Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
army’s history, there were more auxiliaries than regulars actually stationed in Britain. In 1935 Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Dunlop wrote that
In these days, most of the Regular battalions are concentrated in one or other of our great military training areas – Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, or Catterick. The Militia is no longer in existence, and there are large areas of the land without any visible sign of the existence of the British Army were it not for the local Territorial Army unit.3
Things are different today only in that the TA’s geographical ‘footprint’ of training centres is about one-tenth the size of that in 1935.
Service in the fyrd, the Old English word for army, was one of the ‘common burdens’ shouldered by free men of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, who were obliged ‘to build fortifications, repair bridges and undertake military service’.4 I can scarcely think of the fyrd save in terms of that dark October day in 1066 when Duke William beat Harold Godwinson on Senlac Hill to seize the crown of England. But it remained a useful asset even to the victorious Normans. Levies from the northern shires stood steady around the great bloc of dismounted knights (all hefting sword and spear beneath the consecrated banners from the minsters of York, Beverley, and Ripon that gave the fight its name) to break the wild rush of King David’s Scotsmen at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. An obligation for military service was incorporated in the Assize of Arms of 1181 and the Statute of Winchester of 1285, and embodied into the first militia acts in 1558. In the absence of a standing army, the process of selecting men for military service ‘kept the more established householders at home and sent abroad those socially less desirable persons whom deputy [lord] lieutenants and [village] constables wished to be rid of’.5
The practice of calling up the most easily spared sat uneasily alongside the theory that the country was best defended by free men with a stake in its welfare. Sir Francis Bacon had argued that sturdy yeomen made the best soldiers: tenants, cottagers, and labourers were too servile; vagrants and vagabonds unstable and unfit. The Trained Bands, formed in 1572 in an effort to modernise the militia, were essentially county militia regiments, controlled by the lord lieutenants (who entrusted the heavy lifting to their deputies). They were composed of freeholders, householders and their sons, taught how to use pike and musket by a small number of professional soldiers – the rough equivalents of Permanent Staff Instructors in today’s TA. The quality of the trained bands was mixed, partly because the more affluent strove to avoid personal service but sent servants or hired substitutes to represent them. In 1642 the London Trained Bands numbered 8,000 men in six regiments, named the Red, Blue, Green, White, Orange, and Yellow. They were certainly better than most, partly because of the role they played in providing guards and contingents for the ceremonies of mercantile London. There was an intimate connection between status in the city and rank in the Trained Bands: all the colonels were aldermen. They also gained much benefit from the existence of the city’s voluntary military associations, like the ‘Martial Yard’, ‘The Gentlemen of the Private and Loving Company of Cripplegate’, and ‘The Society of the Artillery Garden’.
Many of the enthusiasts belonging to these clubs would have read the drill-books of the period, perhaps taking note of Robert Ward’s warning in his 1639 Animadversions of Warre that drinking was ‘the great fault of the English nation’ and particularly of English martial culture. Ward was profoundly mistrustful of the Trained Bands, and his observations prefigure the exasperated comments of many regular soldiers who have tried to train part-timers. Their training periods were
Matters of disport and things of no moment … after a little careless hurrying over their postures, with which the companies are nothing bettered, they make them charge their muskets, and so prepare to give their captain a brave volley of shot at his entrance into his inn: where after having solaced themselves for a while after this brave service every man repairs home, and that which is not so well-taught then is easily forgotten before the next training.6
In 1642 the London Trained Bands were commanded by Sergeant Major General Philip Skippon, newly returned from the Dutch service, who led them out to Turnham Green that autumn to take part in ‘the Valmy of the English Civil War’ when they helped face off the victorious royalists and save London. ‘Come my honest brave boys,’ called Skippon, ‘pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless us.’ He soon went off to command the infantry in the Earl of Essex’s Parliamentarian army, but the Trained Bands remained a valuable part of Parliament’s order of battle thereafter, though they were never wholly comfortable far from their wards and warrens, with mournful cries of ‘Home, home’ letting commanders know that they had been campaigning too long.
The Cornish Trained Bands, too, were formidable soldiers, though hugely reluctant to serve in foreign parts, that is, east of the Tamar. However, they formed the nucleus of those remarkable ‘voluntary regiments’ under Sir Bevil Grenville, Sir Nicholas Slanning, Colonel William Godolphin, Colonel John Trevannion, and Lord Mohun that were to form the mainstay of the king’s army in the west. ‘These were the very best foot I ever saw,’ acknowledged the royalist cavalry officer, Captain Richard Atkyns, ‘for marching and fighting … but could not well brook our horse (especially when we were drawn up on corn) but would let fly at us.’ There is more than an echo of Xenophon’s wry suggestion to his Greek infantry (peasant farmers and thus horse-haters to a man) that they should pay no attention to Persian cavalry, for nobody he knew of had been killed by a horse-bite.
The King’s western colonels were men whose local power underlines the intimate connection between social standing and the ability to raise troops. This stretched far back into a feudal past and was still important in 1914, when the Earl of Derby raised four battalions of Liverpool Pals, presenting their soldiers with a solid silver cap-badge of the Derby crest. Grenville died atop Lansdown Hill outside Bath in June 1643. ‘When I came to the top of the hill,’ remembered Captain Atkyns, ‘I saw Sir Bevil Grenville’s stand of pikes, which certainly preserved our army from a total rout, with the loss of his most precious life.’7 At his master’s side that day, in war as in peace, was the gigantic retainer Anthony Payne. Sir Bevil’s eldest son John was a 15-year-old ensign in the regiment, and when his father slid from the saddle Payne swung the lad up into it, and gave him the dead colonel’s sword. The Cornishmen, in their fury and grief, surged forward to regain the lost ground. Trevannion was killed when Prince Rupert stormed Bristol shortly afterwards and Slanning, mortally wounded in the same assault, lived long enough to quip that ‘he had always despised bullets, having been so well used to them.’ The death of the four men was a great loss: ‘Gone the four wheels of Charles’s wain,’ exulted a Roundhead poet, ‘Grenville, Godolphin, Slanning, Trevannion slain.’ Lest we get too misty-eyed about loyal country-folk and gallant gentlemen, we must remember that social obligation was laced with economic survival. Grenville had already written to his wife, away in their windy house at Stowe in north Cornwall, to tell her that no tenant could stay at home and expect to keep a roof over his head: they were to turn out in his blue and silver livery or pay the price.
There was an older obligation, for service in the posse comitatus, the armed power of a county, raised and commanded by its sheriff. It was an expedient resorted to by the royalists early on in the Civil War, though with mixed success. An officer commented that one of its gatherings was ‘more like a great fair than a posse’, but Sir Ralph Hopton secured 3,000 sturdy Cornishmen by summoning the county’s posse to Moilesbarrow Down outside Truro in October 1642. Like so much else, the notion crossed the Atlantic, and the ranchers and citizens who ride off with the sheriff to constitute the posse in so many westerns are behaving in a way their English ancestors would have understood.
After the Civil War the militia was retained by Parliament, both because it was seen as a defender of Protestant liberties against arbitrary royal government and because so many members of parliament were themselves militia officers.8 The Militia Act of 1662 charged property-owners with the provision of men, arms and horses in relation to the value of their property, and was the basis for the militia’s organisation for the next century. But by 1685 it was being argued by the government’s supporters that the militia had performed badly against the Duke of Monmouth. Some, largely, uncritical historians have tended to follow this view, but recent research suggests that accounts of the militia’s incompetence are overdrawn. The