Go East Young Man

As the regular reader (and there is only one, especially given that it is August and everyone seems to be on holiday) of the blog will know, I have been digging out old soldiers and rebasing them. Overall, it has been a slightly strange experience. Some bases I have pulled out of their drawers (I mean storage, of course. Stop that snickering in the corner), and greeted like old friends. I have not seen them, I would estimate, for over 15 years, and yet I know exactly who they are, what they are and how they behave. Others, of course, I have to sit and puzzle over, and, occasionally, resort to my army lists (DBR 100 AP armies) to establish exactly what the troop type might be.

The first fruits of the rebasing project are now finished and downstairs in the snug. These are the Poles and the Muscovites. The point of the project is not just to rebase all these toy soldiers. Remarkably, for me at least, the idea is to have a few wargames as well. Thus, the creative juices of the wargamer were set to devise a scenario with narrative potential involving the aforementioned armies, namely early modern Poles and Muscovites. Fortunately, as any wargamer will know, these two armies spent a fair bit of the early modern era at war.

The upshot was as follows.

 The picture shows the edge of a recently built Russian town and fort complex, Tsarputinsberg and part of its outer defences. The garrison consists mostly of expendable ‘Western’ mercenaries that are armed as conventional pike and shot. These are operating the heavy cannon in the earthworks and providing a base of arquebusiers as back up.

The building of the fort and town has not gone unnoticed, and it has been under fairly desultory siege by a Polish Commonwealth army for a while. Tsarputinsberg, therefore, could do with some resupply, and you can see the convoy on the road. It is escorted by a Muscovite army consisting of mounted Boyar cavalry, some infantry (including a couple of bases of Streltsi) and a few Cossacks. The convoy consists of 14 bases of assorted wagons, pack horses and mules.

Naturally, the Poles would prefer that the convoy did not arrive, and so have moved some of the besieging army around the defences to intercept it. They have just broken cover, to the left, the Hussars (far end) and Pancerni (middle distance) riding over the hill in the best traditions of Taras Bulba. Actually, in the best tradition of the only bit,I think I remember of the film, which consisted of (I suspect) Yul Brenner waving forward a long line of Cossacks over a hill to charge, well, someone. Memory does not serve as to whom, and although I have read the book (which isn’t great, as I recall, although 19^th Century Russian literature is not my thing) is, I suspect, rather different from the film.

Anyway, the Polish plan is to block the road just out of artillery range of the fort with the war wagons (you cannot have an early modern Polish army without war wagons and Hussars, now, can you?) supported by the infantry you can see in the left foreground. Meanwhile, the cavalry will attack down the hill, seize the convoy and all will be well with the world. The Muscovite plan is to block the Pole for long enough for at least half the convoy to get to safety.

I do not know if it is just me, my rule or wargaming more generally, but ambushes are very difficult for the defender to succeed at. I noted before that under my Polemos: SPQR rules the only way I had found for the Gauls to win was to ambush the Romans. The same sort of thing happened here.

The picture shows the battlefield at the end of the game. You can see that parts of the convoy have been captured and the rest will shortly follow. To the right are the fleeing remnants of the central block of Boyars. Even if the Muscovites had held on a bit longer, it does not look as though any of the supplies will get through.

So, what happened? If you look closely you will see that the Hussars have not moved, and nor have the far block of Muscovite cavalry. This amused me no end. The Hussars, as we know, are the original class ‘A’ loonies under the Gush WRG rules, or ‘T1M1’ under Tercio. The sort of troops I could never afford on my original schoolboy wargaming budget. Here, they pick up a plus one in the rules for being self-proclaimed elite troops, and another plus one for being uphill of the enemy.

An awful lot in the rules depends on timing, seizing the tempo at the right moment to get your charge in. The Muscovites did that and the central block (together with the general, who went down fighting) bravely charged uphill, outnumbered, at the Polish pancerni and, after a swirling cavalry action, lost, as you can see. The Boyar at the far end quite sensibly, in my view, refused to charge the Hussars uphill. In the Polish bound, rather to my surprise, the Hussars refused to charge the Boyars, even though they are elite and were uphill. Dice can be odd things at times. The Muscovites were quite happy with this result, as you can imagine. Presumably, the Hussars did not want to get their lances dirty, or something.

