John Bullock, of Captain Barron’s, a very sore cut in the fore part of his head, which caused a piece of his skull the breadth of a half-crown piece to be taken forth, also a very sore cut over his head, £1 10s 0d. For curing the cavaliers taken at the fight at Ashe, whereof one was shot in the arme at the elbow joint and the bullet taken forth, in the wrist near the hand. The rest were sore cut in their heads and thrust in the back. £5.
The best accounts of what war did to the bodies of men can be found in the writings of surgeons like Richard Wiseman, whose treatise Of Wounds was widely used in surgical practice. Wiseman was born in 1621 near London, and apprenticed in 1637 to Richard Smith, surgeon. He was present at the siege of Weymouth in February 1645, as a surgeon to a battalion commanded by a Colonel Ballard of the Royalist army. He was also at Taunton and Truro, and finally was among those who escaped with the Prince of Wales to the Scilly Isles. He observed carefully and dispassionately the rending of human flesh, on and off the battlefield: ‘I have known pieces of splinters, etc, sometimes stick so fast in the inward parts, or to have been so inclosed, that they could by no means get them out, yet at length, upon Apostumation of the part, they have thrust forth … ’ Wiseman was endlessly curious about the human body: ‘If the parts be grown stiff with cold, as when the party hath been left in the field all night, which after a battle hath often happened (and particularly to a merry fellow, a common soldier, that used to wear an iron scull under a cap, and from thence was called by a nickname; his wounds were large, and the lips hardened with the cold, and it was well for him, his bleeding was thereby stayed)’.
Some of what he noticed was horrible. ‘Sometimes a weapon sticketh so fast, that by no art it can be extracted’, he wrote grimly. When the weapon had been drawn out, he said, the wound must be cleansed from rags ‘and aught else’, and allowed to bleed. He knew perfectly the importance of removing every scrap of fabric to prevent infection, and describes numerous cases where musketballs carried small pieces of torn cloth into a wound and infected it. He insisted that if necessary a surgeon should enlarge the wound to clean it. When gangrene set in – and Wiseman gives descriptions of several different sorts of gangrene – he suggests scarification, then the pouring in of salt and vinegar, which might have had some antiseptic impact on gas gangrene. He also knew how to stop bleeding: ‘bring the lips of the wound together by suture, and by applying such medicaments to them as have a drying and agglutinative faculty’. He also did amputations, ‘then with a good knife I cut off the flesh by a quick turn of my hand, Mr Murry putting up the flesh while I sawed the bones. After which with a few motions of my saw I separated the bone, the patient not so much as whimpering the while.’ He did at least want to spare his patients pain. But he also thought – oddly – that pain might help in the healing process.
He noticed that in war sword-wounds are frequent, ‘especially when the Horse-men fall in among the Infantry, and cruelly hack them; the poor soldiers the while sheltering their heads with their arms, sometime with the one, sometime with the other, until they be both most cruelly mangled; and yet the head fareth little the better for their defence, many of them not escaping with less than two or three wounds through the skull to the membrane, and often into the Brain. And if the men fly, and the enemy pursue, his hinder parts meet with great wounds, as over the thighs, back, shoulders, and neck … At Stirling in Scotland … one of the soldiers had such a gash thwart the nape of his neck that it was a wonder to us he lived. His wound was full of maggots; and so were those of all the rest that were inflicted on the hinder parts, they having been some days undressed.’
He turned a cold and precise eye, too, on the damage done by musketballs: ‘The figure of [musket wounds] is always round; the bullet furrows the flesh in with it, and the place by which it enters presently contracts closer, but its going out is more lax. A common soldier, shot in the breast through the sternum, lay roaring very grievously, complaining of a pain in his back. I was fetched to him, and turning him on his side I saw the bullet lie like a small wen or scrofule … the soldier ceased his crying, and acknowledged before us his pain was from the bullet in the skin. For indeed the lungs and other internal parts are seldom so sensible of pain, though wounded through.’ He died, Wiseman reports sadly.
