The Making Of The British Army (7 page)

Parliament had its qualms, however. The regiments were officially part of the royal household, raised by royal warrant; Charles had always been careful to refer to them as his ‘guards and garrisons’, as indeed had Parliament. But there were practical problems arising from this de facto existence which could not be ignored for much longer, as the number of soldiers just continued to grow. For the army’s internal discipline on active service abroad was regulated by the ‘Articles of War’, first issued in 1663, but these had no legal force before the English courts. They were, so to speak, the rules of a private club. This did not matter much in the case of relatively minor military offences, where some suitable punishment such as stoppage of pay or fatigue duties could be imposed; but the serious cases, of which desertion was the most prevalent, had to be represented as felonies before a civil court – and the wary courts were reluctant to become involved in military discipline. Parliament wished it could continue to turn a blind eye to the operation of military justice, for to regularize it would be to recognize in law the existence of an army, but with the numbers
of troops constantly growing it was increasingly difficult to do so.

Not that Parliament wanted to see the back of them altogether, for soldiers were proving useful to the common good. Cavalrymen patrolled the roads to apprehend highwaymen and footpads; they escorted valuable merchant convoys and searched for contraband. And in the days before the constabulary, foot soldiers guarding the royal palaces and the theatres were a welcome presence of law and order on the streets of London. When from time to time the mob erupted into violence towards property, they assisted the magistrates in putting down the riot, while in other more peaceful ways the soldiery mitigated their unpalatable image – building roads, repairing bridges, fighting fires and the like. Charles personally supervised the efforts to put out the Great Fire of London in 1666, using his guards to pull down buildings to create firebreaks. But Parliament knew it must soon address the existential question: who ‘owned’ the army? Events rather than debate would force the issue.

Although Charles himself sired many children, poor Queen Catherine produced no heir, so that when the King died in February 1685 his brother James, duke of York, though a Catholic, ascended the throne. He was immediately challenged by one of his Protestant but illegitimate nephews, his 36-year-old namesake James, duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch.

Monmouth had made a name for himself as a military commander: in Flanders he had been brave if erratic, and after Monck’s death in 1670 he had been made commander-in-chief for the Third Dutch War. Charles, however, had steadfastly refused to legitimize him. Nevertheless, Monmouth believed he had both the rightful claim and, critically, the support of the Whigs in Parliament, although it was probably the encouragement of the earl of Argyll, who intended declaring for him in Scotland, that tempted him to act. From the Netherlands, where he had lived in exile since the ‘Rye House Plot’,
¹⁸
in May 1685 Monmouth sailed challengingly for England, but with an ‘army’ of a mere hundred or so, evidently putting his trust in that persistent but false principle of war,
hope –
in this case that the men of
the West Country would rise in his support. Indeed, his campaign plan had the merit of simplicity: like a ball of snow rolling down a long hill, his army would grow in size with its own momentum, and sweep all before it in the march on London.

Monmouth’s three ships were, for a reason never adequately explained, unmolested by the Royal Navy in their leisurely passage through the English Channel and along the south coast. He landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June, and at Taunton ten days later was proclaimed king – truly a provincial folly if ever there was one. Local men, by all accounts, ‘flocked to his support’; it was an apt verb, since they would soon be lambs to the slaughter. First, however, the reckless independence that has frequently characterized the county of Somerset worked to his advantage. There was indeed a ‘snowball effect’: 8,000 men had soon joined his march – but towards Bristol, not London. This diversion proved costly, for a troop of Life Guards, hastily dispatched from Whitehall, were able to turn them back from the city in pretty short order. Further deflated by the news that the earl of Argyll had been arrested, it was a dispirited and now diminishing host that trudged back into the Somerset Levels, Alfred the Great’s famed fastness. But this time the low-lying marshland proved no refuge, and by the first week of July Monmouth lay cornered in the town of Bridgwater, his army having dwindled to perhaps 3,500 pitchforks.

Monmouth had really not chosen his moment well, for with England at peace abroad there were regiments to hand at home, and it was now – if there had ever been any doubting it – that the superiority of disciplined troops told. During the night of 5–6 July, in a desperate throw of the dice, and perhaps to buy time to escape by sea, he decided on a surprise attack against James’s forces from the least expected direction – across the soggy wastes of Sedgemoor. Unfortunately for him, this approach was not only unexpected; it proved too difficult for undrilled men to manage, and they lost both direction and order. Inevitably, too, they were detected by the cavalry vedettes (mounted sentries), and James’s troops, under command of Lord (John) Churchill, later duke of Marlborough, stood to arms efficiently in the darkness. As dawn revealed the wretchedness of their situation, the few rebel cavalry fled, leaving the foot soldiers to face the music unsupported. The battle was a short one. In open country and without cavalry support, Monmouth’s army was helpless – and was utterly destroyed. With much irony, which the wits would soon be tattling,
Monmouth’s sheep were butchered by ‘Kirke’s Lambs’, as the former Tangier Regiment was popularly known, after their colonel, Sir Piercy Kirke, and the emblem of Catherine of Braganza – a paschal lamb – emblazoned on their colours.
¹⁹
It is said that soldiers of Kirke’s descendant regiment are still banned from the public houses of Bridgwater today.

Although in the end the Monmouth Rebellion was little more than a peasant revolt in the long tradition of hopeless causes, it could hardly have been better staged to demonstrate the need for a standing army, for the militia had proved too slow to muster and too lumpen in manœuvre. In the bloody aftermath of the rebellion, James was able to raise nine new regiments of foot, five of horse and two of dragoons, paying for them with money formerly voted by Parliament for the militia. Thus by 1688 the army stood at 24,000, with a further 10,000 in Ireland: the largest number since Cromwell’s New Model.

