The Making Of The British Army (81 page)

As for the various under-secretaries running the army, these arrangements applied to the general regulation of the army, not to its equipping or supply. The Board of Ordnance, originating in the fifteenth century, was responsible for providing the army (and, until 1830, the navy) with weapons, ammunition and warlike stores – generally referred to as ‘ordnance’ – and with the expertise to use them (the sappers, miners and gunners). Indeed, until 1855, when the board was incorporated with the War Office, engineers and artillery were the entire responsibility of the head of the board, the Master General of the Ordnance (MGO), rather than the commander-in-chief. In later years the MGO held cabinet rank. Between 1702 and 1722 the duke of Marlborough was both commander-in-chief (or captain-general, as it was more usually known) and MGO, the only time the two posts were held simultaneously by the same man. Non-warlike stores (principally food and forage) and transport were supplied under the direct orders of the Treasury by civilian agents known as commissariat officers. With
the later supervision of the commissioners of public accounts and the Board of Audit, civil control over army expenditure became ever tighter.

Of the battle of the Boyne, which has of course passed into the legends – myths? – of Ulster, it is worth observing that the casualty figures were quite low for an engagement of such a scale. Of the 50,000 or so participants, about 2,000 died, three-quarters of whom were Jacobites. The reason for the low death toll was that at the Boyne there was no follow-up when the defeated army left the field – sometimes the phase of greatest slaughter – for James’s cavalry very effectively screened the retreat. The Jacobites were badly demoralized by their defeat, however, and many of the Irish infantry deserted. William’s men triumphantly marched into Dublin two days after the battle, the Jacobite army fleeing to Limerick beyond the river Shannon, where they were besieged. James, however, rode with a small escort to Duncannon and returned to exile in France, even though his army was still in the field. His speedy exit enraged his Irish supporters, who nevertheless fought on until the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. They deserved better – as did the deluded followers of his equally fickle son and grandson in 1715 and 1745 respectively. Indeed, James was derisively nick-named by the Irish
Seamus a’ chaca –
a title that translates literally as ‘James the Shit’.

For further reading, Charles FitzRoy’s
Return of the King
(2007) is fascinating on the actual process of restoration, and on Monck’s part in it. There is much in Barney White-Spunner’s
Horse Guards
(2007) on the Restoration forces, and Antonia Fraser is every bit as readable in
King Charles II
(1979) as she was in
Cromwell
, if only indirectly touching on purely military matters. There is a very fine chapter on the Restoration army by Professor John Childs in the
Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army;
and his
The Williamite War in Ireland
(2007) gives a fine picture of the army in the reigns of Charles, James and William. And then on Marlborough there is David Chandler’s
Marlborough as Military Commander
(new edn 2003), Richard Holmes’s
Marlborough, England’s Fragile Genius
(2008) – and, of course, Churchill’s monumental and by no means wholly hagiographical
Marlborough: His Life and Times.
And should anyone want to read more of the sad and wretched affair that was the battle of Sedgemoor, there is the irrepressible David Chandler again in
Sedgemoor 1685: from Monmouth’s invasion to the Bloody Assizes
(new edn 2001).

Chapters 4 and 5: Blenheim and Afterwards

The foundation stone of Blenheim Palace was laid on 18 June 1705 on a site prepared by the royal gardener Henry Wise. Building continued at the Crown’s expense until 1712, when, the Marlboroughs having fallen from favour, the Treasury ceased to provide funds. On the Queen’s death in 1714 the Marlboroughs returned from voluntary exile, but little was done until debts to Blenheim workmen were partially settled in 1716. Building then continued at the Marlboroughs’ expense, and the family took up residence in 1719. After the duke’s death in 1722 Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, completed the chief features of Vanbrugh’s house plan, together with outworks such as the Grand Bridge, the Triumphal Arch and the Column of Victory. Her work was substantially complete by the early 1730s. (These details are taken from
A History of the County of Oxford
, vol. 12.) However, Vanbrugh’s baroque gardens were completely reworked by ‘Capability’ Brown in his characteristic English naturalist style before George III’s visit in 1786.

For further reading, G. M. Trevelyan’s
England under Queen Anne
, though published in the 1930s, is excellent on the general background. On Blenheim itself, besides Churchill and Holmes, there is David Chandler again:
Blenheim Preparation
(new edn 2004), and also the highly readable
Blenheim, Battle for Europe
(2004) by Charles (Earl) Spencer, one of Marlborough’s descendants. For details of the supply arrangements for the ‘scarlet caterpillar’ there is Martin van Crefeld’s
Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton
(1977), though not for the bedtime reader.

Chapters 6 and 7: Dettingen and Culloden

The battlefield at Culloden is the best preserved of any in Britain, with markers showing very clearly the positions of the two sides. There is an impressive visitor centre, though at times it gives the impression that the Forty-five was a war between England and Scotland (with eventual victory in the 1999 devolution). Nearby, Fort George, subsequently enlarged and strengthened, is open to visitors.

There is an excellent article on the findings of the court martial of Sir John Cope in the
History of Scotland
magazine, vol. 2, no. 3, May – June 2002: ‘Unlucky or incompetent? History’s verdict on General Sir John Cope, Part II: the battle of Prestonpans and the aftermath’ by Martin B. Margulies, which gives a fascinating insight into the workings of the
army at the time, its condition and its generalship. The monograph
Culloden Moor and Story of the Battle
(1867) by the Inverness antiquarian Peter Anderson, revised in 1920 by his son, a don of Aberdeen University, is a work of deep scholarship and local knowledge. There is an excellent Osprey volume on the battle – with all the superb illustration and mapping characteristic of that publisher – as well as a colourful one on the Jacobite army itself.

