In August 1643 William Lenthall – the Speaker of the House of Commons – wrote to Oliver Cromwell that ‘nothing is more repugnant to the opinion and sense of this house, and dangerous to the kingdom, than the unwillingness of [regional] forces to march out of their several counties’.Footnote ¹ This frustration reflected the recurring mismatch between national strategy and local priorities within parliament's war effort, which was linked to changing relations between central government and the ‘county community’ in England under the early Stuarts.Footnote ² Provincial communities were becoming more willing to resolve local concerns through the authority and institutions of the centralized state, which required increasingly sophisticated forms of representation. Local elites were using their presence within state institutions such as ecclesiastical courts and commissions of the peace to impose solutions upon a wider range of local issues, such as vagrancy and moral behaviour.Footnote ³ As county committees and regional associations emerged in England after 1642, also supporters exploited these new institutions – intended to support a national strategy – to achieve agency within the parliamentary war effort and defend local interests.Footnote ⁴ Members of parliament had always been responsible for transmitting local concerns to central government, but by 1642 they had become more active in the protection and promotion of their constituents' interests. The early years of the Long Parliament witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of petitions, instructions, and statements of grievance as provincial communities sought to inform MPs about how to satisfy local and national concerns, and which to prioritize.Footnote ⁵ Communities were therefore prepared to use varying forms of political, cultural, and institutional representation to control their relations with central government during the English Civil War, in order to ensure that their local interests were protected.

It has not been recognized, however, that communities also attempted to achieve agency through the military units they raised for the wider parliamentary war effort, even though their efforts to control the composition of forces raised for local service during the conflict have been extensively studied.Footnote ⁶ The importance of military representation at a national level is seen most strongly in the history of the army that parliament raised between June and August of 1642, and which the earl of Essex led into the field from London on 9 September. It has generally been dismissed as a minor footnote to the later parliamentary armies, but this article argues that the army's disappointing performance was a direct consequence of its failure to provide adequate military representation to the provincial interests on whom it relied for financial backing. Its structure dissolved the bonds between local supporters and the units they raised, encouraging a strong degree of strategic commitment amongst its officer corps but denying supporters any influence over the army's deployment. With no sense that their interests were being addressed, supporters lost any incentive to continue donating the money that kept the force afloat. The experience of the earl of Essex's army between June and December 1642 therefore provides an excellent illustration of the strength of localist sentiment during this period, the importance of representation to provincial donors, and the wider difficulties parliament faced imposing national priorities on its war effort.

The omission by most historians of the military angle to these issues is surprising, given that early modern armies in Europe were constructed with reference to wider political contexts, particularly the means used to pay and recruit them. During the Thirty Years War, continental armies were overwhelmingly structured around the Kontributionssystem, the systematic asset-stripping of enemy territories. This imposed certain strategic constraints: many armies became incapable of pursuing a strategy that did not involve the invasion and exploitation of enemy territory.Footnote ⁷ The structure of the French army under Richelieu was determined by political priorities, mainly the reluctance of the French crown to cede proprietary control over its units to the individuals who raised them. The political reliability of the resulting army was adequate compensation for its military limitations.Footnote ⁸ In England, royalist armies were subject to similar sets of concerns. Lacking money in June even for his household expenses, Charles I was thrown upon the financial reserves of his aristocratic supporters: for instance, on 22 June 1642, over forty nobles at York pledged 1,695 horses to the king's service.Footnote ⁹ Edward Hyde wrote in the History of the rebellion that when the marquess of Hertford went into the west of England he was accompanied by a troop ‘raised and armed by Sir Ralph Hopton at his own charge’, and there mobilized twenty-eight local gentlemen ‘with their servants and retinue’.Footnote ¹⁰ Writers and pamphleteers on both sides presented the royalist army as a baronial force raised by nobles from their tenants and retainers, a perception that many historians have been content to repeat.Footnote ¹¹

Ronald Hutton has argued, however, that Hyde actually misrepresented the feudal character of the royalist armies for his own polemical purposes, and that they were far less aristocratic than contemporaries appear to have imagined.Footnote ¹² That said, the relative importance to the royalist war effort of the money and troops donated by nobles did allow them to exercise disproportionate political influence in royal counsels. After 1643 the reliance by Charles I on a series of grandees to rule ‘blocs’ within royalist territory resulted in a war effort structured around the interests of these powerful individuals, often with contradictory agendas.Footnote ¹³ Although Charles acquired an army in the north of England in 1642 by encouraging the earl of Newcastle to draw upon his private resources, this allowed the earl to focus too much upon creating ‘an army that would reflect upon his own grandeur’, and frustrated attempts to orientate the force towards a national strategy.Footnote ¹⁴ Newcastle displayed an excessive preoccupation with the Fairfaxes in Yorkshire, and failed to link up with royalist strategy by exploiting his victory at Adwalton Moor in June 1643 to advance southwards into Lincolnshire. The structure of the royalist armies therefore reflected the relative importance of baronial finance and recruitment, and the need to accommodate the interests of aristocratic supporters. Their effect was to impose numerous strategic constraints that undermined the creation and deployment of a nationally orientated royalist army.

