CHAPTER II

From the political I turn to the purely military side of the Army's history. Treating first of the officers, it has, I think, been sufficiently shown that there were influences enough at work to demoralise them quite apart from any legacies of corruption that they might have inherited from the past. Against their indiscipline and dishonesty George the First seems to have set his face from the very beginning. He had a particular dislike to the system of purchasing and selling commissions. If (so ran his argument) an officer is unfit to serve from his own fault, he ought to be tried and cashiered, if he is rendered incapable by military service, he ought to retire on half-pay; and so firm was the King on this latter point that the Secretary-at-War dared not disobey him.[62] As early, therefore, as in June 1715 the King announced his intention of putting a stop to the practice, and as a first step forbade all sale of commissions except by officers who had purchased, and then only for the price that had originally been paid. One principal cause that prompted him to this decision appears to have been the exorbitant price demanded by colonels, on the plea that they had discharged regimental debts due for the clothing of the men, and suffered loss through the carelessness of agents.[63] It should seem, however, that as the rule [30]applied only to regiments on the British and not to those on the Irish Establishment, the desired reforms were little promoted by this expedient. In 1717, therefore, the King referred the question to the Board of General Officers, with, however, a reservation in favour of sale for the benefit of wounded or superannuated officers, which could not but vitiate the entire scheme. He thought it better, therefore, to regulate that which he could not abolish, and in 1720 issued the first of those tariffs for the prices of commissions which continued to appear in the Queen's Regulations until 1870. At the same time he subjected purchase to certain conditions as to rank and length of service, adding somewhat later that the fact of purchase should carry with it no right to future sale.[64] Evidently ministers kept before his eyes not only the usefulness of the system from a political standpoint, since every officer was bound over in the price of his commission to good behaviour, but still more the impossibility of obtaining from Parliament a vote for ineffective men. They followed, in fact, the precept of Marlborough, and it is hard to say that they were not right.

Concurrently the King took steps, not always with great effect, to check the still existing abuse of false masters.[65] A more real service was the prevention of illegal deductions from the pay of the men, a vice from which hardly a regiment was wholly free, by the regulation of all stoppages by warrant.[66] As part of the same principle, he endeavoured also to ensure honesty towards the country and towards the soldiery in the matter of clothing. In fact, wherever the hand of King George the First can be traced in the administration of the Army, it is found working for integrity, economy, and discipline; and it is sufficiently evident that when he [31]gave decided orders the very officials at the War Office knew better than to disregard them.

It is melancholy to record the fact that he was ill supported by the General Officers of the Army. The Board of Generals, to which the settlement of all purely military questions was supposed to be referred, seems to have been lazy and inert, requiring occasionally to be reminded of its duty in severe terms.[67] It may well be that this supineness was due to the general arrogation of military authority by civilians, but even so it remains unexcused. Colonels again appear to have been scandalously negligent and remiss in every respect; and it may have been as a warning to them that the King on one occasion dismissed seven of their number in one batch from his service.[68] But issue orders as he might, the King could never succeed, owing to the prevailing indiscipline, in making a certain number of officers ever go near their regiments at all. This habit of long and continued absence from duty, especially on colonial stations, is said to have troubled him much, and to have caused him greater uneasiness than any other abuse in the Army. It will be seen when we read of the opening of the Seven Years' War that he had all too good ground for misgiving. Yet the regimental officers must not be too hardly judged. In foreign garrisons, as shall presently be shown, they were exiles, neglected and uncared for; at home they were subject to incessant provocation, to malicious complaints, and in every quarter and at all times to the control of civilians. Lastly, though frequently called out in aid of the civil power, they had the fate of Captain Porteous before their eyes, and indeed took that lesson so speedily to heart that for want of their interposition the life of that unlucky man was sacrificed.[69]

[32]

When officers flagrantly neglected their duty and civilians deliberately fostered indiscipline, it is hardly astonishing that there should have been much misconduct among the men. It was natural, in the circumstances, that after the Peace of Utrecht the profession of the soldier should have fallen in England into disrepute. The greatest captain of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had been rewarded for his transcendent services with exile and disgrace. Many officers had quitted the service in disgust, some of them abandoning even regiments which they loved as their own household. Wholesale and unscrupulous disbandment did not mend matters; and the survivors of that disbandment were confronted with the railings of the House of Commons, the malice of municipalities, the surliness of innkeepers and the insults of the populace. The most honest man in England had but to don the red coat to be dubbed a lewd profligate wretch. Small wonder that, clothed with such a character, ready made and unalterable, soldiers should have made no scruple of living their life in accordance with it.

