How the Army Made Britain a Global Power

1688–1815

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Casemate Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781952715099
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Between 1760 and 1815, British troops campaigned from Manila to Montreal, Cape Town to Copenhagen, Washington to Waterloo. The naval dimension of Britain’s expansion has been superbly covered by a number of excellent studies, but there has not been a single volume that does the same for the army and, in particular, looks at how and why it became a world-operating force, one capable of beating the Marathas as well as the French. This book will both offer a new perspective, one that concentrates on the global role of the army and its central part in imperial expansion and preservation, and as such will be a major book for military history and world history. There will be a focus on what the army brought to power equations and how this made it a world-level force. The multipurpose character of the army emerges as the key point, one seen in particular in the career of Wellington: while referred to disparagingly by Napoleon as a ‘sepoy general, ’ Wellington’s ability to operate successfully in India and Europe was not only impressive but also reflected synergies in experience and acquired skill that characterized the British army. No other army matched this. The closest capability was that of Russia able, in 1806-14, to defeat both the Turks and Napoleon, but without having the transoceanic capability and experience enjoyed by the British army. The experience was a matter in part of debate, including over doctrine, as in the tension between the ‘Americans’ and ‘Germans, ’ a reference to fields of British campaigning concentration during the Seven Years War. This synergy proved best developed in the operations in Iberia in 1809-14, with logistical and combat skills utilized in India employed in a European context in which they were of particular value. The book aims to further address the question of how this army was achieved despite the strong anti-army ideology/practice derived from the hostile response to Oliver Cromwell and to James II. Thus, perception and politics are both part of the story, as well as the exigencies and practicalities of conflict, including force structure, command issues, and institutional developments. At the same time, there was no inevitability about British success over this period, and it is necessary to consider developments in the context of other states and, in particular, the reasons why British forces did well and that Britain was not dependent alone on naval effectiveness.

CHAPTER 1

Winning the Home Base, 1688–1746

To begin with a period book-ended by two episodes of total success (and therefore failure, for a total success for one combatant is a complete failure for their opponent) on home turf is to be reminded of the intensely political character of military capability, let alone victory. Linked to that comes the folly of assuming that the national interest is necessarily clear, a point that is particularly true when civil wars are concerned, but not only then. Assessment of national interest in part arises against this background. Moreover, the ability of an invading force, a largely Dutch one, to overthrow the government in 1688 and of another, a Jacobite one, in 1745 to advance from the western coast of Scotland as far as Derby underlined a vulnerability that suggested that, if the Royal Navy was unable to operate effectively, as in these two cases, the English/British Army would not necessarily succeed.

Protecting the home base was the key need for rulers, and it tested armies, units, their commanders, and the support system, to an extent greater than any other challenge. Civil war was more serious than international conflict in this regard because it did not offer the opportunity for political compromise seen in the latter; the recent history of the British Isles had shown its deadly consequences in the 1640s, consequences kept alive by the memories of families, communities and nation. Loyalty was a particularly important element in such conflict, and it could test greatly the interaction of military and civilian, as well as the situation of the army within the state, and, in particular, the choices and careers of commanders.

The potential of military power had been seen in mid-century during the civil wars (1639–53)¹ and subsequent Interregnum (1649–60), as a large force had been assembled, the New Model Army serving as an expression of the political thrust of the Parliamentary revolution,² only for it to be disbanded as part of the return of royal power in the person of Charles II (r. 1660–85). In turn, Charles sought to establish a new army under his control, but political concern, both about royal power and about the possible consequences of such a force, led Parliament only to provide for a modest force. However, Charles successfully sought alternative funding in the shape of secret grants from his first cousin, Louis XIV of France (r. 1643–1715), although this source, first given under the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670, was unreliable. By the end of Charles’s reign, the army was 9,000 strong, with another 8,600 on the Irish establishment: in other words, based in Ireland and paid from its taxation, but under the control of the British government.³ In comparison the peacetime French army was over 200,000 strong.

