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The marshalling of the rival forces revealed how little 1642the dispute had as yet become an issue for all England. Even in the later stages of the war the total number of soldiers in the field was scarcely one-fortieth of the population. The ordinary citizen was apathetic and desired only to be left in peace; his sympathies may have inclined slightly to the side of king or of parliament, but he was not prepared to bestir himself for either. At first not even half the gentry were in arms, and to the end the labourer only fought when he was constrained by his betters. The struggle from first to last was waged by two small but resolute minorities. It was not a war of classes, for the dividing line ran through every rank of society, and it was not exclusively a war of regions. In essence it was a conflict of ideas, but a local leader—Derby in Lancashire, Oliver in the eastern shires—who was passionate in his cause, could swing his neighbourhood to his side. Nor was it in the common sense a war of religion, for the antagonists were alike Christians and protestants, emphasizing different aspects of their creeds, so that the campaigns had none of the horrors of those of Alva and Wallenstein. Moreover, the edge was taken 1642 off the controversy at the start by the unexpected wisdom of the king. He declined to use his power in Yorkshire to arrest Fairfax and other parliamentarians, and through Colepeper and Falkland he made reasonable overtures to the House of Commons—overtures which were brusquely rejected, so that to many doubting moderates throughout the land, who had been inclined to the cause of parliament, the campaign seemed to open with Charles as the peacemaker and Pym as the irreconcilable.

Yet on broad lines it is possible to compute the rival strengths mainly on a geographical and social basis, a fact which had a direct bearing on strategy. Parliament’s power lay in the towns, for it was there that puritanism especially flourished. London was overwhelmingly in its favour, and London contained one-third of the urban population of England. In royalist Lancashire Manchester was for the parliament, as were the woollen towns of west Yorkshire, and the same was true of the little clothing boroughs of Gloucester and Somerset. Only the university and cathedral cities were definitely for the king. Again, it may be said that the royal strength lay chiefly in the north and west, and the parliamentary in the south and east, the richest districts of England.^[141] In the less cultivated regions, the moors and the sheep-walks, and among the Celtic stocks of Wales and Cornwall, royalism was the accepted faith, for there the peasants docilely followed the gentry, and there was no middle-class to raise questions. Most important of all, parliament held the dockyards and the chief ports (except Newcastle and Chester), and the fleet—sixteen ships of war in the Downs and two in Irish waters, as well as twenty-four merchantmen—was on its side. This meant that it could move supplies easily, and hinder the king’s communications with the Continent; also that the overseas commerce, which provided its sinews of war, could go on unchecked.

The situation of England in 1642 is curiously paralleled FINANCE 1642 by that of the United States at the opening of the Civil War. The American North, like the English parliament, had behind it the more populous regions and by far the greater wealth. It had the fleet and could command the seas. It had the largest cities and the chief industries. The South had a smaller population, but it had a society of country-dwellers who could ride and shoot, and were consequently better adapted at the start for the business of war. The war was made by idealists who swung great masses of pacific and uninstructed citizens. Both sides stood for principles in which they passionately believed, and neither stained its hands with barbarities. Again, the rival forces seemed to be brought blindly to a clash; there was no immediate military objective before either side; it was a trial of physical strength, a submission of two irreconcilable faiths to ordeal by battle.^[142]

There was another point common to the two struggles—neither side had an army in being, each had to create one. With a people mainly apathetic this must be largely a question of finance. Hobbes considered that had the king had the money he might have had all the soldiers he wanted, “for there were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder.” Parliament had the supreme advantage that it could raise loans from the merchant community, could collect customs duties at the ports, and could levy new taxes on the area it controlled, taxes which roused the less opposition since most Englishmen looked on it as the rightful taxing authority.^[143] Charles had no such regular sources to draw upon, and for the most part lived from hand to mouth, mortgaging crown lands, pawning crown jewels, and receiving gifts in plate, and cash, and kind from his supporters. The catholic gentry put their fortunes at his disposal, and great nobles like Newcastle and Richmond raised regiments from their own estates, 1642 and equipped and maintained them.^[144] Money was urgently needed, because neither king nor parliament had any means of compelling the citizens to serve as of right. Neither had a true legal warrant, whether by commission of array or by ordinance of militia, and, though men might at first submit, they were certain, as Hopton was to find in Cornwall, sooner or later to make difficulties. But, more important, there was no proper machinery of recruitment. The defensive power of England by land had been suffered to decline till it had almost vanished.

