The Making Of The British Army (17 page)

At one o’clock Charles Edward’s artillery (twelve guns) opened fire – a pathetic, ineffective ripple of roundshot, ‘extremely ill-served and ill-pointed’, wrote Cumberland in his dispatch. His own gunners answered, whereupon the Jacobite gunners ran.

Accounts of Cumberland’s cannonade differ (it lasted between fifteen and thirty minutes) but it played havoc with the exposed Jacobite lines. It was not so much the physical damage – there were not that many guns, the rate of fire was slow and the soft ground absorbed the impact of solid shot – but its galling effect on half-disciplined troops unused to standing in line under fire was marked.

It appeared, also, to have paralysed Charles Edward. He hesitated for what seemed an age before giving the order to charge, then urged his front rank not to throw away their muskets in their ardour to close with the tormenting guns. At first the Macdonalds would not budge, however, angry because they had been placed on the left of the line instead of the honoured right. Clan Chattan (Lady Mackintosh’s Regiment) were first away, but boggy ground forced them to veer right, into the line of the following regiments, so that the weight of attack was towards the wall on the government left.

Despite the rain, Cumberland’s redcoats were able to get off several good volleys, the product of their six weeks’ training at Aberdeen. The artillery now switched to canister, with terrible effect, ‘the men dropping down by wholesale’, as Cumberland would record.

Even dropping down wholesale, however, numbers spoke as a great mass of Highlanders crashed into the two regiments on the left of Cumberland’s line, principally on the grenadiers of the 4th Foot (‘Barrell’s Regiment’) commanded by the marquess of Lothian’s younger son, Lord Robert Kerr. The 4th, who had been the first regiment to go over to William in 1688 under the lieutenant-colonelcy of Marlborough’s younger brother, was perhaps the most battle-hardened regiment in the army. At Aberdeen they and the rest of the infantry had been trained to thrust obliquely with the bayonet, not at the man coming head on but into the right flank of the man on his left, for the Highlander carried the
targe
(round shield) as well as the broadsword, and with these he had broken the government ranks at Falkirk. But such a drill, if it were possible at all, required the greatest discipline. The 4th held their ground, but at a price: 117 were killed or wounded where they stood, including Kerr himself who received the first charging Cameron on the point of his spontoon seconds before another cleft his
skull in two. ‘There was scarce a soldier or officer of Barrell’s … who did not kill at least one or two men each with their bayonets and spontoons,’ wrote Cumberland. Nevertheless the sheer weight of Highlander numbers drove the 4th back on to the support line.

Unlike at Falkirk, however, the support line stood steady, and those Highlanders who broke through Barrell’s were promptly shot down ‘like rabbits’, principally by Semphill’s Regiment (the 25th Foot) of Edinburgh and Border Scots. Those Highlanders who survived seemed stunned. They ‘never seed the English fight in such a manner, for they thought we were all Mad Men that fought so’, wrote one of Barrell’s afterwards.

Meanwhile Wolfe’s 8th Foot had ‘wheeled in upon them; the whole then gave them five or six fires with vast execution’, as one of his captains later recalled. Having thrown away their muskets despite Charles’s entreaties, the Highlanders could make no reply but hurl dirks, stones and even clumps of earth in the fury of impotence – or sense of betrayal?

On the Jacobite left the Highlanders never made contact with the government line. Nervous of the cavalry to their flank, knee-deep in water and with little support from the second line, the Macdonalds simply failed to press home the attack. Cumberland, coolly surveying the wretched scene, now moved his cavalry forward on the right, ‘upon which, rather like Devils than Men they broke through the Enemy’s Flank, and a Total Rout followed,’ he wrote in his dispatch with understandable satisfaction.

It was soon finished on the left and in the centre too, which suddenly gave way ‘in the greatest hurry and confusion imaginable; and scarce was their flight begun before they were out of our sight’, continued the dispatch. None was so fast in that flight as Charles Edward himself – covered only by the steadiness of the Scots and Irish regulars of the French legion.

By two o’clock the Forty-five was over. It remained only for the Highlands to be ‘pacified’, as after the 1715 rising. But this time there would be ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’: the fugitives were hunted down, and many of them were dispatched on the spot (there had been little quarter given on the battlefield itself). Since they would have been hanged for treason anyway, it probably seemed only summary justice. And the heart of the rebellion was torn out, too: Jacobite estates were even more thoroughly destroyed or confiscated than after the Fifteen,
and penal laws were introduced to destroy, in effect, the clan system – of which the banning of tartan and the Highland (bag)pipes were but the least brutal measures. The duke of Cumberland would receive an honorary degree from Glasgow University, Handel would compose yet another work to celebrate a Hanoverian victory (with an anthem in his especial honour – ‘See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes!’), but north of the Highland line Cumberland would gain the name ‘Butcher’. There would be no more Jacobite risings, however.

As for the military lessons learned, the Forty-five was yet another demonstration of the superiority of well-trained regulars, the devastating effect of volley fire, the winning factor of logistics, and the ‘force multiplier’ (as it would be called today) of the Royal Navy’s close support. These lessons the duke of Cumberland would take with him to the Horse Guards (via two more seasons’ campaigning in Flanders), where in 1748 he was installed as commander-in-chief.

