Revolutionary Armies in the Modern Era

A Revisionist Approach

S.P. Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415867771
• eBook ISBN: 9781135091194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This presents a major re-evaluation of the standard view of revolutionary armies, the range of attitudes towards the role of heroic individuals, the formation and leadership of armies, and the differences and similarities between such armies. Beginning with an exploration of the New Model Army of the 1640s, a force whose name itself seems to denote its revolutionary credentials, the author presents ten case studies from around the globe, including the American War of Independence, The French Revolution, The Zulu-Boer War, the Waffen SS and the Viet-Cong. Through a detailed analysis of source material, he examines the images connected with these armies, both historical and recent, and assesses these images in their socio-political and nationalist contexts.

1 The New Model Army in the English Civil War, 1645–6
Saints in arms?

Pray raise honest godly men …

Oliver Cromwell, August 1643¹

I think these New Modellers knead all their dough with ale, for I never saw so many drunk in my life in so short a time …

Sir Samuel Luke, June 1645²

That the New Model Army should be regarded as somehow revolutionary is not perhaps surprising. It did, after all, bring to a close the first English Civil War (1642–5) with quite unprecedented success and rapidity.

By the end of 1644, several major battles and hundreds of minor engagements between cavaliers and roundheads in over two years of war had brought the Parliament of England apparently no nearer its goal of forcing King Charles I to accept its authority. When a ‘new model’ force was created from the remains of three earlier armies in a desperate effort to revitalize Parliament's flagging war effort, its success seemed far from assured and the possibility of a royal victory remained frighteningly real.

Yet within a matter of months of taking the field in April 1645, the New Model Army had decisively beaten the main royalist field forces at Naseby (14 June) and Langport (10 July). Over the following year the remaining cavalier strongholds were reduced by its regiments, one after another, to the point where by June 1646 the King was forced to admit defeat.³ As Sir Henry Vane put it in a letter to his father: ‘The success is hardly imaginable which accompanies Sir Thos. Fairfax's army.’⁴ All in all, a quite revolutionary change of fortune.

The New Model Army had thus produced an annus mirabilis for the parliamentary cause. But how? What had allowed this army to succeed so brilliantly when earlier armies had failed or allowed defeat to be snatched from the jaws of victory? What was new, revolutionary, about the New Model?

In a manner that would heavily influence later generations of historians, many contemporary observers and participants — reflecting the religious assumptions and preoccupations of the age — tended to explain victory in terms of spiritual and moral superiority. This was particularly true in reference to Oliver Cromwell, the Lieutenant-General of Horse, and his famous regiments of Ironsides.

Cromwell, equating the cause of Parliament with God's will, had from the first believed that the Lord's work could only be accomplished by ‘honest godly men’.⁵ From the moment he began raising his first troop of cavalry in Huntingdon as a farmer-turned-captain, Cromwell had spared no effort to recruit men of good moral character. In his view ‘a few honest men’ were better than any number of men of questionable repute; and ‘sober Christians’ were the most reliable of all.⁶

What was more, as the number of volunteers coming forward between September 1642 and September 1643 led to the expansion of his original band into a force of ten troops — soon to become the shock arm of an entire Eastern Association Army and in turn eventually incorporated into the New Model — Cromwell did not shrink from choosing as officers men whose social position and denomination did not match their high moral qualities. ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fight for, and loves what he knows’. he stated bluntly in one of his most oft-quoted letters, written in 1643, ‘than that which you call a gentleman and nothing else.’⁷

Whether this meant that the Ironsides were led by ‘common men, poor and of mean parentage’. as one critic alleged, or ‘freeholders and freeholders’ sons’ as an admirer claimed,⁸ the reputed behaviour of Cromwell's troopers in and out of battle seemed proof — especially to those Puritan clergy who thought along the same lines — that ‘godly honest men’ who believed in the cause were better soldiers than those who had little faith and honesty.

