An examination of a period of warfare much overshadowed by the Civil War, which reveals why, in spite of the absolutist pretensions of the monarchy, a militarist state failed to develop in the 84 years before Edgehill.

This text explores the English art of war from Henry VIII's chivalric exuberance on the eve of the Battle of the Spurs (1513), to the shock of an ashen-faced Charles I surveying the carnage upon the field of Edgehill (1642). Did the soldier become more deadly in the era of the "military revolution?" Combat on the Scottish borders, expeditions to the Continent, and incursions into Ireland are in turn described graphically, largely from unpublished sources. Institutional and administrative analysis are punctuated by vignettes from Henry VIII's campaigns into France, the exploits of Elizabethan soldiers fighting in the Low Countries, and fierce skirmishes in the Irish Wars. What emerges is a distinctively English approach to war, which in a discussion of the politico-military crisis of 1640-1, sheds light on why the English Civil War commenced as it did. This title should be of interest to students of Tudor and Stuart England as well as military historians.