The Making Of The British Army Read Free

formation should be. Astley, who had seen service with both the Dutch and Swedish armies, favoured the Swedish model of three ranks. 3 But his general-in-chief, Robert Bertie, the earl of Lindsey, favoured the Dutch model in which the infantry stood five ranks deep at least – a formation that was not able to cover as much ground but which was more solid and easier to control, especially with inexperienced troops. And Lindsey wanted also to keep the cavalry in close support, for the Parliamentary commander, the earl of Essex, had fought alongside the Dutch too; and Lindsey fancied therefore that he knew how Essex would fight.
Prince Rupert disagreed. Serjeant-Major-General Astley had once been his tutor, and so he, too, favoured the Swedish model – not least in using the cavalry independently of the infantry. As the lieutenant-general Rupert was not just in command of the cavalry, he was second-in-command of the army; and since King Charles himself was at its head, he would answer only to the King. When Charles deferred to his nephew, Lindsey resigned his empty command and took his place instead at the head of the regiment he had raised in his native Lincolnshire. The earl of Forth, whose service had been with the great Swedish soldier-king Gustavus Adolphus, assumed the appointment, and the ‘Swedish’ troop dispositions were made.
There are better ways to begin a battle than with squabbling among senior officers and making infantrymen change their dispositions and then change back again. But to fight a battle without a common understanding of tactics is asking for trouble, then as now. It was what happened when armies were brought together only on the eve of battle, and when officers received their training – some of it by no means up to date – in very different schools. These things were only avoided by having a professional, standing army. Did Charles wish for such an army, now, as he faced the earl of Essex’s men? Perhaps. But what if the standing army had sided with Parliament instead? After all, Britain was an island, the Scots were manageable and the Irish, for all their intractability, did not threaten the peace of England. Best leave professional armies to the continental powers, for see how they had fuelled a war of religion across Europe for the past twenty-five years! 4

It took time to draw up 15,000 men in line, all but a couple of thousand of them on foot, especially the semi-feudal companies of countrymen with scythes, pitchforks and sickles. The trained bands, if not drilled as well as once they had been, were at least uniformly equipped with the matchlock musket and the pike – in a 3:1 ratio of pikemen to ‘the shot’. In some of the more poorly drilled county militias the proportion of pikemen was greater, for the matchlock was an unwieldy weapon, the barrel 4 feet long, so heavy, and so violent in its recoil, that it had to be fired from a rest driven into the ground. Inaccurate even over its short range, it was a crude device – in essence a steel pipe sealed at one end, with a thin bore-hole through to a ‘pan’in which an initiating charge of powder was sprinkled and then sparked by a smouldering twist of rope (the slow match, hence ‘matchlock’) clamped in a trigger-operated lever. This fired the main charge – powder which had been poured down the barrel, with a lead or iron ball dropped in after it, all tamped tight by a ramrod. It was prone to misfire, for in rain the powder got damp and the match could go out. But with loose powder and glowing matches in close proximity, the risk of premature – and catastrophic – explosion was an even greater concern, and loading therefore proceeded at the pace of the slowest musketeer, to words of command more akin to a health and safety notice than to battlefield orders:
A few of the dozens of‘words of command’ needed to get the musketeers of both Royalist and Parliamentary armies to handle loose gunpowder safely and to fire