Military finance and the Earl of Essex’s regular army: 1642-1644

The purpose of this dissertation is to accurately identify, categorize, and describe a large and previously unexplored portion of the Long Parliament's military spending during the period before the creation of the New Model Army. Specifically, it focuses on the money and the administrative machinery that was used to construct and support the central government's first regular army, a force that was placed under the immediate command of the third earl of Essex.

A collection of important works have shown us how the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century were, in many ways, a decentralized series of phenomena in which local communities armed and waged war against both themselves and outsiders. However, from the outset the revolutionary central government at Westminster played a crucial role by legitimizing and facilitating a concerted, nationwide struggle against the king and his friends. It accomplished this by issuing parliamentary ordinances concerning taxation and strategy, and by providing a centralized hub for money and other military resources. This dissertation integrates a new financial and administrative history of Essex's army into this broader picture by developing and deploying a new organizational taxonomy of civil war armies. Furthermore, it shows how this taxonomy can be used to help shed new light on the messy evolution of what Michael Braddick and others have termed the 'fiscal-military state' in the British context.