J. Fortescue - The History of the British Army

Lastly we come to England, where Oliver Cromwell himself sat at the head of the Provisional Government which he was honestly and unceasingly striving to settle on a permanent basis. He defined his own position accurately enough: he was a good constable set to preserve the peace of the parish. But that parish was in a terribly disturbed condition. All that the most visionary could have dreamed of in the subversion of the old order had been accomplished, had even been crowned by the execution of the King; yet still the expected millenium was not yet come. All factions of political and religious dissent, all descriptions of dreamers, of fanatics, of quacks, and of self-seekers had been welded together for the moment by the pressure of the struggle against Royalism and against the rule of alien races. That pressure removed, the whole mass fell asunder into incoherent atoms of sedition and discontent, for which Royalism, as the one element which strove for definite and attainable ends, formed a general rallying-point. Good and gallant soldiers who had followed Cromwell on many a field—Harrison, Okey, Overton—fell away into disloyalty. Sexby, who had brought the news of Preston to Westminster, became the most dangerous of conspirators. There is nothing more pathetic in history than the desertions; from Cromwell after the establishment of the Protectorate. Nevertheless the misfortune was inevitable, for an army which meddles with politics cannot hope to escape the diseases of politics. Yet, through all this, Cromwell on one point was resolute; he would not allow successful rebellion to be followed by a riot in anarchy. Come what might, he would not suffer indiscipline.

To preserve the peace, however, in such a hot-bed of plots and conspiracies was no easy matter; and before he had been eighteen months Protector, Cromwell brought military government closer home to the people by parcelling England into at first ten and then twelve military districts, each under the command of a major-general. The force at the disposal of these officers for the suppression of disorder varied in the different districts from one hundred to fifteen hundred men, and was composed almost exclusively of cavalry. It amounted on the whole to some six thousand men, all drawn from the militia, who received pay to the amount of eighty thousand pounds annually. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was rather a force of mounted constabulary than of regular cavalry, and there can be no doubt that, if order was to be preserved, such a body of police was absolutely necessary. Yet it is probable that no measure brought such hatred on the Army as this. The magnates of the counties were of course furious at this usurpation of their powers, and the poorer classes resented the intrusion of a soldier and a stranger between themselves and their old masters. After little more than a year the major-generals were abolished, to the general relief and satisfaction. Their brief reign has been forgotten by the Army, which can hardly believe that it once took complete charge of the three kingdoms and administered the government on the whole with remarkable efficiency. But the major-generals have not been forgotten by the country. The memory of their dictatorship burned itself deep into the heart of the nation, and even now after two centuries and a half the vengeance of the nation upon the soldier remains insatiate and insatiable.

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It is now time to pass to the foreign wars of the Protectorate; for though they be little remembered they fairly launched the Army on its long career of tropical conquest, and of victory on the continent of Europe.

1654.

It is not easy to explain the motives that prompted Cromwell to make an enemy of Spain. He was eagerly courted by both French and Spaniards, and it was open to him to choose whichever he pleased for his allies. The probability is that he was still swayed by the old religious hatred of the days of Elizabeth, and, like her, looked to fill his empty treasury with the spoils of the Indies. He did not perceive that the religious wars of Europe were virtually ended, and that nations were tending already to their old friendships and antagonisms as they existed before the Reformation. Be that as it may, he was hardly firm in the saddle as Protector when he began to frame a great design against the Spanish possessions in the New World. His chief advisers were one Colonel Thomas Modyford of Barbados, who had his own reasons for wishing to ingratiate himself with the Protector, and Thomas Gage, a renegade priest, who had lived long in the Antilles and on the Spanish Main and had written a book on the subject. The most fitting base of operations was obviously Barbados, which, from its position to windward of the whole Caribbean Archipelago, possessed a strategic importance which it has only lost since the introduction of steam-vessels. It lay ready to Cromwell's hand, having been an English possession since 1628, and was, if Modyford were to be believed, ready to give active assistance in the enterprise. There remained the question whether the expedition should be directed against an Island or against the Main. Gage was for the latter course, and named the Orinoco as the objective: Modyford recommended Cuba or Hispaniola,[185] and Modyford's opinion prevailed.

Gradually the design matured itself, and presently assumed gigantic proportions. A footing once established on one of the Spanish Islands to leeward, there was to be a general contest with the Spaniards for the whole of the South Atlantic. Two fleets were to be employed, one in seconding the army's operations on the Islands and making raids upon the Main, the other in cruising off the Spanish coast so as to interrupt both plate-fleets from the west and reinforcements from the east. Lastly, not England only, but New England was to play a part in the great campaign. Supplies would be one principal difficulty, but these could be furnished from English America, and not only supplies but settlers, who, trained to self-defence by Indian warfare, should be capable of holding the territory wrested from Spain. Thus the English from both sides of the Atlantic were to close in upon the Spanish dominions in the New World, and turn Nova Hispania into Nova Britannia. There was no lack of breadth and boldness in the design.

All through the latter half of 1654 mysterious preparations went forward with great activity in the English dockyards, and France, Spain, and Holland each trembled lest they might be turned against herself. But the existing organisation in England was unequal to the effort. To equip two fleets of forty and of twenty-five ships for a long and distant cruise was a heavy task in itself; but to add to this the transport of six thousand men over three thousand miles of ocean for an expedition to the tropics was to tax the resources of the naval and military departments to excess. The burden of the duty fell upon John Desborough, major-general and commissioner of the Admiralty, who was not equal to thinking out the details of such an enterprise nor disposed to give himself much trouble about them. His difficulties were increased by the rascality of contractors, and by the composition of the expeditionary force. By a gigantic error, which has not yet been unlearned, Cromwell, instead of sending complete regiments under their own officers, made up new corps, partly of drafts selected by various colonels and probably containing the men of whom they were most anxious to be rid, and partly of recruits drawn from the most restless and worthless of the nation. He returned in fact to the old system that had so often been found wanting in the days of Elizabeth, of James, and of Charles.

The distribution of command was also faulty. The military commander-in-chief was Robert Venables, who had made a reputation as a hunter of Tories in Ireland; the Admiral joined with him was William Penn, who is unjustly remembered rather as the father of a not wholly admirable Quaker than as one of the ablest and bravest naval officers of his day. But as if two commanders were not already sufficient, there were joined with them three civil commissioners, one Gregory Butler, an officer who had served in the Civil War, Edward Winslow, a civilian and an official, and the Governor of Barbados, Daniel Searle. There was of course nothing new in the presence of civil commissioners on the staff, and a general's instructions since the days of Henry the Eighth had usually bound him to act by the advice of his Council of War only; but it is abundantly evident that Winslow was employed not only as a commissioner, but as a spy on his colleagues, or on some one of them whose loyalty was suspected. It is strange that so sensible a man as Cromwell should have made such a mistake as this. Monk was the man whom he had wished to send, could he have spared him from Scotland; but failing Monk, Penn and Venables were both of them men who had shown ability in their previous service.