[CHAPTER V]
It is strange that our historians have for the most part taken leave of the New Model without a tinge of regret, without estimation of its merits or enumeration of its services. Mountains of eulogy have been heaped on the Long Parliament, but little has been spared for this famous Army; nay, even military historians by a strange perversity begin the history of the Army not from its foundation but from its dissolution. Much doubtless besides the creation of a standing Army dates from the great rebellion, though few things more important in our history, unless indeed it be the cant that denies its importance. The bare thought of militarism or the military spirit is supposed to be unendurable to Englishmen. As if a nation had ever risen to great empire that did not possess the military spirit, and as if England herself had not won her vast dominions by the sword. We are accustomed to speak of our rule as an earnest for the eternal furtherance of civilisation; but we try to conceal the fact that the first step to empire is conquest. It is because we are a fighting people that we have risen to greatness, and it is as a fighting people that we stand or fall. Arms rule the world; and war, the supreme test of moral and physical greatness, remains eternally the touchstone of nations.
Surely therefore the revival of the military spirit, and on the whole the grandest manifestation of the same in English history, are not matters to be lightly overlooked. The campaigns of the Plantagenets had shown how deep was the instinct of pugnacity that underlay the stolid English calm, but since the accession of the Tudors no sovereign had given it an outlet ashore in any great national enterprise. Elizabeth never truly threw in her lot with the revolted Netherlands; James hated a soldier, and shrank back in terror from the idea of throwing the English sword into the scale of the Thirty Years' War; Charles's miserable trifling with warfare contributed not a little to the unpopularity which caused his downfall. The English were compelled to sate their military appetite in the service of foreign countries, and as fractions of foreign armies.
Then at last the door of the rebellion was opened and the nation crowded in. It is hardly too much to say that for at any rate the four years from 1642 to 1646 the English went mad about military matters. Military figures and metaphors abounded in the language and literature of the day, and were used by none more effectively than by John Milton.[197] Divines took words of command and the phrases of the parade ground as titles for their discourses, and were not ashamed to publish sermons under such a head as "As you were." If anything like a review or a sham fight were going forward, the people thronged in crowds to witness it; and one astute colonel took advantage of this feeling to reconcile the people to the prohibition of the sports of May-day. He drew out two regiments on Blackheath, and held a sham fight of Cavaliers and Roundheads, wherein both sides played their parts with great spirit and the Cavaliers were duly defeated; and the spectacle, we are assured, satisfied the people as well as if they had gone maying any other way. It is true that the sentiment did not endure, that the eulogy of the general and his brave soldiers was turned in time to abuse of the tyrant and his red-coats; but when a nation after beheading a king, abolishing a House of Lords, and welcoming freedom by the blessing of God restored, still finds that the golden age is not yet returned, it must needs visit its disappointment upon some one. The later unpopularity of the strong military hand does not affect the undoubted fact of a great preliminary outburst of military enthusiasm. Nor indeed even at the end was there any feeling but of pride in the prowess of Morgan's regiments in Flanders.
The rapid advance of military reform in its deepest significance is not less remarkable. For two years it may be said that opposing factions of the Civil War fought at haphazard, after the obsolete fashion of the days of the Tudors. The most brilliant soldier on either side was a military adventurer of the type that Shakespeare had depicted, a man who
dreams of cutting Spanish throats,
Of trenches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades
And healths five fathoms deep.