Mark Stoyle's Soldiers and Strangers is an intriguing and thought-provoking book that asserts that English nationalism was one of the key factors in understanding the course of the English Civil War. Stoyle's argument has several components. In his opening section, he introduces the various “foreign” soldiers who fought in England during the Civil War. These ranged from continental troops to soldiers from any of the Celtic lands on the British Isles. He explores the motivations of these fighters and then explains how the English responded to these incursions of foreign powers on their soil by creating a new English army. The New Model Army was nothing less, in Stoyle's view, than an expression of the English desire to rid England of “strangers.”
Stoyle explains that the English had developed negative stereotypes of most foreigners by the 1640s. Thus, when both Parliament and the Royalists used foreign mercenaries as officers in their respective armies at the outbreak of hostilities in 1642, many Englishmen felt uneasy with these men's roles in an English struggle. This unease quickly transformed to anger as foreigners, most notably Queen Henrietta Maria's French troops, became renowned for plundering and savaging English people. Yet these troops were never very numerous, probably only amounting to a few thousand soldiers during the whole course of the war. While these men play a role in Stoyle's narrative, he focuses most of his attention on the different ethnic groups who fought in England during the war. For he argues that while the vast majority of continental troops in England were professional soldiers fighting for profit, the Celtic men in the field had other motivations to go to war. Stoyle asserts that both the Welsh and the Cornish, who rose for Charles I almost unanimously in 1642, did so because they thought that he would protect their unique identities from the dangers of the English Parliament. Charles was able to rally them to his side because he promised them, in effect, that he understood that they were not part of England. Meanwhile the Irish Catholics supported the King too because they believed that he would allow them to retain power in Ireland while the Scots, who opposed the King, had similar goals as the Irish—they wanted to preserve their own political and religious systems.
Under the strain of repeated military defeats, Parliament agreed to the solemn league and covenant with the Scots, where in return for military assistance, Parliament would agree to convert England to Presbyterianism. This treaty caused great dissension in the Parliamentary ranks because many English people felt that the Scots only intended to fight in order to conquer and occupy English land. Further, the leaders of Parliament's army did not appreciate that most English people detested foreign officers and troops in their army, and it was the popular call for an English army, led by English men, to protect England, that inspired the creation of the New Model Army. Oliver Cromwell, Stoyle reminds us, was often referred to as “God's Englishman.” Contemporaries understood that phrase to mean that he was an advocate of English rather than foreign interests.
This new English army, fired with the idea that it was defending England from foreigners, had vast popular support, and it quickly achieved its goal of defeating and driving out foreign troops from England. The new army was notably harsh to these foreign troops, particularly those who had any real or imagined association with Ireland. While this was happening, Stoyle suggests that the relationship between the Royalists and their Cornish and Welsh supporters was fraying. This occurred in part because the English Royalists looked upon their Celtic troopers with disdain, and because when push came to shove, every time King Charles or his son had to make a choice between defending Cornwall or Wales from Parliament or helping the greater Royalist war effort, they always chose the Royalist good over the western lands. Thus, the Cornish and the Welsh, who both had embraced an almost protonationalism at that point, no longer trusted their Royalist leaders. Further, as the war wore on and their own lands were threatened, they were far less likely to march beyond the borders of their lands to fight for the Royalists. Parliament took advantage of this split between its enemies by both offering terms to the Cornish and Welsh and at the same time threatening them with the New Model Army. After the Royalist armies all but ceased to exist by January 1646, both Wales and Cornwall accepted Parliament's terms. Stoyle also details how throughout 1646 and early 1647 the New Model Army and Parliament managed to remove virtually all foreign troops, be they Scots or continental soldiers, from English soil. By the middle of 1647, then, the English could feel confident that they had protected England from all foreign invaders.
To bolster his argument, Stoyle relies heavily on printed propaganda from all sides to demonstrate that ethnic identity played a key role in shaping people's actions during the Civil War. Because of his sources, he has far more material to show English rather than Welsh or particularly Cornish views, but he has managed to create a credible argument that each of those peoples had an ethnic identity that they felt was threatened by the English Parliament in 1642.
While this book provides useful insights into Cornish and Welsh identities in the 1640s, its real strength lies in its central thesis that for the English, the Civil War was not only a struggle about religious principles but also one for the identity of England. This is a convincing and important argument, and this book will be of use to anyone interested in the development of English nationalism.