The army of the earl of Essex did not, by and large, depend upon large-scale private donations, but rather on a form of regional finance that imposed its own strategic constraints. On 9 June 1642 parliament passed an ordinance asking supporters throughout England to donate money, plate, horses, and equipment. The original intention was to create a flying column of cavalry to reinforce the national deployment of the county militias, but this was overtaken by events: after July the money was used to raise ten regiments of foot, the eventual core of Essex's army.Footnote ¹⁵ Members of both Houses of Parliament responded immediately: by the end of September, roughly 544 horses and £16,080 had been pledged.Footnote ¹⁶ However, these were outnumbered by the 3,014 cavalry horses received by parliament as piecemeal contributions from local supporters.Footnote ¹⁷ The Propositions were circulated at a county level, via well-affected deputy-lieutenants, justices of the peace, and local MPs and notables, who were empowered to tender them to supporters, receive their donations, and transmit the horses, plate, and money to London.Footnote ¹⁸ Parliament therefore depended initially upon subscriptions and contributions from supporters in the localities, rather than from powerful individuals and regional magnates.

However, this system of recruitment and finance brought parliament into conflict with the powerful forces of regional particularism, and the tensions between central and peripheral political interests noted above. Activists rapidly encountered a strong sense of provincialism as they attempted to tender the Propositions: many people were perfectly willing to donate horses and money, provided it was used exclusively for local defence.Footnote ¹⁹ Isaac Pennington reported to the Commons on 8 August that Cheshire would not execute the Propositions ‘till they might be assured that they should be employed for the defence of their own county’.Footnote ²⁰ A system built upon the exploitation of local resources was therefore frequently hobbled by strategic imperatives this imposed. For instance, the decision by Ferdinando, second Lord Fairfax to exploit popular enthusiasm in the West Riding caused his military strategy to be dictated by the demands of local sentiment.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, the earl of Warwick attempted in November 1642 to raise a ‘running army’ from the county of Essex, but when he tried to replace local officers with Scottish professionals uproar ensued.Footnote ²² Captain Henry Farr represented to Warwick that his actions had

Such was the strength of regional loyalty that many officers and men deserted rather than serve outside Essex. In creating their main field army, parliament was thus required to balance two conflicting imperatives. As John Morrill has argued, it needed to create a political system that would assert national priorities; on the other hand, its financial structure required that local interests be accommodated.Footnote ²⁴

Warwick attempted to achieve the former by stressing the national perspective to his officers, asking them to ‘prefer the good of the Commonwealth before any private respect’. Officers should not insist on particular roles, but rather serve in offices that benefited the wider war effort: ‘all our actions should move to one end, which is the defence of our King and our Country’.Footnote ²⁵ However, local supporters appear to have preferred to be granted representation within the units they raised through control over the nomination of the officers. As in units intended for local service, this allowed them to maintain a sense of ‘ownership’ and proprietary control. Like political representation in parliament and county committees, it gave them a degree of agency in the formulation and implementation of wider national strategies.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, when supporters in Watford proposed to raise a troop for Essex's army in late June 1642, they requested ‘leave to recommend unto you John Bird … to be captain’. An experienced lieutenant and corporal ‘shall [also] be recommended to you by the said Mr. Bird and the rest of the petitioners, if you shall find no cause to refuse them’.Footnote ²⁷ This was unlikely, since parliament was asked to maintain the officers as long as they were ‘worthy of that trust and service’: the clear implication was that they could only be removed for incompetence or disloyalty, rather than on the grounds of military or political expediency. Similarly, when parliament sought to raise an expeditionary force to serve in Ireland in February 1642, the first condition of the subscribers was that they be permitted to name their own officers, as an ‘encouragement’.Footnote ²⁸ Control over the nomination of officers was therefore an important quid pro quo in the raising of units, enabling supporters to retain a degree of influence over their units, and thus safeguard local interests. But, as the example of Warwick's ‘running army’ demonstrates, limits had to be imposed: an excessive concentration of particularist sentiment could undermine the wider strategic orientation of the army.

Parliament's chances of success on the battlefield therefore depended on successfully balancing a number of contradictory elements. Resources needed to be deployed as part of a national strategy, but could only be collected through attention to peripheral defence; particularist interests needed to be accommodated within the officer corps of the main field army, but not at the cost of its ability to pursue wider strategic aims. According to prevailing historiographical opinion, the earl of Essex's army should have been well placed to incorporate localist interests. As with the royalist army, historians have tended to see the individual regiments and troops as enclaves of proprietary right, formed by their colonels through the exploitation of regional and kinship connections. Godfrey Davies wrote that regiments were essentially the ‘private property’ of their colonels, and they have often been associated with specific regions, such as John Hampden's regiment with Buckinghamshire and Lord Brooke's with Warwickshire.Footnote ²⁹ This perception has been accentuated by an excessive focus upon units such as Cromwell's ‘Ironsides’, which were raised through such links but will be shown below to have been largely unrepresentative.Footnote ³⁰ Had Essex's army been raised in this fashion, it would have encouraged the donation of money by local supporters, by providing them with the opportunity to incorporate their interests into the enterprise, albeit at the cost of the same regionalism and particularism against which both the king and other parliamentary armies were to struggle.

