First Witch: When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain.
Second Witch: When the hurlyburly's done
When the battle's lost and won.
Macbeth, I, i, 1–4
THIS CHAPTER WILL EXAMINE WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE BATTLE'S lost or won. It will look at the quick and the dead, at those who survived intact or wounded in body or mind, and at those who perished to be mourned and sometimes remembered. It will investigate the joy of victory, the anguish of defeat, and see how people adjusted to both. In combat men tried to surrender, and some were successful only to experience the ordeal of being held prisoner. Those who came home from the wars had to readjust to civilian life, perhaps to rejoin old families or else start fresh ones. They had to return to old jobs or find new ones. Some lost status, others gained it. After every war demobilized servicemen created problems, yet most settled down well enough. For all veterans, war was an experience they could never forget for the rest of their lives. It was one with which they had to come to terms, and perhaps explain, even justify, to their children. The cavalier veteran, Sir John Oglander, tried to do so to his posterity. ‘Thou wouldst think it strange,’ he wrote that ‘there was a time. … When thou went to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou should be murdered afore day.’1
The Dead
In trying to assess the effects of war, we have a skewed sample: we cannot talk to the dead. Would they echo the words carved on the British war memorial at Kohima?
Or would the dead of Kohima protest they did not give their lives fighting the Japanese in 1944: their lives were taken from them? Would they mourn what they missed: the girls they never married, the sons they never taught to bat, the daughters they never walked up the aisle, the grandchildren they never spoilt? We cannot tell. The dead cannot talk, although they should be listened to with the care that Colonel Blackadder showed after both Blenheim and Malplaquet. Thanking God to be numbered among the living, he wrote ‘In the evening I went down into the field of battle, and there got a preaching from the dead.’2
The thing that immediately struck observers about a field after a battle was the sight of the dead. William Patten described the aftermath of Pinkie:3
A Pitiful sight of the dead corpses lying dispersed abroad. Some with their legs cut off; some but ham-strung, and left lying half dead: others with the arms cut off; divers their necks half asunder: many their heads cloven: of sundry the brains smashed out; some others again, their heads quite off: with a thousand other kinds of killing.
‘I have never seen the dead bodies so thick,’ Captain Blackadder described Blenheim after the battle. ‘For a good way I could not go among them lest my horse should tread on the carcasses that were lying, as it were, heaped on one another.’4 Many observers agreed with Blackadder's observation of corpses being piled atop each other, as if men in their dying moments sought comfort from the proximity of their fellows. After Malplaquet, where thirty thousand perished, General George Douglas-Hamilton, earl of Orkney, told a friend, ‘in many places they lay as thick as ever did a flock of sheep.’ George Gascoigne used the same language to describe the defenders he saw during the Spanish massacre at Antwerp in 1575. After Flodden in 1513 an English poet boasted of slaughtering the Scots like cattle. It was almost an anticipation of Wilfred Owen's eulogy for the dead of the First World War:5
What passing bells for those who die as cattle …
And bugles calling them from sad shires.
Immediately after the fighting stopped, a battlefield must have been like an abattoir. By the next day, after the onset of rigor mortis, and the dead having been stripped and tossed aside, they resembled those pathetically white matchstick figures seen on films of liberated concentration camps. Soon corruption set in. According to one observer, three days after the Battle of Worcester (1651) ‘there was such a nastiness that a man could hardly abide in the town.’ Two days later the bodies were still there, strewn ‘in almost every street’. Eight days after Pinkie, William Patten ‘found most part of the dead corpses lying very ruefully, with the colour of their skins charged greenish about the place they had been smitten’.6 It is no wonder that Edward Cooke, a part-time soldier in the London Trained Bands, began his Character of Warre (1626) with a brief poem on the centrality of death:
For one by one be sure to die,
Time takes away, time will supply.
And as He brought you to the Womb
So back he leads you to the Tomb.
Unlike today when chaplains come to break the terrible news, there was no systematic way of letting people know they had lost a loved one. Towards the end of the Civil Wars, news reports of a particular battle would publish the names of the officers who had died. Others would spread the bad tidings by letter or word of mouth. After his commanding officer, Colonel James Cranston, was killed by a cannonball at Malplaquet, Major Blackadder wrote to his wife asking her to gently break ‘the doleful news’ to Mrs Cranston.7
It is hard to compare mourning for the dead centuries ago with today. Military cemeteries are a recent phenomenon, starting in the American Civil War. It is no accident that the classic definition of democracy, Lincoln's ‘Gettysburg Address’, was given at the dedication of a military cemetery. Neither is it a coincidence that Sir Edwin Lutyens's moving First World War cemeteries commemorate those who died making ‘the world safe for democracy’. Since democracy stresses the importance of the individual, the loss of that individual becomes all the more important.8 But early modern Britain was not a democracy so it has no military cemeteries, and the rare surviving tombs are for a very few aristocrats who perished. The only Tudor pictures of common soldiers are of the sixteen archers who accompanied Sir Thomas Assherton on the Flodden campaign, depicted on the stained-glass window he commissioned in 1515 for St Leonard's church, Middleton, Lancashire, which may be England's first war memorial (see ill.1).9 The tomb of John, Lord Semplefield, in Castle Semple, Renfrewshire, is the only one for the four to six thousand Scots killed at Flodden. Not even the slain Scots king, James IV, found his own resting place. Taken to England, his corpse eventually ended up in a mass grave at St Michael's church, London. Adam Loftus, Viscount Lisburne, was luckier. His body is buried in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, with the cannonball that blew off his head at the Siege of Limerick mounted above the tomb.10
In early modern Britain civilized men and women were socialized not to give vent to excessive expressions of personal feeling, especially mourning. The behaviour of the Irish camp followers after the Battle of Dundee, when four to five hundred soldiers perished, shocked many Scots. A correspondent reported that ‘there was a desperate howling among them, and they fought desperately to recover the bodies.’ Such a reaction (which surely confirmed Anglo-Scots’ prejudices that the Irish were an uncivilized lot) was exceptional. While men were expected to control their emotions, that does not mean that they did not feel them. Ralph Verney described his father's death at Edgehill (1642) as the ‘saddest and deepest affliction that ever befell any poor distressed man’. Ralph did not have the consolation of burying his father. In spite of strenuous efforts Sir Edmund Verney's body could not be found, having surely been tossed with all the other corpses into a mass grave.11
After practically every battle or skirmish the dead were buried hastily, sometimes, as Elis Gruffudd noted, in a ditch so shallow that dogs could dig them up to eat.12 A few military manuals, such as Giles Clayton's The Approved Order of Martial Discipline (1591), laid down that a dead comrade be buried ‘with the sound of the Drum, and as such solemnity as his service merits’. At sea the dead were tipped overboard, sewn up in their hammocks, as the captain read the prayer book service. That's if there was time: during the heat of battle they would be unceremoniously tossed into the sea to get them out of the way.
