Military Leadership in the British Civil Wars, 1642-1651

'The Genius of this Age'

Stanley D.M. Carpenter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135769451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Despite the wealth of British Civil Wars studies, little work addresses the nature of military leadership effectiveness in terms of the eventual result -parliamentary victory. It is no longer sufficient to credit religion, economics, localism or constitutional concepts for the outcome without considering the role of effective military leadership. The study of human conflict illustrates a simple, immutable truth -the finest, most inspired or motivated, well-trained, disciplined or experienced force is quite like a modern cruise missile. Without effective guidance, it is no more than a collection of very expensive parts.For the general military history reader, the work provides a concise strategic and operational narrative of the British Civil Wars of 1642-51 in northern England and Scotland. For historians, it offers an additional causative explanation for ultimate parliamentary victory. As a study of effective military leadership, it proposes, through a case study analysis based on a framework of characteristics and behavior of specific commanders from the wildly successful to the abysmal failure, a model of effective military leadership for present and successive generations of military, naval and air officers at all levels of command.

Part I

THE MINSTREL BOY

The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

His father’s sword he has girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him.

‘Land of song!’ said the warrior-bard.

‘Though all the world betrays thee,

One sword at least thy rights shall guard,

One faithful harp shall praise thee!’

Thomas Moore, ‘The Minstrel Boy’

1

THE ART OF COMMAND

Concepts of military leadership

In an authoritative analysis of military effectiveness, a case study of seven nations involved in both modern world wars, Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray concluded that an examination of individual military leadership is a valid way to assess effectiveness and a crucial element for understanding the broader political, strategic, operational and tactical issues. Further, these scholars propose that ‘one must include in the analysis non-quantifiable organizational attitudes, behaviors, and relationships that span a military organization’s full activities’ at the political, strategic, operational and tactical levels.¹ To this must be added the contextual variables such as socio-economic and religious factors that influence not only events but also the performance of men in combat. This combination of individual leadership characteristics (traits and behaviour) as modulated by the context of the period and culture and human dynamics thus provides a model for assessing the military performance of leading commanders in the Civil Wars and for judging their impact.

Ian Gentles asserts that, given the high rate of desertion in the early months of the New Model Army’s existence, leadership was far more critical in maintaining operational effectiveness than has previously been acknowledged. In his summation of the reasons for the success of the new national army, he credits ‘excellent leadership free of interference by parliamentary committees’.² Gentles further cites the value of effective leadership in terms of morale and willingness to endure hardship, saying of Oliver Cromwell that ‘the career of Cromwell illustrates the truth that a military leader makes a crucial contribution to the morale of his troops if he can bring them to feel that they are safe in his hands, that he will not be careless of their lives and welfare’.³ Similarly, Mark Kishlansky tangentially acknowledges the impact of leadership on the success of the New Model Army in the First Civil War, but never directly addresses its pivotal role in explaining the profound and thorough defeat of royalist forces in the months following Naseby. Kishlansky’s thesis that the New Model Army simply resulted from the final act of consensus parliamentary politics and constituted essentially an amalgamation of the three southern armies with little to distinguish it from the predecessors fails to explain why that army proved so overwhelmingly successful. If no substantial difference existed between the previous three armies and the New Model Army of January 1645 in terms of military and operational effectiveness, then what dynamic explains the sudden and dramatic improvement in the war-winning capability of the parliamentary forces? Clearly, the dynamic of effective leadership must be considered.

A more recent work on the human experience of the civil wars by Charles Carlton addresses the issue of leadership, albeit in a limited fashion. In a chapter entitled ‘Tradesmen of Killing … Managers of Violence’ dedicated to an analysis of military leadership, Carlton introduces several characteristics of effective officers, including moral authority, respect, courage, heroic leadership and energy. He analyses several officers from the king down to the company-grade level in light of these characteristics. His effort is the first by a primarily socio-economic historian to address the nature and impact of effective military leadership and to apply an analytic perspective to explain the success or failure of certain officers.⁴

To advance a viable analytical model for evaluating military effectiveness as a function of leadership, a workable definition must be established that incorporates traditional viewpoints (traits) as well as more current conventions on human motivation in terms of a leader’s actual actions (behaviour). Currently, over 350 definitions of leadership have been proposed in various academic studies and yet there is no consensus.⁵ Three examples illustrate the dilemma. In his 1948 survey of leadership literature, Ralph M. Stogdill identified six factors generally associated with leadership – capacity (mental ability), achievement (results), responsibility (dependability, initiative, persistence, aggressiveness, self-confidence and desire to excel), participation (sociability, adaptability, willingness to cooperate and sense of humour), status (rank) and situation (group characteristics and objectives).⁶ William E. Rosenbach and Robert L. Taylor characterize leaders and followers as ‘engaging in reciprocal influence to achieve a shared purpose’. Their concept of leadership is the ability to motivate and inspire followers to achieve a common goal.⁷ Illustrating the current trend in military professional education, Brigadier C. N. Barclay defines leadership as ‘invariably a combination of inherent and acquired qualities’. ⁸ While these descriptions do not provide a definitive definition, they all address fundamental aspects of leadership: traits, behaviour, human dynamics and context.