The succession of Charles’s Catholic brother James II (VII in Scotland) in 1685 led to an unsuccessful rebellion under Charles’s illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth. Its total failure revealed the greater effectiveness of professional troops and the limited capability of an untrained force, notably at the battle of Sedgemoor, where Monmouth was crushed. The battle and its consequences prefigured Culloden in 1746.

This encouragement to James to increase his army led him to tell the English Parliament on 9 November 1685, ‘there is nothing but a good force of well-disciplined troops in constant pay that can defend us from such as, either at home or abroad, are disposed to disturb us.’ In the face of parliamentary hostility to his determination to build up the army and appoint Catholic officers, James prorogued (sent home) Parliament, and built-up the army. Whereas Charles’s army had cost £283,000 in 1684, under James it cost £620,322 per annum. James’s domestic policies, including the quartering of units on towns judged factious, helped link a strong army with unpopular policies. That James was also associated with Louis XIV, in whose army (and that of Spain) he had served in the 1650s, increased anxiety.

In the event, his nephew and son-in-law, William III of Orange, an experienced commander as a result of war with France in 1672–8 (and the leading opponent of Louis), was able to land at Brixham, Devon without resistance in 1688. Blocking William’s advance on London, James’s larger army, however, was wracked by poor leadership. With the officers divided and the irresolute James fleeing, the army largely dissolved through desertion.⁴

The subsequent defeat of James’s supporters in Scotland and, even more so, Ireland, was a far larger task, and one that required an effective army. The challenge was greater than that which had faced Oliver Cromwell in Scotland and Ireland, as France backed the Jacobite (from Latin for James) claim, as it was to do in successive conflicts until the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). After this, the French moved on to support first American (in 1778–83) and, later in the 1790s, Irish opponents of British control; this indicated the extent to which the British government and army could not readily separate home defence from foreign war.

At the same time, the legacy of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 was a strengthened hostility to a standing (permanent) army, which was associated with tyranny by critics of James II and Louis XIV. In political terms, however, this issue was less significant than keeping the military within the law and ensuring the constraints of an army effectively under parliamentary control as a result of the government’s need for taxes. A standing army became illegal without Parliament’s approval granted annually in a Mutiny Act which was essential for discipline in the army. The first Mutiny Act was passed in 1689 and sought to restrain monarchical control over the forces as well as the power to impose martial law. Even so, the legislation was still attacked with reference to the ‘terrors of a Standing Army, in such absolute subjection to the will and pleasure of their officers.’⁵

The conundrum was expressed in 1757, in the Discourse of the Establishment of a National and Constitutional Force in England, a work reprinted in 1794. The author, Charles Jenkinson, who was to serve as Secretary at War in 1778–82, pressed for a militia of non-professional soldiers called up when there was need on the grounds that a strong army threatened national liberties, a repeated claim in British history:

We are in this dilemma, either to keep our army so low as to be inadequate to the purposes for which it was intended; or to raise it so high as to make it one time or other dangerous to our constitution; for certain it is that any number of troops which will be sufficient to repel the strength of France, will have the power, if they should have the inclination, to enslave us.⁶

The political context, which included the unacceptable character of conscription for the army, was more significant for Britain’s strategic dimension than the question of specific army size, which essentially helped to define operational possibilities. Including the Irish establishment, the peacetime army was only about 30,000 strong in the first half of the century, and 45,000 strong in the 1760s. However, the well-known practices of padding muster-rolls for the profit of officers meant that the number of effectives was lower than that of the formal establishment. This was an aspect of the informal economy of the military.

Numbers increased in wartime, but then rapid demobilisations at the end of wars lessened the combat effectiveness of the army, as well as exposing individual soldiers to often very harsh misery in a congested labour market with no social welfare for able-bodied men. Some men therefore turned to crime. The demobilisation after the War of the Austrian Succession ended in 1748 was linked to a perceived social crisis, not least a crime wave and rioting. In part, this crisis reflected the key role of war in the nexus of labour and power relations, and the consequent interaction of the unstable market economy and the needs of the state.⁷ More generally, the military labour market was very different to that in India, not least as the British one was affected by the availability of troops from Europe. Moreover, the possibility of raising imperial forces in the colonies reduced the opportunities there for military manpower from Britain.

