The seventeenth century saw only three years in which there was no fighting: 1669 to 1671. The year 1610 was almost war-free, except that several large armies were on the march and shots were exchanged, though without turning into general conflict. In 1680–2 open war was confined to the far east of Europe, where Russia fought the Ottomans. But in every other year of the century there was warfare, and all the major European powers were at war with either one or more other powers, typically as part of an alliance, or with themselves in civil strife, for over half the century. War was therefore the normal condition of the time; war was the wallpaper. The scale of financial, human and material commitment involved was huge.
The measure of the period’s investment in war is not represented by crude estimates of the size of the armies deployed. Until the middle of the seventeenth century few armies were as large as 50,000 men. Today this number represents just two divisions of a modern army. The forces mobilised by the main combatants in the First World War dwarf these numbers: Russia put 12 million men into uniform, Germany 11 million, Britain 8.9 million, France 8.4 million, Austro-Hungary 7.8 million, Italy 5.6 million, the US 4.4 million, Turkey 2.8 million. These are vast forces. Not all of these men carried weapons, of course, or fought in the trenches; the logistics of that war required the bulk of enlisted personnel to be working behind the lines to supply their comrades at the front.1 But of course everything is relative: the populations of European countries in the seventeenth century were small in comparison. England had a population of about 4 million in 1600, France about 20 million, and the total population of Europe was about 78 million. It did not rise by much thereafter, at the end of the century standing under 83 million.
The main factor keeping armies relatively small in the seventeenth century’s conflicts was the logistical one of arming, clothing, housing, feeding, training, transporting and commanding them. When armies were on the move, feeding and transporting them was done at the expense of the places they moved through: the effect was that of swarms of locusts descending on towns and rural areas, the impact not restricted to damage to local economies, but physical damage to the fabric of the communities and their farmlands, and to the people themselves – rape and rapine were commonplace, and in enemy territory the actions of soldiery could be brutal beyond description.2 One of the worst events of the Thirty Years War was the Sack of Magdeburg in 1631, already described.
The size of national armies in the seventeenth century is a telling representation of the fate of the states they served. In the year 1600 Spain had 200,000 men under arms across its empire, which then stretched from central and south America to Italy and the Netherlands. A century later its army was less than a quarter of that size at its largest extent, and indeed in the interim had fallen much lower; some accounts say that at the time of the Portuguese revolt in 1640 it had trouble mustering 15,000 men in the Iberian Peninsula itself. In the same period between the years 1600 and 1700 the free states of the Netherlands went from an army of 20,000 to one of 100,000, France from 80,000 to 400,000 under Louis XIV at the height of his power, England from 30,000 to 90,000 (but it relied on its powerful navy even more than the Dutch relied on theirs), Russia from 30,000 to 170,000.
The increase in France’s army under Louis XIV was the principal reason why almost all the armies of Europe grew so much in the period. Some historians cite France’s burgeoning military power as the reason that England became a military nation too, but it is more likely that the experience of the Civil War, in which a total of 140,000 men on both sides became soldiers, had an influence in this respect. England’s Dutch king William III fielded an army of 90,000 in his campaigns in the 1690s. At the time it was thought that if a country were well organised and wealthy it could field as much as 1 per cent of its population as a military force. This was a reflection of the way national finances were harvested and applied by central governments, for of course finance is one of the key factors beside available manpower and national willingness. Greater efficiency in taxation, and the wealth to generate tax income, underlay the increase in size of armies as much as the need to have larger armies to deal with the international situation of the time. And a tax regime requires an administrative machine to manage it, a machine whose nature and efficiency is therefore comparable to the one required to raise and manage a large army.
Another great change was the art of war itself, and the weaponry available. In the year 1600 the only state with a standing army was the Ottoman state. It was the menace of the Ottoman threat that made European powers see the necessity for organised forces. Gradually traditional militias and feudal arrangements were replaced by new arrangements. In England from medieval times every man was liable for military service and had to practise archery, but the demands of the new world order made this an inefficient way of being militarily prepared. In the Holy Roman Empire, with its disparate populations and territories, armies consisted largely of mercenaries, who in earlier times were engaged at the beginning of the summer fighting season and paid off in the autumn. By the seventeenth century it was recognised as more expensive and less efficient to do this; the realisation was that it was better to pay a wage through the winter and maintain troops under training, than to incur the large expense of levying and discharging troops each year.
