Furies (6 page)

The English practice of impressment went back to the middle of the century, to the reign of Henry VIII, and passed into the nineteenth century. It would always smack of social cleansing, owing to its illegal methods and selection criteria. In the 1640s, during the English Civil War, Parliament itself accepted the use of impressment. The first targets were the “masterless men”: the unemployed, vagrants, “idlers,” and beggars, but also men grabbed from among the poor in town and country. All these were perpetual fair game, and London was always the main center for the violence of well-spoken recruitment bullies.

The poor lands and people of Scotland saw even more male disappearances than England and Wales. Estimates hold that twenty-five to fifty thousand Scots served in foreign armies during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In the Netherlands and Germany, they were so numerous that they were considered at times—in nasty hyperbole—“to be as ubiquitous on the battlefields of Europe as lice and rats.” Many were volunteers, borne away from Scotland by their faith in the Calvinist fight against “popery,” or by gnawing hunger and the hope of loot overseas. But many more were pressed men, some of whom, before departing, were made to swear that they would never return to Scotland on pain of death.

The British pressing of men into ragtag armies had its equivalent on the Continent, and first of all in Spain.

In their Eighty Years War (1567–1648), the Habsburg kings of Spain used armies of foreign mercenaries to press their dynastic claims on the Netherlands. Ordinarily, not more than 15 percent of their soldiers were likely to be Spaniards. But this percentage was drawn almost entirely from Castile, and by the late sixteenth century, the Castilian male population was being drained. Faced with a chronic shortage of soldiers, the crown now turned to a policy that would produce explosive emotional scenes—even when it drew on
the local support of class-conscious communities as they helped to engineer episodes of social cleansing. In the effort to be fair, Spanish towns also held recruitment lotteries of the eligible men. But aside from leading to mass desertions, the use of lotteries elicited every device of the law, of trickery, fraud, and social connection, as the manipulators jockeyed to keep their men out of the army. The most common expedient had the well-off paying local men to go to war for them. Or, failing this, they called in and paid strangers or outsiders, so as to meet the local quotas. There were always categories of exempt men: nobles, town officials, tax collectors, university students, servants of noblemen and of the Inquisition, and even shepherds and particular classes of workers. But the policies of the kings kept up the relentless pressures, and by the 1630s, even the exempt
hidalgos
(gentry) fell subject to special levies, although many of them were so poor that they could barely afford to keep a horse.

The king's Council of War took for granted that 18 to 25 percent of the men picked for mustering would desert on their way to the points of embarkation: “a gross underestimate,” according to I. A. A. Thompson. For “Companies might easily lose a half or two thirds of their men on the march.” In September 1636, in a letter to King Philip IV, the archbishop of Burgos noted that in his diocese most of the men taken, whether by lottery or by force, “die of hunger before they reach the garrisons.” In Zamora and Salamanca, pressed men were “carried off in ropes and handcuffs.” It was also common practice to jail the new recruits until they were marched off. In the summer of 1641, the town of Béjar was holding seventeen men in jail for a garrison levy. Only three were locals; the others were “bought” outsiders.

In the early seventeenth century, the Iberian peninsula must have been crisscrossed daily by thousands of deserters on the run: dodging, begging, hiding, trying to get back home or somewhere else. Others sought to return to their commanding officers or sat in jails, awaiting trial. Some towns simply rebelled against forced recruitment, such as coastal Murcia, with people ready to kill royal recruiters. In Alburquerque,
in August 1641, two hundred armed men freed a group of recruits, removed their handcuffs, and told them to flee, while at the same time threatening to kill their military escorts. In September, just inside Portugal, another group of handcuffed and chained recruits was freed by an armed band.

But Castilian resistance to forced soldiering paled by comparison to that in Catalonia, a province of the old kingdom of Aragon. Here, in 1636, as the historian Luis Corteguera has pointed out, royal agents were able to recruit only “criminals whose death sentences were commuted for military service.” In June of the same year in Barcelona, when six reapers were tricked into enlisting and detained by force in the recruiter's house, a group of their fellow workers turned up to protest, only to be greeted by armed men who were there on orders from the regional governor. Soon five hundred reapers came back. They stormed and sacked the house.