Like criminals condemned to public execution, early modern soldiers and sailors were expected to die gamely. Not to complain was a matter of manly honour: it was also a matter of belief that the state of one's mind at the moment of death was an indication of salvation or damnation. Thus, the Elizabethans held Sir Philip Sidney up as the perfect Christian knight because at the Siege of Zutphen he not only bore the agony of a smashed thigh in silence, but gave the last of his water to a dying comrade saying ‘thy necessity is greater than mine.’13
The Wounded
The most obvious effect of being wounded was the intense pain, which, before analgesics, could usually only be relieved by alcohol. Richard Wiseman, a surgeon, operated on a soldier with a head wound sustained at the Siege of Taunton (1644–45). Seventeen days later, Wiseman recalled, the patient ‘fell into a spasm, and died, howling like a dog; as most of those do who have been so wounded’.14 Colonel Blackadder remembered one comrade who went mad from the pain of his wounds, continually blaspheming; the only way they could stop him from tearing off his bandages was to tie his hands. Wounded at Ramillies, Lieutenant James Gardiner was captured by the French, who carted him away. After two days of agonizing movement, and no medical attention, he begged them ‘to kill him outright, or leave him here to die, without the torture of any further motion’. Later he ascribed his survival to the cold, which prevented him from bleeding to death. Struck by a shell at Ramillies, which fractured her skull, Christian Davies, the ‘she soldier’ who served in the Scots Greys, received good medical treatment, being trepanned. For ten weeks she lay in hospital, where ‘I suffered great torture by this wound.’ Private Matthew Bishop used the same phrase to describe his reaction to the screams and moans of the dying of Malplaquet, which could be heard four to five miles away.
Wounds produce other, more complicated physical reactions. When the body is hit the adrenal glands automatically release endorphins that act as natural pain killers, enabling men to continue fighting despite terrible damage. At the Battle of Pinkie a pike slit William, Lord Grey of Wilton's tongue piercing the roof of his mouth. Yet endorphins allowed him to continue to fight. He might well have done so until he drowned in his own blood had not John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, given him a ‘firken of ale’.15 In spite of having his dead horse fall on him, Sir Francis Vere continued to lead his regiment at Rheineberg in 1589, although, he admitted, ‘in great pain with my wound’. John Taylor, the veteran of the 1595 attack on Cadiz, remembered seeing a severely wounded trooper continuing to fight, ‘being warm with heat and rage’, and even though his ghastly wounds were ‘open like a grave, but he felt them not’. After a time the endorphins wore off, the soldier became clammy (a symptom of shock), and astounded at his own fighting madness.16 In addition to activating the adrenal glands, wounds can produce other physical reactions. They can induce intense thirst. On being hit at Blenheim, left for dead and stripped of his shirt, Private Donald McBane of the Royal Scots eventually recovered consciousness, and was so parched that 'I drank several handfuls of the dead man's blood I lay beside: the more I drank the worse I was.’ At daylight he was found and taken to the surgeons, ‘who gave me a dram’.17 Wounds may induce a more basic response. During the Siege of Kilkenny (1649) Colonel Hewson, governor of Dublin, was ‘Bruised in the shoulder with a bullet, and thus beshit himself’.18
We do not have statistics on the nature of wounds inflicted, although we do have some for those who survived long enough to apply for a pension. Table 6 below summarizes applicants for pensions in North Wales after the Civil War, and for admission to Chelsea Hospital between 1715 and 1732.
