Exact Phrasing
How a 1960s historian & 17th Century dramatist made a pretty typical thing into a distinct thing?
I’m writing a book on the militia in English history and drama. It’s kind of a weird thing to be doing, though I try to say it enough so that it’s become something that sounds real and normal to me and maybe sounds real to others now as well. It is a very long manuscript so far, so I know there’s a lot to say about the subject in the period between 1560 and 1660. Actually, it’s more like 1558 and 1662, because important legislation falls just outside the one hundred year period that looks neater on the page. I am pretty sure the book’s title will still say 1560–1660 and not 1558 and 1662, but who knows what will happen between now, when I’m drafting chapter 5, and when I actually finish the entire book and am ready for other people to read the giant thing and help me cut it down a bit. And then it will be even longer before it’s cut down enough to give to a publisher…
So who knows.
I am thinking a lot about neat packaging with this book, in part, as I’ve already suggested, because the dates of my study are messy, the book itself is too/very long and currently messy, and because I’ve recently figured out something that is kind of messed up. I think I’ve kind of stumbled on a discovery — one that is sort of major in a way, but because of the relative obscurity of my subject matter in my home field of literature, and because historians, which I read a lot, don’t know who I am and wouldn’t probably care that I’ve made this discovery.
In his book on the first Quarto of Hamlet, Zachary Lesser discusses a textual variant in different editions of the play and considers the point(s) at which critical consensus emerged in our understanding of how Hamlet’s reference to “country matters” would have signified––in Shakespeare’s time and also subsequent to the (re)discovery of an earlier Quarto containing “contrary matters ” instead.[read an excerpt here]
My own “discovery” is sort of related to this kind of inquiry, though not quite with the same stakes, since the phrase I’ve been looking for is not exactly Shakespeare. From what I can tell, it’s Jonsonian.
Jonson is enough of an important playwright for it to sort of matter…his works certainly have been canonical, though shrinking English departments in the United States has meant that some us have few to no opportunities to teach non-Shakespearean drama anymore. And more to the point, when military affairs are invoked, drama scholars might turn to historians to learn more about what Jonson meant by this phrase or that one before they would assume a phrase was coined by Jonson himself.
The phrase I’m talking about is “exact militia.” It appears in Jonson’s play The New Inn (1629/1631). It is also basically on every single page of the chapter on Caroline England in Lindsay Boynton’s The Elizabethan Militia, 1558–1638 (1967). The chapter is titled “Charles I and the Exact Militia,” and it begins with the claim that this phrase and “perfect militia” were more or less synonymous for the programs of reform that the king hoped to achieve.
A bit of a diversion here, but over the past 15 years in which I’ve been writing this book, I have thought about Lindsay Boynton’s title a lot. Even though the book’s coverage seems a bit odd (70 years total?) the years as listed have a neatness to them — look at those 8s at both ends! But there’s also the fact that Elizabeth I was not the monarch for the last 35 of those years, and Boynton does have chapters on the militia under James I/VI and Charles I but the title suggests it’s Elizabeth’s world and the other two were just, you know, trying to live up to her name. This is often something we do in literary studies too, of course, especially when scholars write about early modern military affairs. Typically these books are called “Shakespeare’s [X],” where X=something that other dramatists wrote about too. But why make things messy? Shakespeare’s [X] is probably going to sell better, insofar as these books actually are sold, and everyone knows there’s probably bonus references throughout or maybe even, like Boynton’s book, whole chapters on other people.
Boynton’s title always struck me as kind of misleading, but now, as I’m working more in depth on this chapter on Caroline England, I can see why he came up with it. As he does well to show, nothing Charles did with the militia was all that distinct from what Elizabeth did (or, for that matter, what Henry VIII had done) — it’s just that tax scales hadn’t been revised since her reign, and so, after many decades of under-taxation, he had a lot less money to work with. This situation was not great under James I, but it was generally not as big a problem because James pursued diplomacy over foreign war whereas Charles was trying to participate in foreign campaigns even before his father died. Much of what Charles I seems to have wanted at the beginning of his reign was to simply return the trained bands to the state they had been in around the 1580s — when there were, in fact, tons of complaints about absenteeism, lack of money, lack of coats, and other resources needed to have a strong defensive system.