Anyway, that situation lasted for the whole game – the Hussars failed to charge at least three times. As you can see, even at the end of the game, the stand-off continued. The battle was won and lost in the middle, where the Muscovites fought bravely but numbers usually tell in cavalry actions and they were always outnumbered.

As a scenario it was rather fun, but ambushes do seem a little one-sided. I could have moved the road further away from the hills, but I suspect that would have only delayed the result. Perhaps the Russian deployment was a bit flakey; I could have got the infantry into action sooner if they had been deployed within the convoy, rather than at the front. But then the war wagons would probably have blocked the road, so again, I am not sure.

Anyway, next time, the mercenary garrison had better try to break itself out for the place.

Alexander Again

Never let it be said that I am unwilling to flog a dead horse, or to disturb a sleeping dog. As those of you who read it may have noticed from the last post, my thoughts are turning towards Macedon again, and the escapades of Alexander III, sometimes known as ‘the Great’.

Specifically, I have been reading:

Anson, E. M., Alexander the Great: Themes and Issues (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

This is by a scholar of the man himself, and, as the title implies, looks at some of the more disputed and controversial bits of historiography related to Alexander and his times.

The first thing to note is that Anson thinks that alexander obtained the ‘the Great’ bit fairly early after his death, although as someone noted the last time I discussed this, the first reference to this is in Plautus, the Roman comedic playwright (p. 1). However, Anson argues that the Greeks gave him this name for conquering the Persian Empire, not for being generally great. After all, Anson also notes, Alexander has been characterised in a number of ways in the historiography: ‘The Pretty Good’, ‘The Downright Awful’, a paranoid, a drunkard, someone in constant competition with an assassinated father, and with an Oedipal complex. He has also been seen as a civiliser, and the cause, at least, of mass murder. Here, at least, is a complex historical character.

The wargamer will probably be most attracted to Chapter 2 of the book, which deals with the reign of Phillip II and the rise of Macedon. This discusses the many changes which Phillip seems to have wrought in Macedon itself, not least in reforming the army. Originally, the Macedonian state had been barely a state at all, just a bunch of nobles owning land and acting as companions to the king. Phillip started to win battles and, hence, land, which he distributed not just to nobles but to others who became a burgeoning ‘middle class’, who owed their status, and hence were loyal, to the king. This was the core of the Macedonian infantry.

Anson notes that the sarissa was introduced very early in Phillip’s reign. As a defensive weapon is required much less training than the hoplite panoply and it was cheaper, although Phillip’s income increased rapidly after 356. Middle class Greeks could keep their panoply, but native Macedonians were pastoralists and tenant farmers who could not. The indications are, according to Anson, that Phillip had an independent command before his brother’s death at the hand of the Illyrians in 359, and may have started using the sarissa then (p. 49).

The other innovation Phillip implemented was the foot companions, the pezhetairoi or hypaspists. These could serve as sarissa armed phalagites of be equipped for hand to hand combat, a 15 to 18 foot long pike not being ideal for that. It was these troops that Alexander took in fast moving situations.

There is no evidence that Phillip had a ‘master plan’, but, after a little bit of pushing and shoving in Greece, must have realised that seizing mastery of Greece was a possibility. The question was what to do next, and that had to be something to unite the Greeks. The answer, as we all know, was the invasion the Persian Empire. This was a pan-Hellenic ideal, to punish Persia for the damage to Greek temples and other involvement in Greece over the centuries. Of course, other aims were involved: Persia was reported to be a plunderer’s paradise; some saw the war as a good way to get rid of Phillip, as he was unlikely to return, and so on.

The question is then to what extent did Alexander simply land up in the fortunate position of having domination over Greece, and good army and a bridgehead in Asia, compared to his own ability to conquer the Persian Empire? As with most questions in history, this one can be argued either way. No doubt Phillip left him in a strong position, but he did have to take the initiative and, of course, win the battles.

