The Making Of The British Army (8 page)

‘Palace’ suited both the significance of the victory at Blenheim (as Blindheim was soon known in English) and Marlborough’s own ambition, as well as his capability. He was, quite simply, the greatest figure of British military history, an accolade he shares only with the duke of Wellington. And Blenheim’s architecture, in the exuberant, even florid, Italian baroque style – encapsulated this greatness, and rubbed in, so to speak, the victory over Louis XIV, the French ‘Sun
King’, who for decades had been master of Europe. A vast lake was later created before the palace,
²¹
spanned by a bridge nearly 400 feet long, beyond which an enormous victory column raises the duke, swathed in a Roman toga, far above even the most royal of visitors as they approach. Inside the house itself the grandness of the state rooms, with their magnificent tapestries, marble and wood-carving, together with the sheer vastness of the whole, almost defy description. Ironically, the baroque style had originated as a statement of the wealth and power of the Catholic Church, inspired by the Counter-Reformation of which Louis was so ardent a disciple. At Blenheim that style made the same statement, but on behalf of the Protestant commander-in-chief of what had become the leading Protestant nation of Europe. And in a further historical twist, as if to reaffirm Blenheim’s place in the continuing struggle for Europe, it was here, 170 years after the great battle that had given the palace its name, that the most illustrious of Marlborough’s descendants was born – Winston Churchill. The victory at Blenheim did indeed bear fruits for more than one century.

Baroque did not live long in England, however. Its exaggerated style was altogether un-English, a thing of the Continent; and the Hanoverians, when they succeeded to the throne on Queen Anne’s death in 1714, were duller even than their native subjects when it came to public art. That Blenheim had been built in such a style was a statement that Marlborough had come of age – and, through its captain-general, that the British army had come of age too. George Monck and John Churchill were both sons of West Country gentry; both were raised from penury to ducal dignity by loyal and capable military service to the Crown (only one other English soldier, Wellington, would reach such heights after them). But George Monck, duke of Albemarle, with his pension of £500 a year, had lived at the ‘Cockpit lodgings’ in the old palace of Whitehall. The British army had come a long way, from an affair of the country gentry to one of the great institutions of state – and in the space of just fifty years.

But before the palace was built, before even the battle was fought, the business of the army’s legal status and its control had had to be settled. The ‘Glorious Revolution’, as James’s dethroning became known, gave Parliament its chance to resolve the matter more or less for good.
Hitherto the army had functioned as a department of the royal household, funded by indirect and opaque means. After Monck’s death in 1670 the army’s day-to-day affairs had been run by a lower tier of secretaries, each managing a sub-department such as pay, medical services and judge-advocacy, of whom the secretary at war was the most important. This quaint title (as opposed to the secretary of state
for
war, the later cabinet post) derived from the original function of the appointment – that of secretary to the commander-in-chief when on campaign. And since after Monck’s death neither Charles nor James had appointed a commander-in-chief except when the army took to the field, these civilian secretaries had acquired both experience and increasing power. Through the various legislative instruments of the Glorious Revolution, notably the Bill of Rights of 1689 (and ultimately the Act of Settlement of 1701), and by an annual Mutiny Act for the disciplining of the army, Parliament at last established both de facto and de jure control. Thereafter, to keep more men under arms than Parliament actually voted ‘supply’ (funding) for was unequivocally illegal.

Having sorted out the ‘ownership’ of the army, Parliament was now more or less content to concede its ‘government and command’ to the prerogative of the Crown. Thus although the army’s strength – indeed its very existence – depended on the consent of Parliament, exercised through the annual estimates and the Mutiny Act, all promotions, commands, honours and awards, organization and training, and the maintenance of discipline, were the business of the King, who in the usual course of things was his own commander-in-chief. Even today, an officer is promoted to major-general and above with the express approval of the Queen as commander-in-chief.