‘Great Man’: traits as the determinant of leadership effectiveness – the traditional view

General J. F. C. Fuller, the highly influential military theorist of the early twentieth century, asserts that generalship consists of three pillars: courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.⁹ This description illustrates the theory that credits native ability as the central determinant of leadership effectiveness, the dominant concept prior to the Second World War. In a broader sense, it exemplifies the ‘Great Man’ view of historical interpretation popularized in the nineteenth century by historians such as Thomas Carlyle. In this theory, a successful leader possesses unique or superior traits that not only set him apart from followers, but also catapult him beyond his peers. In recent years, the trait theory has come under increased attack because it cannot be supported by experience or research data. In spite of efforts to derive a model for leadership effectiveness based solely on traits, researchers have achieved no consensus nor has much success been attained by the armed forces in terms of selecting and promoting officers based on a set of desired traits. Further, the traits required for success change with various contextual situations. Finally, the trait theory has failed to incorporate group or human behavioural dynamics.¹⁰ As a result of these weaknesses, many models since the 1950s have emphasized situational theory, which asserts that leadership results from the environment rather than the leader. Thus, most modern leadership analyses rely upon the behavioural model that examines the actions of leaders as modified by their inherent traits, organizational and situational context, experience and training.¹¹

Despite these weaknesses of the trait analysis of military leadership, concepts of leaders as motivators and as the central, irreplaceable element in determining military effectiveness are universal and timeless. Ancient civilizations that exhibited highly developed military systems and theory considered traits the central ingredient of success. As illustrated not only by the military philosopher Sun Tzu, presumed author of the Art of War (500 BC), but by the analytical works on leadership known collectively as the Seven Military Classics, the ancient Chinese showed great concern for all aspects of command, leadership traits and military practices. Throughout these works, a central tenet is the fundamental role of the commander exhibiting specific native talents as the chief determinant of victory or defeat. Sun Tzu regarded the commander as the ‘supporting pillar of state’ whose talents must be all-encompassing or the state will wither. The Six Secret Teachings of T’ai Kung stresses that ‘military matters are not determined by the ruler’s commands; they all proceed from the commanding general’.¹²

Gerat Barry, an Irishman who served for thirty years in the Holy Roman Imperial forces and produced a manual on military discipline and tactics in 1634, laid out the leadership traits required from the rank of corporal to captain-general. His attributes of a commander included prudence, experience, valour, temperance, gravity, constancy, vigilance, care, liberality, courage and resolution. Moreover, Barry commented on the qualities sought by the Greeks and Romans in a commander, including skill in the art of war, courage and valour, projected authority and good fortune. Most importantly, he must possess a great depth of successful military experience.¹³

Other writers of the pre-Industrial period understood the role of effective leadership and the disastrous results of poor command. In multiple writings, they attributed success to the nature of the commander. Barnaby Rich, the most prolific Elizabethan military writer, adopted Cicero’s four traits of a successful commander: experience, valour, authority and felicity – and added the additional qualities of justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance to his definition of an effective military leader. Rich understood, as had military analysts for centuries, that ‘through the default of one ignorant captain a whole army may sometime[s] be overthrown’.¹⁴ Roger Boyle, major-general of Charles II’s forces in Ireland during the Restoration, observed that he ‘very seldom saw the English soldiers flinch if their officers were good’.¹⁵ Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, commented on the defeat of the English forces against the Scottish Covenanter army in the First Bishops’ War in a scathing evaluation of the commander-in-chief, Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, stating he exhibited ‘nothing martial about him but his presence and his looks’.¹⁶ Clausewitz asserts that leadership requires courage, discriminating judgement, rapid and accurate decision-making, determination, strength of character and a ‘thirst for fame and honour’.¹⁷ Finally, Napoleon’s dictum on leadership – ‘in war it is not men but the man who counts’ – is the ultimate expression of the ‘Great Man’ theory.¹⁸

Technology and the evolution of mass national armies altered the role of the commander from the ‘heroic age’ where physical presence counted most. Concurrently, concepts of effective leadership also changed and incorporated dynamics such as human behaviour in combat and the social context of war. No longer are characteristics such as individual courage in the face of an enemy as highly valued in senior officers. Leadership studies through most of the nineteenth century, particularly expressed in biographies of successful commanders, taught how to conduct oneself not only in military affairs, but also in government and business. By the beginning of the twentieth century, military biographies all but disappeared. Military writers realized that no overall theory of leadership incorporated the ‘complexities of the leader, his subordinates, and the situation’, therefore the study of group dynamics, situational context and behaviour replaced the trait approach.¹⁹

