First English Civil War - Armies

Armies

Both the king and the Parliament raised men when and where they could, and both claimed legal justification. Parliament claimed to be justified by its own recent "Militia Ordinance", while the king claimed the old-fashioned "Commissions of Array". For example, in Cornwall the Royalist leader Sir Ralph Hopton indicted the enemy before the grand jury of the county for disturbing the peace, and expelled them by using the posse comitatus. In effect, both sides assembled local forces wherever they could do so by valid written authority.

This thread of local feeling and respect for the laws runs through the early operations of both sides, almost irrespective of the main principles at stake. Many promising schemes failed because of the reluctance of militiamen to serve outside their own county. As the offensive lay with the King, his cause naturally suffered from this far more than that of Parliament.

However, the real spirit of the struggle proved very different. Anything that prolonged the struggle, or seemed like a lack of energy or an avoidance of decision, was bitterly resented by the men of both sides. They had their hearts in the quarrel, and had not yet learned by the severe lesson of Edgehill that raw armies cannot quickly end wars. In France and Germany, the prolongation of a war meant continued employment for soldiers, but in England:

we never encamped or entrenched... or lay fenced with rivers or defiles. Here were no leaguers in the field, as at the story of Nuremberg, 'neither had our soldiers any tents, or what they call heavy baggage.' Twas the general maxim of the war: Where is the enemy? Let us go and fight them. Or... if the enemy was coming... Why, what should be done! Draw out into the fields and fight them.

This passage from the Memoirs of a Cavalier, ascribed to Daniel Defoe, though not contemporary evidence, is an admirable summary of the character of the Civil War. Even when in the end a regular professional army developed, the original decision-compelling spirit permeated the whole organisation as was seen when pitched against regular professional continental troops at the Battle of the Dunes during the Interregnum.

From the start, most of the population of England mistrusted professional soldiers of fortune, be their advice good or bad. Nearly all those Englishmen who loved war for its own sake were too closely concerned for the welfare of their country to attempt the methods of the Thirty Years' War in England. The formal organisation of both armies was based on the Swedish model, which had become the pattern of Europe after the victories of Gustavus Adolphus. It gave better scope for the morale of the individual than the old-fashioned Spanish and Dutch formations, in which the man in the ranks was a highly finished automaton.