Disbandment had been recognized as a socially disruptive and dangerous
process at least since the mid-sixteenth century, particularly if the forces were
not paid their arrears in full.^122 Fears that such a demobilization would lead to
an increase in crime were expressed in 1649 , for example.^123 And the conse-
quences of the demobilization of the armies after 1660 may well have con-
tributed to the perception that crime and violence were at serious levels that
would help to explain attempts in parliament in the following decade to find
more effective punishments for felonies.^124 When James II’s army melted away
at the end of 1688 —shrinking from something over 30 , 000 troops to less than a
third that number in a few weeks, partly by desertion, partly by a clumsy dis-
bandment—the aldermen of London moved quickly to try to arrange passes so
the discharged men could leave the City, where they were much in evidence in
the streets, and return to their ‘own countrys’.^125 Although many of these sol-
diers would in time be enlisted in the new English army that William III created,
the anxiety about street robbery in London in the early years of the 1690 s may
well have been a consequence of the number of demobilized troops in the cap-
ital, and the fear that they retained their loyalty to the king in exile.^126 Certainly,
concern about the disbandment of the forces was to be commonplace at the end
of every war in the eighteenth century because it came to be expected there
would be a great increase in crime, and particularly in violent crime, for the rea-
son that the author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enoughnoticed after the great
demobilization following the peace in 1697 :
We need not go far for Reasons of the great numbers and increase of these Vermin
[ highwaymen]: for tho’ no times have been without them, yet we may now reasonably
believe, that after so many Thousands of Soldiers disbanded, and Mariners discharged,
many of them are driven upon necessity, and having been used to an idle way of living,
care not to work, and many (I fear) cannot, if they would.^127
There had indeed been a major disbandment in 1697 and after. The navy dis-
charged some 15 , 000 sailors of its wartime complement of 35 , 000 within a few
months of the peace, and many more in the next few years, many of them with
wages owed and ‘with only tickets of credit... between them and starvation’.46 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^122) J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450 – 1620 ( 1985 ), 87 – 8.
(^123) The Unanimous Declaration of Colonel Scroope’s and Commissary General Ireton’s Regiments(Salisbury?,
1649 ), 3 – 4 ; The Souldiers’ Demand. Shewing their Present Misery; and Prescribing a Perfect Remedy(Bristol, 1649 ), 3.
I am grateful to Jim Alsop for these references.
(^124) See below, Ch. 6. As late as 1664 Secretary Bennett was issuing warrants to authorize the appre-
hension of disbanded soldiers in and about London and Westminster (CSPD 1663 – 4 , p. 548 ).
(^125) Rep 97 , p. 76 ; Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April
1714 , 6 vols. (Oxford, 1857 ), i. 494 – 5 , 505 ; John Childs, The Army, James II, and the Glorious Revolution(Man-
chester, 1980 ), 194 – 8 ; idem, The British Army of William III, 1689 – 1702 (Manchester, 1987 ), 4 – 6. The anx-
iety that the threat of violence gave rise to then would help to explain the major effort mounted by
proclamation and then by statute to combat highway robbery in the early 1690 s (see below, Ch. 7 ).
(^126) Childs, ‘War, Crime Waves and the English Army’, 8 – 9 ; Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the
English People 1688 – 1788 (Cambridge, 1989 ), 111 – 12.
(^127) Hanging, Not Punishment Enough, 21.
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