| N. Wales | Chelsea | |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple | 13 (44%) | 283 (16%) |
| Head | 7 (23%) | 615 (38%) |
| Arm | 3 (10%) | |
| Leg | 6 (20%) | 566 (35%) |
| Torso | 147 (9%) | |
| Unspecified | 1 (3%) | 28 (2%) |
| Total | 30 (100%) | 1,639 (100%) |
In themselves the figures do not tell us as much as we might wish since they are for those who have survived their wounds, and, incapacitated, required financial assistance. It has been estimated that a casualty had a one in three chance of surviving a serious wound. Of a sample of 233 men wounded at Sedgemoor in 1685, 32 (13.7 per cent) were admitted to Chelsea Hospital.19 The fact that ten of those who applied for pensions in North Wales had shot wounds, and only one had a cut wound (the cause of the rest not being given) supports the view that sword and pike wounds did not require long-term medical attention, being much less lethal than being hit by a musket ball, which tended to bring bits of clothing into the wound, producing gangrene. A sample of eleven soldiers who survived after being treated by George Belgrade in 1645, soon after being wounded (at what today would be called a Regimental Air Post) supports the view that shot wounds were especially lethal: one of his patients was burned, two shot and eight cut by sword or pike.20
Most of the wounded required medical treatment, the sooner the better. Until the end of our period there was, however, no formal system of stretcher-bearers, so if a wounded man could not walk to obtain medical attention, or did not have friends or servants to carry him, observed Hugh Mortyn, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Irish Wars, ‘He is lost.’21 Regimental chaplains were expected to help evacuate the wounded, providing physical and spiritual comfort. The lucky ones lived long enough to make it to a field hospital. Captain Thomas Windham of Wyndham's Regiment (Sixth Dragoon Guards) was wounded in the leg at Blenheim and evacuated twelve miles to one at Nordlingen. ‘I have got all the help I can desire, and on Tuesday last was a fortnight my leg was doomed to be cut off,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘since which times, I thank God, there has not happened the least ill accident.’ Windham recovered and fought at Ramillies and Malplaquet.22
Windham was operated on by a surgeon, who lacked a physician's prestige and education, being denied the title of doctor. (Today surgeons are called ‘Mister’ in Britain.) It has been suggested that their lack of status was due to the Catholic Church, which opposed the shedding of blood.23 More likely poor pay was to blame. In 1513 a surgeon got 8d. a day—an archer's pay; during most of Elizabeth's reign the rate was a shilling, the same as a trumpeter's; after 1580 it rose to 1s. 10d., tuppence less than a lieutenant's. In 1540 the Surgeons Company of London amalgamated with the Barbers—who bled customers as well as cutting their hair. The Barber-Surgeons Company soon instituted exams, which seemed to have little or no effect on the quality of care. Thomas Gale, a member of the company and author of Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie (1586), recalled ‘when I was at the wars at Montreuil [1544] there was a great rabblement that took upon them to be surgeons. Some were sow gelders, and horse gelders, with tinkers and cobblers.’ Perhaps this prompted Gale to publish his text, which was the first in English on the treatment of gunshot wounds (see ill.6). It did not appear to have had much effect for three years later, during the French campaign of 1589, Gale complained that English surgeons knew so little about treating wounds that many troops died. In 1594 during the Siege of Brest an incompetent surgeon botched an operation to remove a musket ball, killing the great explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher.
Even the best of surgeons had to admit that theirs was an uncertain art. John Woodall, a naval surgeon, and Richard Wiseman, an army one, both advised that operations should be a last, desperate resort. Woodhall urged that, before an operation, the patient be allowed to make peace with his Maker, and then be placed gently on a table, with strong men behind and before him, and a well oiled, sharp saw, which he called ‘this great and terrible instrument’, kept out of his sight until the very last moment.24 Patients must be reassured, wrote Thomas Gale, ‘that the fear is much more than the pain’. Such advice might have come as a surprise to Private Donald McBane and Captain Peter Drake, who both likened the treatment of their wounds inflicted at Blenheim and Malplaquet respectively to being flayed alive from head to toe.25
Notwithstanding the pain and uncertainty of surgery, medical services did much to sustain morale. Captain William Mostyn, General George Monck and Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, all agreed that if soldiers knew they would get decent medical care on being wounded (something most men fear more than death), they would fight harder and longer.26 ‘When a soldier is hurt the greatest comfort he can have is a good barber [surgeon],’ concluded Garet Barry's Discourse on Military Discipline (1634). Another advantage of a good barber-surgeon, noted Thomas Digges's Politique Discourses Concerning Militarie Discipline (1604), was that trained soldiers did not have to drop out to help their comrades to the rear.
Women nursed the sick and wounded, usually in a rear hospital. This was especially true during the Civil Wars when fellow countrymen were fighting each other at home. Elizabeth Twysden nursed the wounded during the Siege of Scarborough Castle, as did Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of the parliamentary governor, during Nottingham's. Margaret Blague, widow of a barber-surgeon, was appointed matron of St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, in 1643, supervising twenty-nine nurses (mostly soldiers’ widows) at an annual salary of £6 13s. 4d., plus the right to sell the patients beer, which was five times more profitable. Anne Murray nursed sixty royalist wounded after the Battle of Dunbar (1650), for which Charles II gave her fifty gold pieces. After the royalists shot her husband George as a spy in 1643, Elizabeth Atkin nursed roundhead prisoners held in Oxford, which gave her the opportunity to send intelligence to parliament. After the war she became a counter-intelligence officer, routing out clandestine royalists, one of whom, Edward Crouch, described her as ‘a fat woman about fifty years old’, who was, he had to admit, ‘the most effective ferret for the government’. During the First Dutch War she organized hospitals for several hundred wounded seamen at Portsmouth and Harwich, explaining to the Admiralty that ‘I cannot see them want.’ A thankless government failed to pay her pension: Elizabeth died in poverty two years later.27
The first English military hospital was established in Porchester in 1565 to receive survivors evacuated from Le Havre.28 It lasted for only two months. In 1600 four permanent hospitals were opened in Ireland to encourage volunteers ‘more willingly to adventure their lives in Her Highness's service’, as one of their founders explained.29 None reached their projected 100 beds, and soon closed. In the Civil Wars military hospitals were opened in England, Scotland and Ireland, those in Dublin and Edinburgh each being funded at £600 a year. Parliament's Savoy Hospital in London was well financed and run: the 350 patients got clean sheets weekly, warming pans and a nourishing diet of over four thousand calories a day. Parliament even spent £1,000 sending six wagonloads of wounded to take the cure at Bath. London's hospitals seem to have done a reasonably good job: of the 1,112 patients admitted in 1644 to St Bartholomew's only 152 (or 13.6 per cent) died, as did 116 (or 15.1 per cent) of the 796 patients admitted the following year. The survival rate for St Thomas's was not quite as good: 23 per cent of the 1,063 patients admitted in 1644, and 14.7 per cent of the 825 in 1645 died.30
After the restoration military medical services fell apart, as budgets were slashed and the standing army was brought to its knees. On the other hand, more attention was paid to the care of elderly veterans with the establishment of the Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals.
