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Conscription and English Society in the 1620s

Few habitual activities of government engender more dissatisfaction than conscription for military service. Complaints about taxation are, perhaps, more frequent but only because governments wage war more spasmodically than they collect revenues. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which has seen more men pressed into military service than any other period in the known past, the history of conscription and its impact on the political and social order ought to be of some interest. The seventeenth century, like the twentieth, was wracked with continuous warfare, naked power struggles for international hegemony and fierce ideological combat. As a consequence, while at the beginning of the century no major European state had a standing army, at its end all had. In England, as in the rest of Europe, the century echoed to the banging of the recruiter's drum. Our view of the recruiting process under the Stuart monarchs is framed at each end of the century by two brilliant and brutally satirical portraits, Shakespeare's Falstaff and Farquahar's recruiting officer Captain Plume with his ever present Sergeant Kite. What they tell us is that the crown was horribly served, getting for soldiers the Feebles of mind and body, that providing men for military service (whether pressed or “recruited”) was a dirty, unfair and corrupt process and that the situation under good Queen Anne was the same as it had been under good Queen Bess. This “Falstaffian perspective” on the early Stuart period has never been challenged or examined in detail.