signal fires were
blazing fifty miles off, and whole counties were rising in arms. But
many years had now elapsed since the beacons had been lighted; and they
were regarded rather as curious relics of ancient manners than as parts
of a machinery necessary to the safety of the state. [43]

The only army which the law recognised was the militia. That force had
been remodelled by two Acts of Parliament, passed shortly after the
Restoration. Every man who possessed five hundred pounds a year derived
from land, or six thousand pounds of personal estate, was bound to
provide, equip, and pay, at his own charge, one horseman. Every man
who had fifty pounds a year derived from land, or six hundred pounds
of personal estate, was charged in like manner with one pikemen or
musketeer. Smaller proprietors were joined together in a kind of
society, for which our language does not afford a special name, but
which an Athenian would have called a Synteleia; and each society was
required to furnish, according to its means, a horse soldier or a foot
soldier. The whole number of cavalry and infantry thus maintained was
popularly estimated at a hundred and thirty thousand men. [44]

The King was, by the ancient constitution of the realm, and by the
recent and solemn acknowledgment of both Houses of Parliament, the sole
Captain General of this large force. The Lords Lieutenants and their
Deputies held the command under him, and appointed meetings for drilling
and inspection. The time occupied by such meetings, however, was not
to exceed fourteen days in one year. The Justices of the Peace were
authorised to inflict severe penalties for breaches of discipline. Of
the ordinary cost no part was paid by the crown: but when the trainbands
were called out against an enemy, their subsistence became a charge on
the general revenue of the state, and they were subject to the utmost
rigour of martial law.

There were those who looked on the militia with no friendly eye. Men
who had travelled much on the Continent, who had marvelled at the stern
precision with which every sentinel moved and spoke in the citadels
built by Vauban, who had seen the mighty armies which poured along all
the roads of Germany to chase the Ottoman from the Gates of Vienna, and
who had been dazzled by the well ordered pomp of the household troops of
Lewis, sneered much at the way in which the peasants of Devonshire and
Yorkshire marched and wheeled, shouldered muskets and porte