In 1992, Charles Carlton published a deeply researched but readable social history of early modern English warfare in his Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (London, 1992). Now he returns to the theme with a broader canvas, charting the engagement of the British peoples in warfare during the key phase of Britain’s rise to world power status. Seven chronological chapters, narrating phases of warfare from Bosworth to Culloden, are interleaved with six thematic chapters. These skillfully examine different aspects of the military experience, from recruitment and motivation through campaigning, battle, and naval warfare, to the aftermath of war.

Carlton writes vividly and makes a virtue of quoting contemporaries at every turn. Hundreds of memoirs and many letters home give voice to the fighting men, military treatises, and training manuals bring practicalities to life, and imaginative literature is well deployed. He has an eye for authors with military experience, big names like Spenser, Raleigh, and Donne as well as Churchyard and Farquhar. His finds among the dramatic works of the years either side of 1700 are a delight, from the alarming Colonel Bully to the admirable Captain Worthy. Equally pointed are his quotations from commanders, deadpan amid disaster. Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon, commented, after his drunken men were slaughtered at Cadiz in 1626, “I must confess that it put me to some trouble” (83). From such sources he can give rich illustration of many features of early modern warfare: the pervasiveness of religion, the pressure of the king’s shilling, and the strength of small group loyalty; the privations of campaign, the madness of combat, and the ravages of disease; and the balance of courage, compassion, and cheerfulness in effective officering.

More controversial is his use of modern parallels to make aspects of the early modern military experience comprehensible. He comes close to implying that only those who have seen war can authentically write its history, harping on the ranks and campaigns of the mid-twentieth-century generation: Sergeants Elton and Tawney, Captain Howard, and naval Lieutenant Stone. Yet this approach can pay dividends, as when he shows that Edmund Ludlow’s inability to unclench his jaws for hours after the stress of combat at Edgehill was shared by combatants in Normandy and Burma in 1944. Contrasts are equally striking: in training there seems to have been little need to overcome psychological restraints on killing, as twentieth-century bayonet drill was designed to do.

Carlton writes a genuinely British history. Ireland saw more atrocities than its neighbors from the Elizabethan conquest onward, and the horror of its experiences in the Civil Wars is grimly brought out. Yet by the eighteenth century Ireland and Scotland were making huge contributions in officers and men to what was becoming a truly British army. He also makes commendable efforts to include naval warfare, showing the devastating effects of diseases on long voyages and of heavy cannon broadsides on slow-moving ships, packed with men vulnerable to flying splinters of shot and timber.

Away from his seventeenth-century field of expertise, Carlton’s accuracy wavers. The account of the campaign of 1487 is less than dependable, as Lambert Simnel claims to be Edward IV’s son (not his nephew), is crowned Edward V (not Edward VI), and loses in battle in Derbyshire (not Nottinghamshire). The war of 1512–13 is as treacherous, as Guyenne and Navarre are transposed, Sir Edward Howard reports on a campaign months after his death, and the hundreds of English and Welsh cavalry on Henry’s 1513 campaign are transformed into foreign mercenaries. Lapses persist into the 1540s, as Elis Gruffudd holds the wrong rank, Thomas Becon writes in the wrong century, and Thomas Smith’s comments on French soldiers are transferred onto their English rivals.

He is not averse to intriguing speculations. Was the calm of the British kingdoms under Charles I’s personal rule partly attributable to the absence of tens of thousands of restless young men serving as mercenaries in the Thirty Years’ War? Perhaps it was. Had the Armada landed, would the English have fought a long war of resistance like the Dutch? Perhaps they would not. Their comparatively flat, dry landscape, which in the fifteenth century lent itself to short, sharp civil war campaigns, would not have helped them to bog the tercios down as the flooded Dutch countryside did. Or perhaps it would. In the 1640s, England proved perfectly suitable for a long civil conflict of garrison raids, protracted sieges, and multiple battles, not unlike the Dutch revolt.

Most eye-catching are his attempts to calculate rates of participation and death. These necessarily rely on much averaging and guesswork, but if credible they go a long way to prove his case that war placed more of a mark than is often acknowledged on the rising British kingdoms. Half of all adult males, he reckons, served in the Elizabethan armed forces in one way or another, including privateers and militiamen mobilized in 1588. Extrapolating from admittedly thin evidence on death rates among such forces, including those caused by disease and accidents, he calculates that 2.44 percent of the total English population died in Elizabeth’s wars, a rate comparable to World War I. Similar calculations give the Civil Wars death rates worse than both World Wars combined for England and worse even than the Potato Famine for Ireland. Some of these numbers might be questioned. No Irish casualties, for example, are counted for the 1487 campaign, although chronicles record that Irishmen were slain in large numbers. Henry VIII’s armies took perhaps twice as many Englishmen overseas as he estimates. Conversely, only those between eighteen and thirty-nine are counted as adult males, so the percentages would look less impressive had older men served in the militia or on board ship. The figures are, as Carlton says, to be “treated with the utmost caution” (261). But like so much else in his book, they are bold and thought provoking, and for that we are all in his debt.