Penetrating beneath the surface of such misconceptions, however, strongly suggests that the officer corps of Essex's army was built upon an entirely different basis, one that provided only minimal traction for such local interests. Regiments were not the private bailiwicks of their colonels, but rather loosely connected clusters of officers united around common convictions, the most potent being a strong commitment to parliament's national strategy. Two factors underlay this unprecedented structure, the first being parliament's decision that all the money, arms, and equipment gathered by the Propositions would be disbursed from a central treasury. Even large tranches of money from well-affected supporters in the City of London were paid out through this body, attenuating the capacity of donors to exercise direct control over the disposal of resources. The treasurer of the army, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, was empowered to disburse money only on the warrants of Essex, his nominees, or a quorum of the Committee of Safety, the body appointed by parliament to direct the war effort.Footnote ³¹ The second factor was the commitment to fund all of the expenses of the army: it would be unnecessary for any officer to raise a troop or company from his own pocket or any other source outside parliament's control. Gerrard was explicitly ordered in his commission to dispense money for provisions, munitions, and supplies, as well as ‘coat, conduct, transportation, payment of dues, and wages’. For instance, rather than clothing his regiment from his own pocket, the earl of Stamford received on 20 August 1642 exactly 1,200 sets of coats, shirts, shoes, and snapsacks, which the Committee of Safety had bought in bulk from London wholesalers.Footnote ³² The salaries of his officers and men were paid with effect from their initial commission or muster, a total of £2,344 in that month alone.Footnote ³³ Finally, money was provided for certain regimental essentials, such as £80 for colours, halberds, and partisans, £15 for the surgeon's chest, and £7 for the provost-marshal's irons. Thus officers of foot – including regimental colonels – were able to enter parliament's service without necessarily needing to draw upon private resources to do so.

A similar level of financial coverage was provided for the army's ordnance. On 6 August, Philibert-Emmanuel du Bois, lieutenant-general of the artillery, received £1,000 by order of the Committee of Safety for ‘his necessary disbursements in all such uses and services as the charge of the artillery shall require’.Footnote ³⁴ The phrasing suggests that this money was not intended to reimburse prior outlays, but to supply du Bois with a ready sum of money for immediate expenses. The same applied to the army's cavalry. On 28 July 1642 it was agreed that captains of horse would receive £280 to provide mounts, equipment, ‘and whatsoever [else] is necessary’ for themselves and their officers.Footnote ³⁵ Money was also provided for outfitting non-commissioned officers, and troopers were to be mounted on horses donated under the Propositions, and armed with weapons taken from magazines in the Tower of London. Captain Hercules Langrish was issued over £733 in August, which provided his officers and NCOs with horses and equipment, and his troop with sixty sashes and one month's pay.Footnote ³⁶ Sir Samuel Luke received sixty-four horses and £538 to make his troop ready for service, although he also chose to supplement this allowance with £58 15s of his own money, for buff coats.Footnote ³⁷ The earl of Essex was an exception, and shouldered the costs of outfitting and maintaining his private troop of halberdiers, although he too later reimbursed himself and paid the salaries of the troop from parliamentary funds.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, although the resort to private funding was not penalized, parliament did not particularly encourage officers to look towards alternative financial sources.

Overall, the provision of total funding from a centralized source dissolved the particularist obligations imposed on officers by private or regional resources. Able to rely on parliament for their expenses, officers had far fewer reasons to be side-tracked by the interests and concerns of local supporters, and units were under less pressure to accept officers who could represent those interests within the army. The process of recruitment and regimental organization also took little account of existing particularist connections. Both Houses agreed on 17 June 1642 that the individual troops would have their officers – a captain, lieutenant, cornet, and quartermaster – appointed by a committee of nobles once sixty horsemen had been enrolled, and a similar procedure was adopted for the regiments of foot raised in July.Footnote ³⁹ On 23 September, parliament declared that under-strength units would be dissolved, their officers cashiered, and the ‘common soldiers … disposed of, for the filling up and recruiting of others’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Complete companies in otherwise under-strength regiments were to join the earl of Essex, where he would reassign them to another regiment. These measures suggest that parliament was primarily concerned with aggregating individual volunteers into full-strength military units, rather than preserving the integrity of close-knit contingents raised through the proprietary links of their officers. Moreover, many colonels appear to have taken little active interest in recruitment. Both Denzil Holles and Charles Essex were leading local forces in Dorset while their regiments were being mustered in August and early September.Footnote ⁴¹ This had a negative impact: parliament also noted on 23 September that the absence of Colonels Charles Essex and Thomas Ballard ‘may be a cause that their regiments are not in that forwardness that otherwise they would have been’.Footnote ⁴² Their duties had been delegated to regimental officers, although in Holles's regiment these were men of proven experience and loyalty. Both Lieutenant-Colonel Biddeman and Major James Quarles were professional soldiers, while Vernon Snow has argued that the latter was also a client of Essex, Holles's close political ally.Footnote ⁴³ Holles and Quarles had also attended Christ's College, Cambridge together in 1609.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both officers were, however, outside Holles's network of familial and regional contacts: Quarles was from Romford in Essex and thus unable to recruit officers through these connections.Footnote ⁴⁵ Colonels were therefore often peripheral to the recruitment of their units and in no position to assert proprietary rights or exploit private networks by incorporating local officers into regimental hierarchies. While familial or regional linkages were not unimportant, they were certainly not integral to the effective recruitment and maintenance of units.

