Until recently, military history, and especially that of early modern Britain and Ireland, was dominated by narratives of battles, histories of individual armies, and the debate of the so-called Military Revolution. These histories were largely concerned with the traditional issues of tactics, strategy, and equipment. Only in the last two decades, and especially since the publication of Charles Carlton's important book Going to the wars in 1992,Footnote 1 has the perspective shifted towards such significant, but previously largely neglected, matters as extreme violence, suffering, codes of conduct, the day-to-day life of soldiers and civilians, and the interaction between them. This recent trend was eagerly taken up by historians, not only for early modern Britain and Ireland, but for world history as a whole, and the historiography has experienced a surge of works dealing with these topical questions, an interest which, no doubt, has been fostered by the daily instalments of news from war-torn areas such as Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, most recently, West Georgia. The three books under review form the latest instalment in this growing body of works, concentrating as they do (albeit to differing degrees) on these issues. While Barbara Donagan looks at the texture of the English civil wars (1642–9) from the vantage point of the contemporary laws of war and codes of conduct, their theory and practice in England of the mid-seventeenth century, Roger Manning provides a narrative history of what he calls ‘apprenticeship in arms’ – the increasing professionalization of the military in the three Stuart kingdoms, which he locates between 1585 and 1702. In marked contrast to these works, Age of atrocity, a collection of articles, true to its title, tackles the more gritty aspects of warfare in Ireland, a country whose past has been brand-marked by perpetual violence not experienced by any other Western European country, and, as Kenneth Nicholls points out in his article, comparisons for which can only be found in frontier areas of European Christendom in the medieval and early modern periods (p. 191).
I
In the last two decades Barbara Donagan has established herself as an authority on the codes and practices of warfare of mid-seventeenth-century England, and her expert articles are amongst the most known historical works in early modern British and Irish historiography.Footnote 2 This book, therefore, was eagerly anticipated not merely by those with an interest in the history of warfare in the British Isles, but by anyone interested in warfare in general, and the laws of war and codes of conduct in particular. It was worth the wait. Once again, Donagan impresses with an enviable mastery of an amazingly wide range of primary (printed as well as archival) material, forming the basis of a work which effectively amounts to the first authoritative history of theory and practice of the contemporary codes of conduct and laws of war for the period of the English civil wars. This book is essentially a much more exhaustive treatment of the issues already addressed in her articles, and as such is one of very few monographs dealing with the question of what kind of war the English fought in the 1640s – a matter which began to attract the attention of historians only in the late 1970s, following Ian Roy's claim that the English civil wars may not have been as benign as generations of historians had asserted.Footnote 3 For this reason, Barbara Donagan (together with such historians as Carlton and Roy) remains one of the pioneers of this field. Taking a topic that traditionally lies in the domain of legal and military experts, she skilfully provides a historical framework for the laws of war as they were understood at the time of the English civil wars and the way they were employed.
The book begins with a brief overview of the familiarity of the English people with war and the existent means of military education in the years leading up to 1642. For Donagan, the prevalent theoretical awareness of war and its social and moral consequences, together with common curiosity about warfare, even amongst civilians, did not prevent what she terms ‘humiliating, muddled defeat in their first wars after the halcyon decade’ of the 1630s (p. 60). In order to assess the reality of warfare as it affected mid-seventeenth-century English people, Donagan covers such factors as the unpredictability and brutality of warfare, the geographical spread of war throughout England and Wales, the nature of rules that were intended to mitigate military violence, as well as military equipment and intelligence. A picture emerges of a people who, unprepared for the realities of conflict, were forced to fight a war without clearly delineated front lines against men who very often not only shared the same culture and language as themselves, but were sometimes even friends or family members. What follows is a discussion of the attempts of the English, terrified of ‘England turning Germany’, to regulate the conduct of this war, ‘to maintain the delicate balance between war and decent conduct, and their responses to lapses from ideal standards’ (p. 126). It is here that Donagan develops the groundwork that she laid in her articles for the study of written and unwritten laws of war and codes of conduct, and their observance as well as their infringement. What emerges is the overpowering desperation of both sides to restrain warfare, and to avoid the extreme violence witnessed in the theatres of war on the continent. Donagan adroitly presents this intricate subject in a very clear and understandable manner, depicting the two ‘basic utilitarian and moral considerations’ that lay behind the upholding of these rules – reciprocity and honour (p. 210). Yet, as she makes abundantly clear, these regulations were not infallible, and from time to time they were forsaken and atrocities were committed, despite the universal acceptance of the counter-productivity of such conduct. The practice and failings of the laws of war and codes of conduct are exemplified in the detailed treatment of the sieges of Boarstall House (1645–6) and Colchester (1648). Colchester, in particular, presents an interesting example not only of the severity of these laws, but, perhaps more importantly, of the shift that takes place with the beginning of the second English civil war in 1648. Whereas previously the war was consciously fought on both sides as a foreign war to curtail violence and destruction, with opponents regarding each other as fellow professionals, with the advent of the war in 1648 these concerns were abandoned as the royalists were relegated to the status of traitors and rebels who fell under the judgement of military law and were thus exempt from the protections ordinarily granted to prisoners of war. This development threatened to negate all the efforts of the previous years to contain the horrors of war.