Training troops required discipline; discipline and loyalty to a state or a king brought uniforms into existence; uniforms in fact represented a saving on the costs of fielding an army because they could be mass-produced to a pattern. Weapons too had to be standardised for the same reason. States became major purchasers of clothing, machinery, weapons, provender, horses, carts, canvas and much besides, fuelling the change in commerce, industry and trade in the economies of Europe.
One outstanding example of changes in the ways armies were trained, equipped and managed will suffice to indicate the enormous difference that the war-torn seventeenth century made in these respects. The example is that of Maurice of Nassau, Stadthouder of Holland, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The reforms he introduced into the army of the United Provinces, aided by his cousin William-Louis, Stadthouder of Friesland, were instrumental in their eventual victory over the Spanish Habsburgs and the permanent separation of the two halves of the Netherlands.
Maurice and William-Louis took to heart a revival of interest in Roman military methods that was then in train, and applied these to their own forces. Some of their experiments failed, such as requiring footsoldiers to carry shields. Others were very successful: training troops to dig, as the Romans had done, not only proved useful in providing defences on the battlefield, but was excellent for discipline and esprit de corps, aided also by rigorous drill. They thought about tactics and strategy, making use of armies of lead soldiers to lay out dispositions for discussion. They standardised equipment and in particular weaponry, reducing infantry weaponry to just two items, the pike and the matchlock firearm. Infantry companies were grouped into regiments, and in winter quarters they continued with their training and in the process staged mock battles.
Most importantly of all, Maurice and William-Louis were quick to introduce any technical innovations they thought would be of material use. An important one was the telescope. Maurice is said to have been the first commander to climb a church tower to view the enemy through a telescope. His troops had the first practical time-fuse for delaying the detonation of explosives, and therefore had the first hand-grenades. He made his cavalry employ the recently invented curb-bit, which provides greater control over a horse because of the bit’s lever-action principle, which works the bit on several different parts of a horse’s mouth and, via the shanks and chain, simultaneously on its head. As a youth Maurice was tutored by Simon Stevin, the mathematician and engineer, and when he came into office he employed Stevin on the design of fortifications, asked him to found a new department of engineering at the University of Leiden, and made him quartermaster-general of the army.
The Dutch army did not keep either its technological or its organisational lead for long. Others were quick to follow, and the seventeenth century saw many advances. The Swedes gained ascendancy in the techniques of artillery, the French under Louis XIV adopted the bayonet, in particular the socket-bayonet, and as these developments occurred so tactics and fortifications came under constant review in response, with much resulting development. Some states lagged behind; as late as the first decade of the eighteenth century Saxon troops were still armed with the pike. But the urgencies of warfare did not allow many militaries to remain ignorant of advances in technology and technique in other militaries; arms races have always been a feature of dangerous times.
A consequence of these developments in Europe was that when the imperialistic European powers encountered peoples across the seas, their great superiority in equipment, firepower and military organisation made conquest a much easier matter than if resistance had been offered on equal terms. That was a lesson long before learned by the Spanish in the New World.
Perhaps the greatest revolution in warfare took place at sea. In Chapter 11 above the significance for subsequent history of the seventeenth century’s Anglo-Dutch naval wars was emphasised; they were fought on, and their victories and defeats were predicated upon, the basis of developments in marine engineering that had been accelerating in the previous hundred years.
Until the seventeenth century there had been slow progress from the Mediterranean-confined sea battles which had begun in classical times with oared galleys and remained that way for centuries, right up to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the last galley-fought war, which saw the end of Ottoman efforts at expansion along the northern side of the Mediterranean. The ships that sailed the Atlantic and round the world in the first great age of navigation were small and inefficient; in naval conflicts at the end of the sixteenth century the few purpose-built men-of-war were accompanied by a gaggle of merchantmen pressed into service for the occasion and rigged with temporary fighting equipment. Such was the great Spanish Armada of 1588, defeated by a combination of English and Dutch sailors and the weather round the coasts of Britain. Most fighting at sea was done by privateers raiding merchant ships, there being little difference between privateering and pure piracy, even though much of the former was officially sanctioned.
