The Seventeenth Century

I have seen in more than one place, so it must be true, historians grumbling that there is not very much published in paperback about the Seventeenth Century, at least by comparison with the Sixteenth. I suspect they mean about England, or the British Isles, and are excluding academic historiography from that. ‘Paperback’ seems to indicate a certain popularity. I have seen it said that yet another book about Mary, Queen of Scots, can be predicted and sold, while one about Anne of Denmark is likely to get a ‘who is that, then’ sort of response.

This may well be true. There is something much more exciting and romantic about the Tudors than the Stuarts. After all, the Tudors have a usurper, a sickly boy, a tragic queen (or two), a woman who sacrifices love (of an aristocratic sort, of course) for the duty of queenship (unlike her cousin) and whatever you want to make of Henry VIII. As for the Stuarts, we have a Scot, of, perhaps, questionable sexuality, one who got his head cut off, a military dictatorship, a Merrie Monarch, one who didn’t last and a Dutchman as kings. Perhaps the appeal of the Sixteenth Century is a bit clearer.

As I said, this rather excludes academic debate over the Seventeenth (or Sixteenth) Century. The academy, unfortunately, usually talks to itself, even in these days of Research Impact Assessments. These latter, by the way, is why you often get rather half-baked research appearing on the end of the news. The university and research funders have forced the academic to go public before they are ready. Those of you with long memories may recall the cold fusion fiasco of the late 1980s.

But I digress; or at least, before I digress to far afield, the situation seems to me to be a bit different in wargaming. In Tudor England there was not a huge quantity of fighting, so not much of the period is wargame-able. There were, of course, a few rebellions against Henry VIII, and a couple against Elizabeth, but these really stood little chance against the might of even the Tudor state. There are also various rebellions in Ireland, but these can have political resonances even today and often get overlooked.

The big event in late Tudor England was, of course, the Armada, and that is high on some wargamer’s list. I have, of course, run a narrative campaign of my own set in the period. Actually, for a monarch who really was averse to warfare, because of the cost in both financial terms and human life, Elizabeth I spent much of the reign with her realm at war. To her credit they were mostly defensive wars and, probably to the wargamer’s dismay, did not result in too many field battles in which English forces were involved.

A reason for the relative lack of interest in Elizabeth’s wars might be due to Oman, of course, who did not think that too much interesting occurred militarily during her reigns, and Cruickshank’s Elizabeth’s Army which rather implied that it was corrupt, ineffective and inefficient. Well, maybe, but you do not see many late Tudor armies running around.

The opposite is true for the Seventeenth Century, of course. The English Civil War dominates the wargaming scene after a quiet forty years or so. Following on from that there are the Anglo-Dutch Wars, war against Spain, and then the whole complex of events starting in 1685 and culminating in the War of Spanish Succession. I see an increasing amount of this around, which is an interesting trend which I am not going to try to analyse.

On the whole, then, wargaming, focussed on England and the home nations is in opposition to the historiographical trend. There is, in my estimation, a fair bit more of it than Sixteenth Century wargaming. When we come to continental warfare, of course, the Sixteenth Century tends to strike back, particularly with the Italian Wars and, perhaps, occasionally the French Wars of Religion. The Thirty Years War and allied conflicts of the Seventeenth Century get less of a look in, as do the eastern wars of the Ottomans, Venetians, Muscovites, Poles and Austrians, even though the Austrians made spectacular gains in the period, and the 1685 siege of Vienna was a stunning victory.

Even further afield, the Seventeenth Century was that in which it could be argued, colonialism got going, with extensive contact between musket armed Europeans and natives of every range of sophistication from Africa to India, Japan and China. This early colonial adventuring gets, it seems to me, little attention, except if pirates are added in, in which case more light-hearted games, or role-playing scenarios, come to the fore.

Going back to the paperback thing, I suspect I might have hit a limiting factor on wargaming the Seventeenth Century. There is not a huge amount published on the period in affordable, more popular history. While Wedgwood's books are excellent, they are getting on a bit now and some of her narrative assumptions might be looking a bit threadbare. There are a few other works which count, but really, as historians generally, and in particular military historians have not until recently been particularly interested in battles and campaigns (often dismissed as ‘drums and trumpets’) and more popular writers cannot gain access particularly easily to academic work and so tend to rely on older writings, there is a bit of a deadlock.

This is a bit of a shame. I am sure there is interesting work going on at the moment in academic history, particularly with respect to the Protectorate and its military adventures, but it is rather hard, or takes a generation or so, to emerge into the public, or wargaming, consciousness. There are signs of hope, such as the Helion ‘Century of the Soldier’ series, but the danger is there that the wargamer is simply overwhelmed with information and books (and, if you get them all, they are not cheap).

Still, an interesting paradox. I suspect that there may be other historical periods to which the above apply, and which might remain under-investigated by wargamers. But I don’t know what they might be.