Other chapters in the book deal with interesting, but less wargame related material. The fist discusses to what extent the Macedonian army became a democracy, focussing on the meetings of the army in Alexander’s later years, the ‘mutiny’ refusing to go further into India, and responses to the death of the king. There is an interesting chapter of Alexander’s deification – how much he thought he was actually a living god by the end of his life, and whether this fitted into Greek of Persian patterns of humans, heroes and gods. It is around these issues that many people start to wonder whether Alexander was of sound mind, but perhaps we do not understand the classical mind-set sufficiently to judge.

The other interesting chapter for the wargamer is Chapter 5, which discusses Alexander’s kingdom of Asia. This observes that the conquests after the fall of the Persian Empire had to fit a different rhetoric to the theme of punishment. Conquest became the idea. Alexander often confirmed in place the rulers of places he conquered, such as Porus. He was interested in conquering stuff, not really forming an empire. Further, he started to recruit Persians into the army, and Persian practices into the court. This caused a lot of dissent from the Macedonians who, as we all know, largely wanted to go home.

In terms of the campaign I mentioned last week, however, it would seem that the army that would be used against Carthage would consist, at least in part, of Persian troops, some armed in Macedonian fashion (Persians were recruited into the Companion cavalry, for example) but presumably some using their traditional weapons and tactics. Once a horse archer, I suppose, always a horse archer, or at least, you are useful enough to be employed as a horse archer, rather than retrained as a phalangite, for example.  

So, this is an interesting, scholarly, book, with a good bibliography of references to follow up upon. The question not answered, of course, is the one stated up front: was Alexander mad, bad, great, a god or just lucky?

Another Start?

His ambitions knowing no bounds, Alexander had decided that, after the subjugation of the entire eastern seaboard, he would head from Syria towards Africa, because of his enmity to the Carthaginians. Then, crossing the Numidian deserts, he would set his course for Gades, where the Pillars of Hercules were rumoured to be; afterwards he would go to Spain (which the Greeks called ‘Hiberia’, after the river Hiberus). Then he would skirt past the Alps and the Italian coastline, from which it was a short passage to Epirus.

Accordingly, Alexander instructed his governors in Mesopotamia to cut timber on Mt. Libanus, transport it down to the Syrian city of Thapasacus, and there lay down kneels for 700 ships. These were septemremes, which were to be transported to Babylon. The kings of Cyprus were instructed to furnish bronze, hemp and sails.

Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander (London: Penguin, 2001), 10.1.17-19.

The question of whether Alexander III of Macedon was great or not is one I want to leave aside here; I will probably come back to it in due course. But the interest here is in wargaming, and I note that I do now have a variety of wargame armies for the classical period which are hanging around not doing all that much. This seems to me to be a shame, especially, as I noted a few posts ago, I now have a perfectly adequate table for 20 base armies, even roughly doubled ones and a more recent penchant for narrative campaigns.

By a narrative campaign, I mean one which is basically storytelling with dice. My Armada campaign (which is ongoing, in case you are worrying about Don Pedro and his men) is one such. I have no rules for the campaign – it is all made up as I go along. There are no messengers, logistics, particular anxieties about communications and politics and so on. All of these things, in my experience, slow a wargame campaign down and eventually bring it to a stop.

As examples, I can refer to the various campaigns I have mentioned on this blog. 1618-Something eventually became bogged down in accountancy and communicating with players in a big game. Fuzigore got bogged down because I was trying to keep records of who had fallen out with whom. Greece 360 BC got bogged down because while I was engrossed in a mini-campaign of the Persians trying to clear an island of its piratical inhabitants (who had some Athenian support, but the Athenians were trying very hard to avoid admitting that they were there) I forgot about all the communications, alliances and timetables for raising troops that were going on.

The upshot of all this is that while I very much like the idea of connected wargames, campaigns and so on, the whole Tony Bath is not for me.  I am sure that there are some people who like the idea of spending an afternoon working out the accounts for each state in their game, but it is not for me. I have to cut my wargame coat to match the cloth I have, which is a disinterest in minutiae.

Nevertheless, I do like verisimilitude. Some of the recent posts have tried to indicate that the Abbeys Campaign is a realistic one, in the sense that it was not beyond the boundaries of possibility to have happened. The troops are not entirely fantasy (although the adequate painting of them by yours truly is more a result of hope than reality). The tensions which the activities of the sides uncover are, at least to some extent and with a broad brush-stroke while not examining history too closely, correct for the times. In short, as a story, I can claim ‘It might have happened’.

