Abstract
The central role of the City of London as a source for the supply of men, finance and military equipment for the parliamentary cause was evident to both royalists and parliamentarians from the outbreak of the Civil War. But if London was the key to the kingdom, the source, as one royalist pamphleteer wrote, of ‘continual, not small distillations, but floods of men, money, ammunition, and armes descending from the head city, and metropolis of the kingdome’,2 then the key to London lay in control of its citizen militia, the London trained bands.
… he [King Charles] loosing for a long time none but toterdemalion Welch and Irish, whilest we lost Citizens of a City not inferiour to Rome.1
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Notes
W. D. Macray (ed.), Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Oxford, 1888), I, p. 499.
Sir John Smythe, Certain Discourses (London, 1590).
John Stowe Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England continued and augmented by Edmund Howes (London, 1631) p. 671.
G. G. Walker‘The Trained Bands of London’ Journal of the Honourable Artillery Company, xv (1937) 237.
K. Roberts, ‘Musters and May Games: The effect of changing military theory on the English militia’, Cromwelliana (1991), pp. 5–9.
M. C. Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s campaigns against Scotland 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 1994 ), pp. 174–214.
A. G. Chotin, Histoire de Tournai et du Tournesis (Tournai, 1840 ), I, p. 357.
K. Roberts, ‘Lessons in Revolution: The Impact of the London Voluntary Companies’, Cromwelliana (1992), 35–47.
P. S. Seaver, Wallington’s World. A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London (London, 1985 ), pp. 156, 160.
R. R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom (London, 1894–5), II, pp. 216–17.
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© 1996 Stephen Porter
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Roberts, K. (1996). Citizen Soldiers: The Military Power of the City of London. In: Porter, S. (eds) London and the Civil War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24861-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24861-2_5
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