Fusiliers (30 page)

In addition to the loss of his last brother, poor health, and even poorer finances, Balfour was required to second the efforts of ‘my good and friendly General’, his great patron, Sir William Howe, to clear his name. While the colonel was at sea, an acrimonious exchange in Parliament had produced the inquiry that Howe had long believed necessary to defend his reputation.

Sir William had complained that his plans for prosecuting the war ‘were frequently thrown by unnoticed, and he was left to proceed at his own risk’. The general said he had no criticism of Lord North, the Prime Minister, but attacked the American Secretary, Lord Germain, arguing that ‘the peace of that country will never be restored, while its affairs are suffered to pass through that noble Lord’s hands’. Germain was stunned by the attack, but readily agreed to Howe’s request for the whole matter of why the British army had failed to defeat the rebellion during 1776 and 1777 to be placed before Parliament.

While the legislative machinery began turning in its intricate way to assemble documents and witnesses, Balfour and his master were due to appear before the King. The colonel had never been to a levee before, and it was at these morning audiences that royal favour was shown. In the very week of hearing further misfortune, Balfour therefore went to reap the reward of his family’s sacrifice, presenting himself at the centre of power, in front of the monarch’s person.

On 4 January, Balfour and Howe travelled to St James’s Palace to receive this mark of favour and condescension on the part of their sovereign King George III of Great Britain and Ireland. The normal form was for the guests to form a circle or arc in the drawing room, bowing or curtseying as the King entered, and affecting polite chatter among themselves as he moved along the line, granting each of them a little conversation.

The man that Balfour clapped eyes on that morning was in his forty-third year of life and nineteenth as king. His usual court dress was a coat of royal blue, waistcoat, breeches, stockings and shoes. These clothes had been let out inch by inch as his bulk expanded, despite his best efforts to defy the family tendency to corpulence with a monastic lifestyle.

George usually rose at around 5 a.m. In town he would ride the short distance from Buckingham House, where he lived, to St James’s, where official business was done. He went to chapel every day, usually after a couple of hours with state papers, and often continued working until 6 p.m. The King’s personality was marked by emotional and financial parsimony. His intellectual horizons were as narrow as his geographical ones.

Throughout his long reign, George III never travelled to Wales, Scotland or Ireland. He only twice got as far as Portsmouth, his main naval base on the south coast. George confined himself instead to private residences in London and Kew, with corresponding official palaces at St James’s and Windsor. He shared almost nothing of official business with his queen, Charlotte, and no courtier was allowed to attain any kind of personal intimacy.

The King kept himself
au fait
with his generals or the commanding officers of his regiments, and insisted on personally approving promotions, transfers or executions. Taking such a keen interest in the administration of his forces, there would have been much to chat about with Howe and Balfour that January morning, without trespassing on the sensitive territory of what could be done to win the war in America.

George III was quite adamant that the American war should go on, and had barely paused to question this assumption after the defeat of Saratoga. He did not attempt to direct military operations, a matter that was left to his Prime Minister, American Secretary and a handful of other senior figures including General Lord Amherst, commander-inchief of the Army. The conflict between Howe and Lord Germain was not a matter which the King could settle, for he thought both of them broadly on the right side of the argument compared to many politicians and officers whom he despised. General Howe’s demand for an inquiry coincided with the acquittal of one of the king’s admirals (Augustus Keppel) by court martial. Ministers worried that Howe’s desire to clear his name would produce a second pitched battle between those who supported the king’s policies, notably in America, and those who sought any chance to discredit them. This opposition ranged from many of the great Whig landed families to the London mob.

During the early spring of 1779 the Ministry stalled for time, trying to slow any public examination of the Howe brothers’ war and hoping that everything could be held up until the Parliamentary session ended,
when the matter might go away. Balfour, therefore, was kept hanging around in London for weeks while he, and other intimates such as the general’s secretary, waited to scrutinise on Howe’s behalf the official correspondence produced by ministers.