The standard of the recruit, socially and morally, appears at the accession of George the First to have sunk to the level of the worst days of Elizabeth, of the Restoration, or of William the Third. It is abundantly evident that the ranks were filled in great measure by professional criminals, who passed from regiment to regiment, spreading everywhere the infection of discontent, debauchery, and insubordination. The noxious weeds of desertion and fraudulent enlistment flourished with amazing exuberance, and no severity of punishment had power to root them out. Week after week deserters were brought out into Hyde Park, tied up to the halberds, or simply to a tree, and flogged with hundreds of lashes. Every variety of scourging was tried that ingenuity could suggest. Sometimes the instrument employed was the cat, sometimes the rod, sometimes a twig, varied in the case of the cavalry by cloak-straps and stirrup-leathers. Sometimes the whole[33] regiment did the part of executioners,[70] sometimes the guard, sometimes the drummers only. Sometimes the culprit ran the gantlope, accomplishing the unpleasant journey as quickly as he could, sometimes he walked it with a halberd's point before him, lest he should hurry unduly. Sometimes he took the whole of his punishment at one time and place, sometimes in instalments of a hundred lashes before the quarters of each detachment of his regiment, a practice akin to "flogging round the fleet."[71] Often he received two or three floggings in as quick succession as the state of his back would permit, the execution of the sentence being followed in many cases by "drumming out," with every circumstance of degradation.[72] The sentence of death was often pronounced by courts-martial and not unfrequently carried out, a deserter convicted for the third time rarely escaping with his life. Many a man was shot in Hyde Park during the twenty years of peace, and no opportunity was lost to enhance the terror of the penalty, the firing party sometimes consisting solely of fellow-deserters, who were spared in consideration of the warning given by the ghastly body which their own bullets had pierced.[73]

The newspapers record such matters with little ceremony, dwelling with greater relish on incidents of the cart's tail, of the pillory, or of Tyburn. The picketing of a soldier was indeed for a time a sufficient [34]novelty to attract crowds,[74] but the interest in the process appears to have been short-lived. People were not squeamish in those days, and men would lay a wager to receive so many hundred lashes without flinching, as calmly as if it were to run so many miles or drink so many pots of ale. It is, however, noteworthy that both of the first of the Guelphic kings were prone to lighten the sentences of courts-martial, constantly reducing the number of lashes and remitting the penalty of death. Whether this was due to policy or humanity it is a little difficult to determine, for the populace certainly sympathised with deserters, and would help to rescue them, while there were "malicious persons" who were glad to denounce the severity of military punishments as a reproach against the Government.[75] I am, however, inclined to believe that both kings were inspired by the higher of the two motives, and should receive due honour for the same. The like, I believe, can hardly be said of the malicious persons above named, considering that the House of Commons had the scandalous evils of the London prisons before it in 1729, but left the whole work of reform to be done by John Howard in 1774.

The consequences of filling the ranks with rogues, together with the evils of indiscipline and neglect, did not end with desertion and fraudulent enlistment. That soldiers in their private quarrels should have fought desperately, wounding and killing each other on the slightest provocation, is nothing remarkable, for [35]such encounters were common in the poorer classes of the urban population. But the newspapers report a sufficient number of mishaps through the use of loaded instead of blank cartridges at drill, to show that such occurrences were not wholly accidental. Again, we find a corps so much favoured as the First Troop of Horse Grenadier Guards breaking into open mutiny, because one of their number was sentenced to the picket.[76] On one very scandalous occasion the officers in command of the Prince of Wales's guard were so careless as to allow the troopers to get drunk when actually in attendance on His Royal Highness. The guard was turned out, and after some delay three troopers appeared who, though egregiously tipsy, were able to stagger to their places and stand more or less firmly on their legs. "This," we read, "the Prince complained of as shameful, as well he might"; but at this distance of time the reader, with the self-important figure of the prince who became King George the Second before him, will have no eye except for what was probably the most ludicrous spectacle ever witnessed at the Horse Guards.[77] But the climax of scandal was reached when a burglary was actually committed in Kensington Palace, and when, on the calling of the roll of the guard, but two men were found to be present, the rest being engaged apparently in rendering assistance to the burglars.[78] Certainly the soldiers of some regiments did their best to merit the bad name which was attached impartially to all who wore the red coat.

