Army of Charles II

John Childs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134528660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2006. This study looks at the first standing army in England during time of peace was that of Charles II until its dissolving. Since the earliest times kings of England had raised temporary armies in time of war, but the concept of a force which was not disbanded on the conclusion of hostilities was a radical departure.

Part One

 

I

The New Royalist Army

WHEN Charles II landed at Dover in May 1660, two professional armies existed, both owing him allegiance: the New Model in England and the army of exiled royalists in Flanders and Dunkirk. Neither force was very healthy, being in arrears of pay, and although the New Model was still technically formidable it was broken in spirit and thoroughly demoralised. John Lambert had led this force north in an effort to halt Monck’s victorious Scottish regiments but it had disintegrated through desertion before even coming into contact with them. At the Restoration it was Monck’s troops quartered in and around London which represented the remains of the New Model, with the additional support of Lockhart’s brigade in Dunkirk. If there was to be a military danger to Charles’s return it was likely to come from across the Channel.

Whatever its condition the mere existence of the Cromwellian army was a grave threat to the sovereign, standing as it did for an alien theory of government and society. Moreover it was politically experienced in achieving its constitutional aims having served as the keystone of English politics since the end of the Civil Wars. At the Restoration the army stood aside and did not oppose but it could never be said that the military actively supported the return of Charles Stuart. As the new monarch reviewed ‘his’ troops on Blackheath his reception was at best unenthusiastic, for these were men who had built and run the country without a king and were quite capable of repeating their actions. That they did not was largely due to the power and influence of General George Monck. In his sane and practical manner he had removed all the odiously republican officers and men before Charles set foot in England, and one of the king’s first duties was to appoint loyal colonels to all the Cromwellian regiments.¹ One of the most curious factors of the Restoration was this seeming about-face by the army, ‘which if it had captured Charles II in 1659, would assuredly have demanded that he should share his father’s fate’, yet meekly accepted his restoration twelve months later. Monck was one of the few men, along with Cromwell and Fairfax, able to impose his will upon his soldiers. As a military administrator and disciplinarian he has had few equals, and these abilities absolutely swayed the New Model.² He earnestly believed that the military should be subordinate to the civil power,³ and with his immense prestige and bearing he was able to carry the army with him. If the army did not actually approve of the Restoration, Monck was able to ensure that it did not actively oppose it. Charles’s debt to him was huge.

Quiet and passive though they were, the rank and file could not be relied upon, and it was certain that the ultra-royalist Convention Parliament would never consent to a continuation of the New Model army. Before Charles came over to England he was undecided as to what policy to adopt towards the Cromwellian armed forces and he toyed with tine idea of taking the entire army into the royal service. The Declaration of Breda offered to adopt the army and, ‘to consent . . . [to] the full satisfaction of all arrears due to the officers and soldiers of the army under the command of General Monck, and that they shall be received into our service, upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy’.⁴ However, once in England Charles opted for the disbandment of the army. One of the most pressing causes of this alteration in policy was the appearance of the spectre which was to haunt him all his life—shortage of money. The Cromwellian legacy of a war with Spain swallowed Charles’s meagre funds at the rate of £6,000 a day, the upkeep of the New Model amounted to £55,000 a month, whilst Dunkirk drained the Treasury of £73,868 between December 1660 and July 1661.⁵ A substantial reduction in the armed forces was urgently required and over this king and Parliament found themselves in complete accord. With his revenue unsettled, Parliament against any form of standing army, and the New Model posing a potential threat to both himself and his nation, Charles had to disband the army.