According to the Reverend Richard Baxter, the original Ironside troop had seen itself almost as a congregation, a ‘gathered church’;⁹ and even after it expanded tenfold and more, the troops were so sober and well disciplined, in the opinion of a partisan writer for a parliamentary newspaper, that they did not get drunk, steal, or engage in any of the usual soldierly vices harmful to the civilian populace; ‘insomuch’. it was claimed, ‘that the countries leap for joy of them, and come in and join with them’.¹⁰ More to the point, as their performance at engagements from Gainsborough to Marston Moor demonstrated, such men of conscience were ‘more engaged to be valiant’ and would ‘stand firm and charge desperately’ in battle.¹¹

The success of the New Model Army, organized by Sir Thomas Fairfax with the Ironsides at its core, was therefore ultimately a matter of religious zeal — at least according to the chaplains who accompanied it. William Dell recalled with admiration the ‘spirit of prayer’ within the army, and other chaplains such as the famous Hugh Peters wrote of the huge audiences their sermons drew. The New Model, indeed, soon gained a reputation as a praying army in which every man carried a Bible and troopers rode into battle singing psalms.¹²

Its commanders set the tone. Joshua Sprigge, for instance, wrote that Fairfax believed that nothing was impossible ‘for man to do in God's strength, if they would be up and doing’.¹³ As for Cromwell, whom the Earl of Clarendon saw as acting ‘in the name of Fairfax’ as a sort of de facto chief of staff, Naseby and subsequent victories only confirmed that ‘God made them [the impure royalists] as stubble to our swords’.¹⁴

In 1645, therefore, the New Model appeared to mark a radical break with the past in relation to links between motivation and effectiveness in battle. Though bitterly denounced for buttressing Cromwell's personal dictatorship in the latter 1640s and 1650s and held up as an object lesson of the dangers of standing armies from the Restoration onward, the verdict on the original New Model reached by historians in the modern age has tended to mirror the accounts contained in the correspondence and other records of leading figures in the war.

Thomas Carlyle, in editing the first published collection of Cromwell's letters in the mid-nineteenth century, stated that the New Model Army began ‘an entirely new epoch’. S. R. Gardiner, the first historian to approach the civil wars with supposedly scientific impartiality, concluded that, while not the whole story behind Parliament's victory, the New Model had indeed been pervaded by a ‘revolutionary spirit’. And despite the detailed research conducted by one of Gardiner's pupils, C. H. Firth, at the end of the nineteenth century — which revealed among other things that there was far less saintliness among the troops than commonly assumed¹⁵ — the general histories of England published in the first decades of the twentieth century still tended to lean towards the Puritan ethos in explaining the New Model's success. George Macaulay Trevelyan, for instance, in England Under the Stuarts, first published in 1904 with a new edition in 1925, stated that Cromwell's horse regiments in the New Model were fighting ‘to win themselves civil and religious freedom’. and that ‘they had in them a spirit which soon leavened the whole army’.¹⁶ F. C. Montague, writing a similar volume a few years later, used almost exactly the same words: ‘the puritan zeal common to most of the officers and some of the men leavened the whole body’.¹⁷

This emphasis on the positive effect of religion in the New Model Army was taken further by those historians who saw Cromwell's lack of religious sectarianism and emphasis on ability over birth as revolutionary in a sociopolitical as well as a military sense. ‘It was an assemblage of citizens’. claimed Lieutenant-Colonel T. S. Baldock in the 1890s, ‘each of whom, whilst submitting to the strictest military discipline whilst under arms, believed that he carried with him into his military life all his rights and responsibilities as a citizen.’¹⁸ Sixty-odd years later left-wing British historians, with Christopher Hill as standard bearer, took this line of analysis to its logical conclusion. The new ‘democratic army’. Hill argued, was ‘the common people in uniform’ commanded by officers such as Cromwell who recognized ‘the fact that free men consciously motivated by a belief in their cause could get the better of mere professionals simply by superior morale and discipline’.¹⁹ Brian Manning, in attempting to write a history of the war from the common people's perspective, was equally convinced that the New Model was an unusually motivated force:

There was a puritan leaven in the parliament's forces, especially amongst the junior officers, sergeants and corporals, and concentrated in the horse regiments; and no doubt some of the common soldiers were influenced by the ideas they heard preached and discussed, learning for the first time about the religious and political issues at stake in the war.²⁰

The troopers of the New Model Army, it appeared, were fighting for religious and political freedom, which made them better soldiers. The royalists, meanwhile, according to Joyce Malcolm, found it more difficult to fill the ranks of their armies because few ordinary people actively supported the King and his reactionary cause.²¹

All this has been grist to the mill of those who seek to draw broad connections between military effectiveness and political revolutions. The New Model Army, so it was claimed, was a revolutionary step into the future. Men volunteered out of conscience, promotion was based strictly on merit, good order was maintained through moral cohesiveness and firm discipline, and high morale was constantly fostered by regimental chaplains acting, in the words of political scientist Jonathan Adelman, as ‘the seventeenth-century version of modern commissars’.²²

The men of the royalist armies, ‘neofeudal forces’. were in contrast ‘illiterate thieves, rogues and vagabonds’. led by ‘a very thin stratum of wealthier nobles in favour with the court and without any military capabilities’.²³ Modern organization and above all revolutionary politico-religious zeal thus virtually guaranteed the triumph of the New Model Army. The string of unbroken victories from Naseby onward was no accident. Victory went to the side best attuned to the currents of history, the side most able to harness the forces of change and progress.

This is a comforting view for those, left wing or otherwise, who think that holding the moral high ground eventually translates into control of the state. It is worth stressing that, from Carlyle to Hill, those who have written about the New Model Army tend with varying degrees of detachment to view the King's defeat as a victory for what they believe to be right and good in English history. For Whig historians, it represented an important stage in the forward movement of the English constitution; for Marxists a chance for ‘The People’ to achieve a degree of class-cum-national consciousness.²⁴

Not surprisingly, such views have heavily influenced contemporary popular and textbook representations of the English Civil War. In the 1970 Columbia Pictures release Cromwell, for example, the King's army is portrayed as being three times as large as the New Model. Yet victory at Naseby goes to Parliament because the New Model, under the influence of Cromwell, is the more dedicated and disciplined army (and a far cry from the feebly led Parliamentary Army which had lost to the cavaliers at Edgehill in 1642).²⁵ Lacey Baldwin Smith, in a popular American university textbook on late medieval and early modern England first published in 1966 and into its seventh edition by 1996, writes that Parliament ‘had forged a weapon of righteousness and discipline’ in which promotion was ‘based on merit, not blood’ and staffed by men of conscience.²⁶

Unfortunately, a closer examination of the sources on which this view of the New Model's success is based, and of contrary evidence, suggests that this is an idealized and overly deterministic image. The chances of failure for the New Model Army were quite high, and in many respects the force that won at Naseby was far from revolutionary.

The meaning of the speeches, proposals, and counter-suggestions in Parliament in the winter of 1644–5 which eventually led to the creation of the New Model Army remains a subject of considerable debate. They may well have been a calculated attempt by Cromwell and other hawkish MPs to wrest control of the war effort away from the more dovish parliamentarians who supported the cautious strategies of the existing senior commanders, the earls of Essex and Manchester. On the other hand, though there was much friction between the various parties concerned, key pieces of legislation such as the Self-Denying Ordinance (which barred members of the Commons and Lords from serving in the field) may have been products of a widely held desire for reform and unity.^27...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The New International History Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The New Model Army in the English Civil War, 1645–6
• 2 The Continental Army in the War of American Independence, 1775–82
• 3 The armies of the French Republic and the War of the First Coalition, 1792–7
• 4 The armies of Bolívar and the war for the liberation of Gran Colombia, 1811–24
• 5 The Voortrekkers, Blood River, and the Zulu War of 1838–40
• 6 The armies of the Heavenly Kingdom and the Taiping Rebellion in China, 1850–68
• 7 Sepoys in the Indian Mutiny, 1857–9
• 8 The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9
• 9 The Waffen-SS in the Second World War, 1939–45
• 10 The Viet Cong in the Second Indochina War, 1960–75
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index