He gave helpful advice on how to diagnose injuries to the organs: lung wounds would cause a cough and frequent sighing, while intestinal wounds – almost always fatal – were revealed by excrements and filthy discharges. After stories like this, it’s not surprising that Wiseman also records cases of madness; one man hurls himself in front of a coach, believing himself pursued by demons.
Working with primitive Civil War ordnance presented extra hazards. Ralph Hopton’s mishap with the exploding ammunition cart was not unusual. Nicholas Small of Taunton was injured when a musket he was cleaning went off by accident, tearing off most of his hand. In his petition for a pension years later he claimed he could not work. Many such petitions were received from those whose right hands had been shot away or whose arms had been torn off. Musketballs often shattered bone, creating wounds which rarely healed well, full of splinters of bone, ripe for infection; such wounds could sometimes kill months later. Sword cuts healed better.
Another problem was disease. ‘Camp fever’ ravaged both sets of armies. It may have been a type of malaria, and seems to have been brought on by exposure. The plague flared up in towns like Bristol and Oxford, and there were typhus-like diseases. Pneumonia and other fevers complicated healing.
Multiple injuries were common too. At Cropredy Bridge John Middlewick was felled by a sword cut in the face, and while he lay in the mud a horse stood on him, ‘trod out his bowels’, then a passing soldier ran him through. Unsurprisingly, he claimed after the war that his wounds had incapacitated him.
When Richard Wiseman was present at the siege of Taunton, he recorded a case so horribly graphic that it acts as a kind of summary of what must have happened to thousands of the men who fought. Written on one man’s body were all the powers of war: ‘One of Colonel Arundel’s men, in storming the works, was shot in the face by case-shot. He fell down and, in the retreat, was carried off among the dead; and laid in an empty house by the way until the next day: when, in the morning early, the colonel marching by that house heard a knocking within against the door.’
So the wounded man arose like a dreadful spectre of war:
Some of the officers, desiring to know what it was, looked in and saw this man standing by the door without eye, face, nose or mouth. The colonel sent to me … to dress the man. I went but was somewhat troubled where to begin. The door consisted of two hatches: the uppermost was open and the man stood leaning upon the other part of the door, which was shut. His face, with its eyes, nose, mouth and foremost part of the jaw, with the chin, was shot away and the remaining parts of them driven in. One part of the jaw hung down by his throat and the other part pushed into it. I saw the brain working out underneath the lacerated scalp on both sides between his ears and brows.
Wiseman’s scientific exactitude applies to his own feelings as well. He knew his limitations: ‘I could not see any advantage he could have by my dressing. But I helped him to clear his throat, where was remaining the root of his tongue. He seemed to approve of my endeavours and implored my help by the signs he made with his hands.’
Courtesy must stand in for knowledge where there was none to be had:
I asked him if he would drink, making a sign by the holding up of a finger. He presently did the like and immediately after held up both his hands, expressing his thirst. A soldier fetched some milk and brought a little wooden dish to pour some of it down his throat; but part of it running on both sides, he reached out his hands to take the dish. They gave it him full of milk. He held the root of his tongue down with one hand and with the other poured it down his throat (carrying his head backwards) and so got down more than a quart. After that I bound his wounds up.
It was all he could do. War had erased this man, as
it had so many.
XXIV The World is Turned Upside Down: The New Model Army and Naseby Fight
During the early months of 1645, Parliament’s commitment to holy war intensified. Any captured Irishman or Catholic from Ireland could be condemned to death at once. When Abingdon was attacked and five officers captured, Major-General Browne hanged them immediately. Rupert and his Parliamentarian opposite number Mytton swapped atrocities in the north, taking revenge on each other in a parody of the honour culture. Only the Earl of Essex seemed to think that he was still engaged in a gentlemanly pursuit, returning the Prince of Wales’s hawk and its falconer when they were captured. And his gentlemanliness had recently shown his profound limitations for leadership in war.