Following the Revolution of 1688 and the Scientific Revolution, military surgery improved greatly, helping lay the foundations for the modern profession, with its emphasis on an empirical approach to diagnostics and remedies.31 Because soldiers required longer, and thus more expensive, training, there was an increased pressure to cure them and return them to duty as quickly as possible. Every regiment was required to have a surgeon and his assistant, with their own medical wagon. Serving as military surgeons enabled ambitious men to learn skills that were valuable in civilian practice. James Yonge left the sea to become a prosperous surgeon in Plymouth, eventually being elected to the Royal Society. In order to encourage medical men to enlist, parliament passed legislation in 1698 permitting demobilized surgeons to ply their trade without regard to guild regulations. On the other hand, the growing lethality of weapons countered improvements in medical care. The flintlock musket, and to a lesser extent, artillery, increased the proportion of more lethal gunshot wounds to cuts that were much less fatal.
Wounded veterans had to live with their injuries as best they could. After his thigh was smashed fighting for the king in 1643, William Blundell lived in ‘extreme anguish [that] hath stupefied or perverted my reason’, for every waking second of his remaining forty-five years.32 Captain Robert Parker was luckier. The effects of the shoulder injury sustained during the Siege of Limerick in 1691, he wrote, ‘I feel to this day on every change of weather.’33 Even more fortunate was the Irish trooper hit by a bullet on his belt buckle: ‘My belly turned black.’34 Others overcame their disabilities. Peg-legged cooks were a tradition in the Royal Navy. In the army, after losing a leg at Almansa in 1707, Lieutenant Walter Stapleton took two years to recover before rejoining his unit, eventually becoming a brigadier. In command of a Jacobite regiment, the peg-legged veteran was mortally wounded at Culloden.35
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
In modern wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan psychological wounds, known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), are about as common as physical ones. This may be a recent development, for in the Second World War psychiatric casualties represent between 10 and 15 per cent of the whole.36 In early modern warfare surprisingly few instances of PTSD have been found. After a bullet pierced Lieutenant Skeffington's hat at the Siege of Montreuil (1544), the gunner fell down, ‘crying God be merciful unto me for I am a dead man’. Three days later he passed away without a mark on his body.37 Following his great victories Marlborough suffered from depression, enduring migraines, which he admitted could have been psychosomatic, confessing to his wife to being ‘much out of order’ and suffering ‘much disquietude’.38 The most serious cases of PTSD come mainly from the Civil Wars. Sir Walter Earle, a skilled sapper and veteran of the Thirty Years War, was recalled to the colours to take part in the Siege of Corfe Castle, where a musket ball just missed him, piercing his hat. It was the last straw. Soon afterwards Earle was seen dressed in a bear's skin, walking on all fours in the hope of being mistaken for a large dog.39 During the Siege of Cirencester in February 1643 shelling by a large mortar, as well as the subsequent sack, destroyed Lady Jordan's adult faculties. She regressed to behaving like a child, being able to find happiness only by playing with the dolls that were made specially for her.40 After serving as a chaplain at Marston Moor, Thomas Goad, vicar of Griton, Yorkshire, ‘fell ill and became distracted’, languishing in this condition for at least sixteen years.41 Another military chaplain, Richard Baxter, felt the strain of the war after he was demobilized. For three months he had a copious and unquenchable nosebleed, a sympton of intense psychological strain.42 A maidservant who in 1644 witnessed the brutal massacre of the garrison of Hopton Castle, Shropshire, suffered mental trauma for the rest of her life.43 Psychological wounds brought one soldier—quite literally—to the gutter. In 1659 Captain Richard Atkyns, a royalist, came across the trooper who had saved his life at the Battle of Cheriton, fifteen years before, for which he had given him ten pounds. ‘I saw him begging in the streets of London, with a muffler about his face, and [he] spoke inwardly as if he had been eaten up with a foul disease.’44 Colonel James Gardiner's reaction to being wounded at Ramillies can hardly be counted as a true case of PTSD: a notorious rake, he became a highly religious missionary.