Loath though I am to criticize such an outstanding example of scholarship, it is surprising, given the interests of the author and the scope of the book, that no reference is made to Charles Carlton's Going to the wars (it does not even appear in the bibliography). Though it has its deficiencies, Carlton's book remains the pioneering work in this field, and therefore deserves at least an acknowledgement in a work such as this. Some readers would also perhaps have preferred more examples of personal experiences and the encounters between soldiers and civilians; this, however, as Barbara Donagan makes abundantly clear, is material for a second book. She consciously eschews the entire area of the ‘New British History’ – this most fashionable direction of early modern British and Irish historiographies. Thus she also avoids the pitfalls that come with it, a fact which only contributes to the general integrity of the book. However, it necessarily provokes interesting questions of comparison: how were the wars experienced in Scotland and Ireland? How were they regulated? Unfortunately, no comparable body of research exists for these two Stuart kingdoms. Although modern historians of Ireland have begun to take an interest in this aspect of the 1640s and 1650s, as will be discussed below, the field is very much in its infancy. For Scotland the situation is even graver, the area having received no significant attention since the work of David Stevenson.Footnote 4 Thus it can only be hoped that this discrepancy will be corrected.
II
Roger Manning's book deals with the military apprenticeship of English, Scottish, and Irish soldiers between 1585 and 1702, and is the companion volume to his previous work Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms (2003), also published by Oxford University Press. Following the themes developed in this first volume, Manning presents a detailed history of the military education of the British soldier of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking the Irish Wars as the point of departure in military education, Manning progresses to depict the voluntary and involuntary experiences of British soldiers in the Dutch, Spanish, French, Scandinavian, and German armies, to name a few, from 1585 to 1640. While Ireland is portrayed as more attractive to military adventurers, it is service in the armies of the Netherlands that Manning sees as catering for the newly discovered interest in chivalric values in the late Elizabethan period, and which thus provided valuable first-hand military schooling in the revolutionary warfare methods and tactics developed by military innovators such as Maurice of Nassau. Expanding on this theme of foreign service as the preferred method of acquiring an ‘apprenticeship in arms’, Manning takes a sweep through such issues as the increasing ‘re-chivalrization’ and ‘remilitarization’ (p. 60) of the British population in the first half of the seventeenth century and the increasing demand for British manpower. This demand, as he goes on to show, was so exorbitant that the commissioners in charge quickly resorted to the illegal conscription of men for foreign service – a practice that invariably proved a lot more successful in the feudal and economically immature societies of Ireland and Scotland. Reviewing the inevitable interaction of the four nations of the British Isles in these foreign armies, Manning arrives at the somewhat surprising conclusion that, despite all the existing friction and animosities, the soldiers learned to co-exist, thus paving the way not only for what he terms ‘a common European martial culture’, but also for ‘the integration of these elements into the English and British armies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ (p. 93) – though the lack of any supporting empirical data means this claim remains unsubstantiated.
