A Primer for Clann Tartan on Interpreting 1640

First Edition
Eric Ferguson
2002

Introduction

This primer is intended to provide Clann Tartan members with enough information to interpret the scenario that puts us into the Second Bishops War in 1640. The operating assumption is that members are already grounded in 1630; therefore the following pages will concentrate on the changes that occurred in the subsequent ten years and the situation that confronted the people we will be portraying.

A complete perspective on the Bishops Wars would view them in context of the wars variously known as the English Civil War, the British Civil Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Bishops Wars of 1639-40 were the start of 17 years of war in Scotland, England, and Ireland. Knowledge of these wars will not only be useful to members when answering patron questions regarding the effect of the Bishops Wars, but will be useful for those occasions when we mix with other 17th century groups, most of whom reenact the English Civil War. However, events after 1640 are beyond the pale, so to speak, and will be only briefly touched upon.

Since there will be no differences in the way we interpret our different periods, the focus will be on just historical information, not interpretive methods. The only likely change is the questions we may get from our more inquisitive patrons. Everything we’ve been doing with first person, third person, hands-on, etc. stays the same.

Some of what follows will be familiar to those who read my Captain’s Corner articles in 2002, but much of this will be new.

General Background of the Bishops Wars

During services in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on July 23, 1637, Janet Geddes registered her objection to the use of a prayer book written by bishops by throwing her stool at the Dean of the church. She thereby set in motion perhaps the biggest war in the history of Scotland, Ireland, and England, and eventually brought about the American Revolution and the changes that have resulted from it.

That may be slightly exaggerated. She did however begin the protests that culminated in the National Covenant first signed on February 28, 1638, and there‘s no question that this began the conflicts known as the English Civil War, the British Civil Wars, or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Scotland had mostly been neglected by King Charles I since he succeeded James VI, thereby following his father‘s precedent. James VI mostly ignored Scotland after he left in 1603 to take the English throne. Charles was two at the time. James had taken to calling himself James I of Great Britain.

Charles became king in 1625, but didn’t bother making his first trip to Scotland since 1603 until 1633, when he finally went to be coronated. This annoyed the Scots. They probably differed over whether they resented his ongoing neglect of Scotland or felt lucky for it when they saw how he governed England. In 1629, Charles dismissed the English parliament and began the period known as the “personal rule,” when Charles governed without the parliament until he sought funds for the Second Bishops War in April-May 1640. At least Charles’ neglect let the Scots govern themselves.
 
Conflict came over control of the Kirk --- the Prebyterian Church, which was Scotland's offical church. The structure of the presbyteries started with the grass roots, who elected their elders. The members of a presbytery included the pastors and elected elders from each congregation, and the presbytery held the power of ordination. The Anglican Church, also known as the Episcopalian Church, was run by its bishops, and the top bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was directly appointed by the king. Charles, taking seriously the English king’s role as head of the Anglican Church, determined in 1637 that all his subjects would use the new Anglican prayer book, like it or not. This required upholding the authority of appointed bishops.

When protesting Scottish Presbyterians signed the National Covenant, they weren’t asserting religious freedom as we now understand it: they declared theirs the only true faith and intended to impose it on all Scots, maybe even all Christians. However, they put their names on a document which declared a limit to royal power in matters of faith, and it was the limit of royal power that was the subject of the coming wars. Equally significant, the signers weren’t all nobles like Magna Carta and the Declaration of Arbroath. The middle classes signed too. The political thought that came from these wars formed the basis of the American Revolution.

King Charles saw the protests purely as a challenge of royal authority, and the rebels had to be brought to heel, so he decided in 1638 to plan an invasion of Scotland for spring 1639. That wasn’t much time, but the appearance of a royal army would cow the Scots.

Or maybe not. The Scottish Parliament decided to throw together its own army, generally referred to as the Covenanter army for the Covenanters who controlled the parliament. Both armies would be raw conscripts, but the Scottish army had three advantages. First, the Scots followed the Swedish conscription system and used the structure of the Presbyterian Church, which provided a grass roots organization for raising conscripts, while the king’s recruiting was quite haphazard. Second, the Scots made a point of including veterans of Danish and Swedish service in the officer corps including giving command to Alexander Leslie, who had been a field marshal for Gustavus. Probably sergeants and corporals were veterans too. The king ignored the English veterans, which were plentiful, and chose officers just by social status, so the officers were as inexperienced as the soldiers. He even turned over most of the officers between 1639 and 1640. Third, the Scottish Parliament commanded the resources of most of Scotland. The army was still short of pay, food, arms, etc.; Scotland was a poor country after all. However, Charles’ refusal to call an English parliament meant the English army was no better off. Moreover, many English, especially the Puritans, were reluctant to support a war against English speaking Protestants for a king who had abused his authority. Thus, the Scots organized and trained their army more quickly.