There are many reasons he didn’t achieve what he wanted, and Boynton and others have provided excellent scholarship on why his attempts at reforming the militia failed. I have no quibbles with or challenges to this work overall — it’s just this one tiny thing. Boynton discusses the militia under Charles with this phrase over and over. Even as he doesn’t claim Charles was attempting to be innovative, he gives the impression of the King’s profound desire for his militia to be exact. Every historian who has written about the militia in the 1620s and 30s uses “exact militia” or “perfect militia” to refer to it — all of them citing Boynton as their primary source.
I have been over this chapter in Boynton’s book many times, especially the claim that “exact militia” was a sort of “buzzword” in the period (p.244). He cited some State Papers throughout the Caroline militia chapter, and I knew I’d need to figure out how to access them if I really wanted to know exactly how Charles I had used this phrase. But Boynton writes so assuredly of the perfect being a thing that I spent a long time believing there was an “ur-text” in which Charles said: “My Militia! It will be Exact! It will be Perfect! You will not believe how exact it will be because I will ensure those who are commissioned to take musters are going to be exacting. Their records will be perfection. Their certificates will be exactly correct and perfectly clear. It will be the most exact, most perfect militia in the world!”
I think I’ve now looked at what’s out there. And that document sort of exists, but it also sort of doesn’t.
What I have found, essentially, is one manuscript in which Charles uses the phrase “a perfect militia” exactly one time, dating from probably 1625 or 1626. The document refers to this body’s “settling,” but overall the document isn’t the program alert or major announcement that I felt Lindsay Boynton had led to me to imagine above — it’s not especially emphatic or fetishistic of the phrase “perfect militia,” and the document as a whole reads much like many similar documents from Elizabeth’s reign, where the words “perfect” and “exact” appear as well.
Somebody living during Charles’s reign did use the phrase “exact militia” and also claimed to have identified the best militia in the world, but it wasn’t England’s this person meant by that description, and it wasn’t a real person who uttered it; it was a character in Jonson’s The New Inn.
I can’t claim to have checked every single official state document in existence that might have also used one of these phrases. So far, I’ve limited my inquiry to texts composed prior to the printing of Jonson’s play, since i’m looking primarily for the earliest articulations of the reform program, which I know doesn’t really begin in earnest until after 1629, when Charles begins his Personal Rule. And I’m always willing to admit I might be the problem — I’m not trained as a historian and maybe I haven’t yet found the golden ticket. In fact, I have only in the last seven or eight years learned how and where to access the kind of primary documents that historians have been reading for centuries. For a long time, I didn’t know the difference between State Papers and the Calendar of State Papers. I still don’t know exactly what Parliamentary diaries look like in their original form. I’m still trying to figure out the difference between a PRO and the SO, and get mystified as to why some things are in the National Archives and some things are in other libraries.
But. I am living in the 21st century! I have searchable databases where tens of thousands of documents are available — some of them are transcribed, and others I’m finally able to read pretty well, despite my lack of formal training and despite the fact that my own university doesn’t have access to “the good stuff.” Thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library and the access to online resources that it has provided while it’s being renovated, I’ve been able to look for that phrase “exact militia” in state papers. I’ve been able to look for “perfect militia” in state papers.
I’ve looked for both adjectives as they are attached to two nouns, muster and militia, searching in documents from and about general militia musters and special levies for foreign service. I’ve been able to track down most of the documents that excellent historians who have written about the exact or perfect militia have cited in their work. These include Kevin Sharpe (The Personal Rule of Charles I; Mark Fissel English Warfare, 1511–1642 & The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640; D.P. Carter (“The 'Exact Militia' in Lancashire, 1625–1640”); Anthony Fletcher (Sussex, 1600–1660: A County Community in Peace and War) and Henrik Langelüddeck (“The chiefest strength and glory of this kingdom’: Arming and Training the ‘Perfect Militia’ in the 1630s”).
All of these scholars are really great. None of them relied on full-access databases of archival materials when they did their earlier work, so I don’t mean to pretend I’ve got something on them that is intrinsic to myself or rooted in my own talent or ingenuity. And I’m certainly not calling them out for trusting that Boynton’s claim that under Charles ‘the perfect militia’ was a thing.
The matter of whether it was a significant phenomenon is complicated, though. Under Elizabeth, commissioners and councillors seem to have used “perfect” pretty regularly in their requests around mustering, most often to request accurate counts of weapons and people.