The second part of the book is devoted to the experience of warfare during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The rebellion of the Covenanters in 1637 led the population of the British Isles into a series of wars of unprecedented magnitude, and most of the swordsmen who were involved were new to the art of war. Manning juxtaposes here the two groups of military men who fought these wars – the experienced veterans who learned their trade in the militarily advanced Dutch, Spanish, and Swedish armies, and the amateur swordsmen whose knowledge was mainly derived from the abundant military literature of the day and whatever experiences they gathered as the wars progressed. According to Manning, the deep-rooted mistrust of mercenaries prevented the amateurs from learning from the experienced veterans, and the question of military discipline and conduct was a particularly vexed issue, contributing to the escalation and persistence of the military conflict. While he is generally correct, it needs to be remembered that, despite this mistrust, most of the famous and successful military commanders of the 1640s were experienced veterans: men such as Thomas Fairfax, David Leslie, Prince Rupert, and Lord Inchiquin, with Cromwell as a notable exception. Furthermore, as Mark StoyleFootnote 5 has recently pointed out, the lack of military knowhow in Britain necessitated the employment of foreign experts, something that was routinely practised on all sides, leading to the arrival of a sizeable proportion of foreign soldiers and, especially, military engineers in the British Isles. Manning points out that the outbreak of these wars finally marked the departure of the ‘halcyon days’ of the 1630s – it was the return of these derided professional soldiers that introduced the three Stuart kingdoms to a new military reality, effected by the military revolution that took place in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century, and brought home the necessity of a standing army. Following the instability engendered by the wars of the 1640s and the republican regime, this need grew in importance through the Interregnum into the Restoration period – the topic of part iii of the book. Due to the highly politicized nature of the military profession as it developed throughout the 1640s and 1650s, professional soldiers were forced to seek employment abroad in order to allow the Stuarts to use military ranking as a system of reward. By looking at the experiences of British soldiers abroad before and after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the author arrives at a rather surprising conclusion – in his view the denominational and political allegiance of professional soldiers played a much more important role post-1648, whereas, during the so-called European Wars of Religion of the first half of the seventeenth century, it was much more common for soldiers to attach themselves to a particular commander, irrespective of his denomination – a circumstance explained by ties of kinship and personal loyalty. Further research needs to be done, however, to corroborate this claim.
It is to the inevitable alienation of the military class by way of the tendency of Charles II to reward the loyal and ignore the skilled, and the traditional mistrust of standing armies and professional soldiers, especially in England, that Manning attributes the gradual decay not only of British military tradition, but, more notably, of the House of Stuart. And it is with this alienation that he explains the success (at least in military terms) of William of Orange: by the time the value of a strong and loyal army dawned on James II, William (soon to be William III), ‘had already suborned the loyalties of most of the officers, and that would cost James his kingdoms’ (p. 341). Despite this, however, William seemingly could not avoid making the same mistakes: following his conquest of Ireland and Scotland he excluded most of the Irish population from the political nation, and thus from the military service. In Manning's view, this alienation of part of his subjects, together with his general lack of interest in his British and Irish kingdoms, helped to foster the Jacobite ideology in the more remote of his kingdoms, while his failure to utilize the Irish Catholic manpower strengthened the European Catholic armies. Nevertheless, as part iv of the book demonstrates, the wars that William III waged, and most notably the Nine Years War, laid the military and fiscal foundations for the British empire.
Thus Manning provides a detailed introduction to the field. Although he attempts to look at all three Stuart kingdoms, he fails to avoid that most dangerous of the pitfalls of the ‘New British History’ – notwithstanding the necessary European contextualization, this book still remains very much within the realm of Anglocentric history-writing. Covering a comparatively long period in one monograph, the author appears to have chosen breadth over depth, with certain parts of the volume resulting in more superficial accounts than others. The second part of the book, for example, especially in view of Barbara Donagan's work (amongst many others), appears rather rudimentary, and at times not only naïve and outdated, but simply narrow-minded, particularly in the treatment of Cromwell and his Irish and Scottish campaigns, following the traditional Irish-nationalist line of interpretation. The research, although very thorough at times, is too often based on outdated secondary material, much dating as far back as the eighteenth century. Although many crucial recent works, especially for the seventeenth century, are featured in the bibliography, the author appears not to have made much use of these, and in some instances none at all. As mentioned at the beginning of this review, this particular historiographical field has experienced an unprecedented surge of late. The current book, however, omits any mention of works by such important writers as Charles Carlton, Mark Fissel, David Trim, Padraig Lenihan, and Mark Stoyle.Footnote 6 Disappointing, too, is the lack of maps and statistical apparatus. The book would only have profited from visualized data: many more questions would have been answered and much more powerful conclusions could have been drawn from a statistical analysis of the number of soldiers who learned their trade abroad or at home, of those who remained abroad and those who returned, and so on. Manning delivered what he set out to do – this is a book about the development of the military profession in Britain and Ireland from 1585 to 1702, and it is a valuable contribution to military history, despite all its shortcomings. It remains, however, an overview. Those looking for a more in-depth and up-to-date treatment of the different areas covered in this book will have to look for their answers elsewhere.
