The keys to victory: Supplying the armies of the British Civil Wars (1639-1653)

This article is from Military History Matters issue 143

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At the outbreak of the British Civil Wars – the intertwined series of conflicts also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and sometimes simply as the English Civil Wars – the antagonists attempted to seize existing stores of arms, munitions, and equipment. Parliament took the great arsenals of the Tower of London, Hull, and Dublin – but smaller magazines existed in towns throughout the country, and many aristocrats had personal arsenals, while even the merchant guilds had their own armouries. Armies had to be fed and armed, while equipment had to be maintained and transported, and everything had to be produced or procured.

By the mid-17th century, the major centres of English arms production centred on London and Kent, the West Midlands and the Severn Valley. In Scotland, production was based largely in the central belt, chiefly in Edinburgh, while Ireland was reliant on imported arms and munitions. So, for an effective war-effort, all sides needed first to establish the necessary machinery to resource, produce or otherwise acquire the necessary materials. And then they needed to be able to transport those materials from one place to another. As Cardinal Richelieu observed at the height of the Thirty Years War: ‘history knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies, and I have witnessed how all the enterprises which were embarked on in my day were lacking for that reason alone.’

The price of war

Parliament held most of the aces – yet, despite their resources, even the Parliamentarians struggled to finance their war-effort: between 1645 and 1649, Parliament’s annual military expenditure was £1.7 million, but its revenue was £1 million a year. While less ruthless, the Royalist financial administration was operating relatively efficiently by 1643, and was managing to keep pace with Parliament. But with the more limited resources at his disposal, the King was forced to compensate merchants who were paying suppliers from their own pockets through the creation and extension of monopolies.

Royalist efforts were weakened by the fact that more of the fighting took place in Royalist territories, preventing them from maintaining effective financial machinery. The resulting insecurity had an impact on the revenue that could be raised, and necessitated increasingly extreme measures: free quarter, special levies, requisitioning, and then ultimately the looting and robbing of their own shires, rendering the countryside incapable of paying the taxes on which the Royalist war-effort depended.

The need for armies to live off the lands through which they passed placed a considerable strain on local communities; goods and services (including accommodation) would have to be paid for, normally by a system of vouchers that could be redeemed for cash. Some did get their money (Parliament’s Eastern Association probably had the best record in this respect, as ‘householders seldom had to wait for more than a year for payment’, according to one account), but the Royalist record was poorer and got worse as their cause deteriorated, until ultimately their vouchers were worthless. In Ireland and Scotland, the need to live off the land was even more pronounced: the ‘scorched-earth’ tactics of the Scots in the face of the Cromwellian invasion in 1650, for instance, almost spelt disaster for the English army.

A capital asset

Parliament’s greatest asset was London, and its ability to manufacture and supply weapons, ammunition, uniforms, and military equipment made a fundamental contribution to the Parliamentarian war-effort.