Now, this is where we switch back to all those classical armies and the opening quote from Curtius Rufus. The words are from book ten, which as I am sure you all know, is towards the end. Alexander III is about to pop his clogs, and we all know what happened then: the successors fell out among themselves. But what if history had taken a marginally different course?

The possibilities are, of course, boundless, but I will take a slightly conservative one. Alexander had ranged across the eastern part of the known world. The quote from Curtius suggests he was about to turn west, first target Carthage. What would have happened if his son, Alexander IV, had been a bit older (at the time of Alexander III’s death he was minus three months)?

*

The generals looked sternly at the young man. The only woman in the room smiled at him encouragingly ‘Go on Alex,’ she said, ‘tell them’.

Alexander unfolded the square of papyrus. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is my father’s will.’ The older men looked expectantly at him. ‘He says that the empire is to be held together by me as his successor, with your support. And he also says that we, together and in unity, are to carry out his plans, which he sets out under his seal.’

‘What are his plans?’

‘We are to capture Carthage and then establish a port at the Pillars of Hercules. And then we are to capture Spain and the Greek cities of the coast.’

‘What about the barbarian lands?’

‘There is no mention of them, but I suppose that he would expect us to found cities in the regions, as he did in India.’

‘What then? We will have conquered the world.’

‘Only when we can walk from Alexandria to Eprius both ways around the sea may we rest.’

‘You are not your father, lad.’

‘No, Perdiccas, I am not. But I am my father’s son and none may deny it. This is his will, and I intend, with you, to execute it.’

*

And so there you have another start to a campaign, a fairly simple one, the aim being only world domination. The first action, I imagine, is going to be a naval landing outside Carthage, or maybe a full blown naval battle as the invasion force attempt to land. As with all campaigns, a decisive defeat for the Macedonians will spell the end of it. The only other thing I have to work out is how to include my Indian armies.

Reality is Odder…

… than fiction. Often.

492. Sir Henry Woddryngton to [Hunsdon?] [Aug. 11.] Cott. Calig., D. I., fol. 276.

… (fn. 4) ay last in the mor … the Spanish fleet to the Fryth … there cast anchor and launched out … cockboat with 12 or 14 men in her, all Spaniards, directed to Colonel Simple, who … conveyed to him safely to Edinburgh. After conference with him, the town understanding that they were Spaniards committed them to ward; who confessed that in that ship there is about 100 soldiers with victual and munition.

"Upon thapprehension of those that came ashoare, Collonell Simple road in great haste to therle Bothwell to his howse of Creighton, viij myles from Edenbrowghe. And Carmighell understand[ing] therof made ready and pursewed him with all speed and brought him back to Edenbroughe."

'Elizabeth: August 1588', in Calendar of State Papers, Scotland: Volume 9, 1586-88, ed. William K Boyd (London, 1915), pp. 587-606. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/scotland/vol9/pp587-606 [accessed 17 July 2018].

I have the good fortune to work for an academic institution, which gives me free access to a range of resources, including a decent research library (although having worked in Oxford, it is not a patch on the Bodleian; but then, few places are) and online resources. One which recently came to my attention was ‘British History Online’ (https://www.british-history.ac.uk/) which, to my interest at least, has digitised a great number of historical items, including the Calendars of State Papers, which are one of those resources much seen referred to by the amateur, but rarely (or never, in my case) accessed.

Unfortunately, for those who are not attached to academia by however tenuous a thread, accessing some of the content takes money. You can subscribe as an individual, but I am not sure how much it costs, The focus is on 1300 – 1800 documents, which is perfect for me, but then I wargame in an odd corner of the odd world of wargaming anyway.

The point I am vaguely gesturing to in the title of the post is that what really happened is often as weird, if not more so, than what we can imagine. I am, as some of you probably know, engaged in a narrative wargame campaign set in 1588 when a breakaway section of the Spanish Armada landed at Whitby in North Yorkshire. Being somewhat interested in events in Scotland as a result of this, I was intrigued to come across the above entry in the August 1588 entry in the Calendar of State Papers: Scotland.  These documents are summaries of letters sent to and from English agents in Scotland to the Elizabethan regime and preserved there. Thus, you do not get a full picture of what is going on – it is a bit like hearing one end of a telephone conversation. Nevertheless, the bit I have reproduced above is suggestive of a few things.