AFTER DETTINGEN AND CULLODEN THE WAR WITH FRANCE STUMBLED ON.
It spread to India, where both countries had growing trading interests and increasing numbers of troops to protect them. It spread to North America, where along the Ohio, Missouri and St Lawrence rivers colonial volunteers and British regulars clashed with French troops and their native Indian auxiliaries. Finally in 1748 the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle brought an inconclusive end to operations in Europe, though skirmishing would continue intermittently in both India and North America.

But the fighting in three continents had underscored the lessons of Dettingen and the Forty-five that disciplined volleys of musketry and handy artillery carried the day in the field battle; that sound logistics were crucial; and that cooperation with the navy could be the key to success. The prime importance of firepower and logistics the army had understood in Marlborough’s time; but, Cumberland having shown the way, cooperation with the Royal Navy was only now emerging as a vital principle in the strategy of Britain’s expanding trade and the colonies.

There was a further lesson, but it was perhaps too ambiguous yet for the army to embrace. ‘Light troops’ – troops that fought more as individuals than as parts of the volleying machine – would be indispensable in ‘frontier’ warfare (what would later be known as ‘small
wars’) in which the enemy did not himself fight in formed ranks. And as the continental armies grew ever more rigid in their formations on the battlefield, so there would be opportunity to dance around them with troops who could move in ways other than the strictly regulated adjustment of column and line. The Austrians were already using light troops, mainly horsed irregulars from the wilder margins of the empire – Pandours, Croats and, of course, Hungarian hussars – though principally in reconnaissance and raiding beyond the battlefield. Frederick the Great was experimenting with his
jaegers –
men in green, hunters from the German forests, and deadly with the rifle, a weapon with which to take careful aim rather than having to rely on sheer weight of shot in the volley.
⁴⁰
The French had their
chasseurs
, too, who had helped defeat the duke of Cumberland at Fontenoy. But the opening British volley at Fontenoy had felled 700 officers and men in the French front rank, and that devastating spectacle was etched deep in the British military mind. It would be a full decade, indeed, before the British would employ light troops – in America – and three decades before a British army fielded light infantry on the Continent.

‘King George’s War’, as the War of the Austrian Succession was known in England (for many believed that George had subordinated the country’s interests to those of Hanover), did, however, put paid to the pretence of ‘guards, garrisons, augmentations’, and any other euphemisms, for the duration of hostilities. ‘Our liberties are in no danger from our standing army,’ Henry Pelham, the new prime minister, assured Parliament in the early 1740s, ‘because it is commanded by men of the best families and fortunes.’ In other words, the country need no longer fear being coerced – militarized, indeed – as in Cromwell’s day, for the interests of its military leaders were exactly those of the country as a whole. Britain would not be, as Voltaire said of Prussia, an army with a country attached to it.

With the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, therefore, not nearly so many battalions were disbanded as after Utrecht; nor did the coming of summer see the chimneys blocked up as usual, or – worse – pulled
down. Indeed, in 1751 the duke of Cumberland formally reorganized the infantry into ‘regiments of the line of battle’, each known by its number rather than by the colonel’s name; and for the first time an army list was published giving details of commissions, regiments and the seniority of general officers. But an army in a country whose strategy was maritime not continental was never going to be very big: if more troops were suddenly needed they would have to be raised from scratch, and paid off afterwards. The line of battle – of the infantry in particular, but of the cavalry too – would still be rather elastic.

The duke’s modest reforms, including an attempt to standardize drill, proved timely, for in 1755 the continued skirmishing in North America produced a backwash of war in Europe. At first it scarcely came to shots – except for poor Admiral Byng, who failed to press home the battle with a French fleet sent to capture Minorca and was consequently put in front of a firing squad. Voltaire’s Candide famously refused to go ashore at Portsmouth when told that the British liked to shoot an admiral from time to time – ‘pour encourager les autres’. But Byng’s sentence sent a stark message to admirals and generals alike. War was no longer, if ever it had been, a casual affair: the nation expected victory. And encourage it certainly did. One of the admiral’s descendants, General Julian Byng, who planned the first successful tank attack, at Cambrai in 1917, and whose Third Army held on more tenaciously than others during the massive German offensive of 1918, was always acutely mindful of his ancestry.

Paradoxically, the resurgence of war on the Continent came from the very policy of avoiding war on the Continent. For in Britain’s grand maritime strategy trade and the colonies were the paymaster, and their protection the first priority after home defence. But France’s military force and economic potential continued to be a threat to the North American colonies and to the Royal Navy’s hard-won control of the North Atlantic. So in order to stop France from pouring reinforcements into Canada and building more warships, Britain adopted an indirect approach: she would distract France by drawing her troops into war nearer home. It might not have passed for ‘just war’ with St Augustine, but it had its strategic logic.

In May 1756, therefore, having made subsidy treaties with Hesse-Kassel and several smaller states, Britain concluded an alliance with Prussia. A few months later France obligingly tightened the strategic noose around her own neck by an alliance with Austria: Empress Maria
Theresa’s obsession with revenge on Frederick the Great over the loss of Silesia would bind Prussia into the fight more surely than any treaty. Ironically, too, Britain could now relax a little about the Scheldt estuary (the perennial fear being that it would fall into French hands, offering a prime site from which invasion barges could bear down on the Thames); for, the Austrian Netherlands now being the domain of a French ally, Louis XV could hardly invade them. And so in September, with the harvest gathered in and the depots restocked, the Prussians marched into Saxony, an Austrian ally, and the War of the Austrian Succession began again, albeit with the line-up of belligerents changed. This time it would be called the Seven Years War.