While Balfour idled, the hurly-burly of life in Georgian England went on about him: Parliament moved a bill to allow Earl Percy to divorce his wife; the mob burnt down a Catholic chapel in Blackfriars, going on to sack the houses of several well-known local Papists; David Garrick, the great Shakespearean actor, died and was buried, his hearse being ‘followed by more than 50 coaches of the principal nobility and gentry in and about the metropolies [
sic
]’; the ‘Young Prince of Annamaboe’, a ‘free black’, successfully won
£
500 damages from a ship’s captain who had employed him as a navigator but then, upon their arrival in Jamaica, double-crossed him and sold him as a slave; and the Secretary at War introduced into Parliament a new bill for recruiting soldiers and sailors. It is this last item, gleaned from the newspapers of that spring, apparently the driest and least interesting, that would be of the greatest importance to the Fusiliers, as they fought on at war.

Towards the end of March, Balfour left the febrile political battleground of the capital and headed east to Chatham. The army had turned this naval base into its main port of embarkation for recruits heading to America. The lieutenant colonel went to meet the 23rd’s latest batch of men, that included thirty-six rank and file, and thirteen pressed men. The latter were being sent under the new legislation that allowed magistrates to send those convicted of minor crimes into the army or navy.

There were three pipsqueak second lieutenants, the senior of whom was sixteen years old, travelling with the forty-nine privates. Seeing the potential for all manner of trouble if these virgin officers were put to sea in charge of a motley crew of recruits and criminals, Balfour intervened, insisting a more senior officer go on the transport, a 270ton cargo ship called the
Anne
, with them. It was duly done.

On 26 March, the
Anne
left Chatham, much to the excitement of one of those subalterns, the fifteen-year-old Harry Calvert. This young man was one of the first officers of the Royal Welch ever to have benefited from a military education in his own country, having been enrolled the previous year at the Royal Military Academy in
Woolwich. This establishment trained cadets for commissioning in the artillery and engineers – there was no school for infantry officers in Britain at the time – and Calvert had been sent there after sound instruction at Harrow school.

Calvert’s father, Peter, was very ambitious on the boy’s behalf. After barely half a year at Woolwich, Peter accepted, in the son’s words, that ‘the advantage of witnessing actual service … was esteemed as overbalance to the interruption it would give to my military education’. Calvert bought his boy a second lieutenancy in the 23rd. The father had plenty of money to spend because he and two brothers were partners in a highly successful brewery.

Having been gazetted into the 23rd, Harry Calvert ‘very joyfully’ removed his trunk from Woolwich, where the rigid curriculum and oppression of senior cadets had made him unhappy. He embarked upon his campaigns with enormous enthusiasm, an excellent education, military diligence and an acceptance of fate born of religious faith. Propelled by the ambition to escape the status of a tradesman’s son, Calvert would prove a great catch for the regiment and the army.

While one contingent was packed off to sea on the
Anne
, the regiment’s recruiting parties were beginning their campaign of 1779. Ministers hoped that the new Press Act would produce a great harvest of recruits, so parties of redcoats were sent all over the country to shepherd this livestock towards Chatham and America. In the north of England this effort was led by the commander of the Northern District, none other than that veteran of Lexington and recent divorcee, Lieutenant General Earl Percy, whose family estates were in Northumberland. The general had an acting major called Richard Temple in charge of the effort in Lancashire, an officer of the 23rd who was also responsible for running his own regiment’s recruiting parties.

Temple had set himself up in Preston, as ordered, in February. Another officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, complete with recruiting serjeants and corporals, was in Manchester. Liverpool was the province of the 46th Regiment’s parties, Lancaster of the 20th’s and so on, with different corps carving up all the counties under Percy’s aegis.

Recruiting had become very difficult by the fourth year of the American war. Tens of thousands of men had already been swept up. While the prospect of French and Spanish invasion did lift the country’s sagging patriotism somewhat, those who were keen to
defend against this threat joined the militia or local defence volunteers.