It may be asked why the system of enlistment for three years, which had produced such excellent results in Queen Anne's time, should have been abandoned. The reply, judging from the arguments of a later time, is that there was apprehension lest men should pass [36]through the ranks of the British Army to strengthen those of the Pretender. There are signs that a reintroduction of the system was talked of in 1731, and was received by at least one observer with joy at the prospect of converting the whole nation into a sort of militia,[79] but I can find no official trace of such a revival. If it be asked how the Army survived a period of such discouragement and distress at all, the answer, I cannot doubt, is that it was saved, as it has often been saved, by the spirit, the pride, and the self-respect of individual regiments. There were always officers who worked hard and conscientiously for the credit of their own corps, and always men who were proud to take service with them and help them to maintain it. After the Peace of Utrecht, as at the present day, the War Office did its best to subvert regimental feeling by a return to the practice, expressly condemned by Marlborough, of strengthening the weaker corps by drafts from the stronger, but then as now regimental traditions preserved the War Office from the consequences of its own incapacity, and the Army from total dissolution.

So much for purely British affairs: but the British Empire, then as now, was not bounded by the shores of the British Isles, and it is necessary to examine next the broader question of Imperial defence. As the reader will have gathered in the course of my narrative, the system of home defence, up to the birth of the New Model and beyond it, had, apart from the fleet, been always the same. A few gunners and a few weak independent companies were maintained rather as caretakers than as defenders of the fortified places; in the event of an invasion there was the militia; while in case of an expedition beyond sea, a special force was raised, and disbanded as soon as its work was done. The standing Army gradually swept the independent garrison-companies out of existence, though there were still a few at Hampton Court, Windsor, and one or two similar places in the last year of King William the[37] Third; but as has already been seen, the standing Army voted by Parliament just sufficed to furnish garrisons for the most important British fortresses and no more. Practically, therefore, the new system differed little from the old: if England were called upon to fight an enemy outside her own borders she must still raise a new army before she could send a man beyond sea. The only difference was that there were sufficient skeleton regiments, with their officers complete, to absorb several thousand men.

In our possessions abroad the old English system was followed exactly. British colonies were expected to raise their own militia and to provide for their own defence, as though each one of them had been an England in herself; and they fulfilled that expectation with a readiness which in those days seems astonishing. In the case of the American colonies, and in particular of the northern provinces, the problem of forming a national militia presented little difficulty; for theirs was a country where the white population could increase and multiply, and where white children could grow up to a vigorous manhood. The reader will shortly be able to judge the American militia by test of active service. But in the tropical islands of the West Indies, and to some extent in the southern provinces of Virginia and Carolina, the conditions were different. There the white man could not thrive and rear a healthy progeny, while a horde of negro slaves, sound, strong, and prolific, made an element of danger which was only kept in awe by systematic intimidation of almost incredible severity.[80]

Failing the natural increase of a white population, the ranks of the militia in the West Indies were kept full by continual exportation of white "servants" from[38] England, that is to say, of men, women, and children saved from the gaol or the gallows, plucked naked and starving out of the gutter, trepanned by scoundrelly crimps, or kidnapped bodily in the streets and spirited, as the phrase went, across the Atlantic. From the earliest days of English colonisation the seeds to be sown in the great continent of the West had been gathered from the weeds that grow by the roadside. In 1610 three hundred disorderly persons were sent to Virginia, in 1617 and 1618 a cargo of poor and impressed emigrants, in 1620 "a parcel of poor and naughty children." New England, with higher ideals and a deeper insight than her sisters, resolved to accept only youths untainted by vice, but even so did not escape an infusion of the very scum of the earth.[81] An enlightened Frenchman did indeed formulate a scheme for recruiting old soldiers as emigrants for Virginia, but for the most part the white servants were drawn almost exclusively from the unprofitable classes.

The Civil War, the conquest of Ireland, the subdual of Scotland, and the crushing of royalism introduced a new element into the exported white servants. Irish men and Irish girls, grouped under the generic name of Tories, were shipped off to the West Indies by hundreds and even thousands.[82] English and Scottish prisoners of war, the vanquished of Dunbar and of Worcester among them, followed the Irish; and, finally, all ranks of the Royalists who dashed themselves in vain against the iron will of the Protector, many of them men of birth and high character, were, in the phrase of the day, Barbadosed. After the Restoration the supply of white servants, though swelled for a moment by the rebellion of Monmouth and by the innocent victims of Jeffreys, reverted to its dependence on the gaol, the crimp, and [39]the "spirit." Transportation, though not long obsolete, has been well-nigh forgotten as a means of penal discipline, and quite forgotten as the first foundation of our system of colonial defence.

