The modern temptation to hastily inflict a barely revised version of a doctoral thesis on the world is one that the author of this fine monograph has splendidly resisted. It is based on a doctoral thesis of 1981, the intervening period (or some of it) having been spent as chief executive of Oxford University Press. If the resulting book shows its age, it is not in dated historiography, because the author has clearly taken extensive and careful account of recent research, but perhaps in its subject. It is not quite an old-fashioned institutional study, but there are signs of it. It looks at the army in (mostly) peacetime, after its most important and famous actions were already in the past. It also situates its subject very solidly in the historiography of mid-seventeenth-century English political-military affairs; little account is taken of more recent “war and society” style literature, and there is little by way of comparison with European armies of the period, such as those of the Thirty Years' War.

What it accomplishes thereby is a very close, detailed, highly contextualized account of the interface of military and civil authorities in a period of great flux. As the author points out, 1649–60 was unique in seeing England ruled by a standing army—itself a novel organization in English terms. The army as an institution is discussed in the early chapters, with the focus on the upper ranks of the army and, often, Cromwell's own role in relation to them (much of the book inevitably bears on the effectiveness of Cromwell's management of the army); relatively little is said about the rank and file. The precise definition of the titular organization might have been explored slightly more explicitly, in fact, because troops serving outside England are also largely excluded. Questions of promotions, pay, and garrisons are discussed in detail, but in practice, “the army” is often interpreted as the leaders of the army, the major-generals, commanders of garrisons, and so on. This said, Reece places a great deal of stress on the army's instinctive urge, felt at all ranks, to preserve its unity, its honor, and its independence.

The mid-seventeenth century was also unusual in seeing a substantial military force in permanent residence, as a common sight for English people. The book spends a good deal of time examining the consequences of this, in terms of the financial, religious, and governmental impact on the localities. The author, who is not shy to engage critically with other historians, makes a strong case that the disruptiveness of the military presence can be overstated; he argues particularly strongly that the distinctiveness of the rule of the major-generals in 1655–56 is greatly exaggerated. Undoubtedly, the army played significant roles in local affairs: on a mundane level, in policing; and in more contentious issues around religious control. These interventions could be disruptive, but often they were not; in cases of conflict with local elites, the army often won out, but not invariably. Reece stresses the ability of military authorities to cohere with existing local elites, in an effort to maintain the greatest possible level of stability. If the circumstances of interregnal politics were unprecedented, the texture of what is described is very familiar to students of early Stuart and indeed Tudor England—the jockeying for patronage, difficulties over taxation, struggles for local control, and so on.

Underlying these detailed and heavily archival discussions is the question of the army's political role, a theme that comes to fruition in the last section of the book, a much more explicitly political study of the army's role in the Restoration. This seeks essentially to explain how an army that in 1647 had captured the king, occupied London, and defied Parliament allowed that event to happen, and allowed itself to be rolled over and made irrelevant, while the principles for which it had fought for so many years were unstitched almost at a stroke. This is in many ways where Reece's book takes off, and what might appear to be a rather dry study becomes compelling. Chapters 9 and 10 describe the events from the end of the Protectorate to the Restoration from the perspective of the army, on basically chronological lines, tracing how an event that seemed improbable took place with such little fuss, moving through the confused sequence of these months smoothly, always with the comparison point of 1647 in mind. Reece concludes that by the early months of 1660, the army was so weakened by repeated political purges of its officers that its former unity and the solidarity between officers and men was gone. The physical separation of most regiments from each other played a part too; collective action depended on close and intense communication. Meanwhile, the army leaders lacked the skill, decisiveness, and political good sense of Cromwell, and into the vacuum stepped the effective leadership of General Monck.

Overall, this is a very fine study. It has an extremely solid basis in the secondary literature as well as very wide and deep research in manuscripts and printed sources. The coverage is also broad, covering the entire country, with various case studies of particular themes in specific areas. The style is confident and argumentative without stridency. It is often the fate of books that appear to be works of military history to be pigeonholed and ignored, but this book is certainly of rather wider interest than might be thought from the title.