Only the threat of war with France could rally the people of Catalonia to the defense of the larger realm, if with little enthusiasm. In August 1639, aiming to halt the advance of a French army in the province of Rosselló, the northeastern province of Spain, officials had managed to raise a force of ten thousand men. Almost immediately, however, two thousand defected, and by November more than nine thousand “Catalan soldiers were missing” from the Rosselló campaign, although many of the losses were the result of disease and casualties. Early in January 1640, when the French finally surrendered the fortress of Salses, the price was found to have been the death of “4,000 to 10,000 Catalans,” including “a quarter of the nobility,” victims all of “disease and wounds.” A great and unprecedented Catalan revolt broke out before the end of the year, when it was discovered that the royal government proposed to keep and billet troops in Rosselló, in preparation for a springtime campaign against France. Repudiating their allegiance to the king of Spain in January 1641, the angry Catalans “elected France's Louis XIII as their new king.” And therein, for a time, lay a different history, well told in J. H. Elliott's
The Revolt of the Catalans.

In eastern Europe, starting at the Elbe River, where serfdom saw a resurgence and had deeper roots, hauling men away was also a labor of brutality. Tsarist Russia brought in a compulsory draft in the 1630s, taking one peasant from every ten or twenty households, including even boys of fourteen and fifteen. Noblemen, poor ones in particular, were also subject to enlistment, and they nearly always opted for the cavalry units. Under Peter I, around 1700, the men borne away numbered from one in fifty to one in 150 households, depending upon need.

Conditions in the Russian army were the very ones we have come to expect. Soldiers often went cold and hungry, and they were seldom if ever paid on time or in full. Aside from the fact that half of their pay was routinely deducted for clothing, they were sometimes also paid in kind. Captains beat their men, in a replay of lord beating serf. Desertion was rife, and in the early eighteenth century gangs of disciplined deserters occasionally terrorized rural communities. Peter I had recruits put in irons, in the clasp of which they might be marched hundreds of miles to their destination. Punishment for deserters was inevitably harsh, ranging from hanging and flogging to sentences of hard labor for life. “On the march back from Pruth in 1711,” Hughes tells us, “gallows were erected in camp each night to remind deserters of the fate that awaited them.” But the hunt for runaway men could also lead to stiff reprisals against their communities or families, with the former compelled to provide substitutes or guarantees, and family members “seized as hostages until they [the deserters] gave themselves up.” John Keep observes that recruitment in Russia generated furious debate, “for everyone knew that … a recruit was unlikely ever to see his family again.”

THE REASONS FOR THE PASSIONATE resistance to being pressed into a soldier's life were not hard to fathom. In Spain, as in England, it was clear that forced recruitment was crudely one-sided, or given to every degree of string-pulling and favoritism. Where choosing the needed men was the job of the local lord or community, as in Sweden,
Brandenburg, and Russia, parochial interests, and local likes or dislikes, came quickly into play. In the world of early modern Europe, with its “natural” hierarchies of privilege, this had to be tolerated. Such was life. What was
not
life in the rebellious popular imagination was the life of the common soldier. Whether by lottery, selective conscription, or kidnapping, impressment was often seen as a kind of sentence of death. Men knew—the knowledge circulated—that armies were unhappy hosts to disease, hunger, and other forms of wretchedness, such as the effects of freezing cold and dogs' abuse from officers. What lesson was to be drawn from this? That it was better to die at home, in one's own squalid poverty, than to die even more wretchedly in a foreign land. The devil you knew was better than the one you didn't know.

In Sweden, a needy nobility and the overriding ambitions of the Vasa kings carried that agrarian country into a close series of wars in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The call for fighting men, hence for peasants, became acute during the Thirty Years War; and at one point the ordinary peasantry had to offer up one son from every eight households. Replacement pressures became pitiless. Between 1626 and 1630, the Swedes and Finns (then under Swedish rule) supplied Gustavus Adolphus with 51,367 conscripts, of whom 35,000 to 40,000 had perished by 1630, mainly from disease. Too dispersed to resist, peasant communities appear to have cooperated with this cull, thereby keeping control over the question of the men who would be picked for war in distant fields. Well-off farmers took little poor boys into their houses, fed and clothed them, drew on their labor, and then, when the summons came, turned them over to the army as substitutes for their own sons. Now neither the farmers nor their offspring would be drawn for the carnage in Germany.