The most obvious deduction from the above is that contemporaries did not know about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Obviously, they knew that it was, that it had sailed up the Channel and been dispersed by a gale with a little help from the English fleet, but no-one knew where it was or in what state. It may well have landed up off the coast of North Yorkshire, or Scotland, or Ireland. Individual ships probably pitched up in all of these places. Some of the ships were indeed wrecked in them. But it was perfectly possible, in the world of 1588, that some ships, 20 is mentioned a bit further on in the CSPS, might have made a landing. The uncertainties of how the various factions of Scotland would react to that remain, precisely, uncertainties. James certainly acted against some, if temporarily.

That is, of course, the second deduction. How either English or Scots would have reacted to the Armada landing is a matter of speculation. Some think that the troops would have romped through to London, captured the Queen and either deposed her or insisted on her return to the Catholic faith. Others think that an offer of a treaty including toleration for Catholics and an exit from the Low Countries would have been sufficient. Opinions vary on how English Catholics would react, as they do as to how the English trained bands and so on would do in battle.

There are, here, mighty imponderables, questions which contemporaries would have wondered about but which they did not have to answer. As a wargamer interested in such things, I do have to find some sort of answer. As you have probably seen, my answer is that the results would have been neither as good as the optimists expected, nor as bad as the pessimists feared. Some English would have fought; there were enough vested interests in the regime to ensure that, to say nothing of residual anti-Spanish resentment, left after the marriage of Mary to Phillip II. Some Catholics may have joined the Spanish. It rather depended – the factors making people choose sides are many and various.

The other issue is that, of course, the passage above from CSPS really makes no comment about the importance or otherwise of the events. Was there a Scottish Catholic conspiracy? Was it just a few minor malcontents? I have no idea. In the general run of things, there is little about Scotland and the Armada. There does not need to be. Aside from the aforementioned wrecks, the Armada changed little in Scotland, except that James VI received an enhanced payment from the coffers of the English government. Various claims by English diplomats and agents that Phillip had offered James 20,000 French crowns, 20,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry are just that: claims. I doubt if there is any evidence even if the papers of the Scottish government were extant (they might be, I don’t know).

Nevertheless, the point is that my Armada lands scenario is a realistic one in terms of the history of the period. It is made up; it did not happen. But contemporaries certainly did not see that it was impossible. My fiction relates quite closely to the reality. 

It Was Inevitable…

With the predictability of a window breaking during a game of garden cricket, the protestations about sizes of wargame armies and wargame tables that the dedicated reader of the blog might recall from last year have been overtaken by, well, the eyes of the wargamer. In short, the table has grown:

Now, the above is likely to gain me a prize for all comers most boring blog photograph. If, however, you are anything like me, you will spend hours of endless fascination attempting to identify the books at the far end of the tables.

Yes, that was not a typo. Tables; the plural was intentional. Another table has been added to the collection. Another table the same has been obtained, meaning that the potential surface area for the conducting of a wargame has been doubled.

To be consistent I have to insist that my arguments about force to space ratios, flanks, and all the rest of it remain unchanged. Nor will the action at Coldingham be on a larger scale than before – it will be fought out on the same basis as was posted last week. I am not doubling the size of the armies. Honest. No, really, I’m not.

The issues, such as they are, have nothing to do with the land battles, at least, of the Abbeys Campaign. The increase in table size does have a little to do with the naval aspects of the campaign, of which progress has just been a few scribbles of rules on a piece of paper (give me some kudos – it was a proper piece of paper, not the back of an envelope). After all, more space is needed for your average naval battle than for a land battle as ships have a tendency to move a bit and falling off the edge of the world seems to be a bad idea.

