Map of a Nation (12 page)

T
HE EARLY STAGES
of the Seven Years War went badly for Britain, but they proved a boon for William Roy. When military strategists decided a decisive blow was needed against France on its home soil, Roy was sent as a junior member of a unit to attack Rochefort, a port in south-west France. The mission fell to pieces when its adviser lost his nerve and its leader called the whole thing off. At the resulting court martial, Roy gave eloquent and frank evidence and earned a reputation as an expert in military engineering.

By March 1759 Roy had been promoted to Sub-Engineer, the second rung on the Corps of Engineers’ professional ladder. By now the Seven Years War was well under way and Roy was sent to fight under the leader of the allied troops – Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick – to defend the Hanoverian homelands of Britain’s king against the French. Roy industriously surveyed potential camps and battlefields, and distinguished himself in the allied victory at the Battle of Minden in August 1759. In the following year he was
commended
for his ‘zeal’, ‘assiduity’ and ‘talents’ at the siege of Munster. Roy produced a map of Minden: a beautiful pen-and-ink and watercolour survey, which incorporated a technique whereby the positions of both armies’
regiments
were marked by overlapping flaps that were fixed to the map’s surface and which could be moved about to follow the troops. The French
appropriately
called these
papillons
, butterflies. After the battle, Roy’s map was pored over by those involved in a controversial court martial to determine whether a British commander had been guilty of insubordination. His contribution to the trial, and the part he had played in the Seven Years War generally, brought Roy further military accolades. He was promoted to Deputy Quartermaster General of the forces in Great Britain, responsible for maintaining the troops’ supplies. Roy pulled off this tricky logistical role with aplomb, and was later promoted to ‘Commissary General of all Stores, Provisions, &c.’

Over the years Roy grew into a patient, gentle and well-liked man, who
managed people well. His shyness seems to have metamorphosed into a measured self-control and dislike of frivolity, and his soldiers were fond of him. An anecdote told almost twenty years after Minden mocked anyone who might suggest otherwise. In 1778, when the prospect of a French
invasion
reared its head again during the War of American Independence, Warley Common in Essex was turned into a camp for the county’s militia. One late September morning, Roy was riding on the road to Warley when he noticed a young officer a little way ahead and ‘observed the poor
condition
of his horse, and asked what it was owing to?’ The young man, wanting to shift the blame and impress the stranger with a controversial opinion, began to lay into a well-respected figure and laid the fault at the door of the Commissary General, William Roy. He claimed intimate acquaintance with Roy, accused him of embezzling rations, and concluded ‘his observations with many hearty curses against the Colonel’. Rather bemused, Roy
listened
patiently, only commenting quietly that he hoped ‘Roy was not so much in fault as was apprehended’. The two rode on for a while, side by side. As they drew near to Warley Common, two senior officers approached the pair, and upon recognising Roy, they saluted him as such. His young
companion
was thrown into ‘great astonishment and confusion’ at this exposure of his lie and although Roy tried to persuade him to travel on, he was
unsuccessful
. The
Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser
delightedly ridiculed the dupe who had questioned Roy’s competence and affability.

In September 1759, Roy had been promoted in the Army to captain and the Board of Ordnance had particularly congratulated him on the fact that he had achieved this ‘extraordinary promotion’ on his ‘own Personal Merit’. Six years later, in July 1765, he was appointed to the prestigious position of Surveyor-General of Coasts. He was hired to ‘inspect, survey and make Reports from time to time of the State of the Coast and Districts of the Country adjacent to the Coast of this Kingdom’. The instruction to ‘survey’ the coasts did not solely entail map-making: in this sense, ‘surveying’ referred to the general communication of the shape and quality of the land in words or images. Within three months of his appointment, Roy received a letter from one of his seniors informing him that ‘it is His Majesty’s pleasure that you should immediately repair to Dunkirk’. In February 1763, the Seven
Years War had ended when France, Spain, Portugal and Britain had signed the Treaty of Paris. The Treaty’s thirteenth article had stipulated that the military improvements made by the French to ‘the town and port of Dunkirk’ during the war should be destroyed to ensure the security of Britain’s south coast. Roy was appointed to oversee the demolition. It was not an enjoyable mission. A glutinous fog hung over the port and the French were hostile and obstructive. They harped on the Treaty’s caveat that the engineers should protect the safety, health and ‘wholesomeness of the air’ of Dunkirk’s inhabitants, by ensuring that the demolitions did not lead to
flooding
or compromise sanitation. Stalemate was reached and the work ground to a halt, leaving Roy and his colleagues sitting around in idle frustration.

In November 1765 the new British Ambassador to France descended on Dunkirk to negotiate between the parties. Roy may have already met Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, at the Battle of Minden, where both were present and shared an interest in military cartography. Now in Dunkirk, Lennox quickly singled out Roy, who was nine years his senior, as a
like-minded
compadre. Confidentially, and without mincing his words, this rather mercurial, egocentric aristocrat, who was dismissive of fools and
rabidly
protective of allies, solicited the engineer’s opinion, and Roy voiced his suspicion that the French were indulging in groundless prevarications. Both men duly resolved that ‘the Demolition … should … go on’ regardless. Roy took this opportunity to confide in Lennox, confessing that his health had ‘not been bettered by my winters Occupation at Dunkirk’. He begged of his influential friend that ‘you will be so good as [to] procure me His Majesty’s leave to return to England’, and in mid February 1766 the two men boarded a boat in Calais together and set sail for England.