The white servants might, in the majority of cases, have been termed white slaves. They were frequently sold for money at so much a head without the least concealment, and were granted away in scores both by Oliver Cromwell and by James the Second as a means of profit and reward to good servants or to favourites. The practice was thoroughly recognised; and not a voice, except that of the younger Vane, was ever raised against the principle.[83] Theoretically the white servants were bound apprentices for a term of years, rarely exceeding ten, at the close of which they received their freedom with, as a rule, a grant of Crown-land to encourage them to settlement.[84] During their period of servitude they were obliged to serve in the ranks of the colonial militia, not as free men, but as the subjects of their masters. Every planter was bound by law to furnish his quota of men, and old colonial muster-rolls frequently consist only of a list of masters, with a figure showing the number of servants to be supplied by each of them, not unlike the provincial muster-rolls of Queen Elizabeth's day in England. Having furnished their men to the ranks, the masters took their places at their head, in such numbers as were required, as their officers.

Three causes conspired to clothe the colonial militia with an efficiency unknown to the militia of England,—the presence of powerful neighbours, native or European; the knowledge that little help was to be expected from the mother country; and, in the tropics, the eternal dread of a rising of the negroes. Barbados, an island no larger than the Isle of Wight, could at the close of [40]King Charles the Second's reign show six regiments of foot and two of horse, or a total of six thousand men; while Jamaica, a less fortunate island and a full generation later in settlement, produced in the same year seven regiments of four thousand men. Jamaica, it may be observed, owing to the presence of wild tribes of runaway slaves called Maroons, lived in more than ordinary terror of a servile war, and therefore kept her militia up to a high standard of efficiency. The reader should take note, in passing, of these Maroons, for we shall meet with them again at a very critical time. Even so, colonies frequently observed the true English spirit of apathy.[85] The main point, however, is that each colony, tropical or temperate, made provision for its own defence in respect of trained men and of fortification. Magazines were replenished partly by local laws, which compelled all vessels trading regularly from England to pay dues of gunpowder in proportion to their tonnage; the mother country making frequent grants of guns and of other stores from the depots of the Ordnance in England, and occasionally doling out even a small subvention of money. As a rule, moreover, the Crown was careful to appoint men of some military experience to be governors, in order that the local forces might not want a competent commander; and it is noteworthy, as a curious survival of old military traditions, that the civilian who performs the functions of sheriff in the West Indian Islands still bears, in a great many cases, the title of provost-marshal.

But even in the days of Charles the Second this primitive method of colonial defence showed signs of breaking down. At St. Kitts, which island was shared by the French and English until the Peace of Utrecht, the French kept a small permanent garrison. The English were of course bound to do likewise, and accordingly two independent companies of red-coats were stationed there at the cost of the Crown—stationed, not maintained, for they were left at first without pay,[41] clothing, or attention of any kind from home, for whole years together.[86] In times of emergency such companies were quartered also in other colonies, such as Jamaica and Virginia, but these were never retained for longer than could be helped, the colony receiving the option of maintaining them at its own expense or of dispensing with them altogether. As the men were generally mutinous for want of pay, they sometimes proved to be an element of danger rather than of security.[87] Where settlements were granted out by charter to companies or to proprietors, the burden of defence of course fell on them, and was almost invariably borne by a local militia. There were, however, exceptions, notably the East Indian and African Companies, which, as they concerned themselves not with colonisation, but solely with trade, will be more conveniently discussed elsewhere. New York, from its supreme importance as a commercial and strategic station, was provided by its proprietor, James, Duke of York,[88] with two regular independent companies of English.