The effectiveness of the English ships involved in defeating the Armada has been attributed to superior craftsmanship and design in the capital ships of Queen Elizabeth’s navy. They were faster and more nimble than the Spanish galleons, yet at the same time could carry heavier guns. The pattern was the first pair of ‘race-built’ ships, the Foresight launched in 1570 and especially the Dreadnought, launched in 1573. The high forecastles and aftercastles distinctive of the galleon design were dispensed with – they were ‘razed’, hence the description ‘race-built’ – making them sleek and streamlined not just in appearance but in actuality, with less ‘windage’ and less top-weight, enhancing their speed and manoeuvrability. This counted in the actions against the Armada in 1588 when the English fleet was able first to break up the Spanish fleet – ‘running rings around them’ one naval historian writes – and then harried its dispersed elements into the North Sea, as they tried to escape around the northern reaches of the British isles. There they met with severe storms that drove many of the Spanish ships on to the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.3
These innovations, and the evolution of the galleon-design into the frigates of the seventeenth century, were inevitable concomitants of the spread of national interests across the oceans. But what really changed the face of maritime warfare occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century. These were the three wars fought between the English and Dutch, described in more detail in an earlier chapter. The war which took place between 1652 and 1654 was fought entirely at sea and consisted of a number of major battles, which demonstrated to both sides that they needed fleets that were entirely purpose-built and with crews trained for the task. From then on there was no place for merchantmen either hired or pressed – often unwillingly – into service. In England a regular naval officer corps was created. Big battleships were built, capable of fighting only in the summer months but so effective that smaller vessels disappeared from the line. The logistical requirements of navies were even more demanding than those for armies, in that the personnel, equipment and provender could not be resupplied while the navy was at sea, so an efficient land-based infrastructure had to be organised to ensure that the navy was fully operational once it set sail.
The consequences of this were far-reaching. In England carpentry, shipbuilding, the manufacture of canvas, nails, pitch, the protection and management of oak woodlands, and much besides, already established in the previous century, now advanced by bounds. A long list of services and industries flourished in specific response to the needs of the navy that England maintained from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, under the management of Robert Blake during the Commonwealth and Samuel Pepys after the Restoration. By the closing decade of the century, when the Dutch fleet was put under Royal Navy command by William III, the British navy was the largest in the world.
From the Revolution in England of 1688 until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 there was a constantly recurring state of hostilities between England and France, in which the Royal Navy played a central role. What presaged the nature of the conflict was the fact that when William III came to England to take the throne, it was in a fleet of 100 warships and 400 transport ships carrying 11,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cavalrymen with their mounts. A few days later Louis XIV declared war on England in support of James II’s claims, and there followed a succession of naval battles, ending in English victory at the Battle of La Hougue four years later. The naval opposition of the states facing each other across the Channel was thus set for the succeeding century and more.
In the case of the growth of armies and navies required by the seventeenth century’s constant state of war, two factors were crucial: the growing wealth of the major states of Europe apart from Spain, and the increasing power and efficiency of state bureaucracies. The latter was necessitated by the task of raising revenues to fund the forces required to fight the wars, while the logistics of being at war improved the effectiveness of state administrations required to manage the complexities involved. The point of noting this is a very particular one: it shows how the emergence of modern state institutions was fostered by military exigencies, or at very least that these played a major part in the emergence of the modern state. Wars and emergencies make demands on the creativity of individuals caught up in them, not just in direct and obvious ways relating to weaponry and tactics, but in the more remote-seeming reaches of offices and workshops far behind front lines. The idea that the growth of modern forms of administration resulted from these military developments was first put forward by Michael Roberts in his study of Sweden in the period between 1560 and 1650; although controversial, the thesis has much to recommend it, as another element in understanding how the modern outlook was forged.4
And this was a matter not only of bureaucracy, but of the political order which it served. In this respect the century saw as great a change as in epistemology and the understanding of nature.