King Edward was by no means the only commander of merit whom the war revealed. We should be inclined to rate the Earl of Salisbury’s ability high, after considering his manœuvre at Bloreheath. Being at the head of inferior forces, he retired for some time before Lord Audley; till continued retreat having made his adversary careless, he suddenly turned on him while his forces were divided by a stream, and inflicted two crushing blows on the two isolated halves of the Lancastrian army. The operations before Towton also seem to show the existence of considerable enterprise and alertness on both sides. Clifford was successful in his bold attempt to beat up the camp and rout the division of Fitzwalter; but on the other hand Falconbridge was sufficiently prompt to fall upon the victorious Clifford as he returned towards his main-body, and to efface the Yorkist disaster of the early morning by a success in the afternoon. The same Falconbridge gave in the great battle of the ensuing day an example of the kind of tactical expedients which sufficed to decide the day, when both armies were employing the same great weapon. A snow-storm rendered the opposing lines only partially visible to each other: he therefore ordered his men to advance barely within extreme range, and let fly a volley of the light and far-reaching ‘flight-arrows,’ after which he halted. The Lancastrians, finding the shafts falling among them, drew the natural conclusion that their enemies were well within range, and answered with a continuous discharge of their heavier ‘sheaf-arrows,’ which fell short of the Yorkists by sixty yards. Half an hour of this work well-nigh exhausted their store of missiles, so that the billmen and men-of-arms of Warwick and King Edward were then able to advance without receiving any appreciable damage from the Lancastrian archery. A stratagem like this could only be used when the adversaries were perfectly conversant with each other’s armament and methods of war. In this respect it may remind us of the device employed by the Romans against their former fellow-soldiers of the Latin League, at the battle of Vesuvius.
That the practice of dismounting large bodies of men-at-arms, which was so prevalent on the continent in this century, was not unknown in England we have ample evidence. The Lancastrian loss at Northampton, we are told, was excessive, ‘because the knights had sent their horses to the rear’ and could not escape. Similarly we hear of Warwick dismounting to lead a charge, at Towton, and again--but on less certain authority--at Barnet. This custom explains the importance of the pole-axe in the knightly equipment of the fifteenth century: it was the weapon specially used by the horsemen who had descended to fight on foot. Instances of its use in this way need not be multiplied; we may, however, mention the incident which of all others seems most to have impressed the chroniclers in the fight of Edgecott-by-Banbury. Sir Richard Herbert ‘valiantly acquitted himself in that, on foot and with his pole-axe in his hand, he twice by main force passed through the battle of his adversaries, and without any mortal wound returned.’ The engagement at which this feat of arms was performed was one notable as a renewed attempt of spearmen to stand against a mixed force of archers and cavalry. The Yorkists were utterly destitute of light troops, their bowmen having been drawn off by their commander, Lord Stafford, in a fit of pique, so that Pembroke and his North Welsh troops were left unsupported. The natural result followed: in spite of the strong position of the king’s men, the rebels ‘by force of archery caused them quickly to descend from the hill into the valley[120],’ where they were ridden down as they retreated in disorder by the Northern horse.
Throughout the whole of the war artillery was in common use by both parties. Its employment was decisive at the fights of Tewkesbury and ‘Lose-coat Field.’ We also hear of it at Barnet and Northampton, as also in the sieges of the Northern fortresses in 1462–63. Its efficiency was recognised far more than that of smaller fire-arms, of which we find very scant mention[121]. The long-bow still retained its supremacy over the arquebus, and had yet famous fields to win, notably that of Flodden, where the old manœuvres of Falkirk were repeated by both parties, and the pikemen of the Lowlands were once more shot down by the archers of Cheshire and Lancashire. As late as the reign of Edward VI we find Kett’s insurgents beating, by the rapidity of their archery-fire, a corps of German hackbut-men whom the government had sent against them. Nor was the bow entirely extinct as a national weapon even in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Further, however, than the end of the great English Civil War of the fifteenth century, it is not our task to trace its use.
The direct influence of English methods of warfare on the general current of European military science ends with the final loss of dominion in France in the years 1450–53. From that period the occasions of contact which had once been so frequent become rare and unimportant. The Wars of the Roses kept the English soldier at home, and after their end the pacific policy of Henry VII tended to the same result. Henry VIII exerted an influence on Continental politics by diplomacy and subsidies rather than by his barren and infrequent expeditions, while in the second half of the century the peculiar characteristics of the English army of the fourteenth and fifteenth century had passed away, in the general change and transformation of the forms of the Art of War.
[VII.]
Conclusion.
We have now discussed at length the two systems of tactics which played the chief part in revolutionising the Art of War in Europe. The one has been traced from Morgarten to Bicocca, the other from Falkirk to Formigny, and it has been shown how the ascendancy of each was at last checked by the development of new forms of military efficiency among those against whom it was directed. While ascribing to the pikemen of Switzerland and the English archery the chief part in the overthrow of feudal cavalry--and to no small extent in that of feudalism itself--we must not forget that the same work was simultaneously being wrought out by other methods in other quarters of Europe.