The lack of documented psychiatric cases—those whom Wilfred Owen described as ‘men whose minds the dead have ravaged'—is hard to explain. Perhaps it was because soldiers and sailors tended to be in combat for far less time than today, battles being over in a day or two. Also the syndrome was not medically recognized. The first doctor to do so was Johannes Hofer, a Swiss, who in 1678 described a state of continuous melancholy, incessant talking of home, insomnia, lack of appetite, palpitations and fever. As treatment Dr Hofer recommended sending the man home or dosing him with purgatives.45
Victory was the best cure. After winning at the Boyne on 12 July 1690, Dr George Clark had a good night's sleep, while Thomas Bellingham recalled ‘A glorious day,’ even though ‘I was almost faint with want of drink and meat.’46 Victorious at Dunkeld (1689), the Cameronians ‘gave a great shout, and threw their caps in the air, and then all joined in offering praises up to God’.47 Joy at being alive when so many had died could be tempered both by survivor's guilt and by the apprehension that next time one might not be so lucky. ‘We have acquired much glory, but it has cost us the most precious of our blood,’ wrote Captain James Fitzgerald after Fontenoy (1745). A year later, after Culloden, the duke of Cumberland expressed a similar sense of survivor's guilt, asking, ‘Lord, what am I, that I should be spared when so many brave men lie dead upon this spot?’48 After writing in his diary that the English victories in the Seven Years War were due to their superior courage, honour and skill, Sergeant Millner pulled himself back, lest he be tempting fate. ‘The battle not being to the strong,’ he wrote, as one can almost hear him knock on wood, ‘but whosoever it pleaseth God to give it unto.’49
Defeat is appalling. As the duke of Wellington once observed, ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ Robert Parker described defeat at Ballymore, Ireland, in June 1691:50
Here the miserable effects of war appeared in a very melancholy manner … the wretches came flocking in very great number about our camp, devouring all the filth they could meet with. Our dead horses, crawling with vermin, as the sun had parched them, were delicious food to them: while their infants sucked their carcass with as much eagerness as if they were at their mothers’ breasts.
Defeat is traumatic. It took six months before the chaplain, Alexander Shields, could face this experience after his regiment, the Cameronians, were routed at Steenkirk in August 1692. ‘Ever since that fearful and fatal stroke at Steenkirk I have not heart to write to anybody, the dispensation being so distressing, confounding, and silencing.’ In fact the only reason why he forced himself to write about the battle was that he was sending a full list of the dead back to his fellows ministers in Scotland so they could inform the next of kin.51
Defeat is bitter. Being beaten by the French in 1513 was ‘so dolorous’ that Edward Echyngham could hardly bear to write about it. After being thrashed at Prestonpans (1745), Sir John Clark ‘thought Hell had broke loose, for I never heard such oaths and incriminations branding one another for Cowardice and neglect of duty’.52 Those who could, fled the battlefield as fast and far as possible. According to the Jacobite song ‘Hey Johnnie Cope’, when the British General Sir John Cope heard that Princes Charles's army was about to fight his at Prestonpans,53
He thought it would't be amiss
To have a horse in readiness,
To flee Prestonpans in the morning.
With their mounts’ four feet, cavalry had a distinct advantage over two-legged infantry. So much so that after being routed at Naseby Lord John Belasyse bitterly observed that ‘The horse knew well how to save themselves, though not their honour.’ After the same defeat a royalist infantryman ran thirty miles to Ravenstone, Leicester, where he tried to steal a loaf of bread from a servant girl. He was so demoralized that she was able to kill him with a laundry stick.54 After Ramillies some French infantry managed to run 108 miles to Louvain.55 A Danish chaplain describes how on the evening of 12 July 1691 the Irish fled after the Battle of Aughrim, ‘not knowing what to do. … Throwing away their arms.’ After running for about seven miles, some tried to stop and regroup, but failed to do so because of the ensuing rabble of camp followers. Many wounded men and horses expired beside the road; some troopers begged to be put out of their misery. There was so much blood all over the place, concluded the chaplain, ‘that you could hardly take a step without slipping’. Statistics give an idea of the slaughter. Seven thousand Irish died: only four hundred and fifty were taken prisoner.56
It took time to restore units that had broken and run. After Sir Thomas Salisbury's Denbighshire infantry did so at Edgehill, an eyewitness called them ‘poor Welsh vermin, the off-scourings of the nation’. Four weeks later they redeemed their honour at the Battle of Brentford, when they drove three crack parliamentary regiments, Holles's, Hampden's and Brooke's, into the Thames.57
The best example of how a unit broke and had to reconstitute itself was the eight-hundred-strong regiment in French service commanded by Colonel Henry Fitzjames.58 John Stevens, a captain in this largely Irish Catholic unit, records how they panicked at the Battle of the Boyne when their own cavalry appeared without warning on their flank. Since they had taken few, if any, casualties, Stevens felt the shame greatly; it ‘so perplexed my soul that I envied the few dead’. As they retreated, the Irish looted the supply train, getting drunk on brandy. Incapable of further retreat, many fell victim to the pursuing Williamites. Stevens grew so parched that he could not quench his thirst, even though he drank from every ditch and puddle he passed. Soldiers blamed their officers: officers condemned the generals. Two days after the Boyne the survivors straggled into Dublin. Fitzjames's Regiment raised its colours, but only twenty men rallied around them. So Stevens struck off on his own in an attempt to recover the stragglers. He tried to requisition a horse from a village, but the women drove him away. Arriving at Kilkenny on 16 July, he found many of his soldiers drunk, while others had looted the castle for food. Senior officers had requisitioned rations from the town authorities, which they sold at a £300 profit as their own men starved to death.
The process of rebuilding the regiment into an effective fighting force was long and hard. By July 16 Fitzjames's Regiment had sufficient men available to storm a house in Cashel, whose owner had refused to give them food. Three days later the food supply had improved enough for the regiment to muster 150 men. Many troopers were almost naked, having lost their clothing plus their tents at the Boyne, so they started building huts. A week later the muster roll had doubled to three hundred, of whom only half were armed. The suggestion that those who had thrown away their weapons should be shot was rejected: it would have left too few alive to reconstitute the battalion as a viable unit. It was certainly not one in early August, when many were too weak, and the rest too undisciplined for duty. Stevens thought that after they had wallowed in the delights of looting and of ‘being under no command’, only the severest punishments would bring them back to order. Worse still, even though deserters were ordered to be shot, many, including some of the bravest troopers, ran away for a second time. Eventually the regiment was restored as a fighting unit, and a year later it fought courageously during the Siege of Limerick. Afterwards Fitzjames's Regiment was part of the Irish Brigade that served in the French Army until 1792.