The distribution and significance of these networks emerge through a detailed study of the officer corps of the army. The prominence of certain troops allows their origins to be reconstructed, demonstrating that some were indeed based upon the mobilization of local resources, the most obvious example being Watford's request to raise its own troop and appoint trusted officers.Footnote ⁴⁶ The petition, including the desire for proprietary control, was granted with apparent goodwill by both Houses, probably due to its dual sponsorship by a Hertfordshire MP and by Cornelius Burges, vicar of Watford and already an important and powerful puritan divine in London.Footnote ⁴⁷ Watford certainly shouldered the expenses of Bird's troop, since it appears to have received money only for wages and the purchase of sashes. The fact that Burges signed both warrants indicates the close oversight that the town maintained over its troop.Footnote ⁴⁸ In August, supporters in Kent were allowed to put their Proposition-money towards the recruitment of a troop commanded by a local gentleman, Edward Berry, which also only received money for sashes and salary.Footnote ⁴⁹

Undue focus upon such examples can, however, produce a distorted impression of their actual incidence in the army. The true distribution of particularist interests is shown most accurately by a prosopographical analysis of the officer corps, based on a pamphlet printed in 1642 called A list of the army raised under … the earle of Essex.Footnote ⁵⁰ Despite the difficulties of reliably identifying each individual officer, specific patterns would be expected to appear within the army if it had indeed been raised in a quasi-feudal fashion.Footnote ⁵¹ Where colonels relied on family linkages, repetition and duplication of surnames are an obvious indication. Regiments based around regional ties would generate officers with a common county of origin or residence. Tenurial connections would require a highly detailed study to reconstruct, but since many holdings were concentrated in geographical blocs, the absence of such clusters may be taken as a strong indication of weak tenurial connections. Hughes has used this principle to argue that the local forces raised by Lord Brooke in Warwickshire were based on ideological appeal rather than seigneurial ties because officers originated mainly from areas of the county outside his landed holdings in the south.Footnote ⁵² The pattern of regional links therefore provides a measure of the importance to regiments of tenure and tenancy, one with a firmer quantitative grounding than contemporary pamphlets or accounts.

Overall, the officer corps does not display convincing evidence of large-scale recruitment through such quasi-feudal criteria, although such practices did operate on a smaller scale. A limited number of units were based on familial connections: the quartermaster of Cromwell's troop was his brother-in-law, John Desborough, and another brother-in-law, Valentine Walton, was captain of a troop in which Walton's son was cornet.Footnote ⁵³ Some links even appear to have crossed units: in Lord St John's regiment, Captain John Harvie had Noah Neale as his ensign, and in Sir William Constable's regiment Moses Neale was an ensign in the same company as Lieutenant Robert Harvie. Around 8 per cent of the troops of horse and 5 per cent of the companies of foot had captains who exercised sufficient proprietary control over their units to appoint at least one relative as their officer. Undoubtedly the actual totals were higher, since – as in the case of Cromwell and Desborough – not all relatives would have shared surnames with their sponsor. The absence of extensive clusters of family groups within regiments, however, supports the argument that such connections were frequently peripheral to officers within the army.

Cross-referencing officers with alumni lists of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Inns of Court indicates that around 380 officers – just over 40 per cent of the 950 officers in Essex's army – attended one or more of these institutions. This provides a large enough sample to identify a number of units with regional identities, although never amongst more than two officers. Hercules Langrish and his lieutenant, John Dingley, were from the adjacent Hampshire villages of Deane and Wolverton.Footnote ⁵⁴ John Harvie and his ensign Noah Neale appear to have come from the Bedfordshire village of Upper Dean.Footnote ⁵⁵ Regional identities of this type can be found in 18 of the 200 companies of foot, and 7 of the 75 troops of horse, a mere 50 officers out of the 380 whose origins can be traced. Extrapolating this figure for the whole army suggests that approximately 125 officers, 13·2 per cent of the total, served with at least one officer from the same county. This is high enough to discount the possibility of coincidence but also too low to indicate anything other than a limited pattern of regional affiliation or tenurial allegiance within the officer corps of Essex's army. Its corollary is the absence of regional identities within individual regiments, such as the supposed origin of John Hampden's officers in Buckinghamshire. Although one captain was Hampden's kinsman and neighbour Richard Ingoldsby, another, John Stiles, was from London, while Hampden's Major William Barriff and Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Wagstaffe were professional soldiers, from Essex and Warwickshire respectively.Footnote ⁵⁶ One of the lieutenants was referred to simply as ‘a Dutchman’. Thus, Hampden's officers possessed few ties of kinship or personal allegiance with his county. Similarly, the only officer from Warwickshire in Lord Brooke's regiment was his lieutenant-colonel, Sir Edward Peyto.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even allowing for the incomplete nature of the sample and the difficulties of reliably identifying officers, the complete absence of such evidence is highly suggestive: the army does not appear to have coalesced around rigid frameworks of familial, tenurial, or regional loyalty.

