THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
283 
THE 
FIELD ARTILLERY OF THE GREAT REBELLION; 
ITS NATURE AND USE. 
BY LIEUTENANT H. W. L. HIME, It.A. 
The nature and use of Field Artillery during the civil wars of Charles I. 
is a subject that has seldom attracted the attention of military writers, and 
it has generally been disposed of in a single sentence by those who have 
chanced to notice it. Yet it is a subject to which great interest is attached, 
for to these civil wars may be traced the origin and rise of Field Artillery, 
properly so called, in England; and the chrysalis bears no closer connexion 
to the butterfly than the Artillery of the Great Rebellion to the Royal 
Regiment of Artillery. There may be satisfactory reasons for commencing 
the history of the Regiment with the Company formation of 1693 and the 
Regimental Train of 1698, but such a history is but a chapter, however 
long and important a chapter, in the history of Artillery in England. Each 
phase of the existence of the British Artillery is a higher development of 
the preceding one, and to fully understand the state of the Ordnance and 
the manner in which it was used towards the close of the 18th century, it 
is necessary to go back a step and examine its condition in the middle of 
the century. To conclude that the origin of a standing force of Artillery 
dates from 1.693, because the history of the Regiment begins at this year, 
would be a most serious mistake. 
Vixere. fortes ante Agamemnona 
Multi 
There were gunners before General Borgard, and in point of antiquity as 
an established force the English artillery precedes the cavalry and the infantry. 
Clouds and darkness envelop the birth and infancy of a corps whose history 
stretches back into the dim twilight of the 14th century, but although it 
may be true that the yeoman of the guard, hitherto regarded as the most 
ancient military body in England, were formed by Henry VII. in 1485, it 
is no less true that we find traces of a standing force of artillery even at 
this remote period ,—“ a kind of regular troops, chiefly accustomed to the 
