HISTORY

that proved ‘fatal’ to his cause. Parliament, which in any case had a smaller component of foreigners in its own army, cleared them out during the reorganisation of its forces in the winter of 1644-5, after which the New Model triumphed as the champion of Englishness and as the deliverer of the land from alien incursion. Soldiers and Strangers is boldly and imaginatively conceived, and is written with verve and style. Sometimes the argument is over-bold, as indeed Stoyle seems half-aware. Part of the difficulty is his heavy dependence on the evidence of printed propaganda, which told its readers what to think but does not

or ‘strangers’, was a potent political weapon. Yet the English could not sustain the Civil War on their own. They needed the military leadership and expertise that in recent decades had been gained by the rest of Europe during the Thirty Years War. And they needed manpower. Parliament brought in a huge Presbyterian army from Scotland, which the Puritans piously called ‘our brethren’, a phrase soon mocked not only on the royalist but on the parliamentarian side, where the Scottish soldiers became equally detested. The king tried to import armies from Scotland and from the Continental monarchies. Mercenary soldiers arrived from France (to find themselves called the ‘beastly and buggerly French’ and ‘barbarous blood-suckers’), the Netherlands, Lorraine, and from further afield – even, it seems, from Mesopotamia and North Africa. Mercenaries were generally more prone than native troops to indiscriminate plunder and destruction. They also allegedly strove to ‘protract and spin out the war’ and so prolong their income from it. Foreign captives suffered some merciless treatment. It was the Irish who came off worst. Cromwell’s slaughters at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 merely continued the earlier policy of Parliament, which in legislation of 1644 – that ‘golden ordinance’, as a delighted Puritan divine called it – declared that every Irishman captured in England must be put to death without quarter. MPs were incredulous when Prince Rupert, the king’s foreign nephew and commander, responded to the execution of thirteen of the king’s Irish soldiers by hanging the same number of English prisoners, as if Irishmen could somehow be regarded as ‘equal’ to Englishmen. After the Roundhead victory at Naseby a huge number of female camp-followers on the king’s side, supposedly from Ireland, were unhesitatingly put to death, as ‘whores’, by the Roundheads. Actually it seems that they may have been from Wales. For the Welsh attracted brutal treatment too, as did the Cornish. Wales and Cornwall supply the most original parts of Stoyle’s book. Though both communities had parliamentarian enclaves, Wales in the south, Cornwall in the east, both were overwhelmingly royalist. The king, maintains Stoyle, was ‘irrevocably committed’ to ‘ethnic diversity’ in his armies, a policy

Birmingham gets the sack

necessarily tell us, as one might infer from Stoyle, what ‘many English men and women’, or ‘thousands’ of them, did think. ‘Ethnicity’, which is not defined, is too loosely related to the sentiments of class, religion and locality with which it interacted. In any case the royalism of Wales and Cornwall may make at least as much sense when taken together with its non-ethnic counterpart in the northern counties of England, that other ‘backward part of the land’. Stoyle skilfully traces the tendency of Welsh and Cornish soldiers to lose their royalist enthusiasm when their local regiments, having at first been given local tasks, were broken up and their members absorbed into nationwide English armies. But how much did ethnic feeling contribute to that change, which was paralleled in most of the counties of England? For if the English could hate foreigners, most of the time they were busy enough hating each other. I suspect, too, that the purging of foreign soldiers by the Cromwellian leadership owed more to its will to win the war than to any xenophobic impulse. Stoyle likes to cite the assertions by Cromwellians of ‘English’ values and birthrights, but those statements were more often than not innocent of anti-alien sentiment. They had a long pedigree and a long future. When England expected every man to do his duty, Nelson was not inciting his English sailors to turn on the other Britons at their side. Yet the boldness that has over-propelled Stoyle has also been a stimulus to discovery and thought. Soldiers and Strangers is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable studies of the Civil War to have appeared in recent years. To order this book at £20, see order form on page 78

MADegree in Biography Starting January 2006 Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MAin Biography was the first postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. Course director: Jane Ridley Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG Tel: 01280 814080

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

18