Time went on, and the system of defence by transportation became more and more unstable. White men, chafing against servitude, ran away from the West Indian Islands by scores to join the pirates that swarmed in the Caribbean Seas. The long war from 1689 to 1714 finally cut off the supply of white servants altogether for a time, every possible recruit having been seized by the press-gang or by the parish constable to serve in the regular army or navy. At the accession of King William the only British garrisons in the colonies were one company at the Leeward Islands and two at New York; by 1692 the West Indies alone had one complete regiment[89] and four independent companies of red-coats. At the accession [42]of Queen Anne the independent companies for a time disappeared from the West Indies, and gave place to regular regiments of the Line, which have furnished the garrison ever since.[90] Elsewhere, however, the old principle still held its own. In 1695 two companies at New York were increased to four, and in 1696 another company took charge of Bermuda and Newfoundland. The close of the War of the Spanish Succession found England in exclusive possession of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Minorca, and Gibraltar, all of them requiring permanent garrisons, and not one with the means of providing a militia of its own.

A situation so novel called for an entirely new departure in English military policy, but no one appears to have perceived any necessity for the same, possibly from the conviction that, however clearly a soldier's eye might see, the eyes of the country and of the House of Commons would certainly be blinded. The authorities, therefore, held fast to the tradition of the Tudors, that the garrison of a strong place must be irremovably attached to it. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland required special attention, and were accordingly furnished with four independent companies apiece, which in 1717 were merged, by some brilliant inspiration at headquarters, into a single regiment of ridiculous weakness, now living in our midst as the Fortieth Foot. The Leeward Islands having received their regiment of the Line during the war, were allowed to keep it during the peace, on condition of providing barracks and extra pay for all ranks; but a colonial garrison, even though it were a regiment of the Line, was still a garrison, and therefore irremovable; and so it came to pass that the Thirty-eighth Foot remained in the Leeward Islands unrelieved for sixty years. But meanwhile it was found indispensable to keep a small garrison also at Jamaica. The temptation to revert to the old system was irresistible, so two independent[43] companies took charge of Port Royal.[91] Then Carolina was perceived to require defence, and in 1720 another independent company was sent there; then the Bahamas and Bermuda, which had hitherto shared a company between them, asked for a company apiece and received them; and at this strength the colonial garrisons remained until 1735. Then Jamaica was seen to be in serious peril from a rising of negroes, and everything pointed to the permanent quartering of a whole regiment in the Island; but still the old expedient was followed. Six independent companies were drafted from the regiments at Gibraltar, making with the two already in existence a total of eight independent companies; nor was it until 1743 that these were at last combined into Trelawny's regiment, or, to give it its modern name, the Forty-ninth Foot.

But meanwhile, in 1737-38, the needs of a new colony forced the War Office to provide yet another garrison for the defence of Georgia; and it was boldly resolved to form a whole regiment for that service and for that alone. Its colonel was the governor and founder of Georgia, General James Oglethorpe; and it was formed by the simple process of turning over the whole of the effective privates of the Twenty-fifth Foot to that estimable man.[92] This incident marks the furthest limit to which the principle of separating Colonial and Imperial service was pushed by the War Office. Another quarter of a century was to see, not the impressment of English soldiers for a colonial regiment, but the embodiment of colonists into an English, and a famous English, regiment.

But it was not in respect of the localisation of foreign garrisons only that the War Office showed itself hide-bound by ancient tradition. The authorities were amazingly slow to recognise that the conditions of service at Portsmouth and Annapolis, at Hull and at Gibraltar, were not and could not be identical. In [44]a previous chapter I hinted at the neglect which drove the garrison of Gibraltar to burn their huts for fuel. The experience of twenty years seems to have taught the War Office but little, for in 1730 the men were still without a roof over their heads and suffering terribly from exposure and from dysentery.[93] In Minorca the quarters of the troops were equally bad, the fortifications were in as ill condition as the quarters, and the unhappy soldiers begged in vain for new bedding to replace that which they had fairly worn out by ten years of service.[94] At Annapolis and Placentia the barracks were falling down; and from Bermuda came complaints in 1739 that no stores of any kind had been received since 1696. In New York the tale of misery and hardship almost passes belief. There, men on the frontier-guards marched to their posts knee-deep in snow and lay down in their clothes, for want of bedding, when relieved: the sergeant having orders to wake them from time to time, lest they should be frozen to death in the guard-room. Yet the officers begged in vain for the supply of their wants. The Office of Ordnance, in abject fear of swelling the sum of its estimates, pleaded that Parliament had made no provision for such services: and the result was that forty-nine men out of two weak companies perished in a single winter for lack of a blanket to cover them.[95]

