Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain and Ireland. During the sequence of civil wars that ran from 1638 to 1660, 4.5 per cent of the English population, 9.2 per cent of the Scottish, and 20.6 per cent of the Irish population were killed. These were catastrophes far greater than the First World War (in which 2.61 per cent of the total British population died) and more terrible even than the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.
Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt boasted that England was a ‘demi-paradise’ circled by a sea which cut it of from other nations— but that was not true. England was one part of an archipelago off the north-west coast of Europe; the English have always shared it with (amongst others) Welsh, Cornish, Scots, and Irish. These peoples have almost always been involved in some sort of struggle for control of various parts of the islands.
In 1746, the last battle on British soil was fought at Culloden. Conflict within Britain did not end, but the British state was by then strong enough to supress major rebellions at home and to project military power abroad. Marlborough had established Britain as a major military power by beating the French at Blenheim in 1704 and until 1914 the British experience of warfare would no longer be of conflict within the British archipelago, but of global campaigns to expand and defend empire.
Charles Carlton is interested in how the nations of Britain became both so steeped in warfare, and so bound together, that they were able to engage in that worldwide project. His book, This Seat of Mars, has two major strands. One is a brisk military history of Britain from 1485 to 1746 which stresses the increasing power of the centralised state which eventually became the United Kingdom. This explains how, after centuries on the side-lines, the British state came to able to marshal immense military forces. In alternating chapters, his second strand attempts to reconstruct the experiences of ordinary people caught up in those military campaigns. By imagining the corrosive stress of low intensity conflict, the shock of high intensity sieges and battles, and the chronic privations of long campaigns, Carlton explains how the British were moulded into such a martial race that they were able to control the world’s trade and a good portion of its land-mass for several generations.
Carlton recreates early modern experiences of warfare by drawing on what we know about those of soldiers in the 20th century. This promises to illuminate otherwise obscure aspects of warfare in the 16th and 17th centuries, which are largely undocumented. For example, soldiers of the period simply did not talk about having felt fear. Carlton takes this to be the result of an unwillingness to admit to what might be construed as cowardice and uses evidence from a more understanding age to get at what he thinks earlier soldiers must have felt, but were not able to describe.
This approach certainly helps us to imagine something of the impact war must have had on those who participated in it. It does, however, leave questions begged rather than answered. Carlton turns to evidence about the modern experience of war to fill in what he assumes are gaps in the evidence but, with no 17th century soldiers to ask, how can we be sure that their silences really need filling?
Perhaps in a world where sudden and violent death was a constant presence, the fear a solider felt in combat really was an unremarkable phenomenon. They may not have talked about it because it didn’t seem important to them. We should, as ever, be wary of projecting our own preoccupations upon our ancestors. That said (and a stubbornly infelicitous prose-style apart), This Seat of Mars is an informative study of how we became who we are through a series of otherwise unimaginable ordeals.
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