There was a particularly politically contentious demobilisation after the Nine Years’ War ended in 1697, with the opposition to William III using Parliament to force a reduction in size despite William’s well-justified fear both that war with France might break out anew over the Spanish Succession and that his diplomatic efforts to arrange a satisfactory solution of the issue would be handicapped by the foreign (both hostile and potentially Allied) response to British troop reductions.

On 8 March 1701, the House of Commons refused to support an army big enough to fulfil their promise of troops to help the Dutch, only for attitudes to change later that year as political opinion turned away from France and toward William. It was this change that enabled William to prepare to take part in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The issues involved in recruitment had long been a theme of comment and satire, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and they remained significant, as with George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer (1706). Set in Shrewsbury, this was one of the most successful plays of the century, as well as the first staged both in New York and New South Wales. Whatever the comic aspects, aspects of social life, however, helped ensure familiarity with violence. Duelling was a product of concerns with rank, reputation and masculinity, and, it has been argued, an aspect of the imperial state, with its aspirations fronting a society in which status had to be affirmed while masculinity as linked to display and aggression.⁸ Masculinity was also associated with horsemanship, even if the proper nature of the latter was debated.⁹ At a different social level, poaching, thanks to clashes with gamekeepers, was another manifestation of a familiarity with violence, although, as with duelling, without any unit cohesion or real discipline.

The problems of raising troops in Britain encouraged the hiring of foreign units, a policy also favoured by a number of European powers including France, Spain and Austria, but with Britain particularly reliant on this expedient, and especially so when invasion of either Britain or (after 1714) Hanover threatened – as it did for Britain in January 1756. Henry Fox, Secretary of State for the Southern Department, wrote:

If we have secured the metropolis [London] it is all. There is not in all the west or north of England a single soldier … if invasion or threats of invasion from France can effect the keeping our fleets and troops at home, while they send regular troops with their fleets to North America, the object of the war will be lost in the first year of it…. we have required both Dutch and Hessians.¹⁰

Thirty-seven percent of British strength in America in 1781 was provided by German auxiliaries.¹¹ In part a prudent response to the demands of the navy and the opportunities of the domestic economy, the small size of the army, however, made rebellion particularly challenging. It was still possible to increase numbers by the use of volunteer forces, notably militia, who offered numbers that might be useful to deter possible dissidence. Nevertheless, the militia did not provide the military value against the Jacobite threat that was produced instead by the alternative of deploying subsidised regular forces from Continental allies. In 1715, John, 2nd Earl of Stair, the envoy in Paris, presented Hanoverian forces to the French as a resource for George I against the possibility of Swedish intervention on behalf of the Jacobites:

There were 10,000 or 12,000 men on the Elbe, in case the King of Sweden or any other foreign power thought fit to support the rebellion, and that Staden and Hamburg were at least as near Scotland as Karlscrona, or any other port, from whence the rebels could be supported.¹²

The Dutch were willing in 1715–16 to send troops to act against the Jacobites and were asked anew in 1722 when Jacobite action was anticipated.¹³ Martin Bladen, who had been a colonel in the War of the Spanish Succession before selling out from the army in 1710, was to tell the House of Commons in 1731 that the Hanoverians were a military resource: ‘We have 22,000 Hanoverians for no expense.’¹⁴ In 1753, in contrast, when Hanover was threatened, the hopes were of Russian troops who would be able to intimidate a hostile Prussia.¹⁵ This was a remedy pursued on a number of occasions during the period from 1734 to 1756 when Russia was allied to Britain, and then again after 1763.

Reliance on foreign troops in Britain, however, was not to be pursued during the crises caused first by French entry into the War of American Independence, and later by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; the new situation drove the need for a greater reliance on militia and volunteer units.

