Introduction

Summary

The spark for this book was struck as early as 1974 when – as a very young enthusiast of all things to do with the English Civil War – I read the following remarks in Brigadier Peter Young's Cavalier Army:

Cannon were most useful in siege work but counted little in battles. Their slow rate of fire, perhaps one round every three minutes if served by an expert crew, meant that there would have to be a great concentration to cause a decisive number of casualties. However, cannon did not exist in great numbers in the England of that time.

A few years later the same author's Civil War England added the further detail that guns could ‘seldom if ever’ be moved once a battle had begun, moreover the ‘rate of fire was slow, for the loading drill was complicated, and the provision of ammunition was but small’. Young was then regarded as the doyen of Civil War military history, and most historians of the Stuart period, including the remarkable C.V. Wedgewood, took his advice very seriously when it came to producing their own general histories of the wars. Opinion had obviously moved on little in the century since 1870 when H.W.L. Hime had been moved to write that the subject of artillery in the Civil Wars had ‘seldom attracted’ attention, and been ‘generally disposed of in a single sentence’.

Turning back to Young's first major, and arguably best researched, book on an English Civil War battle to discover just how few and inefficient English guns were in 1642 furnished the interesting statistic that Young believed that the Earl of Essex had a least 30 guns on the field of Edgehill. Since there were about 15,000 Parliamentarians at the battle this implied a ratio of about one gun per 500 men. The great battle of Marston Moor saw the Allied armies with 100 guns in the field, and, though most of these were Scottish light pieces, this was still one gun for about 300 men. At Cropredy Bridge, Parliament had 24 guns with its 9,500 men, a ratio of 1:400, but the Royalists had ten pieces for their 8,500, a ratio of 1:850. At Naseby in 1645 the King's army numbered about 9,000, and was accompanied by 14 pieces of ordnance, including two mortars – the ratio of guns to men here being a little under 1:650.