Such connections instead appear to have existed as a loose structure, alongside other axes of association based on shared sociability and institutional experience. Essex's lifeguard was recruited through contacts made in the Inns of Court: Edmund Ludlow and several others assembled ‘as many young Gentlemen of the Inns of Court, of which we were then, as [were] found disposed to this service’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Common residence at either Oxford or Cambridge was also a factor. As noted above, Denzil Holles and James Quarles probably met in Cambridge. Captain Oliver Beecher entered Lord St John's regiment, not only because both were from Bedfordshire, but also because both had matriculated at Queen's College, Cambridge in 1615.Footnote ⁵⁹ Henry Atkinson appears to have served as lieutenant of Lord Saye and Sele's troop of horse through an acquaintance begun at Oxford: both would have been aged eighteen at the time of Atkinson's matriculation in 1628.Footnote ⁶⁰ Finally, linkages were forged in the Honourable Artillery Company; Isaac Dobson and his ensign James Baker joined the Company within one month of each other in 1635.Footnote ⁶¹ The existence of parallel frameworks places into context the importance of both familial and regional connections in the creation of units in 1642. Regiments were not structured around the necessities of recruitment and financial exploitation: instead, they were clusters of officers associated by looser networks.

The four regiments raised in May 1642 by the Irish Adventurers were created in a similar fashion, and produced the same results.Footnote ⁶² From February, subscriptions had been circulated to individual counties via sheriffs and JPs, who were to receive and record donations to be forwarded to London.Footnote ⁶³ There, a central treasury provided a generous allowance of £1,035 to each captain of horse to mount and equip his troop, as well as access to arms and armour in the Tower. The Adventurers were allowed to nominate their own officers, with parliament only retaining the power of veto: the appointments of several captains were delayed in June because the Lords worried that they were ‘unfit persons to be employed as commanders’.Footnote ⁶⁴ No further type of formal selection occurred, allowing officers to choose billets in the army according to their own preferences. A prosopographical study similar to that above, and based on the contemporary pamphlet A list of the field-officers chosen and appointed for the Irish expedition, shows that at least thirteen of the twenty-five captains of foot had previous military experience: for example, Captain Charles Dawson had served at Cadiz in 1625, the Netherlands in 1627, and the Bishops' War in 1639.Footnote ⁶⁵ The officer cadre was thus highly capable, but also dominated by men who – like James Quarles – possessed no automatic entrée into extensive regional or familial networks. It is therefore unsuprising that Wharton's army also displayed a low incidence of such connections, well below the number seen in Essex's army. This suggests that they were not integral to the recruitment of this force, and that most officers also existed within a loose and fluid matrix of association.

This conclusion is reinforced by the history of the regiments after 30 July, when parliament ordered them to join the earl of Essex for service in England.Footnote ⁶⁶ As the example of Warwick's ‘running army’ has shown, regional loyalties ran deep: had familial, tenurial, or regional connections been integral to Wharton's units, their continued existence would have depended on the maintenance of those links, and a broad continuity of personnel during the transfer would be expected. However, while eighty-one officers of foot out of the ninety-four in Wharton's army, an overall percentage of 86·1, transferred to Essex's army, only fifty-seven officers, 59·3 per cent of the total, continued to serve in the same regiment, and only fifteen, some 15·9 per cent, remained in the same company. The rest moved to different units, left the army entirely, or entered parliament's service elsewhere: Captain Paul Watts was sent by the Committee of Safety to Portsmouth.Footnote ⁶⁷ Overall, while seventeen companies out of the thirty-two retained at least two officers, only five retained all three. Thus, nearly half the companies disintegrated entirely, while another third suffered disruption in the continuity of their personnel. An even lower degree of continuity existed amongst the officers of the seven troops of horse. Ralph Whistler's unit, Wharton's personal troop, remained intact, probably because it was already fully recruited and equipped: in August, it received money only for sashes and salaries.Footnote ⁶⁸ Several officers were permitted to leave for Ireland and new men were drafted in to replace them; overall, thirteen of the twenty-six officers remained in Essex's army, but only five stayed with their original troops.Footnote ⁶⁹ A strikingly low degree of cohesion therefore existed amongst the officers of Wharton's army, alongside a much higher level of overall loyalty. The majority of officers were apparently eager to serve parliament, but were not particularly concerned about the identity of their fellow officers.

What is equally striking is that officers who entered other regiments – as well as a futher group of reformadoes incorporated piecemeal into the army in July – did not encounter the violent protests that Warwick experienced with his force.Footnote ⁷⁰ Where their placement backfired, it was not due to regional or familial exclusivism. Nehemiah Wharton, a sergeant in Holles's regiment, objected to Lieutenant-Colonel Biddeman on the grounds that he was both demanding and ungodly: ‘a goddam blade and doubtless hatch[ed] in hell’.Footnote ⁷¹ He thus welcomed the promotion of James Quarles, a professional soldier, since the major was a man of strong Calvinist convictions, who anticipated enjoying ‘those everlasting heavenly joys which the Lord … hath prepared for all his chosen Elect people’.Footnote ⁷² Wharton's complaint was therefore not against professional officers per se, but ungodly officers. Reformado soldiers could integrate comfortably into existing regimental hierarchies, unimpeded by objections to their professional status, provided they conformed to certain religious standards. Those who did not were made to feel unwelcome, and the earl of Essex was forced to defend foreign officers such as du Bois, John Dalbier, and Hans Behr against xenophobic attacks within parliament and its army.Footnote ⁷³ Nevertheless, the fact that such officers were incorporated into the army in the first place argues against its character as a baronial force underpinned by close networks of tenurial or regional loyalty. It instead emerges as an army held together by looser linkages of friendship and kinship, as well as shared institutional or social experiences, and, above all, by a strong commitment to the national priorities of parliament.

