civil Wars were debated and developed. For instance, when parliament, angry at the Cadiz debacle, refused to vote money to attack Rhé, the king levied a forced loan, in which subjects were required to lend the same amount of money they would have paid in a legal tax on the promise that they would be paid somehow and sometime in the future. Many were sent to prison for refusing to pay; even more debated the limits to the king's prerogative. It is no accident that those Englishmen who came of political age during the wars of the 1620s were more likely to be roundheads, whereas those who did so during the 1630s tended to be cavaliers.71
Ship money played a similar role in the radicalization of many members of parliament. In the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, as relations between the king and parliament deteriorated, the Commons cited ship money as one of their major grievances. Such may have been the case—but only in retrospect. Notwithstanding the objections to the tax from those such as John Hampden, the vast majority paid, if not cheerfully. With the acuteness that only hindsight bestows, some historians have argued that the crown's inability to raise enough money to pay the ever-increasing costs of war in the first half of the seventeenth century inevitably led to a confrontation between king and parliament. However, the failure of the four expeditions was not due to a lack of finances. For instance, the assault on St Martins failed not because someone was trying to save a pound or two on lumber for the scaling ladders. In truth, as ship money showed, Charles could in fact raise large sums to build a large fleet without a widespread public refusal to pay. The failure of James's and Charles's military policies was due to bad planning and bad luck, poor leadership and downright incompetence. The seeds they planted in the 1620s were harvested in the 1640s.
Even though Charles spent much time and not a little money on the trained bands and militia, the state of those units that marched off to fight the First and Second Bishops’ Wars (described in Chapter 7) was proof positive of the failure of his policies. Such weakness notwithstanding, the militia had exposed a very high proportion of the king's subjects to military matters. As the officers and men drilled, perhaps with little enthusiasm, and afterwards as they drank, with certainly far more gusto, they got to know each other better, and the bonds of civilian life were strengthened into comradeship. The militia was a firm enough foundation for parliament to use as a basis for their army, which, with many a change, won the Civil War.
Considering the ineptness that preceded that war, the conflict itself was fought with a surprising degree of competence. This was mostly due to the mercenaries who returned home in the late 1630s and early 1640s to offer their skills to whomever would pay. Many mercenaries were not too particular for whom they fought. Sir James Turner recalled that when in August 1640 he reached the harbour to take ship to return to Scotland, there were two vessels, one carrying mercenaries to fight for the king, and the other for the Scots Presbyterian rebels known as covenanters. He did not much care which one he boarded. ‘I had swallowed without chewing in Germany a very dangerous maxim,’ Turner explained; ‘so long as we serve our master honestly, it is no matter which master we serve.’72 When in May 1639 the Royal Navy captured a vessel carrying twenty Scots veterans home to fight for the covenant, they all promptly volunteered to fight for the crown. Returning from the Thirty Years War, Colonel Edward Massey went to York to seek a command in the king's service, but finding he lacked sufficient connections rode on to London where there was more money and fewer officers: he soon found a colonelcy in the parliamentary army.73
During the thirty-six years between the accession of James and the outbreak of the Civil Wars, large numbers of men from the British Isles served overseas as foreign mercenaries. The absence of such a large group of young violent males may have helped make the British Isles more pacific. In these years there were no rebellions, and only a few small revolts, such as those in the Fen country. In Ireland the period between 1603 and 1641 was also remarkably peaceful, especially when compared to the previous and ensuing six decades. While the absence of so many young men may have made the British Isles more peaceful, without doubt the return home of so many mercenaries skilled in the latest techniques for killing their fellow creatures made possible the bloody Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century. In October 1640, less than two years before the outbreak of that war in England, a letter writer sardonically observed that these mercenaries ‘took up the trade of killing men abroad, and now are returned to kill, for Christ's sake, men at home’.74