The decade and a half that followed the Glorious Revolution was a time of deeper modernization, however. Every act of the King, including but by no means only military acts, was taken on the advice of a minister who was personally responsible both to the Crown and to Parliament. Marlborough made the army what it was in the field, but without William Blathwayt, secretary at war from 1683 to 1717, described by the diarist John Evelyn as ‘very dexterous in business … [having] raised himself by his industry from very moderate circumstance’, he could scarcely have achieved what he did. Just as Pepys had earlier served the navy as Secretary to the Admiralty, so Blathwayt became the army’s general administrator and principal staff officer, in effect founding the War Office. He became in addition ‘Secretary to the
Forces’, responsible to the King for the detail of the army’s ‘command and government’, and also to Parliament for the exercise of financial control and for guarding against military encroachment on civil liberties. The happy coincidence of great general and great minister has more than once been the making of success: Marlborough and Blathwayt were the prototype combination.

One result of this early separation of the civil and military functions in the army’s government was the distinctively apolitical character of the men in uniform, at least in comparison with their counterparts on the Continent. Before the Glorious Revolution the army had been a political affair because it had been the decisive instrument of internal politics. ‘The standing army were a body of men who had cut off his [Charles II] father’s head … had set up and pulled down ten several sorts of Governments,’ wrote Clarendon in his history of the Civil War. He might have added, had he lived, ‘and chased their King, his own brother, from his realm’. Now the standing army was very firmly under control of the King in Parliament, at the hands of a civilian secretary at war. A century later, the great Whig statesman Charles James Fox would write that ‘the theory of the constitution consists in checks, in oppositions, one part bearing up and controlling another’; and the army had become a model of constitutional theory and practice. When the duke of Wellington was commander-in-chief in the 1820s he remarked (without complaint, for there was no greater advocate of constitutional control than he) that he ‘could not move a corporal’s guard from London to Windsor without obtaining the authority of the civil power’.

William of Orange and Mary Stuart, Anne’s elder sister, had ascended the throne jointly – or, more correctly, ascended the
thrones:
the King in England as William III, in Scotland as William II and in Ireland as William I (in the north of which, then as now, he was known affectionately by the Protestants as ‘King Billy’). Above all things, William was a warrior. His life had been defined by conflict with Spain over the Spanish Netherlands, and with Louis XIV who coveted Flanders and who, despite buying millions of tulip bulbs each year for Versailles, despised the Dutch as merchants as well as disapproving of them as republicans and utterly detesting them as Protestants. Seeing his new kingdoms as a source of money and troops with which to prosecute war with Spain and France in his struggle to preserve the United Provinces as an independent, Protestant polity, William made doubly
sure that what passed for an army in Britain was shaped for war on the Continent. This meant, initially at least, bringing in Dutch experts, of whom the most intriguing was Frederick (later duke of) Schomberg. William appointed him Master General of the Ordnance and commander of the army in Ireland, charged with putting down the rebellion (or loyal resistance, as James’s mainly Catholic adherents there saw it).

Born German (von Schönberg), Schomberg had become a marshal of France and then, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, provoking the exodus of Huguenots, had thrown his lot in with the House of Orange (Charles II had even tried to poach him to take over from Monck). Bringing in an outsider did not endear William to home-grown senior officers. Not least of the noses put out of joint was that of John Churchill, who might have expected the honour himself after committing himself to the Revolution at the critical moment. An earldom went some way towards pacifying James’s former deputy commander-in-chief, however, and after a stint in Ireland (not long enough to tarnish his reputation, mercifully, for the campaign, if not as bitter as Cromwell’s, was nevertheless bloody), the new earl of Marlborough was sent to the Continent.