This commitment was commonly based upon a combination of two distinct factors: ideological enthusiasm or profit. Captain Carlo Fantom, a Croatian mercenary, was open about his motives, boasting that ‘I care not for your cause: I come to fight for your half-crown[s], and your handsome women.’Footnote ⁷⁴ He was typical of many other officers who committed themselves to serve the lord general's national strategy mainly because it promised regular and generous pay. Horatio Carey enlisted first under Wharton and then under Essex because he was a self-confessed soldier of fortune, and his return from the continent to aid the king in 1639 had caused him to lose ‘certain employment there’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like Fantom, he was a man out of sympathy with the army's religious character, owning a manuscript book full of refined bawdry, including one poem salaciously entitled ‘A privat discourse with a mistress’, and when he defected to the king in 1643 his new banner included a motto mocking the earl of Essex as a cuckold.Footnote ⁷⁶ Clarendon accused many officers of joining the army due to the ‘lowness and decayedness of their fortunes’, hoping for promotion and preferment by parliament.Footnote ⁷⁷ Purists in the parliamentary ranks such as Lord Brooke objected to mercenaries, who had no ideological commitment and owed allegiance only to their paymasters, but such motives were a boon to the army. With no private resouces or local allies, and dependent on parliament for their pay, these men had no choice but to commit themselves to the national strategy pursued by the lord general.Footnote ⁷⁸

There was, of course, no inherent contradiction between the service of professional soldiers for both monetary and ideological gain. Robert Kirle explained that, upon returning to England in 1642, he had enlisted under Essex for ‘imployment’ and because he thought parliament's cause ‘full of honour, justice and piety’.Footnote ⁷⁹ His defection was due to a difference of opinion with the Presbyterian clerics that dominated the army's chaplaincy.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was precisely this fiery puritanism, however, that many in the army had enlisted specifically to protect. Like James Quarles, many officers and men were fervent puritans: on the journey from London soldiers broke altar-rails and tore up surplices, and Nehemiah Wharton enjoyed the ‘heavenly sermons’ delivered by chaplains such as Obadiah Sedgewick.Footnote ⁸¹ Constantine Ferrer was a professional soldier, but did not fight for mercenary reasons: when offered £500 in November 1642 to defect he rejected ‘such an act of baseness’ and copied to parliament his response that he served only for ‘the preservation of the true Protestant religion, the safety of His Majesty's person, the defence of the laws of the land, the liberties of the subject, and privilege of Parliament, whereunto I am persuaded all true hearted Englishmen are conscientiously obliged’.Footnote ⁸² Officers such as Edmund Ludlow, Edward Massey, and Edwin Sandys described identical motivations: they had enlisted to defend parliament, the Protestant religion, and Charles I from his evil counsellors.Footnote ⁸³ The army was therefore dominated by men who conceived of service in terms of national priorities, rather than strictly local agendas. This proved to be a formidable cohesive element, capable of uniting officers behind a single national strategy, despite an apparently low level of loyalty to individual colleagues.

The rejection of purely parochial agendas extended even to those troops raised through the manipulation and exploitation of private and local interests. These units were invariably commanded by men willing to subordinate local concerns to the national strategy that parliament had authorized and empowered Essex to execute. Cromwell and Walton had raised their troops initially for service in East Anglia, but the college plate captured in Cambridge on its journey north was sent to London in service of the Propositions, and Cromwell obeyed the instructions of the Committee of Safety to join the lord general's army in Worcester.Footnote ⁸⁴ Hercules Langrish claimed in 1656 to have been ‘allwaies most cordiall and faithfull’ to parliament, while Berry's troop was under the command of Colonel Edwin Sandys, who defended his loyalty to ‘so good a cause, as ever I was employed in’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Supporters in Watford were similarly ‘forward and zealous’ in defending parliament, offering their troop for deployment in Essex's army rather than as a supplement to local forces.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus, even the scattered existence of particularist units did nothing to affect the overall direction of Essex's army, since most were officered by captains who evidenced a wholesale devotion to parliament's agenda.

