The Making Of The British Army (85 page)

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A dragoon’s horse was meant simply to be the means of moving quickly from one battle position to another. Dragoons would then have to be detailed as horse-holders, usually one dragoon to three horses, making them somewhat uneconomical.

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Gustavus Adolphus was reckoned to be the finest soldier of his age, ‘the first modern general’, but it was charging thus at the battle of Lutzen that he had been killed ten years before Edgehill.

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Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
(begun after 1649, published in successive volumes after the Restoration).

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From ‘Edgehill Fight’ – one of the ‘songs’ written for C. R. L. Fletcher’s
A History of Englandby
Rudyard Kipling (1911).

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Campaign planning – what is known today as ‘operational art’ – involves the setting of military objectives to achieve the strategic aim, and the tactical employment of forces on the battlefield to achieve those objectives.

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After the Restoration the Reverend Nicholas Monck was made provost of Eton and bishop of Hereford, such was the King’s gratitude and General Monck’s favour.

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The Royal Hospital was founded by royal warrant in 1681. It was built on royal land, and in part with royal money. The Royal Hospital Kilmainham served the same purpose in Dublin.

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About £90 million in today’s retail prices, and £1.25 billion in terms of average earnings.

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Wentworth’s regiment took precedence over Monck’s, although it had been formed later, by virtue of its earlier allegiance to the Crown. The Coldstream Guards make their point nevertheless by their regimental motto,
Nulli secundus
(‘Second to none’).

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Formed in 1664 as the Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment, it consisted of naval infantrymen under the Lord High Admiral rather than the commander-in-chief.

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The exact title was ‘The Republic of the Seven United Netherlands’, or ‘of the Seven United Provinces’ – commonly referred to as the United Provinces, or the Dutch Republic, or Holland. Holland was in fact but the dominant province – and the richest.

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Eventually the Royal Scots would be given seniority as the 1st Regiment of Foot in the infantry of the line (of battle), and the Queen’s Regiment would be the 2nd. The distinction between Guards and line regiments was simply that of purpose: the Guards were ‘Household troops’, for the personal protection of the monarch, from which they derived a certain cachet; the line was the workaday muster of regiments that did the job of fighting. When the King took to the field, however, the Guards went with him and fought as a sort of ultimate reserve – or so it was in theory, for Charles did not actually go on campaign.

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The Scots Greys were formed in 1681 from three separate troops by Lieutenant-General Tam Dalyell, whose namesake and descendant, the Labour MP and author of the intractable ‘West Lothian Question’, was a National Serviceman in the Greys in the 1950s.

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Named after the house in Hertfordshire where the plotters (it has never been precisely established who they all were, and how complete were their plans) intended to assassinate Charles and his brother on his way back from the races at Newmarket.

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The infantry carried colours (flags), and the cavalry standards or guidons, as a rallying point for troops and to mark the location of the commander. Later they were emblazoned with battle honours and other distinctions to make them recognizable to their followers. Once consecrated they achieved almost mystical importance as the soul of a regiment, and extraordinary efforts would be made to save them from capture. The term ‘serving with the colours’ came to mean service with the regiment rather than being a reservist.

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Indeed, two centuries later the feeling in Cornwall, whence the Trelawny family came, was still strong, inspiring the famous Parson Hawker of Morwenstow to write what became the ‘Cornish national anthem’ – ‘The Song of the Western Men’ or, simply, ‘Trelawny’.

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‘Capability’ Brown was brought in by the second duke to make an English pastoral landscape, and most of the baroque gardens – a mini-Versailles – were destroyed.

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The number in the line’ fixed their seniority (usually by date of raising): the lower the number, the higher the seniority.

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How fusilier (with or without a z) regiments subsequently acquired their cachet is baffling: escorting anything except the sovereign has always been
infra dig.
But fashionable they were (until the 2007 infantry reorganization reduced them dramatically), if for no better reason than the coloured feathers they wore in the head-dress (or pure white in the case of the late, incomparable, Royal Welch Fusiliers, as well as the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) until the RRF was formed in 1968, and the too-short-lived Royal Highland Fusiliers).

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The ‘Royal Corps of Halberdiers’, the regiment of Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy, are entirely fictitious. There never was a formed regiment of halberdiers in Britain’s armies. The Swiss Guard famously used the weapon to cover the flight of the pope during the 1527 sack of Rome, dying to a man. NCOs were still carrying the spontoon at Waterloo, but it had been abandoned by the time of the Crimean War (one of the few examples of progress during those forty years of military atrophy).

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next ten years. It reached the big screen in 2005 as
A Cock and Bull Story
, with Steve Coogan as the eponymous gentleman.

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‘Battalion’ is largely interchangeable with ‘regiment’ at this time, except in the cavalry, which never used the term. ‘Regiment’ tended to be used of the complete ‘administrative identity’, whereas ‘battalion’ described the ‘tactical identity’, a unit composed of a variable number of companies, fighting as an entity, and today under a lieutenant-colonel. Regiments could raise additional battalions in time of war, and nowadays the infantry comprises principally what are called ‘large’ (multi-battalion) regiments rather than the post-1950s single-battalion ‘county’ regiments.