But the story of helplessness and neglect does not end here. The War Office appears to have imagined that all the world over there were, as in England, not only alehouses, wherein troops could be quartered, but landlords who would provide them, according to the tariff of the Mutiny Act, with food, fire, and candle. It would seem not to have occurred to it that supplies in an isolated barren fortress like Gibraltar must of necessity be limited; nor was it until 1720 that, at the [45]King's instance, it was ordered that Gibraltar should be provided always with victuals for two months in advance. The feeding of the garrisons there, in Minorca, in Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland was entrusted to contractors, but in the contracts the most obvious necessities were overlooked. Thus, though Minorca was supplied with brandy, oil, bread, salt, and tobacco, the item of meat was entirely omitted, and it was actually necessary for the governor to explain that the five articles above enumerated were insufficient for the nourishment of the British soldier.[96] At Annapolis—loneliest, dullest, and dreariest of quarters—the soldiers were expected to content themselves with water for their only beverage. Not unnaturally they mutinied; and their officers were fain to purchase molasses at their own expense and brew them beer.[97] Deadly though the climate of the West Indies then was, men could think themselves fortunate to be quartered there, for Jamaica and the Leeward Islands showed far more generosity to the British soldier than the British Parliament.[98]

The greatest hardship of service on foreign stations remains yet to be noticed, namely, the absence of any system of periodic reliefs. Englishmen did not accept exile so readily in those days as in these. Ordinary soldiers did not conceive that they enlisted for service in foreign garrisons; that duty was for men especially recruited, as they thought; and they constantly deserted in sheer despair of ever returning home.[99] A distinguished officer, the Duke of Argyll, went the [46]length of saying that a long term of duty at Mahon was equivalent to a punishment, and that his only surprise was that the troops had not mutinied both at Minorca and Gibraltar.[100] The Board of General Officers urged the question at least once upon the King,[101] but without result. A still more cruel matter was that the War Office refused to grant to invalided soldiers a free passage home. Even in these days of sanitary science the amount of sickness among our troops in the tropics is sufficiently great: the reader may calculate for himself what it must have been when malarial fever, yellow fever, and smallpox[102] were allowed to run their course unchecked. But the only answer of the War Office to an appeal from the Governor of Jamaica for the return of invalided soldiers was the usual plea of no funds, urged with something more than the usual warmth of indignation.

Such petty economies, of course, cost the country incredibly dear. The hardships of foreign service led not only to desertion but to extreme difficulty in obtaining recruits for the independent companies abroad. To overcome these obstacles three separate devices were employed. The first was to offer large bounties, which from between 1720 and 1739 grew swiftly from thirty shillings to seventy-five.[103] This proving very costly, recourse was made to the mischievous practice of drafting men from regiments at home, thereby transferring the expense from the state to the regimental officers, who were compelled to pay as much as five pounds a head for the men drafted to them.[104] The system being simple was soon carried to outrageous lengths. The bounty failing to attract recruits for Carolina, a draft of pensioners was sent out in their place, and the same principle was [47]shortly after extended to Gibraltar.[105] Thus not only was cruel hardship inflicted on the pensioners, but the one reserve which England possessed for her defence in time of emergency was frittered away in service abroad. Finally, on the rare occasions when a relief was sent to the Mediterranean garrisons, the relieving regiment was generally so much weakened by desertion before its departure that it was necessary to turn over to it bodily the two junior companies of the relieved, and to call for volunteers from the remaining companies. If the requisite men could not be obtained by these means, the orders were to select as many more as were required by lot.[106] The inevitable result was that the garrison was composed mainly of discontented men, ready to desert at the first opportunity, with an infusion of lazy, cunning old soldiers, who had contracted an attachment to the wine or the women of the country, and were content to pass the rest of their lives in chronic insobriety.

The difficulties of the whole situation became so pressing that the Board of General Officers advised the King to make transportation to service abroad an alternative penalty for desertion, and to show no mercy in inflicting it.[107] The King declined, nor can it be denied that there was wisdom in his decision; but it is none the less certain that abundance of deserters received pardon on condition of enlisting in corps that were quartered in the colonies, and particularly in Carolina.[108] The principle of sending off bad characters to wear their red coats on the other side of the Atlantic received final sanction in 1742, when over a hundred mutinous deserters from a Highland regiment were divided between the Mediterranean garrisons, the West Indies, and Carolina.[109] Such a windfall did not come every day.

