The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

So thought Mr. Peters in that year of grace 1645, and so thought many who, in the Commons House of Parliament, heard him tell his story of how Basing fell.

With the death of the king in 1649 came the real beginning of the end. This is no place to discuss the merit or demerit of a step so serious that it only finds a partial parallel in the action of Elizabeth towards Mary of Scotland. But two great results grew out of it: the proclamation of Charles II. as King of Scotland, and the invitation of Ormond to Ireland, where also Charles was hailed as the new sovereign. From this came the last two wars of the Commonwealth, the first of which was fought in Ireland. There anarchy reigned. Petty war was the normal condition of the rather more than half-savage clans. There had been a massacre of Protestants, variously estimated at from forty thousand to a hundred thousand, under circumstances of the “most revolting barbarity; ... men, women and children they indiscriminately murdered, in a manner of which the details recall those of the massacre of Cawnpore.” This fact must be gravely borne in mind in considering the English invasion, and must be added to the fierce religious hatred and the increasingly intense political antagonism which the latest events had once more brought to the front. There is much to be said for the bitter revenge taken by the stern Protestant party, which composed the army sent to destroy the Irish people who had done their utmost to aid the monarchical cause in the late war.

To the sectaries it was no mere word-painting to say that Papacy was “Anathema,” and the Pope “Antichrist.” To break down the “carved images” was infinitely less a figure of speech in Irish churches than it was in English fanes. War in Ireland was to them a crusade, a religious war, a war of creeds as well as people; and the antagonism of peoples was little less than the antagonism of creeds. So alien were the Irish deemed, that, long before this, Pigott of Clotheram disinherited his eldest son merely for marrying an Irishwoman! Often conquered before, never had this unhappy land been more completely subdued than now. Yet even with this “curse of Cromwell” came peace and prosperity. “Districts which had recently been as wild as those where the first white settlers of Connecticut were contending with the red men, were in a few years transformed into the likeness of Kent and Norfolk. New buildings and new roads were everywhere seen.” Rightly or wrongly, he held that war was not made with rosewater any more than omelettes without breaking eggs. He may have been, and probably was, quite conscientious when he wrote: “Truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood.”

It is not just to severely condemn Cromwell for his action in Ireland. He lived in the seventeenth, not the nineteenth century, and acted according to his lights. His Irish campaigns have been described as “a series of blood-massacres, the just punishment of atrocious deeds, or as the fanatical orgie of a tyrant. This was a complete perversion of fact, and Cromwell’s conduct in Ireland had yet to be judged impartially by a candid historian and by a competent thinker on war. No doubt he was a stern and severe conqueror; no doubt they turned their eyes away from Wexford and Drogheda; no doubt Cromwell and his avenging host regarded Celtic Papists as accursed idolaters, dripping with the carnage of 1641, and to be trodden under foot, like the doomed tribes of Palestine were crushed ‘at the bidding of the Lord’; but when he set foot in Ireland, he had to deal with a nation in armed and furious revolt, which had a country difficult in the extreme to penetrate. The experiences of previous Irish wars had shown, that under conditions like these, it was essential to strike hard at once, and the peculiarities of the Irish climate, fatal in the seventeenth century to British troops, made it necessary to avoid the inland districts, and, if possible, to obtain immediate success. These considerations explained his deeds in Ireland. He was pitiless and inexorable, but he acted upon a far-sighted policy, and his generalship was bold, decided, and brilliant. His severity at Drogheda, he told them himself, was calculated ‘to prevent the effusion of blood.’ Just as Villars deliberately starved Fribourg, just as the garrison of Pampeluna would have been put to the sword had it not yielded to the summons of Wellington.”[12]

Whatever be the criticism of the means he employed, the end was that all open rebellion had ceased by 1653.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, too, the war-cloud had again burst; and though Fairfax resigned rather than invade that country, Cromwell either had less scruples, or was more firmly determined to put down all armed insurrection to the Republic, and assumed command of a fresh army of the North.

But the actions were, except that at Dunbar, disconnected and inconclusive. There were the usual small affairs, minor sieges and operations in an exceptionally difficult country. Whether Cromwell wilfully left the doorway into England open or not is doubtful, though Colonel Walford is of opinion he did; but be that as it may, the Scotch army fell into a trap, marched into England as far as Worcester, and there met what Cromwell and his party thought the crowning mercy of defeat. His army had marched to that victory for twenty-four days, and had covered in that time 350 miles.

Thus in Scotland, as in Ireland, the stern discipline of Cromwell’s army, though the religious feeling was in this case more or less common to both, prevailed when the time came. Notwithstanding the theoretical, and to a certain extent practical, sympathy which linked the two nations of Great Britain together, all the wild and undoubted bravery of the Northern Celt availed the royal cause at the end as little as, or even less than, that of his more emotional brother across the channel of St. George. But it must be remembered that the racial antipathy between the two great branches of the inhabitants of Britain had never been so accentuated, certainly not for half a century, as that which existed then, and long after, between the Irish and the British.

What is clear in this last campaign is, that Cromwell had little in common with those who governed the sister kingdom. “You ken very well,” said the Lord Chancellor of Scotland in 1645, “that Lieutenant-General Cromwell is no friend of ours.” He knew this, and his personal and possibly religious antipathies were therefore in no wise lessened.

But with the general and steady improvement in the systematic conduct of war that is increasingly apparent as time went on, there is evidence of an attempt at organising a system of supply; an attempt that, though in a very sketchy and elementary way, foreshadows the higher strategy that is more and more noticeable as the eighteenth century grew from youth to old age.