Surrender
Although surrender is one of the most difficult of military transactions, training manuals—then and now—do not instruct you how to do so successfully. So troops have to work out their own codes of behaviour. Surrendering was a risky act, and even when a capitulation was accepted prisoners ran a grave risk of ill-treatment, hunger, disease and death. Wounded at Malplaquet, Peter Drake tried to surrender. A couple of enemy soldiers threatened to shoot him if he did not go away. The third did so, at the same time as Drake fired his pistol. ‘I shot the upper part of his head and he tumbled forward. I saw his brains come down: his ball only grazed my shoulder.’ The wadding set his coat on fire. ‘It was all done in an instant,’ Drake concluded.59 During the War of the Spanish Succession, Matthew Bishop was unlucky to be captured in an ambush by partisans. ‘They behaved to me in a barbarous, cruel and inhuman Manner,’ stealing his clothes, watch, money and even the buckles from his shoes. When he objected they beat his head bloody. His screams attracted the notice of a corporal of regular troops, who took him to his officer, who in turn checked his wounds and gave him a meal. As he was being marched off to captivity, the drums of a large British unit were heard approaching. His captors ran to hide in some woods, while Bishop bolted to his compatriots.60
On being taken prisoner a soldier goes through a metamorphosis. One moment he is an enemy, determined to kill you: the next he is begging for his life. Being held prisoner was usually a most disagreeable experience, particularly for the other ranks. Eight to ten of the six hundred British prisoners incarcerated in Dinan, France, in 1703 died each day, the latrines being emptied only every fourth day. In Dunkirk seventy to eighty men, captured during the War of the Spanish Succession, were crammed into a room, in which only half could lie down at one time.61 An anonymous dragoon recalled being captured at Brihuega, Spain, in 1710. Stripped of everything except their clothes ‘that were not worth the taking’, the men were force-marched twenty-one miles. Forbidden to drink from the wells they passed by, the enemy brandished burning brands of straw in their faces, ‘cursing our Queen and us’. At Colmenar Viejo, nineteen miles north of Madrid, armed peasants tried to storm the house in which the English were locked, perhaps to kill, certainly to plunder them. The dragoon remained a prisoner until 1714. Throughout his captivity he was highly critical of the English officers, who got much better treatment and refused to help their men.62 Wounded at the Siege of Denca (1707), Captain George Carleton was taken prisoner when the city surrendered. He was held, presumably on parole not to escape, at Valencia, which he thought ‘the pleasantest city in Spain’. Apart from an agent provocateur from the Inquisition, who tried to discuss the doctrine of purgatory with him, the captain enjoyed his two years as a prisoner in Spain so much that on being liberated he travelled around the country for a couple more years as a tourist.63 Senior officers were treated even better. Three days after the French captured Major General Sir William Cadogan near Tournai in 1706 he was paroled, and soon after exchanged.64
A most horrible—and most shamefully forgotten—treatment of prisoners took place after the Battle of Dunbar (1650), when Cromwell dispatched five thousand captured Scots to Newcastle with instructions for its governor, Sir Arthur Haselrig, to ‘let humanity be exercised towards them’.65 It was not. In Morpeth the captives were jam-packed into a walled garden. They were force-marched, sometimes through the night. Since many had not eaten for eight days they dug up and gobbled raw cabbages, which gave them dysentery. Most of the survivors were herded into Durham Cathedral. In one of England's loveliest buildings, now a World Heritage Site, there took place a shameful atrocity. Even though they received oatmeal, beef, more cabbages, coal for heat and straw to lie upon, the ‘flux’ ravaged the Scots. They ‘were so unruly, sluttish and nasty’, Haselrig reported, ‘they acted rather like Beasts than men.’ Within this holy purgetory all discipline broke down. Underneath the high Gothic ceiling and vaulted stained-glass windows, men lay dying in their own blood and excrement, their moans echoing like a ghastly plainchant amid the cathedral's superlative acoustics. Some men simply gave up. Those with money were robbed and murdered; those with warm clothes were strangled and stripped. Some of the survivors were sent to fight in Ireland, while two and a half thousand were transported to New England or to Barbados—that hellhole—as indentured servants. By the end of October 1651 the six hundred Scots remaining in Durham were dispatched to work as forced labour draining the Fens. Of the five thousand men marched south from Dunbar it would not be unreasonable to estimate that in the next couple of years at least half died as a result of their captivity—a rate twice that of British prisoners held in the Second World War by the Japanese for three and a half years.66
If soldiers reneged on their surrenders, custom decreed that they lost all claim to any protection. Take Du Roy's regiment, which capitulated to the Royal Scots Dragoons at Ramillies. When the Scots started to pursue other French troops who had not surrendered, Du Roy's men took up their arms again, ‘for which they suffered’, recalled a dragoon, what ‘they deserved’.67
Home from the Wars
Men eagerly anticipated coming home from the wars. In 1670 with more lust than literary skill John Baltharpe, a common sailor, looked forward to doing so:68
We watered then and made things fit
Unto old England for to get
To think upon our English Girls
We joyful was as any Earls.
