English Army
The English Army was the army of the Kingdom of England from 1661 to 1707. It was raised by King Charles II after the Stuart Restoration of 1660 saw him ascend to the English throne, and consisted partly of personnel who were veterans of either the Royalist units Charles II maintained while exiled in France or the New Model Army. The English army was the second standing army of the English state after the New Model Army, and was raised at the same time as the Irish and Scottish armies.
It consisted of a number of infantry, cavalry and artillery units, and fought in numerous conflicts in both Great Britain and abroad, including the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch wars, Nine Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession. The first English marines, which later became the Royal Marines, were formed as part of the English Army in 1664. In 1707, England was merged with the Kingdom of Scotland under the Acts of Union 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the English Army was merged with its Scottish counterpart to form the British Army.
Origins
Primitive steps towards standing armed forces began in the Middle Ages, the Assize of Arms of 1252 issued by King Henry III provided that small landholders should be armed and trained with a bow, and those of more wealth would be required to possess and be trained with sword, dagger and longbow. That Assize referred to a class of Forty shilling freeholders, who became identified with 'yeomanry', and states "Those with land worth annual 40s–100s will be armed/trained with bow and arrow, sword, buckler and dagger".Tudor and Stuart organisation
Prior to the English Civil War in 1642 the English Tudor and Stuart monarchs maintained a personal bodyguard of Yeomen of the Guard and the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms or "gentlemen pensioners", and a few locally raised companies to garrison important places such as Berwick on Tweed, Portsmouth, and Calais. Troops for foreign expeditions were raised on an ad hoc basis in either country by its King, when required. This was a development of the feudal concept of fief.In practice, noblemen and professional regular soldiers were commissioned by the monarch to supply troops, raising their quotas by indenture from a variety of sources. A Commission of Array would be used to raise troops for a foreign expedition, while various Militia Acts directed that the entire male population who owned property over a certain amount in value, was required to keep arms at home and periodically train or report to musters. The musters were usually chaotic affairs, used mainly by the Lord Lieutenants and other officers to draw their pay and allowances, and by the troops as an excuse for a drink after perfunctory drill.
English Civil War
In 1642, at the start of the English Civil War both the Royalists and Parliament raised men when and where they could, and both claimed legal justification. Parliament claimed to be justified by its own recent "Militia Ordinance", while the king claimed the old-fashioned "Commissions of Array". For example, in Cornwall the Royalist leader Sir Ralph Hopton indicted the enemy before the grand jury of the county for disturbing the peace, and expelled them by using the posse comitatus. In effect, both sides assembled local forces wherever they could do so by valid written authority.After two years of ruinous but indecisive military campaigning, Parliament passed the Self-denying Ordinance, and created the New Model Army, the first professional standing army in Modern English history. An experienced soldier, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was appointed its Lord General.
The New Model Army proved supreme in field, no more so than in the Second English Civil War which was succinctly described by Sir Winston Churchill:
From its foundation, the New Model Army adopted social and religious policies which were increasingly at odds with those of Parliament. The Army's senior officers formed another faction, opposed both to Parliament and to the more extreme radicals within the lower ranks.
In the aftermath of the Second English Civil War, Parliament was made subservient to the wishes of the Army Council whose leading political figure was Oliver Cromwell. In an episode known as Pride's Purge, troops used force to prevent members of the House of Commons opposed to the Army Council from attending Parliament. The resulting Rump Parliament passed the necessary legislation to have King Charles I tried and executed by beheading, and to declare England a Commonwealth.
The next two years saw the New Model Army invade first Ireland and then Scotland defeating their armies and occupying their territory. The New Model Army with the aid of English militias easily defeated a predominantly Scottish Royalist army under the command of Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651 bringing the Civil War to an end.
Interregnum
During the Interregnum the power of all the republican experiments in governance relied on the military might of the New Model Army, which, whenever it was called upon, was easily able to meet the challenges of its enemies, both foreign and domestic.Two particularly notable events of the interregnum were to have long-lasting effects. The first was political; the army's complete seizure of power when Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653 is the closest to a coup d'état that England has had, and the subsequent Rule of the Major-Generals. The other was the Battle of the Dunes, where soldiers of the New Model Army fighting in their red-coats astonished both their French allies and Spanish enemies by the stubborn fierceness of their assault up a sand-hill high and strongly defended by Spanish veterans who were forced to retreat.
It was only after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the loss of his influence that the other members of the army could not agree on an alternative to the restoration of Charles II. Even so, it was under the firm guidance and with the agreement of General George Monck of the New Model Army that the restoration of the monarchy took place in 1660.
Stuart Asquith argues:
Restoration
On 26 January 1661, Charles II issued the Royal Warrant that created the first regiments of what would become the British Army, although Scotland and England maintained separate military establishments until the Acts of Union 1707. A third military establishment, the Irish Army also existed in the Kingdom of Ireland. For some of his enforced exile King Charles II had lived at the court of Louis XIV; he had witnessed the changes introduced in France into the organisation of the troops maintained in time of peace as well as of war. On his return to England in 1660, Charles took measures to support his recently restored throne on the fidelity of his soldiers; he moreover endeavoured to fix the hitherto unstable basis of a military government. As no system is improvised, a precedent for the innovation was to be found in the history of England. Two regiments created in the reign of Henry VIII, still subsist, the Gentlemen Pensioners and the Yeomen of the Guard formed in those days a sort of transition between the system of accidental armies and permanent armies.This latter state of things was however so contrary to the constitutional customs of England that Charles II introduced it by degrees, gradually filling up the cadres of his battalions and, although contemporary writers considered it a formidable army, it did not exceed 5,000 men. King Charles put into these regiments those Cavaliers who had attached themselves to him during his exile on the European continent and had fought for him at the Battle of the Dunes against the Roundheads of the Protectorate and their French allies. For political expediency he also included some of the elements of the New Model Army. The whole force consisted of two corps of horse and five or six of infantry. It is, however, on this narrow and solid basis that the structure of the English army was gradually erected. The horse consisted of two regiments the Life Guards ; and The Blues, formed by Lord Oxford, out of some of the best New Model Army horse regiments. The foot regiments were Grenadier Guards, the Coldstream Guards, the Royal Scots, and the Second Queen's Royals.
File:Rhc-charles2.jpg|thumb|upright|A 1676 statue of Charles II in ancient Roman dress by Grinling Gibbons has stood in the Figure Court of the Royal Hospital Chelsea since 1692.|alt=Gilt statue
It will thus be seen that the military system prevailed in England almost at the same time as in France; the two people, however, hailed in a very different manner an innovation, which changed, especially in time of peace, the character of the armed force. In France, under the absolute rule of Louis XIV, it does not appear that the establishment of standing armies met with the shadow of opposition. This was not the case in free England. Pamphleteers wrote tracts voicing the fear of a people who within living memory had experienced the Rule of the Major-Generals and had liked neither the imposition of military rule, nor the costs of keeping the New Model Army in being when the country was not at war with itself or others. People also remembered the "Eleven Years' Tyranny" of Charles I and feared that a standing army under royal command would allow monarchs in the future to ignore the wishes of Parliament.