The History of the British Army. J. W. Fortescue
corps that composed it, there was the adoption of the historic scarlet uniform differenced by the facings of the several regiments.
Clothing however, leads us to the more complicated question of the pay of the Army. The regular payment of wages was, as has been seen, the first essential step towards the establishment of a standing force; and with it came concurrently the system of clothing, mounting and equipping soldiers at the expense of the State. It should seem, however, that the rules for regulating the system were sufficiently elastic, for we find quite late in the second Civil War that troopers generally still provided their own horses, and received a higher rate of pay, and that colonels were permitted to make independent contracts for the clothing and equipment of their regiments. The stoppages from the soldiers' pay at this period are also instructive. The deduction of a fixed sum for clothing dates, as has been already told, from the days of Elizabeth if not from still earlier times. But to this was now added the principle of withholding a proportion of the wages, under the name of arrears, as security against misconduct and desertion; while it was a recognised rule that both men and officers should forfeit an additional proportion so long as they lived at free quarter. An allowance for billet-money, and a fixed tariff of prices to be paid by soldiers while on the march within the kingdom, contributed somewhat to lighten the burden of all these stoppages, and made a precedent for the Mutiny Act of a later day. It is worthy of remark that the garrison of Dunkirk found in the town special buildings, constructed by the Spaniards for their troops and called barracks,[200] and that it was duly installed therein in the autumn of 1659. The reader, if he have patience to follow me further, will be able to note for himself how long was the time before English soldiers exchanged life in alehouses for the Spanish system of life in barracks.
But there is another and more interesting aspect of the question of pay, when we pass from that of the men to that of the officers. The extinction of the old military adventurer brought with it the total abolition, for the time, of the system of purchase. In the Royalist regiments that gathered around Charles Stuart in Flanders, we find that companies and regiments still changed hands for money, but in the English standing Army the practice seems utterly to have disappeared. Promotion was regulated not necessarily by seniority but by the recommendation of superior officers, and, as external evidence seems to indicate, ran not in individual regiments but in the Army at large. The arrears of officers, especially of those who possessed means of their own, often remained, through their patriotic forbearance, not only many months but many years overdue; and it is interesting to mark that their inability to watch over their own interests while they were engaged on active service led to the appointment of regimental agents, who drew their pay and transacted their financial business with the country on their behalf. The Army Agent may, therefore, justly boast himself to be a survival of the Civil War.
Nor can I leave this subject without reference to yet another remarkable feature in the New Model Army, which unfortunately has not passed into a tradition. I allude to the great and sudden check on the ancient evil of military corruption. To say that corruption came absolutely to an end would be an excessive statement, for the minutes of courts-martial on fraudulent auditors are still extant, but it is probable that during the Civil War it was reduced to the lowest level that it has touched in the whole of our Army's history. The abolition of purchase and the higher moral tone that pervaded the whole force doubtless contributed greatly to so desirable an end. It is, however, melancholy to record that the evil was evidently but scotched, not killed. Before the Protector had been dead a year, there was seen, at the withdrawal of part of the garrison of Dunkirk, a deliberate and disgraceful falsification of the muster-rolls, aggravated by every circumstance that could encourage fraud and injure good discipline. Contact with foreign troops was probably the immediate cause of this lamentable backsliding, but it furnishes a sad commentary on the fickleness of Puritan morality.
Finally, let us close with the greatest and noblest work of the New Model Army; the establishment of England's supremacy in the British Isles as a first step to their constitutional union. No achievement could have stood in more direct antagonism to the policy of Charles Stuart, who strove with might and main to set nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and paid for his folly with his life. It may be that the greatness of this service will in these days be denied. There were not wanting in the Long Parliament men who intrigued with Scotland against England rather than suffer power to slip from their hands, and it is not perhaps strange that the type of such men should be imperishable. Those, however, who call England the predominant partner in the British Isles should not forget who were the men that made her predominant.[201] The Civil War was no mere rebellion against despotic authority. It accomplished more than the destruction of the old monarchy; it was the battle for the union of the British Isles, and it was fought and won by the New Model Army.
Authorities.—In so slight a sketch of the Civil War and the Protectorate as is given in these pages any lengthy enumeration of the authorities would be absurd. Readers will find them for themselves in the exhaustive history of Mr. Gardiner, to whose labours, as well as to those of Mr. C. H. Firth, I am very greatly indebted. Such collections of documents as the Calendars of State Papers, Rushworth, Thurloe, and Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters and Speeches are almost too obvious to call for mention. The Clarke Papers are of exceptional value for purposes of military history, and Sprigge's Anglia Rediviva is of course an indispensable authority as to the New Model. But even in such fields as the newspapers and the King's Pamphlets Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Firth have left little harvest ungleaned. Of the military writers of the time Barriffe is the most instructive, particularly in respect of certain comments added in the later editions. A French folio volume, Le Mareschal le Bataille (1647), gives excellent plates of the drill of pikemen and musketeers, and beautiful diagrams of the evolutions.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.