The Furie of the Ordnance: Artillery in the English Civil War (review)

The historiography of English Civil War armies has on the whole not been very kind to guns and gunners. According to Peter Young – in many ways the 'father' of the serious study of the art of war in this period – artillery was a subject that was not worth bothering with. Most armies, true, dragged a number of field guns along with them, but on the field they were of little use. Too immobile to be moved very far, the pieces could not even do very much damage, being hopelessly inaccurate and slow to load, as well as provided with little in the way of ammunition. Meanwhile, the problem was worsened still further by the fact they were deployed in 'penny packets', and crewed by men who had no notion of such refinements as enfilade fire. At best, then, all that could be expected of them was a desultory preliminary bombardment that might or might not kill a few of the enemy. If their owners were on the attack, their contribution then ended forthwith: incapable of indirect fire, no sooner had the infantry and cavalry moved forward, than they were completely masked. If, by contrast, the troops they were with were on the defensive, things were a little better – as the opposing side closed, they would inevitably inflict a few casualties – but, once matters dissolved into a general mêlée, all the gunners could do was to abandon their pieces and seek shelter – or, conceivably desert to the other side (implicit in at least some accounts is the idea that gunners were devoted not to the side that happened to employ them, but to the guns they served: no sooner had the latter been over-run, then, than they would simply join the other side).

Except when it came to sieges, artillery was therefore neglected. However, what appears to have escaped the traditional view is that, as King and Parliament alike lavished the 'sinews of war' on their cannon, it follows that artillery formed a vital part of the seventeenth-century battleline. Such, at least, is the recognition that lies at the heart of Stephen Bull's new book. On the very first page we learn that guns were far more numerous in the English Civil War than has often been assumed – indeed, that, in reality, commanders such as Rupert and Cromwell often fielded more-or-less the same ratio of guns to men as, say, Wellington and Napoleon. There follow chapters on seventeenth-century guns and gunnery, the supply of artillery in England prior to 1642, the struggle engaged in by both sides to equip themselves with decent artillery trains, the equally desperate struggle to protect mediaeval castles and city walls with a variety of cannon-proof earthworks, and the use of artillery in sieges and on the battlefield. All are equally informative and well-written, but, given that siege warfare is already well-chronicled, it is the material on battle that is the most important. From this we learn that the use of cannon could be devastating – the accounts of men wounded in this fashion are as graphic as they are moving – that artillery pieces were much more versatile than is genuinely admitted, that the science of gunnery was advancing apace at the time of the Civil War, and, finally, that the generals of the period often made excellent use of the resources at their disposition (though Bull's net could, it is true, have been thrown wider in this respect: while he discusses Edgehill and Marston Moor, there is no mention of Cheriton, where Sir Ralph Hopton appears to have foreshadowed later practice by amassing the bulk of his guns in a commanding position to the left rear of his line). Still more interestingly, perhaps, we see that such was the importance that was placed upon artillery...