[48]

It is now easy to see why foreign service should have been no less unpopular with officers than with men. Their soldiers were discontented and miserable through evils which they had no power to remedy; their regiments were filled with the worst characters, for whom they were obliged to pay an extravagant price; no better provision was made for their comfort than for that of the men: and the life was insufferably dull and monotonous. Nothing, however, can excuse the systematic evasion of duty which was so common among them, still less the hopeless indiscipline which nullified the King's repeated orders for their attendance. Altogether it is clear that England was not yet the least awake to the fact that she had entered upon possession of an Empire, and that an Empire must be defended by the sword. There was no definite scheme of defence, no attempt to realise the extent of the country's military resources, no effort to discover how they might be turned to most effective account. To live from hand to mouth, from budget to budget, was sufficient for Robert Walpole, while the King, if ever he looked beyond the sea, gazed eastward and not westward, and then not at India, but at Hanover.

It remains for me to mention such improvements as were effected in the Army during the period under review, which, though they were few, were none the less far-reaching. The first was the permanent organisation of the Artillery. As has been seen, the Commonwealth latterly maintained a field-train ready and equipped for the field, while William the Third improved upon this by distributing the train into two companies. In the chaos which followed upon the Peace of Utrecht this organisation was suffered to collapse, and the Board of Ordnance, when ordered to fit out a train in 1715, was absolutely unable to do so. It was therefore determined to revert to the system of King William by the establishment of four permanent companies of Artillery, which was duly ordained by Royal Warrant of 26th May 1716. Two companies[49] only were created at first, with a total strength of nine officers and ninety-two men, but the number was increased to four companies in 1727, with the title of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, a designation which still covers about a hundred companies and over a hundred batteries of garrison, field, and horse artillery. The first colonel was a foreigner, Albert Borgard by name, who had entered the British service in time to fight at Steenkirk, and had afterwards served through the War of the Succession in Spain, distinguished more than once by grievous wounds and always by excellent and honourable service. We shall see that the career of the corps has been like unto that of its first colonel.[110]

A second novelty in the Army during this period has enwoven itself even more closely into its traditions. In 1725 General Wade was sent up to Scotland armed with instructions for the disarmament of the Highland clans, and with statutory powers to send all clansmen that did not surrender their arms to serve the King in a red coat beyond sea. Whether any recruits were obtained by those means is uncertain, for Wade exercised his authority in a judicious and tactful spirit, and earned immortality by employing his troops in the construction of roads, whereby he not only kept them from the idleness which begets indiscipline, but endowed the country with a lasting benefit. To enforce the disarmament, overawe the disaffected, and preserve order among the clans, there were raised in that same year four companies of Highlanders, under Captains Lord Lovat, Sir Duncan Campbell, John Campbell, and George Grant.[111] There had been independent companies for service in the Highlands since 1710, but these had been disbanded in 1717, though the officers were subsequently reappointed. The new companies wore their national dress, which, as it consisted principally of black, blue, and green tartan, presented a sombre appearance, [50]and gained for its wearers the name of the Black Watch.[112]

The ranks were filled with a number of young men of respectable families who had joined the corps to gain the Highlanders' beloved privilege of bearing arms, and many were wealthy enough to keep their gillies to attend them in their quarters and to carry their arms and kits on the march. The privates were taken indiscriminately from all the clans, but the officers from the Whig clans only. The service seems to have been popular, for the companies, though increased almost immediately from four to six, were within eighteen months raised to a strength of one hundred and ten men each. The fact that within the same period they had worn out their arms by sheer hard work proves sufficiently that their life was no easy one. At length, on the 7th of November 1739, orders were issued for the raising of four additional companies, and for the formation of a Highland regiment, seven hundred and eighty strong. The colonel appointed to command them, John, Earl of Crawford, was suffering at the time from a wound received in battle against the Turks five months before at Krotzka,[113] and was therefore unable to take immediate charge of them. Finally, a few weeks later, a sergeant and a private[114] were brought down to London, the first kilted soldiers ever seen in the capital, and were duly exhibited to the King, presumably with satisfaction to his sartorial mind. Thus came into being the famous regiment which, ranking originally as the Forty-third of the Line, is still with us as the Forty-second Highlanders.[115]

[51]

For the rest, it must be noted that with the accession of a foreign dynasty the Army began early to show signs of subjection to foreign influence. In not a few directions the strict German precision of George the First worked decidedly for good. Before he had been on the throne two years he instituted a regular system of inspection of all regiments by General Officers,[116] and shortly after, observing that every corps used such methods of drill as happened to be preferred by the colonel, he ordered an uniform exercise to be drawn up for all.[117] More curious, however, was his interference with the arming of the infantry, for while on the one hand he insisted that every man should carry a sword as well as a bayonet, a curious old-fashioned prejudice,[118] yet within two years he introduced the steel ramrod, which was the newest of new improvements.[119] This steel ramrod is emblematic of much, since it was the invention of a veteran who had fought among the Prussian troops throughout Marlborough's campaigns, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, famous in Prussian history as the "Old Dessauer."

