The Making Of The British Army (13 page)

Where did this leave the army? In many respects back in square one. MPs who still had a horror of the notion of a standing army could rail in Parliament against the annual estimates, which were still couched in tentative, even apologetic, tones as ‘a number of troops not exceeding …’ By the end of the eighteenth century’s second decade the number was in fact a paltry 8,000 in England and Scotland, the same as in Charles II’s day, with once again an entirely separate Irish establishment. And with no war to fight on the Continent, soldiers – ‘the brutal and licentious’ as Kipling would much later and with heavy irony versify them – were scattered about the country once again in small detachments, billeted on inn-keepers and the like with mutual dissatisfaction, and winning even fewer friends when enforcing public order, which too often looked like party political work. It were better, argued men in Parliament and shire hall alike, to place the nation’s defence in the hands of the militia once more, which was in turn in the hands of the county authorities. No one appears to have identified the possibility of treating the two as complementary, with the militia as a partially trained reserve for the regular army, offering some sort of administrative framework for recruiting and the basis for rapid expansion. All this would have to wait for another 200 years, until the decade before 1914.

The cuts might have gone even further after 1714 had there not been a sharp reminder that Utrecht did not guarantee universal peace. Indeed the provisions of the treaty at once precipitated a crisis, for Prince James Edward Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’) had been sheltering the while in France, which along with Spain and the papacy had recognized him as King, but the treaty required Louis XIV to expel him, which in 1715 he decided to do – unfortunately by warship to Scotland.

In anticipation of James’s landing the Catholic Highlands and the more Episcopalian parts of the Lowlands rose in ‘feudal’ loyalty, and a scratch Jacobite army under the earl of Mar had soon captured the ancient capital, Perth, without opposition. The great fortress of Stirling
Castle remained in government hands, however, and after a month’s indecision in which the Jacobites first took and then lost Edinburgh (Leith citadel), and with James still at sea, Mar made the fateful decision to divide his force and invade England. Committed only to restoring James to the throne of Scotland, many Highlanders deserted, but a Northumbrian Jacobite squire, Thomas Forster, had assured Mar that there would be armed support for him in Lancashire, a strongly recusant county. And so over the border they poured, 2,500 undrilled men in homespun tartan, like the cattle-reiving ‘blue bonnets’ of centuries past, led by the inveterate but wholly unmilitary Lowland Jacobite, Viscount Kenmure.

At Carlisle they met with the usual anti-reiving opposition, not so much from the under-garrisoned castle as from the Cumberland militia armed with pitchforks. These they easily brushed aside, but few recruits had come their way on the march through the Border country, and the long, onward trudge through the rainy autumn fells of Westmorland disheartened many a Highlander, though he usually thought of rain and rough pasture as home. Lancaster received them sullenly, but on 9 November at Preston 1,500 recruits rallied to the cause.

The new Whig government’s response to the threat had been swift. Regiments, principally of dragoons, were hastily re-raised. But the response was somewhat paranoid, too. In the contrary West Country suspected Jacobites were arrested, though many of them were really no more than residual ‘non-jurors’ – clergy and officials whose conscience had prevented their repudiating the original oath of allegiance to James II in order to take a second to William – and probably no more than moderately Jacobite in sympathy. A good number of troops were also moved to Oxford in the fear that the university’s traditional Royalism would somehow transmute to Jacobitism. Despite these diversions, however, government reinforcements were soon arriving at Preston, from Scotland as well as the south, including the Cameronians, a viscerally anti-Catholic regiment and veterans of Marlborough’s four great victories. Opposition to the Act of Union of 1707 which bound England and Scotland together as the Kingdom of Great Britain with one parliament, and thereby made the Scots and English armies officially into one, had undoubtedly fuelled support for James among the Scots; but the Act also made for a more efficient government response.

And so in Preston the skirmishing began, with buildings set alight and a little cannonading to keep the Jacobite outposts busy. After a few days there was street fighting – noisy, destructive, time-consuming, but to no purpose or effect. With reports of government reinforcements arriving by the hour, the Highlanders rapidly began losing heart, and on 14 November Viscount Kenmure’s ‘army’ surrendered unconditionally. The ‘bag’ numbered barely 1,500, of whom a third were English (though the majority of the Lancashire men had fled). Although fewer than twenty Jacobites had been killed, 200 government troops had been killed or wounded – more than enough to frighten London; and ministers were not inclined to be magnanimous. Kenmure was tried for treason, and beheaded.

Meanwhile at Sheriffmuir south of Stirling the earl of Mar, his forces swelled to 12,000, clashed inconclusively with a government force half the size led by the doughty duke of Argyll, who had served with real distinction under Marlborough. Neither side was left in possession of the field, but Mar, dithering as before, retreated towards Perth, leaving Argyll to lick his wounds and bring reinforcements from Stirling.

At last in December James landed, north of Aberdeen. But he was at once severely cast down: besides the bleak granite prospect of that city, which cannot have cheered him much after Paris, the news of Preston and Sheriffmuir was hardly encouraging. Beset by a raging fever, he did little to inspire his confused and demoralized troops. He briefly set up court at the old royal palace of Scone outside Perth, and ordered the burning of villages to hinder the duke of Argyll’s advance, which even the deep snow was failing to do.