There were dangers facing a recruiting officer like Temple, and they did not arise from shot or shell. Having been retrieved from half pay at the outset of the American war, he had not even left British shores. Rather Temple and others like him performed a function ‘attended with many disagreeable circumstances to the officers employed on it, and very often the cause of their total ruin’. Since these parties often lived at inns and used drink to ply their prospective recruits, it was frequently the case that men forgot to draw the line between imbibing for work and pleasure. One of the 23rd’s recruiting serjeants had, for example, left England with the regiment in 1773 pursued by the constable of Yeovil for a great sum in unpaid booze bills, and also owing his captain money. He had been broken to the ranks for this misdemeanour.

As for the ‘disagreeable’ nature of the work, this often resulted from the parents of the hero who had enlisted when drunk pursuing the recruiting party, trying to persuade their boy to desert or the officer to release him. Sometimes the army would have to do so – if the lad was apprenticed to somebody, too small or too young – but in many cases the unpleasantness often resulted from the man himself realising that he had sold his life for a few guineas of bounty money, the so-called King’s shilling, and might never see his loved ones again.

Temple’s solution to this problem during 1775 and 1776 had been to maintain the momentum of his party through the countryside. He wrote it was ‘absolutely impossible to keep many recruits long together whilst surrounded by their friends and relations who employ every allurement possible to prevail upon them to desert’. The recruit who absconded left Temple three guineas the poorer, since he had to account for the money.

During the first year of the war, Temple’s party had tried to work the northern parts of Ireland, but it soon proved to be a fruitless task, and by the latter part of 1776 the recruiting reports for the army as a whole show months going by without the island yielding a single recruit. With the army’s recruiting ground of earlier decades proving so barren, efforts were made in Scotland, which proved so successful that several large battalions of highlanders were raised. The Fusiliers could not, however, recruit north of the Tweed, and, abandoning Ireland, they were left to trawl the counties of England and Wales.

Faced with such difficulty in finding enough volunteers the
government sanctioned a series of steps: bounty money had been raised, recruits offered the chance from December 1775 to enlist for the duration of the war only (rather than, as usual, for life), recruiters permitted to take ‘rogues and vagabonds’ off the hands of magistrates, the height limit had been reduced and the ban on Catholics enlisting relaxed. Finally, many categories of criminal had been added to the first two, and a system put in place whereby magistrates who sent men for foreign service would be paid for each one they delivered.

So, in March 1779, Major Temple turned up at the local sessions and awaited his men. The first difficulty arose when some of the inmates realised that by volunteering before they were convicted, they might still get paid their three guineas bounty. Temple would not have minded personally, but he knew the court officers would soon become disgruntled because they would not get their fee, and could therefore, he wrote, ‘no longer be expected to exert themselves on a service attended with danger and possible odium’.

As the major had noticed, once the element of compulsion had been introduced by the Press Act, the emotional temperature had risen considerably. Those whom he collected from the House of Correction in Preston were guilty of such crimes as fathering illegitimate children, poaching or being a runaway servant. William Smith, who came to the 23rd via the Manchester assizes, had stolen two and a half yards of linen from a merchant. Reports of army life were sufficiently alarming for many of these men to be terrified by what awaited them. Smith, it can be recorded, went quietly to the Fusiliers and died of fever two years later in an American hospital. Others did not go willingly.

On 27 March, four pressed men escaped from Preston House of Correction. Temple suggested such felons be gathered in Lancaster Castle instead since it was more secure. When the time came to move them down to Chatham, the 23rd’s new recruits were marched under armed guard.

The officer of the Royal Welch who went to collect a party from Manchester House of Correction was shocked to find that two of the inmates had cut off their own thumbs rather than serve in the war. ‘Please inform me in what manner I am to deal with these two men,’ he asked the War Office. The answer came back that by this act of self-mutilation, they had succeeded in cheating the press.