Colonel Ardant du Picq in the 1860s, the first modern military theorist to examine the behaviour of men in battle, emphasized the role played by fear and morale in determining outcomes. Through his studies of conflict from the ancient Greco-Roman experiences to the American Civil War, he concluded that, while the circumstances of time, geography, culture and technology change, the ‘human element remains the same’.²⁰ By the 1940s, a decided shift towards the behavioural approach to leadership studies occurred. Since no generally acceptable model of successful traits could be derived that suited the complex combination of people and situations encountered in both modern warfare and business, the behaviour of leaders operating within varying situations and group dynamics replaced the traditional study of traits. Additionally, the concept that not only is leadership inherent (a holdover from the trait approach), but that its principles can be taught, took hold. Modern military education and training reflects this concept. Thus, military history and studies have firmly embraced a combination of the trait, behavioural and situational approaches when addressing effective leadership.²¹ Modern studies of leadership assume that a leader’s behaviour will be a function of both the traits and the situational context, particularly group dynamics.²²

The chaos of war and the human element

Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, a philosophical godfather of modern military history and strategic analysis, categorized the three spheres of war as mental, moral and physical. The study of military leadership owes much to Liddell Hart. A veteran of the trench combat in the First World War, he sought to analyse war and formulate techniques to restore the loss of mobility encountered in the first great world conflict of the industrial age. Two of his first significant works, Great Captains Unveiled (1927), which addressed the generalship of Gustophus Adolphus, the duke of Marlborough and James Wolfe, and Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon (1928), centred on successful commanders and heralded a number of examinations of effective military leadership during the last century. John Keegan, an advocate of studying human conflict through the prism of the human element, proposes the dynamics of the emotional, physical, religious, cultural, political and economic. In his analysis of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Ulysses S. Grant and Adolf Hitler in The Mask of Command, Keegan postulates several ‘imperatives’ that successful commanders must exhibit to succeed in war, including sanction, example, prescription, kinship and action.²³ Inherent in both Liddell Hart and Keegan’s concept of the spheres of war are the human factors of fear, morale, inspiration, confidence, hope and dread. All must be manipulated, focused or controlled by the effective commander. Failure to do so will result in anarchy and defeat, two tributes to the chaos of war.

Michael Roberts, who argues that European warfare in the seventeenth century underwent a profound military revolution based on the advance of weapon technology and tactical innovations such as those of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Prince Maurice of Nassau, compared the early modern army to an ‘articulated organism of which each part responded to impulses from above’.²⁴ Despite Roberts’s rather mechanistic likening of an army to a machine, the battlefield of any era is, as Keegan aptly describes, a ‘wildly unstable physical and emotional environment’.²⁵ Given the potential for chaos, the one stabilizing element is effective leadership. It is the dynamic that prepares a force for combat and provides the guiding momentum for mobilizing and focusing all other elements. Leadership is the dynamic which, if effectively employed, overcomes the wrenching fear every combatant faces. It is the central influence that conquers chaos and ultimately determines victory or defeat.

Major-General Frank Richardson, a Royal Army Medical Corps psychiatrist who devoted his retirement years to a study of psychological factors in war, concluded that leadership is the most important single factor in the preservation of high morale.²⁶ Coming to a similar conclusion, Professors John Dollard and Donald Horton of the Yale University Institute of Human Relations published a study in 1944 of the dynamics of fear in combat and its effect on unit cohesion, morale and efficiency. In interviews with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a unit of American volunteers who fought for the republican government in the Spanish Civil War, the researchers found a constant among the respondents. Decisive and competent leadership controls fear in battle. Soldiers have more confidence when the leader is tested and proven and takes no unnecessary risks with their lives. Eighty-nine per cent of the respondents agreed that receiving frequent instructions and directions from leaders both reduced fear and made better soldiers. In Dollard’s succinct analysis, ‘leadership means reassurance’.²⁷

In a study conducted on several United States Army divisions engaged in combat in Italy and the south-west Pacific in the spring of 1944, a team led by Samuel A. Stouffer examined the attitudes of soldiers on all manner of subjects, particularly the role of effective leadership in overcoming fear and instilling confidence. In response to the question: ‘Can you recall a case in your experience in which an officer did a particularly good job of helping his men to feel more confident in a tough or frightening situation’, 31 per cent cited leadership by example along with the display of personal courage and coolness. A further 26 per cent mentioned encouraging the men through pep talks, jokes and the dissemination of information, while 23 per cent cited the display of active concern for the men’s welfare and safety.²⁸

These studies illustrate a central feature of leadership that has always been recognized by military theorists, but, unfortunately, tends to be missing from most British Civil War histories in terms of analysing the military outcome. In the chaos and terror of combat as men struggle to conquer fear and the urge to flee, especially when friends and comrades are killed or horribly wounded, soldiers hope their commanders possess the leadership skills that will see them safely through to victory or safety. Therefore, in any analytical model of effective military leadership, the ability to control or manage the human factors under the stresses of the chaos of combat must be considered.

Characteristics of effective command

The leadership model for analysing the actions of the six regional commanders under examination incorporates the elements of traits and behaviour (characteristics), human dynamics, and the social, religious, economic and political context of seventeenth-century Britain. The model is an amalgam of the traditional trait theory and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone’
• PART I The minstrel boy
• PART II Chariot of fire
• Conclusion: military effectiveness: a relative assessment
• Appendix: Biographical sketches
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index