The phrase “perfect militia” also appears in print, a manual by Sir John Smythe. This particular text was published in 1591. In it, Smyth uses the phrase “perfect militia” twice, which, we might note is twice as many times as Charles seems to have used it, and Smyth does so in a manual that exceeds 180 pages. Given the length of the text, it doesn’t seem all that much of a thing for Smythe either.
Now let’s turn to “exact militia.” I haven’t found this exact phrase used in texts and documents from the 1620s at all, with the exception of Jonson’s play.
The word “exact” is pretty common in Caroline documents regarding the militia, wherein it appears typically attached to musters. Lord Lieutenants, their deputies, Captains, and Sergeants were often asked to take “an exact muster” or “exact view” (again referring to the accuracy of counting on certificates more so than the drilling). I feel compelled to note that the word appears in reference to campaigns outside of England and not merely in relationship to the trained bands — so exactness may be a military priority, but it was not uniquely applied to the militia.
I’m really not convinced there’s a solid paper trail that proves that Charles and his council were calling the militia anything so singular or neat all the time. Sometimes the word they use is “orderly,” for instance, and in Jonson’s play it’s also described as “fine” and well-ordered.” From what I’ve learned, MPs almost never really talked about the militia on its own; almost every discussion of it seems to have happened while foreign campaigns were being discussed. In fact, the blurring of war and homeland defense was also why the “scheme” (insofar as we can call it that) for a perfect militia was bound to fail — there were too many other contexts that required raising weapons and men for the domestic institution to find adequate participation and funding.
Unless this Signet Office document I’m hoping to have scanned from the National Archives comes back with better evidence, I have to say that there doesn’t seem to be an ur-text indicating that the“exact militia” or “perfect militia” was something Charles or his councillors or lieutenants repeated often. At least not anymore so than they and their predecessors had done under Elizabeth. The words “exact” and “perfect” also appear in commission letters under James I/VI as well.
Having said all this, I think the fact that the phrase appears in Jonson’s play in a printed edition in 1631 must mean something — it certainly signals that the playwright understood that this was a meaningful phrase in the context of 1628 and 29. And certainly, the various people who held power in the Caroline government did hope to improve an institution that had been claimed to be in decline since the 1590s. There is clear evidence that Charles wanted the counties to prioritize local defense more than they had under his father. Jonson knew John Selden, who had been tasked with looking up the statutory basis for impressment for foreign campaigns as part of the debates over billeting and other military policies in the House of Commons. Jonson must have known that “an exact militia” would become a thing.
What’s especially interesting to me as I have been trying to get to the sources of the phrases in this chapter is something I discuss in the introduction of my book, which is the matter of why even look at drama for the history of this domestic institution. In his opening chapter, Boynton says: “To treat Elizabethan, or Jacobean, drama as a major source for writing military history is as unreasonable as it would be to write the social and economic history of the 1930s from drawing-room comedies, or of the 1950s from ‘kitchen-sink’ plays” (5). The phrase he uses for his chapter title to define the Caroline “programme” doesn’t appear to have come from Charles I or anyone in his government prior to Jonson’s play. I don’t mean to make the claim here that it was Jonson that actually made it a thing, nor even that Boynton would have seen it in the play. Whether he knew The New Inn or not, it was Boynton who made the exact militia a thing, and all of us have followed him in repeating it.
Why does it matter exactly? I’m not sure I’m ready to make any claims about this aspect. (I have some ideas that I will offer in my book!) But I do think in part there’s a tendency with scholars to talk about the Stuart monarchy as failing at this or that, and by associating Charles with an aim for perfection (vs. Elizabeth, whose commissioners were asked to produce the same thing), we’re able to see his badness as that much more of a contrast to other monarchs. He was already subject to quite a bit of nostalgia for Elizabeth during his own lifetime, but by distinguishing his militia as one that was a major priority, we can see that he didn’t do anything right. The militia was wrested from him in an ordinance passed by Parliament in 1642, making clear only then that the instrument was detachable from the royal prerogative. How delicious that this same instrument, which he would reference in his scaffold speech, was the very one he started his reign trying to perfect?
There are records that help us document the militia’s place in his ruling priorities, and it’s never at the top of the list, despite a couple texts that are mildly suggestive that it might be important to him above other things. With the benefit of 21st century tools, we might need to revise our vision of Charles slightly in this one small aspect of his reign. It doesn’t change the basic narrative of his militia as an institution that did not meet expectations but it would have the benefit of being fairer about how we understand those expectations in comparison to others who ruled before him.