Upon his return, the middle-aged Roy took stock. He knew that his career in military map-making had given him ‘a [more] thorough knowledge of the country’ than anyone else alive. The story of his life could be plotted on a map: he had spent time in Scotland, south and western England, south Wales, Ireland (which he had surveyed in 1765), and even various Continental
hotspots
. But the British Isles’s real maps were upsettingly patchy. There was no single national survey that could ‘join the whole together’, as Roy put it, and this shortcoming in the nation’s self-knowledge worried him immensely.
On 24 May 1766 Roy committed his concerns to paper and drafted a
memorandum
to the King, George III. In these ‘Considerations on the Propriety of making a General Military Map of England’ Roy fretted that, in time of war, when the British Navy was called away, the nation’s coastlines became dangerously vulnerable to invasion. He felt it was of the utmost importance that ‘knowledge should be acquired, in as far, at least, as regards the Nature of the Coast, and the principal Positions & Posts which an Army should occupy, when called upon to defend the Country against the Invasions of its Enemies. The only Method of attaining this Knowledge seems to be, by making a good Military Plan or Map of the whole Country.’

Roy estimated that the expenses of the map’s start-up year would reach
£
2778 12s. And then he guessed that around
£
2500 annually would be sufficient, over a period of six to eight years. He effectively promised George III that the nation could be given its first complete, accurate map for a sum in the region of
£
15,000–
£
20,000 (roughly between
£
1 million and
£
1.5 million today), and in the space of less than a decade. But his proposal was knocked back, probably on account of cost, combined with political apathy in the midst of a period of peace. Nevertheless, Roy’s ‘Considerations’ were the first viable proposal for a national mapping agency in Great Britain. It was a momentous document, on which its creator considered that ‘the honour of the nation’ depended. Roy was certain that, when a national survey came into being, it would be executed by military map-makers.

The rejection of Roy’s proposal did not mean that the progress of
cartography
had ground to a halt in Britain. A number of citizens from a variety of backgrounds turned their attention to map-making in the second half of the eighteenth century, and when the Ordnance Survey was finally
established
in 1791 it would owe much to these innovators, as well as to its more obvious military progenitors.

 

O
N
22 M
ARCH
1754 a small group of ‘Noblemen, Clergy, Gentlemen, & Merchants’ met at Rawthmell’s coffee-house on Henrietta Street in
London, between Covent Garden and the Strand. Amid the chatter of Rawthmell’s comfortable surroundings, these men brought into being the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. (In 1847 the Society was given a royal charter and became the Royal Society of Arts, a name it retains to this day.) Designed to encourage the
application
of those disciplines to the public good, the Society of Arts soon attracted a host of eminent members, including the charismatic botanist Joseph Banks, the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, the future
statesman
Benjamin Franklin, the actor David Garrick, the musicologist Charles Burney, the writers Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne, the artist William Hogarth and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson. What a ‘Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences!’ the Marquess of Rockingham exclaimed.

The Society of Arts was initially focused on ‘the Encouragement of Boys and Girls in the Art of Drawing, [which] is necessary in many Employments, Trade and Manufactures’, on the basis that ‘the Encouragement thereof may prove of great Utility to the Public’. Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, opened the sculpture gallery at his mansion at Goodwood in West Sussex to enthusiastic young painters who needed somewhere to practise their skills. The Society’s fervour was partly patriotic: its members wanted to turn London into a rival to Paris, ‘a Seat of Arts, as it is now of Commerce, inferior to none in the Universe’. The Society of Arts offered incentives, ‘premiums’, in the form of healthy sums of money or medals to those who successfully met its challenges. And in 1759 its members set their sights on another practical application of art: map-making.

In the early 1750s, a Cornish antiquarian and naturalist called William Borlase had become aggravated at the shortcomings of the maps he was using. Borlase wrote frustrated letters to a friend, challenging him to deny ‘whether the state of British Geography be not very low, and at present wholly destitute of any public encouragement. Our Maps of England and its
counties
are extremely defective,’ he grumbled. The recipient of Borlase’s letters was Henry Baker, a fellow antiquarian and naturalist, and a founding member of the Society of Arts. Borlase persuaded Baker to make the lamentable state of British map-making a priority for the Society. ‘’Tis to be wished, that some
people of weight would, when a proper opportunity offers, hint the necessity of such Survey,’ he wheedled, suggesting that

On Baker’s recommendation, the Society of Arts duly agreed to establish a regular prize of up to
£
100 to ‘give proper surveyors such Encouragement as may induce them to make accurate Surveys of two or three Counties towards completing the whole’. Its members hoped that the Society of Arts’ competition would result in the production of a series of accurate maps of Britain’s counties that could be pieced together like a jigsaw into a full national survey. These maps would be created using the most up-to-date methods and instruments, on a uniform scale of one inch to one mile. And the Society also tried to accelerate the painfully lethargic progress of British cartography by stipulating that candidates must complete their surveys within one, or at most two, years. Its members were enthused by the
possibility
that the resulting maps would be ‘of great use in planning any scheme for the Improvement of the Highways, making Rivers Navigable and
providing
other means for the Ease and Advancement of the National Commerce’.