At first there was not much opportunity to display his talents: Marlborough commanded a mere 8,000 men under the German-born General Waldeck in laborious siege operations along the principal waterways, the economic and strategic arteries of the Low Countries. Battles were rare, for non-conscript armies represented a significant investment, too valuable to risk in unpredictable actions; and commanders sought victory instead through the advantage of fortress lines or by campaigns of manœuvre. Marlborough was, however, seeing how continental warfare was done and making calculations for the future – not least when it was right to avoid battle, and when it was right to fight. He already had some experience, if on a small scale, and had seen enough fighting to understand the elements of battle; and the colonel of the sister regiment in which he had cut his teeth, Monck, must have been a powerful example of generalship and statecraft to him in those early days of the Restoration. Indeed, Monck’s own reflections on the soldier’s art,
Observations on Political and Military Affairs
, published in 1671, the year after his death, contained much that spoke to Marlborough in the pursuit of personal success: ‘A General is not so much blamed for making trial of an ill-digested project, as he will be for the obstinate continuing in the same. Therefore the
speediest leaving of any such enterprise doth excuse the rashness which might be imputed to the beginning.’

William’s war with France had by the time of the Glorious Revolution become a much wider affair. There were other princes who had had enough of Louis XIV’s territorial aggrandizement, for it went beyond merely acquiring defensible frontiers. Louis wanted his own man on the throne in Spain when the ailing Charles II breathed his last, and wanted also to make sure the ‘right’ man was elected Holy Roman Emperor. In 1686, therefore, an unlikely alliance had united Protestants and Catholics alike against France. Holland, the Rhenish states, Prussia, Denmark and the hitherto traditionally pro-French Sweden joined with Catholic Austria, Spain, Portugal, Bavaria and Savoy in the ‘League of Augsburg’ against the Sun King. France’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1688 had given William his opportunity to land in England (for Louis would otherwise have come to James’s aid), and so now Britain joined the League. This ‘Grand Alliance’, as it then became known, would stand against Louis, the embodiment of absolute monarchy, on and off for the next twenty years.

Marlborough knew Flanders well; he had first served there
against
the Dutch. But his light was now pushed even further under the bushel by the arrival of King William in person after defeating the Irish rebels and James’s Franco-Irish army at the battle of the Boyne. Indeed, the light was almost extinguished, for the following year, 1692, he was dismissed from his lieutenant-generalship and briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of Jacobitism and misappropriation of funds (not
wholly
trumped up), having made the mistake of being too vocal in his criticism of Dutch favourites.

In Marlborough’s temporary absence the war against France did not go well, though the number of troops rose steadily. By 1692 there were 40,000 British soldiers in the Low Countries, and by the end of the war five years later there were 56,000 (the same number as in the British Army of the Rhine in 1990 when the Berlin Wall began to crumble) – and this from a population of at most six million in the British Isles as a whole, less than a tenth of that today. And although the Scottish and Irish contingents remained officially separate from the English, in Flanders they increasingly operated as a single order of battle. A distinctly ‘British’ character to the army was beginning to emerge.

The Guards were forging their own character, too (the Scots Guards, originating before the Commonwealth as the King’s bodyguard in
Scotland, had been placed on the English establishment in 1686). Proximity to the sovereign, ‘public’ (guard) duties at the royal palaces, and a consequential emphasis on smartness of uniform and precision in foot drill lent them distinction. And alongside the general increase in infantry and cavalry, ‘specialists’ were appearing. Grenadiers – troops trained to prime and hurl grenades – had been introduced in 1678, and by 1690 every infantry regiment had a company of them. They were hand-picked, the taller and stronger of the rank and file, and acquired a certain cachet through their ‘bishop’s mitre’ hats (which allowed an over-arm throwing action that the tricorn would have hampered) and their honoured place on the right of the line or at the head of the regiment when it marched in column. Fusiliers made their entrance too, men armed with the new
fusil
, a prototype flintlock musket (in which a piece of flint produced a spark to the initiating charge when the trigger released a cocked hammer), rather than the matchlocks carried by the rest of the infantry. The first regiment to carry the fusil, numbered seven in the line of battle,
²²
was known as the ‘Ordnance Regiment’, its job being to escort the artillery (which still belonged to the Board of Ordnance), for there was less chance of accidental ignition of the gunpowder in the ammunition waggons than there would have been had the escorts carried the matchlock. Later they would be known as the 7th Regiment of Foot, or the Royal Fuziliers.
²³