The Making Of The British Army Read Online Free PDF Page A

their arms and making off. Up the slope began the Yorkshire horse. On this flank, however, the ground was broken, and they could hardly get into a gallop, still less keep formation. Cromwell judged the moment perfectly: down the hill he took his ‘Ironsides’, as soon they would be known from Rupert’s lament that they cut through anything, and saw off Langdale’s hearties in short order. Unlike Rupert, however, Cromwell had his men in hand: he sent two regiments in pursuit, and with the rest he turned against the Royalist centre while those of Ireton’s men who had at last rallied attacked on the other flank.
The Royalist foot fought like tigers. Rupert’s regiment of ‘Bluecoats’ stood their ground to the last, their ensign, who would not yield, killed by the Parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax. Charles tried to lead his Life Guard of Horse to the rescue. ‘Sire, would you go on your death so easily?’ cried the earl of Carnwath, seizing his bridle and forcing him to halt. But the tide of Parliamentarian foot and horse was overwhelming, dragoons now pouring fire into the Royalist flanks. With no help from Rupert’s cavalry in sight, those of the infantry that could get away now broke and ran.
The aftermath was bloody and inglorious. Fairfax’s troops hunted down the fugitive Royalists and put to the sword even those who surrendered. Coming on the baggage train they hacked to death a hundred camp-followers, believing them to be ‘whores and camp sluts that attended that wicked army’, or else Irish, or both, though they were in fact simply the innocent distaff side of Charles’s Welsh regiments, who paid highly for their inability to protest their virtue in English.
At Naseby, although the New Model had not performed uniformly well, they had been able to rally, and thereby proved the superiority of professional troops. And now there was no time for Charles to make good the deficit. His cause was all but finished, though there would be another three years of bloody, pointless skirmishing before the war in Britain was over.
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But when peace came, so did the obvious question: what to do with the New Model? Was a standing army any more lawful, affordable or expedient than it had been before the war? How would Parliament control it?
The place of the army in the state, whether republic or monarchy, remained a fundamental and problematic issue – and by no means, of course, one for these islands alone. In Britain it would not be settled for another half-century; in France, not for two centuries; in Germany, three. The problem was that by 1649, when the execution of King Charles apparently settled the nature of the state, the New Model Army, though its officers were ‘professionals’ and its rank and file in regular pay, had become thoroughly imbued with puritan zeal, and thus politicized. After 1649 it became the means of imposing a political and religious vision on the civil population – as well as conducting the brutal suppression of Catholic (and therefore Royalist) Ireland, where war dragged on until 1653. The decade that followed the execution of Charles I was to see the nightmare that Englishmen had so far only heard of from across the Channel – martial law, the ‘rule of the major-generals’. And the scourge of foreign wars, albeit largely naval ones, returned too.
In fact Cromwell’s missionary zeal and the rectitude of his intentions were by 1658 (when he died) so mired in the cruelty and increasing absolutism of his means that many a man formerly sympathetic to Parliament began thinking himself no better off than his fellows on the Continent who had endured the clash of armies in religion’s name for thirty years. Country gentry and town merchants alike wanted peace, order, lower taxes – and fewer soldiers. Indeed, the legacy of the Commonwealth was to be a hearty dislike of soldiers and a renewed mistrust of standing armies.
Cromwell’s son Richard now succeeded his father as