[A-List] The legacy of Oliver Cromwell

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The anonymous reviewer here neglects to mention that Frank Kitson authored a
notorious 1971 book, "Low Intensity Operations", which set the tone for the
British Army's activities in Northern Ireland from the early 70s onwards.

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OLIVER'S ARMY DAYS

Books: Old ironsides: the military biography of oliver cromwell by frank
kitson (weidenfeld & nicolson, £14.99)
The Sunday Herald, 14 March 2004

WHO - or what - was Oliver Cromwell? Was he a renegade Englishman who
engineered the downfall and death of his king? Or was he a 17th century
Hereward The Wake, a hero from the fens, who felled a tyrant? Was he Ireland
's most brutal oppressor? Did he force a political union on Scotland because
he saw the future shape of the United Kingdom? Was he a politician who took
to soldiering? Or was he a military genius who happened to have been a
politician before finding his true calling? They're the kind of questions
historians have been chewing over ever since Cromwell died in 1658.

And while General Frank Kitson's latest book does not set out to answer
them, he makes a decent fist of assessing Cromwell's soldierly achievements,
which are all the more remarkable for the fact Cromwell's military career
lasted no more than 10 years - from 1642 to 1652. Any man capable of turning
a bunch of East Anglian farming lads into the most efficient cavalry
regiment in Britain (the "Ironsides") was plainly special. As General Julian
Thomson says of Cromwell in his foreword: "Perhaps above all, he was a great
trainer."

Cromwell was certainly not among those high-born Britons who automatically
(and often disastrously) led armies in times of crisis. Born into a minor
gentry family in Cambridgeshire, he took his Puritan beliefs into parliament
when he became a member in 1628. When the hostility between parliament and
Charles I came to blows in the early 1640s, he was given the job of raising
and training a troop of cavalry to serve under the Earl of Essex. Within a
short time, Cromwell's troop had become a regiment and he was one of
parliament's rising military stars.

Cromwell's first major engagement was at Marston Moor in October 1643. It
was a closely-fought and bloody business. Cromwell played his part, but it
wasn't his victory; Marston Moor was largely won by the tactical skills of
parliament's Scots allies like the Earl of Leven, Lawrence Crawford, Sir
James Lumsden and Sir David Leslie who were battle-hardened warriors.
According to Kitson, their expertise was crucial.

The battle at Marston Moor ended (more or less) what is now seen as the
first Civil War. The second broke out in March 1648 with a series of
Royalist uprisings across England. At which point the Scots - with that
unerring ability to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory - switched sides,
took up the King's cause and invaded England only to be trounced by Cromwell
at Preston. With some justification, Cromwell now saw the Scots as
treacherous turncoats and Scots prisoners of war were treated harshly.
Hundreds were shipped as slaves to the Americas. After pushing through the
execution of Charles I in January 1650, Cromwell turned his attention to
Ireland. His name is still used as a curse in Ireland over the massacres at
Drogheda and Wexford. As Kitson points out, this is unfair. Almost all those
who died at Drogheda were "old English" Royalists or Irish Protestants while
the Wexford killings were carried out against his orders. Much more deadly,
in the long run, was the "Cromwellian settlement" which handed over almost
all the best land in Ireland to Cromwell's troops .

Once he'd brought Ireland to heel, the Lord General, as he then was, crashed
into Scotland in 1651, routed a large Scots army under David Leslie at
Dunbar, dispensed with the Scots parliament and government, and declared a
union of Scotland with England. In his way, Cromwell was a more effective
"hammer of the Scots" than Edward I. And when a Royalist force of Scots
struck down the west side of England, Cromwell raced from Edinburgh to crush
them at Worcester. Kitson is right to claim that, "No more perfect
instrument of military power than the New Model Army . has ever fought on
English soil".

The book has its share of surprises . For example, the renowned New Model
Army was not raised by Cromwell, but by his boss, "Black Tom" Fairfax.
Cromwell's cavalry tactics were largely modelled on those of that dashing
Royalist general, Prince Rupert of the Rhine (a rather stern Calvinist). I
had no idea that the sectarian rivalry between Independents and English
Presbyterians was so fierce; in fact, it threatened the coherence of the New
Model Army.

So how does Cromwell rate as a soldier? Does he rank with Europe's great
commanders? "It is difficult to compare Cromwell with the great captains of
history," writes Kitson. "For one thing, he never fought as the commander of
an army against a really high-class enemy commander. Nor did he ever have to
plan or execute a campaign with an ally."

But Kitson says Cromwell embedded something in Britain's military culture
that has never been lost. "Before Cromwell, armies were raised for a
specific purpose," he writes, "used and disbanded with nothing to show for
their existence. Since Cromwell, although regiments have been raised and
disbanded, there has been a thread of continuity running through the army as
a whole. In the same way that Blake is regarded as the father of the Royal
Navy, so should Cromwell be regarded as the father of the British Army."

This is an informed, very workmanlike book. Plainly, Kitson admires Cromwell
the soldier if not Cromwell the statesman. But I did find the book light on
technical information. Where, for example, did 17th century Britain produce
its firearms, cannon and ammunition? How long did it take to train a
musketeer? And I could have done with a "timeline" to keep track of the
dates. But these are (relatively) minor beefs. Kitson's book is a very
useful addition to the literature on that extraordinary Cambridgeshire
squire whose talent as a soldier saw off one of the worst of the Stuarts and
made him Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.