The real drivers for the increase in table size are two-fold. Firstly, there is the issue of my ancients battles and armies. Some of you may recall that, a long time ago, I starting a ‘doubling’ project. That is, I aimed to produce a second 20 base army for each army I already have. Progress has been a bit on the slow side for reasons of sloth, real life intervening and an unfortunate inability to count. To explain the last bit, I now have, for example, 57 bases of Ancient Spanish.  You might easily note that the remit, for 40 bases (forty is, as I’m sure you know, twice twenty – I have two degrees in numerate subjects but you would not know that from here) has been exceeded.

Admittedly, calculational dysfunction is only part of the reason (although it is, embarrassingly, part of the reason). I have also been reducing my lead pile. Mr Berry of Baccus was kind enough to note that the Spanish foot that he cast and I was painting have been out of production for many years. He suggested keeping them in pristine condition as antiques. I fear he may have only been partially joking. Anyway, the upshot of all this is the aforementioned overproduction of bases of figures, although I still have some left over Spanish foot to preserve and, hopefully, sell, to augment my pension.

Now, for those of you who have kept reading thus far, a point is about to emerge. That point is that a twenty base army fits, just about nicely, onto to the original 80 cm square table. There is not much room, granted; my troops are based on a defiant standard of 40 mm width, and even my mathematics is up to the calculation that shoulder to shoulder they fill the entire width. Still, even the most naïve wargamer does not always put his toys in a single line.

Nevertheless, there is a problem, given that I like the wargamer to worry about things like flanks. It is possible to fill up the width of the table, pretty well, so that the edge of the wargame world is the flank guard, even if some bases are held back in reserve. So a bigger width of table is really called for.

The other issue is that of rolling dice. In my youth, I had a six foot by four-foot table, which had six inches at each end marked off. This was to provide room for boxes of soldiers, reserves, rules, drinks and the rolling of dice. If the whole table is required for deployment (and even a twelve base army needs some room) then one’s dice rolling activities have to be on the battlefield, and, usually, the dice roll either onto the more important bits of the action (potentially displacing toy soldiers, of course) or land up on the floor. I know that dice rolling trays are available, and I might yet invest in one, but I would have to put it down somewhere.

Finally, of course, there is the fact that a wargamer is always looking for the biggest, the best, and the shiniest. Most wargamer’s collections seem to grow rather than shrink. Mine is no exception, but I really, really have sworn off expansion on any major scale. I am planning to have firstly, a lot more wargames (justifying the investment in real estate) and to expand my rebasing project, to include my extant Muscovites, Poles, Ottomans, Mughal and other Indians, Vietnamese, Chinese and, yes, you’ve guessed it, Tibetans. But I have no real expectation that an expansion in numbers will be required, except on a very modest scale.

So, there you have it. This is my last territorial claim. My empire shall expand no further; it has hit the limits of resources and energy. With this I shall be satisfied. Twelve base renaissance armies are the bee’s knees; twenty base ancient armies are also the bee’s knees. I think we have a deformed bee, here, but you get the point. We go for quality, not quantity.

And you can believe all that if you will, but I cannot fit another table into the room.

Coldingham Conflict

So, what is going on here then?

This is, of course, the mock-up for the next Abbeys Campaign battle. The government forces are advancing from the north, nearest the camera, heading south to succour the English forces opposing the Armada break-away army landed at Whitby a couple of battles ago. The Scottish Catholic ‘rebels’ are advancing from the west, that is, from the right.

The point of conflict is the bridge at Coldingham. The government forces have to exit the table, along the road on the far side, right of the bridge, heading, naturally, south. The rebel forces have to stop them and nip the intervention in the bud.

The photograph is, as I mentioned, a mock-up. I have to make a few extra road sections to ensure everything fits. I would also like to paint up the six Scottish pike and six shot bases I have (half of which are on the painting stands as I type) but reflection on my painting to playing ratio suggests that perhaps having a wargame to keep the momentum going might be an idea. After all, I have a sufficiency (if not a surfeit) of pike and shot bases for the game, even if they are not specifically Scottish.

That, of course, raises another issue, that of the army lists for Scottish forces in the later sixteenth century. This suffers from a bit of a hole in history – the Scots were not really involved in any large-scale conflicts in the period. That is, from the defeat of the French in the early 1570’s, until the first Bishop’s War in 1639, there was no large-scale military activity in Scotland.