The New Model Army was both part of the trend towards holy war, and a form of resistance to it. Its building was one of the bravest acts Parliament performed in the entire war, and meant surrendering the military initiative for months at a time while it was formed. It also meant putting up with almost constant mutterings from the peace party in Parliament. From the moment the legislation to create it was passed, it was obvious that the New Model would have to succeed quickly in the field or be voted out of existence.
Recruitment was by now so difficult as to be virtually impossible. Most of what had been Waller’s army had simply gone home when it had had enough. Though it was still possible to find those of enough substance to join the cavalry and bring their own horses, the infantry was far less attractive. Elevenpence a day was a day-labourer’s wage, and even the meagre sum of eightpence a day was by no means regularly paid. Conditions were tough and rations very basic; men were expected to march and fight after meals of biscuit and cheese. Like pay, even this poor fare was by no means always available. The result was a steady stream of desertions, and plenty of mutinies; those left in what had been Waller’s army were vehemently mutinous, while Essex’s regiments had only been prevented from mutiny by prompt action on the part of that soldier’s favourite Philip Skippon, who promised them their arrears of pay.
The New Model was supposed to have 14,400 infantry, and needed to recruit 8460 new men to meet this target. The Parliamentarian heartlands of London and the south-east were given targets to levy, and few fulfilled them on time. The French ambassador saw men being rounded up in the streets of London, and then sent to Maidenhead by boat to stop them from escaping at once. Even when a rough bunch of unwilling troopers could be rounded up, they often deserted immediately. The men from Kent mutinied as soon as they had been impressed, barricading themselves into a mansion near Wrotham, and had to be put down by a full-scale military operation by the trained bands. When the Kentish levies got to Windsor they deserted and headed for home once more. It didn’t help that some of the initial conscripts were ex-Royalists. Richard Baxter thought that ‘the greatest part of the common soldiers, especially of the Foot’, were ‘ignorant men, of little religion’, and ‘the abundance of them such as had been taken prisoners, or turned out of Garrisons under the king, and had been soldiers in his army. And these would do anything to please their officers.’ But he also wrote with eloquent affection of those who served with him in Colonel Whalley’s regiment: ‘Many of my dearest friends were there, whose society had formerly been delightful to me, and whose welfare I was tender of, being men that had a deeper interest in my affections than any in the world had before those times … It was they that stuck to me, and I to them … My faithful people that purposedly went through with me so many wars and dangers.’
Baxter had begun the war by thinking that all armies were vanity, which partially explained his reluctance to join up. Now he came to see them as the Lord’s chosen people. Later, he saw them as deluded idiots. One thing that helped change his mind was his mother’s experience of war. She was in a town that was stormed, and burned, and she saw men killed before her eyes, and survivors stripped to their shifts and plundered. She was a timid woman and she never recovered. But Baxter felt certain that his own men were not capable of acts like this. He was in a crack corps: Whalley’s horse, half of Cromwell’s old Ironsides. Somehow it was those old Ironsides who set the tone for the new army.
Each of the New Model infantry regiments consisted of 1200 men arranged in ten companies. Pikemen were interfiled with musketeers. The pikemen had to be tall and strong to manage their hefty weapons, and they gave themselves a few airs as a result. There is a myth that the people of early modern England were much shorter than those of today because of poor nutrition. Archaeology suggests not: the average Londoner in 1700 was only about an inch shorter than his counterpart today, but differently shaped, with bow legs, and beefy arms, a physique suited to use of the pike, which had a heavy iron head; by the time they’d picked up their sleeping gear and rations, the pikemen had to abandon any armour or fail to move at all. The muskets were hefty affairs too. Musketeers had swords as well as guns to carry, but these were often fragile, cheap affairs that gave way in battle, so in close combat they learned to use their muskets as clubs.