Finally, the national scope of the army was reinforced by legislative structure and external presentation. On 22 September, parliament ordered that the nobles and MPs serving under Essex form a ‘Committee of Assistance’, whose role was to advise the lord general and to report his resolutions to Westminster.Footnote ⁸⁷ This ensured that Essex was continually reminded of his national responsibilities and enabled parliament to discern immediately if his strategic gaze was wandering, as it was to do in 1643.Footnote ⁸⁸ His commission as lord general also gave him absolute authority over the direction of all parliament's forces, while his officers in the army were bound into obedience through an oath to ‘defend, maintaine and obey’ both parliament and the lord general.Footnote ⁸⁹ So absolute was this oath that Sir Simonds d'Ewes considered it to be against both liberty and law, and even the Venetian ambassador thought it unprecedented and ‘despotic’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It may well be that Essex also sought to strengthen his authority by presenting himself as a de facto lord high constable, a medieval office with sweeping political and military powers.Footnote ⁹¹ This theme of obedience was certainly reinforced in a speech he made to his troops on 24 September. He insisted that his men should obey ‘such as (by your own election) you have made Commanders over you’, a principle whose logical conclusion entailed absolute loyalty to the lord general and his overall strategic plan.Footnote ⁹² The principle was carried over into the army's external presentation. Just as royalist officers and troopers wore red sashes to express obedience to the king, parliamentarian cavalrymen wore sashes or ‘scarves’ in Essex's heraldic livery of tawny orange.Footnote ⁹³ This would have been understood as an expression of personal allegiance: Essex's regiment of foot flew ensigns of that colour, and he outfitted his private troop – led by his servant, Thomas Pudsey – in a livery of grey coats with orange and silver buttons.Footnote ⁹⁴ Significantly, the captains John Alured and Sir John Hotham, both of whom operated outside the army in Yorkshire, did not receive money to purchase these scarves: their detached service was apparently to be represented visually.Footnote ⁹⁵ Likewise, although Cromwell's troop had been raised in early August 1642, it was not until 29 August – several days after he returned from Cambridgeshire, and shortly before he was ordered to join Essex's army – that he received money to purchase scarves.Footnote ⁹⁶ Thus, although individual regiments might have carried personalized banners and ensigns that suggested feudal values of individual allegiance and obligation, the army was also a visual statement of its subordination to the strategic direction of parliament and its lord general. In almost every possible respect, the earl of Essex's army was directed towards one aim: the single-minded pursuit of a national strategy. As a strategic instrument, it was therefore without equal during the autumn of 1642.

However, denied the agency and representation provided by proprietary control of their units, regional supporters had little reason to consider that Essex's army had their interests or security at heart. There were, admittedly, some concessions made by parliament to regional concerns: for instance, on 26 September the Committee of Safety gave £500 to Francis Allen to raise a force in London ‘for the service of Kent’.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, the sums involved were never sufficient to facilitate a reliable system of local defence. As the regional associations were to discover after November 1642, provincial troops cost almost as much as a national army, and the small sums disbursed by the Committee cannot have done more than reinforce the impression of most local supporters that they received inadequate returns on their initial investments. Thus, all that the Committee ultimately achieved by attempting to balance competing local and national demands was to sabotage further the effective operation of both. Diverting money to local defence undermined Essex's efforts to keep his army in the field, but the continued prioritization of the national strategy left no motive for supporters to donate resources to the central treasury. This is reflected in the dramatic reversal of the army's financial fortunes after August. The numbers of horses received under the Propositions fell dramatically, from 1,585 in August to 771 in September, 251 in October, and 136 in November, the early peak probably reflecting a lag-time between the collection of horses in June and their delivery and registration in London.Footnote ⁹⁸ On 12 September a parliamentary committee was established to pursue members who had pledged money and horses but failed to deliver.Footnote ⁹⁹ By this date, Essex's army was already entering a financial crisis. Money continued to arrive from London – £10,000 on 11 OctoberFootnote ¹⁰⁰ – but this was a drop in the ocean, given that the weekly charge in September of paying and supplying the army was around £30,000.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nehemiah Wharton recorded that some soldiers overcame the shortage of food by confiscating loaves and cheese from civilians and poaching deer from royalist estates, but salaries had to be paid in coin, and as this fell into arrears the army's cohesion and unity of purpose broke down.Footnote ¹⁰² Essex only managed to issue three warrants during the journey from London between 9 and 24 September, causing a local financial crisis.Footnote ¹⁰³ Wharton's letters reveal an increased incidence of plundering and internal dissension around this period, including a mutiny over pay by several regiments on 7 September.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A series of three company accounts from Hampden's regiment indicate a consistent shortfall of amounts ranging from £10 to £20 during this time.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These sums were between 6·3 per cent and 12·5 per cent of the total monies disbursed in the companies, and would have been larger in some cases had personal credit not been available: Captain Arnett owed £56 to his officers as their arrears, and used a loan of £34 from Thomas Mosely to bridge the gap. Others were also forced to draw on private credit in the course of their duties: Lieutenant-General du Bois was lent £20 by Lord Wharton in September for the artillery train.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Declining central finance therefore undermined both the army's internal cohesion and the central control that parliament could extend. Unsurprisingly, on 17 September the army was reported to be mutinous, whilst two days earlier Essex had published an open letter to parliament and the City of London warning that ‘our treasure … growes neere an end, and … our army consists of such as cannot be kept together one day without pay’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By this stage, parliament's cause could only be saved by a massive infusion of cash, or by the ‘quick and happy conclusion’ that Essex promised to deliver if funds arrived.