I use the term large scale advisedly. There was a lot of small-scale activity, on the Borders and, I imagine, in the Highlands and Islands. The Scots were also peripherally involved in the Tyrone Rebellion, both as suppliers of military hardware and as mercenaries. But it is not as if specific Scottish armies were involved.

This, incidentally, raises another marginally interesting issue. The DBR army lists for the ’Scots Common Army 1513 AD – 1602 AD’ claim that the Scots had no firearms up to the terminus date of the list. My limited historical resources would beg to differ. A ‘contemporary sketch’ of Carberry Hill, 15^th June 1567 seems to me to clearly show Scottish foot armed with firearms:

 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/utk/scotland/popup/carberry.htm.

According to Wikipedia (OK, not a great source), Mary had about 200 hagbutters at Carberry.  

Looking a bit further back in time, Caldwell observes that the Scots, in the aftermath of Pinkie and the mauling given to the army then (1547, as any wargamer will know) the Scots took a serious interest in hand firearms. Arran could (or did) deploy rather few, although handguns were not unknown in Scotland. As the Scots relied on the pike, it is possible that they simply did not fit the tactical plan.

The upshot of all this is, of course, a problem for a wargamer engaged in an imaginary campaign tied to a historical context. There are other issues as well. Mention ‘Early modern Scottish army’ to most people and they will inevitably think of hordes of wild highlanders rushing down hills at people. As I mentioned in the Sherrifmuir post, while this is not entirely fictional, it is not wholly accurate either. There is thus much pondering of imponderables.

I do overthink things, I know. At some point, a plunge has to be taken, and so I can hazard a guess as to what these armies will look like. The rebels, having moved through border country, may well have an advantage in light cavalry; on the other hand, the government will probably have the edge in heavier cavalry and musketeers. The question of what the heavier cavalry might be is a bit questionable. Famously, the Scots went into the English Civil War with lancers, although they did have more conventional sword and pistol cavalry as well. It seems moderately likely that any heavier cavalry would be of the lance armed persuasion.

Therefore, the army lists will look something like this:

Scottish Government: 1 light horse; 1 demi-lancer; 5 pikes; 5 muskets.

Scottish Catholics: 2 light horse; 4 pikes; 4 muskets; 2 Highlanders.

This probably ensures that there is sufficient difference between the two sides to give an interesting game.

Tactically, the rebels have to seize the bridge at Coldingham. If they can manage that, the government forces are going to struggle, although the stream is passable. Google Maps suggests that the banks are quite steep, at least in the town, but the water is neither deep nor wide. It is also quite possible that it has been canalised in recent decades (or centuries).

The rebel advance will, therefore, have to push the light horse forwards to grab the bridge, and then hope that they can hold it long enough for the rest of the army to come up. It is always possible that the two sides will negotiate rather than shoot at each other from that point, which would probably be a winning draw for the rebels. However, the government army can try to cross the stream and then take the bridge from both sides. As I discovered in the action at Guisbrough, taking a bridge when it is actively defended, even by musketeers, is a tricky option. This one has the added complication that government forces would have to advance through the town first, which will give them a terrain disorder marker to start with.

Quite what the highlander contingent will be doing during this is anyone’s guess. They are not really adapted to urban warfare or the holding of terrain items. Perhaps the best bet is to deploy them as flank guards back from the stream, to charge any government forces that try to cross while they are still disordered from doing so.

It could be an interesting game – I hope so anyway – and the dice will, I’m sure, have something to say about the situation. Now I must paint those new road sections…..

Caldwell, D. H., 'The Battle of Pinkie', in Macdougall, N. (ed.), Scotland and War AD 79 - 1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1991), 61-94.

Sheriffmuir

The regular reader of this blog will be vaguely away, as I am, that I have a passing interest in the Jacobite rebellions of the early eighteenth century. In a sense, I suppose, this is a natural progression from an interest in the seventeenth century. The Jacobites, after all, were something of a bit of leftover business from the later seventeenth century and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, of 1688. How glorious it was depends, of course, on whose side you were on.

Much of the interest of the Jacobite rebellions is focused on 1745, of course. It was, after all, bigger, better organized and had more of a chance of success than the earlier efforts. Furthermore, it was also romantic: Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that. I suppose we could also note that it was decisive: there were no more Jacobite wars after it.