There had been no real army in England since the days of Henry VIII. Expeditionary forces had gone abroad under James and Charles to fight in foreign quarrels, mercenaries and pressed men and for the most part wretched stuff, “a rabble of raw and poor rascals.” For home defence there was a nominal militia, since it was the legal duty of every man to serve against invasion, and Elizabeth had established the trained bands, selected groups in every county, calculated in 1623 to reach the number of 160,000. But the training was to the last degree casual and perfunctory—one day a month during the summer—and, though under Charles the arms were better, only the London regiments learned to shoot. This was the material out of which the armies were made which Charles led against the Scots in 1639 and 1640, and of which Sir Edmund Verney wrote, “I daresay there was never so raw, so unskilful, and so unwilling an army brought to fight.” King and parliament contended as to which should control the militia; the matter was vital to constitutional theory, but in practice it meant little, for the militia as it stood was of no more value than the ragged regiment that Falstaff marched through Coventry, “cankers of a calm world and a long peace.”

But there was some soldierly training among the higher ranks. Scions of the gentry had long been in the habit of going abroad to the wars, though to a less degree THE SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE 1642 than among the Scots. When it came to raising new forces an expert could generally be got as major or colonel of a foot battalion or lieutenant of a troop of horse. Some had fought under Prince Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch service, and some in the Swedish service under Gustavus. Just as the leaders on both sides in the American Civil War were graduates of West Point, so the chief figures of the royal and parliament armies were veterans of the continental wars. On the one side among those who had had such field experience were Essex, Warwick, Skippon, Sir William Waller, and Scots like Balfour, Crawford and Ramsay: on the other, Astley and Hopton, the elder Goring, Gage, Lindsey, the Scots Ruthven and King, the young Palatine princes Rupert and Maurice, and a certain Captain George Monk out of Devon who was one day to be a resounding name. Such men had learned new lessons in army organization, in gunnery and in minor tactics, and, if it came to creating armies, would be useful in shaping the raw material.

Each side began by attempting to use the antique skeleton organization that existed, and neither did much with it. Parliament could lay its hands on the greater number of men and a better equipment, but the discipline was all to make. Each side laboured to seize the county magazines where the arms of the trained bands were stored, but the bands themselves were for the most part a rabble.^[145] Hence the arms were mainly used to equip volunteers. At first the staple was voluntary enlistment, officers being commissioned to raise regiments. On the king’s side the young courtiers entered the king’s guards; on the parliament side the gentlemen of the inns of court enlisted in Essex’s bodyguard, and the London apprentices flocked to the regiments of Brooke and 1642 Holles. But presently both sides had to resort to compulsion, and in the second year of the war impressment ordinances were issued by both king and parliament for the districts which they controlled. When the New Model was introduced more than half its infantry were pressed men. One result of the initial lack of enthusiasm in the rank-and-file was that only a small proportion of the men on the rolls could be expected to turn up at any given moment in the field.^[146]

Two other difficulties faced the commanders on both sides. One was the intense localism which made it hard to get men to serve out of their own districts, and which consequently led to the multiplication of weak local units. “When the enemy had left their own particular quarter they thanked God that they were rid of him and returned to their usual avocations.”^[147] Parliament was the chief sufferer; in 1643 and 1644 it had four more or less independent armies, under Manchester, Fairfax, Waller and Denbigh, and the raising of each new one depleted the ranks of the old. This localism also gave undue weight to the local magnates. In Yorkshire the royal cause suffered because the Earl of Cumberland was supine, and in Wales because the Herberts were at feud with many of the gentry, while in Leicestershire the other side was compromised by the quarrels between the houses of Huntingdon and Stamford.^[148] On one point parliament was wiser than the king, for when a parliamentary regiment fell below strength it was usually merged in another; whereas, on the royal side, losses were supplied by the raising of new regiments and the lavish granting of commissions, so that the army was full of colonels commanding handfuls.^[149]

The other difficulty was the snare of fortresses, and INFANTRY

1642this largely contributed to the ruin of the king’s cause. The castles and manors of his supporters were fortified and garrisoned as they had been in the old wars of England, and thereby hopelessly crippled the main purposes of the campaign. There was a financial reason for the practice. Since there was little money, troops were left in garrison at free quarters with a district assigned for their support. This was disastrous for the countryside, and not less disastrous for strategy. It was an unhappy following of the practice of the Thirty Years War, and kept a field army from ever being at its maximum strength. It would have been better for Charles to have dismantled and evacuated every fortress, and to have held only certain vital seaports, for the garrison custom weakened his striking power and gravely prejudiced him in popular esteem.^[150]