Not surprisingly, Parliament grew ever more alarmed. Not only was money they voted being misappropriated, but James was now appointing Catholics to key positions – in Ireland replacing virtually all Protestant officers by Catholics. With the birth of a son to James’s ultra-Catholic second wife Mary of Modena after fifteen years’ barrenness, the 1688 equivalent of the men in grey suits (known with retrospective admiration as the Immortal Seven) moved to secure a Protestant succession, inviting James’s nephew and son-in-law Prince William of Orange to take his place. ‘Nineteen parts of twenty of the people … are desirous of change,’ they assured him.

And despite the failure of Monmouth’s earlier endeavour, ‘Dutch William’ managed to assure himself that the venture was politically feasible. Being a seasoned soldier, he also knew how to make sure it was militarily feasible. Not for him three ships and the hope of scythes and pitchforks: on 1 November he left Antwerp with a fleet of 200 troop transports escorted by forty-nine warships. The Royal Navy once again failed to intercept, pleading contrary (no doubt Protestant) winds, and William landed barely four days later at Torbay with 11,000 foot and 4,000 horse, including 4,000 English and Scots from the Anglo-Dutch Brigade.

At once he began a methodical but direct march on London, and the West Country, seemingly willing to overlook the blood-letting after the Monmouth rebellion, rallied to his side. Encouraging news of support in the midlands and the north also came, as did deserters from James’s army; further backing came from William’s sister-in-law Anne, James’s own daughter, and her husband Prince George of Denmark.

James moved determinedly to intercept the invader, ordering the Huguenot but ultra-loyal commander-in-chief, the earl of Feversham, to concentrate his troops on Salisbury Plain, while decanting the Court from London to the cathedral close in the city itself. At this stage, militarily at least, the outcome was not a foregone conclusion. James’s army outnumbered William’s, and despite rumours and fears of disaffection the regimental officers were loyal enough – though this was perhaps less to do with personal commitment to James (the bulk of them thought his Catholicizing odious) than to the investment they had made in their commissions.

And here chance played its part; or, to put it another way, James’s record caught up with him. The 4th Regiment of Foot was commanded by Colonel Charles Trelawny, whose brother, the bishop of Bristol, along with six other bishops, had been put in the Tower the previous year after protesting against James’s Declaration of Indulgence (allowing freedom to practise religion according to conscience – or, depending on point of view, freedom publicly to espouse and promote Catholicism). The bishops’ incarceration had provoked the biggest wave of popular support the Church of England has ever seen.
²⁰
Trelawny’s regiment, veterans of fighting the Moors at Tangier and Monmouth’s men at Sedgemoor, were in outposts at Warminster on the western edge of the Plain, and therefore the first infantry likely to make contact with William’s army. Their disaffected commander’s lieutenant-colonel – the officer in executive command – was Charles Churchill, younger brother of (Lord) John Churchill, the hammer of Monmouth’s rebellion and now Feversham’s second-in-command. Treason, as Voltaire famously said, is a matter of dates; exactly when John Churchill decided to throw in with William has never been established, but one person who would certainly have known was his brother Charles.

Trelawny and his lieutenant-colonel, Charles Churchill, now declared for William, and almost to a man the regiment followed. The news of this and other defections (‘desertions’, had the outcome been different) unnerved James, who abruptly ordered a withdrawal to London despite the urging of John Churchill and Feversham to stand and fight. But if the order was precipitate, in its fear it was self-fulfilling: by the time James’s army reached Hounslow Heath, where it camped, there were fewer than 8,000 men still in its ranks. Days of trying to ‘fix’ and to horse-trade followed, but on Christmas Eve, with the Dutch at the gate, James fled the country. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ was accomplished with barely a shot fired – in England, at least.

Ironically, the Restoration army whose very
raison d’être
had been to secure the Stuart monarchy was in the end the death of its male line (though ‘Jacobitism’ would flicker and occasionally flare for half a century and more) and, with it, of all religious ambivalence in the English state. There was now an unequivocally Protestant monarch – two, indeed, for William was to reign coequally with Mary. And with such a settlement England’s fledgling standing army might have been reduced – had it not been for two things. First was Ireland: James’s Catholic army did not intend to surrender the country without a fight. Second was the Netherlands, or rather King William’s Dutchness: he was first and foremost the Stadtholder, and there was unfinished Dutch business on the Continent – war with Spain, France and Austria. To ‘Dutch William’, England and Scotland were a source of manpower for these wars, and he had no intention of reducing the army. On the contrary, he had every intention of making his Britain a continental power.

‘WE HAVE NOTHING TO EQUAL THIS!’

King George III’s astonishment, dismay even, on first seeing Blenheim Palace half a century after it was finished was perhaps not surprising. By comparison, his own royal residences must have seemed provincial, whereas Blenheim ranked in scale and magnificence – as still it does – with the great baroque palaces of Europe.

From the laying of the foundation stone in the winter of 1704, the house was called, at Queen Anne’s wish, Blenheim – the gift of a grateful nation, of a grateful sovereign indeed, to John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, after his victory over the French at the village of Blindheim in Bavaria in August that year. Marlborough had engaged Sir John Vanbrugh to build a suitable memorial in Woodstock Park in Oxfordshire opposite the old royal palace, and so Blenheim became, uniquely, a ‘palace’ rather than a ‘house’.