The Scots could have invaded England, but decided that doing so would unite the English behind the king, who was hampered by the country’s division. Instead, they let the king cross into Scotland. There was almost a battle at Kelso on June 4. The English cavalry had reports the Scottish army was bigger than themselves. Using their Swedish experience, the Scots placed their soldiers in such a way as to appear more numerous. At a parley, the Scots advised the English to retreat. They took the advice. Charles discovered that the Scots wouldn’t run at the sight of the royal army. 

The king and the Covenanters entered into negotiations which resulted in the Pacification of Berwick, wherein the king agreed to Scottish legislation asserting the primacy of the Kirk. There was no fighting between the Scots and English in this first war, but during these events there had been fighting in the north of Scotland between Covenanters and Scottish Royalists. The Royalists were defeated in the one big battle, the Brig O’ Dee (bridge over the River Dee) at Aberdeen, by the Earl of Montrose, who led the Royalist armies during the 40‘s. We can see here the source of bitterness for the civil war of the 40’s: to the Royalists, the Covenanters had risen in rebellion against their king, and rebels were worse than criminals. To the Covenanters, the Royalists had attacked while Scotland was being invaded by England, arguably a worse form of treason.

Charles was just playing for time by the treaty with the Scots. He intended a full scale invasion in 1640. He called an English parliament for the first time in 11 years to raise the funds needed. However, Parliament wouldn’t back an invasion of Scotland. Many English disliked bishops too and sympathized with the Scots, or at least distrusted the king too much to hand him so much power. Charles dismissed them after just a month, thus why this is known as the “Short Parliament,” and tried again on his own.

This English army was even worse off than the year before. Charles had stretched his financial resources and the support of the English taxpayers in 1639 to no effect. The trained bands (militias) refused to leave home, the criminals and vagrants who filled the ranks were often uncontrollable by officers or civil authorities, his taxes were of questionable legality, the bureaucracy wasn’t ready to support a war effort yet --- the English army was a complete mess and organizing was taking far longer than it should.

Charles’ plan was ambitious, at least given his resources. The Marquess of Hamilton, a Scotsman who had directed the recruitment of soldiers for Gustavus, would sail up the Firth of Forth to attack Edinburgh by sea. The main English army would assemble in the northeast around York, and an Irish army under Thomas Wentworth would be ferried to England to attack from Carlisle. Charles never found the money equip Hamilton’s fleet or ferry Wentworth’s Irishmen. He even gave up trying to garrison Berwick and Carlisle, which guarded the East and West ends of the border respectively, though he did keep a garrison in Edinburgh Castle. The castle in fact appears to have fired the first shot of the Second Bishops War when it fired upon the city and killed perhaps 30 civilians.

The Scots meanwhile decided they needed to strike while the English were still disorganized. On August 28 they attacked and overwhelmed the English at Newburn on the River Tyne, and went on to capture Newcastle upon Tyne. The English would have had a huge advantage in numbers had their army been together instead of spread all over much of England with a large chunk still sitting in Ireland. At this battle however, the Scots had the larger army, the superior artillery, the experienced officers, better training, and better generalship which resulted in a gross mismatch. In October, the Scots and Charles agreed to the Treaty of Ripon. Presbyterianism was momentarily secure, and the king had to pay to maintain the Scottish army.

An effect of the war was to secure Covenanter control over the Scottish government, though they had to keep an eye peeled for Royalist plots (even though the Covenanters never renounced the king). For the moment, the Scottish army was the best in the three kingdoms and regarded as a desirable ally should civil war break out in England. Charles was forced in November 1640 to call the English parliament which eventually overthrew and executed him (the Long Parliament). Moreover, Scotland’s successful resistance to the king must have had some influence on the Catholics in Ireland who rebelled in 1641, and caused the crisis between Charles and the English Parliament that resulted in the civil war in England that started in 1642.

