‘New Model Army’ established

The use of the term ‘New Model Army’ is attributed to the historian Thomas Carlyle in 1845, and records from1646 refer to the Parliamentarians’ ‘New Modelled Army’’, an idiom that contrasted their new force with the force that had been raised by the Parliamentarians’ local associations of counties whose units were reluctant, or even refused, to serve far from home. Although it was disbanded in 1660, after the Restoration of the Monarchy, this new army was not a militia, could serve anywhere across the ‘Three Kingdoms’, and was in effect our first professional army before the Restoration of the Monarchy.

The ‘restored’ King Charles II’s Royal Warrant of 26 January 1661 established the first regiments of a small standing army in England, but it was not until the Acts of Union of 1707, that the separate military establishments of England and Scotland were joined to become, in effect, the British Army.