These are strong opinions and expressions, and as their general acceptance would logically render war impossible, it is no small gain to have in their favour so great an authority as Grotius. But it is an even greater gain to be able to quote on the same side an actual soldier. Sir James Turner at the end of his military treatise called ‘Pallas Armata,’ published in 1683, came to conclusions which, though adverse to Grotius, contain some remarkable admissions and show the difference that two centuries have made on military maxims with regard to this subject. ‘It is no sin for a mere soldier,’ he says, ‘to serve for wages, unless his conscience tells him he fights in an unjust cause.’ Again, ‘That soldier who serves or fights for any prince or State for wages in a cause he knows to be unjust, sins damnably.’ He even argues that soldiers whose original service began for a just cause, and who are constrained by their military oaths to continue in service for a new and unjust cause of war, ought to ‘desert their employment and suffer anything that could be done to them before they draw their swords against their own conscience and judgments in an unjust quarrel.’[318]
These moral sentiments of a military man of the seventeenth century are absolutely alien to the military doctrines of the present day; and his remarks on wages recall yet another important landmark of ancient thought that has been removed by the progress of time. Early Greek opinion justly made no distinction between the mercenary who served a foreign country and the mercenary who served his own. All hired military service was regarded as disgraceful, nor would anyone of good birth have dreamt of serving his own country save at his own expense. The Carians rendered their names infamous as the first of the Greek race who served for pay; whilst at Athens Pericles introduced the custom of supporting the poorer defenders of their country out of the exchequer.[319] Afterwards, of course, no people ever committed itself more eagerly to the pursuit of mercenary warfare.
In England also gratuitous military service was originally the condition of the feudal tenure of land, nor was anyone bound to serve the king for more than a certain number of days in the year, forty being generally the longest term. For all service in excess of the legal limit the king was obliged to pay; and in this way, and by the scutage tax, by which many tenants bought themselves off from their strict obligations, the principle of a paid military force was recognised from the time of the Conquest. But the chief stipendiary forces appear to have been foreign mercenaries, supported, not out of the commutation tax, but out of the king’s privy purse, and still more out of the loot won from their victims in war. These were those soldiers of fortune, chiefly from Flanders, Brabançons, or Routers, whose excesses as brigands led to their excommunication by the Third Lateran Council (1179), and to their destruction by a crusade three years later.[320]
But the germ of our modern recruiting system must rather be looked for in those military contracts or indentures, by which from about the time of Edward III. it became customary to raise our forces: some powerful subject contracting with the king, in consideration of a certain sum, to provide soldiers for a certain time and task. Thus in 1382 the war-loving Bishop of Norwich contracted with Richard II. to provide 2,500 men-at-arms and 2,500 archers for a year’s service in France, in consideration of the whole fifteenth that had been voted by Parliament for the war.[321] In the same way several bishops indented to raise soldiers for Henry V. And thus a foreign war became a mere matter of business and hire, and armies to fight the French were raised by speculative contractors, very much as men are raised nowadays to make railways or take part in other works needful for the public at large. The engagement was purely pecuniary and commercial, and was entirely divested of any connection with conscience or patriotism. On the other hand, the most obviously just cause of war, that of national defence in case of invasion, continued to be altogether disconnected with pay, and remained so much the duty of the militia or capable male population of the country, that both Edward III. and Richard II. directed writs even to archbishops and bishops to arm and array all abbots, priors, and monks, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, for the defence of the kingdom.[322]
Originally, therefore, the paid army of England, as opposed to the militia, implied the introduction of a strictly mercenary force consisting indifferently of natives or foreigners, into our military system. But clearly there was no moral difference between the two classes of mercenaries so engaged. The hire, and not the cause, being the main consideration of both, the Englishman and the Brabançon were equally mercenaries in the ordinary acceptation of the term. The prejudice against mercenaries either goes too far or not far enough. If a Swiss or an Italian hiring himself to fight for a cause about which he was ignorant or indifferent was a mercenary soldier, so was an Englishman who with equal ignorance and indifference accepted the wages offered him by a military contractor of his own nation. Either the conduct of the Swiss was blameless, or the Englishman’s moral delinquency was the same as his.
The public opinion of former times regarded both, of course, as equally blameless, or rather as equally meritorious. And it is worth noticing that the word mercenary was applied alike to the hired military servant of his own as of another country. Shakespeare, for instance, applies the term mercenary to the 1,600 Frenchmen of low degree slain at Agincourt, whom Monstrelet distinguishes from the 10,000 Frenchmen of position who lost their lives on that memorable day—
In this ten thousand they have lost,
There are but sixteen hundred mercenaries.
And even so late as 1756, the original signification of the word had so little changed, that in the great debate in the House of Lords on the Militia Bill of that year Lord Temple and several other orators spoke of the national standing army as an army of mercenaries, without making any distinction between the Englishmen and the Hessians who served in it.[323]
The moral distinction that now prevails between the paid service of natives and of foreigners is, therefore, of comparatively recent origin. It was one of the features of the Reformation in Switzerland that its leaders insisted for the first time on a moral difference between Swiss soldiers who served their own country for pay, and those who with equal bravery and credit sold their strength to the service of the highest foreign bidder.