The Scottish Army in 1640

We are portraying the Scottish army that invaded England in 1640. The commander was Alexander Leslie, who had fought in the 30 Years War and risen to the rank of Field Marshall under Gustavus. He was made the first Earl of Leven by Charles after the Bishops Wars. He was also given command of the Scottish army sent to Ulster, and the Scottish army sent into England in 1643. Another general was Major General Robert Monro, the same Monro who wrote his memoirs of his time in Danish and Swedish service.  He commanded a regiment in the Bishops Wars, and was second in command in Ulster until Leslie was recalled, and he commanded the army in Ulster until he was imprisoned by the English Parliamentarians.

The officer ranks were a mixture of veterans and socially prominent men. Colonels were chosen for social status, while lieutenant colonels had to be veterans, and appear to have actually run the regiments. Similarly, captains had to have high social status while lieutenants ran the companies. Sergeants, corporals, and rotmasters were probably veterans, while private soldiers were mostly green conscripts.

A key difference between this army and the Scots recruited for Denmark and Sweden is the way it was recruited. The Scottish regiments of the 20’s and 30’s were a hodgepodge of impressed men, poor men, and professional soldiers. The officers of the Bishops Wars didn’t have to spend so much time convincing men to join. Using the presbyteries' organization of their local areas, each locality had to produce a specified number of men. Ministers and elders had an intimate knowledge of their communities, and so knew who had valuable trades, who held steady jobs, who were strangers or masterless men, who got caught stealing, getting drunk, or missing church. They tended to pick the less desirable men for soldiers, though the more respectable working class men would be included too, and the more prominent men could enter the army as officers. It was a more democratic army than the refuse from the jails the English were putting together.

Local governments had the initial responsibility for arming soldiers and paying them for the first 40 days in accordance with feudal custom, at which point the central government was supposed to take over. In practice, the central government never had enough money and as the wars dragged on, and local governments became responsible for more and more.

A soldier’s pay was six shillings a day. There were 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings to a pound. A Scottish pound was worth one-twelfth of an English pound. An English soldier’s pay was six pence a day, so the pay was actually equal. However, the pay was dropped to four shillings a few years later as money grew scarce.

There were some clothing issues, typically the cheap hodden gray ubiquitous in the lowlands. Some Highlanders who crossed the border with Leslie were issued with common coats and breeches, making them indistinguishable from Lowlanders, and making it possible for us to play Highlander while dressing Lowlander. Soldiers always would have been somewhat on their own for providing clothing, so they never would have been quite uniformed. At some point, probably after the Bishops Wars, the red coat came to be the mark of a veteran for both English and Scottish soldiers. Officers still looked like any European, except that they commonly took to wearing the identifiably Scottish blue bonnet.

Typical infantry weapons were still muskets and pikes. Arms were in chronically short supply, forcing the Scots to use a higher proportion of pikes to muskets than was typical under Gustavus. Flint weapons were scarce and gunsmiths in Britain who knew how to make them almost non-existent, so throughout the civil wars all sides relied on matchlocks. British gunsmiths made matchlocks as quickly as they could, which wasn’t nearly fast enough for either side. Both the Scots and the king were buying muskets in the Netherlands, and scraping up everything they could in private hands. Consequently, the muskets would have been a complete hodgepodge of styles and calibers. In other words, the mixture of muskets we have at our events would be typical.

Some soldiers were equipped with halberds. Highlanders in particular might show up with bows, but unlike in Swedish service, they sometimes got to keep them. Swords were still assumed to be a soldiers sidearm, since observers thought it worth mentioning that they were lacking, but shortages meant most soldiers never received them. Armor likewise was in such short supply that even pikemen typically went without. The motley collection of swords and armor we show the public is likely even more accurate for 1640 than 1630.

Before the modern boot camp was invented, training was somewhat haphazard. It was done when time allowed, which meant it might have to wait behind traveling, pitching camp, and building fortifications. The Scots did a better job than the English of finding time for it, or perhaps experienced officers and NCOs made it go faster, thus why striking in late August seemed like a good idea --- more time might have let the English training catch up. Scottish conscripts would have been marched off to the nearest leaguer and trained until they had to move.

Scottish veterans of the Wars in Germany used what they knew and trained their recruits in Swedish tactics. Since Monro rose through the Swedish army, wrote down his version of drill, and was a general, we can be pretty certain that what he described was very close to what was really done. Monro didn’t describe artillery much being an infantry officer, but the Scots’ tactics at Newburn and advantage over the English in artillery indicates that the artillery likewise used veteran soldiers and Swedish training.