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An officer would remain colonel of his regiment – an appointment – long after promotion to general officer. In time, the colonelcy became honorific, and regiments would hope to have a senior general as colonel for his influence and prestige – and in some cases for his deep pockets.

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Later in the eighteenth century the term ‘division’ came into use. The divisions were typically each under command of a major-general, and in Wellington’s Peninsular army were themselves grouped into corps under a lieutenant-general.

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The private soldier did not fire his musket except at the express command of an officer -a key ingredient of what was (and is) called fire discipline.

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The ‘goose-stepping’ of some armies makes a political point, while the more languid pace of those in the Napoleonic heritage – the French and Italian notably (and even to an extent the US) – are more the relict of the old drill which moved large numbers of conscripts about the battlefield in column.

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Bavaria had changed sides after the Nine Years War.

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Lines of communication through territory held by the enemy or a neutral state – or even uncharted – as opposed to ‘interior lines’ through territory firmly held.

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One league = two and a half miles.

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Queen Anne had, however, recently made him Master General of the Ordnance as well as captain-general (commander-in-chief), and so at Blenheim the artillery (and engineers) were at least obliged to follow his orders, though it would be some years before he got the sort of guns and teams he wanted.

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They carried gold-, silver- or bronze-tipped staffs to indicate their status.

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The 6th Foot was one of the first to go, though they had been raised as early as 1674.

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A body of troops or a defensive position is ‘in enfilade’ if fire can be directed along its longest axis, thereby inflicting the greatest damage – from which the verb ‘to enfilade’ is derived. The allied ranks would therefore have roundshot bowling the length of their lines from the left as they advanced.

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Under authority of letters of marque’ private captains were allowed to sink or capture enemy merchant ships and seize their cargo without threat of being treated as pirates – except, of course, by the enemy.

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Catholic (on the whole) Scots who preferred foreign service to Hanoverian – like their Hibernian co-religionists, the ‘Wild Geese’.

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The ‘rifle’ – originally ‘rifled musket’ – was a weapon with a spiral of grooves in the barrel (‘rifling’) which imparted spin to the round as it was fired, thereby giving greater accuracy especially over longer range. The round – ‘bullet’ – was specially shaped (usually cylindro-conoidal) to engage with the grooves. The disadvantage of the rifle over the unrifled musket was its slower rate of fire: since the bullet had to be a tight fit in the barrel it had to be forced in rather than (as with the musket ball) merely dropped in.

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It was the 39th Foot (later the Dorsetshire Regiment), however, which claimed the aptly punning motto
Primus in Indis.

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One ball loaded and then another on top of it. The range was reduced, the accuracy too, but at close quarters the device had the obvious effect of doubling the strength of the volley.

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‘Batteries’, usually six to eight guns, were grouped into ‘brigades’ until 1938, when permanent groupings of batteries were introduced and renamed ‘regiments’. For this reason batteries of the Royal Artillery still today have a greater sense of independent history than do companies or squadrons in the infantry and cavalry.

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Ironically, Sackville had been a member of the ‘board’ of Mordaunt’s court martial.

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William Carr Beresford reorganized and led the Portuguese army, and well. Yet in his battles he almost invariably lost control and had to be bailed out by others – sometimes by Wellington himself.

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Timothy Murphy is Schoharie County’s Revolutionary hero. Owner of one of the first double-barrelled rifles, he was known to the Indians as ‘the magic man whose gun shoots without reloading’.

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Though it had been the CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, who used the term to describe Churchill’s obsession with ‘sideshows’ in the Mediterranean: see pp. 104, 363.

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At that time his name was actually spelt
Wesley.

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The 1757 Militia Act re-established militia regiments in England and Wales under the control of the county lieutenancy, with a form of conscription in which each parish made a list of adult males and held a ballot for compulsory service. If any of the chosen men was unwilling to serve in person he was required to find another man to serve in his stead.

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Other than the abortive landings in Ireland, the French were able to get only the briefest of footings on the soil of the realm – in February 1797 at Fishguard in Pembrokeshire, of all places. The landing was seen off by the Pembroke yeomanry – and, so legend has it, by the women of Fishguard, who in their traditional red cloaks and high black hats looked like so many infantrymen on the headland above.

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There were in fact two regiments whose colonels were called Howard, and to distinguish them they added the facing colour of their uniform to the name – hence the Buff Howards (known as the Buffs) and the Green Howards, names which lasted over 200 years.

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Though there is anecdotal evidence that the more ‘cosmopolitan’ officer cadets are not so attracted as once they were now that the regiment’s colours are nailed so firmly to the Yorkshire mast, the ‘Dukes’ and the Green Howards in particular always having had a wider appeal. The law of unintended consequences is never more evident than in changes to the regimental system.