Sir William Doyley reported a systematic programme for the disbandment of the New Model to the House of Commons from the Committee for the Army on 30 August 1660.⁶ Under this scheme all the officers and soldiers who were in pay on 25 April 1660 and had not deserted since that date would receive their full arrears and be paid off with a bonus of an extra week’s pay from the king’s own purse. This was accepted by Parliament and shortly afterwards two acts were passed which sealed the fate of the old army. ‘An Act for the Speedy Provision of Money for Disbanding and Paying Off the Forces of this Kingdom both by Land and Sea’,⁷ continued the hated monthly assessments for a further two months at the rate of £70,000, whilst a Poll Bill was raised to yield £210,000. With these sums it was hoped to be able to pay off the arrears of the army and keep it in full pay up until the time of its disbandment. A second act, ‘for the Speedy disbanding of the Army and Garrisons of this Kingdom’,⁸ arranged for the army to be broken up three regiments at a time the order of which was to be chosen by lots drawn by the Privy Council. Exceptions were made of the regiments of the Dukes of York and Gloucester and those commanded by Monck, now Duke of Albemarle,⁹ all of which were to be disbanded at the very end of the proceedings. Likewise, companies guarding the arsenal at Hull and the Scottish border at Carlisle and Berwick were also retained in pay until the completion of the disbandment. These relevant acts received the Royal Assent on 13 September 1660.

The disbandment commenced immediately with Albemarle in overall charge. This fate was accepted quietly and calmly by the army, a mentality no doubt assisted by the inclusion of a clause in the Act for the Speedy Disbanding which withheld the arrears from any man who attempted to jeopardise the operation. The full payment of arrears amounted to a considerable sum of money and this must have served as a weighty bribe to ensure the good behaviour of the troops and the smooth running of the disbandment. Parliament’s wisest precaution was in relaxing the laws relating to apprenticeship permitting disbanded officers and men to practise a trade in their own towns or counties without having to undergo the rigours of an apprenticeship.¹⁰ This must have greatly eased the return of 40,000 men into civilian life. The king and his wealthier subjects did their best to employ disbanded soldiers on building houses and gardens, the canal in St James’s Park being constructed by ex-soldiers.

It cost the country £835,819 8s 10d to disband the army. The Poll Bill and the monthly assessments raised £560,000, but the king had to find the balance from his own resources.¹¹ The disbandment went more slowly than had been hoped, as the money from the Poll Bill did not materialise very quickly and even the monthly assessments had to be hurried along by a proclamation from the king.¹² On 6 November fifteen regiments of foot, four of horse, and twenty-two garrison companies had been dissolved, leaving three of foot, nine of horse, and eleven garrison units. By Christmas 1660 the New Model army had ceased to exist except for Albemarle’s foot, the ‘Coldstream Regiment’, and his own regiment of horse. Ludlow was deeply incensed at the death of this magnificent fighting machine:

The Army which had so long stood in the way of the Court, was now wholly disbanded, except only Monck’s Regiment of Foot; and that was balanced by a Regiment of Horse under colour of being a guard to the King. This together with the payment of their arrears and a liberty of trading in corporations was the reward they received for their services, notwithstanding all the fair promises of Monck and the King. And thus these men who had accumulated treachery upon treachery, were dismissed with infamy.¹³

Burnet was of a more reasoned opinion:

The Army was to be disbanded, but in such a manner, with so much respect, and so exact an account of arrears, and such gratuities, that it looked rather to be a dismissing them to the next opportunity, and a reserving them till there should be occasion for their service, than a breaking them. They were certainly the bravest, the best disciplined, and the soberest army that had been known in these latter ages: every soldier was able to do the functions of an officer.¹⁴

Whatever the political rights and wrongs of the disbandment the actual process was a great success with little record of disturbance by the soldiery. Pepys, writing in 1663, leaves the impression that the old soldiers settled down into civilian life with ease:

Of all the old Army now you cannot see a man begging about the street; but what? You shall have this captain turned a shoemaker; the lieutenant a baker; this a brewer; that a haberdasher; this common soldier a porter; and every man in his apron and frock etc, as if they had never done anything else . . . the spirits of the old Parliament soldiers are so quiet and contented with God’s Providences, that the King is safer from any evil meant him by them one thousand times more than from his own discontented Cavaliers.¹⁵

For the majority of the New Model this return into trade and commerce was natural as it had been from these employments that they had originally been recruited.