III
While atrocities form only one aspect of the two works discussed so far, the collection of articles that comprise Age of atrocity are a conscious departure from the traditional evasion of the issue. Dealing with the ugliest part of Ireland's past, this volume presents a long overdue history of bloodshed and violence of this troubled kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, as the editors so vigorously point out in their introduction to the volume, has been neglected for centuries by both Irish and English historians, albeit for different reasons.
The introduction, written by all of the three editors, sets this volume in its historiographical context, and demonstrates the urgent need for more detailed research on violence and atrocity. Skilfully depicting the past trends of avoiding controversial history-writing, the editors set out to redress this imbalance. The aim of this volume, which is essentially one ‘about killing’, is not only to place extreme violence ‘on record’, but ‘also to determine its causes and effects, and to establish its contemporary meanings’ (p. 19). Its purpose is therefore to arrive at a better understanding not only of the incidents of violence and atrocity, but also of the enduring importance of the period in question as a whole. The articles that follow achieve this, albeit with varying degrees of success.
The first four articles deal with Ireland under the Tudors. Concentrating on extreme military violence perpetrated by both sides, David Edwards challenges the traditional view of the endemic violence in sixteenth-century Ireland being largely the consequence of a highly militarized aristocratic class. Expanding on his earlier work,Footnote 7 Edwards gives a fresh and excellently researched picture of the Tudor government in Ireland, which ultimately leads the author to the conclusion that the Tudors pursued a clear policy of conquest. The second article takes a slightly different perspective in its dealing with one of the best-documented massacres of the sixteenth century. In this insightful depiction of the events surrounding the massacre of the Spanish and Italian force by the English at Smerwick in November 1580, Vincent Carey identifies the theme of deliverance and divine providence as a crucial element, which marks the point of departure for an ethno-religious rationale for the application of extreme violence in Ireland. Hiram Morgan, in turn, looks at atrocities committed by Hugh O'Neill, ‘a typical Irish dynast and warlord’ (p. 95). Having reviewed a few instances of murder and slaughter, Morgan arrives at the conclusion that O'Neill's perspective was essentially Machiavellian. The major exponent of the ‘big raid’ as an important element in the strategy and tactics of Irish warfare, the power-hungry O'Neill could only be fought with similar measures, a fact which ultimately led to the implementation of the scorched earth policy as exercised by Mountjoy following the English victory at Kinsale. John McGurk takes up where Morgan leaves off by looking at the pacification of Ulster from 1600 to 1603. Focusing on the English rationalizations for extreme violence against the native population, McGurk covers a lot of the familiar ground. Concluding that the level of violence against non-combatants post-Kinsale was indeed unprecedented, he justly expresses reservations regarding the religious aspect of the Nine Years War. In contrast to Carey's interpretation of Smerwick, for him the concept of Renaissance civility takes a clear precedence over any religious bias.
Departing from the more or less chronological progression of the volume, the next article is devoted to the reporting of violent deaths which are ascribed to divine retribution. Clodagh Tait delivers a nuanced analysis of the unusual deaths of four government officials: Drury, Ireton, Coote, and Brouncker, and the facts and rumours surrounding their demises, emphasising the need to view such incidents within their wider context of written as well as orally transmitted reports. Placing such events within the general historiography of martyrdom, she points out that it is this combination of the ‘prosaic and the fantastic’ in particular which allows much deeper insight into early modern Irish society (p. 153).