Over the Border

The Scots’ decision to strike was no surprise to the English. They knew Scottish preparations were ahead of theirs, and as the Scottish army gathered, the English tried to concentrate their forces in a defensive position around Newcastle upon Tyne, in Northumbria. They further guessed the Scots would try to ford the River Tyne at the crossing at Hexham, 20 miles away, so as to attack Newcastle from the less fortified south. However, the Scots showed up at Newburn, about six miles upriver from Newcastle. The English rallied what forces they could and built a couple breastworks to try to stop the Scots from getting across the river, but the choice of location gave the Scots an advantage of roughly 9,000 to 3,000 in numbers. Moreover, the Scots had 40-80 cannon, 5-10 times the English artillery, and had managed to conceal much of it in some woods.

The Scots had to wait for the tide to go out before attempting a crossing. The battle started before that when an English musketeer fired at a Scottish cavalryman as he watered his horse at the river bank. Some Scottish musketeers returned fire, and the battle escalated from there.

The Scots used their huge advantage in artillery to blast the English breastworks, and the successful concealment of the artillery in the woods gave the Scots clear shots. The Scottish cavalry attempted a crossing when the tide ran low enough, but the English musketeers were able to repel it. The Scots continued the bombardment and forced the English to retreat from their breastworks. The second cavalry charge was briefly blunted by the English cavalry, but at this point they received no support from their own artillery or infantry. They too were forced to retreat when the Scottish musketeers began crossing, and at this point the English were in disorganized retreat. The English abandoned Newcastle and the Scots occupied it, giving them control of northern England. The war ended with the Treaty of Ripon on October 26. Charles was forced to pay for the maintenance of the Scottish army to prevent them living off the land, so to speak, and he had to call the English Parliament into session, where the Covenanters expected more sympathy with their cause.

Interpretive Changes for Clann Tartan

As mentioned earlier, the clothing and equipment we’ve been using to interpret 1630 serve at least as well for 1640. The core of our character backgrounds don’t need to change at all. What we need to do is fill in the last ten years.

While even officers might have had only a dim understanding of the issues of the Wars in Germany, the issues of this war are so salient in our characters’ everyday lives that even the common soldier and lower class woman will have some idea of what’s going on, and probably an opinion, albeit likely an opinion parroted from what came from the preacher’s pulpit. Church attendance was almost mandatory at this time, and religion was inextricably linked with politics, so even if someone wanted to avoid knowing what was going on, they would probably know something. It’s also possible an enlisted man or his family members would be sympathetic to the Royalists but figure he had no choice in the matter, though he wouldn’t let his officers know (soldiers of all sides were generally impressed or conscripted regardless of their sympathies). The Royalist rising in 1639 probably told every Scot that a civil war was possible. 

The key change for soldiers is this is a national army, not a mercenary army. The army of 1639 was disbanded, the army of 1640 expected the same, and it was reduced to three regiments in 1641, so both professionals and conscripts are temps. Officers were chosen with an eye to their support for the Covenant, and even those who didn’t support it or care must have considered repelling an English invasion more important than supporting the king, besides the chance a war offered for advancement (like Leslie and Monro). Soldiers’ opinions mattered less since they were mostly conscripts, but some volunteered, probably mostly the veterans who became NCOs. There was no chance of going off to the continent or having to serve for years, but it was still a chance for adventure and getting away form home. Like in 1630, a poor man could figure on pay, clothes, and regular meals.

The army moved quickly when it invaded, indicating it carried a small camp on the march likely including a lot of sleeping in the open and eating cold meals. The tendency to recruit single men over married men would have limited the number of families. When our camp is heavily female, that’s easily explained by the bulk of the men being off cutting firewood, patrolling, training, and when we’re in garrison or camped long term there would be a lot of construction work building breastworks and walls. Local civilians would certainly be coming around to try to do business with an army needing probably everything. Even while in England, Scottish civilians make sense since some families would have come along to do laundry, mending, and such.

Even though we’re interpreting the start of one of the biggest wars in Scottish history, we have to mindful that our characters don’t know such is the case. They may guess that the fighting with the king isn’t done, or that a civil war is coming, and they may be quite worried for the immediate future, but they don’t know what’s coming. This may be made understandable to patrons by comparing it to the little Americans could have guessed at the start of the American Revolution, Civil War, or Vietnam War.