Within the scant amount of research that has been done to date on the army in Restoration England, garrisons have been commonly presumed to have been inactive, reserve forces with little military value, due to their absence from the battle front, which has been the main, and perhaps the only, research focus of concern in conventional military history. The aim of this paper is to challenge this assumption by illuminating the yet unexplored military functions of the garrisons and shed light on some important aspects of civil-military relations during the period, especially the strong connections forged between provincial communities and locally stationed troops. Concerning their military roles, first, garrisons acted as main bases for soldier/officer recruitment, enabling the government to realize the rapid expansion of regular forces (both army and navy) in time of war. The smooth execution of this function was crucialy dependent on the personal networks created by garrison commanders and their diligent acceptance of heavy administrative and financial burdens. Secondly, the garrisons were engaged in local defense in collaboration with provincial communities. Garrison commanders, in many cases, kept close contact with local governing elites, secured their support, and thereby were able to successfully mobilize various local resources in the form of money, materials and manpower, to pursue their activities. Although hardly involved in actual battle, the garrisons provided no less important military service. Behind the collaboration between the garrisons and provincial communities lay the local connections built by garrison commanders. Out of the 116 garrison governors commissioned during this period, sixty per cent were linked to their respective stations through at least one of the following four types of connection: (1) birth, estate or marriage, (2) their (or a close relative's) appointment to the same garrison in the past, (3) holding administrative/judicial office in the town corporation or county where they were stationed and (4) election as MP for a nearby borough constituency. These connections encouraged provincial communities and stationed troops to come into close contact, through which they could create and maintain reciprocal partnerships. It was in this way that civil-military relations in Restoration England essentially depended on the personal/local-based links and negotiation efforts between the two sides.
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