The Making Of The British Army Read Online Free PDF

‘Lord Protector’, and a power struggle began – among generals, among politicians, among leaders of the religious sects, between Parliament and generals, between generals and the army. Little wonder, therefore, that even those who had fought against the old King were soon looking to a return of the old order – the King in Parliament – which meant the return of a properly elected parliament and, of course, of the King himself.
But to restore the Stuart king would take soldiers, and a man with vision, integrity and grip to lead them. In Scotland commanding thearmy of occupation was Lieutenant-General George Monck, an old professional (he had seen much action in Dutch service) who had begun the war a Royalist. Perhaps fortuitously he had figured little in the fighting in England, serving in Ireland until 1643 and then in January the following year being taken prisoner in Cheshire. Refusing the offer of his liberty on condition he changed sides, he had spent the next three years in the Tower, until in November 1646, at the end of the first Civil War – the defeat of the Royalists in England – he finally took an oath of allegiance to Parliament, whereupon he was made major-general and commander in Ulster. In 1650 he took part in the invasion of Scotland, and after the shattering defeat of the Scottish Royalists at Dunbar Cromwell promoted him lieutenant-general and commander-in-chief north of the Tweed. Over the next eight years he had earned a name for firm but fair government and loyalty to his troops – not least over their pay, which was always heavily in arrears. He had not benefited personally from confiscated Royalist or Church assets, and so had no financial stake in Cromwell’s Protectorate. Above all – at least in the eyes of the exiled son of Charles I, the king-in-waiting – he was not a regicide: he had not signed Charles I’s death warrant, nor even been a member of the High Court of Justice which condemned him. He was known to all, indeed, as ‘honest George Monck’, and to some as no more than a simple soldier, almost a bumpkin, an image given force by his rich Devon accent and enormous bulk. He had nothing to fear from the return of the King.
By the summer of 1659 Charles II was trying to make contact with Monck through the general’s brother, a clergyman in the most Royalist of counties, Cornwall, and through Viscount Fauconberg, a grandee of Royalist-inclined Yorkshire. 10 Charles offered titles and baubles, but the general would not yet commit himself, publicly at least. And so when in the depth of winter honest George Monck gathered his troops at Coldstream, a tiny ‘border toon’ whose name but for this assembly few would know, he had confided his intentions to no one. Some of his men may have had thoughts of their own – Monck for Lord Protector, indeed – but for the most part they were content to follow him in the hope of getting their promised arrears of pay. Before leaving Edinburgh he had paraded and addressed them directly: ‘The army in England hasbroken up the Parliament, out of a restless ambition to govern themselves … For my part, I think myself obliged, by the duty of my place, to keep the military power in obedience to the civil.’ It was indeed a statement of fundamental doctrine. No general since the Restoration has tried to overawe Parliament, let alone break it up. Few, probably, have even thought of it.
On 1 January 1660 Monck crossed the Tweed, the border between his command in Scotland and that of northern England, and began his march on London, just as Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon and begun his march on the capital of the Roman republic –
alea iacta est.
Unlike Caesar, however, Monck did not burn his boats, for the Tweed was not quite the legal barrier that the Rubicon had been, and neither was it a Gallic torrent. There was, indeed, a good bridge, although 6,000 men could not cross it expeditiously, and so many of them waded through the icy stream.