Prominent among the experiments directed to this end was that of Zisca and his captains, in the great Hussite wars of the first half of the fifteenth century. In Bohemia the new military departure was the result of social and religious convulsions. A gallant nation had risen in arms, stirred at once by outraged patriotism and by spiritual zeal; moved by a desire to drive the intruding German beyond the Erzgebirge, but moved even more by dreams of universal brotherhood, and of a kingdom of righteousness to be established by the sword. All Bohemia was ready to march, but still it was not apparent how the overwhelming strength of Germany was to be met. If the fate of the struggle had depended on the lances of the Tzech nobility it would have been hopeless: they could put into the field only tens to oppose to the thousands of German feudalism. The undisciplined masses of peasants and burghers who accompanied them would, under the old tactical arrangements, have fared no better than the infantry of Flanders had fared at Rosbecque. But the problem of utilising those strong and willing arms fell into the hands of a man of genius. John Zisca of Trocnov had acquired military experience and hatred of Germany while fighting in the ranks of the Poles against the Teutonic knights. He saw clearly that to lead into the field men wholly untrained, and rudely armed with iron-shod staves, flails, and scythes fixed to poles, would be madness. The Bohemians had neither a uniform equipment nor a national system of tactics: their only force lay in their religious and national enthusiasm, which was strong enough to make all differences vanish on the day of battle, so that the wildest fanatics were content to combine and to obey when once the foe came in sight. It was evident that the only chance for the Hussites was to stand upon the defensive, till they had gauged their enemies’ military efficiency and learnt to handle their own arms. Accordingly we hear of intrenchments being everywhere thrown up, and towns being put in a state of defence during the first months of the war. But this was not all; in his Eastern campaigns Zisca had seen a military device which he thought might be developed and turned to account. There prevailed among the Russians and Lithuanians a custom of surrounding every encampment by a portable barricade of beams and stakes, which could be taken to pieces and transferred from position to position. The Russian princes habitually utilised in their wars such a structure, which they called a ‘goliaigorod’ or moving fortress. Zisca’s development of this system consisted in substituting for the beams and stakes a line of waggons, at first merely such as the country-side supplied, but afterwards constructed specially for military purposes, and fitted with hooks and chains by which they were fastened one to another[122]. It was evident that these war-waggons, when once placed in order, would be impregnable to a cavalry charge: however vigorous the impetus of the mail-clad knight might be, it would not carry him through oaken planks and iron links. The onset of the German horseman being the chief thing which the Hussites had to dread, the battle was half won when a method of resisting it had been devised. With the German infantry they were competent to deal without any elaborate preparation. It might be thought that Zisca’s invention would have condemned the Bohemians to adhere strictly to the defensive in the whole campaign, as well as in each engagement in it: this, however, was not the case. When fully worked out, the system assumed a remarkable shape. There was organized a special corps of waggoners, on whose efficiency everything depended: they were continually drilled, and taught to manœuvre their vehicles with accuracy and promptness. At the word of command, we are told, they would form a circle, a square, or a triangle, and then rapidly disengage their teams, thus leaving the waggons in proper position, and only needing to be chained together. This done, they took up their position in the centre of the enclosure. The organization of the whole army was grounded on the waggon as a unit: to each was told off, besides the driver, a band of about twenty men, of whom part were pike-men and flail-men, while the remainder were armed with missile weapons. The former ranged themselves behind the chains which joined waggon to waggon, the latter stood in the vehicles and fired down on the enemy. From the first Zisca set himself to introduce fire-arms among the Bohemians: at length nearly a third of them were armed with ‘hand-guns,’ while a strong train of artillery accompanied every force.
A Hussite army in movement had its regular order of march. Wherever the country was open enough it formed five parallel columns. In the centre marched the cavalry and artillery, to each side of them two divisions of waggons accompanied by their complements of infantry. The two outer divisions were longer than the two which marched next the horsemen and the guns. The latter were intended--in the case of a sudden attack--to form the front and rear of a great oblong, of which the longer divisions were to compose the sides. To enable the shorter columns to wheel, one forward and the other backward, no great time would be required, and if the few necessary minutes were obtained, the Hussite order of battle stood complete. To such perfection and accuracy was the execution of this manœuvre brought, that we are assured that a Bohemian army would march right into the middle of a German host, so as to separate division from division, and yet find time to throw itself into its normal formation just as the critical moment arrived. The only real danger was from artillery fire, which might shatter the line of carts: but the Hussites were themselves so well provided with cannon that they could usually silence the opposing batteries. Never assuredly were the tactics of the ‘laager’ carried to such perfection; were the records of the Hussite victories not before us, we should have hesitated to believe that the middle ages could have produced a system whose success depended so entirely on that power of orderly movement which is usually claimed as the peculiar characteristic of modern armies.