The Jacobite Wars, 1688–1746

The key military success in home control is apt to be underplayed because it did not occur in England. Instead, the warfare in Ireland ensured that that country was under the control of London in foreign policy and defence. This warfare was more serious and sustained than the unsuccessful attempt to reverse British control by rebellion in 1798. In the event, the Jacobites, the supporters of James II, were totally defeated at the Boyne on 1 July 1690 and Aughrim on 12 July 1691, and William III’s forces conquered the island, repeating the success of Oliver Cromwell and thus registering an important continuity in English military history.

The Boyne campaign was crucial to the fate of Ireland. The French advice to their ally James II was to play a waiting game, rather than to risk battle. James was urged to burn Dublin, to destroy all the food and forage in William’s path, and to wait for a French fleet to interrupt William’s seaborne supply route, the subsequent privation to demoralise and weaken him. James, however, understood the need to consider political as well as military contexts. Grasping Dublin’s symbolic and strategic significance, and fearing that the logistical and political strains of delay would lead the French and Irish to waste away before his opponents. James therefore decided to fight – rather as George Washington did in 1777 to block the British advance on Philadelphia, then the capital of the Revolution, only to be defeated at Brandywine. This was position warfare.

Outmanoeuvred at the Boyne, James fled and his army collapsed, providing William with a clear victory very different to the battles in the Nine Years’ War on the Continent. The conquest of Ireland was difficult, but in a way less threatening for the British government than later Jacobite rebellions in Scotland, because the latter provided an opportunity to advance on London without needing to gain control of the Irish Sea. Yet, had William failed in Ireland, his position in Britain and especially Scotland would then have been precarious, as the Jacobites would have had their own territory in which to recruit and raise funds. Moreover, France, as the ally of the Jacobites, would have been in a stronger position to intervene in Britain. Such counterfactuals (‘what-ifs’) might seem idle speculation, but they were present to ministers and commentators aware of the challenge posed by Ireland, not least if it was supported by a foreign power, as it had not been in the mid-17th century.

The key elements in 1689–91 deserve attention, because the victories for William were those for a hybrid or mixed force, which was very much to be a pattern of British military activity on land (although far less so at sea). In August 1689, William’s troops, many of them Huguenots or Dutch, had landed and occupied Belfast and successfully besieged Carrickfergus, as in effect a sequel to the invasion of England the previous year, but failed to force a battle and lost heavily that winter through disease. The following year, William benefited from a larger army than that of the Jacobites and French, by approximately 35,000 to 21,000. The deployment of this force, and William’s arrival in June 1690, reflected the significance he attached to Ireland. In contrast, he did not go to Scotland, where, despite victory at Killiecrankie in 1689 – the Jacobite charge defeating static musketeers – the Jacobites collapsed in 1690–1. In Ireland, with an army increased by English recruits and 7,000 hired Danish troops, William succeeded at the Boyne and in capturing Dublin, but failed when he tried to storm Limerick in August 1690. A separate force, benefiting from naval support, played a key role in capturing the fortified ports in southern Ireland. Commanded by John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, who proved a vigorous commander, this force took Cork in September and Kinsale in October.

In 1691, William was not in command, and a new French commander, Charles, Marquis of Saint-Ruhe, was sent with arms. Nevertheless, on 30 June Athlone fell to the Williamite forces after hard fighting and a very heavy bombardment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Winning the Home Base, 1688–1746
• 2 Fighting the French on the Continent, 1689–1748
• 3 Fighting for Empire, 1689–1753
• 4 The Seven Years’ War, 1754–63
• 5 Fighting for America, 1763–83
• 6 Winning Another Empire: India, 1746–1815
• 7 Fighting in Europe, 1793–1815
• 8 The Army around the World, 1793–1815
• 9 The Army as a Political Force 184
• 10 Culmination, 1815
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Selected Further Reading
• Endnotes