The allied army in the War of Austrian Succession was and is sometimes referred to as ‘the Pragmatic Army’ after the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ of 1713, a legal mechanism to ensure that the Austrian throne and Habsburg lands would be inherited by Emperor Charles VI’s daughter, Maria Theresa. The Holy Roman Empire was famously neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, but by this time the residual
Reich
of German nations. It was elective, and as elector of Hanover George II was a member of the electoral college of eight. The empire had less and less real power but retained enormous prestige, being the remnant of the former Western Roman Empire (though its constitutional arrangements were more Byzantine than the Eastern Empire of Byzantium itself). It was as well that George II disappeared periodically to Hanover (spelt with a second ‘n’ by his German subjects) to attend to its affairs, for they would have taxed the brains of all his archbishops combined. Nevertheless, Reed Brown’s
The War of Austrian Succession
(1993) manages to steer the reader through its complexities, and Michael Orr’s
Dettingen 1743
(1972), though a little dated now, is a clear account of the battle. And although it is not directly germane to the story of the making of the British army, David Fraser’s incomparable
Frederick the Great
(2000) describes the rise of Prussia and its army magnificently, while for the life of the man who wrote all those celebratory anthems, Jonathan Keates’s
Handel: The Man and his Music
, first published in 1985 but revised and republished in 2008, is a delight.

Chapters 8 and 9: The Seven Years War

The outcome of the war was indeed a great amendment to the geography books. In India, France was emasculated. In Europe, Germany was shot of all French troops, Portugal was rid of the Spanish, and Minorca was restored to Britain. French Canada was now British. In the West Indies, three islands were returned to France – Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia – but Britain kept Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica and Tobago, giving it the strategic hand in the Lesser
Antilles, the guardians of the Caribbean and much of the Spanish Main. Florida was gained in exchange for Cuba, seized a year before the peace in a fine action by Admiral Sir George Pocock and the 38-year-old General George Keppel. The Spanish were pleased enough with the exchange – a troublesome and vulnerable peninsula with British and French land neighbours, for a rich spice island – but for Britain, gaining Florida was far more significant in strategic terms, if not nearly so profitable, for Spanish Florida had been a brooding threat to South Carolina. The fly in the ointment was still Louisiana (a vastly bigger territory than the present state), but it had at least changed hands – from French to Spanish.

This is a Cinderella of a period for the army as far as popular historians are concerned: between the Marlburian and the Wellingtonian feasts it must seem comparatively poor pasture. But there are some interesting collections of papers published by the Army Records Society (and Sutton Publishing), notably volumes VI,
Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of King George II, 1731–1762;
XVIII,
The Journal of Corporal William Todd, 1745–1762
; and XX,
Amherst and the Conquest of Canada.
Details of all the society’s publications are available on its website:
www.armyrecordssociety.org.uk
.

Chapter 10: The American Revolutionary War

There was a certain paradox in Pitt’s strategic aim in the Seven Years War, the destruction of French power in Canada, which some at the time recognized: ‘I don’t know whether the neighbourhood of the French to our North American colonies was not the greatest security of their dependence on the mother country, which I feel will be slighted by them when their apprehension of the French is removed,’ as the duke of Bedford remarked to the duke of Newcastle. And so was fired in due course the ‘shot heard round the world’:

The American Revolutionary War is altogether more popularly covered than the Seven Years War which gave the duke of Bedford such cause
for concern.
Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War
(2003) by Hugh Bicheno is one of the most recent works.
Fusiliers
(2007) by Mark Urban is an absorbing account of one battalion’s experience of the shock of the new type of war, as its subtitle suggests:
How the British Army Lost America but Learned to Fight.
There is an excellent collection of documents and first-hand accounts by an officer of the Black Watch in the Army Records Society’s volume XIII,
John Peebles’ American War, 1776–1782.
The war is also fertile ground for comparison with later campaigns, of which (General Sir) Michael Rose’s
Washington’s War
(2007) is perhaps the most apt in its analysis of the war alongside that of the Iraq insurgency.

Chapters 11–14: The Napoleonic Wars

Prior to the formation of the experimental rifle corps in 1800, the Board of Ordnance held a trial at Woolwich to select a standard rifle pattern. The design by one Ezekiel Baker was chosen, and 800 rifles were produced. After several modifications, the third and final model had the barrel shortened from 32 to 30 inches and the calibre reduced to allow it to fire a .625-inch calibre carbine bullet with a greased patch to grip the seven rectangular grooves in the barrel. It took a 24-inch ‘sword bayonet’ (hence Rifle regiments always fixed – and still fix – swords not bayonets. The Baker was 45 inches from muzzle to butt, 12 inches shorter than the Brown Bess musket, and weighed 9 pounds. Black powder fouling in the grooves made the weapon much slower to fire and would affect the accuracy of the weapon, so a cleaning kit was issued to riflemen (the Brown Bess was not issued with a cleaning kit).

Vimeiro was a terrible baptism of British volley fire for Napoleon’s army of Spain, but there had been an earlier example of devastating musketry – though it was largely unobserved, and its effects were not felt beyond the actual battlefield. On 27 June 1806 a British force of some 5,000 men commanded by Major-General John Stuart sailed from Messina in Sicily, landing in the Gulf of Sant’Eufemia, in Calabria in the Kingdom of Naples, three days later. A French force of about 6,000 moved to confront them, and on 4 July the two met on the plain of Maida, the British occupying a low ridge. As the French advanced, the British held their fire until at about 50 yards they began volleying. The French faltered, the British charged with the bayonet and the French were routed. The entire action lasted only some fifteen minutes. But Stuart, instead of following up (there were few other French in
Calabria), marched south and after a series of minor skirmishes returned to Sicily. The opportunity thus lost to open a ‘second front’ would not come again for two years – when it presented itself in the Peninsula.