Perforce we must turn our eyes for a moment towards the military reforms which were going forward in Prussia under that half-demented, half-inspired monarch, King Frederick William. Of the really important lessons which the British learned from him and from his far greater son, it is not yet time to speak: for our present purpose it must be remarked, and remarked not wholly with a light heart, that he was the first great military tailor that sat on a throne. He was also, unfortunately, an admirable soldier into the bargain, and thus has led many monarchs into the delusion that the most important military manual is the book of patterns, and that a soldier is made not by training and discipline but by tape, goose, and shears. His influence soon made itself felt in England, for as [52]early as 1718 we find Colonel Cosby of the Eighteenth Royal Irish insisting that every man of his regiment should wear ruffles at the sleeves and bosom of his shirt;[120] and three years later, when Frederick William visited England in person, the grenadiers of the Guards were bidden to let their whiskers grow, to do him honour on his arrival.[121] Thus dawned the era of powder, pigtail, and tight clothing.

With the accession of King George the Second the reign of the military tailor in England began in good earnest. George did not love his brother-in-law, Frederick William, but he envied him not a little the reputation of his army. He had little capacity for military duties beyond the sphere of a sergeant-major, though he had won his spurs gallantly enough at the head of a squadron at Oudenarde, but being ambitious of military distinction he threw himself with all the enthusiasm of a narrow nature into the pleasing excitement of dressing his army. Before he had been on the throne four months he announced his desire that every regiment should have "fixed clothing," and by a single edict swept away all lace from the buff belts of the cavalry.[122] In the following year the headdress of the Horse-Grenadiers was altered,[123] and in the next year again the Foot Guards were prohibited from wearing perukes except in case of sickness.[124] And so the process went on, barely interrupted even by war, until finally it culminated in an elaborate table of regulations as to colours, clothing, facings, and lace,[125] and, to the great good fortune of posterity, in the depiction of a private of almost every regiment in the Army.

In such trifles were the great lessons taught by Marlborough forgotten. The great Duke's mantle had descended on one man, but even if he had been suffered [53]to wear it, the Secretary-at-War would not have heeded him the more. Until 1742 he remained obscure, and meanwhile the better known officers died fast. Cadogan, the Duke's successor, died in 1726, and was laid with his great chief in Henry the Seventh's chapel, not with military pomp, but, by his own express desire, with all possible privacy. It should seem that he shrank above all things from even the semblance of a share in his master's glory. Of the veterans who outlived him, Lord Orkney and the Duke of Argyll were made field-marshals in 1736, while Wade, the kindly administrator of the Highlands, and Lord Stair took their part, as shall be seen, in the next war. Beyond them no one knew whither to look for an English general. Some perhaps counted on little Prince William who, dressed as a corporal, was often to be seen drilling a miniature company of the Coldstream Guards,[126] not yet dreaming that he would one day be called the butcher of Culloden. None thought of looking into a little house at Westerham, in Kent, where Colonel Edward Wolfe, a veteran of Flanders, was educating his little son James, a remarkably ugly boy with a shock of red hair and a turned-up nose, who had been born to him in 1727. None guessed again that a natural genius for war lay in another boy two years older than Wolfe, who was the scourge of every orchard, the terror of every tradesman, and the ringleader of all mischief in and about Market Drayton, and who bore the name of Robert Clive. Yet these two, the one frail and delicate, the other an incorrigible scapegrace, were the instruments appointed to carry on the work begun by Cromwell and by Marlborough. Marvellous to relate there were still alive in 1731 two old men, the one a Royalist officer aged one hundred and eighteen, the other a Puritan soldier aged one hundred and eleven, who had fought at the battle of Edgehill and yet shared some few years of the world with Wolfe and Clive. They had seen[54] Oliver Cromwell as a simple captain, and they lived to see William Pitt gazetted a cornet of horse.