Arguably they were more useful as clubs than they were as guns. The Civil War musket was both cumbersome and unreliable. It was fired by match, a long woven cord, which had to be lit and kept alight whenever there was a chance of action. In the wet and miserable weather of the Little Ice Age that chilled England in the seventeenth century, this was virtually impossible. To fire, the soldier had to ram the powder charge down the length of the muzzle, and then ram in the heavy lead ball. Then a short length of lighted match had to be fixed in the cock, which then had to be primed with a small pinch of powder; too much would make the gun explode. To do all this in a surprise attack, like the Parliamentarian charge on Byron’s ‘forlorn hope’ at Marston Moor, was very difficult indeed. Reloading was also very slow. Given the closeness with which the armies usually drew up, musketeers would often only fire one round before hand-to-hand clubbing began. To cope with this, Civil War armies usually placed musketeers six deep, so each front rank could be replaced by others with pieces primed and ready. The New Model, however, was trained in the Swedish method where three ranks fired at once; the first kneeling and the second stooping while the last rank stood. The massed fire-power proved decisive.
There were other problems with the musket which Swedish methods couldn’t solve. Since soldiers carried their charges in bandoliers, any kind of wind made it likely that a spark from someone else’s match might set them all off. It had a wide barrel, four feet long, which made it exceptionally heavy. Its range was limited; it could kill at 400 yards, but this was due to luck rather than judgement; to have any hope of accuracy, musketeers had to withhold fire until the enemy was within 150 yards. There were flintlock firing mechanisms, but they were far too expensive for the infantry; the New Model had a company of flintlock-armed men guarding artillery.
The cavalry had iron headpieces, buff-coats of thick leather, and were armed with a sword and a pair of pistols; only officers carried the lighter flintlock-fired gun, called a carbine. They had been completely won over by Rupert’s ruthless, terrifying cavalry tactics, inspired by Gustavus Adolphus. And yet Sir Charles Firth was sure that Cromwell and his men never mastered Rupert’s express speeds, relying more on perseverance than on shock tactics. But Rupert sacrificed discipline to speed; Cromwell’s men were better controlled.
What the New Model lacked was artillery. It did have fifty or so field guns, including the culverin, with its twelve-pound balls, and the tiny drakes which could fire three-pound balls. Most guns could fire only around fifteen shots an hour. They couldn’t be relied on to hit anything they were aimed at beyond around 300 paces, and were only effective against tightly-massed troops at close range. But in a battle they could be devastating.
As well as guns, the army needed food. There was an initial shipment of Suffolk cheese and bread, the meal of what John Evelyn called an honest laborious countryman, but otherwise the soldiers were supposed to buy their food locally out of their wages. The cavalry had to feed their horses as well. Since
the ordinary soldier got only eightpence a day – with Fairfax himself on ten pounds a day – this allowed only for biscuit or bread, cheese and beer. Occasionally there might be meat, as a treat. There were regimental surgeons, paid about the same as ensigns, seldom properly trained or qualified, each one aided by two surgeons’ mates.
But the New Model wasn’t only about food and guns and tactics. It was about ideas. Initially, only the Eastern Association cavalry and probably a few infantry, especially those in Skippon’s regiments, were really committed to what later became the ideology and spirit of the entire army: the idea that they were God’s saints fighting the Lord’s battles, as the ancient Hebrews had done before them. Banal though it sounds, one of the first things to begin to unite these men was the adoption of a uniform, the red coats worn in the Eastern Association troops. This was so inspirational that it survived as the standard dress of the British soldier long after the New Model’s other ideals had been abandoned. The Eastern Association cavalry had of course been portrayed in every Parliamentarian newsbook as the great God-given victors of Marston Moor. In putting on their uniform, the New Model was conceding that they were its models. It was as if they donned its ideology with its red jackets.
And just as Cromwell had been forced away from the peace party by what he took to be the unacceptable behaviour of the peacemakers, so the New Model Army more and more conflated the war with religious struggle because their opponents said they were doing so; as always, Civil War politics were often about heated reactions to propaganda. The other force driving this view of the New Model was the London radical sectarians, especially the Baptists, who volunteered for military service in the army precisely because they saw it as God’s instrument for the destruction of popery.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 50