This discussion of rumours and superstitions brings us closer to the next topic in the volume – the Rebellion of 1641 in Ireland. Clearly seeing the uprising of 1641 as a sectarian conflict, MacCuarta argues that, while the sectarian impulses of the rebellion formed only one aspect of a much more general anger against all things English (an argument previously advanced by Nicholas Canny),Footnote 8 the rhetoric of religious purification and the conduct of the Irish both suggest that anti-Protestantism was already deeply ingrained into the fabric of society by 1641. He further proposes that the sectarianism seen in Ulster differed merely in degree rather than in kind from that which existed in other parts of the country – an argument that needs to be verified by a comprehensive analysis of confessional strife in Ireland as a whole. Whatever the reasons behind the outbreak, the unusual ferocity (by European standards) of the Irish wars that followed cannot be denied, and is confirmed by the archaeological findings of Clinton, Fibiger, and Shiels. During excavations at Carrickmines they uncovered a mass grave, which the authors date back to the end of a siege that took place there in March 1642. This discovery not only provides tangible evidence for the extreme violence of the war that followed the uprising, but, more importantly, demonstrates its indiscriminate nature, confirmed by the unearthed remains of women and children. When the English eventually got their bearings and retaliated for the alleged general massacre of late 1641, they did so with a vengeance, and any victory on the Protestant side, however morally dubious, was celebrated in England. Kevin Forkan portrays an example of an alternative history of this kind – that of Sir Charles Coote's representation as a Protestant icon in his battle against the forces of antichrist. Created with a specific agenda, this history of Protestant victory was soon airbrushed away to fit the political needs of an English government becoming increasingly aware of the expediency of being depicted as victims, not victors, of the rebellion. How much of what Coote was alleged to have committed was true is a question that cannot be solved readily; that the English did commit atrocities against the native Catholic population cannot be doubted, however. In his piece, Kenneth Nicholls provides a brief overview of atrocities committed by the English against the Irish in Leinster. For him, just as for MacCuarta, 1641 was clearly an ethno-religious conflict, comparison for which can only be sought in frontier areas of European Christendom.
To escape the horrors of war and the possibility of being killed by the rebels, many English and Scottish Protestants sought refuge either in England or Scotland. John R. Young provides a new perspective on the refugee movement, by looking at the group who fled to Scotland – an aspect of the history of the rebellion which has thus far escaped any major investigation by historians. Not only does he place this particular theme within the wider context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Thirty Years War, he also points to the church records of Scotland as a source that could enrich our understanding of what happened in 1641–2.
With this article the part of the volume dealing with 1641–2 is effectively concluded, with the next two articles concentrating on the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and specifically Cromwell's conduct at Drogheda. While Micheal O'Siochru takes the conventional path in dealing with the rumours and propaganda following the storm of Drogheda (and Wexford), treading ground already explored by the likes of James Burke, Scott Wheeler, and Jason McElligott,Footnote 9 John Morrill's interpretation is more unorthodox, intriguing, and thought-provoking. The ‘barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands with so much innocent blood’ (p. 257), this most famous line from Cromwell's despatches from Ireland, for centuries taken to be referring to the native Irish Catholics, is interpreted here as directed against the royalists – ‘those who, in the wake of what he [Cromwell] took to be a conflict resolved, continued to fight for the family and the office God had blasted’ (p. 265). Instead of the bigoted religious fanatic who dominated Irish historiography for so long, Cromwell emerges as an erastian whose patience was sorely tried by the royalists' refusal to accept their failure. While most historians would agree with the traditional view of Cromwell as being the main cause of all that followed, Morrill reminds us that perhaps this scapegoating of one man ‘let those really responsible off the hook’ (ibid.).
The volume finishes with an article very close to Donagan's work – one dealing with the laws of war. John Childs, well versed in military history of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,Footnote 10 provides an excellent overview of the commonly accepted codes of warfare at the end of the seventeenth century and investigates their theory and practice during the Jacobite War in Ireland. He concludes that the conduct of this particular war was ‘neither outstandingly ferocious nor especially benign’ (p. 300). More importantly, however, he provides a very fitting conclusion to the volume by reminding us that a distinction needs to be made between atrocities committed in the heat of battle and premeditated acts of killing depicted elsewhere in the volume. When military discipline breaks down ‘because of weak leadership, the blood lust of victory, starvation or lack of pay’, the laws of war cease to be effective, just as much as when powerful ideological convictions, and especially ethno-religious prejudices, are at work; it is the latter, however, as has been shown in this volume, that was and is so often the cause of the most disturbing cases of atrocity and bloodshed. By looking at violence, atrocity, and bloodshed from various angles, the contributors of this volume have broken the circle of avoidance of this difficult and (especially for Ireland) still politically charged topic, and opened it up for further research. It is to be hoped that the new generation of historians will follow their lead by addressing the issues raised by this volume and eventually redressing the imbalance in Irish historiography to bring it more in line with the wider historiographies of the British Isles and Europe.
