Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by John Morrill

Author:John Morrill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Parliament’s Advantages

The king had several initial advantages – the support of personally wealthy men, a naturally unified command structure emanating from the royal person, and a simpler military objective (to capture London). But Parliament had greater long-term advantages: the wealth and manpower of London, crucial for the provision of credit; the control of the navy and of the trade routes with the result that hard-headed businessmen preferred to deal with them rather than with the king; a greater compactness of territory less vulnerable to invasion than the royalist hinterlands; and the limited but important help afforded by the invasion of 20,000 Scots in 1644 in return for a commitment by the Houses to introduce a form of Church government similar to the Scottish one.

It was always likely that the parliamentary side would wear down the royalists in a long war. So it proved. Purely military factors played little part in the outcome. Both sides deployed the same tactics and used similar weapons; both had large numbers of experienced officers who had served in the armies of the Continental powers in the Thirty Years War. In 1645 both sides ‘new modelled’ their military organizations to take account of the changing military balance, the king setting up separate grand commands in Bristol and Oxford, Parliament bringing together three separate armies depleted in recent months: an army too large for its existing task, the defence of East Anglia, the unsuccessful southern region army of Sir William Waller, and the ‘marching army’ of the commander-in-chief, the earl of Essex. This New Model Army was put under the command of an ‘outsider’, Sir Thomas Fairfax, to avoid the rival claims of senior officers in the old armies, and all MPs were recalled from their commands to serve in the Houses; but otherwise commands were allocated more or less according to existing seniority. The New Model was not, by origin, designed to radicalize the parliamentary cause and it was not dominated by radical officers. Professionalization, not radicalization, was the key; the army’s later reputation for religious zeal and for representing a career open to the talents was not a feature of its creation. The great string of victories beginning at Naseby in June 1645 was the product not of its zeal, but of regular pay. In the last 18 months of the war, the unpaid royalist armies simply dissolved, while the New Model was well supplied. The Civil War was won by attrition.

The last 12 months of the war saw a growing popular revolt against its violence and destruction. These neutralist or ‘Clubmen’ risings of farmers and rural craftsmen throughout west and south-west England sought to drive one or both sides out of their area, and demanded an end to the war by negotiation. Again, as the discipline of royalist armies disintegrated, they were the principal sufferers. But the hostility of the populace to both sides made the fruits of victory hard to pick.

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