Reflecting on the foregoing practice, the historian Robert I. Frost has concluded that in view of “a growing landless proletariat” in Sweden and Finland, from which “the military state drew its cannon fodder,” the designated system of culling “was beneficial for all: the government got its soldier, the farmer did not have to go to war,
and children from poor households received a more comfortable upbringing.” Indeed, he opines, the poor families also “benefitted: they did not have to feed an extra mouth.” Never mind that the chosen young man now went off to die of disease, starvation, or wounds.

THE EUROPEAN POPULATION EXPANDED in the sixteenth century, passing from nearly 62 million souls in 1500 to about 78 million by 1600. But by the 1590s the rate of growth began to slow down, stunted by plague epidemics, ruinous weather, and harvest failures. Spain, Germany, and Italy saw declines in their populations. War, too, impeded growth by spreading disease and wrecking the productive cycles of rural life. With their demand for longer-serving or bigger armies, princely states scooped down more deeply into the pools of men fit to brandish pikes and guns. By the early 1630s, at the peak of the all-European Thirty Years War, field commanders had seen such a dramatic wastage of soldiers that it became impossible to find the needed volunteers—or even to find enough men to press quietly into the ranks of mercenaries. The result was that battles usually ended with the impressment of large numbers of the captured enemy soldiers, who now passed to the winning side. In the wake of their shattering victory at Breitenfeld (1631), Gustavus Adolphus's Protestant army took in the Italian regiments of the defeated Imperialist commander, Tilly. But happily enough for them, “they all deserted the next year, as soon as they came in sight of the Alps.”

Although triggered by religious conflict, the Thirty Years War turned into an outright bloody contest for territory and loot, while always being passed off as a conflict over dynastic, religious, or security claims. Hence pressing the captured enemy into the ranks of the victorious did not always make for strange bedfellows.

Under the guidance of Cardinal Richelieu, France entered the Thirty Years War in 1635, in pursuit of a policy aimed at stopping the supposed expansionist march of the Spanish and German dynastic
houses. From this point on, in their clamor for soldiers, the French began to turn to the practice of forcible recruitment. Thanks to the sway of aristocratic authority in the local communities, many officers (noblemen born) were able to drum up companies of volunteers: tenants and servants of theirs, as well as retainers and others. But these numbers no longer sufficed for the ambitious needs of the crown.

In the 1640s and 1650s, French recruiting parties used alcohol and trickery to catch their men. They would get them drunk, or have them enticed by prostitutes, or slip coins into their pockets and then swear that their victims had accepted the binding enlistment money. But quotas were more often reached by means of violence. Recruiters would seize travelers, grab men off the streets, break into houses, or even lay hands on their prey in church. Force was more easily used in the country than in towns, and peasants were likely to flee or hide when hearing about the approach of recruiters. In the 1670s, officials “reported that, owing to the threat of forced enrolments, markets were deserted and peasants feared leaving their homes.” During the Nine Years War (1688–1697), writing from Orléans, an officer of the crown claimed that “the markets are full of people who carry men off by force.” The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714) set off another flurry of impressments. Now and then, bands of peasants responded by assaulting recruiters and releasing the kidnapped men. In the 1690s, a leading minister frankly admitted “that enrolments are still almost all fraudulent,” and he repeated this claim in 1706.

The activity of press-gangs was an embarrassment for the government, and edicts were issued against the practice. But the demands of war, widened by Louis XIV's aggressive foreign policy, imposed connivance on his ministers. And army officers, more than conniving, were the linchpin of the system. They “themselves forcibly enrolled and kidnapped men and even boys, including monks, notaries, geriatrics, and shopkeepers whose relative prosperity would have given them little incentive to take the king's silver.” In one case, Paris's top policeman had to force a cavalry captain to abandon his
possessive claim on a boot maker. The claim was based on a signature fraudulently obtained, and the captain had threatened to kill the cobbler if he refused to join his regiment.