Many returning veterans’ expectations were disappointed by the public's indifference. Even though they knew that Surgeon's Mate James Yonge was an exchanged prisoner who had survived over a year of hellish captivity in the hands of the Dutch, the boatmen at Deal, Kent, gouged him half a crown to be rowed ashore.69
Returning to England was particularly painful for those veterans who had been evacuated as sick or wounded. All too often they were abandoned at an English port, to be looked after by the local authorities. In 1590 the mayor and jurats of Rye described the wounded and sick who had been discharged from Cherbourg and dumped on them without warning:70
The diseased soldiers. … Rested upon the town's charge eight days in the most miserable sort, full of infirmities in their bodies, wonderfully sick and weak, some wounded, some their toes and feet rotting off, and lame, and the skin and flesh of their feet torn away with continual marching, all of them without money, without apparel to cover their nakedness, all of them full of vermin. … We constrained to wash their bodies in sweet water, to take from them all their clothes, and strip them unto new apparel. Then we appointed them several houses for their diet, and also surgeons to cure their wounds and rottenness. By this means we have saved some forty eight of them.
Such generous treatment was the exception. The sick and wounded evacuated from Ireland to Bristol and Liverpool during the Elizabethan Conquest or the Civil Wars fared far worse, as did the survivors of the Armada and the 1625 Cadiz expedition: of the latter a dozen dropped dead on a single day in the streets of Plymouth. Those, like the forty-eight from Rye fortunate enough to recover, still had to make it home.71 Sometimes they were issued money; more often they were lucky to be given a pass requesting the local authorities to help them on their way.
After every major war large numbers of veterans were demobilized. Their treatment often depended on the nature of the war. For instance, those who fought for Richard III went home from Bosworth Field quietly, hoping to escape the notice of Henry VII who, by proclaiming that his reign began on 21 August, the day before the battle, turned them into traitors, liable to the law's hideous punishments. Henry VIII's veterans seemed to return to civilian life fairly well. At a guess twenty-five thousand Englishmen served overseas in his reign, not too large a number to present great problems. The rest of the king's troops were mercenaries who went back to their own countries. In contrast, over a quarter of a million men served overseas in the last eighteen years of Elizabeth's reign. The return of those who survived created immense problems. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, recommended to the Privy Council that veterans of both sides in the Irish Wars be encouraged to serve in foreign armies: it got them out of the way, and—better still—over three-quarters of them would never return to make trouble at home.72 In 1590 five hundred veterans discharged from the Portugal expedition threatened to loot St Bartholomew's Fair: they scared the London authorities so badly that the city mobilized two thousand of its militia.
After the Civil Wars well-off royalist veterans tended to maintain a low profile in the hope of avoiding the sequestration of their lands by parliament. Alexander Brome consoled himself with the thought that he and his comrades need no longer lock their doors—the roundheads had plundered them of everything worth stealing. The royalist poet took refuge in gallow's humour. ‘Why should we not laugh and be jolly,’ he asked, ‘Since all the world now is grown mad?’ When, in Brome's lights at least, England returned to sanity by restoring Charles II to the throne, cavalier hopes for revenge and, better still, preferment, were dashed. The poet bitterly complained:73
We have fought, we have paid
We've been sold and betray'd.
Nonetheless seven thousand cavaliers applied for part of the £60,000 Charles II set aside for their relief in 1663. At an average of £8 16s. 8d. per application, this bounty was far from generous. Thus, many veterans found places in the new standing army—all ranks of the Life Guards being raised from cavalier officers—or sought service overseas, where out of sight they were out of both the king's mind and pocket.
The situation for the parliamentary troops after the end of the Civil Wars was very different. For the first and only time in British history after a war the army, which had become highly radicalized, did not demobilize, remaining at an average strength of forty thousand men during the commonwealth. After the restoration, like the cavaliers a decade earlier, roundhead soldiers had to lie low, hoping not to attract the attention of the authorities. As it happened many found employment in Charles II's new standing army. At the end of both the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession large numbers of men were demobilized. Perhaps a quarter of a million men left the armed forces. Little was done for them. In 1713 only four thousand veterans were in receipt of a pension, a number that had doubled by 1750.
Adjusting to civilian life could be hard. Officers resented the loss of social and economic status. Thomas Churchyard observed that on leaving the army, captains such as he74
Must learn to bear a peddler's pack
And trudge to some good market town
So from a knight become a clown.
In 1719 An Epistle from a Half Pay Officer made a similar complaint:75
How whimsical our fortune! How Bizarre
This week we shine in scarlet and gold:
The next, the sword is pawned—the watch is sold.
No wonder retired officers waxed nostalgic about the past. In Thomas Otway's play The Soldier's Fortune (1681) an unemployed captain asks another, ‘must we never see our glorious days again?’ Disenchanted, his comrade sadly replies, ‘Those days have been.’ Disappointment could turn into anger. As the ballad, ‘A Pleasant Song made by a Souldier’ (1614), griped:76
I watched on the sieged walls,
In thunder, lightening, rain and snow …
When all my kindred took their rest,
At home in many a stately bed.
Another version of this pamphlet was printed in 1664, presumably for sale to demobilized servicemen. Claiming that ‘the fruit of war is beggary’, Martin Parker's ballad, ‘The Maunding Souldier’ (1629), requested:77
Good your worship, cast your eyes
Upon a soldier's miseries …
But like a noble friend,
Some silver lend.
