This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles 1485-1746  by Charles Carlton

(Yale University Press), 2011

332pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-13913-6

Shakespeare did not exaggerate when he defined being a soldier as one of the seven ages of man. Over the early modern period, many millions of young men from the four corners of the present United Kingdom went to war, often with bloody consequences against each other. The almost continuous fighting on land and sea for the two-and-a-half centuries between Bosworth and Culloden decimated lives but created the British state and forged the nation as the world's predominant power. In this innovative and moving book, Charles Carlton explores the terrible impact of war at individual and national levels.  There are many stories that teachers could easily use in their classes to enliven their lessons.  For instance, the clergyman who helped Charles I escape from Oxford and later led a failed royalist rebellion in 1648.  Faced with capture, he fled to a tower where parliamentarians hacked off his hands while he clung to the building and once he fell into the moat he was bludgeoned to death with one soldier boasting that he had cut out his tongue as a souvenir!  The book provides, in alternate chapters, a robust military and political narrative interlaced with accounts illuminating the personal experience of war, from recruitment to the end of battle in discharge or death. Carlton expertly charts the remarkable military developments over the period, as well as war's enduring consequences - camaraderie, courage, fear and grief - to give a powerful account of the profound effect of war on the British Isles and its people.