The History of the British Army. J. W. Fortescue
He never moved without a cloud of scouts on front and flanks; he made it a rule never to march after mid-day; and when he halted he marked out the camp, and posted every picquet and every sentry himself. He showed himself to be the first English exponent of the principle of savage warfare. He invaded the enemy's country, carrying his supplies with him, and sat down. If he was attacked he was ready in a strong position; if not, he made good the step that he had taken, left a magazine in a strong post behind him, and marched on, systematically ravaging the country and destroying the newly-sown crops. The enemy was obliged to move or starve, and wherever they went he swiftly followed. If they turned and fought, he asked for nothing better than the chance of dispersing them at a blow; if they dodged, he brought forward another column from another base to cut them off, while he destroyed the fastnesses which they had deserted. Finally, when his work was done he settled down quietly to govern the country in a conciliatory spirit. He was able gradually to reduce his military establishment, and, ruling at once with mildness, firmness, watchfulness, and unflagging industry, showed himself to be not less able as an administrator than as a general. Scotland has known many worse rulers and few better than her first English military governor.
1655.
1657.
1654–1658.
In Ireland, after Cromwell's departure, the reduction of the country to order was carried on also by a number of flying columns. Of their leaders but two of the most successful need be named, namely Robert Venables and John Reynolds, the latter Cromwell's kinsman by marriage and sometime captain in his regiment of horse. Ireton had been appointed Lord Deputy on Cromwell's departure, but dying in November 1651 was succeeded by another soldier, Charles Fleetwood. Though a valuable man when under the command of a strong officer Fleetwood was soon found to be useless when invested with supreme control, and he was soon practically superseded by Henry Cromwell, the Protector's second surviving son. Henry had entered the army at sixteen, had fought with his father in Ireland, and had become a colonel at two-and-twenty. He was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland at the age of twenty-eight. The country was quiet enough at his accession so far as concerned open rebellion; the Tories had been mercilessly hunted down from bog to bog, and the Irish fighting men had been transported in thousands by recruiting officers to the armies of Spain and of France. What gallant service they did under Lewis the Fourteenth, for they did not greatly love the service of Spain, has been told with just pride by Irish writers; and we too shall encounter some of their regiments before long. Henry Cromwell's difficulties lay not with the native Irish but with his own officers, the veterans of the Civil War, who were alike jealous of his appointment and insubordinately minded towards the Protector. Immediately on Henry's arrival some of these malcontents held a meeting, wherein they put it to the question whether the present government were or were not according to the Word of God, and carried it in the negative. The very members of the Irish Council, old field-officers who should have known better, were disloyal to him, but being old comrades of Oliver's could not be dismissed. Young as he was, however, Henry gave them clearly to understand that he intended to be master, and therewith proceeded to the difficult, nay impossible, task of executing what is known as the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. He showed conspicuous ability in extremely trying circumstances, abundant firmness and foresight, and a tolerance of spirit towards the men of other creeds, even Catholics, which was as rare as it was politic. The military governor of Ireland under the Commonwealth was assuredly not a man of whom the British Army need feel ashamed.[184]
Lastly we come to England, where Oliver Cromwell himself sat at the head of the Provisional Government which he was honestly and unceasingly striving to settle on a permanent basis. He defined his own position accurately enough: he was a good constable set to preserve the peace of the parish. But that parish was in a terribly disturbed condition. All that the most visionary could have dreamed of in the subversion of the old order had been accomplished, had even been crowned by the execution of the King; yet still the expected millenium was not yet come. All factions of political and religious dissent, all descriptions of dreamers, of fanatics, of quacks, and of self-seekers had been welded together for the moment by the pressure of the struggle against Royalism and against the rule of alien races. That pressure removed, the whole mass fell asunder into incoherent atoms of sedition and discontent, for which Royalism, as the one element which strove for definite and attainable ends, formed a general rallying-point. Good and gallant soldiers who had followed Cromwell on many a field—Harrison, Okey, Overton—fell away into disloyalty. Sexby, who had brought the news of Preston to Westminster, became the most dangerous of conspirators. There is nothing more pathetic in history than the desertions; from Cromwell after the establishment of the Protectorate. Nevertheless the misfortune was inevitable, for an army which meddles with politics cannot hope to escape the diseases of politics. Yet, through all this, Cromwell on one point was resolute; he would not allow successful rebellion to be followed by a riot in anarchy. Come what might, he would not suffer indiscipline.
To preserve the peace, however, in such a hot-bed of plots and conspiracies was no easy matter; and before he had been eighteen months Protector, Cromwell brought military government closer home to the people by parcelling England into at first ten and then twelve military districts, each under the command of a major-general. The force at the disposal of these officers for the suppression of disorder varied in the different districts from one hundred to fifteen hundred men, and was composed almost exclusively of cavalry. It amounted on the whole to some six thousand men, all drawn from the militia, who received pay to the amount of eighty thousand pounds annually. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was rather a force of mounted constabulary than of regular cavalry, and there can be no doubt that, if order was to be preserved, such a body of police was absolutely necessary. Yet it is probable that no measure brought such hatred on the Army as this. The magnates of the counties were of course furious at this usurpation of their powers, and the poorer classes resented the intrusion of a soldier and a stranger between themselves and their old masters. After little more than a year the major-generals were abolished, to the general relief and satisfaction. Their brief reign has been forgotten by the Army, which can hardly believe that it once took complete charge of the three kingdoms and administered the government on the whole with remarkable efficiency. But the major-generals have not been forgotten by the country. The memory of their dictatorship burned itself deep into the heart of the nation, and even now after two centuries and a half the vengeance of the nation upon the soldier remains insatiate and insatiable.
CHAPTER IV
It is now time to pass to the foreign wars of the Protectorate; for though they be little remembered they fairly launched the Army on its long career of tropical conquest, and of victory on the continent of Europe.
1654.
It is not easy to explain the motives that prompted Cromwell to make an enemy of Spain. He was eagerly courted by both French and Spaniards, and it was open to him to choose whichever he pleased for his allies. The probability is that he was still swayed by the old religious hatred of the days of Elizabeth, and, like her, looked to fill his empty treasury with the spoils of the Indies. He did not perceive that the religious wars of Europe were virtually ended, and that nations were tending already to their old friendships and antagonisms as they existed before the Reformation. Be that as it may, he was hardly firm in the saddle as Protector when he began to frame a great design against the Spanish possessions in the New World. His chief advisers were one Colonel Thomas Modyford of Barbados, who had his own reasons for wishing to ingratiate himself with the Protector, and Thomas Gage, a renegade priest, who had lived long in the Antilles and on the Spanish Main and had written a book on the subject. The most fitting base of operations was obviously Barbados, which, from its position to windward of the whole Caribbean Archipelago, possessed a strategic importance which it has only lost since the introduction of steam-vessels. It lay ready to Cromwell's hand, having been an English possession since 1628, and was, if Modyford were to be believed, ready to give active assistance in the enterprise. There remained the question whether the expedition should be directed against an Island or against the Main. Gage was for the latter course, and named the Orinoco as the objective: Modyford recommended Cuba or Hispaniola,[185] and Modyford's opinion prevailed.