One of the aims of this collection has been to stimulate subsequent discussion and investigation of military identity and to foster further interdisciplinary studies of early modern warfare and its representation. One is aware, of course, that there are many other directions in which subsequent studies of military identity can be taken and that the geographic, temporal and thematic coverage could be expanded further. Although several of the chapters above discuss the significance of differences between English, Old English and Irish military identities, analysis could equally focus on the fighting men of Spain, France, the Low Countries, Italy, Germany, Sweden, or the Ottoman Empire, as well as expand beyond Europe to consider those in the New World or Japan. Nearer to home, although Robert Monro was mentioned in the introduction above, it would be instructive to further examine the distinct military identity of Scottish soldiery and, indeed, both the Scots and Irish regiments active in continental Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as part of a wider British military identity. The study of regimental identity obviously complements the broader explorations of collective military identity discussed in the essays above. It can also be set alongside other forms of martial communities found in this period in, say, garrisons (Calais, the Dublin Pale) or military societies (for example, the London Artillery and Military Garden companies).

It is easy to envisage subsequent studies that look beyond this collection's temporal scope and address military identity, citizen soldiery and martial professionalism during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, and beyond. In terms of specific stereotypes of military identities adopted and ascribed in this later period, it would be productive to discuss the figure of the cavalier in relation to that of the swordsman mentioned above, and to consider certain exemplars of this type, such as Prince Rupert of Bohemia or Sir William Cavendish. To broaden the thematic range of future studies of our core concept, following the lead of Andreani and Hadfield's essay, attention needs to be given to non-combatants who formed part of what Lynn calls a ‘campaign community’, be it, say, as military surveyors or surgeons.

Julius Caesar's reports of campaigning in northern Europe and during the Roman civil war were widely read and imitated by soldiers, politicians, colonial administrators, historians, writers and soldier-authors throughout the early modern period. But the utility of Caesar's Commentaries in this period extended way beyond the spheres of historical record or, indeed, battlefield tactics. This chapter sets out to demonstrate that the Commentaries had a much wider field of application, and that they represented an influential, authoritative model of military identity in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. My focus here is upon Caesar's twin roles as the text's protagonist and author, and upon the legacy of these paired roles in the Commentaries’ applied reception history. The chapter begins by considering prominent aspects and models of military identity provided both within the text and by Caesar's composition of the Commentaries themselves. It then argues that Caesar's apparent mastery with both pen and sword formed a particularly resonant model of military identity during the early modern period. In particular, I examine how this distinct conception of military identity was translated into English (and England) through successive editions of Sir Clement Edmondes's Observations upon Caesar's Commentaries (1600, 1604, 1609), and how it is epitomised for Edmondes by his friend Sir Francis Vere. This chapter argues that Caesar's Commentaries provided early modern writers, fighters and writing fighters with a vital paradigmatic template for how the arts of the pen and the sword might be productively aligned or synthesised. As will be shown, Caesar's Commentaries constituted a significant resource for both battle-hardened and study-bound polemologists in this period as they returned to perennial questions about how one goes about making a good soldier, and concerning the relative value of martial book-learning and practical personal experience.

Caesar's Commentaries and military identity

Julius Caesar produced seven books of commentarii concerning expeditions made into Gaul, Germany and Britain between 58–52 BC – a text usually known as De Bello Gallico – and a further three books on the civil war (De Bello Civili) waged against Pompey between 49–48 BC.

TO THE RIGHT NOBLE YOUNG LORD, WILLIAM, LORD HARBERT OF CARDIFFE

It is with the dedication above – and another addressed to William Herbert's father Henry, second earl of Pembroke – that the Elizabethan soldier and author Robert Barret opened his 1598 treatise The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. Barret invites his dedicatee to contemplate a particular way of viewing himself and assures him on the appropriateness of doing so, given Herbert's noble family and status. Although the eighteen-year-old Herbert had ‘scarse arrived yet to the bearing of Armes’, Barret responds to the great potential his dedicatee had evidently shown through his interest in military affairs, and to what is described to Herbert's father as ‘the Martial vertues already shining in him’. The dedication speaks too to expectations predicated by Herbert's social rank, and assumes a natural, inexorable connection between nobility and military identity. The association between Barret's military subject-matter and his dedicatee is further suggested by an intuitively perceived resemblance between the promise shown in Herbert and the martial reputation of his family.

This chapter should probably be entitled ‘The many ends of chivalry’. For centuries, writers, churchmen, soldiers, historians and moral commentators complained that chivalry and the ideals of knighthood were in decline, had been degraded to an idle or effeminate state, or were otherwise a hollow imitation of an authentic, perfected manifestation extant in the (usually unspecified) past. Witness the broad date–range of the sources quoted above. The complaint that chivalry has irretrievably declined, or indeed died, has been associated with numerous events and actual deaths from medieval and modern history, including the destruction of French knighthood at Agincourt; Richard III's death at Bosworth; the passing of Sir Philip Sidney or Elizabeth I or Prince Henry Stuart; the execution of Marie Antoinette and the end of the ancien régime; and the mechanisation of warfare in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejoinders and more nuanced considerations can be found for each claim, but the essential idea remains that chivalry's end can be temporally located. The present chapter adopts a different approach.

Throughout the Tudor period English and Welsh soldiers fought extensively in military expeditions in Scotland, Ireland, France and the Low Countries. But until relatively recently the received narrative concerning the degree to which England experienced any sort of significant ‘military revolution’ during the sixteenth century maintained that the nation lagged behind the more militarised countries of continental Europe in both the theory and practice of war. Such a view continues to influence the ways in which historians and critics treat English contributions to what became a substantial literature on the art of war, a vast body of writing in manuscript and print that explored every facet of the logistics, strategies, technology and legality of war. Nearly 200 military books were printed in England during the sixteenth century penned by serving and ex-soldiers, polemicists and scholars of practical disciplines with battlefield applications (like geometry and surgery). Military autobiography – a term grappled with in a moment – formed a modest though nevertheless significant and revealing sub-set of Tudor martial writing. Charles Oman made a prefatory comment in his classic History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century about the perceived lack of ‘any autobiographical record by English military men, till we have arrived at the very end of the Tudor period, when material begins to become abundant from Francis Vere and his less-remembered contemporaries’. Much has been written on French, German and Spanish martial life-writing, most notably Yuval Harari's 2004 monograph on early modern military memoirs, though very little has been said to date about material from the British Isles. The present article endeavours to remedy this and, indeed, will challenge Oman's negative claims about native sources. It examines – for the first time – how a range of sixteenth-century British authors represented war and reflected upon their experiences of combat, and it also looks at the different forms and opportunities of which these figures made use. After discussing the ontology of military autobiography itself, this article offers a critical survey of extant native sources written prior to that moment mentioned by Oman, when Sir Francis Vere began composing his autobiographical Commentaries (c. 1604).