The Making Of The British Army Read Online Free

never will fight in the same field with boys again!’
But it did not please God. Just before midnight the earl of Lindsey, like so many of his Lincoln regiment, joined the ‘harvest of death’.
Others on the Royalist side were soon thinking the same as their late general-in-chief, if not directly blaming Rupert then recognizing that Edgehill was not the way to make war. And those who had recently seen service abroad also knew that a continental army would have swept them from the field. It was well that Britain was an island, and the navy capable – and that the Parliamentarian army was no better found than they.
Parliamentarian officers were thinking along the same lines, too. Oliver Cromwell, MP for Huntingdon and a captain of horse, had arrived too late on the field at Edgehill to see action, but he had been able to see well enough what had happened. He wrote at once to his cousin John Hampden, one of the Parliamentary leaders:
    Your troopers are most of them old decayed servingmen and tapsters; and their [the Royalists’] troopers are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen who have honour and courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or else I am sure you will be beaten still.
     
Cromwell may have been a puritan, but he was a puritan gentleman. However, he also recognized the weakness of the Royalist cavalry. Their lack of discipline had let slip a thorough victory at Edgehill, and he sensed it would not be the last time that Royalist
élan
would turn into unruliness. They could be countered by disciplined troops.
At Edgehill something profound had been, if not born, then certainly conceived:
    Thank Heaven! At last the trumpets peal
Before our strength gives way.
For King or for the Commonweal—
No matter which they say,
The first dry rattle of new-drawn steel
Changes the world today! 8
     
The change that Kipling wrote of two and a half centuries later was not merely the overturning of the constitution but the dawning of the realization that war could no longer be made in the old feudal way; that there must be system and discipline, and thus (eventually) a regular, professional army. For although there would be another two years’ inconclusive fighting (during which Cromwell would rise to lieutenant-general) before Parliament grasped the nettle and raised an army in which enlisted men received proper training and regular pay, and the officers were selected and promoted on professional merit, Edgehill was the genesis of the ‘New Model’.
And when Parliament did at last grasp the nettle it did so resolutely and without too much scruple: puritan ministers might teach the Gospel, but it was the likes of Carlo Fantom, a Croatian (the Croats were famed for their irregular light cavalry), who would teach the sword. ‘I care not for your cause,’ he boasted: ‘I come to fight for your half-crown and your handsome women.’
Fantom was indeed a notable ravisher, and would soon change sides for the promise of more half-crowns. But the Royalists, on that occasion at least, proved to have the greater principles and eventually hanged him – for ravishing.
The New Model Army would not be especially large, however – 22,000 men and 2,300 officers, two-thirds infantry to one-third cavalry (about the number, indeed, of the British infantry today) – but it would be superbly disciplined, equipped and trained. And for the first time a British army would wear a true uniform – red. Cromwell was certain of the type of man he wanted to lead such troops, too: ‘I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than what you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ Out went the officers who had attained their ranks as MPs, and in camethose who had proved themselves capable. While