An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585–1702 (review)

In An Apprenticeship in Arms, Roger Manning locates the ‘origins’ of the British Army in seventeenth-century Europe, a time and place plagued by turbulent religious and dynastic warfare, and explains that the army’s development during this period was the result of a symbiotic dynamic between Europe and the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. During that bellicose century, the three kingdoms came to form an important pool of officers and men for European armies. Their recruitment was aided and abetted by the rulers of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who regarded European military service as a social safety valve; a form of social cleansing designed to rid their society of its criminals, vagrants, and unemployed; a field academy or apprenticeship for its officers to learn and perfect their knowledge of continental tactics and technologies; and an arms-length means of influencing European politics.

In return, Europe came to exert a formative influence on English, Scottish, and Irish society and politics, and on the development and character of the future British Army, especially the formation of its professional officer class. Many veterans of the continental wars of the period returned home to play a decisive role in the bloody civil wars fought in the three kingdoms (the origins of which Manning situates in Europe), including those fighters in the entourage of William of Orange’s 1688 invasion force. William’s enterprise was one, Manning points out, that William could not have contemplated without the military assistance of the Anglo-Dutch and Scots Brigades. Upon his ascension, William brought important administrative reforms and state-building techniques to the three kingdoms newly under his rule, including a fiscal and banking system essential to the support and sustenance of a professional army. In short, Manning’s study provides a refreshingly Eurocentric perspective on the seventeenth-century ‘origins’ of the British Army and, in the process, demonstrates how European politics, with its dynastic and religious imperatives, influenced English, Scottish, and Irish civil conflict and society.

Nonetheless Manning’s work is grounded, solidly and centrally, in the history of the three kingdoms. The Irish wars and their atrocities the subsequent suppression of Scotland and Wales during the Civil War, the decay of a military tradition during the Restoration, and its recovery after William’s relatively easy conquest of the three kingdoms are all explained by Manning within the shifting alliances of class, region, and religion, crosscut by the politics of personality and ambition.

Manning employs a lifetime of scholarship and extensive primary research on this subject and its context to produce a well-written, authoritative, and sophisticated analysis that is informed by a broad, comparative perspective. A sharp critic of the Whig interpretation of this period – its objectives, politics, and personalities – Manning examines the debate and resistance within British society to the substitution of a military hierarchy for a social one within its armed forces, and the creation of a more rational, modern professional army based upon merit and expertise. He explains the military’s ‘corrosive’ effect upon aristocratic society, culture, and warfare; its dilution of regional identities, which created a sense of belonging before the Act of Union; and how these issues played themselves out in the complex politics of the three kingdoms.

An authoritative reference for students of seventeenth-century British and European military and political history, Manning’s study is essential reading for an understanding of the seventeenth-century ‘origins’ of the British Army.