The stalemate that resulted from the battle of Edgehill on 23 October frustrated both hopes. By November, both sides had retreated to winter quarters, the king to Oxford and Essex to Windsor, but operations continued, and Prince Rupert's brutal attack on Brentford on 12 November demonstrated that even areas deep within parliament's heartland were vulnerable to sudden and devastating attack. The lord general's army offered no defence: at Brentford, Denzil Holles's regiment had been wiped out.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Essex had failed to change the strategic situation that imposed intolerable and ultimately counter-productive pressures upon his tactical options, and parliament's declaration that ‘there is no probable way under God [to suppress the royalist army] but by an army raised by authority of Parliament’ must have rung increasingly hollow.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even Watford fell victim to its own enthusiasm: on 11 November, the House of Lords noted that Watford's zeal had ‘left themselves very naked, and open to the Violence of all Malignants’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The solution proposed for Watford was that supporters there raise money and muster forces for local security, and join with surrounding towns in a defensive alliance. This process hints at the vicious cycle in which Essex's army and parliament's war effort were becoming enmeshed. As local fears rose, money was increasingly diverted into regional defence, rendering the army unable to offer military protection that would render such measures unnecessary.

The process was one resisted by parliament and the Committee of Safety, mainly through attempts to shift income from voluntary to compulsory contributions. On 26 August an ordinance was passed empowering supporters within London to ‘desire and stir up’ defaulters: their names were to be publicly recorded to promote peer pressure.Footnote ¹¹¹ But there was also a carrot to accompany this stick. As far back as July 1642 the county of Buckinghamshire had been encouraged to forward money from the Propositions by allowing it to hold back £1,000 to recruit troops of horse for local defence.Footnote ¹¹² Now this principle was extended, and two regiments of foot were detached from Essex's army to protect the City of London, based on the Common Council's petition to parliament that ‘it is very probable the inhabitants of the said city will cheerfully subscribe to lend money and plate upon the Propositions, besides what they have done already, if part of the money which shall be subscribed be assigned to the City towards the great charges they shall be at for the defence and safety thereof’.Footnote ¹¹³ Thus, parliament was still gambling that by sacrificing a certain percentage of the Propositions to local defence they would encourage the collection of the remainder. From November, however, a harder line was adopted. A series of ordinances passed on 29 November sought to embarrass those who had failed to contribute towards Essex's army despite benefiting from its protection and security.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Under the ‘fifth and twentieth part’, commissioners were nominated in London, Southwark, and Westminster to register recalcitrants and to extort appropriate donations, by confiscation of their goods if necessary. Those unable to contribute would be imprisoned. In the provinces, committees were empowered to receive donations and to confiscate money, plate, and horses, supposedly to prevent them falling into enemy hands.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Finally, in 1643 parliament established the two pillars of the later fiscal-military state: the excise, and a weekly assessment or subsidy.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Both were explicitly intended to support Essex's army and the maintenance of a national strategy.

In the event, these arrived too late to prevent the flow of money from national to local projects during the winter of 1642, a process best exemplified by the regional associations that proliferated after November. In East Anglia, as elsewhere, confidence in Essex's army collapsed, and local supporters increasingly looked to defend their own borders.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Regional armies became institutionalized, causing the parliamentary war effort to become overwhelmed by myriad conflicting and competing financial and strategic demands. Efforts were made to keep the war effort on track, most notably in February 1643, when Lord Grey of Warke was ordered to raise a mixed brigade of foot and horse within the Eastern Association and join the lord general's army at Reading. However, this venture instead demonstrated the limits of parliament's ability to impose a central strategy on local supporters. It backfired spectacularly, because the association chose to prioritize the maintenance of those forces defending its territorial integrity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Soldiers deserted the brigade due to increasing arrears of pay, and by June 1643 only 200 men were left in Sir Thomas Barrington's regiment.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For most committee members and local contributors the demands of regional defence had priority.

The history of Essex's army is therefore one of frustrated potential. By December, the main field army of parliament had become paralysed into immobility; officers and soldiers deserted the army in response to increasing arrears, leading parliament to issue an order in November commanding them to return to their regiments under pain of death.Footnote ¹²⁰ Some of the ‘fiery spirits’ in the Commons mocked that it was ‘summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire, but cold winter at Windsor’.Footnote ¹²¹ Even as new sources of revenue appeared throughout 1643 and 1644, the entrenchment of regional associations prevented Essex and his army receiving the money needed to recapture control of the strategic direction of parliament's war effort. It would take until 1645 to recover from this disaster. This turn of events can be traced directly to the structure of the army between June and November 1642, which nullified the influence of regional and particularist interests within the officer corps to an unprecedented degree. While its composition gave both the lord general and his sponsors exactly the ability they needed to concentrate their resources upon the prosecution of national strategic aims, it denied regional supporters the agency and representation they required to continue supporting those aims. Without any control over the use of their money, or assurance that it would provide local security, even those well-affected towards parliament preferred to prioritize regional defence over a national strategy. Representation, military as well as political or cultural, was therefore crucial to parliament's war effort while it remained directly dependent upon the support and goodwill of partisans in the localities. The other side of the coin was that this representation could only be achieved by sacrificing the national strategy for which the army had been raised. It was only once this circle was broken, with the imposition of compulsory subsidies to support the New Model Army, that the parliamentary war effort regained its momentum. In the meantime, the earl of Essex's army had become a victim of its own success: like Essex himself, its history during 1642 was one of ‘unfulfilled promise’.Footnote ¹²²