Others found home hard to come home to. After an absence of eight years, which (as noted) included a very pleasant two years touring Spain, Captain George Carleton took a coach to London in 1715: ‘When I arrived I thought myself transported into a country more foreign than any I had fought in.’78 Corporal Matthew Bishop returned home to Chatham after the War of the Spanish Succession to learn that his wife had had a son by him. On being told that Matthew had been killed at the Siege of Ghent (1708), the supposed widow had remarried, and was now heavily pregnant by her second ‘husband’. The misunderstanding was entirely Bishop's fault since he had not written to his wife for three or four years. Mrs Bishop—if that is her correct designation—fainted on seeing Matthew, and went into premature labour, from which she died. The two newly minted widowers had a furious row, after which Matthew returned home to Deddington, Oxfordshire.79
In 1566 Thomas Harman warned that if nothing was done to help returning soldiers, then they would turn—or return—to a life of mendicancy or crime.80 Statistics show that he was right. In London before 1580 only 1.8 per cent of vagrants were ex-servicemen. Between 1620 and 1640 the proportion rose to 12 per cent. In Doncaster it peaked at 49 per cent in 1627–29. Many veterans followed Private Pistol's recommendation: ‘To England will I steal, and there I'll steal.’81 James Turner, a goldsmith's apprentice, enlisted in the London militia, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before being discharged. Pepys thought him ‘a mad, confident, swearing fellow’. Unable to settle down to an honest job, he took up burglary, but was caught and executed in 1664.82 Since discharged cavalry troopers were often allowed to keep their horses and pistols, a few became highwaymen. Captain James Hind, who had fought at Worcester in 1651, was hanged, drawn and quartered the following year at Oxford with two other royalist officers, Hussey and Peck, for highway robbery.83 Even though the admittedly rudimentary statistics do not show a spike in crime following the Civil Wars, there was one after both the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Epping Forest east of London was reputed to be a nest of crime. In 1698 a gang of five highwaymen, all ex-servicemen, were reported plying their trade near Henley-on-Thames, while the following year Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset, was robbed between Chelsea and Fulham by ten highwaymen, all veterans.84
The Treatment of Veterans
There was little sense that veterans were entitled to help from the taxpayer. When asked whether ex-servicemen surely deserved benefits for having ventured their lives during the Civil Wars, Sir Thomas Wroth, a Somersetshire gentleman, curtly observed, ‘they were well paid for it.’85 For most of the early modern period civilians held soldiers in a contempt that was in part engendered by fear. Even though he was writing a Defence of the Militarie Profession (1597), Geoffrey Gates likened returned soldiers to vomit. They had seen and done so much evil, and plundered so widely, violating the norms of civilized society, ‘that they seem to come rather from hell’.86
Naturally, veterans responded angrily to such treatment. Sir John Oldcastle bitterly noted (in the 1600 play of the same name) that in England ‘There be more stocks to sit poor soldiers in, than there be houses to relieve them at.’ Lieutenant Stumpe, the one-legged veteran in Ben Jonson's Alarum for London, lamented:87
But let a soldier that hath shed his blood
Is lamed, diseased, or anyway distressed
Appeal for succour, they look a sconce
As if you knew him not.
An early eighteenth-century ballad protested:88
My King and Country for to serve
I fought like a sailor so bold.
Now that the war is over
I really cannot get my gold.
Not being paid their arrears of pay angered many veterans. Ralph Bostock was particularly bitter. After spending eighteen years as an unpaid gentleman volunteer (as well as all of his £1,000 patrimony) fighting for Queen Elizabeth in Ireland, France and the Netherlands, he was discharged without a penny.89 Being denied £70–£80 in back wages upset Lieutenant John Felton so much that in August 1628 he assassinated the duke of Buckingham, Charles I's favourite.90
Many veterans could not afford the luxury of anger. Because civilians did not believe that they were entitled to help from the public purse, when wounded veterans appeared before local magistrates to petition for assistance, they had to be deferential. During his three and a half years’ service in the king's forces Robert Davies was wounded seventeen times, having suffered a cracked skull, lost the use of both feet and one eye—yet even after the restoration he had to grovel for a 40s.’ pension.91 Sergeant William Stoakes, of Shepton Mallet, was wounded at the Civil War's first battle, Babylon Hill; fought at Edgehill and Brentford; took part in the capture of Bristol and the Siege of Gloucester; stormed Bolton; at Marston Moor ‘received many dangerous hurts'; and was taken prisoner at Naseby. In 1662 he petitioned the Somersetshire magistrates, saying how much he had suffered from ‘the usurped and tyrannical power’ of parliament, ‘and since it had pleased God to restore his sacred majesty,’ the royalist veteran begged the magistrates to grant him a pension. They did.92 Other justices were less charitable. In 1620 Hugh Drayton was brought before the Atherstone magistrates because he ‘did revile his majesty in his drink’. He apologized, explaining that his pension was £16 in arrears, and that his war wounds had addled his mind—especially after a beer or two. Nonetheless the magistrates ordered him whipped.93
For those who survived war, things could never be the same again. Yet many of them wanted to return to the same—to what they had done before going to the wars: to homes, jobs, having and bringing up children, to sleeping with their wives—and to doing so without nightmares. After the Elizabethan wars, Thomas Wilson noted in The State of England (1600) that ‘gentlemen who were wont to addict themselves to wars are now grown good husbands.’94 Nostalgically, veterans remembered comradeship, new experiences, exciting times, as they tried to suppress those things best forgotten. Remarkably many—perhaps most—managed to put the hurly-burly behind them. As a surprised Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1663, ‘Of all the old [i.e. New Model] army you cannot see a man begging about the street. You shall have this captain turned a shoemaker, this lieutenant a baker, that a haberdasher, this common soldier a porter, and every man in his apron and frock, etc., as if they had never done anything else.’95