Anyway, I have been reading this:

Reid, S., Sheriffmuir 1715: The Jacobite War in Scotland (London: Frontline, 2014).

This is, of course, by Stuart Reid, who is a well-known writer on Scottish military affairs. The book covers quite a lot more than the title suggests, including the Battle of Preston which, last time I looked, was in England.

Reid gives a thorough and, so far as I can tell, well-balanced account of the activities of the various sides and factions in the rising. One of his main points is that the Jacobites were not really attempting to start a war. They seem to have reckoned that they could carry out a change of government in Scotland without one. That change was, of course, to put James (the ‘Old Pretender, of James VII & III, or the Chevalier – you picks your title and takes your choice) on the throne rather than George I of Hanover (and England, Ireland and Scotland).

Presumably, the model for this revolution was the 1688 one in England. That was, within that kingdom at least, a fairly bloodless change of government. Residents of parts of Scotland and, in particular, Ireland might choose to disagree, of course. Whether the goal was even slightly achievable was somewhat moot, right from the start.

The revolution would have to be backed by force, and so recruiting was started. The Jacobites are often thought of, in popular imagination, as being highlanders, and many of them were, but the leadership, as Scottish military leaders throughout the early modern period did, preferred, if possible to arm them with conventional weapons. This was simply because, despite a load of myth and mystique, conventional fighting was a lot more effective, in most circumstances, than the highland charge.

We can reach back to at least Montrose and the Scottish Civil Wars of 1644-6 to see this. When Montrose was just starting out, the troops fired a single volley and charged with cold steel. This was very effective, admittedly, against unsteady reserve line troops, as those who faced Montrose were. However, as soon as was possible, the troops were rearmed with musket and pike and became a lot more conventional, although they did retain strategic mobility and Montrose was the master of deception, if not of scouting.

Similarly, the rebellious troops of the ’15 were armed conventionally, so far as the commanders could manage. They had a fair bit of trouble with the Royal Navy intercepting supplies, and so some troops remained under-armed by the standards of the day, but they managed. The Royal Navy also got in the way of operations. The project to land an army on the south side of the Firth of Forth was partially blocked by the arrival of warships.

The Jacobites thus landed up with two armies. One based around Fife, the other south of the Forth attempting to link up with rebels on the Border and in northern England. After a lot of wandering around, fairly optimistically, trying to recruit, the latter army landed up in Preston, where it was attacked and defeated, and surrendered to a bit of a ragtag army, which did have some regular units.

North of the border, things were fairly farcical. In fact, it seems to me that if the events had not led to tragic loss of life, it could be called a comedy. Argument, recrimination, lack of direction, failure of both political and military leadership all contributed to the government and rebel forces clashing at Sheriffmuir on 13^th November 1715.

As I am fairly sure few wargamers will need reminding, Sheriffmuir is really only memorable for one fact: both armies ran away. That is, of course, a bit of an over-simplification. In fact, one wing of each army ran away, and it took a while for the other wing to work out what had happened and even longer to decide what to do about it. As it was neither side fancied their chances of a second go, the rebels, in part, because the highland charge which had been effective meant that some of their victorious men had no muskets and no cloaks, as they were discarded before the charge, of course. It was a chilly night.  

The upshot was that even, as is probable, the battle could be called a draw, the Jacobites lost because they needed a win. A draw was a perfectly good result for the government; the army was in being, Edinburgh was held and any waverers were discouraged from supporting the Jacobite cause.

The arrival of James VIII & III after the battle did not help much. The cause was shattered. Reid notes that the best thing he did was leave again quickly, allowing his supporters to make what peace they could with the government. It was notable, incidentally, that in some parts of Scotland, no matter what orders arrived from the different sides and the choices of neighbouring lairds, they had no intention of fighting each other. Some even asked permission of opposing landlords to march over their land on their way to join forces with their own army. We have to admit that it was civilized, if, as noted above, rather farcical.

Wargaming potential? Well, I am still thinking about it. Wild charges aside, finding a set of rules which permit half of each army to scarper and the rest still to be in the field might be a little tricky. It would probably make a very nice, multi-player campaign to while away a few winter afternoons, though.