Whilst only the two regiments of Monck and a few garrison companies remained in England at the end of 1660, the entire Dunkirk brigade was unaffected by the general disbandment. Charles appointed Sir Edward Harley to the governorship on 14 July 1660 in place of Sir William Lockhart. Harley had originally fought for Parliament during the Civil Wars but fell foul of Cromwell over the disbandment of the New Model in the late 1640s. As in England, the Cromwellian regiments in Dunkirk were purged of their republican officers and royalists commissioned in their stead, whilst some supernumeraries were paid off. The new governor was given a warrant for £5,000 to pay off 200 horse and 400 foot as they were ‘unserviceable’, but whether these men were politically or physically unserviceable is a matter for conjecture.¹⁶ Given the generally high standards of the New Model these men were probably political undesirables. One thousand men were sent over to Dunkirk to fill these vacancies from the pool of disbanded men in England. Once under the command of Harley and the royalist colonels the discipline of the garrison deteriorated so that on 30 December 1661 Secretary Nicholas was forced to write to Lord Rutherford, who had succeeded Harley in May 1661, complaining that there was too much drinking and debauchery within the garrison and that the officers were never present with their commands but spent all their time in London.¹⁷

For the two years which Charles retained Dunkirk the garrison numbered 6,000 foot and 600 horse, half of which were stationed in the fort at Mardyke. The only non-Cromwellian troops in the garrison were the remains of Charles’s army of exiled royalists. At the Restoration the survivors of this corps were taken into Dunkirk and formed into a single regiment of foot guards under Lord Wentworth and the few cavalry later amalgamated with the Duke of York’s Troop of Life Guards.¹⁸ The enforced coexistence of these two forces, the Cromwellians and the royalists, in one confined garrison town might well have accounted for the loss of discipline. Two years before they had fought one another at the Battle of the Dunes; one clause in the new articles of war summed up the tension between the two factions:

No man shall presume by word or deed to transgress against His Majesty’s Gracious Pardon in the Act of Indemnity, or to utter any reproachful words to the disrepute of the Three Nations, or the inhabitants of this garrison, or of any person in them, for former actions, on pain of punishment as an Incendiary.¹⁹

Wentworth’s Guards were soon in a miserable condition having received no pay for six months, and in a petition to the king in October 1660 the officers stated that they were ‘daily constrained to sell one thing or other of clothes, as some already have to the very last shirt they had to put on’.²⁰

Without sufficient money to maintain this garrison Charles realised that the only possible solution was evacuation but this conveniently coincided with another reason for wishing to be rid of the place. Dunkirk was full of republican troops and was viewed with the deepest suspicion in England, for it was both strong enough and correctly positioned to invade across the Channel. Negotiations were opened for the sale of Dunkirk to France. In October 1662 England parted with her colony for 5 million livres and the English and Irish troops dispersed. Prior to this Lewis Farrell’s and Edward Harley’s regiments had been sent to Tangier late in 1661, and on the sale the three troops of horse went to serve with the British brigade sent to fight in Portugal, Wentworth’s Guards sailed for England, and the Duke of York’s regiment entered the French army as a mercenary unit, whilst Rutherford’s, Falkland’s and Taafe’s regiments were disbanded in Dunkirk. The policy was to permit only Wentworth’s to return to England as a formed unit, all the Cromwellian formations being broken up abroad so that the men came back to England as individuals or were sent into foreign service en bloc. In this way no political danger developed from the Dunkirk garrison and the dispersal of the last reservoir of the New Model passed off without any serious incident.

The old army had virtually disappeared by the end of 1660 and yet by March 1661 Charles had founded the nucleus of a new army. He was certainly no opponent of a standing army, provided that it was controlled by him and not by Parliament, having been very proud of the little army which he had raised to fight with the Spaniards in Flanders. Ludlow stated that the king was in favour of establishing a new army,²¹ and, according to Burnet, Clarendon held similar views:

And there was a great talk of a design, as soon as the army were disbanded, to raise a force that should be so chosen and modelled that the King might depend upon it; and that it should be so cons...