But James’s counsellors had also lost heart. The earl of Mar, not for nothing nicknamed ‘Bobbing John’ for his rapid switching of allegiances, ordered a retreat eastwards to the coast on the pretext of finding a stronger position. James saw that the game was up, however, and like his father before him abandoned his throne without a fight, taking ship for France on 4 February and in customary Stuart fashion leaving a message for his fatally loyal Highlanders to ‘shift for themselves’. A century later, when tartan sentimentality was gripping even the Prince Regent, Sir Walter Scott romanticized the whole sorry affair in
Rob Roy.

The Fifteen, as the campaign became known (to distinguish it from the second Jacobite rebellion of 1745, which would press the government much more sorely), and a minor but potentially more successful
rebellion (or rising, according to taste) in 1719 had given London a fright, but it also taught the army a good deal about ‘counter-insurgency’ and the occupation of hostile territory. The Irish general George Wade was appointed ‘Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s forces, castles, forts and barracks in North Britain’, and told to pacify the Highlands.

Wade had seen what it took to pacify his own country. He had also served in Flanders with Marlborough, in Spain and in the West Indies, and he had studied the Roman army of Agricola’s day which had brought the
Pax Romana
, of a sort, to Caledonia. He would now apply what he had learned in a grand scheme worthy of the legions themselves, building firm bases in the Great Glen at Fort William and Kiliwhimin (later Fort Augustus) and at Inverness (Fort George), with fortified barracks at strategic points such as Ruthven midway between Perth and the Highland ‘capital’. They can all be seen today, in various states of repair – the finest of them, Fort George, rebuilt east of Inverness after 1745, with its vast ramparts and massive bastions one of the most formidable artillery fortresses in Europe, and still garrisoned by regular troops (it is also home to the regimental museum of the Queen’s Own Highlanders). Wade linked these strong points by a beacon chain and constructed 250 miles of metalled road requiring forty new bridges (including one over the wide Tay at Aberfeldy) to move troops and artillery rapidly to anywhere that trouble threatened. And in case these measures failed to contain rebellion within the Highlands, he also reinforced the great strongholds of Stirling and Edinburgh, and engaged Vanbrugh’s assistant at Blenheim, Nicholas Hawksmoor, to build a huge barracks– fortress at Berwick to guard the eastern route into England. It remains today in all its military elegance under the patronage of English Heritage, and houses the regimental museum of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the regiment now incorporated, along with the Queen’s Own Highlanders, into the Royal Regiment of Scotland (though Berwick is still an English city).

And while south of the border the militia was increasingly neglected, in Scotland Wade organized the ‘Highland Watches’ under the local gentry to prevent fighting between the clans, deter raiding and enforce the new disarmament laws. In 1739 these watch companies would be mustered into a regiment of the line, the ‘Black Watch’, so-called for their dark-coloured ‘government’ tartan, and for many years they were the only troops allowed to wear tartan of any kind. Wade also mounted
a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign, opening schools in the Highlands funded from forfeited Jacobite estates.

But it would not be quite enough. A Jacobite romanticism, not wholly the retrospective invention of Sir Walter Scott, and a genuine attachment to the ‘Old Religion’ (Catholicism) would mean a good many more Highland men slain – in the Forty-five, when James’s son, ‘the Young Pretender’ Charles Edward, sailed from France and raised the Stuart standard in the heather.

For the time being, however, retrenchment remained the policy. As soon as the threat of the Fifteen was past, the army’s entire establishment was cut again – to 18,000, the lowest figure since James II’s reign. Britain was still unquestionably a major European power, but it was a power based on residual memories of victories past, not the capability for victories future. An army of 18,000 was to prove wholly inadequate for a nation of the first rank, even when employed dextrously in collaboration with the ever-strengthening Royal Navy. It was not enough for Britain’s new wars of trade, nor its unfinished business with Spain; and certainly not for yet another continental dynastic contest – this time of the Austrian succession.

KING GEORGE II, WHO SUCCEEDED HIS FATHER TO THE BRITISH THRONE AND
to the electorate of Hanover in 1727, had three passions: the Queen, music, and the army. Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach was probably the most intelligent woman a British king has ever had the fortune to marry. By relentlessly championing Robert Walpole as ‘prime minister’ she played no small part in consolidating both the Hanoverian succession – which in spite of the ghastly Stuart alternatives was by no means universally popular – and constitutional monarchy itself. Nor was she merely a power behind the throne: when the King was away on state business in Germany, as he frequently was, Caroline had vice-regal authority. A contemporary verse ran:

They had eight children, and despite – perhaps even because of – his several mistresses, George was devoted to her. When she was dying, in 1737, she urged him to take another wife. ‘Non,’ he replied resolutely: ‘j’aurai des maîtresses!’ And he had a pair of matching coffins made with removable sides, so that when he followed her to the grave (twenty-three years later) they could lie together again.

George inherited his passion for music from his father, whose protégé Handel he continued to champion: he is famously credited with the custom of standing during the ‘Hallelujah chorus’, and Handel composed the anthems for Caroline’s funeral, as he had for the coronation. But like his cousin Frederick William I of Prussia
(der Soldaten-König)
, George believed the army to be the first and noblest occupation of a king. He certainly took little interest in government, which was ably if corruptly (in modern eyes; the eighteenth century was on the whole more tolerant) conducted by Walpole. It all worked rather well.