This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles, 1485-1746 by Charles Carlton

Author:Charles Carlton [Carlton, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Military
ISBN: 9780300139136
Google: bemMywEACAAJ
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2011-11-22T20:41:55+00:00

James Ure, who ran in the panic fear after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge (1679), confessed, ‘The Lord took both courage and wisdom from us.’ In other words fear had made them foolish, for it was well known that staying to fight rather than running away was a far less dangerous option. As the earl of Castlehaven explained, ‘For though man in his reason be the most excellent of creatures on earth, yet having lost it by the passions of fear, is one of the least.’ Most of the 179 casualties the Cameronians took at Steenkirk in 1692 occurred as they ran. Their chaplain, Alexander Shields, noted that at Lander the following year ‘there were more killed by running than by standing.’33 Statistics bear this out. Of a sample of eleven battles in the early modern period, the winning side lost 4 per cent of its men, compared to the defeated who lost 16.7 per cent—over four times as many. In a drawn battle, such as Edgehill, each side lost 13 per cent, as they fought one another to a stalemate, neither side breaking in a panic fear.34

For pursuers a panic fear was a killing spree, a binge of elation, of blood lust; it was an orgasm of carnage. Unable to see his fleeing victim's face, the horseman could swing his sword down against his back, neck or head, usually with fatal results. Perhaps the origins of this blood lust go back to man's earliest roots as hunter-gatherers, when we chased some huge beast, to relish its capture, death and consumption. Certainly there were links between combat and hunting. As Thomas Dekker observed in his poem, ‘The Artillery Garden’ (1615):

Of war hunting is but the Ape,

Doing her tricks in less fearful shape.

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