296 
MINUTES OF PEOCEEDINGS OF 
30 carpenters extraordinary, 2 Engineers of fireworks, 6 Petarders, 
2 Engineers of Fortification, 1 Provost with Lieutenant and Halbardiers, 
100 Mariners, “chiefly such as use the rivers or streames,” 1 Master 
Quartiller, 1 Doctor, 2 Chyrurgions, 2 Barbers, 1 Apothecary, 1 or 2000 
Pyoneers, 2 Tenders with master, and 1 Chaplaine. 
In spite of the addition of the chaplain, the gunners were profane and 
dissolute men. If they resembled their brethren of the militia a few years 
later, as they no doubt did, they were wont to attend a morning drill— 
“ . . . . . .a short essay, 
Then hasten to get drunk, the business of the day,”* ** 
and the following quaint anecdote from Binning's “Light to the Art of 
Gunnery,” proves that they swore as terribly as the soldiers with 
whom Captain Shandy served in Elanders. “My first discourse is of 
gunners, because many times it falleth out that most men employed 
for Gunners are very negligent of the fear of God. Many examples of 
this nature might be alleged and produced from the sad experience of pre¬ 
ceding times ; but I thought fit to intimate only this one, for the terrifying 
all Godless, and the confirming all Godly Gunners; which example I had 
from Seyger van Begterne, General of the land of Overyssel, in his Diurnal 
from Amsterdam to East India. In the 38th Folio of that book he saith. 
That in the year of our Lord, 1631, in the month of April, there was on 
the island Nero a Gunner whose name was Cornelius Slime, but a very 
godless and prophane man, who at no time could speak but he would be 
cursing and swearing; and when any would ask him what was his hopes 
after this life were ended, his answer was. It may be to Heaven or it may 
be to Hell; but, said he, if I do go to Hell, there I will sell Tobacco and 
Brandy, and that would be good medicine for the Devils. But one day 
this Cornelius Slime, in the presence of my author and many more, being 
cursing and swearing and many times giving himself to the Devil; in the 
mean time, in presence of all those people, the Devil lift him up in the air, 
and let him fall to the ground with a great noise; but the second time 
being caught up by the Devil, he was taken where never man living could 
find him. From the like the Lord deliver us all! But if experience had 
not taught me what that the lives of many gunners are, I would have said 
nothing of it here.” 
The foregoing sketch may give some notion of the nature of the Field 
Artillery, materiel and personnel, at the breaking out of the civil war between 
Charles I. and his Houses of Parliament, but there are almost insuperable 
difficulties to be overcome in writing any satisfactory account of the tactical 
use made of the Artillery in the campaigns that followed. The ordinary 
histories of the time, written by men without “ the least tincture of the 
art of war,”f do not often trouble themselves about military operations, and 
when they do touch on such subjects they are rarely instructive. In such 
narratives of battles as are still extant, little attention is paid to the Artillery, 
* Dry den’s “ Cimon and Iphigenia.” 
f Eapin’s “History of England,” Yol. II. Book 21, p. 499, 
