How then should you play The King's War? In my view you must look to ways of getting the most Victory Points out of your Sinews of War. Move your big armies aggressively where you can gain two advantages - a high chance of victory in battle and to be in the position to have breached your enemy's line of armies. Move your small armies to seize territory costeffectively while tempting your opponents to send larger armies against them. This means you need to align quality leaders against the weaker breathren of the other side. Aim to achieve matches of generals on the defensive (and mismatches on the offensive). The King and Essex mark each other well, and Hopton and Waller are natural enemies. Prince Rupert is the catalyst of much and Parliament lacks an equivalent - Tom Fairfax being too poor in patronage until the days of the New Model. Sieges are difficult affairs and I only siege where my main armies can cover the siege army. There is no point in committing resources to a siege where an enemy army can approach and catch your army at halfstrength. Sieges are the children of victory or numerical superiority. A word about combat. The combat system is closely based on reality. Most English armies were pretty low on the technical skill of major battle so that opportunities were often lost. The casualty level is low desertion and attrition will cost you more. You need good subordinates and to ensure you have a good cavalry and infantry mix. With good leaders and lucky dice small armies can eliminate their opponents. This rarely happens with large armies, but a beaten large armies leaves a big hole in the line through which territory can be seized. The King's War requires you to use battles to win the war, winning the battle is only the first part of the problem. At present The King's War is an anglo-centric production. Anglocentric with the Cornishmen and the Welsh. Without the latter the King would have been a lot quicker to the scaffold and the pronounced West and East split of English political should not disguise the vast importance of Welsh recruits and Shrewsbury as their major recruiting centre. The only three outsiders are, firstly, the "Irish" regiments, which are not, I hasten to add, the sort of green-Irish who march on St Patrick's Day but English and Anglo-Irish from the Pale whose chief crime was to include a significant number of Roman Catholics. Those spawn of the Jesuits were a real problem. Good soldiers in the main (though beaten at Nantwich by Black Tom Fairfax) they were a considerable assistance to the Malignant cause but their very presence raised the hackles of much of English opinion. Why? Because they were standing army used to kill the bog Irish and while that sounds very fine in a far-off country it is not quite so humourous when it is your your back-yard in which they are doing the killing. Secondly, we have that splendid force the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant proper Scots: no kilts, Catholics or Claymores, but decent Protestant claretdrinking Scots. Sharing a land border they could easily invade an England which had lost its last encounter with Scotland (the Bishop's War) handily. However, unless rigourously controlled the Parliamentarian player uses them as shocktroops, hence their cost, relative immobility and single-mindedness. Thirdly, we have the army of the Marquis of Montrose, tragic hero of another of Dame Cicely's pellucid works and with all the kilts, Catholics, kerns and Claymores you could want. There is an exciting game to be had from his war in Scotland but not on this scale I think, so Montrose becomes a Noise Off which will eventually pull much of the Covenater forces back to Scotland. We will for present purposes (and no other) count the Cornish and Welsh as English. No other foreigners? What about England's bane France? Surely they could have become embroiled, even if the naughty English Crown had been helping the Huguenots at La Rochelle but a decade before? Well I thought long and hard about this. The old enmity with France (seen without the distorting glass of Louis XIV and Napoleon) came to an end with Henry VIII and the last of the campaigns arising from the Hundred Years War. Queen Mary lost Calais in 1558. Thereafter England's enemy was Spain, as was France's. By 1604 the Stuart monarchy had repaired affairs with Spain but substituted no animus with France. The traditional English fears: European hegemony and control of the Flemish coast, were linked to Spain not France. In my view the chance of the Cardinal Richlieu diverting his attention from his war with the Spanish Habsburgs and his proxy war with the Austrian branch was low. The Swedes needed subsidies and there were armies to be funded on the Rhine and in Flanders. It was not until 1643 (the year before Marston Moor) that d'Enghein won the battle of Rocroi and damaged the Spanish in the Low Countries. King Louis XIII having died and a Regency being in progress (not to mention enormous expenditures which were to drive France into the Fronde) the chance of serious involvement was minor. England was, in any case, a minor and failing power which offered little threat to France - its expeditions in Elizabeth's time being the nearest thing to an Attacker Elim I have ever seen. The major activity of our fleet under King Charles was to convey Spanish bullion safe from interception by the Dutch and the French. At first Richelieu refused to send an ambassador to the Court of St James since the King had no foreign policy of his own. The frequent Anglo-Spanish alliance meant that Richelieu's natural allies were the Parliament which disliked the Spanish as Catholics and repositories of the Black Legend. La Ferte Imbault (French Ambassador in in the early 1640s) was instructed to make contact with Pym - a leading Parliamentarian - and align him with His Most Christian Majesty. Of course the Cardinal died in 1642, but Ambassador Harcourt (who was sent over by Cardinal Mazarin) concluded that the Royal Navy was a better ally for France that the Royal Family, especially as such foreign help as Charles had was Spanish quartered - many of his commanders were from the Army of Flanders landed by Dunkirkers (privateers from the Spanish Netherlands). There was always the Duke of Lorraine who might have put a handy army of say 10,000 men into the field. I see some problems here: The Duke was a mercenary, and the basic problem Charles Stuart had was a lack of the readies. It had driven him into conflict with his Parliament and most of the merchant class. He could only have paid the Duke in French coin, and the French could use him elsewhere. Short of growing cork feet the Duke was not going to get across the Channel without a fleet and Lorraine itself had none. The Royal Navy was strongly Parliamentarian and kept the Narrow Seas. There was no real French Channel Fleet though the Dutchers might have helped. So it would be a small force that could land at it might have to wait in port for some time. The Lorrainers were, like any army of the Thirty Years War, notorious pillagers. Their arrival would have caused a reaction of enormous force. Both in local Clubmen risings and in anti-Royalist sentiment. He who sups with the Devil must have a long spoon. This might have been worth the candle before the Parliament had built its armies (German troops were used by Lord Protector Somerset in the 1550s to snuff out rebellion). So I ultimately abandoned the involvement of continental armies, but you might care to build in the possibility of someone getting across. (Be sure to see the rules for French intervention in the next issue. - Ed.) How good were Continental armies compared to English? I would make then Veterans with Attitude in 1642 but by 1644 the English were rapidly moving to having the sorts of forces that won great victories under the Lord Protector, so Veteran but no more than that. Back to Art of War Issue # 26 Table of Contents Back to Art of War List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Clash of Arms Games. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com